The new, definitive, version — thanks to Stephen Duffy for the soundtrack. The normal sized version on YouTube might look a bit better, as might the full HD version if you have the bandwidth (I just wish YouTube didn't make quite such a mess of motion in videos like this. But hey, it's free!).
Jerry Coyne recently posted some notes on Steven Pinker's latest book ("The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined"). The posting concentrates mostly on (and basically agrees with) Pinker's defense of the idea that religion is at least as responsible for violent death in the 20th century as atheism, if not more so.
This sort of thing irritates me — it just feels like a self-righteous sideshow or smug righteous dick-waving. For me, the relevant dimension isn't religionists vs. atheists, it's Believers vs. non-Believers. "Believer" (upper-case "B") here is shorthand for people for whom certainty is more important than curiosity, and / or for whom personal revelation and personal authority are the most reliable sources of truth (and for whom the idea that there's a coherent and consistent absolute Truth is generally not a particularly troubling notion). That sort of attitude and divide transcends religion: you don't have to delve too far into politics, culture, economics, and history to find Believers attempting to impose their Beliefs at sometimes great cost to the rest of us, and with little or no regard for logic or evidence.
You don't start a revolution or war or crusade with the word "maybe". You don't typically kill enthusiastically in the name of a diffuse sort-of-belief in openness, curiosity, and reasonableness, you do it in the name of a burning lip-smacking belief in a just and loving One-True-God, or the self-evident righteousness of a particular splinter group's infallible interpretation of Marxism-Leninism™ (or something similar, perhaps cynically faked). Us and Them in other words, with Them as the evil or the class enemy. Religion (as usually understood) is only one way to channel that into death and destruction. It's the desperate need of a significant proportion of humanity to believe (at any cost) and to believe they're (radically) different that's at the root of the problem, rather than what it is they believe.
"Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about an Australian study that found recent technology for artificial hips and knees did not perform any better than older designs misstated, in some editions, the nationality of researchers who, in a separate study, examined differences in the reported performance of such devices before their introduction and later in registry data. They were Austrian, not Australian."
I recently started a couple of blogs on Tumblr (nothing terribly new or interesting — you can find them yourself if you know what to look for). It's something I've meant to do for a long time, but just never got around to actually doing until this year's Christmas holidays.
It's been an interesting experience for a seasoned blogger like me — Tumblr's basically an ecosystem of bloggers and re-bloggers, producers and reproducers, with the emphasis on the latter in each case. Tumblr makes re-blogging whatever you encounter a trivial exercise (a bit like retweeting); presenting someone else's work (images especially) in a completely different context, without commentary, and without the carefully-crafted surrounding text and formatting, seems to be a large part of Tumblr's raison d'etre.
I'm guessing the ratio of reproducers to producers is sometimes as high as 10 to 1 (if not more). Entire blogs exist to do nothing more than reblog other people's work in a personalised context (usually just jamming the reblogged images up against each other), a sort of display of personal logos-by-proxy and visual bling that seems to exist solely to define the identity and in-group of the reblogger. A sort of hi-tech equivalent of the posters teenagers (still!) put up on their (non-Facebook) walls, I guess (or the edgy art aging hipsters put up on their immaculate walls). I don't think it's accidental that a lot of the re-blogs I've stumbled over are ostensibly run by teenagers or people in their early twenties. Tumblr also lacks a usable native commenting system, which adds a sort of lack of interactivity to the hall of mirrors feeling.
Does all this worry me? Not really — the whole effect of reblogging or reproducing is something quite new, a sort of postmodernism-for-the-people in ways that feel pretty congenial to me. It does make me wary of putting up some of my people photos — god knows where some of those familiar faces and bodies might end up — but stumbling across a really well-thought-out wordless reblog can be a real joy.
I guess I'm sort of proud to be one of the producers, but I'm also fascinated and sometimes even enchanted by the effect of all the reproduction. Let a hundred flowers bloom and all that — understanding that it's often just one flower being reblogged a hundred times (and the flower turns out to be van Gogh's). Benjamin would be fascinated, I'm sure — and Adorno's probably spinning in his grave (Adorno's, not Benjamin's).
A couple of weeks ago a massive fire gutted the Sequoia apartments building on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley; as of now (a few weeks later), the Sequoia's been demolished, and Cafe Intermezzo, Raleigh’s Bar And Grill and Thai Noodle II are no more — and dozens of students are (or were) homeless. For a lot of people like me, on top of the loss of Cody's, Andronico's, Blake's, Owl Drugs, etc., it feels like the end of something special for Telegraph and the surrounding Southside neighborhood. I'm not so sure — predicting the imminent death of Telegraph Avenue is one of those perennial media hardies 'round here, and it's still there despite it all. But this time it's harder than usual to be optimistic.
Telegraph and Southside have been one of the centers of my life since I moved to this part of the world. When I first wandered up through the UC campus to see what Telegraph was all about, it felt like a smaller and much sunnier version of the Camden Markets of the 1980's — street vendors selling clothes, music, food, jewelry, etc.; cheap cafes, bars, and coffee shops; bookshops and music stores; music venues; shops selling unselfconsciously edgy clothes and fashion — all surrounded by a whole bunch of funky (and worse) apartments and student accommodation. Southside was lorded over by the university, and the people on the street were a mixture of students, aging lefties, academics (I once nearly ran over Robert Reich on my bicycle when he stepped off the curb without looking), hipsters, tourists, travelers, and boring normals like me. Unlike large parts of the rest of California, people actually walked along Telegraph and the surrounding streets (and often got there on foot, too), and it was both destination and thoroughfare.
I drifted into the scene and started selling stuff (T-shirts, photos, jewelry, etc.) on the street as a relief seller or for friends, and got to know a bunch of the regulars on the street and in the stores. I shopped at places like Cody's or Moe's (for books) or Amoeba and Rasputin's (for music), got my breakfast and coffee at the Milano (and played the card shark there at night, too, for a while), ate at Intermezzo, Smart Alec's, or (rarely) Raleighs, got my hair cut at Panache or the tiny place inside the arcade between Channing and Durant, bought groceries at Andronicos (a few blocks further south), watched live music at Blake's (never my fave Berkeley venue, but never mind), bought generic clothes at the Gap (it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it), supplies and medicine at Owl Drugs, classical music at Tower Records' excellent classical music store, shoes at Bill's, etc. Even now, although I actually live in Oakland, it's still my default Saturday morning destination. A fairly congenial place for me, in other words.
But it's always been way too easy to romanticize the place: Telegraph was also Riot Central, especially with the nearby People's Park thing, and has often been plagued by random violence (even in broad daylight — I've been assaulted there at least three times over the years. Not seriously, but it's been enough to make me very wary after dark). The homeless (literally) lying around with their pit bulls outside store entrances edgily harassing passers-by in the worst years didn't exactly help the ambience either. Economic insecurity is the norm for a lot of businesses up there: the reality is that it periodically totters on the brink of becoming either a bombed-out ghost town or a cleaned-up suburban strip mall (most people seem to root for the former, often with way too much enthusiasm).
That list of places I gave earlier feels very nostalgic nowadays. A lot of those places are either boarded up, derelict, burned out, or have been empty for years (Cody's, Blake's, Panache, Andronico's, Intermezzo, Raleighs, etc.), have fled for greener pastures (e.g. the Gap), went out of business years ago (e.g. Tower), or have been shoved aside by generic corporate replacements (e.g. Owl Drugs by Walgreens, trying to be the Duane Reade of Berkeley). The Sequoia building fire just hastened the process: several businesses and a large handsome building containing dozens of (really crappy) apartments burned out, gone.
Some of the destruction was inevitable — who buys CD's any more? (Not me). Or books? (I do, but only until I get an iPad) — and the recession has been a killer. But there's more to it than that: in the City Of (Proud) Stereotypes, the various groups associated with Telegraph often seem to be trying to outdo themselves in living up to the various (warring) stereotypes they identify with. Telegraph itself just becomes so much collateral damage; people just shake their heads and walk on by (to Cal, or to downtown, or back to BART or the bus or theirs cars).
For me, one of the most telling sign of what's wrong — more than the empty stores, the boarded-up shopfronts, or the burned-out buildings — is that the average street seller on Telegraph is now (I'd estimate) well into his or her 60's. There are simply very few young faces either in front of or behind the tables or stalls (it's always a weird feeling when I'm the youngest person around). In fact, the faces I do see there are often the same faces I saw when I first got here (when I helped sell). I was at an art show opening in one of the hipper parts of Oakland the other evening where an artist I know slightly (and who's about half my age) was showing a collection of smaller commercial pieces — the sort of things that would probably sell well to non-hippies on Telegraph. When I asked him whether he'd ever thought of selling on Telegraph he rolled his eyes, smirked, and said "two words: tie-dye hell". He'd rather sell at the various state and county fairs (as would I, come to think of it).
Another telling sign is that while in decades past you'd probably naturally head up to Telegraph (or Sproul plaza nearby) to start or join protests or political action or to witness some sort of mass cultural event, nowadays you'd probably head for somewhere else (downtown Oakland, for example, way down the other end of Telegraph Avenue). Telegraph's not the center of anything much, really. It feels like an outpost — of the university, of the bustling art scene in Oakland, of the resurgent food precincts down around Shattuck or up in the Northside, of the progressive (or otherwise) politics being forged and argued in Oakland. It's still a thoroughfare, but not much of a destination.
Is it going to recover? What would "recover" mean? I don't know. But it's done it before, and the fire(s) might just spur enough of the right kind of redevelopment to avoid the worst that anyone wants for it. Some part of Telegraph seems to want to be like Santa Monica's Third Street — bright, shiny, safe, alive, popular… and absolutely dominated by large corporate outlets (Levi's, Gap, Skechers, etc. — I'm more the Venice type, myself). Another part seems to want something more along the lines of Camden Markets, but that would require a much younger and more arty and outward-looking bunch of sellers on the street. Another vision seems to be of Peoples Park writ large, a sort of scrappy street full of street people left to do their own thing in their own super-democratic "fuck you!" way (or, more cynically, a Boulevard of Broken Dreams).
But every time I get too optimistic, I just have to walk past the vacant fenced-off hole just opposite the missing Sequoia building, a striking monument to Telegraph's (and Berkeley's) inability to get its act together. Within my memory, that site used to be the (derelict) old Berkeley Inn; it's been vacant for twenty years, the victim of all sorts of politics, economic, legal, and cultural battles.
"It [his stencil] is a homage to the indefatigable labour Tox has committed to his continuing masterpiece. This tag is merely a symptom of an epic journey to identify every brick in the city. He has traversed the city like no other and has found its transcendental value. An atavistic practice, like cutting initials into bark, painting bison in caves, or piling stones on song lines. The spray can is the quill of the urban vernacular" — Mark Newell on the jailing for 27 months of Daniel Halpin, a.k.a. "Tox", the Camden graffiti artist, letter to "Camden New Journal", as quoted in Private Eye's Pseuds Corner, Eye 1295.
Too good to be true? Probably, but if he actually said that and meant it, well, Mark old boy, can't you just admit that some of us are getting a little tired of our neighbourhoods — our walls, our windows, our cars, our trees, our art, even — being turned into collateral damage from a massive and escalating territorial pissing match? And can't you just admit some of us in those neighbourhoods are getting increasingly pissed off at artwankers like yourself egging it on from the sidelines?
"[P]iling stones on song lines"? Pissing on those song lines, more like it.
Céline Sciamma's "Water Lilies": more an afterimage of a movie than a movie — and so much the stronger because of that. Story-showing rather than story-telling.
(But it taught me that if there's one thing that makes me giggle helplessly more than the sight of a character breaking into song in the middle of a musical, it's characters breaking into a synchronised swimming routine in a movie…).
Late last night, a convoy of more than twenty police cars, lights flashing, sirens screaming, screeches past, scattering traffic on the road in front of my place on its way to … well, where? We'll never know.
This morning, K. looks up at me from behind the counter at Kefa and says she saw me on the TV at the Occupation demo at the Port last night! It looked just like you! Sadly, no, I have to say, I can barely walk due to a knee injury, and sat inside watching it on the TV too (I may be out for the entire winter). I feel left out, dislocated, frustrated.
A few blocks away up on East 14th, the Occupation's almost invisible, hidden behind the class divide. No secret here: the dirty little secret so far has been how little interest or support the movement gets from people who normally wouldn't have any reason to go downtown at the best of times, let alone now. It's a class thing, in every way.
The most appropriate symbol for the Occupation seems to be the drum circle, that omnipresent knot of stoned older hippies and young skinny white guys with knotted beards and dreads, making a sort of near-rhythmic sound haze that forms the soundtrack for just about everything in front of City Hall. It seems almost designed to stop you from thinking.
Microsoft's vision is of screens everywhere; what they hope you won't notice is that every one of those screens will contain inescapable non-stop targeted advertising. The future's so bright….
Oakland's making the headlines the world over again, and it's hard not to feel depressed and angered at the sheer stupidity of the responses to the occupation movement. Here's a city that's historically and temperamentally full of residents and officials who would overwhelmingly support the aims of the Occupy Oakland and Occupy Wall Street movements (and the vast majority of whose police officers are definitely part of the 99%, as one protester eloquently put it to a hostile crowd yesterday evening) — and here's a city that couldn't find any sort of positive accommodation or at least some way to live with it. I was tempted to wander off up to City Hall myself last night, but I'm barely able to walk due to a minor knee injury.
Meanwhile, we've had a small swarm of tremors in the last week just beneath us (the latest early this morning), setting us all on edge. The Big One's brewing somewhere, we all know that….
"No city in the world impresses more [than Sydney] in its approach from the air – the harbour, the beaches, the bridge, the Opera House, the mountains". David Humphries in an otherwise fairly enjoyable whine about whiners in today's SMH.
Blimey. Hasn't he ever flown into, say, Rio, or San Francisco, or L.A. on a beautiful winter's day (when there are real mountains with snow on them only a few dozen miles from the beaches…)? Seattle gives those places a run for the money as well (something to do with that tall volcano and Puget Sound, no?). Even Chicago's a beautiful and impressive place to fly in to after a recent snowstorm (and if you want snow and mountains, try the approach into Denver from the west). And don't get me started about Hong Kong, or Wellington, or even (closer to home) South Lake Tahoe….
I suspect it's that scrappy belief that Sydney's often rather ordinary charms — whether physical or cultural — are really really (rilly!) special that helps define Sydney as being so much like any other mid-level city striving for notice (or notoriety). Not that anyone cares what I think, but Sydney's a great place (I have to say that, don't I?) with very definite charms and some unique characteristics, but a place like Sydney has to pick its battles carefully — and from the air, first impressions are often of how flat it all is and how suburban Sydney looks (as the American woman next to me commented during my last approach to the place by air).
And I'd say few cities in the world impress less on their approaches from the airport. Well, maybe San Francisco, with its utterly charmless ticky tacky box houses and industrial wastelands, or LA's 405 on a bad day, and any bit East of the East River on the way to Kennedy, but never mind, it's that view from the air that matters, no?
I'm at a major tech conference in the City all week, so after lunch I wander the couple of blocks up to the mothership on Stockton. There are actually people in tears out the front, and little hand-written stickies on the front windows in various languages saying things like "Your Apple changed the world more than God's apple!". I never know what to make of this sort of personalising-the-remote-hero thing, especially with a guy as ruthlessly private as he was, but he definitely left his mark on my industry and day-to-day environment. Above, the Blue Angles periodically shriek and roar invisibly above turned heads, adding to the other-worldly atmosphere. Back at the conference, Apple laptops and phones and tablets seem to predominate, something that would have been inconceivable even a decade ago.
(Everyone in the industry here has an Apple or Jobs story, and, of course, I have mine, dating from the late 1980's and involving close collaboration in Cupertino on a project that never really got off the ground, but that taught me a great deal about how to deal with unpleasant corporate self-righteousness and how the powerfully-arrogant treat the peons, but I'll spare you all that — with the Apple of that time (or later), it's hardly a unique story).
"Mark Owens, who worked with curator Zak Kyes on 'Forms of Inquiry,' discerns an even more sweeping sense of entitlement among some practitioners: “being a graphic designer is more like having a passport that allows you to trespass in multiple domains, whether it be filmmaking, art, writing, publishing, curating, fashion, or even architecture.”
No one pauses to question why any of these fields, already occupied by highly competent practitioners, might need “trespassing” designers to help them do the job, or what it is about graphic design education that would qualify a designer to intervene in such a range of disciplines." (Rick Poyner being enjoyably droll in a recent Design Observer blog posting).
It's not about actual trespass or anything like that, it's about the glamour the word "trespass" brings (rather than, say, "interfere", or even "tread all over"). Much like that old fave "transgression", it almost always signals self-stroking puffery. And having a passport rather implies you're not so much trespassing as being, well, a tourist with a nice visa, or a traveler just passing through with the government's approval, no?
Ten years on, and I still haven't returned, despite having had several opportunities. Not only would it be unrecognisable now, but I don't want to feel the ghosts being squeezed out by self-regard and self-absorption. We so often do to shared memory what they did to the wreckage of the towers (and often enough for much the same reasons).
(I'm always deeply suspicious of making too much meaning from events like this: it's not usually the big events that signal things about society or politics, it's the reaction to the mundane (and what constitutes "mundane") that says it all more eloquently).
Janis Anton, a friend of mine in Oakland, is having a new show (she's had a few lately, including in New York): the 23 Hour Project. The opening's this Friday — see you there….
Seen in a recent Information Week news item: "Google, like Facebook before it, offers a social network that doubles as a surveillance network."
That's almost right; more accurately, "Google, like Facebook before it, offers an advertising network that doubles as a social network." I still come across people out there who use these things who don't understand that we are the product being sold through Facebook and Google+. That surveillance network isn't a side effect — it's the whole point.
(Yes, I'm an active particpant on both Facebook and Google+).
Iconoclast: when used of another person, typically a polite way of saying "boringly persistent monomaniac". When used as a self-description, doubly so (except the politeness is replaced by smug (or even grim) incomprehension).
(Brought to mind again by the latter part of John Wilkins's My feet, my neck, my head. No, John's not my target — having met him several times in real life for enjoyable lunches (etc.) in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sydney, he's about the last person I'd accuse of monomania — it's the grim Believers in the anti-belief movement that get my goat…).
Moe's has a little display of hipster graffiti books in the arts section with (inevitably) Banksy's "Wall and Piece" as the centerpiece. One of them (focusing on local Bay Area graffiti), has a breathless blurb that celebrates its own in-tuneness with the underground (oh, the subversion!). Phrases like "[the authors] scoured the neighbourhoods for the abandoned buildings, tunnels, and back alleys", "this stunning scene", "illegal but powerful work", "the region's dazzling array of graffiti and street art" just roll off the (back) page.
Not so much breathless as breathtaking, really, if (like me) you actually live in one of the neighborhoods featured in a bunch of the book's celebratory pages. My neighborhood's increasingly infested with graffiti (it's noticeably worse now than even a year ago, with almost every external surface tagged repeatedly). But I'm betting no one connected with the celebration asked the residents of my extended neighbourhood what we thought about it: what do we think about the fact that pretty much every piece of graffiti around here is just a scribbled tag, many of them gang tags (there's none of that lovely middle-class Banksyesque art around here)? What do we think about the kids playground that's tagged every damn week so that nowadays it's such an unpleasant place to be we don't go there any more (especially when the graffiti one week was "Fuck You All!!" repeated across the slides and swings)? What do we think of the graffiti on the local tree trunks (oh, that's powerful work, for sure!)? What do we thing about walking down a street where every non-barred window has gang tags etched into the glass? What do we think about having to try to get graffiti off our cars? What do we think about the fact that pretty much every external surface in our neighbourhood is now covered in the territorial pissings of local and visiting gangs or taggers? What do we think about the fact that around here, graffiti means your neighbourhood is basically inhabited at night by (sometimes armed) people who'll do whatever it takes to mark your window or car or a local street sign as theirs?
The trouble is, yes, graffiti is powerful; and if you think it's confined to abandoned buildings, tunnels, and back alleys, you're as blind as a bat (or you're tone deaf to the lived environment).
Graffiti is like architecture: it helps sets the tone of a street or area just by its presence; it's inescapable; and it's almost always imposed on a neighbourhood without the consent of, or consultation with, its residents. In my neighborhood, nearly all graffiti (like bad architecture) is oppressive and damn-near omnipresent. And it's that oppressiveness these books celebrate, whether they admit it or not. You'd think it'd be a nice gesture for the proceeds of these books to go towards community-led graffiti abatement programs; but that would be, well, subversive, no?
