Asymmetric Warfare

New Dawn Fades

2010-11-08T12:52:00.004-05:00

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We're proud of ourselves, in a way. But our enthusiasm is a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos – we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don't want Other Worlds. We want mirrors."

-Gibarian, Solaris (2002)

Absent Almost Always

2010-09-12T22:32:00.002-04:00

Basement Pipes, Six Variations

2010-08-29T00:54:00.004-04:00

Station Two Station Photo Blog

This Is Tomorrow Calling

2010-08-28T16:31:00.004-04:00

Listening to

"Love Me Madly Again"

Bryan Ferry, In Your Mind (1977)

Time Enough

2010-08-27T11:02:00.003-04:00

Well Worn Asics TIgers; PX100 and PX600 Instant Photos

2010-08-11T20:00:00.015-04:00

These Asics Tigers have been a small, consistent part of my life for an astonishing six years. They've seen me though transitions large and small, and through passages that were by turn trivial, and heartbreaking, and catastrophic. Without noticing it (until now), these trainers have stayed with me though some amazing times and they're not down yet. They've become companions.

It's striking and sometimes a little heartbreaking I suppose, how quietly and slowly, small things in our lives become sigils, of a sort.

Equitable Building, Downtown Atlanta

2010-08-11T19:10:00.005-04:00

Station Two Station Photo Blog

Do Not Disturb

2010-06-18T13:28:00.004-04:00

On My iPod Today

2010-06-01T09:16:00.004-04:00

Listening to Forever Bachelor

Available on

Cause/Effect

2010-05-24T22:55:00.002-04:00

"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."

--Rachel Carson

In Theory, 2005

2010-05-17T11:27:00.002-04:00

Deep Theta

2010-05-15T14:28:00.003-04:00

Why Stop Time

2010-04-09T18:45:00.014-04:00

William GIbson noted that humans are the only animal who creates prosthetic forms of memory that survive their creator: writing, music, dance, art, photography ...shadows on cave walls.

In counterpoint, Tonino Guerra, in his forward for a book of Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroid photographs, recounted a story about traveling with the film maker Michelangelo Antonioni. In Uzbekistan, Antonioni offered three elderly men an instant photograph he'd taken of them with his SX-70. After looking over the image, the eldest handed back the gift and asked "why stop time?".

Why indeed.

Photographs stop time, though always imperfectly. And no camera accomplishes this feat of imperfection quite like the Polaroid SX-70 cameras and their decendants. Even when integral film and cameras were first introduced by Polaroid in the early 1970s, contemporary analog photography easily outperformed them --if accuracy and detail are alone the metric for a desirable photograph. But Polaroids produced images that were more often than not far from technically accurate but approached something oddly closer to emotional truth. Maybe that's why so many people cling to this magical, frustrating and peculiar technology despite the exponential ease and ubiquity of digital cameras. And why so many people have worked so hard to restore instant photography to the market.

I'm happy it's back in my life.

...I Feel Safest of All

2010-04-01T10:33:00.004-04:00

Listening to

"Cars"

Gary Numan, The Pleasure Principle (1979)

Walk Through Polaroids of The Past

2010-03-23T08:30:00.008-04:00

Listening to

"Hiroshima Mon Amour"

Ultravox, Ha! Ha! Ha! (1978)

The Suckers and The Mugs

2010-03-20T18:46:00.007-04:00

"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I."

Harry Lime, The Third Man

A Legacy So Far Removed

2010-03-15T15:42:00.003-04:00

One Hand Stops Clapping; A Death In The Family

2010-03-09T11:03:00.005-05:00

This morning one of my much-loved Beolab 8000 loudspeakers emitted a small pitiful 'pop' followed by an ominous and persistent 60 Hz hum. Some piece of its inner workings has apparently thrown in the towel.

I love these loudspeakers and after 14 years of reliable service can hardly complain about what I hope will be a brief, albeit expensive, illness.

Look At 'Em

2010-03-05T09:20:00.006-05:00

"Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate'em."

Harry Dean Stanton

Repo Man (1984)

Decades

2010-02-25T16:33:00.006-05:00

Less Is More [Expensive]

2010-02-12T17:31:00.005-05:00

Lately, I've spent some time reconsidering my online life and how it seems to have grown disproportionately large. Let me explain:

In the past decade I've relocated to another city, seen many of my closest and most durable friends likewise move to other cities, and for my own part disappeared into competing black holes of career and a long, tedious journey through cancer (and a multitude of treatments for said affliction) that have so consumed my life that I may as well have moved to another solar system. As many of my most important personal connections have grown geographically remote and the circumstances of my life conspired to kept me more homebound, my connection to the larger social world has slowly shifted from actual face-to-face to Facebook. And instant messaging. And email. And so on.

I'm as grateful as anyone for the way these tools have enabled me to maintain meaningful connections that would otherwise have been lost to geography and circumstance, but can't shake the feeling that too great a percentage of my social life is mediated through the internet. In a lucid and humane essay in The New Scientist, Yair Amichai-Hamburger also worries that the cultivation and maintenance of a rich online life sometimes comes at the expense of a more psychologically satisfying real one, that a growing percentage of people lead lonely, melencholy lives bereft of meaningful human contact despite their having 3,000 Facebook friends and a continent full of people following their every Tweet.

If there is a backlash against a perpetually connected life lived through iPhones or Blackberries, it's not making much of a ripple in the marketplace. But just in case, a few manufacturers have taken tentative steps at building products marketed explicitly to address the concern. Bang and Olufsen's now discontinued Serene mobile phone was a beautiful, but wildly uneven first attempt that offered a deliberately limited feature set absent of any rich internet access, instant messaging, Facebook or Twitter. More recently, Sony Ericsson introduced the Pureness mobile phone that it markets as a stylish* (and improbably expensive) alternative for affluent customers who very deliberately want not to be tethered to social media every moment of their lives (Sony Ericsson and Wallpaper magazine have created a microsite that offers insight into the design process and thinking underpinning the Pureness phone, as well a forum for debating the role of mobile devices in contemporary life. Link here). What the Serene and Pureness have in common are striking design, prohibitive pricing, and marketing campaigns that both elevate and differentiate the phones principally by the features they lack.

Of course there's no guarantee that disconnecting oneself from social media will result in a more rewarding life outside of it. But for my own part it's something that with each passing day seems more and more worth exploring.

*the Pureness is in every way a worthy successor to Sony Ericsson's one spectacular design classic, the lovely and equally feature-free T610.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

The Borderland

2010-02-02T10:58:00.004-05:00

I've been absent for a few months. New posts coming soon. Promise.

Objects of Desire™

2009-12-22T15:55:00.006-05:00

The Observer's Cell Phone

Fringe, episode "August"

Fall 2009

A terrific bit of prop design from an episode of Fringe a few weeks ago. The Observer's phone looks like a cross between the Bang and Olufsen Serene mobile and a military field compass as manufactured on another planet in 1958.

Obviously I want one.

Like Brittle Things Will Break Before They Turn

2009-12-14T19:17:00.005-05:00

Winter, 1979

West Second Avenue

Lenoir City, Tennessee

Production and Decay of Strange Particles

2009-12-09T18:43:00.002-05:00

The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act

2009-12-09T07:58:00.006-05:00

...The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."

From "Twelve Virtues of Rationality"

Eliezer Yudkowsky

http://yudkowsky.net/

Vanishing Point

2009-11-24T13:01:00.002-05:00

On My iPod This Morning

2009-11-23T06:23:00.007-05:00

Listening to

"Ruby Tuesday"

Franco Battiato, Fleurs (1999)

An Army of One

2009-10-30T18:01:00.007-04:00

“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

Don DeLillo

from "The Names"

I Wake Up and Have My Realizations Sprayed

2009-10-28T11:15:00.012-04:00

My fondness for Brion Gysin and William Burrough's Cut-up Method continues, this time directed towards already mind bendingly surreal chemtrail/New World Order conspiracy theories. Genuinely creepy, shamelessly opportunistic and vastly unethical Henry Kissinger, it should come as no surprise, figures prominently in a lot of NWO scenarios, having been pulled directly from the Dr. Strangelove branch of Central Casting for Villains. The fruits of this exercise are as amusing, and revealing, as ever:

"Kissinger lives in depopulated California. The reasons that stopped a number of chemtrail depopulations are indeed useless. Nothing magical, the "contrails" have been overcast since 1998. I had your toxin-laden contrails posted horizon-to-horizon and lived the sprayed Holy chemtrails, described by Kissinger's NWO Society. Indeed, I stopped the dark sprayed plans, believing the depopulation peddlers are all useless eaters.

I wake-up, have my realization sprayed, and now: no reality."

Counterpoint

2009-10-26T13:08:00.003-04:00

The Bang and Olufsen Serene is the anti-iPhone. Or it was before the marriage between B&O and their manufacturing partner Samsung went south.

As a design object it's polarizing and spectacular, luscious and maddening. It bucks a raft of industry trends and glides obliviously past consumer expectations: something of a Bang and Olufsen tradition. Living with a Serene day-to-day requires lot of patience as well as a willingness to abandon wholesale a lot of reasonable expectations for a mobile device.

Where to start. On my carrier in the U.S. (T-mobile) it was ultimately impossible to set up the Serene to send or retrieve email or multimedia messages, so after a long struggle I threw in the towel. Next, the experience of dialing a number –never mind pecking out a text message– on the circular keypad runs from awkward to militantly counterintuitive, depending on your patience and the length of message (note: shorter isn't just better, it may very well be all you have the time to compose). And about that circular keypad: for a company that prides itself on innovative and superior solutions, the same diabolical, hand-cramping idea was abandoned as unworkable over 40 years ago by AT&T's Bell Laboratories before reaching the market, then attempted unsuccessfully by Nokia decades later to a chorus of hoots, jeers and mountains of scorn in the marketplace. Why repeat a competitor’s failed approach?

In the end, all of this is irrelevant to a niche product like the Serene. Designed by an audio company, the Serene delivers crisp, better-than-landline-quality voice communication, but either by default or design –take your pick– it makes any other activity so grudging and onerous that the user is discouraged from even trying. Ironically, It's this distinction alone that makes the Serene the anti-iPhone. While the iPhone’s ludicrously unreliable and overextended network is seldom able to make or complete a voice call, but offers a zillion applications to keep the user distracted, the Serene offers few features beyond the ability to hold a conversation in sparkling, interruption-free clarity, and this it does exceedingly well.

I like the Serene. Closed, it looks like an anodized aluminum and black rubberized Chanel compact. The build quality is first rate, the ringtones pleasing, the audio quality second to none, and the motorized open/close function at once truly useful, beautifully executed, and geekily delightful. Of course it's feature-free, favors style at the expense of usefulness, suffers from an near total absence of any technical support in the U.S. market, and is completely overpriced. In that sense it simultaneously represents everything that's right and wrong about Bang and Olufsen and offers some insight into why the phone and the partnership that sired it failed.

On My iPod Tonight

2009-10-22T00:31:00.011-04:00

Listening to
Splitting the Atom
Massive Attack, 2009

Round and Round

2009-10-20T18:03:00.016-04:00

"Experience is a form of paralysis" -Erik Satie

The Measured Response

2009-10-08T17:03:00.006-04:00

On My iPod This Morning

2009-10-07T11:52:00.003-04:00

Listening to

"Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space"

Spiritualized, 1997

In Transit

2009-10-04T11:13:00.005-04:00

1994

Winter On Gratz Street

Knoxville, Tennessee

The Inside Game

2009-09-21T23:50:00.009-04:00

"You are now breathing...virally mutated molds, nano-particulates of aluminum and Barium and cationic polymer fibers with unidentified bio-active material...Drs. Staninger and Karjoom and researcher Jan Smith have reported findings of self-replicating nano-machines and rivers of silicon running wild through the bodies...Welcome to the brave new world of toxic skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems as well as the emergence of a bizarre and frightening new plague...We must join together to stop this insane program of chemtrail spraying now."

-excerpt from a chemtrail conspiracy website

I'm a late comer to the chemtrail conspiracy. Don't ask me how, up until now, I've managed to miss it. It's exactly the sort of empty calorie, Krispie Kreme whackiness I usually can't get enough of. There are dozens upon dozens of websites devoted to the subject, most stocked to the rafters with elaborate, intricate narratives and New World Order paranoia futilely refuted by reputable experts.

All of this got me thinking about conspiracies and how drawn to them the intertwined popular and media cultures are. From Vince Foster-was-killed-by-the-Clintons, to Bush-blew-up-the-World-Trade-Center, to HIV-was-engineered-by-the-CIA, to the elaborate, shop-worn fictions of Roswell and the Kennedy assassination, and finally to the recent unhinged and deeply creepy Obama-isn't-an-American Birther movement, the coherent narrative offered by conspiracies, however dark, seem so much more attractive than the chaotic, random and incomplete realities they compete against.

Neuroscience has long described the human mind as a sophisticated pattern matching machine. While as a species we may be compelled from deep within the structure our brain stem to find comfort in organization, this hard-wired ability to tease out patterns from complex data may sometimes misfire and lead us to see connections where none exist --and at considerable cost and peril. Pattern matching it might indeed be. I'm not so certain about the sophisticated part.

"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." -Don DeLillo

Inroad

2009-09-15T19:58:00.007-04:00

2009

Downtown 94

2009-09-15T15:40:00.003-04:00

1994

Fresh Perspective

2009-09-07T13:13:00.006-04:00

"Defamiliarize the ordinary" Paul Rand

Here Come The Warm Jets

2009-09-07T11:03:00.015-04:00

Like the Polaroid SX-70 Land camera and Concorde, the U-2 spy plane's spare, singular design has aged insanely well. Even though the first test flight was held in 1955, the glider-like fuselage looks completely contemporary: it could as easily have been drawn up yesterday by Marc Newson. Designed by Kelly Johnson and Lockheed for Cold War high-altitude reconnaissance, the U-2 was first rejected by the Air Force before catching the attention of a civilian review panel that included inventor, industrialist and 20th century American super-genius Edwin Land of Polaroid. He successfully lobbied CIA director Allen Dulles to sponsor development and construction of the plane, which 60 years later is still in chic, stylish service.

Realer Than Real

2009-09-03T23:25:00.009-04:00

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

The Inhuman League

2009-09-02T23:27:00.009-04:00

"I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer."

Noel Sharkey

Full interview here:

Why AI is a dangerous dream - opinion - 01 September 2009 - New Scientist

Toughen Up

2009-09-02T10:36:00.005-04:00

Listening to "Biko"

Bloc Party Intimacy (2008)

Enroute

2009-08-31T19:44:00.005-04:00

Molecular Gastronomy and The Kitchen of Tomorrow

2009-08-29T10:24:00.010-04:00

The automated kitchen-of-tomorrow has featured prominently in science fiction since ...forever. The food dispenser is one of those ideas that seems an obvious enough next step if one assumes making dinner is nothing but toil. Of course in practice, the preparation of meals is an enjoyable activity, bound up in cultural and social traditions and needs that transcend the convenience of some automat-like contraption extruding dinner onto a conveyer belt. This might be why the more elaborate depictions of science fictional food dispensers are seen in spacecrafts and not in some imagined future home: surely astronauts and those people on Star Trek have better things to do than sauté spinach or poach an egg.

Of them all, 2001: A Space Odyssey's gleaming little General Mills-branded galley is my design favorite: intricate, sleek and practically seething with 1960's technological optimism, it's food preparation activities are so removed from human interaction that it functions as nothing more than an elaborate vending machine. While there has been little progress, or apparent interest, in fully automated food prep (outside my own home, anyway), smaller, incremental advancements soldier on with ever more sophisticated and complex ovens, cook tops, robotic Nespresso machines and the like making deeper inroads into the kitchen daily.

Recently, appliance giant Philips has posted several advanced and novel food preparation concepts that take more ambitious strides towards bringing molecular gastronomy to market. The standout concept Philips has proposed is a stereolithographic "food printer", that can both reconfigure and combine various foodstuff and ingredients, then "...‘print’ them in an array of unique shapes and consistencies, in much the same way as 3-D representations of product concepts are now produced" through repurposed ink jet printer technology (interesting article here, accompanying, somewhat cheesy video here).

Bench Test, Lenoir City 1978

2009-08-28T14:51:00.006-04:00

1978

Central Methodist Church

Lenoir City, Tennessee

Don Hewitt

2009-08-19T17:48:00.005-04:00

Don Hewitt was the creator and producer of CBS's 60 Minutes. He practically invented the the short documentary form of the television news magazine. By all accounts an irascible, hard nosed, stand-up guy, he managed to make news entertaining without making it entertainment.

"I plan to die at my desk" Don Hewitt

Know Where To Stop

2009-08-17T01:11:00.010-04:00

"If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." Orson Welles

When Routine Bites Hard

2009-08-09T12:11:00.010-04:00

1993

On Gratz Street

Knoxville, Tennessee

I'm Nothing Like This

2009-08-06T09:52:00.004-04:00

"When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it any place"

Ava Gardner

Now Recruiting

2009-08-02T21:23:00.002-04:00

Recherché. Like I'd Know.

2009-08-01T10:04:00.005-04:00

Biltmore House

Asheville, North Carolina

Summer 1978

Shut Up and Finish Your Meal

2009-07-31T22:36:00.003-04:00

"We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission"

- 22 July 2009 - New Scientist

Shared via AddThis

Dont Let Me Hear You Say Life's Taking You Nowhere

2009-07-24T15:32:00.006-04:00

On my iPod today:

"Golden Years"

David Bowie "Station to Station" (1976)

Sometimes Reality Is Too Complex

2009-07-22T14:45:00.008-04:00

"...in life, one can only know the present. No one's lived in the past, or will ever live in the future"

Natasha Vonbraun to Lemmy Caution

Alphaville (1965)

Sharing The Risk

2009-07-17T10:17:00.020-04:00

40 years ago this month, I remember staying up late with my family to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon. What I recall most vividly was not the scratchy, black and white video images, but the surreal caption NBC ran at the bottom of the screen: "Live From The Moon."

Four days later the crew splashed down in the Pacific. When the recovered astronauts were choppered to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet, they greeted the cameras and cheering crowd wearing respirators and hazmat suits, before ducking into an Airstream trailer that had been retrofitted into a mobile quarantine facility. This quick dash into quarantine wasn't for the astronaut's protection: it was for the explicit protection of everyone on Earth.

In the years leading up to manned expeditions to the moon, there was broad (but not unanimous) scientific consensus that the lunar surface was lifeless: that the absence of atmosphere and continuous exposure to hard radiation alone rendered the moon perfectly sterile. But with empirical evidence to support this assumption unavailable, scientists could not guarantee the Apollo crew (and their lunar samples) would not return to earth with an extraterrestrial organism. In their report ("Conference on Potential Hazards of Back Contamination from the Planets, July 29- 30, 1964”. More background here), the advisory committee stated that "...negative data will not prove that extraterrestrial life does not exist; they will merely mean that it has not been found." The characteristics and behaviors of a hypothetical extraterrestrial organism, if introduced into the earth's biosphere, were as unknown as the consequences.

Should the hypothetical organism prove pathogenic, the committee hypothesized that contemporary science would likely be catastrophically ill-equipped to deal with the occurrence. With admirable actuarial precision, they calculated that the instant the returning Apollo 11 capsule's hatch was opened to the earth's atmosphere, the statistical risk of catastrophic (or possibly lethal) global contamination multiplied by 1,191,600,000 (using a formula they succinctly, if melodramatically, termed "the logarithmic order of death" and factored by the sum of the world's population, circa 1964).

The precautions taken by NASA to minimize a "back contamination" event were considered unnecessary by most experts, and arbitrary and incomplete by others. Most prominently, they included the construction of the now almost completely forgotten Lunar Receiving Laboratory: a high-containment facility where the lunar soil and rock samples could be studied in isolation much as we would Ebola or some other dangerous terrestrial pathogen. The LRL served as partial inspiration for one of Michael Chrichton's earlier best sellers, The Andromeda Strain, about a scientific team struggling to deal with a deadly extraterrestrial organism brought back to earth by a returning spacecraft (see the striking Robert Wise-directed 1971 original and not the flaccid, stupefying A&E network miniseries adaption of a few years ago).

With Apollo 11's landing on the lunar surface, the entire world watched that century's most perilous technological high-wire act from the safe distance of a quarter million miles. A few days later, upon the spacecraft's return, that same global audience --along with the earth's entire biosphere-- participated fully, if unwittingly, in a far riskier gamble. If the advisory committee’s logarithmic order of death was to be trusted, the odds against such an occurrence were better than a trillion to one, and as it happened, no pestilence returned with the astronauts. But when they cracked opened the hatch, all of us were along for the ride.

Carport 1979

2009-07-13T22:32:00.000-04:00

The Radioactive Wasps Have Come Home To Roost

2009-07-06T18:24:00.011-04:00

For over 40 years, the U.S. Government and its civilian industrial partners enriched plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal at a remote, sprawling facility in Hanford Washington (background here and here). It was steady work, at least until peace broke out briefly in the 1990s and the Hanford Site was revealed to be one of most stupendously, mind-bogglingly contaminated places on the planet. Contamination of decommissioned nuclear weapons facilities has proven to be one of the most durable leftovers from the Cold War (by durable we're talking the tens-of-thousands-of-years kind of durable) and Hanford's the worst of the whole sorry lot.

Lately things at the Hanford Site have taken a distinctly Toho Studios turn: wasps that have nested in the contaminated ground have become seriously radioactive, giving Hanford's seemingly endless environmental train wreck a fresh B-movie dimension. The New Scientist has a thorough and relatively straight-faced account here.

None of the afflicted wasps have grown to Mothra-like proportions but there's still room for hope.

A Territory to Ridicule

2009-07-03T22:04:00.006-04:00

I've been having a lot of fun lately with Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up method. Although a good case could be made that most everything that comes out of Sarah Palin's mouth sounds like it's already been thoroughly massaged by a cut-up machine, I couldn't help but wonder what running the first few paragraphs of her resignation speech through the process would yield. Using one of the many online cut-up engines, here's the appropriately sinister and mildly hilarifying results:

"Faith and family: nothing's more important for our state. Vast riches, beauty, and strategic placement --remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this help the United States.

Hi Alaska.

Know that besides me, Alaskan's grasp what can be purchased in this great land and globe, mocking "Seward's Folly". Secure Alaska, so Alaska could the people serve. Our beloved Alaska I want serving boldly as a territory to ridicule."

30 Ghosts

2009-06-29T12:52:00.010-04:00

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living*"

Arthur C. Clarke

*or at least there were 40 or so years ago when Clarke wrote the forward to his novelization of the 2001 screenplay.

His Sources Can Zoloft

2009-06-27T13:08:00.016-04:00

Remember William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's cut-up method? If not, there are scores of articles on the technique available on the Web (a good starting place can be found here), and a number of online cut-up generators (my favorite) that automate the process for our lamentable post-literate world. In light of this week's most recent Lurid Spectacle, I thought the process might provide some helpful clarity. I couldn't have been more correct:

"Recently he injected. Officers who acted, trying, reveal another was death --Paxil taking be included. Interviewed Dr. Reliever, his anxiety was also a sedative --and the star's injection. Officers after Vicodin: his whereabouts due. Jacko had prescribed pain star's other Cop. Soma, Vicodin, Dilaudid. Personal star's gave doctor painkiller at attack. Recently other pill was called Vicodin. His Sun called physicians.

His sources can Zoloft."

My Hood, Circa 1979

2009-06-25T11:34:00.005-04:00

Home Away From Home

2009-06-23T11:24:00.006-04:00

Cochrane's beautiful little mid-[23rd] century cottage.

Star Trek, "Metamorphosis"

First broadcast November 1967

Another Time. Another Place.

2009-06-20T20:10:00.011-04:00

I've been ruminating a lot on the circular nature of change. Well, the circular nature of my change. Circling back, as it were, here are a few more photographs from that period several years ago when I last found myself at a cross roads.

You Can Tell Me All About It On The Next Bardo

2009-06-17T12:37:00.007-04:00

Knoxville 1997, Stormfront

Twelve years ago, after coasting along on neutral, predictable curves for what felt like entirely too long, things began to shift. Nothing seismic, or dramatic, or even particularly interesting at first. Just a series of small changes that seemed to be accumulating into something bigger, and a sense of things ending. I could see this particularly sharp, acute corner ahead but had no idea what was around it. But I did know everything was going to change and I remember taking very conscious stock of my life and wondering what would still be in inventory when it was all settled. Then I turned the corner, everything did change, and quite a few things closest to my heart, and a very many that weren't, were missing from inventory when it was done. Turn the page.

Today, everything is changing again. This time though, the shifts are seismic. And dramatic. And interesting, albeit in that slowing-down-to-look-at-the-traffic-accident sort of way. I made coffee this morning and figured the time was right to start taking stock.

On My iPod Today

2009-06-14T15:12:00.002-04:00

Face The Music (Volcano Sold Separately)

2009-06-12T11:14:00.007-04:00

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

Pascal

It's Been One of Those Days. Weeks. Months.

2009-06-09T20:56:00.008-04:00

So I'm watching Solaris again. The movie posters from its release in Russia, France, Japan and Sweden are beautiful one and all.

Traffic Cones

2009-06-08T01:15:00.007-04:00

Complete series can be seen here.

Late Night, 1977

2009-06-06T09:39:00.003-04:00

S2S Photo Blog

2009-06-05T15:39:00.007-04:00

This is my new photo blog.
http://stationtwostation.wordpress.com/

On My iPod Tonight

2009-06-04T16:33:00.004-04:00

Tycho Sunrise Projector (2004)

I Want This

2009-06-02T21:08:00.009-04:00

Designed in 1962, the Ford Ghia Selene concept car pretty obviously never even made it close to an assembly line. Instead, Ford went on to inflict Pintos, Aerostars and Crown Victorias on a credulous and insufficiently flame resistant buying public, leaving the Selene's space-age design and presumptive tendency not to explode to the Jetsons. Even though some of the paleofuturistic qualities can be found in the almost-for-real plug-in electric Aptera 2e, I'd still rather be driving the Selene to my gig at Spacely Sprockets each morning.

Where Would I Be Without You?

2009-06-01T17:59:00.002-04:00

Walton Street

2009-06-01T14:40:00.007-04:00

30 May 2009

Saturday Afternoon

Whereabouts Unknown

2009-05-30T14:41:00.005-04:00

Sometime in 1978

Resurrecting Polaroid. Maybe.

2009-05-29T16:20:00.015-04:00

The New York Times has run a couple of interesting articles this week concerning my favorite camera company Polaroid. The slow decline and ultimate financial failure of Polaroid's instant camera and film business was almost inevitable with the advent of digital photography. Still, there are a lot of people out there who love Polaroid photography for reasons more subtle and numerous than mere convenience, its competitive disadvantage against digital technology be damned. As the Times reported this week, a handful of scientists in the Netherlands and an Austrian entrepreneur are attempting to restore Polaroid's abandoned (and almost landfill-bound) manufacturing equipment and return instant film to the market. Article here.

The possibility of returning my SX-70s to active service is very exciting and I wish them great success in this venture. Dr. Land, I think, would be delighted. However more advanced and ubiquitous digital photography inevitably will become, for many people instant photography holds a unique and durable charm. Hopefully there's still room in the marketplace for it.

An expansive gallery of Polaroid photographs, submitted by readers, is posted on the New York Times here. It's definitely worth looking at.

Objects of Desire™

2009-05-27T21:13:00.016-04:00

In an endless stream of fungible electronic devices, the life cycle of the mobile phone is among the most fleeting. They live fast, grow worn and scratched in our pockets and bags, then shoot off towards obsolence like a cannonball. As commodity items, cell phones rarely achieve any durable notoriety for their design, which is sad really, considering how ubiquitous they are. We talk, text and surf on them for a while then off they go to leak a lengthy list of nasty chemicals into some unseen landfill that never seems to be in our back yard.

The Sony Ericsson T610, released in 2003, was an exception. Designed by Erik Ahlgren in near-Bauhaus gloss black plastic and brushed aluminum, it was the first mobile I fell in love with as a design object.

The T610 came equipped with a mediocre near-VGA quality camera that produced grainy, oddly-colored photographs that were, in a number of unflattering respects, the digital equivalent to the liquidy and often equally indistinct Polaroid images I had fallen in love with some 20 years earlier. While the T610 didn't spit the photo out into your hand, it could transmit it by MMS, Bluetooth or email easily enough, which gave it some of the immediacy of a Polaroid camera.

Inspite of --or maybe because of-- its pixilated, closed-circut security camera quality images, this little phone wound up becoming my favorite camera until it finally grew so dented and frayed and wonky that I was forced to replace it.

Wednesday Afternoon

2009-05-27T18:40:00.005-04:00

Great pho, even greater basil rolls

Dua Vietnamese Restaurant

53 Broad Street

Atlanta, Georgia

Hang On

2009-05-26T13:48:00.002-04:00

"You get to a certain age. Your bones ache a little. You get up in the morning and you're not as gung-ho as you thought you were going to be. You hang onto who you were because you don't know any better."

Don Hewitt

On My iPod This Weekend

2009-05-24T13:15:00.010-04:00

My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (Sire Records, 1981)

Brian Eno and David Byrne

The 2006 reissue has extended versions of some songs, several additional tracks and a booklet of interesting background and production notes. What it is missing is Peter Saville's striking, evocative original artwork (above). Pity. While I admittedly bought all things Eno often without so much as an advance listen, Peter Saville's album art probably closed the deal for me as much as anything else.

Lenoir City,Tennessee, Early Spring 1980

2009-05-22T14:10:00.003-04:00

I'm Feeling Apprehensive

2009-05-20T21:10:00.002-04:00

Breathe. And Stop.

2009-05-19T17:02:00.003-04:00

December 2004

Those Disco Synthesizers, Those Daily Tranquilizers

2009-05-18T10:37:00.004-04:00

This Is Tomorrow Calling

2009-05-15T15:00:00.005-04:00

Objects of Desire

2009-05-14T21:20:00.012-04:00

The Golden Age of the blobject may be years past its sell-by date (see Bruce Sterling's terrific 2004 essay here), but the slippery Aptera 2e plug-in electric, um, car is way beyond cool in that retro science fictional sort of way that I seem to be compulsively drawn to. The three wheeler looks like the love child from a marriage between Luigi Colani and Ross Lovegrove. It's pure Logan's Run minus the feathered hair and Dacron jumpsuits.

The production model differs, predictably, from the even more science fictionally overendowed concept vehicle: external cameras providing in-dash rear and side-view video are replaced with conventional door-mounted mirrors, there's a bit more glass, a more conventional dash, and split, partially opening windows reminiscent of the DeLorean*. But none of these alterations make much of a dent in the appealingly whacky over-the-top design.

Never mind the zero tailpipe emissions, the Aptera is the perfect opportunity to pull out that zippered silver jumpsuit you know you've been wanting to wear. You. Not me.

*and the lovely, beleagured and exceedingly peculiar Subaru SVX.

Milburn Drysdale Is Prologue

2009-05-13T17:06:00.007-04:00

"The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

John Maynard Keynes

To Understand The [Recent] Past You Must Understand The [More Distant] Past.

2009-05-12T07:52:00.002-04:00

...or something like that.

My Dinner Was Delicious

2009-05-11T20:04:00.003-04:00

I Deny You

2009-05-10T21:38:00.005-04:00

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment"

Marcus Aurelius

Another Damn Tune I Can't Get Out of My Mind

2009-05-09T10:29:00.012-04:00

Listening to "Moonlight and Muzak"

from M's 1979 album "New York-London-Paris-Munich"

Sift The Evidence Then Move

2009-05-08T18:26:00.004-04:00

In Transit

2009-05-07T20:31:00.005-04:00

7 May 2009

MARTA Station

On My iPod This Morning

2009-05-06T07:46:00.007-04:00

Although it was released in 1977, there's little of the 70's about it. It may be 33 years old, but it's still Music of Tomorrow.

Wiretapping The Memory Palace

2009-05-05T16:28:00.008-04:00

Japanese scientists have developed a technique that reconstructs images directly from the brain. The test images retrieved thus far are simple, monochrome characters but even at this early stage of development, the results are easily recognizable. The scientists assume that they will be able to reconstruct more detailed and complex images in time, including images retrieved from dreams. The applications of this sort of technology have been explored in fiction ad nauseam (see Wim Wender's film Until The End of The World, 1991), and the implications for art and privacy alone run the gamut from exciting to deeply creepy. Articles here and here.

Some aspects of art in general, and maybe photography in particular, are about externalizing the internal. In that sense, this new technology can be seen as a logical extension of the paint brush, or more closely, the camera. Apart from providing a grand new thoroughfare between the internal, physiological event of perception and shared, external reality, it also offers the very scary possibility of technologically updating Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon beyond his wildest dreams.

Late Night Storm

2009-05-04T19:58:00.007-04:00

1981

Long exposure of a summer storm

Lenoir City, Tennessee

Volatile

2009-05-02T17:50:00.008-04:00

...we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile"

William Gibson

From "Pattern Recognition"

It's A Godawful Small Affair

2009-05-02T09:33:00.006-04:00

1983

Knoxville, Tennessee