Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Yo, el Supremo!  My niece Nicole is in Paraguay at the moment. I'm not absolutely sure why. It's a Wilson High or some similar kind of thing. Tipped off by my other sister that there was a web site of sorts where her parents (My sister Ann and brother-in-law Al) could obtain sparse information and the occasional picture, I shook this site out of the internet: LearnServe.org -- Category Archive for 'Paraguay' | LearnServe International. They even have their own Flicker set LearnServe Paraguay '09 Blog - a set on Flickr and apparently a Facebook presence as well. The point of this seems to be cultural and global engagement, beyond some material assistance. That and having fun. They are having fun. I don't think I've ever seen my niece look happier than she does in those pictures.    Following this I did a little reading on the culture geography and history of Paraguay. About which I frankly knew nothing  CIA - The World Factbook -- Paraguay. From this brief reading it seemed that a "Paraguayan Example" could be spoken of. An example of a nation returning to democracy after years of authoritarian rule. For most of my life Paraguay was under the personal iron whim of General Alfredo Stroessner and the Colorado party  Alfredo Stroessner - Wikipedia. It was a nation exemplifying thin institutions and strong man rule. A nation existing in a permanent state of martial law. At one point to preclude demonstrations he shut down and partially razed one university. During these years the Catholic Church was one of the few institutions he dared not confront harshly.  Paraguay had auspicious beginnings. Asuncion was the seat of Spanish governance for all southern South America initially. Though this provincial seat moved to Buenos Aires later on, Paraguay gained bloodless independence from Spain by simply following the decision of local leaders in Buenos Aires. A notable incident from early Paraguayan history is the central government's breaking up Jesuit administration of autonomous missions in southern Paraguy. They were too well-run, self-possessed and peaceful, and this bothered the central government. A strain of authoritarianism increased and found expression in the rule of megalomaniac isolationist Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. In a subsequent generation of dictators that of Carlos Lopez's son, Francisco Lopez, the disastrous war of the Triple Alliance was fought in the 1860s.   I, the Supreme [WorldCat.org]  Augusto Roa Bastos' 1974 novel on Rodríguez de Francia is one of  Paraguay's most well known literary works, an examination of the despotic mind. A likely reference and marker to the Stroessner regime. The 20th century history of Paraguay was one of poverty and non development, coups and return to absolutism. Followed by decades of resistance and demonstration. 1989 brought an end to the Stroessner era and a slow twenty year return to democracy. A new constitution in 1992 was written by a special and freely elected constitutional assembly. By this document Paraguay is constituted as a representative and pluralist democracy with a separate bicameral legislature executive and judiciary.  In December of last year I wrote a post here  titled "PP !=Dd" It dealt with Thailand's dueling people power movements. Thaksin's populist Red-shirts, and the middle class and urban elite Yellow-shirts. Both rooted in existing national interests BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Thaksin demands fresh resistance. What I intended was that popular (populist) street demonstration do not alone indicate a fervor for universal democracy. Either big D or little d democracy. I see democracy, rule of the people, as existing in these two facets. Big D democracy I identify as the principle of democracy embedded in a societies formal institutions and processes. Little d democracy I see at heart as a simple thing . A principle of basic fairness rather than a complex and highly charged ideal. I see it; though, as the more fundamental concept. Where big D democracy crumbles with its institutions, and ossifies with their corruption. Little d democracy can't really be broken and always reasserts itself in human affairs. Democracy's aim is to organize the governance of a group in a manner that our comfort and discomfort as individuals - how comfort and discomfort is experienced - is effected as locally directly and equitably as possible. That the voice of each penetrates all decisions that affect each. When trying to weigh sympathy towards a protest movement or group I would look most closely at their commitment to little d precepts and non-violent character. Protests which have which have greater participation and voice as an object and a spontaneous character, rather than ones supporting existing vested interests ought to be viewed more favorably even when the latter appear mounted on the plinth of big D democratic institutions. There is a great tendency of states, political factions, to transition to authoritarianism using the power of offices freely won, then erecting barriers to further entry and controlling outcomes.     New modes of communication will enhance democracy some say. Techno-democracy, or perhaps Demo-technocity. But what technology gives, technology takes away. In the past few weeks I've heard much about what weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, and texting can do:  Does 'Tiananmen + Web = Tehran'? - washingtonpost.com. Do Internet communication technologies make a real difference? On balance I think yes, because they radically increase the  multiplicity of pathways. The internet particularly lends itself to the power and immediacy of images. In Iran though it was characterized by an ad hoc and emergent nature that did not prove sustainable.  The struggle against authoritarianism and the paranoia of security states can be called Information Wars. It is about information and the control of it. And it is nominally true that information is empowering and democratizing. There is much speculation in the media about the degree the Internet facilitates the transmission of information, through and around gatekeepers. Though there is surprisingly little hard information. The BBC has a program, Digital Planet, that does look specifically at these issues. Here with an article on Web-logging in Vietnam, Cuba and China  BBC NEWS | Technology | Blogging all over the world.  The efficiency and effectiveness of governments to clampdown on the ways and means of information seemed to surprise some as though it were unreasonable for a nation to be able to censor the whole world wide web China, Cuba, Other Authoritarian Regimes Censor News From Iran - washingtonpost.com. The Iranian government's mastery over cell phone networks and texting, Nokia unapologetically sold them: BBC NEWS | Technology | Hi-tech helps Iranian monitoring. This is great re-assurance for such regimes. Even as the Washington Post picks up on the story that China is effectively disbarring its civil rights lawyers  Human Rights Lawyers 'Disbarred' by Paperwork - washingtonpost.com, there is news that they are secure enough to publicly charge and prepare lengthy incarceration for Liu Xiaobo principle author of the Charter '08 document  BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China activist formally arrested.  Organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology focus  mostly on US laws and policy though they do have a side international focus  CDT | International  and the Global Internet Policy initiative (GIPI) which seeks to generate and offer legal frameworks for telecommunications policy based on principles of a "decentralized, accessible, user-controlled, and market-driven Internet." The Personal Democracy Forum also takes as its mandate the effect of technology on political communication. Initially very US and web 2.O fashion forward campaigning centric, they are opening a European Forum this fall, and with favorable view there, beyond in the future.  As a last thought; I do enjoy spectacle of watching republicans who piously championed the freedom demonstrations in Iran try to figure a stance on the coup by Honduran rightists and the military against the leftist and Hugo Chavez befriending, but legitimate leader of Honduras, President Zelaya. Who admittedly seemed on the verge of a de-legitimizing power grab himself.  Honduran Military Sends President Into Exile; Supportive Congress Names Successor. The pretzel logic of the supreme ones and those who wait by their stage doors with flowers. 11:19:58 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Brain Damage   I feel the need to write a post that is not long and not about politics.  I was dismayed to hear WFMU DJ Kenny G. (not that Kenny G. but WFMU's own chanteuse of French criticism Kenneth Goldsmith - Wikipedia) is rotating off their schedule for a while. Busy guy I suppose. Kenny G:  making radio the way BauBike makes bicycles.  Kenny's show figures in a little story I want to tell. It happened one day at the library a few weeks back while I was working. It involved Kenny playing then back announcing a piece by someone named Paul McCarthy. At the same moment I was in the middle of a processing a book by an artist named Paul McCarthy. In the trancelike semi-hypnotized state of mid-afternoon copy cataloging, worlds collided and entangled. At first I sensed only a vague confusion which returning full consciousness could not make go away. After some effort realizing that what I was listening to and what I was working on were both about someone with the same name. Nearly as I can determine the same person. The book Paul McCarthy : central symmetrical rotation movement : three installations, two films,  I recall from memory and a cursory examination was a description of a series of installation art pieces. These consisted of a room, with walls and windows, built within a gallery space. The rooms were built on turntables and spun around. In addition there was a closed-circuit video system consisting of a number of cameras and one or more monitors. The monitor would switch between cameras through a special circuit, but was synchronized so that it would never reflect the vantage point of any hypothesized viewer of the monitor. The song was called Finito Kenny G playlist | 05.20.09. The problem really was having portions of my mind running autonomously under only a simple rule set that these separate things should not be the same.  Nothing seemed right the whole rest of that day after that.  I had a strange echo of this a few days later while flipping through an issue of biking magazine I found myself reading about Andrew Bird. Turns out Andrew Bird rides a bike. Keeps one on the tour bus, tools around between shows. Can one whistle and ride a bike at the same time? Yes, I tried it this morning with only moderate bodily damage.     While I'm here considering WFMU I should give thanks to WFMU dj Diane Kamikaze for mentioning the Art of Pompeii exhibit that was at the National Art Gallery back earlier this year  National Gallery of Art - Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.  I live here in DC I didn't know about it. On the strength of her recommendation I went through it with my sister and nephews the next weekend. I liked the statue of Silanus, All these years I missed the fact that Bacchus had a regular drinking buddy. On the way out of that I was thrilled to find as special bonus a Robert Frank Exhibit down the hall  NGA: Looking In Robert Frank's The Americans:. I wish I had seen the companion exhibit on Photography as narrative in the post-war period  Reading the Modern Photobook   National Gallery of Art - Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans: (bottom). My nephews were flagging a bit by that this point, though. I enjoyed that little coda to the trip immensely. Frank, particularly with his book the Americans, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson form my photographic touchstones. Robert Frank later made a movie about the Rolling Stones. h5ntgj9eim 11:52:55 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Saturday, June 20, 2009

A Republic...  There was a recent contested election in Iran, and allegations of fraud. Iran is a country which ascribes to Sharia law. Law with a close relation to original severe Islamic law. You steal a car you may lose your hand. You try to steal a whole country you may lose your head. This was not just an optimistically fraudulent election. One where you keep your head down, but an eye on things and help yourself along: ballot shortages in less sympathetic districts, padding the count in safer districts.  This was an election where the falsification was planned to a massive and comprehensive scale from the outset Was Iran's election rigged? Here's what is known so far. | csmonitor.com. One designed to carry a message. The degree of detail controlled is the key indicator. Uniform results across all districts throughout the country this was intended to be a signal of disrespect for democracy. It began with a false informal announcement of a Mousavi victory. After this a second formal announcement of Ahmadinejad's victory, Only an hour after the polls closed, with no witness observed ballot counting, in a national election conducted by paper ballot  New Analysis Points to Fraud in Iran - Behind the Numbers. Immediately on the heels of this: cell phone, text messaging, and internet interruptions. And later broadcast cut-off of the foreign media on subsequent days. When the totals of the official numbers are released they appear to show many localities voting at 90 to 130 percent of their registered number Iran election turnouts exceeded 100% in 30 towns, website reports | World news | guardian.co.uk. Problematic since there is a well documented ceiling to electoral participation due to natural friction - illness and accident - at or below 80 percent. All this prior-intent amounts to a coup d'etat and hollows the meaning of an Islamic Republic of Iran.  As the scale of the deceit became known and demonstrations started  Social Networks Spread Defiance Online - NYTimes.com. A program of reaction began Iran elections: mass arrests and campus raids as regime hits back | World news | The Guardian. Arrests, detrainments and an active campaign of agent provocatiership. As Ahmadinejad's thugs ran through the streets in an orgy of violence. I found it interesting that the arrest of Iraqi Civil rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani The Associated Press: Rights groups: reformists seized in Iran crackdown mirrored the arrest of a well-known Vietnamese lawyer, Le Cong Dinh, just last week BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Vietnam holds high-profile lawyer. At the time I had associated that arrest with the arrest and decertification of civil rights lawyers in China that I had mention in a prior post. My (smart, beautiful) friend Trân Nguyen, adding to what the BBC story told me, said she had heard through Viet community news sources that men gained entry to Le Cong Dinh's office in Saigon under false pretenses and once inside proceeded seize his files and computers without warrant. In charging him the Vietnamese authorities seemed most concerned that he had attempted to write a new version of the Vietnamese constitution: one fairer, more just, and democratic. This they referred to as "reactionary". All of these events underscore danger of allowing this style of governing to appear successful. One piece of information that struck me as significant; someone interviewed earlier in the week commented that Iran's theocratic leadership had apparently determined they could control the country effectively and permanently with only genuine and reliable support from thirty percent of the population. That they believed a modern society could produce and extract wealth enough to buy support from that margin, give them license, and gain permission to repress and suppress the remaining seventy percent. This is a dangerous notion, and an existential threat to democracy.    Ayatollah Khamenei's statement one Friday 19Jun09 (Tehran Time) that Ahmadinejad was the definite winner of the election, signaled a reassertion of absolutism  BBC NEWS | Middle East | Ayatollah demands end to protests. It was followed by an unapologetic, but at the same time still extra-judicial crackdown. This brutal intimidation was accomplished mainly by Ahmadinejad's Basij militia Who's behind Iran violence? Website posts video in name-and-shame campaign. | csmonitor.com. Armed not just with batons and fists, but now Kalishnikovs and directed (or inclined) to act in a threatening deadly and increasingly random manner.  Iranian leadership continued full of bluster and pronouncement that the violence, injury and damage was Mir Hussein Mousavi's responsibility, not theirs  UTV News - Iranian elections: Ahmadinejad's 'dirt and dust' jibe rebounds. They take care; though, to keep direct agents of the government from actions that might implicate them.   The Obama administration must find a line of engagement no matter how this plays out. A narrow line, to remain prepared to deal with the situation when it settles  Does Obama still want to engage Iran? | csmonitor.com. This isn't like taking New England and ten. If U S politicians support demonstrations and have made a show of it, but nothing comes of it. You can't just pay the bookie and move on. There will be an ever more irrational and paranoid Ahmadinejad in the tomorrow that follows. This is the problem with fits of shallow and irresponsible indignation among those who preferred genuine freedom only in the breech (thought they like to appear as its champion). Rather they court governments of strong men who can give a constant correct answer irrespective of the noise of their people or their legislatures. They salute the world's peacock thrones. They disparage the diplomatic hand as undemonstrative unproductive, but are incapable of recognizing the military hand is as weak if not weaker still. Not seeing that when military power is used, even when it obtains its end, it becomes smaller. The uncertainty is removed. What can be broken is broken, What is not, can not.  The principle that saying too much might be harmful. That making sweeping statements to claim ownership identity and brand, with politics of another country What's behind Iran's power struggle | csmonitor.com, issuing veiled and empty threats can only backfire and empower those that wish to discredit the protester's cause Iran's elections - the human rights dimension | TPMCafe. Allowing them to make this sudden strife the work of an outside enemy, not the treachery of their own leaders. This is not that difficult to grasp, and yet figures like Charles Krauthammer do it any way. I might conclude that their overriding motivation is harassing the President only. That they have no particular interest in or concern for the protesters on the streets of Iran. No more than the ones shot on the streets of Tehran generations earlier. Or shot in Chile and Argentina. Too often to some U S opinion leaders these were never more than a mere rabble who deserved whatever fate men like Pinochet saw fit to give them.  Now that the regime in Tehran has tipped its hand; however, the Obama administration can afford to take a more forward position and acknowledge the courage and  passion for democratic rule the Iranian people have shown. I hope that he will and think that that he ought to.  Calling the U S and Britain names now cannot restore the legitimacy the clerical autocrats have lost in the eyes of their own people. They cannot make the rest of the world go away like so many inconvenient ballots, inconvenient citizens. 8:36:36 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Perfect Day  I've had a song, Lou Reed's Perfect Day, stuck in my head the past few days. I can't  think why, but I've been thinking about the rise of a particular type of leader in the republican party. Seemingly drawn from an American version of Commedia dell'arte, The stock characters are all there: harlequin, brighella, il capitano etc. Their activities have been welcomed, joined with and cheered on, by certain sections of the party in the name of energizing the base. Even as it drives that base down to new levels of baseness. A vitriol that calls for a reactive if not reactionary sensibility. The rank and file, and the elected leaders beholden to the public do not seem to realize that the needs of this set of individuals; controversy, attention, and ratings, may not necessarily align with the parties best interests.  Now after half a year of malignant broadcast the seeds sown by this hint they may return the whirlwind. A Doctor who performs abortions is shot to death in a church in Kansas City. This is when Scott Roeder shoots Dr. George Tiller. The irony of taking a human life to fill a pro life agenda is not lost, but few take it further to the principle that if any social, subgroup, can rationalize taking human life, for whatever reason makes sense to them, the general moratorium vanishes. Not long after a vile cantankerous old man walks into Washington DC's Holocaust museum shooting a man dead as he came through  Holocaust shooting signals race turmoil, some say - washingtonpost.com.  This person James von Brunn was his name  I think was at the University Maryland back in the spring. I didn't make the connection until I saw in one article that he supported himself in partial fashion handing out materials from the liberty lobby. There was a guy handing out copies of a newspaper called the Spotlight and little cards that raged over the forgotten grievance surrounding the Israeli air force's attack on the US Navy vessel USS Liberty in 1967.     In wake of all this, having spent several months ardently stoking this fire of bully vendetta the reaction of the republican commentators is first to try to deny anything is happening, attempting to brush off suggestions that such people as Roeder and Brunn the Holocaust museum shooter are right wing extremists in any event  Eastern Shore Acquaintances Say Museum Shooting Suspect Spouted Hatred - washingtonpost.com. Unfortunately for this argument as people emerge from the chrysalis of childhood into adulthood political sensibilities become as fined tuned and in as innate a manner as one's ones sense of balance or gravity. Brunn's problem was not too many Kumbaya sing-a-longs. Some seized on the fact that Brunn also had the the address of the National Review among his belongings. Surely no true dexter-winger would consider a grievance against hero and champion of La Causa William Kristal. Argument by exclusionary definition, the no true Scotsman argument as some have pointed out  Latest Right-Wing Meme: Von Brunn's A Lefty | TPMMuckraker. The shooting at a US Army/Navy recruiting center in Little Rock Arkansas  AFP: Arkansas army center gunman trawled web for target that killed one soldier, wounded another by Abdulhakim Muhammed, aka Carlos Bledsoe, 23  is an outlier does not change median data. In law enforcement eyes it reinforces a forming notion that we are in a period marked by Lone Wolf terrorist acts  The Associated Press: 'Lone wolf' terrorists elusive target for police.  What Bill O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and others in the unelected leadership committee ought to remember is that those whose ideology has been honed and pushed into a murderous rage are unstable, are less than ordinarily rational, and unpredictable as well  Federal Eye - Eye Opener: Does Holocaust Shooting Validate Homeland Security Report? Certainly I have seen comments following some of these articles that indicate social constraints are being dispensed with Hate Crimes and Hate - dot.comments in favor of seething contempt.  None of these commentators know when some statement or phrase of theirs will make one of these self-appointed guardians of righteousness sit up on the couch in front of the TV and yell "You saying what know?" Then reaching for his (or her) gun between the cushions calling out: "Bess, old Bess where are you? You loaded? We got some varmint hunting to do"  As Lou Reed sang at the end of Perfect Day: "You're going to reap just what you sow. You're going to reap just what you sow." 11:55:27 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Gate of Heavenly Peace "As I walked  on to Kendall square, and crossed the river basin there, the Charles was black, the sky was blue, the view was old, the bridge was new." Bridges, Squares. ... Ted Leo & the Pharmacists   It is twenty years since the spring vigil for voice and autonomy at the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Twenty years since it was crushed, literally, beneath the treads of armored vehicles and gunfire. A bridge between Beijing University Students and the cities workers, broken. A bridge between rising privileged intellectual and bureaucratic tribes and the nations laborers, factory workers of the new economy, never built. Broken as well the link between that generation and the next; the new generations in China. As this pinnacle moment of their youth was brushed away from official existence. The past occluded. The meaning of their lives taken away from those coming of age now. The square by the gate is not discussed either way, good or bad, necessary or unnecessary, overreaction by frightened old men. It is banned, scarcely referred to. Written out of history. And little official memory from this side.   My one constant window on the world is from a library cataloging technician's quarter-cubicle. And our acquisitions department's river of new books that flow by me, steady broad and deep. From this I take as a marker of the new China's cultural dynamism and wealth not only the amount and heft of books on the art world in China; the new galleries and exhibitions. Also the radicalness and challenging nature of this new art. It is not, one more exhibition of a dusty scroll with a delicately painted reed on it drawn by a sensitive Confucian captioned in bone script (personally I like Huang Binhong's stuff).  It is not Mao-approved revolutionary social realism. No ballet of Kalishnikovs here - well un-ironically at least.  These books  The revolution continues : new art from China [WorldCat.org] wear their hearts on their sleeves somewhat - or dust jackets at least. They have titles like  China under construction : contemporary art from the People's Republic = Zheng zai jian she zhong : Zhongguo dang dai yi shu [WorldCat.org] ,  Fancy : dream [WorldCat.org]  ,  New world order : contemporary installation art and photography from China [WorldCat.org] ,  Beyond Beijing = Zi you xing [WorldCat.org] , Susi, key to Chinese art today. Future & fantasy [WorldCat.org] and,  dslcollection a private Chinese contemporary art collection [WorldCat.org] This last  is a dvd of a private collection, but the collection also has a strong (flash-based) web site, so you can see much of it online  DSL COLLECTION.  This richness and dynamism often seems to lack reference to, masks, the failings of the new China. The essential exploitivness of its world factory culture. Perhaps all societies as they progress through structural transition encounter an exploitive phase. This does not mean they can't try to be self-aware. That some citizens should not attempt, or be allowed,  to bring these matters forward to the conscience of all. To ask there be one measure of fairness and justice. Without this there is not balance or symmetry. It would require greater familiarity with this contemporary art world to see what attitudes on the contradictions and disparities of Chinese modernism actually exist in it. Art sometimes declines to drape its final meaning across its surface.   Manifestos for the time being have been left to the prosaic side. Charter '08 is only from only the end of last year :10 Dec '08 Charter 08 - Wikipedia. I had wanted to write more on this, but have yet to turn up much on it. The manifesto, published in an english translation earlier this year will have to speak for itself for now:  China's Charter 08 - The New York Review of Books.  Primarily it is a reform movement. Seeking only to broaden and deepen the existing political system not over throw or replace it. It  asks for freedom of assembly and association, an independent judiciary, introduction of legal allowance of other political parties. The principal drafter was detained even before manifesto was formally released. The governments trending reaction can be gauged from this. Many others have been interrogated, possibly all those who were original signers, signers of the subsequent petition supporting it, or in any other way formally connected to it. The Chinese press forbidden to discuss or even refer to its existence.   Similarly regarding authoritarianism and its discontents This CSM article China guts budding civil rights movement | csmonitor.com  reveals that Chinese lawyers who have taken cases to defend cultural resisters are finding their legal licenses are being revoked. Apparently there is a law in China that its 120,000 or so lawyers must renew their registration to practice law every year. The greatest danger the current Chinese government poses is that it serves as a brutalist model for how a modern mass society ought to proceed. A partitioned society capable of delivering profound luxury to a privileged elite while keeping political power out of the hands of the rest. An example that has admirers across the world even in the west, even in the US. More than few US companies, particularly internet and telecom companies, have debased and libeled themselves in a scramble to sell or enable populace-controlling technologies to China (M, C, Y, G).  Such a society is in a fundamentally unbalanced situation, not stable. No matter how channeled and regulated. No matter how on the threshold of a heavenly garden of peace it portrays itself as being. 11:24:42 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Glass The building I work in, McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, consists of an old and new half. The different sections, McKeldin East and McKeldin West, each made from different construction techniques and materials built in the mid 1950s and 1990s respectively. The new section is a building in the modern style, a sealed building with full air-handling, and artificial lighting necessary throughout the work day.  There is a minor artifact among all this that set me thinking. In the old building the windows are a mixture of oversized sash or casement windows which formerly could be easily opened with a crank.  In the new section some modern equivalent of a casement window. They can be opened and pivot outward when they do so, but this is not allowed. They are constructed as a rectangular box, two large panes of glass with a set of micro-venetian blinds installed between them. All of this in a prefabricated sealed rigid aluminum frame. When the building was new these windows were quite nice. They did not accumulate dead bugs, dust, dirt, or wads of chewing gum. For cleaning all they ever needed was a wipe with a dusting cloth, some windex at the most. The problem is that with the building now a only a dozen years old many of these blinds no longer work. They were operated by a fiddly little plastic knob which in turn operated small plastic gears. These are now stripped and the blinds stuck in their last place. It is unlikely they will ever be fixed. Parts would have to be ordered, the windows disassembled and reassembled following sets of unfamiliar instructions. The windows might even need to be sent away for repair or replaced. There will never be a season where there will enough time or money in the facility budget for this to happen. In the end a hundred years from now when this building comes down, those windows and their inoperative blinds will come down with it, just as they are today.      A year ago when a highway bridge collapsed and fell into a river in Milwaukee I had a similar set of thoughts. Not so much for that particular bridge, which was being attended to when it collapsed. The thoughts were provoked more by the articles that appeared in many newspapers at the time that carried data and anecdote that the nations highways and transportation infrastructure were ready to fall apart. This system, all that metal concrete and asphalt, is the nations crowning engineering and technological achievement. In quite real ways one of the central sources of our wealth, with the increasing reliance on just-in-time shipping our most critical and efficient warehouse as well. The articles warned this system is not being funded for the degree of upkeep that will allow it to keep its manufactured potential capacity. It is being allowed, in an era of tight budgets and deliberately diminished government revenue capacity, to degrade in place. It will soon become clear as maintenance bills become more acute and unavoidable, that we have been coasting for decades on the achievements and sacrifice of past generations.   We have a bent for cultural and material complexity. One strongly organized towards processes and economies of scale in initial manufacture. Little is geared towards the efforts of upkeep and sustenance. When I was younger one might hear people speak, disapprovingly, of planned obsolescence or "the throwaway society." This was with consumer goods though, and besides the approach worked so well it seemed plainly to justify itself. With more durable goods and industrial built environment, it went quietly unnoticed how much our material world was being front loaded, with disadvantage and costs down the line.   Our reigning belief is in technology. That technology will bring us out of any desert and into the promised land. That within our technological acumen is the solution to any problem that we create or encounter. I don't recall that anyone has come forward to formally claim technology, a mere adaptation of science to corporal need, as a force that halts or even reverses entropy. Just that everyone seems to regard it so. This distinct from, even partially opposed to, similar though broader claims for human ingenuity which however would include poetry. What our modern systems of fabrication do is give us a material world manufactured to exceptional standards of finish. Giving us an illusion of power over the natural world we do not possess so completely. Our world comes to us with it's utility baked in, airless, between two panes of glass largely incapable of reuse repair or adaptation. 11:18:04 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Good idea / bad idea  Recently I discovered that I believed in an odd proposition. I believe there are as many bad ideas in the world as there are good ideas. A manichaean turn of thought. Restating this brings out implications lying within. There is an even division of good ideas and bad ideas. For every good idea that comes to you, so will a bad one. There is an even distribution as well. The universe is not lumpy with ideas, a pocket of good ones here, obtainable one after another. Bad ones in another well-marked pocket safely way over yonder. We encounter both with the same frequency.      This is the way it is: in us, in this world, even on the internet. Certain people, I'll allow, are filters of ideas creating dark storms or protected harbors around themselves respectively.  Some, maybe many may not believe this. There is the prevalent concept of the neat or cool idea. An indeterminate close relative of mine, like a nephew say but let's avoid unnecessary particularity, is of the age where these ideas are the best. Ideas like toy mods. Making good toys even better. For instance modding Nerf guns. The sort of improvements that  Humans vs. Zombies players make to them to have them fire further and harder.  Modding nerf bolts, so they can become something far more adventurous, as seen on tv or read about in adventure books. All these things are realized by the leading educational institution of our time. Tube-sock(et) University (101, 102) we'll call it, to avoid unnecessary litigation. Neat ideas by their very nature; the daring, original, and powerful aspects of them, make captive imagination.  These ideas are the hardest and trickiest to judge, and must be weighed the most carefully of all.  Some would imagine they believe something of this sort: that ideas are like wheat. Rather that consideration of ideas is like threshing. A simple matter of separating grain from chaff. The only bad ideas, the conceptual dross of the affair, are those ideas that nothing can be done with. Inedible, unsubstantial. Dismissed with the wind.  This notion itself, that it is the efficacy of ideas that is their measure, should not be considered above the fray. Clever ideas or dumb ones, acid or base, contrary to what might be believed there are no neutral ideas. Ones neither good nor bad, that could be harnessed to fine purpose whatever their cast. All idea's as they come into being, manifestations of crystalizing thought, need to rigorously examined for their potential and long term effects. Perhaps no bad idea is completely without merit, nor good idea unalloyed. The key question may be whether the life they will take on is controllable with what resources native and material you have at hand. However, in the fullness of time no good end will come out of a bad idea beginning. Everything is all fun n' games til somebody gets their eye put out. 11:48:46 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Circling the Drain  The Washington Post, august institution that it is, has seen fit to cut Bill Griffith's comic strip Zippy the Pinhead. They've been cutting or shrinking their comics for some time now. The comics are becoming a nano-form. But really, cutting Zippy to save Judge Parker or Peanuts redux?  That's telltale. Zippy is the one comic I'd take to my single-palm desert island on the  half-shell. As "Canderville" pointed out the other week the comics started as a carnival barker attraction for papers. The yellow kid put the original yellow into journalism, don't mistake that.. Scaling them back now in a fight to regain readers is non-intuitive thinking, like taking the sweet and cold out of ice cream.  This is part of their advanced program of containing costs by curtailing service and product. Towards this end they have been collapsing and reworking sections all spring. They eliminated Book-world their premier Sunday tab sized book-review outright; distributing its book reviews and commentary throughout the rest of the paper and rest of the week. Business was eliminated as a free standing section and merged to the daily A section. The Opinion and Editorial pages no longer rate a separate section on Sunday and remain on the end of the A section as they are any Monday through Saturday. The Sunday Outlook section, OpEd's former home, has been refashioned to be a half-lobotomy Style section. Allowing Style to complete its transformation into a celebrity addled lowlife entertainment device.  Out of all this, the elimination and dispersal of Book-world especially seemed a move that can be read as de-emphasing and de-privileging the power of the printed word. None of it, where-ever it lands, could have the thematic force and literary power it had in its own section. A dubious strategy for a newspaper, but likely deliberate as the Washington Post joins the late race to some imagined future post-word world. The American Journalism Review has a story in their latest issue concerning the current practice of many newspapers to cut cost by eliminating copy-editor positions  The Quality-Control Quandary. This they note is sure eventually to impact on quality control, but quality is scarcely the point these days and I'm sure that's a bus the Post will try to jump on if they haven't already.  While the Washington Post, and what other newspapers are still around (my beloved Boston Globe, newspaper of my youth), are complaining about the changes forced upon them. Others talk of a citizens army of technological sharers. Dave Winer, the person originally behind for the Radio Userland web logging software,  particularly has the idea that Twitter (or whatever twitter like product he favors at the moment can "replace" journalism. A significant point because his concept of Journalism, as an entrepreneur and silicon valley gadfly, is a thing that will submit to his PR blandishments. When they don't, when they do their job, he says they don't get it, and can be done away with. Weakening institutional or professional journalism will place news gathering and an informed public at significant disadvantage against increasing and professionally capable public relations teams. It is the aim of these to replace a balanced and informed populace, with a narrowly aware and emotionally beholden one. Moreover; relying on Tweets or blogs to become the news and information gatherers places them in complex difficult and even dangerous positions without requisite professional knowledge or sensibility. As immediate sources they cannot be as effective, as secondary sources they cannot be as authoritative. Husker Du once pointed out "it don't mean a thing." Aside from that;  though, I feel no need to carry the banner of Twitter backlash  News Industry on Twitter: Full of Crazies, Not Reliable - O'Reilly Broadcast.    This is part of the technological upheaval of standard model. Those that have demonstrated that information once deposited onto the internet can be aggregated automatically, believe that further applications of technology can overcome limitations of the original source. A discussion on a Diane Rehm show brought up a point from the first round of aggregation. Full text vs partial text. This leads into questions on how the aggregation occurs: through RSS, manual or extracted. And what is presented: all, summaries, leds, decks etc. A primary example might be Google news vs yahoo's news (scrape, rss respectively). And in presentation Dave Winers river-of-news RSS readers vs Google reader and all other similar 3 panel readers. I never had the idea that RSS or scrapping was intended to deliver the whole article to a user. I saw it as a thing that arranged headlines with a scope note. I don't even use RSS to read other weblogs.  To the degree it was ever a choice by news providers, allowing RSS to transfer the entire text of a piece of writing was a strategic error. There was no overwhelming need for it, and it cut the basic connection to the information's originating source.  Some argue now this was one of a number of management missteps rather then technological inevitability, in the shepherding of journalistic content. Giving it away, free is not a revenue stream. The Associated Presses decision to license its content to Internet portals is one of the sorest points for newspapers and is the subject also of a critical article in the American Journalism Review.  From the AP's perspective the article relates once before the wire service tried to withhold content/product, from new technology; from radio in the 1920s and 30s (AP wire is a creature of the newspaper industry). UPI stepped in and gained significant market share, by 1941 AP had given in. It is reasonable that the AP wire be a hosted services by design. That their product appear on a hosting newspaper, radio, or TV station's web site, whatever the page or link the user was on or followed. Portals who buy or turn around the wire service for news dangle rights, the scrapes and RSS blocks that make them an attractive service, then provide copy on pages that generate ad revenue back to them, cut newspapers out and made them superfluous. The AFP seems to have an attempted solution in place. They don't dump their news feed directly to the Internet. Google Yahoo etc can only provide a link from a subscribed host which then gets eyeballs on their own ads and traffic to their site. These practices form what is known as structured content: [AP president Tom] Curley can foresee someday offering varied levels of access to AP content. While some stories or news videos would remain universally available, others could be coded to provide intermediate access, giving a viewer a brief synopsis. And still other kinds of content could be fully protected, offering perhaps no more than a headline for free. ... The idea is beset by a number of questions, most pointedly: How much would advertising revenue suffer when only paying customers are allowed to enter a site and traffic inevitably falls? A Costly Mistake? | American Journalism Review.   From my perspective as an end user if structured content rules the day and content successfully retreats into walled gardens, accessible by payments additionally to an immediate right to read a story, a subscription or micro-payment ought to gain the user a gifting URL. An email/blog this story URL, allowing the user to share and create a dialog on an article. They could even charge extra for this, differentiated between business and non business users, if they feel the need to.  Newspapers would rather all dialog occur on their own comment sections, but that is not going to happen. Nor, I'm sure they will allow, will the best conversations take place there.  Interest communities today are increasingly, because they can be, non geo-specific (several years ago I attended a talk where a Prof. Langdon Winner made this specific point 17Nov05). Focus comes to a story in graduated fashion and from around.   There is another notion about that news appetite now demands immediate reporting and the technological and distribution means that support this. The 24-hr News Cycle. Call it the campaign for realtime. This means the Internet, it means news aggregation. Even TV and radio which can distribute in real-time, need this to gather news in realtime. The recent Senate hearings on the future of journalism had pronouncements of this sort: "[P]aper and ink have become obsolete, eclipsed by the power, efficiency and technological elegance of the Internet...Most experts believe that what we are seeing happen to newspapers is just the beginning - soon, perhaps in a matter of a few years, television and radio will experience what newspapers are experiencing now." Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet : U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation  Through much of the commentary on the state of newspapers in the press recently especially when newspapers weigh in on themselves is the idea that something unfair has happened to (print) journalism. That we (the buying public and government) ought adapt ourselves to the relief of their needs and traditions. At this point I recall that the news, the fourth estate, has gotten many nearly all major "ground" stories of last decade wrong.  The warning voices on Iraq, WMD, Al Qaeda connections, the ease of certain glorious and useful victory were drowned out by voices repeating political assurances and urging us forward. A similar story on the financial crisis can be told, by the late spring of 2007 the Post and other papers were running stories on the the potential for a wave of foreclosures and questioning parts of the mortgage market, but if they were aware of its potential to bring the financial markets of the world to a virtual stand still they kept that well hidden. Mostly they were content to remain cheerleaders of feverish bull. The Press no longer operates in public interest but as adjunct to and explainer of power. As even Post writer Howard Kurtz relates  most people believe that newspapers problems are of their own making Under Weight of Its Mistakes, Newspaper Industry Staggers. An unoriginal tale of failure to engage with a changing world. Most people are content to allow newspapers to fall by the wayside and see what comes next Media Notes: Can Newspapers Be Saved? Believing that in this  it is not the papers nor even the model of journalism embodied by print. Rather only a more abstract idea of free flowing information as disengaged from institutional interest s as possible that matters.   One of the remedies I've heard repeatedly pushed is to allow a relaxation of media cross ownership rules Washington Help Ailing Newspaper Industry? : NPR. This, it is always stressed, will allow great economies of scale as the owners of radio, tv, and newspapers can field a single army of reporters. I remain open, but dubious here. A distinction between in-market and inter-market concentration needs to be made. A distinction between, combining and pooling new-gathering activities perhaps an efficient economy, and concentration of ownership which is a media concentration of voice and view.  The ultimate value of news, the endeavor of the fourth estate is as a stop against power opposed to a mere flogger of ephemeral information-like content; ball scores (Nats lose, and repeat) and movie times. Can it affect the behavior of those with power over our lives? Power they gain from us. If it cannot, if restrictions on the way it can be used and shared particularize and reduce its ability to create a informed modern citizenry to confront power. Then it does not have value and ought not claim its worth to society, or the price they would set on it. The dialog, the conversation and assessments that occur alongside realtime news and the 24-hr news cycle, needs to occur with the same velocity and liquidity.  In any case it needs to occur with the same velocity as power is exercised over our lives. What will be valued and paid for is what can do that. 9:38:08 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Friday, May 1, 2009

Indie-Lotr I saw on Metafilter He was in Mordor, wasn't he? | MetaFilter that there is a forty minute long internet movie called The Hunt For Gollum  coming out next week. It is, as you might guess, a JRR Tolkien inspired LOTR thing. It premieres 03 May 09 during a London Science Fiction Festival, after which point it will be available from the project's web site. From the precis and trailers available the story they tell is drawn from the appendices of Lord of the Rings. Briefly Gandalf (a wizard) becomes suspicious of Bilbo's (a hobbit) ring (a magic ring). He enlists Aragorn (Mr. Strider, a dunedin) to find Gollum (hard to describe but not unlike Dick Cheney) and learn more about its origin. I have to admit that while I read the Hobbit as a kid, I did not read the trilogy until the movies came out. My sisters and niece said I would enjoy them more if I read the books.  This film the brainchild of Chris Bouchard. It is a fan organized non-profit film project.  Independent Online Cinema, and Rickety Shack films, which are I imagine his production and rights companies, encompass the project. He composed the film's soundtrack too. The web site describes the affair as a Collaborative Online project. Rooting about on the site it is apparent that everything used for it was borrowed or donated, including people and their time. At that, the whole thing seems carefully, professionally, and systematically attended to. Yet they claim the film, shot direct to digital with mid-range pro-am Sony and JVC digicams, was completed for the expense of some 3000 pounds. Which is what 7 to 8000 dollars? That's hardly money at all. I truly wish I had the knack or talent to try something like this.  As I looked over this, I thought of another similar film I had heard about, also through Metafilter, as it happens, Iron Sky. Two words: Moon Nazi's. They escaped in their souped-up V2's, now their coming back to get us! From Finland, and the makers of something called Star Wreck: in the Pirkinning (!). Chris Bouchard even has another one of these internet movies coming out soon an epic horror called Human Residue (2009). There is a lot of weirdness, entire categories of weirdness, out there on the internets; I guess I just haven't been keeping up. I'm dedicated to my own project of destroying newspapers by reading all their content online for free. The "THfG" website (more to the point here) refers to a sister fan film project that it is sharing crew and equipment with: the movie "Born of Hope". This film follows the story of Arador and his son Arathorn, who are (I'm just guessing here) the grandfather and father of Aragorn. It is being made by Kate Madison as producer and mostly shot in a Sturbridge-village like place, an Anglo-Saxon settlement recreation near Bury St. Edmunds. THfG was shot in a park in North Wales. I'm still not sure how people make money on this sort of thing, but if they're happy why should I complain?  This next part functions like an addendum to the main as I did not finish (or even write much of) this until after Sunday and having seen the film.  First and main impression it is an earnest homage not only to Tolkien but especially to Peter Jackson. The other related observation is that unlike much of this sort of thing it is not reliant on ironic distance. There is no snark to this. As well no over-use of leavening humor to compensate for the leaden weight of most fan fiction, when throwing itself out to a wider audience. It follows lines laid down by Jackson's project - which he himself peeled out of layers of Lord Of The Rings commentaries and establised popular imagery. It was quite moving and well done. It told a small well defined story and still managed to give it the look and feel of sweeping grandeur.  For myself  a lurking practical question was: do these under-cut Jackson's upcoming projects and if not why not? The thing to point out here is that there is a lot of room in Tolkien's metaverse. You could send a small army of filmmakers in there and have them not get in each others way. One other thing these projects do which could be usefull to New Line Cinema frankly is that they keep the franchise alive and in peoples hearts while Jackson and del Toro get their act together: "It has been announced by Guillermo del Toro that shooting for this film will not start until 2010:  imdb The Hobbit (2012)." Unless I hear otherwise I may choose to believe there may indeed be some level of awareness between these projects. 9:50:42 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Like Coxey's Army   About a month ago I heard a story on NPR's Morning Edition that referred to a protest march in Vietnam. The story as a whole dealt with the effect the global down-turn is having on those nations and economies where global manufacturing is now encamped. The march had formed the hook of the story. After a few weeks I decided to double back inside the internets and find out what all that had been about.  Toward the end of March there was a largely catholic protest march in Vietnam  Catholic Culture : News Briefs : Viet court affirms conviction of Catholic activists, sparking new protest.  My friend Trân indicated that this was not the first time something like this had happened. Five thousand residents of a northern Vietnamese town marched on Hanoi. They didn't get very far. They got some twelve kilometers before a police force that rivaled their size could be assembled to stop them. Not bad for a prayer vigil that just decided to get up and take a walk. All this was following the trial and conviction of a group of (Catholic) church leaders. They had been arrested late last year for protesting the seizure of church property by the government and had been charged with destructive behavior  VIETNAM Sentence against faithful of Thai Ha upheld. Catholics protest injustice - Asia News. A minor populist uprising and a reflection of latent resentment of the government. The varied sources of this resentment, the stories indicated, were local corruption much of that centering on access to good housing.  Interference by the central government in Catholic Church affairs VIETNAM Ahead of trial against faithful of Thai Ha, Catholics welcome a new bishop - Asia News. Also, a general dissatisfaction due to rising unemployment and abruptly lowered expectations of the current depressed global economic situation. As the NPR report put it:  The communist government of Vietnam derives much of its political legitimacy from rapid economic growth. Now that the global economic crisis is slowing this export driven economy, the government is worried that discontent will spread among the people  Vietnam Worries Economy Will Spread Discontent.   What is it about a protest march? What is it about the notion of someone saying: "Hey let's form a group and march down the road to capital city." I imagine it is the spontaneity and symbolism of the thing. The strong immediate demonstration of feeling. Even if what thought has to be put into it takes a few hours days or weeks of planning, that's still spontaneous for the majority of participants, and there's never the feeling it can't be done. For everyone involved there is that cathartic feeling of accomplishment at the end. It is spectacle and almost never fails in its mildly disruptive nature to be disobedient. And so earns its place as a subset of civil-disobedience in the taxonomy of protest.     I would say further that the protest march is a thing in its own category. More  than the sum of its parts. This is due to its deep history. It traces through periods of direct action as well as modern movement-protest. In the United States, since March of 1894 when Coxey's "army" left Massillon Ohio towards The District of Columbia; marching on Washington List of protest marches on Washington, D.C. - Wikipedia has become a national pastime Marching on Washington : the forging of an American political tradition. The attraction is clear, it is a bonding experience of considerable power, it creates a consciousness among those involved or who simply witness it. Few of these would doubt it creates a raised consciousness. Another factor is how well it lends itself to the principles of non-violent protest. The more disciplined and emotive the crowd the more gravitas behind the message. And yet the march is still certainly a cousin of the mob. What happens when the march stops? Where have they stopped? Is the cathartic feeling sufficient, do the marchers feel their implicit (or actual) petition is delivered, understood? Or do they need more?  However, the critical observation to make here is that a protest march does not equal a protest movement.  What then makes a protest movement? Simply stated it is a program of activism that brings about change. It is worth qualifying that as preferably change towards greater degrees of self-determination. There are institutional factors involved with protest movements. They are a coherent promulgated set of aims, embodied in groups that represent those aims. The initial phase is to raise awareness for your cause. Success here could be read in the scale and number of protest events. Against this as Debra Minkoff argues one might look at the density of activist organizations  and sequencing of allied protest movements [ The Sequencing of Social Movements | Debra C. Minkoff : JSTOR link] The first sees protest movements emanating out the the observed popularity and success of previous disparite protest events. The second sees the crucial determinant of the success of movements lying in the accumulation of organizational competency and the effect of degrees of competition among activist groups for that competency (to simplify the argument a great deal). Sequencing of allied protest movements refers to the relation and effect of concomitant though not directly related protest movements to each other in the formation of a generalized era of reform. There are problems extrapolating studies and histories of U S or western european movements Protest and opportunities : the political outcomes of social movements [WorldCat.org] elsewhere Repression and mobilization [WorldCat.org]. Western style protest is not useful for situations where the government is willing to outlaw criticism, and jail or kill large numbers of protesters.  Considering the future of protest, of reform in Vietnam the first thing that has to be said is that for the Vietnamese it is lonely struggle. The literature in protest studies of resistance to and attempts to reform people's republics of the left, runs thin. At first glance there is opportunity for a potential sequencing of reform movements in Vietnam. There is the Catholic Church with its commitment to social justice  and autonomy of conscience. There is the Democracy movement represented by the forces behind the TdNgonluan web site  Freedom Democracy for Vietnam tdngonluan.com and their existing 8406 movement Bloc 8406 - Wikipedia, named for the date they released their Manifesto for Democracy in 2006. The Falun Gong movement is a potential source for reform as it gathers adherents in Vietnam BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Falun Gong finds followers in Vietnam . I know little about them: a spiritual movement dedicated to exercise, meditation and well being: phapluan.org. They've been active in China for 20 years. The government there recognized the incompatibility of such a group dedicated to self-reliance with a collectivism or managed capitalism that prefers the people remain reliant on a privileged elite. Similarly there is potential for the principles of the extensive roadmap for reform and human rights en-scribed by Charter 08, Charter 08 - Wikipedia, which has already elicited arrest for one of its principle drafters Xia Liu - A Voice for My Husband - washingtonpost.com to spread to Vietnam. At some point in the near future I'll have to come back and look into and write more on Charter 08 and its earlier model Charter 77.    States born thorough revolutionary action seem to have an especial difficulty dealing with reform movements. A tendency to see any criticism as counter-revolution, revanchinsm,  a step back from achieved perfection. Vietnam's regime attempts to deal with a tool like the protest march by making visiting a city where they fear one might be forming illegal, and backing that up with house to house searches.  Where some power structures will deal with reform movements grudgingly through bargaining and expansion of rights and franchise - which they may certainly view as mere appeasement. Regimes which view themselves as the pinnacle result of a movement of class  struggle will instinctively shy away from correction and offer only reaction and repression. 11:32:51 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

D B TV    This posting is intended as a rant. A rant, like any good philippic, for which I endeavor to be as unreasonable as I can be. Difficult for someone born - somewhat by nature - to a libra mentality.  Here I give the observations of a suburban broadcast TV viewer as the shift is made to Digital Broadcast TV. I have never had cable and intend to watch whatever broadcast TV offers until it finally disappears altogether, like a cheshire cat. My friend Trân, having burnt bridges with the local cable concern, opted to continue television through a satellite dish arrangement, and threw her converter box coupon away with a laugh. Cable etal, is a near infinite variety of the finite. You have to pay for it (I can scarcely afford this DSL line), and they show commercials.    The digital propagations that comprise the new system are fragile signals, subject to considerable weather degradations and antenna placement issues. It is nearly possible, perhaps possible, to simply wave these signals away. By hand. Any breeze over 8-mph produces pixelated breakup. Rain or wind above 15 mph results in screen freeze or a "No Signal" message across all (nominally) available channels. Additionally antennas, rabbit ears or what have you, must be repositioned between viewing channels on transmitters at different locations. It is true that when you are receiving a signal the picture is excellent and free of the snow, static and double-imaging  that plagued analog broadcasts. And I do like the weather channels (the .2 channels)  that grow like kudzu off the big city stations. But the intermittent signal loss which runs between 10 and 50 percent, points to an impossibility of following narrative programing. Above 20 percent intermittency you are missing scene set-up shots and either the subject, predicate, verb, or adjective out of every line of dialog. The only programming that can be followed under these conditions is baseball. This struggle is compounded logarithmically if you try this in a rural area. I can walk outside, go across the street to some high ground and see the tower these radio waves are supposedly emanating from.     My sister Ann recently emailed me a link to an article in the Everett (Snohomish County) Herald  HeraldNet: For antenna users, there's a dark side to digital TV which offered some confirming observations on the delicate nature of the digital signal. "[T]he little-known downside of converting to a more technologically advanced yet weaker broadcasting system." is how the author Amy Rolph describes it. Later she quotes Jay Zacharias, assistant chief engineer for KCPQ: ""If people have a good line of sight from their antennas to our antennas, they should get a good signal.""  So if you can see the signal tower you should be alright. Perhaps they should just mount jumbo-trons to the towers and cut out the middle man. The comments from the readers that follow the article are noteworthy too. The first commenter claims interim DBTV is often using UHF spectrum on lower power:  All current digital TV broadcast is on UHF frequencies, even the ones from VHF channels ... After June 19th the VHF frequencies will also be converted to digital TV use. At that time the signals should be almost as strong as the old ones...Even though the current digital channels include VHF channels the digital broadcasts are all on UHF right now. When they quit analog broadcast then they can use the bandwidth to broadcast digital TV on the real VHF channels. Another commenter claims he has been informed that interim D B TV is using non-optimum tower installations while analog is still in service. I strongly suspect that something like this is true, that the transition period is full of compromises and scaffolding that will fall away when analog is no longer obligated. At the same time the robust VHF spectrum that transmitted analog was auctioned off for cell carriers and isn't coming back.    Thinking about this I was again struck by what little information really lay in what was coming out of the federal government on this. Maybe I wasn't looking deep or hard enough. Maybe it took more than parsing the consumer palaver of the DTV's pages Digital TV Transition: What You Need to Know About DTV . It needed listening deeply to the voice of the shuttle; those second, third and fourth links in off these web pages, where you hear the government talking to itself, and to its first public: industry. I have noted a transition in the governments outreach and internet information from 'how to obtain and hook up a box'  TV Converter Box Coupon Program Website, to 'how to a catch signals' The Digital TV Transition: Fix Reception Problems. There is more focus on antennas Antennas and Digital Television both large and small AntennaWeb. I saw an public service advertisement for a service the FCC offers from their suite of pages (which I had already discovered on my own). The FCC's The Digital TV Transition: DTV Reception Maps. This is FCC data overlaid on a Google maps interface. It was this type of data from the FCC that that the Herald article above was responding to. This is the GIS revolution in motion. For any area entered, a list of stations in the market(s) involved appear in a list on the left. They are color coded by their estimated received strength, clicking on the call signs makes an icon representing the tower appear on the map with a line to your location, with bearing and distance. Along with this you get numbers of effective power expressed in kW, and receive power in dBm. Since these are undefined technical terms they are useful here only as measures of relative efficacy. In a cursory examination I'd say if a station's receive power in dBm (expressed as a negative number) is weaker than -36  (higher) you won't get that station with a pair of rabbit ears. Another set of  data that comes with this page is whether a station is planning any major upgrades, or is operating on a weak or UHF frequency in the interim, and will only go to full power after June 2009. Dependent, it seems, on the information from the relevant Form 387s filtering down to this level.    The FCC has more comprehensive coverage of these matters on their maps book pages  Map Book of All Full-Power Digital Television Stations Authorized by the FCC. These include the pre and post transition coverage of all broadcast stations in the U S, and an additional separate map book of FP station with significant changes in coverage  Map Book For Full-Power Digital Television Stations Having Significant Changes in Coverage. These maps by market, station, and network measure points where coverage is gained, where it is lost but where the content is covered, and lost with no direct substitute from another content provider. Judging by the DC area and the Milton/Lewes De areas the only two I'm familiar with, all this suffers from a singularly creative level of optimism. The FCC also seems to have assumed that if signal strength in an area ought to be at a certain level, according to their standard model - then it is. If terrain or a dense curtain of urban buildings obstruct this, they don't count it. Although those hills and those buildings aren't going anywhere. In many area's they point to significant coverage gain in the periphery, but the receive power there is -66 dBm. That signal is only available if you choose to mount an amplified outdoor antenna the requisite 20 to 30 ft above surrounding terrain. Otherwise the drifting "No Signal" tag will be your tv companion. (I've found I can change the border color of the no signal tag, and often amuse myself by this)        There is strong indication between the lines that the engineers and bureaucrats knew this replacement was less adequate. Offhand I don't know whether it is better to believe they were so blinded by the industry's pressure to make this happen, the corporate and institutional gains that would roll forth if they ignored it, or that they were so incompetent that they didn't see it at all. Either way I only see it as dereliction of professional ethics, and abandonment of fiduciary responsibilities.  Moreover I see a governing assumption lurking in the background of all this that the overwhelming majority of the American population would switch to cable or satellite at this point leaving only a small rump population on broadcast who could be safely ignored.  Forming only an minor adjunct to an industry that would center itself on other ways and means elsewhere. I am inclined to regard this as, at the least, a malfeasant expectation, and not synonymous with mere technological advancement - whatever that is believed to mean. I see this as favoring cable and parallel non-public providers long term aims concerning content (rights) management and control against the interests of the American public. It is all a haphazard swindle. 11:54:14 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Fortune  I've written about this subject previously. I probably don't have that much to add this time around. It is about a particular day.  Not the most significant day in my life, not even the most significant day from those years when it occured. Who knows what  significant is, though. In any event a day memorable in its own right. The 30th anniversary of the day the aircraft carrier I was on, when I was nineteen year old sailor, sailed into an oil tanker. That's how the day began in fact. I knew the anniversary was coming up and wanted to write something full and complete, to nail the moment down - to the extent I could remember anything. The day arrived, I wasn't prepared yet.  I find myself scrambling now to come up with some coherent thoughts, and I remember nothing. USS Ranger CV 61 05-09 Apr 1979. the transit back to Subic   What happened was that on O5 Apr 1979 at 0544 in a dim hazy predawn the USS Ranger (CV 61), a 78,000 ton Forestal class aircraft carrier, struck the Motor Vessel Fortune (Monrovia) a Liberian flagged, but Taiwanese owned vessel, about 600 ft. in length. One of our escort vessels describes it in their official history USS ELLIOT (DD 967): Command History 1979. The collision also earns a line in this Italian list of naval incidents lista incidenti ad unita' navali nucleari.  It was routine for many ocean vessels to be registered in Liberia at that time - they had no maritime regulations, safety training, or equipment standards, etc, whatsoever. It made Liberia a free market perfection. The collision's impetus was a misreading by the MV Fortune of our ship/airport running lights. They read the lights to indicate we were on a different course than we were, and assumed we had better charts and knew what we were doing, so they put themselves on what they thought was a parallel course. They actually put themselves on a course to cut in front of us. We were just beginning a transit of the Straits of Malacca at the time approximately 24 miles from Singapore. The straits are a narrow and very busy shipping channel between Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula.  Lcdr "Crash" Kramer, and Lcdr "Tasmanian "Thies - we gave them nicknames afterwards - the OOD and Navigator  who were present on the bridge at the time compounded the MV Fortune's initial error. They disagreed whether to turn to port and try to regain a true parallel course, or to starboard and pass below their stern (the correct answer). The Captain was asleep in his cabin at the time and not available as tie-breaker.  No action was taken in time and we hit them amidships at 5 knots. This ended with 10,000 tons of oil washing ashore on Singapore. The largest oil spill in that region until sometime in the late 1990s  OIL SPILL CONTROL: Govt. of Mayasia. Tonnes of oil it says in that link. Normally you hear of oil spills in terms of barrels. I have no idea how many barrels of oil that might be.   Oil Tanker M.V. Fortune after the collision. USS Ranger hit the Fortune amidships and cut a dozen feet in, from the deck to well below the waterline.     I have limited personal recollections of that morning. The collision alarm went off - three bell like tones in a row. Of course if you are asleep there is always the chance  you might miss a couple waking up, leading you to spend a few seconds trying to remember what an unfamiliar abrupt piercing tone might mean in the course of shipboard life. This was followed by the impact itself a hard audible crash that fishtailed the ship and knocked people out of their racks. OZ division's berthing was on the O3 level under the number 3 wire, about four-fifths of the way to the stern. We probably felt the collision least of all. While I along with Mark Edmunds, and Mark Ramsey were airwing, being with RVAH -7,  it was routine for our rating to be TADed to ships company.  Others from RVAH-7 like Mark Edmund's roommate from our Key West quarters Kent Dotson were berthed further forward. It was still very apparent we hit something. After this General Quarters was announced and we needed to report to our assigned duty stations within a few minutes as ship would go into lock-down (material condition zebra) after that. The next six hours were spent with all watertight doors shut throughout the ship. The principle practical meaning of this for us - no bathroom breaks. The nearest head was on the other side of a dogged hatch. One of our people, SN Ted Galpa, I think had been on the fantail doing trash detail  when it happened (trash detail: carry all the watches plastic trash bags down to the stern, tear a hole in them - "rig for negative bouyancy", toss in ships wake) He sees the silhouette of the ship we hit, gets back up to the CVIC on the 03 level and gave us this info, confirming the speculation and rumor going around that we hit a ship, not a reef or a submarine (- which is what I thought unable to accept at first that we hit something we could see). A group 3 cargo ship. The intense smell of sulfur pervading the ship indicated it was an oil tanker. Carrying no. 6 grade crude we found out later on. Unrefined oil straight out of the earth. There was little or no official word for the first hour or so. Though I believe we knew they had put up helos  to survey the situation.  A picture I took myself with my Olympus OM-1. Arc welding on the starboard catwalk, Subic Bay PH. a week after the incident.   For the rest of the day they worked to determine the extent of the damage, put the ship's launches in the water, put divers over the side. The impact tore a hole in the Ranger's bow at the water line that you could have squeezed a small car through  We slowly reversed away from the MV Fortune and the soon voluminous and potentially dangerous oil spill surrounding it  They determined the bulkheads in our bow behind the tear were holding, and that the ship wasn't taking on water. The decision was made to move all the planes and mobile equipment as far back to the stern as they could be stationed to raise the bow up . The ship turned north, away from the equator we had been about to cross the next day, and limped back to Subic Bay in the Phillipines for initial repairs. This consisted of welding steel plates over the gaping hole in the bow. Then later to Yokuska Japan to go into dry dock for more extensive repairs.  Unfathomably the MV Fortune was seen by us several months later back on the job, repaired and a good 50 to 70 feet longer. They had spliced in a new midsection. I used to have a picture of that which I can't find now.  I can find no trace of what became of the MV Fortune after that on the internet now, though there seems to have been a bulk cargo ship named MV Fortune out of Monrovia in the late 1990s.  To official history (the USS Ranger is now decomissioned and awaits potential transformation into a musuem currently) it all seems quite dry and unremarkable.     April 5, 1979: Near the eastern approaches to the Straits of Malacca. USS RANGER collided with the Liberian tanker FORTUNE suffering substantial damage but no injuries while the tanker is holed in the port side from the main deck to the waterline. Following the collision USS RANGER's CO was relieved by Capt. Roger E. Box, USN. ( USS Ranger CV-61)  They note that Captain Box replaced Captain Thomas G. Moore after this. That happened a month or so later after the USS Ranger nearly swamped a barge tug leaving Yokuska, the USS Ranger tried to assume helm control while the tug still had a line on us. There had already been a maritime court of inquiry that had assigned joint blame for the big accident. Captain Moore was gone within hours of that second incident. The Navy at the time routinely assigned command of Aircraft Carriers to fighter pilots like Captain Moore. As I think about it, these improvised repairs worked well enough, there was a least one period of very heavy seas when we spend three days on the edge of a typhoon off of Luzon. Nothing broke off that couldn't be winched back in place. In late August we returned to Yokuska (near Yokohama) where the Ship Repair Facility had built us a new bow section and we went back into dry-dock for a few weeks to have it fitted on. It was on this occasion that I got up to Kita Kamkura and Tokyo. From there we pounded back to Hawaii at flank speed to test it out. Every single thing on the ship rattled against something else for a week. Pens danced on desktops and the typewriters seemed to type by themselves. Your pillow rattled against your head when you tried to sleep. September at the end of the cruise: Ship Repair Facilitiy Yakuska Japan, presents us with the new bow (tied up with red ribbon) they have fabricated for us over the summer.(photo is from the 79 westpac cruise book credited "UKN")   Every so often I'll come across a reference to the history of that year and the Ranger's small part in it in some book or article. I'll think of the repercussions and opportunity lost of that incident. The Persian Gulf not sailed to. That's where we were headed after all. A port call in Perth, across the Indian Ocean, a patrol off Kenya a port call in Mombassa, then late spring and early summer in the Persian Gulf. The Kitty Hawk had to take our place. When we went back to San Diego in September, they came out to take up 7th fleet duties. Leaving no carriers on station in the gulf for the rest of the year. The point of carriers, really, is what doesn't happen (there is a cost-benefit/risk analysis equation in there somewhere to be sure).  I don't recall anything in particular happened in the Persian gulf region in the later part of 1979. There was something indistinct about a radical Islamic revolution in Iran. This was a long time ago though, and I'm sure all that was sorted out fully in the many years since. Peace Out. 8:56:05 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Thursday, March 26, 2009

the Bailout is Not my New Bicycle  I put the economic crisis out of mind for a while. I took my furlough day. Furlough days are an interesting concept - you don't have to go to work, but the state doesn't pay you either. Mitigates the reason I took the job in the first place. The economic conundrum is like a bad penny, though it keeps rolling back into view. The bail outs are not my new bicycle, but the stimulus is the new surge.  It's somewhat confusing, the bailouts are plural, the federal government is buying different things: "toxic assets", "preferred stock". There was the recent stimulus bill as massive as the bailout. Additionally in the middle of all this the cast of principle characters seemed to change. I began to think I had lost the thread of it all.  I turned to Wikipedia, naturally, but also to a web site called Budget Watch, and made an appointment with Frontline. There is a concrete benefit of summaries, I think.  Daily news produces a fog of present detail.  Response of the current crisis began (in earnest with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. (H.R. 1424) passed October 3 of last year. This brought into being the 700 billion dollar behemoth: the Troubled Assets Relief Program. This program is managed out of the Treasury dept. By a newly created sub-bureaucracy in fact: the Office of Financial Stability. The TARP consists of a number of purchasing programs: mortgage-backed securities (the heart of the problem), whole loan (for banks that simply have too many mortgages on the books) and equity purchase programs. A triage of sorts using the camel bank rating criteria is one part of the TARP program's work, but the bulk of it consists in determining what to pay for these assets in the absence of an open market. At the end "we the people" own something called an equity warrant. Throughout all this there are FDIC buyouts occurring, of routinely failing banks. Bringing up what hopefully will be the tail of this parade the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - Wikipedia  also know as the Stimulus Bill. The official return of Fiscal Policy. Across the district and environs people are dusting off busts of Keynes and finding a delicately inconspicuous spot in a conspicuous room for them.  The next obvious question is How much will this cost? This is where budget watch's web site us useful because they have placed all these programs, in clickable, sortable and filterable tables, and these tables have columns of numbers. You can add it up Stimulus Watch: Government Responses to the Financial & Economic Crisis | US Budget Watch. At this point the Republicans are willing to raise spectre of deficits. This is a joke. One beyond pointing to Richard Cheney claiming deficits don't matter. While household economics isn't the correct mental model for national debt, they do matter (at least their principle) a little. Beyond this is the stark fact that for eight years the republicans threw money around like a drunken sailor in a liberty port. The executive and every member of their caucus. They worked hard at not eliminating bureaucracies but semi-privatizing them into their own voting base. Senator Gregg (R. NH) offers a useful example. In the Frontline episode that documents the growth of the federal deficit  FRONTLINE: ten trillion and counting | PBS . He acknowledges in one scene the continued growth of the deficit during periods of republican control, though he tried to hold the line, he pauses then adds "most of the time". In heaven you've got your good things and I've got mine. Here no, There are no party favors in a fiscally responsible budget. Minor logrolling aside. A minor irony here is that the targeted spending needed to produce a stimulus effect is not necessarily the classic liberal agenda spending that so many democrats have waited a decade for. Oh well.   The next natural question is who is to blame for all this. There might even be a practical side to such questions as we try to relate cure to illness. The illness, well it involves some zombieism they say. Zombie banks is the nom de guerre for a bank which has gone dark, is no longer performing the services of a bank, merely absorbing liquidity. The prevailing feeling is that these banks have no liquidity, and number among the undead. There are other indications that these banks may be sitting on what liquidity they have and may even possess reasonably accurate transaction costs information on parts of the market. They simply regard all that as proprietary information, and the game as still in play, their value to anyone but themselves irrelevant. For the rest of us it amounts to a question of confidence, whether systemic or accidental trust is gone out of the market. Whether a system as extensively leveraged as the one that existed can have enough market information available to remain stable. The expansion of the financial sector as a driver of the economy was done under the banner of market machinery. It is certainly a moral hazard for the government to repair this system, save it's progenitors from their folly and wind it up for a future of the same. Robert Reich had the simple observation the other week that any institution that might be considered Too Big to Fail, whether a monopoly or duopoly or not, should be considered as being outside the free market system, as no possible market force could then form any check on it's behavior or activity  Robert Reich's Blog | Talking Points Memo | The Real Scandal of AIG:. Within any possible free market, there is inherent limit to the size corporations can grow to, Either they find that limit on their own or they don't, but they can not be allowed to rule through failure.  At this point you quickly enter the dangerous territory of Populism and Scape-goating. The Bonus Babies of AIG, recently in the news, were the perfect poster children of entitlement. There is no segment of this current culture more imbued with entitlement than the elite professional classes. These entrepreneurial executives were  not really delivering a  thousand times more value than wage workers (like myself). Still being human they can flee only so far from humanity. Send them down to the company softball team. Even Ted Williams only hit in the 400s.  It is curious (to me) at the wage level I have to argue my value to the system, rarely to any avail, money is tight times are tough. At the financial sector executive level They argue it must be demonstrably proved they are not worth their millions, never to any avail - times are tough, one can't be to careful. Better to pay the man what he wants. They are not irreplaceable though. There is an excellent system in place for training and retraining high quality MBA's. Best Practice programs for identifying and deep selecting the Best and Brightest of new workers. The very fungibility of these elite trained belie their claim of critical uniqueness. What they can do is defect and blow up a company. This is why they get their pay. Retention bonus are like blackmail. It is like robbery. They are shorty-on-the-corner jacking us up for the Jackson's in our pocket with a borrowed glock. I thought this is why we built so very many jails.  Paul Krugman seems to be casting himself as a consistent skeptic of the current system. He has both a blog Economics and Politics - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com and a column Paul Krugman - The New York Times at the New York Times he can harness for this. He is a critic of Geithner, and Lawrence Summers certainly. His main beef is systemic problems of the financial markets. Institutions he seems to believe Geithner tying to insulate from change Op-Ed Columnist - The Market Mystique - NYTimes.com. Even in detail: when the TARP plan recently amended itself to the idea of bringing private institutions in to assist in buying troubled assets. He noted that as long as this was sponsored by loans from the federal government there would be an inescapable propensity for these concerns to inflate the value of these assets Geithner plan arithmetic.  While on one hand it is encouraging to see attempts to bring the market back in to price and absorb these entities, the other hand shows the financial sector still insistent on the privilege their own affairs while the resources of the entire nation are laid at their feet to keep them afloat They arrested me and they put me in jail. And called my pappy to throw my bail. And he said, "Son, you're gonna' drive me to drinkin' If you don't stop drivin' that Hot... Rod... Lincoln!" [Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen] 11:25:40 PM    comment [];trackback [];

Monday, March 16, 2009

L E D   A week ago in the Washington Post's Style section there was an article that I was actually inspired to read  when I saw the teaser at the foot of the front page. A legend of a Led Zeppelin show at the Wheaton (Maryland) civic center in 1969  Reunion for 1969 Led Zeppelin concert in Wheaton - washingtonpost.com. Had it actually happened or was it just a figment of collective imagination? The answer the article seemed to lean towards was that - yes - in a disorganized preamble to Led Zeppelin's first US tour, this had happened. I think I once saw Beefeater (a Dischord band) play this same venue. As I read the article there was a moment of improbable serendipity: Jeff Krulik had organized the reunion the Post article hung its hat on, and led the rumor confirmation efforts. I know Jeff Krulik, Jeff, then program director, is the person who brought me into WMUC, the University of Maryland's student run radio station,  back when I was in college. The person responsible for the debilitating condition I suffer from, I call "dj disease'. If at any point in your life you've answered a question with the words "Tav Falco" or "Johnny "Guitar" Watson" you probably have this. It didn't require much arm-twisting, being on the radio, at any rate. Jeff Krulik  may be more well known to some as the person, along with John Heyn, responsible for the short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot.            In the wake of WFMU's annual fund raiser it's worth spending an additional moment on the idea of radio forms. Free form radio not just as an interlude, but as the perfected form. As a life pursuit. This is against the idea of commercial, talk, college(iate), or even lpfm community radio. Low power community radio (LPFM) could be an ideal when the object of the enterprise is a limited geographic community. Certainly WMUC's ten watts reached little further than the outskirts of the College Park Campus. Or it could be something of a bait and switch when the idea seems to be to administratively stifle the growth into supporting audiences of larger non profit, or locally owned commercial stations. I can see lpfm and college radio as a training proving ground for well formed free-form, without growing into an audience of a certain size and attracting commensurate talent pool I don't see them as a replacement or substitute. A radio station - any music culture promulgator which is going to be successful needs an identity, a personality, individuality, a sense of itself. A certain momentum behind that self.  Years go in Washington there was a group called the Council for Progressive Radio. I recall (and only vaguely) this as a collection of prog. rockers and Firesign theater aficionados inspired more by WGTB nostalgia than any affinity for what WMUC was doing. WGTB was Georgetown University's radio station which was off the air for a period in the mid 1980's after the Jesuit administrators there accidentally started listening to it . This was also during the interregnum between WHFS i and WHFS ii (now null set). The goal of the council was a free form progressive radio institution whether distributed by broadcast (AM even), sideband, cable or even pony express. I believe they were poised to be flexible. If somehow they had been successful D.C might now have something like WFMU. I can't identify any trace of this organization remaining now.  Ars Technica had an article Labels: whatever the future of music is, it isn't "free" - Ars Technica based on a UK seminar (and resulting white paper named Lets Play recorded Music ( MusicTank) . The subject in general was how to coax the cat of digital recorded pop music back in its bag, or at the least get the cat to come across with some cash. The RIAA (and similar organizations)  no longer believe it needs radio to introduce and popularize its product. Perhaps niche audiences have become too small to support big radio, maybe its become easy enough for these audiences to talk amongst themselves via social networks. All the same popular culture must be relentlessly commercialized, and commodity packaged. Certainly music culture and the standard model for this is the prerecorded pop song. It's all about monetizing it. The report refers to the a la carte model, by which they mean iTunes. Not particularly favored because it leaves the patron almost feeling like they own something especially now that iTunes offers higher bit rates. More discussed by the panels that made up the seminar were various type of Blanket Licenses - for streaming rights -  all sharing attributes of being limited time/use/area - essentially being borrowing models. The tensions between the recording industry, digital device makers and internet service providers were apparent. The former believing they should just get their payment from the latter up front. Leaveing  it to the ISPs already in contractual relational with their customers, to redefine activities possible, with a data stream,  into revenue stream services. Augmenting (or bypassing) that by monetizing traffic data garnered and data mined from net activity (right now verizon is saying to themselves "music makes this guy hungry - he went from iTunes to Google and looked up  Buff Medway - sell that man a chicken).  At no point do they seem concerned with where the meaning or value of music comes from. Believing only that if they can hold it with one hand they can charge for it with the other.  What gives modern music culture, a composition or performance its importance to an audience? Not just a particular instance, but the culture of the beat combo;  assorted small branded groups of overstated socially reflective personalities. The songs in sonic and lyric form are well examined elsewhere. In broad form a snapshot taken in youth, of desires and anxieties of a handful of generations; expansive and retrenched by turns. With perhaps a meta narrative revolving around not only the performed living of musicians, but the frontiers they stake out. The arbitrators of our destiny. A functionalism of some variety is likely at work here. Cultural forms are solutions (answers) to cultural questions. When the questions change the cultural forms of the answers must change also. The Beatles are content to be represented in the digital age by a video game. A blinking diode light cousin of the old toy Simon. This may be the best revenue solution for work created to speak to people now in their sixties.  L.E.D Zeppelin are likely to make a similar decision.   Of course it's not all just fast cars and guitars. There is the strange case of Little Kenny G. Inhabitant of WFMU's non-rock spree modernist space. With radio dominated generally by humorless music types or talk shows, both equally blanketed under a wide-eyed sincerity, an antidote to hyper earnestness (like tramadol) should be nearby. Recreation of a 1966 lecture by Foucault? Essentially a piece of aural sculpture. I find my reptilian reflexes fighting down the impulse to take notes. It's unkind.  You gotta ask, how does a guy like Kenny G talk himself onto the air? Even with art somewhere there's the pitch. The question I ask myself is: would I schedule him? I think back to the brief time I was a college radio program director, scarcely a matter of weeks really, and many years ago. I once put a dj on the air, a freshman. Came across him in the record library a week or so latter listening to a German Shepherds 7" possibly THC. "Oh no, you're not going to be one of those are you? I got a schedule full of that sort already." He replied he knew what he liked. We never really saw eye to eye after that. He later conceived of a record - in the way people conceive records and the songs their rock star bands of the mind might produce. Kustom Karnal Blaxploitation he would call it. An homage not so much to Kevin Nutt as to Kenneth Anger. The songs would have names like: (I want to go to) Malcom X Park, but they would never explain why. 11:51:37 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2009 P Bushmiller. Last update: 7/3/09; 6:55:46 AM.