New York Is Dead

Coming back to NY is always nostalgic, but as the city continues to get more expensive, and only cater to the wealthy, more and more of old NY disappears. In once affordable, interesting, artsy neighborhoods like Soho, Greenwich Village and The East Village the assortment of artists and countercultural misfits have been replaced with hipster yuppies that dress like Weezer and the teacup poodle set.

Great places like 99X (where I bought my first pair of Doc Martens), The New Music Distribution Service, and Rocks In Your Head already closed over a decade ago, but each time we return to NY the list of iconic NYC places that are still open gets shorter. Religious Sex already closed a few years ago, as did Second Coming Records (where I bought about 40-50% of my entire 80s and early 90s record collection). Accidental CDs Records and Tapes is now gone as well. And while CBGB's demise and the troubled decline of the Limelight have been well chronicled by many, the death of a slew of smaller clubs and bars haven't been, such as the excellent experimental music venue Tonic and the wonderful Avenue A dive, The Korova Milk Bar. On this trip the death list continues to grow: Love Saves The Day (which will keep it's New Hope, PA store open) is closing in January and Pongsri Restaurant is gone without a trace. Urban Outfitters has become so much a clone of The Gap that its previous existence as a quirky NY venue is pretty much moot. So many small art galleries and music venues died when Soho became an upscale shopping mall, I can't even remember most of their names -- and the larger, wealthier galleries wiped-out most of the remains of the Meat Packing District club scene. Meanwhile, entire working class neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen no longer exist.

A few survivors still hanging on: Exit Art, The Kitchen, Bleecker Bob's, Trash & Vaudville, The Strand, St. Mark's Sounds, and Forbidden Planet, Katz's Deli, East Village Books, and St. Mark's Bookstore. If you're in New York, help keep these places open by giving them your business. There might be no way to make NY affordable for working class people, artists, writers and musicians again, and bring back its cultural vitality, but maybe a few vestiges can be kept intact.

UPDATES: Mondo Kim's is also closing, leaving only a video sales shop on 7th. Their entire rental collection will be given to any NY film school or rental shop that agrees to continue to allow Kim's customers to rent from them.
And yes, by New York I mean Manhattan. In fact, I basically mean Soho, East Village/Lower East Side/Bowery, Greenwich Village/Chelsea/Meat Packing District, and environs. Even though I lived in Brooklyn for a few years, and Williamsburg / Greenpoint seems to be thriving -- that's all new stuff as far as I'm concerned. And while I'm all for new stuff that's interesting (i.e. not corporate cookie-cutter crap), I miss the old New York.

Home For The Holidays

I'm in New York visiting family for the holidays. Since living in California and working a demanding (time-wise) job means I rarely get to see them, I will most likely be back to the blog in 2009.

Sonoma County Wine

Anu and I went up north Sunday, into Sonoma County, Napa's lesser known sibling region. While everyone seems to know about Napa wines these days (we recommend V. Sattui, Praeger Port Works, Heitz, and Grgich), Sonoma is only starting to get the recognition it deserves. There are too many really good wineries up there to list them all, so I recommend repeated visits, and a trip to the Sonoma County Harvest Festival (each October) to sample a range. Here, however, are a few of our favorites:

Amphora
Winemaker Rick Hutchinson is a heck of a nice, friendly guy, and Amphora is one of the best places around to go for barrel tastings because of that. Rick makes one of the only Chardonnays I'll even drink at all, never mind enjoy, and his reds include excellent Zinfandel and Cabaret Sauvignon, as well as Merlot, Syrah, and Pinot Noir (all varietals I don't normally care for that much, but all of which are excellent at Amphora -- I've even bought futures on Pinot and Syrah there). We drink way too much Amphora wine to really have a favorite.

Suncé
Hailing from Croatia, winemaker Frane Franicevic makes California wines in an old world style. While I'm not normally a big fan of non-German whites, their Pinot Gris is particularly good (as are their German style whites: Riesling and Viognier). Their reds include a particularly good selection of California-Italian style wines: several Zinfandels, Barbera, Sangiovese, and also a very good Bordeaux-style Meritage wine, and several Pinot Noirs. My particular favorite on the red side is the Meritage, though really even their least interesting wine is above average. The staff is friendly, and Suncé's barrel tasting days also involve good food as well as great wine.

Camellia Cellars
Winemakers Bruce Snyder and Chris Lewand run a small, homey shop and are also friendly folks. Camellia makes some good Zinfandel, Sangiovese, Syrah, and even a Dolcetto. Their blends, Damio Grazie and (when it's available) Lost Barrels, are both excellent. Lost Barrels is a favorite of ours, though that blend is always an experiment and is only available when Bruce decides that he's got a blend worth releasing -- and that's not every year.

Deux Amis
This small winery run by Phyllis Zouzounis and Jim Penpraze specializes in Zinfandels -- they have five different Zins, one Pinot Noir and one Petit Sirah. You can really taste the difference between their Zinfandels, and all five are good. Tasting is by appointment only, though, so call in advance if you're going up to Sonoma and want to visit this winery. It's worth the bother.

Martin Ray
Formerly Martini and Pradi, Martin Ray has restored the M&P red jug wine, and while it is no longer unsulfited, it still tastes very much like an Italian working class table wine, which is great. The large jug wine is, in my opinion, superior to their smaller jug wine called "Red" in the fancier bottle. They also have a good Cab and some other decent wines, but the jug wine is really the main reason we go to Martin Ray.

Trendadue
Another winery that we go to primarily for one thing, Trentadue carries the sparkling wine that the once great, now defunct Topolos / Russian River winery used to sell (it is made by the same winemaker, who was a subcontractor to both wineries specifcally for this sparkling wine). Trentadue also has one of the few Rosé wines that I can drink, and good selection of decent red wines, and some nice Port style wines (including one made from Viognier, which is unusual and tasty).

Even though there is good stuff to drink right here in Alameda County -- such as Rosenblum (who also have a shop in Sonoma), Periscope (who share a space right here in Emeryville with another good winery, whose name I can't remember, but if you go to Periscope you get to try both), and St. George (who make spirits, not wine) -- we still like to go up to Sonoma, a growing region where you can see the vineyards and make a day of it.

Unfortunately, the consolidators, and bus tour operators (who charge for tours but don't share proceeds with the wineries, and therefore drive the wineries to charge for tastings because tour visitors rarely purchase wine), are starting to ruin Sonoma like they have Napa. If you want to establish relationships with winemakers and tasting room staff, and enjoy all the benefits that provides (friendly service, interesting discussions, barrel tastings, sit-downs with snacks and wine, etc.), you had best start heading up to Sonoma now, before it's too corporate for anyone to have a good time other than the company accountants.

Wally's Cafe

Wally's Cafe in Emeryville is one of my favorite restaurants, and I highly recommend going there if you're in the area and like Middle Eastern (Lebanese in this case) food. Wally's is a mom-and-pop joint which has a totally different atmosphere and style, but still reminds me of the sadly defunct Bistro E. Europa with Gypsy Flavor in San Francisco. Both restaurants were run by immigrant couples making traditional, delicious, and not-at-all-fancy dishes. And in both cases, the friendly owners are as much of a draw as the food.

You won't find anything at Wally's made with organic whole kale with extract of ginseg root, or that sort of thing. There are no special light, Atkins, vegan, macrobiotic, raw, or whole options (though a vegan could happily eat the Hummous and Babaghanouj with pita, or the excellent Lentil Soup). No, this food is traditional style Lebanese comfort food. I was in fact introduced to the restaurant by a Lebanese colleague who, rarely able to find food that reminds him of home, discovered Wally's the week it opened.

My favorite dish is the Pomegranate Chicken, which is done in a style which I've never had anywhere else, and I consider to be up there with the best dishes of much fancier Middle Eastern restaurants in the area. The Gyros, Kafta, Shawarma, and other dishes are also excellent, and the Baklava and Hibiscus Iced Tea are both must haves.

Ejected from his homeland by war, Wally has come to the U.S. to try to have a better life, like my own family after WWII. Restaurant work was not his first career, but this is his third restaurant, and the experience certainly shows in the excellent food. At least one review has called the Yelp kudos for Wally's Cafe "overly enthusiastic given the category." What I think this reviewer is missing is that the category itself is part of the positive vibe around the place. Wally and his wife Angelica are friendly and unpretentious, and so is their restaurant. Given the sometimes obnoxious tone found in the abundant hipper-than-thou Bay Area restaurants, Wally's is a lungful of fresh air.

Located behind a dingy bar (The Bank Club) with which it shares bathrooms, Wally's is very much in the style of what New Yorkers affectionately call a local dive. It's the kind of place that you're not sure if you should let people know about. I want Wally to have as much success as possible, but on the other hand I don't want a bunch of schmucks to start showing up and ruining the place for the rest of us. I'll err on the side of drumming up business for him, though, and say that in these tough economic times small businesses like Wally's really need your support. So when you're in the Emeryville-West Oakland area and are thinking about grabbing lunch, go grab it at Wally's. You won't spend much more than at, say, the nearby Denny's or IHOP -- but the food and atmosphere are 1000 times better.

Depression Depression

Maybe it's cyclical Christmas blues, or maybe it's the impending economic Depression, but I've been depressed even more than usual the last 3 weeks or so. The Bay Area doesn't have very ambitious weather, and its idea of winter is rain, which I love, so it's not like that's to blame.

I'm going to go with the impending economic Depression theory. I've blogged a bit about the economy over at TFG, but it's getting to me enough that it's interfering with my real life, not just agitating my political braincells, and stepping all over the mental space needed for the things I'd normally write about here.

In fact I've been unable to write anything at all of much value since the week before Thanksgiving, which just makes me angrier. I find myself more worried than excited about anything and everything lately (even more so than usual).

Our house is now likely worth enough less than we paid for it that if we sold it we may not even be able to pay-off our mortgage and wind up making monthly payments on something we don't even own anymore. This means we're stuck here no matter what, for quite a long time.

None of the personal projects I'd hoped to get third party investment for are going to be looked at right now, either. Everything is our lives are in stasis as we slog through these wretched economic times (and meanwhile various CEO types are going around defending bonuses that vastly exceed all the money I've ever earned in my life).

They're even aggressively, preemptively cutting costs at work, something they've never done before. I'm lucky to have a job at all. But I don't want to feel that way. I want to feel excited about my work, and the economic situation is making that very difficult since I feel like there's a gun to my head to work or else (which makes it pretty hard to actually enjoy it).

All in all it's very unsettling to be so excessively -- settled. And yet, while a bad economy makes work start to feel more like a prison, at the same time it makes that security seem so precarious. It's a very aggravating contradiction to feel like the situation both traps you somewhere, and at the same time makes you feel like that place ejected you that you'd be totally lost.

Now I know why they call it a Depression.

Contributing to Two Books for 2009 (maybe more)

Ben Goertzel and I will be rewriting "The Path to Posthumanity" into a book we hope will actually sell this time, along with new co-author Lisa Rein who lends her needed experience as an editor to the project. Right now we're still in the preliminary phases of getting into the rewrite, but the book will be out by mid-2009 if our publisher agrees to release it at a reasonable price point. Ben and I have at least four other books we're supposed to be working on together, and I'm hoping we'll get cracking on at least one of them in 2009.

I am also contributing to a forthcoming handbook of Visual Effects production, an outline for which was just submitted to a publisher. That book is an edited volume, and will have around 30 authors or so. I doubt anyone outside the industry will have any interest in the book, but it should be pretty good for industry folks (hopefully meaning not just TDs, but artists, producers, directors, cinematographers, and others as well).

New URLs and Hosting Changeover

After many years sharing a colocated server hosted by Silicon Valley Colocation (formerly part of Meer.net), I have unfortunately had to switch over to a shared managed server hosted by Webfaction. This was not my choice, but the server was once shared by four paying contributors, and the last one decided to opt-out a month ago, leaving me responsible for a $200/month bill which, since my web sites earn no money, I couldn't really afford, despite that being a great price for great service.

I will miss SVcolo and the server itself, but so far the transition to Webfaction has been very smooth, and their prices are very reasonable for the services provided. My only complaint so-far, besides only being able to afford a shared server (my problem, not theirs), is that SFTP transfers are very flaky and unreliable, and that DNS override changes take a while to propagate even into WF's own DNS servers. I've also not yet heard back to my support request about SFTP (and one about e-mail services), but have heard back in less than 24 hours for the other four or five support requests I've made, which is a very good response rate for a shared server account at any company.

Because DNS changes are trivial using Webfaction's server control panel, I've done some things I'd been too lazy to until now, including pointing www.lhooqtius.com at this blog, and www.feralgovernment.com to The Feral Government. While I'm not thrilled about losing the freedom associated with a colocated server, the upside is that what little system administration (which I was sick of doing years ago) I have to do for my own sites is trivial, and everything else is Webfaction's responsibility. Downtime due to someone else's code run amok on the server is a real concern, but it's a risk I have to take at this point due to the economics of the situation. Hopefully things at Webfaction will be as trouble-free in the long-term as they have been over the last few days.

Slumdog Millionaire

While some people think this year has been a bad year for films, I've seen some really fantastic films this year: Let The Right One In, Death In Love, Ponyo, and now, Slumdog Millionaire -- Danny Boyle's best film, at least equal to and perhaps even better than Trainspotting (which is one of my favorite films), and a great film not just in the "Oscar worthy" sense, but also in the "people will still be watching this film in 100 years" sense.


Part love story and part social commentary, Slumdog Millionaire is a postmodern parable, a fast-paced, relentless story about struggling against seemingly insurmountable odds. Based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, it traces the tragic life of Jamal Malik as he attempts to explain to a police inspector how he came to know the answers that led him to 10 million rupees and the upcoming final question on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" This conceit is a brilliant hook, as it provides a tension line -- will Jamal be exonerated by the police, win the money, and get back the girl of his dreams -- that gives the already poignant flashbacks an added sense of urgency, and allows them to succeed in driving the main plot forward rather than seeming like pointless digressions.

The acting is excellent, especially star Dev Patel (adult Jamal) and child actors Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (as youngest Jamal and his brother Salim, respectively), and Director Danny Boyle creates a sense of time and place that feels very genuine. Despite the fast pace, the editing is masterful, and there is neither staccato cutting nor excessive shakycam in an attempt to give false urgency to boring scenes. There's no need, since there are no boring scenes, and the urgency seems all too real. Sound and music is also carefully integrated, helping to craft both setting and theme, without turning any of the film into a music video (a potential Bollywood "homage" thanfully avoided by Boyle).

Some have given this film negative reviews based on what appears to me to be the flawed belief that any film which shows poor people managing to (even momentarily) be happy despite their circumstances is unrealistic. This leads to the ridiculous claim that this film which depicts squalor, murder, child mutilation, child prostitution, and a litany of other social ills is somehow soft-pedaling poverty -- presumably because it hasn't utterly destroyed the spirit of Jamal and everyone else in his class, and because no enlightened white saviors arrive to set things right and assuage their historical guilt. Since this film is a parable about the indomitability of the human spirit, there is some degree of the fantastic. But that element is restricted almost entirely to the Millionaire conceit and the endgame of Jamal and Latika's romance, rather than whitewashing the depictions of a life of poverty.

If you get a chance to see this film, do so immediately. And hopefully you will have the chance. Fox Searchlight, who showed their marketing prowess with Sideways, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno (none of which made under $40M domestic), has inexplicably restricted this film's release to 49 theaters for Thanksgiving Weekend despite the fact that it's pulling in an average of $10,000/weekend night at the theaters it's in. People do want to see this film. It's not a narrow demographic indie film (which I personally like), but a universally appealing, Dickensian story of rags-to-riches fortune, good vs. evil, and true love.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love eating, drinking, and spending time with friends and family. Sometimes it's the one day a year I manage to relax and not get angry about how everything isn't perfect all the time (though not always -- sorry everyone who was at that first Thanksgiving in our new house in San Pablo).

Unfortunately, for my (sadly, currently AWOL) Kiowa friend Mark and other Native Americans, Thanksgiving is an anti-celebration of how a coastal tribe of First Nations people helped the subsequently genocidal English survive their first winter in a strange land. According to John Toland's book on Hitler (and other sources), the Nazi holocaust was modeled after the genocide of the Native Americans. While many things in American history may be admirable, that aspect of our collective past, along with slavery and other racist actions, is not. So this Thanksgiving I give thanks for family (like my awesome wife), friends, food, cats, art, music, literature, science, technology, a great job (even if it pisses me off sometimes) with great colleagues, and for the country that in 1955 accepted my war refugee family as residents and maybe in my lifetime will manage to live up to all its Liberal, Democratic ideals at least as much as it preaches them.

I also give thanks that our friend Todd seems on the road to recovery after his terrible accident, and that our friend Philip has survived yet another tour in Iraq (as a journalist).

Finally, I give thanks for those First Nations people and all the things they tried to teach our European forebears, including all the things they tried to teach us that "we" didn't listen to. I wish more of them were around today to share in every Thanksgiving with us, and I'd certainly give thanks if more Americans were to pause and reflect on those things in our past and how we can be better world citizens and atone for sins we didn't commit, but which we benefit from, by making the world a more peaceful and creative place (and I mean that in the least Hippie-bead-herder way possible).

Theater Weekend

This weekend turned out to be theater weekend.

Friday night we went to "The Execution of Precious Memories," a contemporary dance, vocals and music performance by Blixa Bargeld (of Einstuerzende Neubauten), Nanos Operetta, and the Kunst-Stoff dance company at Project Artaud. The hour-long performance featured interpretations, both spoken and sung, of memories submitted by the general public, accompanied by music and dance. Blixa's vocalizations, and the music by Nanos Operetta, were engaging throughout. Especially compelling were the pieces during which Blixa actually sang, making the text feel much more poetic than if it had been read. The other vocalists were not as consistent. Their performances were good, though not as dynamic as Blixa's, and therefore unable to elevate some of the uninteresting and poorly composed memories that were, for reasons unclear to me, included in the piece. Unfortunately, the least successful part of the performance was the integration of the dance with the text and music. While Nanos Operetta did a fine job of providing an exciting, interpretive score, the Kunst-Stoff dancers seemed to be dancing an entirely different piece of work. None of their movements corresponded to either an apparent interpretation of the text, nor the energy of the music. The rhythm and movement patterns of the dancers remained relatively constant throughout, despite changes in tempo and dynamics in the music, and different ideas and emotions being expressed in the text. It was worth going to hear the music, and about half the text, but the dance and remaining text were sufficiently unsuccessful that I felt they made a potentially excellent work merely pretty good.

Saturday night we went to the closing night of Thrillpeddlers' Shocktoberfest 2008 show. Featuring Grand Guignol style theater, and a vaudevillian performance of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody accompanied by a player piano, it was a silly, enjoyable evening that was capped by a very well done black-lit Spook Show, as the closer to the third and final play (which was also the best of the three). While not nearly as polished and intellectual as Project Artaud, the Hypnodrome is another local theater worth supporting, and the Shocktoberfest shows are enjoyable Halloweentime diversions, complete with beer and popcorn. Modernized interpretations of turn-of-the-century French Grand Guignol plays are performed, as are contemporary texts written in a similar style. The Vaudville meets fetish scene stylings of the troupe are, of course, very San Francisco and quite amusing. While you won't get high art from this venue, it is definitely a place to go for a good time.

On Sunday we stayed away from Theater and instead went to see Disney's Bolt in 3D. It was a lot better than I had expected, and I actually enjoyed it (though I would much rather have seen a full 90 minutes of the world presented in the opener). Furthermore, the Disney Digital 3D presented on the Dolby 3D system actually looked good, and didn't give me a splitting headache. The Dolby system is a notch filtering based technology that doesn't require a silvered screen, rather than a polarization based technology that does. It also isn't the traditional headache-inducing red-blue anaglyph technique. I'd seen an R&D demo of notch filtering based 3D at SIGGRAPH a few years ago, and it looked very promising. Now that promise has been fulfilled. And Disney's use of it was not over-the-top. The separations were all motivated, and mostly restrained, making for something I've never had before: a relatively pleasant 3D viewing experience.

Return Authorization Request

Dear Bates Uniform Footwear,

I am writing to complain about my recent order. I ordered one pair of Men's Ultralight Enforcer Tactical Sport Shoes model 2262, but I was clearly sent the wrong item. While what I was sent is able to attach to my feet, it is not exactly what I had in mind. Please see attached photo for details.

Gamemastery

Starting in January, I'll be playing my first roleplaying game campaign in fifteen years, in a world loosely based on John Brosnan's pulpy Sky Lords books. I pitched four character possibilities, and in writing them up I realized that they'd make an interesting character set for a novel or graphic novel (which I'm now kicking around as a back-burner project while I finish up a bunch of other writing projects, and work full-time). This thought led me to consider my two long-term Gamemasters, their styles, and how that influenced my perspectives on Gamemastery, and in turn, about storytelling.

Dave Osborne was my GM through junior high and part of high school (he's older than me, so he graduated, leaving only summer campaigns until I went to college). With Dave, I played several years mostly AD&D, Twilight 2000 (a great, underrated game), and a hybrid of Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. We started playing mostly by the book, or so we thought, but it quickly became clear that Dave was cooking the books to make the campaigns turn out how he wanted them to, modulo what he thought of our decisions at each turn. This realization pissed-off his brother to no end, leading to several dorky fistfights, but I saw the utter wisdom of this approach. Games of chance are boring, games of skill require actual skill, but role playing games should be neither -- they are group storytelling, and the role of the GM is to keep the story engaging, suspenseful, and enjoyable for the players. By the time we got to playing Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, we had evolved as gamers to the point that it seemed utterly natural to merge the two systems as each had weaknesses -- Cyberpunk was, for us, the better gaming system, and Shadowrun the more interesting world (though Shadowrun did have a better system for hacking, and Cyberpunk had no magic system, so we had to integrate modified versions of a bunch of Shadowrun rules into a Cyberpunk framework).

When I got to college, my Gamemaster was Sylvan Clebsch (a great GM, and also creator of Stellar Crisis, Roger Wilco, Targetware, and other interesting gaming software). Though he was creating in essence a better version of the G.U.R.P.S. idea (an RPG rules system that adapted to any game world) that ultimately became his thesis, and we playtested it for about two years (in a game world that was a hybrid sci-fi/fantasy environment where everything went), it was incredibly obvious what was going on. Sylvan was also an adherent of the shared storytelling approach to gaming, despite working on a rules system, and we'd roll dice and he'd work out the statistics of how his system was doing so he could improve upon it -- and then everything would be fudged in order to make the game go in whatever direction we had collectively convinced him was most interesting.

Occasionally we'd start a new "stick to the rules" campaign to help him shake-down the system, but those were always short lived. Characters died left and right, and the campaigns came to abrupt halts. Sylvan got some good data about his system from these campaigns, but nobody particularly enjoyed playing them. I also recall that we tried at a few other systems (definitely AD&D, and I think also Twilight 2000, GURPS, and Shadowrun) to see if these lackluster campaigns were because of a flaw in his system that was not present in other systems. No, his system was in fact superior (I still wish he had released it, but the paper gaming market was floundering in 1992). In the other systems campaigns were as short or shorter, and the shared storytelling was at least as encumbered by annoying rules accounting.

What I came to realize was that for really successful GMs, running a campaign was all about story, but not quite like in filmmaking. Role playing gaming is a shared story, evolving based on interactions between players and GM, and does not fit into a three-act structure. The idea with a good role playing campaign is more like improve theater meets serialized novelization, comic book series writing, or television series writing. What happens with the best campaigns is putting a continuing cast of characters into exciting situations that give the players (and the GM) stories that are enjoyable to weave as they work their way through the situations.

Dice rolling and lookup tables were just opportunities for the GM to make a decision about where they wanted to take things next, their modules and notes merely suggestions of possibilities. The absolute best GMs (such as Sylvan and Dave) could go "off script" for hours based on an interesting idea thrown at them by a player. On more than one occasion I caught more than one great GM "looking up" results on a blank piece of paper, merely using the rules accounting time to think about what would be a interesting thing to have happen next. (Another option is to more or less stick to the rolls, but to keep giving the player more chances, stuff like: "Sorry, you miss the jump across the chasm and are plummeting to your death -- but you land on a ledge but a couple meters down taking damage, what do you do next?")

Some people enjoy being rules lawyers and playing games of chance with their campaigns. I do not, and fortunately I grew up with two very skilled GMs who could weave a great game story, and bring their players into it (and I'm very sad that I am no longer in contact with either Dave or Sylvan). My opinion is that the most talked about, most enjoyable, and most interesting RPG campaigns have always involved Gamemasters making gross violations of the so-called rules (the ones written down in the handbooks) in favor of adhering to the one canonical rule of RPG campaigns: make them fun.

Because our GM for this upcoming game is a writer-director-story artist, I am hopeful that his approach is 99% inspiration and 1% computation. A really good story-based role playing game is even more fun than the best novel or movie you'll read, because it involves a group of friends, by creating the story together, invest themselves in it in a way unlike any "read only" entertainment (and, frankly, in a way that video games also completely lack).

Things You Can Learn From James Bond

I saw Quantum of Solace last night, and while it was action packed, it was ultimately not terribly satisfying as a film. While I must agree with Ebert's assessment that "James Bond [should not be] an action hero," the action scenes would have been more exciting had my emotional investment in the characters been greater. Being able to tell what was happening more than half the time also would have helped. It's just not true that fast cutting is a substitute for a tense, psychological duel between a hero and a cunning, materially superior enemy. However, despite not liking it as much as Casino Royale, I did come away from the film with some valuable lessons:

10) MI-6 has adopted Microsoft Surface as their computing platform of choice.

9) People just won't learn the lesson of Inigo Montoya and have some sort of plan for what to do with themselves after they've carried out their vengeance.

8) If your best operative is coerced into revealing information about your operation, you should go to extraordinary lengths to find him and kill him afterwards, because that'll clearly undo the damage done to your plans.

7) Contemporary Opera is a criminal front activity.

6) Only European super-villains know where water comes from.

5) Colonialism, corruption, crony capitalism, moral degradation, and environmental cataclysm is the fault of Green Energy companies.

4) Provided you somehow slow down within the last six inches before hitting ground, you can fall from any height.

3) Don't trust anyone above the rank of Major.

2) It's merely mildly annoying to people when one kills random bad guys, but being out for revenge against someone who has deeply wronged you really pisses folks off.

and

1) Do not hold meetings in any hotel that is made out of bombs.

High Desert Test Sites

Anu and I spent the weekend in the Mojave Desert at the High Desert Test Sites event, an arts weekend in the greater 29 Palms - Joshua Tree - Pioneertown not-exactly-metro area. It's a pretty fascinating region of the state, both in terms of the alien landscape and the odd cultural mix of military families, hermits, hippies, and reformed hipsters. Not surprisingly, the best food in the region is Mexican, and if you venture out there I recommend stopping at pretty much any mom and pop Mexican joint for all your meals.

Tromping around in the desert was enjoyable (rent a car if you go out there, because dirt roads abound, and your car will surely be the worse for wear), but the art presented by this art weekend mostly ranged from nonexistent to unsuccessful. There were, however, two actually successful installations.

The "Time Traveling Hooker," a character created by Ann Magnuson to bring life to multiple site-specific installation and video works, was far and away the best work directly connected to the HDTS event. Installed in room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, where rocker Graham Parsons died, it is a musing about life and death, and a person's place in the world, embodied in the life and death of this particular celebrity. But I felt it wasn't really about Parsons, but rather about reflecting on what in life would bring someone to an isolated, lonely place like Joshua Tree, and how incredibly unglamorous it is to die alone in such a bleak, desperate surrounding as that room.

The Noah Purifoy Foundation, though not actually directly connected to HTDS, was also interesting. A collection of "naive" art junk sculpture, this permanent site is worth visiting if you travel to the Joshua Tree area. The work is not quite the pinnacle of found object sculpture, but a lot of it is interesting, and the architectural scale pieces are particularly compelling in how you can interact with them. Also, this installation definitely feels appropriate amongst the farm equipment, seatainers, and other homesteader detritus throughout the region.

Most of the rest of the work was forgettable, or no longer present when we arrived, except for two pieces which fit into my category of "if they were better, they could have been good." Marnie Weber and the Spirit Girls were a campy, theatrical performance art band which suffered primarily from Weber's uneven vocals and often pointless lyrics. Had she stuck with her Will-Shatter-esqe vocals, the schtick would have worked perfectly, but attempts to sing wandered into Nico territory, and beyond. The instrumentalists, however, were all quite talented and some of the compositions were imaginative and energetic.

The other near miss was Yoshua Okon's "White Russians," in which attendees were invited into the home of local residents to drink White Russians and subsequently be accosted by a melodramatic performance of stereotypical redneck behavior. It was culturally insensitive, and the deliberately uncomfortable atmosphere of the performance was overshadowed by the inherently uncomfortable social situation. Had the piece focused on a cultural meeting between the local so-called "rednecks" and the art crowd, facilitated by the artist as cultural conduit, it may have been quite interesting. I was certainly up for chatting with the locals and exchanging cultural perspectives, but the situation was not designed to facilitate this, and the staged "fight" that broke-up what social interaction did emerge was a failure as agit-prop (but certainly a success as an irritant). I didn't learn anything about challenging cultural stereotypes, prejudice, or bridging the city-country / red-blue divide. Rather, it reinforced things I already knew: pompously self-assured artists often wind up being culturally insensitive in the very way they claim to be critiquing, and people shrieking is annoying in an annoying way, not a provocative way.

While I wasn't impressed with most of the art, I did enjoy the mid-desert scavenger hunt aspect of having to drive around all sorts of unusual (to me) desert environments, spread across quite a large area, to find the installations and performances. That aspect alone made HDTS worth at least one trip, and to be fair, almost all of the art (that was still there when we got there) was sufficiently amusing to add to the experience rather than detract from it.

Happy Election Day

If you're one of my fellow Americans, make sure you get out and Vote!

R.I.P. Studs Terkel

The great Studs Terkel, author, oral historian, radio personality, social activist, and unashamed Liberal, passed away yesterday at 96.

I wish I'd had the opportunity to get to know him, but I know his work, and it has been a great inspiration to me as a writer and social activist. Terkel's books, especially Race, The Good War, Working, and Hard Times, helped shape my understanding of our nation. Though my own working class upbringing exposed me to a variety of characters in many different life situations, my family rarely left New York when I was a kid. Studs Terkel's books gave me glimpses into the worlds of people outside our region, and across generations. Even though I am also a voracious reader of more "objective" academic histories, the personal narratives in Terkel's works made history and biography even more engaging.

He led a long, full life, but his passing is still a great loss. The literary world will never be the same, as there are currently few, if any, writers following in his footsteps as oral historians and chroniclers of working class culture.

Happy Halloween

As A Clifford, I Proudly Live In The Past

I found out this evening that a few months ago Tom Ellard called quits on his awesome, pioneering, and long running electronic / industrial band Severed Heads. While Ellard continues to do video projects and other work under his own name, the demise of Severed Heads ends 28 years of audio experimentation ranging from weird sound collage to peculiar pop music. Like Andrew Eldritch's rejection of Sisters of Mercy's classification as a Goth band, Ellard never really did quite cotton to the Industrial genre he helped create. Yet, even with the jump to more dancey synthpop on "Bad Mood Guy," he never could quite ditch the rivethead fanbase. And even the more recent work still maintained that wonderful Severed Heads penchant for weirdness. If you've never heard Severed Heads, that's a shame. I feel sorry for you.


Though TE exhibits a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards much of his early work, having bought my first Severed Heads album when I was 13, I forever remain a huge fan. The classic releases "Come Visit The Big Bigot" and "Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live In The Past" are still among my favorite albums, and Severed Heads is a band whose work I always return to. My hope is that at some point in the future, like so many other bands, Severed Heads will have a reunion. Perhaps Tom Ellard will have a reunion with himself, or maybe he'll dig up some combination of Richard Fielding, Garry Bradbury, Paul Deering, Stephen Jones and/or Andrew Wright and have a proper reunion. Who knows, maybe they could tour as the opener for yet another reincarnation of Pink Floyd?

Final Post-AFF Thoughts: It's About The People

As much fun as it is to see great films, and hear interesting panel discussions, far and away the best part of Austin Film Festival was making new friends.

Sure, a few people were laying-on the used car salesman charm as they schmoozed the most important people they could identify in order to "help their careers," but I also met some genuinely nice people who were just interesting to talk to and fun to hang out with.

Ass-kissing the most famous person in the room is par for the course at many film industry events, but at AFF it was refreshingly restrained. As a result most people, even the well known ones, were approachable and willing to engage in actually interesting conversations. And, for the most part, even the neophytes understood that we were all just there to have a good time talking about screenwriting and filmmaking (and politics, philosophy, literature, art, science, sports, and whatever else came up).

Both growing up in one of the playgrounds of the world's rich and famous, East Hampton, NY, and nearly seven years at a hugely successful studio has me accustomed to not giving a damn about status. Such a history sometimes has the opposite effect on people, but in my case it led me to decide that there really are basically two kinds of people: people I can carry on an interesting discussion with and whose company I find pleasant, and those who don't meet that criteria. I don't particularly need to make "contacts" (to use the corporate doublespeak that essentially reduces a person to their profit potential), but it is fun to meet interesting people some of who may become genuine friends.

If sycophants, lunatics, the bitterly belligerent, and the desperate make you as uncomfortable as they do me, AFF is far and away one of the better events out there. Other than the occasional overly aggressive self promoter or bitter defeatist, most of the people at AFF were quite nice and pretty much all were at least well behaved (the at least four different people I observed asking Robert Townsend to read their script because it featured "a black guy" notwithstanding).

Other AFF Films

In addition to Death In Love, I also suggest folks check out the opposite end of the spectrum: the comedies Role Models and Summerhood. David Wain's Role Models is wide release, starring Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott, and will be very easy for you to find at a multiplex near you. On the other hand Jacob Medjuck's summer camp flick Summerhood is, like Boaz Yakin's Death In Love, still on the festival circuit and may require some seeking-out. Please support the little guy and make the effort, for both Death In Love and Summerhood. Indie filmmaking depends on you, the audience.


Another AFF film I liked was Paul Schrader's Adam, Resurrected. For a while, I was completely engrossed by this story of a circus performer concentration camp survivor, and if it weren't for some peculiar (and, I'd say, somewhat unsuccessful) choices made by director Schrader in the last 15-20 minutes of the film, I'd recommend it unreservedly. As it is, it is a very interesting piece that's still really worth watching, and perhaps you won't be popped out of the film at the end like I was.

There were also some really fun short comedies that I wholeheartedly enjoyed: The Miracle Investigators, Below The Law, Easy Pickin$, Richard Cocksmith And The Above Ground Pool, and The Universe Connection. Any of these are worth checking out, though the first three may be funnier to more people than the quirkier humor of the last two. My own experiences trying to simulate a 50's look in Drake Tungsten give me a special fondness for The Miracle Investigators, which is brilliant straight-faced comedy that hits a period look (the 70's) with great success.

Oliver Stone's W was probably his best film since Natural Born Killers, but like NBK, I can't unreservedly recommend W. It is interesting, and both Josh Brolin and James Cromwell do a good job (as do Jeffrey Wright as Powell and Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney). However, the film isn't anything we haven't already heard, and the emotional hooks aren't deep enough. It's still worth a viewing either if you're a Stone fan or you're into biopics, but I'm not convinced it's as important a film as Stone was probably hoping for.

Death In Love

Having recently returned from the Austin Film Festival, I'm not only quite tired (we're also in a crunch time at work), but also thinking about the interesting films and people I encountered there.


If it happens to show up at a festival, arthouse theater, or other venue near you, you should check out writer/director Boaz Yakin's Death In Love. An incredibly challenging film, Death In Love is far from the escapist entertainment so popular in Hollywood these days. The story "depicts the effects of a Jewish woman's love affair with the doctor in charge of human experiments in a Nazi concentration camp on the lives of her sons many years later." It is, at its core, a study of certain forms of evil, power dynamics in relationships, and despair. In the theatrical sense of the term, this film is a tragedy. The protagonist is not lovable. There are no hijinks, no shoot-outs, and no magical redemptions. You won't get a satisfying, typically American happy ending out of this film. But even if you wind up not liking the film like I do, its compelling intensity will grab hold of you and keep you thinking about it for days on end. Given a seemingly endless stream of saccharine cinema down at the multiplex, being confronted with difficult philosophical questions is alone reason enough to give this film a look.

I'm working on arranging a showing and Director's presentation here at work, but if you're not here, take whatever other opportunity you get to check it out.

AFF and Work Schedule

My work schedule, and going to the Austin Film Festival, means I won't be blogging during the middle two weeks of October.

The Best Thing Google Has Ever Done

I'm generally not a huge fan of Google. My "Personal Webmind" design, and the Webmind search engine created by myself, Renato Mangini Dias, Greg Greenshpun, Meyer Rozengauz, Ben Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin, provided superior design and search results to Google search when we tried to sell them the company in 2001. (I am still suspicious of the similar offerings from Google that cropped up later, but perhaps I should attribute them to "great minds think alike" and be done with it.)

Among Google's other offerings, there have been other shortcomings as well. Orkut became worthless as it was overrun with spammers and trolls. Google Maps is pretty cool, but to me it still is an "almost there" reworking of a project by Michael Potmesil, formerly of Bell Labs, which had most of the current Google Maps functionality in 1997-98 when I was at the company (sans the funding to send trucks around taking street photos), plus lofted 3D cityscapes. YouTube is a hive of content thieves and moronic commentary that nearly drowns out what little of value to be found on it, and even this here Blogger is merely LiveJournal rehashed with more marketing money behind it.

But Google Book Search is the bees knees. In some ways it is nothing but Amazon's "search inside this book" without being tied to a store. However, Google Book Search provides better bibiliographical information, and features something which I think constitutes the first real attempt by Google to live up to their self-proclaimed "don't be evil" edict.

That attempt, which thus far looks like it might be successful, is subsidized scanning of public domain books found in libraries. Google has finally provided a service I find completely invaluable, and which is sufficiently better than the competitors to warrant the hype. The PDF scans of old books are even more interesting than Project Gutenberg texts in that they preserve the original formatting (which is very interesting to me, but if you don't care, many of the books are also available as plaintext).

I hope that there isn't fallout from this project in the form of libraries deciding to discard or destroy the books themselves based on the availability of digital versions. Digital storage is too short-lived to justify discarding real media like books, but the incredible convenience of not having to dig around in stacks or wait for interlibrary loans for old, rare books is a fantastic idea. If Google takes this project to the point where a truly substantial catalog of tens or hundreds of thousands of books in the public domain (based on expired copyrights, mostly) becomes available, I will have to grudgingly admit that Google has finally done something that might make me stop being disgusted with them.

The Upside Of The Downturn

As the world falls apart around us, or so the newspapers and television pundits claim, perhaps there is some upside to the downturn. My hope is that it will be better art, music and writing.

The 1980s (the late Cold War Era, the Reagan years) brought with them a treasure trove of angry punk rock (which started to rear its wonderfully ugly head in the mid 1970s, during the post-Viet Nam Ford and then Carter years), and literary and cinematic dissections of the "me generation" and the ever-present Cold War. During the Clinton Years, however, anti-establishment culture got co-opted and eliminated by mainstream media. Some of it survived, but its prominence has been nothing like it was in the 70s and 80s.

Maybe now that we're on the brink of economic cataclysm, we'll see not only a less poppy reinvention of punk rock and other 1970s-80s counterculture, but also a return of 1930s era artistic trends as well. The 30s of the Great Depression also brought with them a lot of great culture including: films like Duck Soup, literature by folks such as John Steinbeck, and in the art world, late Surrealism.

Great struggles often lead to great art. While I'm not exactly thrilled about the struggle part, perhaps at least we can enjoy the side benefit of some great art.

Horace Engdahl's Ignorance

According to the Guardian, Nobel Prize comittee chair Horace Engdahl has out-of-hand dismissed any chances of Americans winning the Literature prize. He was quoted as saying: "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."

Poor Mr. Engdahl. His own ignorance is keeping him from a treasure trove of great American literature. And if he's dodging any books that may seem excessively American, he may very well be missing out on the best our country has to offer.

A respondent called Sarka, commenting on this Guardian follow-up commentary, points out: "Universal or provincial? It's a silly argument. The American novels I love best are thoroughly American in themes and treatments, if in very different ways. The same goes for any other nation - don't tell me that the appeal of Dostoyevsky's novels is not partly their extreme unabashed Russianness..."

I think this nicely references the core paradox of storytelling: it is from the specifics rooted in a particular place, culture, time, and character that universality emerges. Carefully observed, passionately related details create a sense of realism, even in the most fantastical of stories, which makes the narrative come alive.

What makes a story seem universal is richness of specific detail. Details, not necessarily overwrought Victorian explication, but relevant observations of people, places and problems, grab the audience, and their empathic and mirror systems kick-in and allow them to relate to the narrative at a very core level. While one may never have been a soldier freezing on the Russian Steppe, or an immigrant laborer drunk in a seedy bar in Brooklyn, it is the relating of particulars about such people and places that allow us to feel as if their specific stories relate to universal themes.

American novels are best when they are American.

The Guardian mentions some obvious examples: Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Cormac McCarthy. But there are a number of other great American authors who are being overlooked, or who will achieve greatness one day and then be overlooked. Let me name a few so you can add them to your reading list: Thomas Pynchon, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon, Frank Turner Hollon, Craig Clevenger, Dave Eggers, Douglas Coupland, and David Foster Wallace (who sadly will now never get a chance at a Nobel).

Of course, genre fiction never gets considered, but Dennis Lehane is a great crime writer, and there are numerous American science fiction authors of high quality, such as William Gibson and Harlan Ellison. If none of Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, or Arthur C. Clarke were given Nobel Prizes in Literature, probably no science fiction writer ever will be.

Kurt Vonnegut, who was not really a genre writer, but his genius was called into question by some who decided he was (and that that was necessarily bad), was also overlooked. So were Joseph Conrad, and "the poet laureate of skid row," Charles Bukowski.

Of course, there are many more great American writers. Please feel free to post comments with your recommendations. Outside the U.S., the Guardian quotes David Remnick as citing Proust, Joyce and Nabokov as overlooked, to which I'd add Murakami and Bulgakov (his greatest work being published posthumously may have been part of it, but other writers have received Nobels for their lesser works).

Either Mr. Engdahl is reading some particularly bad American writing, or he is simply unwilling to accept the fact that Americans, like any other people, can tell compelling and universal stories embedded in the context of their own unique experiences. Regardless of the source of his ire, I am skeptical of someone who can cast aside all literature from a nation of three hundred million people with nary a shrug. How is it that someone tasked with judging literature can be so ignorant of such a crucial element of storytelling: that personal, temporal, spatial and cultural particulars are precisely what cause a well-told story to come alive and resonate as universal?

I already consider the arts and sciences to be something far greater than game shows to be "won" by the cultural uebermenschen, but with people like Mr. Engdahl serving as judges, such competitions seem even more dubious to me. His sort of attitude may work well for Simon Cowell, but I'd expect more from an organization with such pretensions to relevance.

Let The Right One In

If you get a chance to see "Låt Den Rätte Komma In" ("Let The Right One In") in a theater, do it. If not, at least see it on DVD (when it comes out) before going to see, if you must, the upcoming 2010 remake by Matt Reeves. (He of Cloverfield, a film I couldn't get more than ten minutes into without getting severe motion sickness and turning it off. How that guy is going to remake a film that uses stillness so beautifully is a real mystery to me).


Very Scandinavian in its usage of stillness, and cold, desolate places, to establish both tone and theme, "Låt Den Rätte Komma In" is simultaneously charming and violent. In the vein of some of the best of contemporary Japanese cinema, it takes a naturally transgressive subject and turns it into a twisted love story. That is a trope which I'm a total sucker for, and this film does it wonderfully. Don't go if you happen to not be a fan of transgressive cinema (though it is nowhere even vaguely close to the extremes some current Japanese films reach), or if you require films to be fast-paced.

However, if you enjoy contemplative films with a twisted story, this is a must see. It has two more dates in San Francisco: tomorrow and Oct 10, 2008. Check your own city for listings if you're not in the Bay Area, and jump at the chance to see this film if you get one.

Not In Love Anymore

I once had a girlfriend ask me if I loved my computer more than her.

Though the answer was "no," at the time the question didn't seem quite as ridiculous as it now does. Once upon a time, when video games weren't outgrossing movie tickets, major news media weren't quoting Internet memes, and computers weren't ubiquitous, I loved computers. I loved video games. I loved programming. I loved modding hardware and building systems. Even word processing seemed new and amazing.

Today, a friend posted something to a discussion on the Simon's Rock alumni mail alias in which he casually mentioned "loving" his laptop. I realized that I found the statement surprisingly absurd. More than lamenting about the diluted meaning of the word "love," I lament that I no longer love computers.

When the hobby was more obscure, and being a computer nerd was uncommon, I enjoyed both the underground social aspect of computing and the fact that it was a lot more DIY. In the 1980s, pretty much every computer owner I knew wrote programs and could maintain their system. Creating your own software and comparing notes was just part of the hobby. As that creative aspect was replaced by just more consumerism, computing became decreasingly interesting to me. Becoming mainstream didn't help. Now that computers are everywhere, the novelty is gone. Standardization and market forces (including some "aggressive" business practices on the part of some companies) has eliminated all the interesting, creative and unusual hardware developments that used to occur. Computers are no longer a new frontier, and have become boring.

Though I still enjoy writing programs, I do agree with Donald Knuth's recent argument in Communications of the ACM that programming as it is currently taught and practices has become soulless and uncreative. That most programming jobs involve maintaining other people's code, stitching together mystery code through opaque "business logic" interfaces, and copying the functionality of popular, successful software is a shame. Once upon a time, there was a lot more room for experimentation and innovation even in professional, commercial software development. Now it's mostly maintenance, refinement, updating, and replication.

Sure, there are still interesting research and career opportunities in computing, but financial support for them is dwindling as "safe" bets are now the norm in the industry. Once, the whole computing community was innovative. Now, the innovators stand out. Naturally, this happens to every industry as it matures, and it was to be expected. Personally, I didn't think it would happen so quickly, and to such an extent. In one sense, it means that we've done our jobs well and covered a lot of ground, but there could be a lot more interesting R&D and hobbyist computing going on if the industry hadn't so fully embraced the commodity model of business.

I still like computers. We've had many good times together, and I still want to be friends. I hope computers sill want to be friends, too. But I just feel like we've both changed, grown apart, and I'm just not in love with computers anymore. Computers, you're still young and have a lot going for you. I'm sure you'll find someone else.

The Feral Government

The soapbox was stinking up the rest of this otherwise artsy and personal blog, so I've finally moved politics over to a blog called "The Feral Government." Check it out and enjoy (or whatever one does with political discussions).

Congratulations Jason and Frederique

I attended a lovely engagement party last night for my friends Jason and Frederique. Many mutual friends were at the party, which was good fun. I am even more excited about their wedding than I already would have been because they've asked me to officiate the wedding (I've been a Universal Life Church minister since 1992, though I'm getting re-ordained just in case, since I was ordained in Massachusetts at the time and am not sure just how careful the record keeping is down there in Modesto). Having a year to plan for it already seems like hardly enough time. I'm even more nervous about it than my own wedding, because at my wedding I just had to do one part properly, not be in charge of holding the entire ceremony together.

Regret

"The funny thing about regret is it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done." - The Butthole Surfers "Sweat Loaf"

Friday I hung out with a friend I hadn't seen since the mid-90's. It was nice to see Bella, and I look forward to doing so again next time she and her beau visit from Denver. However, the first time I see someone I haven't seen in a long time, I start to get into a nostalgic mood -- and with nostalgia, comes regret.

Bella was part of a group of friends that included my ex-girlfriend Beth. While my relationship with Beth was doomed to fail for a variety of reasons, and my breaking up with her was inevitable, the way in which I broke up with her is one of the stupidest, worst things I've ever done. Twenty-three year olds are prone to being stupid, particularly about relationships, and I was no exception. She has never communicated with me again, and thus I've never been able to apologize. I regret having dumped her in a letter, without calling, and for the truly idiotic reasons I gave for ending the relationship.

But, the Butthole Surfers are right -- it is better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done. While I regret the way that relationship ended, and also that with two of my other previous girlfriends, those pale in comparison to how much I regret not seeing my grandmother again before she died. That is the one thing I regret the most in my life. I had reasons for not seeing her: I couldn't deal with seeing someone who'd always being so strong on her deathbed, and I tried to convince her (and myself) that the treatments would work and there was no urgency to the matter anyway. Sure, I talked to her on the phone several times, but I refused to go see her. My mother claims she understood and loved me all the same, and with all my grandmother had seen in her life (which included 16 years in labor and DP camps), I suspect that she really did -- but I have never been able to forgive myself (and I probably never will, so don't bother with any comments intended to be helpful in that regard). My inability to confront death head-on continues to plague me, but it hasn't caused any worse remorse than this incident.

That is the funny thing about regret, after all. Who knew Gibby Haynes was such a sage? So my advice to everyone out there is this: do everything you can do, because one time you don't do something because you choose not to, that'll be the worst regret you ever have.

Confessions of a Yakuza

I just finished a very interesting book called Confessions of Yakuza, which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of Japan.

What is most surprising about the book is its relative lack of violence. The old guard Yakuza portrayed in this book are most concerned with keeping the Police away through maintaining good relations with neighbors, and providing a comfortable gambling environment for their customers. While Eiji, the titular Yakuza, does spend time in jail for killing a man, it was a fellow Yakuza, and if his story is to be believed, it was in self-defense. And there is little reason to doubt his story, as the book is full of confessions and tales which are embarrassing and unflattering. It seems he was holding back little from the author, Dr. Saga.

The portrait of Japan during the prewar period is especially interesting, with its rampant corruption and rotten infrastructure, it is easy for a Yakuza to come off as more of a good guy than the Police or Officials. Many gangster books romanticize the life, and make the code of conduct and code of honor seem more inviolate than they ever really were, and this book does seem to be doing that. But knowing whatever crimes Eiji may have omitted to make himself look better would do nothing to diminish the fact that Japanese life during his time was not the utopia that many in the US currently fantasize about Japan.

It is a kind of historical biography that is very uncommon. Criminal histories abound, but biographies of someone who isn't famous are quite rare (Eiji was a Yakuza boss, but he is very far from a household name like Al Capone). Without that fame getting in the way, the author need not have an agenda, and the resultant book feels convincing, and definitely worth a read if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

End of a Long Relationship

No, Anu and I are not separating. Our relationship is great. It's Amazon that I'm breaking up with, after thirteen years (I bought books from Amazon when they first opened).

Amazon was unable to ship me my books without damaging them after 3 tries. Even after two complaints, the books were still just tossed into a box and the edges and corners damaged.

I will no longer order art books or other collectible books from Amazon. They just can't get it right. When a customer complains about a specific problem, and you then repeat that mistake twice in a row, while supposedly attempting to redress the mistake, that is outright embarrassing. I'm still willing to buy non-art, non-collectible books from Amazon, so I guess we'll still be friends with benefits, but I think it's time I see other booksellers.

Amazon is so focused on their other businesses, including trying to destroy the wonderful cultural artifact that is the book with their Kindle device and ridiculously overpriced, transient digital books, that they no longer really deserve to be called a bookseller anyway. I'm going to give my money to smaller businesses, like local booksellers and Bud's Art Books (who ship their books perfectly packaged). I've also just received my first order from Heavy Ink, but I'm less than thrilled with their packaging (they're new and small, so we'll see if they respond to my complaints or not). though it's still better than the absolutely terrible job Amazon does.

Visual Effects Society

The Visual Effects Society had its membership meeting yesterday. Parts of it were dreadfully boring, and other parts were quite interesting (particularly the debate that arose about awards categories). VES is still a young society, and there are a lot of improvements that can be made about how the organization benefits its members. I've decided to throw my hat in the ring and have applied to join the Technology and Standards & Practices committees. Hopefully this organization can succeed in its goals of raising the stature within the industry, and therefore the credit, compensation, and job security, of the artists who are responsible for a large percentage of what people are actually excited about in most blockbuster films these days.

You Break It, I'm Not Buying It

I just had Amazon ship me a replacement for five art books I ordered from them. The original order was just tossed into a box, one of the books landed open, shipped open, and got a cracked spine. What caused me to become so annoyed that I not only wrote them a letter, but am blogging about it, is that the replacement order was packed just as poorly.

Amazon sometimes smartly plastic-wraps books to a piece of cardboard to help prevent corner damage. If done wrong, that process itself causes corner damage, but if done right, the cardboard absorbs all the damage. In my note to them to request replacements and get my return ticket for the 5 damaged books, I specifically requested they properly pack the books by wrapping them to plastic and using enough padded mailers to prevent further damage. They did not do this.

When a customer specifically requests something which your company has done for them in the past, and which they are now upset isn't being done, you should either provide them with that service or tell them it is no longer cost effective to do so, and the customer can decide whether or not to go do their business with another vendor. I doubt Amazon can't afford protective wrapping, I think it is laziness and bad quality control. After all it is more expensive to now have to pay return shipping for two orders, totaling ten hardcover books. What seemed like a casual moment of cost savings has the potential to cost them a customer of thirteen years.

A number of articles have run in business magazines over the last few years about dwindling customer service, some complete with cost-benefit analysis showing that customer service isn't worth paying for and that businesses are better off losing a few customers than paying to give them good service. This kind of short-sighted thinking is leading American business down an unfortunate path, one which I personally feel is contributing to the unsustainable disposable-economy mindset prevailing today.

My preference is still for local bookstores, but that preference is declining. This isn't because of gas prices or even lack of time away from work (though the latter does account for most of my on-line shopping, I make time to go to bookstores and record shops), but rather because instances of damaged merchandise are also skyrocketing at small shops. People using bookstores as libraries has always contributed to damaged stock at brick-and-mortar places, but lately it seems that in addition to rude customers, shopkeepers just don't care how their merchandise is cared-for (price stickers that are hard to remove have pissed me off for years, but now it seems many places don't pay anyone to straighten-up the stacks, watch for clumsy or malicious customers, etc.).

I find the whole situation very unfortunate. My hope is that Amazon won't suffer a third strike, but given that their packing in general has been spotty lately, I'm not holding my breath. If you have something like this happen to you, please complain. Companies will not spend money to improve their customer service unless their customers demand it.

Pop Music Is Better In A Foreign Language

I've been listening to a lot of unfamiliar music lately. I can't help but do that periodically, and thus the record and CD collection keeps on growing. I've had the most fun unearthing great old (i.e. 1977-1982) Punk stuff I haven't heard before on sites like Killed By Death, Good Bad Music, and 7 Inch Punk. These sites are a treasure trove of obscure bands like Breakouts, Modern Warfare, Hugh Beaumont Experience, Le Ritz, Frantix, Crap Detectors, The Huns, and a whole slew of other bands, many of which never released anything beyond one or two 7" singles. (And if anyone out there has any Brainbombs stuff you want to part with, let me know immediately. I wish I'd found them when stuff like Burning Hell, Genius & Brutality, and Urge To Kill were still in print.)

I've also been checking out some Hip-Hop, in particular Chamillionaire (I saw the Hip Hop Police / Evening News video while doing some music video research, and it's possibly the best Hip-Hop video I've ever seen, so I was hooked), and anything I can get my hands on by Dangermouse (the genius behind Gnarls Barkley, and the Grey Album -- which in my opinion is the gold standard for mash-up, and one of the best Hip-Hop anythings ever released).

Both genres underscore the fact that popular music often has stupid lyrics because, more so than mainstream rock or pop, there is often enough decent (not always intelligent, but at least clever) writing going on that the unbearably bad stuff really stands out. Hip-Hop suffers from this more than Punk, because it is driven by the lyrics, whereas with Punk it's easy enough to blather incoherently behind a wall of distortion (and often a fine idea, one which Death Metal fortunately takes to its logical conclusion).

Writing pop lyrics isn't easy, though. Many older forms of pop music (what we now call by names such as folk, world music, renaissance song, etc.) were structured around storytelling (most music that wasn't was liturgical or martial or otherwise ceremonial, and generally is classified differently). Since there was no three-minute radio format, songs could be as long or as short as needed to tell the tale, and "concept album" type collections of multiple songs used to tell a single tale were also an option. Even with those relatively liberal format constraints, it's still not easy to write something that is simultaneously engaging, thought provoking, and metrical. Throughout the ages, most pop music has been vapid and dull. Now add the additional constraint of the (roughly) three minute contemporary pop format, and it gets much harder. Fortunately (for them), many pop lyric writers seem to eschew trying very hard.

Further complicating things is genre constraints. Hip-Hop, for example, seems to have a requirement for at least one of the following tracks on every album: "don't mess with me because I'm tough and I'll smack you down," "I had it bad but now I'm rich and/or powerful and those of you who doubted me all suck," "the police are always giving me trouble," and "that woman left me for another guy and now I hate her. " Even an artist like Chamillionaire who has smart tracks like The Morning News and The Evening News is still obligated to make less engaging fare such as Pimp Mode. Punk, also, has its genre obligations, which are actually fairly similar to those of rap: poverty, street violence, run-ins with the police, and bad relationships.

Few if any Punk bands (even mainstream Pop-Punk like Green Day) have ever embraced the "I'm a player" stance of mainstream Hip-Hop, instead sticking steadfastly to rebellious conterculturalism. This, to me, is preferable to the "player" type tracks in Hip-Hop, and part of why I enjoy Punk -- even in English - - quite a bit more than most Hip-Hop. That doesn't mean there aren't silly, boring, or stupid Punk songs (those are legion), but the stylistic mode is different and so when the best of the Punk bands put out so-so tracks, the manner in which they are inferior to their best work is different than with Hip-Hop acts.

Which brings me to the title of the post. I am a big fan of pop music (including Punk, Hip-Hop, Metal, etc.) in languages that I don't understand. This allows the vocals to just become another textural element in the soundscape, and though I can't understand the words, the emotional tone of the vocalist still rings through. That is often the most compelling part of pop vocals, anyway. Instrumentals are also enjoyable, but the human voice is an instrument itself with many interesting sonic possibilities. Songs in foreign languages maintain the different layering, both emotionally and texturally, which sets vocal music apart from instrumentals -- yet at the same time, I don't get jolted out of a song by inane lyrics.

So, if you're in a band, and you have the ability to sing in any language other than English -- for my sake, please do.

Stop The Subprime Bailout

Even CNN has noticed that many taxpayers are far from excited about a government bailout of individual borrowers and institutional lenders involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.

As a responsible homeowner with a non-exotic mortgage, one which is no small burden to maintain given the high prices here in the Bay Area, I do not feel it is right to be asked to shoulder the burden of paying for other peoples' financial mistakes through my tax dollars. Why should the government reward financial irresponsibility on the part of borrowers, and unethical lending practices on the part of lenders (and repackagers)? A bailout encourages these sorts of lenders to keep on making these loans, which are irresponsible at best and criminally predatory at worst, under the assumption that we taxpayers are on the hook.

The housing market has begun a process of correction, and in addition to needing to pay my own mortgage, the loss of value of my home and real wages makes me even less able to pay more taxes to try to redress others' negligent and/or criminal behavior. I'd rather see my tax dollars go towards fundamentally more important things, like health care and education.

Or, if Congress wants to bail people out, don't bail out speculators, charlatans, and the irresponsible. Instead, bail-out young home buyers like me who were pinched by speculation-driven high property values, but who still worked hard, planned right, and spent time researching an "as affordable as possible in our area" home in order to buy under sensible, fixed-rate terms.

Despite my own resultant financial losses from this financial crisis, I do realize that a correction is necessary in order to keep housing values stable in the long-term. Let the market correct so we as a country can achieve stability and begin the process of rebuilding a housing market with sensible practices and realistic, not speculative, pricing.

If you feel the same way, in addition to checking out the Nobailout.org folks, this page can help you write your congresspersons and tell them.

Steve Kurtz: Tactical Art

Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble spoke at Berkeley last night, and it was a very interesting, engaging lecture titled "Art and Discipline." If you have the opportunity to see Kurtz deliver this lecture, I highly recommend doing so.

Kurtz only briefly mentioned his four year ordeal with the Department of Justice (this is also a good article about it), and only as a single exemplar of his overall thesis that the role of art is to push back against the social mechanisms of what he's termed "expression management."

Expression management is the Foucaultian "discipline" in the talk's title, and includes not only the obvious external forces such as censorship and persecution, but also the more subtle external and internal "microfascisms" of socially emergent behavior stimulated by mass inculcation of accepted "dos" and "do-nots" that leads to self-censorship and autogenous persecution.

Kurtz gives interesting examples such as a harmless performance art prank designed to attract the local constabulary: a grown man playing with Hot Wheels and Green Army Men and listening to a boom box with relevant sounds. Doing this in any tourist or commercial district never failed to attract the Police within five minutes, but at Daytona Beach led to outrage amongst citizens that the Police were planning to arrest the guy that CAE had to terminate the performance before someone assaulted an officer.

To me, that was the most successful instance of that series of performances in that it caused average people to realize, without any propaganda or guidance from the CAE performer (who remained silent), that the power of the Police to arrest someone for being inoffensive (but abnormal) is both absurd and dangerous. It was heartening that the polity responded to the persecution of someone on the grounds of harmless "weirdness" with outrage rather than approval.

He went on to describe the results of some of CAE's more deliberately provocative projects, including inadvertently causing Halifax Police to believe it was under terrorist attack by placing digital readouts on the ferries which apologized for the raw sewage in the harbor as part of the Halifax Begs Your Pardon project.

The most interesting example he gave, however, was the response of the city of Leipzig to the Marching Plague performance. Kurtz uses this experience as an example of both autogenous persecution and the possibility of a different social response to threat than the one prevalent in the U.S.

In staging this mock bioweapon release in front of the U.S. Embassy, what Kurtz found was that his own internal microfascisms were causing him to attempt to derail his own project by listing things he was sure they wouldn't be allowed to do: march and then assemble in front of the embassy, then use a city tower to release the smoke with the (harmless) biological sample in it, and then bring skin samples from the participants to a lab for testing.

What he found instead was that the Leipzigers, despite Germany's decades longer ordeal with terrorism (from not just Islamists, but also neo-Nazis and Communists), were quite willing to support the project. When the sponsoring Leipzig arts institution asked, the city gave them use of the tower, and permission to march to and in-front of the embassy, with no fuss. The biological laboratory in the city was equally obliging.

Certainly nobody sane would say Europe is some kind of utopia, but the interesting thing is that the Leipzig response to these "threats" is more sensible than even Kurtz' own internalized initial responses. By being rational and using sensible metrics for threat assessment, the Leipzigers correctly judged that this was a free-speech performance, not a security threat, and responded accordingly. The Leipzigers figured out what Kurtz pointed out to the audience: terrorism is real, but statistically uncommon. Most people, even the socially provocative ones, are not terrorists.

Here in the U.S., we rely on security theater, and over-response, such as erroneously clamping-down on photography. I myself have been literally run out of town in Rodeo, CA, with a Police cruiser less than 5 feet from my bumper, for taking photos of the local refinery. Yet, construction permit filing requirements mean that blueprints of the facility, much more useful to an actual terrorist, are likely publicly available (though perhaps not fully up-to-date).

These responses aren't just ineffective, they are very dangerous to core freedoms such as those of expression, inquiry, association, and privacy. Kurtz' work asks people to consider this, and to do what little they can do at an individual level to find a way to preserve freedom in the face of expression management both internal and external.

David Maisel: Library of Dust

A friend of Anu and I, David Maisel, has a great show up at Haines Gallery, San Francisco . The series is called Library of Dust, and there is also a book available from Chronicle Books.



This amazing photo series reflects upon death, material nature, and the ongoing dichotomy between forgetting and remembrance through images of copper canisters containing the cremains of mentally ill patients of the Oregon State Mental Hospital whose remains went unclaimed after their deaths.

Over 5000 such canisters exist, dating back as far as 1913. Exposure to the elements, and chemical interaction with their contents, has caused a number of the canisters to corrode in often very aesthetically pleasing ways. The corrosion not only reflects the decay and demise of the former person resting within, but reminds the viewer of the relationship between ourselves and the material chemistry of nature.

The patterns that emerge on these canisters are intriguing natural shapes, which often hint at one of Maisel's other major bodies of work: aerial photographs. The corrosion on these canisters exhibits similar geometries to the earth, whether it be a natural coastal formation, or a strip-mined pit. Comparative aesthetics helps link the canisters to Maisel's prior works, and to the larger relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Simply taken at face value, the photos are stunning and evocative. Anyone with an interest in materials will be instantly enthralled. However, once you discover the contents and history of these canisters, the work takes on whole new dimensions of meaning -- making this a wholly successful project at every level of artistic practice. All of Maisel's work is excellent, but for me Library of Dust is a marquee series that evokes a litany of both personal and political philosophical musings, but which also succeeds simply as technically and aesthetically masterful photography.

If you get a chance to see the work in-person, I highly recommend doing so. Otherwise, or in addition to doing so, I also highly recommend the beautifully produced book of the series.