May 27 2004
Off and Away:
Heading to Philadelphia today for Mix Weekend then onto Chicago for BEA. Updates sporadic until then. Have a good week ya'll.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Heading to Philadelphia today for Mix Weekend then onto Chicago for BEA. Updates sporadic until then. Have a good week ya'll.
The New York Review of Magazines takes a long hard look at the business they themselves are apart of. Another fine product of the Columbia School of Journalism. Who knew (via Arts Journal)?
I was fascinated by this article in Salon on new trends in traffic science, one of which argues that more chaos and less control on the roads leads to calmer traffic and fewer accidents and pedestrian fatalies. That means blurring the boundary between sidewalk street, fewer traffic lights and stop signs, and letting car, pedestrian, bicycle and yes, tree use the street space equally.
Pedestrian activist Linda Baker wrote the article so you can guess where her sentiments lie. But no matter how interesting I found her reasoning, I couldn't quite by it because I didn't get to see it in action. How about some picture, or, saints alive!, a video? Traffic has been so the same for so long that I need to see it different to believe it.
Bumper sticker seen on the way home today:
"I Love Airplane Noise"
Say what?
Rumors of a Video iPod have been greatly exaggerated. Well thank god for that. I'm still waiting for the dual-headed firewire cable that will allow me to run into a friend on the bus, who coincidentally is also listening to their iPod, and be able to trade songs back and forth just as you can beam files on a Palm Pilot (via Gizmodo).
Suzan and I took a drive northward today that evolved into a treasure hunt for some of the area's better art work. We visited Florence Ave. in Sebastopol, where found-object sculptor Patrick Amiot had installed his pieces on the lawns of his neighbors. In front of his house is an enormous jukebox with Elvis Presley crooning on top. The whole thing is made of scrap metal and coffee cans.
On a tip from Bay Area Backroads (where we first heard about Patrick's work), we also took in the Quicksilver Mining Co., a gallery specializing in Northern California artists. Their upcoming show features Monty Monty an assemblage artist who makes vehicles, animals and devices out of vintage antiques and collectibles. Isn't this stuff great?
Suzan has informally banned me from buying anymore three dimensional as we're practically out of shelf space but I see this sort of thing and drool. It reminds me of what beauty there is in everything, so long as you have an eye for how it all hangs together.
Oh, lord this is big. Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 911 has won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, perhaps the most prestigious award in world cinema.
Its still unclear how the film will be distributed in America, but oh my it will be now.
I can't wait. I plan on attending a screening on the day they escort George W. Bush from the White House and the whole country knows what a lying, spineless, dangerous lot they all are. I'll be there and I will laugh.
Seems that we'll be seeing healthier french fries any year now. Who wants to sample them for me (via Rebecca Blood)?
My friend Anil Dash is defying the exodus of blogger titans out of San Francisco and moving here. I hope to see him some (via Torrez).
Wretched Reviews puts history's worst book reviews on T-shirts, mugs, journals and postcards. Just to keep you and your creative impluses honest.
I don't know where I found it but I dig this essay Michael Chabon wrote about his adopted home of Berkeley. It's almost like a a biography (or an obituary, gasp!) of a city which I think is a fine idea. I might do one about Ann Arbor someday.
Ishle Park rocked the muthafriggin' house! MJM and Jason invited me at the last minute to see her read and sign books at Galeria De La Raza. She read maybe 8 poems of astounding beauty and literary zest and even sang a few Korean folk songs which worked with the poems instead of sounding like an I'm-the-evening's-entertainment-so-I-can-do-what-I-want indulgence. The crowd there heavily drew from the sponsoring organizations, The Kearny Street Workshop and Locas Arts, revealing the considerable depth and power of the Asian-American arts community in San Francisco, something I knew existed but didn't now to that impressive extent.
Man, I need to get back to writing poems.
So I only managed to do one of the activities I had in my sights this weekend and took in Nextfest with my buddy Bradley. 6 huge pavilions were packed rather snuggly into Fort Mason where I usually go to buy used books or the occassional piece of craft. Each exhibit section made a bold pronouncement The Future of Design, The Future of Transportation, The Future of Health. After an hour of being wowed, Bradley and I came to the same conclusion...
The future is not for people like us.
Oh sure, we gawked at what NASA has in mind for the inexpensive robot explorer and were appropriately reverent at advances being made in heart transplants. But ya know what really got us?
Dodgeball.
On a far wall of the hall, some company had set up a wall which two teams stand on either side of. A projector allows you to see the other team on your side of the wall with a series of digitized glass panels over them. The object is to throw or kick a ball at those glass panels and "break" through to the other side. Whoever shatters more panels wins. It's dodgeball where the target is pixels instead of flesh and bone.
What a wonderous place the future will be.
The $1,000 omelet. At that price, I'd want a foot rub with it. Toes too.
Three of my favorite things in the whole wide world are hiphop culture, documentary film and promulgating about the future. It stands to reason then that Nexthetics, The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and NextFest are all this weekend and, last I looked, I can only be in one place at a time.
We should all have such problems.
I'm in this month's issue of Readymade Magazine on page 73, a little ode to the sandwitch.
Librarian.net links to an awesome list of 10 ways a library can effectively use technology without breaking their banks. Jeez, if SFPL got on these, I'd be there everyday.
Does anyone know of a good magazine about documentary film? Not just for the makers of but those who like to watch as well?
On a tip from Bookslut, I checked out the website of the Columbia Journalism Review and came across this amazing article by Brett Cunnigham about how the class bias effects journalistic coverage of working class communities and citizens. It is a gorgeously written, subtle, intelligent piece that avoids being shrill or preachy, or succumbing to precisely the slanted perspective it criticizes. I read it three times then marched into the living room and thrust it at Suzan.
"You MUST read this."
If this is the level of work CJR does, I'm subscribing tomorrow.
A very happy birthday to my friend Jessa, who threw down something great this weekend for her 30th birthday. I haven't been to a cookout, thrown by someone's mom, in many a moon. I miss it.
Thanks to some seriously fierce curating from my buddy George, I'm now familiar with the possibilities behind apple's new iTunes feature, iMix. Ostensibly it allows you create a mix from iTunes's music library and let your friends know about it.
Neat idea. Here are a few ways it could be better...
1. Search Functionality: I only know about George's mixes because he told me. Shouldn't I be able to go to iMix, type in someone's user name and see their mixes, just like I can see their Wish List on Amazon?
2. The 30 second rule. How about letting people hear songs on iMixes in their entirety and then limiting the number of times you can play before you by? 15 30-second fragments does not a mix make.
3. My iMixes. The home page of iMix is either a set of the most top rated mixes or the most recently added, both of which are useless pieces of information. The essence of a mix isn't what's on it but who gives it to you. A mix from a stranger is just a random collection of songs. So how about my own page with my mixes and links to my friends and theirs? A little social software action up in this piece?
Or maybe that's where they are headed...
Back home now. A wild two days in Baltimore, complete with a 10 year reunion concert of the Mental Notes, a singing group that several friends of mine began our senior year at Hopkins. One of the original members remarked that current Mental Notes were 8 when the group began. Dayammmmnnn!
The Hillel dedication was amazing. All these familiar faces from Jewish Baltimore that I remember from my days at the BJT, the beautiful building with meeting rooms, religious services, a library and an activities center that will serve the Hopkins Jewish community for generations. My dad looked happier than I've seen him in a long time. I'm super proud of both my parents for putting their money where their heart is.
Now I'm home, trying to get caught up but not killing myself. May is a rather light month which just a few magazine assignments, little book business and a Litquake item or two before I leave for BEA the first weekend of June.
Off I go.
What exactly is so strange about a grown man alone on a merry-go-round? And why does it merit the attention of one cop, three photographers, and maybe two dozen squealing tourists and their kids?
Its Friday afternoon. I'm in Bryant Park, right next to the New York Public Library, sending off an article for The Believer. Bryant Park is the town square of wireless access in New York City, one big green laptop heaven.
I spellcheck one more time, hit send and it's gone. A week's worth of work nearly 6,000 written and rewritten words. And I'm done. I have to celebrate.
It's a beautiful afternoon. The park is teaming with folks drinking, chatting, making merry. What can I do? I was tempted to dash across the Great Lawn in triumph but it's closed for resotting and I try to only make a spectacle of myself in my hometown.
Then I see the merry-go-round. I flash quickly to the end of Catcher in the Rye and start walking.
"How many people do you need to get this thing moving?" I ask the friendly ticket booth lady. The merry-go-round is stopped. There is nothing sadder than a still merry-go-round.
"Just one" she says and smiles at me.
I pay my ticket and hop on board. A medium-sizes brown horse calls out. I grad his mane and climb on.
And I ride.
A merry-go-round is a joy when you're all grown up and not terrified of falling off. You can ride side saddle, lean waaaayyyy back in the stirrups or even off the side of the horse and over the ground below. No one cares, especially when you're the only one on the merry-go-round.
I'm getting into it, a few heavy leans, a "Yee haw!" or two. A couple stop and start filming me with a video camera. A tall teenage girl starts shooting pictures. The Bryant Park cop stares as if to say "Right, today he rides. Tomorrow he's molesting todlers." Three sets of children are waving. Folks sitting at the tables bordering the ride gape uncomfortably.
I have a great time.
When the Italian Um-pa-pa song finishes up, I slide off, thank the nice woman running the thing and head for the subway. It's the best $1.75 I've spent in New York, the sun is shining, I'm free for the weekend.
If I lived here, I'd do this every Friday.
Avenue Q is a dippy, corny little musical my mom and I went to last night. It had been years since I'd seen a show on Broadway and, puppets? I'm always down for puppets.
Avenue Q is about a street in a forgotten part of Manhattan and everyone, puppets, monsters, and humans alike who lives on it. Everyone is in their mid to late 20's trying to figure out like. The puppeteers are visible as as actors on stage. Their facial expressions mimic those of their puppet friends.
It's creative and clever as hell and lots of fun. It ain't much of a musicial if you care about stuff like that (I don't). The songs are bland and barely necessary. You'll learn nothing about life you didn't know after one semester in college. But the puppets, man! God bless those puppets. And mega dap to Rick Lyon, the genius who designed them all.
Oh and there's a character named Gary Coleman. Who is Gary Coleman in the story. Played by someone who is not Gary Coleman. Don't ask.
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
