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.

Back To School?

For the eleventh time, I'm thinking of making a stab at finishing my Bachelor's degree. I have over 120 credits, but I've never quite finished due to being easily distracted by paying work, and the fact that every transfer I've made has either required two years of classes (which, until recently, I never was even in the same city long enough to complete) or finishing a thesis at Simon's Rock (which I almost did, but my thesis was tied to my work at Webmind, and when Webmind went kaput so did my desire to work on that particular thesis). However, I figure that since I've done Masters or PhD level work in at least four disciplines (Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia / CG R&D and Production, Systems Engineering, and Screenwriting), perhaps it's high time I had anything other than an Associates' Degree.

I am looking at Thomas Edison State College, Ohio University, and now (thanks to Taj Moore) University of Maryland, University College (I could beg to be given another chance to finish my thesis at Simon's Rock, which would be my first choice given that I actually like and respect SRC, but my topic exhausted any interest it had a while ago and my thesis adviser retired justifiably pissed off at me that I'd not finished it during the Webmind days). So my only enrollment criteria at this point is minimum amount of time until graduation. I've got over 120 credits, and both institutions offer "portfolio review" of prior work experience towards credit, so in theory I should be able to graduate in 1 semester. However, I doubt that will happen, because all schools want more of your money, so they almost never transfer more than 2 years worth of credits. I have no interest in 2 years of undergraduate work, so if neither TESC nor OU will graduate me in 1-2 semesters, I'll have to go back to Simon's Rock on hands and knees.

At this point, I shouldn't even care about the degree. After all, I've always found school boring (and, often, insultingly patronizing), and excelled in the workplace rather than academia. I have plenty of projects of my own, and not enough time to do them all. However, there is a faction at work which is opposed to promotions for people who do not have degrees, and indeed advanced degrees. Plus, if I ever wanted to go back into research (short of getting rich and paying myself to do it), the glory days of being a wunderkind who can get a job at Bell Labs with no Bachelor's are long past. There also seems to be some value to having a degree when trying to raise money for projects. So this could just be a precursor to grad school -- something I'm quite ambivalent about, as that seems like it could be a huge waste of time and money. But, alas, given the end of the Internet boom glory days, and my being young enough to be a "wunderkind," it seems that I have failed to completely avoid (as I'd hoped I had) the need to finish the Bachelor's, if not also then going to get a Masters' or PhD.

Up The Punx

I've been on a mini-hiatus from Industrial, Goth, Electro and Metal to get back to my punk and postpunk roots. Here's a pile of what I've had on heavy rotation lately:

Poison Idea
Fucked Up
Career Suicide
The Restarts
A.F.I.
The Casualties
The Locust
Das Oath
Ampere
Dezerter
Riistetyt
Mindless Self Indulgence
The Business
The Distillers
Subhumans / Citizen Fish
The Skulls
Adolescents
Gogol Bordello
The World/Inferno Friendship Society
Pixies / Frank Black
The Prids (the best post-punk band around)
The Faint
Defunct Finnish shredders Hiljainen Kevaet
Defunct New York art punks False Prophets
Defunct SoCal staples The Dils
Defunct Seattlites The Gits / Dancing French Liberals of '48
Obscure (and possibly defunct) Japanese punx The Abnormals
And, of course, the late, great post-punk legends Joy Division

Happy Birthday Mach Kobayashi

I just found out that this weekend was also the birthday weekend of my friend Mach Kobayashi. Mach is not only a VFX whiz and a heck of a nice guy, he's also an all-around talented artist, writer and programmer. If you haven't seen his iPhone application Mach Dice, you should -- especially if you're a gamer nerd.

David Foster Wallace

Brilliant writer David Foster Wallace, an inspiration to a whole generation of emerging writers, took his life Sept. 12th, 2008.



The choice of Sept. 12th certainly resonates. Each Sept. 12th, after the numbness of another Sept. 11th of remembrance wears off, I am left contemplating a whole host of personal and political quandaries, a pile of vexing questions about the whys of the world and the seemingly ever-failing quest for mutual understanding between both persons and people. I didn't know him, but I can imagine the possibility that Wallace had similar feelings conjured up by this inauspicious date. Wallace's desperate portrayals of the world in his work, commented upon already by others such as Salon's Laura Miller who noted the "increasing darkness" of Wallace's writing, was a perfectly reasonable response to observing the society around him.

It's even understandable to me that someone with so much to offer could have possibly felt quite the opposite. Feeling that way is pretty much par for the course in an overpopulated, overstimulated world. The profound lack of understanding and compassion displayed by too many people makes it simple to feel like an insignificant voice, one which conveys nothing but one's own failure and fraudulence, particularly when one has chosen to dedicate themselves to communicating emotions and ideas to others.

There is conjecture that Wallace felt this way, based particularly on Wallace's "Good ol' Neon," -- as well as the opposite feeling that to believe this is to deny the ability of Wallace to look beyond himself in his writing. People are complex, the trite observation goes. Writers put a bit of themselves into everything they write. I can fully understand the uncertainty about where the observation about the world ends, and the observation about oneself begins.

What I can't understand, because to do so could bring disastrous consequences, is making that final choice to accept as real whatever form of imagined defeat he must have been feeling. It is even sadder than the world in which nonexistence can seem -- even for a fleeting moment -- to be a superior option to existence, that a single instant can be so irreversible, can so easily turn a glorious hero into a tragic one, and thus deprive the world of someone with so much left to give to it.

Happy 40th Birthday Mark Andrews

Happy Birthday to my boisterous, prolific friend, Pixar Director Mark Andrews. His birthday roast in honor of his hitting the big four-oh was hilarious good fun. If you haven't read his graphic novel "Tales of Colossus," you should check it out:

Totoro Forest Project

The Totoro Forest Project is a fund raising effort being spearheaded by Pixar artists Dice Tsutsumi, Enrico Casarosa, and Ronnie Del Carmen. The goal is to raise money to help preserve Sayama Forest near Tokyo, Miyazaki's inspiration for Totoro's forest in his classic film My Neighbor Totoro. I was lucky enough to win, in the online auction, this work, "Blind to Fear" by Clayton Stillwell:



This work, along with many others from the auction, will be on display at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum from Sept 20th, 2008 through February 8th, 2009.

Though the auction is now long over, there is a book of the work available. Proceeds from the book will also go to the forest fund. Keep an eye on The Totoro Forest Project Blog for information on how to purchase the book when it becomes publically available.

Fucked Up

A few days ago I saw one of my favorite punk bands, Toronto's Fucked Up. Aside from FU's third guitarist, the twelve-year-old-looking Ben Cook, making me feel about a hundred years old, the show was non-stop awesomeness (actually, to be honest, it was once-delayed, once-stopped awesomeness -- delayed by the late arrival of vocalist Damien Abraham, and stopped by a triple guitar string blowout two songs in).

The raw energy level displayed by FU harkens back to earlier days of punk, before Green Day and their ilk made punk into a subgenre of radio pop. People moshed. The Hemlock is a tiny venue (the bar area is at least ten times the size of the live music room). You can drink beer from a glass bottle there. It was sort-of like CBGBs back in the day, only cleaner. Much like many a show at CBGBs, the openers were an odd choice. Strange Boys and Crystal Antlers, with their blues, funk and classic rock inspired brands of punk, were really not the best fit for tour mates, but they were decent enough to sit through.

If you enjoy punk, and haven't heard Fucked Up, you really ought to (and also drummer Jonah Falco's other band, Career Suicide). FU is often compared to Portland greats Poison Idea, and the comparison is definitely apt, especially when talking about their live sets. But, mainly in their recordings, FU also throw in a bit of downtempo, Fugazi-esque material as well. Not downtempo as in redundant, verse-chorus-verse pop punk, but more sophisticated intros, bridges and breaks that add interesting layers on top of what is otherwise an all-out sonic assault.

Since NY, LA and SF have nearly completely succumbed to the all-hip-hop, all-the-time wave of the present, now is the time for unassuming Toronto, Canada to reign over the world of punk. If you haven't checked out FU and their peers in the Toronto punk scene, pogo on over to your nearest record shop and rediscover punk as it was meant to be.

The History of Murder

Those of you who are familiar with my obsession with reading about science, philosophy, the arts, and World War Two may find it surprising that my guilty non-fiction reading pleasure is true crime books.

Unfortunately, the true crime genre is filled with badly written tripe ranging from the mountains of mediocre Mafia books to the truly pathetic "From The X-Files of Murder" (which I read over a couple lunchtimes recently, and was sorely disappointed with). There are also the comprehensive, yet somewhat perfunctory, case files such as "Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of The Cali Cartel" (which was actually pretty good for that style of book), interesting pop-tech books like John Douglas' "The Anatomy of Motive," and even the occasional gripping personal narrative like William Queen's "Under And Alone" (which I desperately wanted to adapt as a screenplay when I read it, but unfortunately Daniel Barnz and Ned Zeman had the same idea first). What is generally lacking in the genre, however, are any sort of well written, engaging histories (ideally, of the quality of a Richard Rhodes or Martin Gilbert).

Enter Colin Wilson and the deceptively titled "The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder." Having been unfamiliar with Wilson, and given that title, I had expected its 500+ pages to be filled with typical true crime historiography: titillating anecdotes listed in chronological order, with no premise, no analysis, and no historical grounding.

I was pleasantly surprised. Wilson, a largely self-taught philosopher, is a literate writer. And while it turns out he is better known in the U.S. for his books on mysticism, this book sticks to the subject without any real digressions into that territory. It is sadly not a masterpiece in the vein of Rhodes or Gilbert, but it is a very readable, egaging tract that actually bothers to have a thesis.

Though it is indeed rooted in a series of titillating anecdotes listed in chronological order, Wilson ties these together with historical grounding, sociological analysis, and, most surprisingly, literary and artistic reference to both describe the times he's writing about and root some of his social premises in contemporary interpretations. Some of the historical grounding is light, as the focus is on the crimes themselves, but there is enough to draw a basic picture of an era for an otherwise historically uninformed reader.

Wilson does build-up a premise: that contemporary murder, particularly thrill killing and sex murder, was once the privilege of the upper classes (such as Gilles de Rais) for the particular reason that they were comfortable enough to eschew common crimes for material gain or to avenge one's "honor." Being spoiled, Wilson demonstrates through numerous cases, is a necessary precursor for this kind of psychopathology. Prior to our modern era, the working classes did not generally have enough resources to become spoiled and thus their crimes, no matter how copious and gruesome, were nearly always rooted in personal material gain or vengeance (such as Sweeney Todd). It is an interesting idea, and while this is not a scholarly work of criminology or psychology, Wilson does a credible job of making this point.

Though there are also a few dubious or underdeveloped ideas in this book (particularly his thinly drawn premise that rape stems from a different psychological basis among the pre-industrial poor), ultimately it is an interesting popular history that holds together rather well against many of its genre peers. It is particularly good as an overview, providing the reader with a slew of historical people, cases and literature to pursue on their own. I've read other reviews which claim that Wilson's two-book "The Killers Among Us" is a superior work, and given that "The History of Murder" is itself a surprisingly good work in a genre that too often embraces simply awful writing, I look forward to finding out whether or not those reviews are correct.

Beware of God

I just finished reading Shalom Auslander's hilarious and thought-provoking collection of short stories, Beware of God.

With story titles such as "Smite The Heathens, Charlie Brown" and "Holocaust Tips For Kids," it's apparent that Auslander's perspective, and sense of humor, is not for everyone. Drawing upon the indoctrination he received growing-up Orthodox, and his keen observations of both day-to-day human nature and the hypocrisy of religion, Auslander skewers the religious closed-mindedness and bigotry of both Goy and Jew alike.

Stories such as "Waiting for Joe" and "It Ain't Easy Being Supremey" ridicule the blind obedience, moral certainty, and resulting factionalization amongst religious zealots by transferring those tenets of belief onto the worldview of Hamsters and Golems, respectively. "Heimish Knows All" does the same for preachy moralizing, from the viewpoint of a family dog. And the obsequiousness obedience to an unreachable deity is shown for what it is, just another form of celebrity worship, in "They're All The Same." Possibly the most moving of the stories is "Holocaust Tips For Kids," which relates a young boy's perspective on the Holocaust and how to survive it (presumably, Auslander recalling his own childhood thoughts on the subject).

Every one of the stories in Beware of God is an easy, entertaining read, while at the same time making keen observations on humanity and our relationship to belief. While the humorlessly observant and easily offended need not apply, the rest of us can have quite a good laugh along with our critique of the foibles of religiocity.

Indieauteur.com on hiatus for a while

Yahoo! is much too buggy, and their customer service is nonexistent. I've decided to cancel my hosting account with them, and find an alternate provider or build WP on my colocated server and run it myself (I'd rather not, I'm way past bored with system administration).

I will re-launch indieauteur.com after I've found a better hosting site, and come up with a decent design template for the site (the current one, which I just found and downloaded, is pretty awful). There wasn't any real activity on that blog, anyway -- I spent most of my time fighting bugs in the Yahoo! system, including having to delete and re-create the site four times because Wordpress irrecoverably hung (at least, the Web management console became detached, so without console access I couldn't do anything). Yahoo! offers no support for restarting it on their end (or, really, much support at all). Their servers are also very slow. I highly recommend avoiding them for Web hosting, even for something "simple" like a blog.

Someone has recommended "WebFaction" to me. I'm going to give them a try. They are three times as expensive as Yahoo! (about $35/month vs. $35 / 3 months on Yahoo!), but their pre-sales support folks answered two sets of questions already -- infinity times the number of answers I've ever gotten to a support e-mail as a paying Yahoo! customer.

SIGGRAPH 08

My report on SIGGRAPH 08 will be relatively short because even though I enjoyed going, there wasn't a lot to talk about. I gave a talk, with Max Planck (no, not the famous dead physicist), about our system for shading the background robots on WALL-E. Though I've been co-author on a presentation previously, when I was at Bell Labs, I have never spoken at SIGGRAPH before so that was interesting. It was a much different experience than the free-for-all arguments that break out at the Transhumanist and Real AI events I've primarily spoken at. At SIGGRAPH, everyone listens politely, and follow-up questions are either nonexistant (in our case) or very nonconfrontational (a colleague's talk) -- at least, that's the case if you happen to be there representing Pixar. Perhaps more relaxing, but also a bit less amusing.

The Computer Animation Festival this year was shown in a very unsuccessful format. Instead having a few showings of the exact same juried Electronic Theater, and the other clips running in 4-6 category-based sessions that repeat multiple times, they merged the film show and animation screening room concepts into a series of different "competition screenings," so everyone saw a slightly different program -- but not different enough to warrant seeing all of them.

The seven "competition screenings" were subject to an audience prize vote. I saw two, one of which inexplicably ran after voting was closed. There was plenty of overlap between the two sessions, even though I chose the two that appeared to intersect the least. Under this arrangement it was entirely possible that you could miss seeing the winning entry unless you sat through other clips at least twice, if not more. Even worse, the Demo Scene, Japan Media Arts Festival, and similar screenings were only shown once -- and each was 15-30 minutes. If you were late, or a session you had to be in (say, if you were a speaker) was on at that time, you had no other chance to see this material. This hasn't been the case in the past, and I have previously always managed to see all of the clips. It was frustrating to miss some work I heard was very good. The theater, however, was amazingly excellent. Fortunately, I still managed to see a lot of good stuff anyway, such as Oktapodi, Mauvais Rôle, Rua das Tulipas, Appleseed: Ex Machina, and a few others.

Two interesting panels were presented by people from start-up studios Lightstream and MeniThings. Both are doing independently funded feature animation, and had a lot of interesting perspectives about starting a studio from scratch. Lightstream is doing a feature called "The 4th Magi," and MeniThings one called "Terra." The latter is much more technically primitive, but I think will be accomplished for a very low budget. It has the possibility, from what I saw, to be decent at the level of an average Don Bluth film. If that is the case, and my estimates of how cheap it is are correct, "Terra" could show that feature CG animation is within reach of independents, rather than being solely the domain of very wealthy studios (and individuals, like Laika's Phil Knight).

The technical and production talks I went to were all good, but nothing mindblowing. I did enjoye the four "Kung-Fu Panda" presentations I saw. They did good work on that film, and their presentations made me want to go see it (I haven't yet, but will soon). The "Horton" crew did some very nice hair work with hairs growing from hairs and tons of LOD management to make a very hairy show managable, and I hear some folks at work are doing something similar in our hair system, which I'm excited about. Their work was very nice, but it didn't make me want to see yet another Dr. Seuss story savaged by insipid hipsterism and faddish, crass humor.

I also saw the Clone Wars film. It was better than I expected -- but I expected my eyeballs to burst into flames within a few minutes, and for me to run screaming from the theater just in time to narrowly avoid my head exploding. We were softened-up by an enjoyable Q&A in which John Knoll asked Director Dave Filoni a bunch of snarky insider questions which essentially only John Knoll could get away with asking. It was done on a TV show budget, with a TV show crew. Go into the film expecting to vomit copiously, and keep in the back of your mind that the film was dirt cheap (by Lucas standards), and that nobody involved ever wanted it to be seen anywhere other than on TV (except Lucas), and you might make it through only throwing-up a little bit (such as whenever the phrase "sky guy" is uttered, for example). Taking the spirit of Filoni and Knoll's Q&A to heart as we watched it, we were able to even somewhat enjoy the moment. However, since you probably won't get to see it under such ideal conditions -- don't.

I actually like being down in LA, and we also got to see lots of friends, so all in all it was a good trip, even if SIGGRAPH itself was merely "pretty good" rather than awesome.

Donate To Help The Prids

I just found out that my friends, The Prids, were in a serious automobile accident not too long ago (while I was away, so it took me a bit of time to hear about it from other mutual friends).

Fortunately, none of them were as injured as badly as Todd Blair, but being an indie band working full time at recording and touring, with the paltry income from it that so many indie bands endure for years, several of them were not insured. Their hospital bills are enormous. David being airlifted to the hospital alone cost over ten thousand dollars.

So, please donate to help The Prids. They aren’t just the world’s best independent postpunk band, they’re also a nice bunch of people who are not going to be able to easily afford these hospital bills without a huge community of people lending a hand.

Ponyo

One of the great things about my workplace is that Japan's fabulous Studio Ghibli has their U.S. premier showings of their films at our studio. Not only do we get to be the first outside of Japan to see the films, but we get to see them subtitled rather than dubbed (the general releases of their films here are dubbed).

Miyazaki's latest, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, is a very charming love story between a boy and a goldfish. I don't want to give away all the twists and turns of the story, but suffice it to say it has all the requisite unusual, magical elements that people expect from a Miyazaki film. This film skews younger than several of Miyazaki's recent films, and that is reflected both in the storytelling and the artistic styles used in the film. However, that does not mean it isn't highly enjoyable for older audiences as well.

Ponyo manages to mix in an environmental message, without beating you over the head with it, and some philosophical reflections on love and life as well. However, given the younger intended audience, there is not the depth of probing and degree of conflict found in a film like Princess Mononoke. I think this led to a third act with some unfulfilled potential, especially with regards to the adventure and element of the story and challenging the main character, but it still manages to be at least satisfying.

That one criticism aside, I still highly recommend seeing Ponyo (and, if possible, to see it subtitled so you can hear the original voice acting).

To Upgrade Or Not To Upgrade

A G5-based Mac is the center of my home studio. I've got some quite expensive software (Waves, NI Bundle, etc.) which costs a lot to upgrade each time Apple releases a new, incompatible technology (this happened when going from OS9 to OSX, and again when Core Audio reared its pointless head). Intel Macs have been around for a while now, so I have to decide whether or not I should spend the money to upgrade everything, or just keep it running on the old Mac as long as possible.

The other alternative is to switch to Windows, running Steinberg Nuendo, and cross-grade Waves, etc. onto that platform. This would also move me to Avid or Premiere and away from Final Cut Pro (not that big of a deal), and while initially expensive it would mean the end of spurious incompatible hardware and OS revisions cropping up. Microsoft, to their credit, understands that their users run other software on their OSes and that incompatible OS upgrades mean cash outlays to upgrade/replace these apps. I've been delaying this decision for quite a while. I'd like to just get my studio stabilized and focus on using it rather than maintaining it, so I'm inclined towards just running the G5 until flames shoot out the side and it melts into a pool -- but that means that eventually I can no longer get new upgrades and plug-ins for Logic and other packages.

This flurry of incompatible upgrades that Apple released over the last few years was a big part of my turning from being platform agnostic and running all 3 major OSes, to really regretting ever having bought a Mac at all. Apple has always been antagonistic towards many of their developers and corporate users, but in the last several years their attitude towards customers has also become "either you're with us, or you're against us." Buy into the Apple hype wholesale (and be rich enough to do it), or forget it. My current plan is to get a trial version of Nuendo and see what I think.

Supply And Demand

According to various pundits, my generation is the first one that is predicted not to have a quality of life that exceeds that of their predecessors. Quality of life is ill-defined, but what has been presented in these arguments seems to revolve around cost of living vs. compensation, amount of leisure time, job satisfaction, and feeling of control over one's own destiny. Clearly, this is a rather American definition of what constitutes a quality life. Being an American, it resonates with me.

I feel that if the pundits are correct about the effect, the cause they are always claim to be seeking is fairly obvious. It is not some mysterious conflation of economic subtleties. It isn't globalization, global warming, or even wage deflation, per se. Those things are all symptoms of what I think is the larger issue: the supply of people exceeds the demand.

It is not popular to talk about population control. Many people feel it is their God-given right to reproduce as prolifically as is conceivable. They forget that with rights come responsibilities, and that the world's excess supply of people is leading to compensation deflation and resource contention as there are more people than jobs and resources in our current markets. New jobs can indeed be created the by new demands placed on the global resource system by new people, but there is a tipping point beyond which this benefit is exceeded by the detriment of trying to incorporate many new people into the economic system. I don't know if we're past that tipping point, but it is obvious to me that our current economic and social structures, when coupled with this population boom, put us at least dangerously close to it.

Related to this issue is longevity. I am in favor of longevity, since I myself would like to live a nice long time, but with these increases in longevity come extended stays in the workplace for a large number of people and this taxes the economic system. The market is not expanding at a rate which creates quality, desirable jobs for younger people who are unable to fill existing positions, because those positions are held by Baby Boomers who are neither retiring nor dying. With increased longevity either needs to come an economic system in which opportunity expands proportionally to population growth (and given that the world is not infinite, there is a tipping point here also beyond which that is impossible), or a decrease in fertility. If we haven't passed the tipping point, the market could in theory expand in this way -- but it currently is not.

But don't just blame the so-called third world, or "foreigners" in general. Sure, many jobs (not just blue collar ones) in the U.S. and Europe are experiencing wage drag due to competition from China, India and other developing nations. Never mind that American and European companies owned by American and European investors also encourage this competition in order to increase their profit margins by stifling compensation gains -- right here at home we have a different kind of disparity based on job displacement by population.

The Baby Boomers, that 60's generation who thought they would save the world, are actually a population bubble whose longevity, fertility, and expansive lifestyle (and concomitant resource usage) is in fact a population spike which is causing (or at least stoking) a number of the economic and social justice problems they claimed were of utmost importance to them. Despite America's youth-centric culture, the Baby Boomers are the largest population of any generation to cling to power, authority, and money so late into life.

Someone who was 20 in 1968 is now 60. With current projected lifespans, these people are likely to live another 20-40 years. Those who do retire will strain the Social Security system, requiring my generation to pay an unprecedented amount for their upkeep, for an unprecedented length of time. Those who do not retire are ensconced in all the jobs that my generation would like to have, which might make it possible for at least some of us to own our own homes, and destinies, and at the same time chip in for the care and feeding of aging Boomers.

It is possible that growth will increase, and certainly folks like myself who have attempted to help create new markets such as computing and biotech are trying to make that happen. However, should sufficient growth not come to pass, the "correction" to compensate for Boomer-inflated markets will fall squarely on the shoulders of me, you and a lot of folks just like us. This would be a much bigger correction than the ones after either the Internet or housing bubbles, and it's already starting to happen. In order to curtail this economic slide, many more people need to become involved in opening up new markets and expanding existing ones -- especially those who benefit from the current system and might not see the benefits to adjusting it, as they control the resources needed to do it.

Even if we can stimulate sufficient economic growth, we also, as a global community, still need to start looking seriously at population. No matter how sensible new policies and how robust new markets may become, the planet is a finite system and therefore there is some number of people beyond which there will simply not be enough resources to go around. In order for a maximal number of people (all around the world, not just in the US) to live a good life, there must be fewer people than this limit. I certainly don't support either genocide or eugenics, but rather I'd like to see sensible population planning policies which use education and economic incentives to encourage birth control and responsible family planning. Fecundism at any cost is a dead-end path, and it's about time the human race let go of this misguided ideology.

Sweet Dreams Are Not Made Of This

In the last few years, I've noticed hard drives failing at a spectacular rate. This phenomenon has cut across vendors. I've had Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM and Seagate drives all fail on me, regardless of whether internally or externally mounted. Just this week, one of the drives in my Buffalo DriveStation Quattro failed, and so did one of the drives mounted in one of my machines at work. External housings also fail at an alarming rate (I've had controllers or power supplies fail on about 40% of the ones I own).

Electronic devices in general are either failing more often, or their ubiquity is making apparent failure rates that have always been there. My new computer shipped with one or two chips of bad RAM. Our GPS navigational device failed recently. All manner of components fail regularly, often bringing down an entire system.

As someone who engages himself in discussions and debates about Transhumanism, I have come to believe that while it is fascinating to contemplate the high-level concerns about the feasibility of uploading -- ranging from whether or not the human mind is sufficiently represented in determinate hardware for it to be at all feasible, to trying to determine if scanning brain states or understanding the underlying logic is a more tenable approach -- that a much more mundane concern must first be addressed before any of those discussions move beyond the realm of fantastical speculation. That concern is reliability, both of hardware and software.

Simply put, nothing lasts forever. But, if we want to explore the idea of allowing our minds to outlast our body hardware, we must deal with the decidedly unsexy problem of reliability. Hardware and software will always fail, though hopefully not always as frequently as is the case now. A major component of reliability is trust, which is placed in the hands of other people. In the case of Transhumanism, that trust is placed in the hands of future generations who may have no real attachment to their wards, depending on what differences would emerge between uploads and humans should this become feasible.

What we are trusting others to do, even in contemporary society, is to maintain systems that keep us alive. Aircraft mechanics, hospital equipment technicians, traffic systems engineers, and a whole host of other people are entrusted to maintain and repair systems we've come to utterly depend upon. Uploaded minds would not only need more reliable hardware, but also a trustworthy system of stewardship in which redundancy is provided, timely and complete backups are maintained, and hardware and software failures are addressed before minds are literally lost.

One limiting factor here is cost. Doing all these things requires resources, and as more and more minds got uploaded, more and more resources would be needed. Incentives would be needed to give the stewards reason to perform their duties, both the promise of future uploading for themselves and material supplies and comforts in their biological lives.

Perhaps this all becomes a moot point once computers can reliably maintain, repair, upgrade and replace themselves without loss of data. But we're so far from this point that there is a legitimate bootstrapping concern here. Waving it away with hopes for a magical "hard singularity" by which a rapid transition causes the universe to go from chaotic and flawed to perfectly managed in a matter of minutes may palliate some people's concerns in this area. Personally, I don't see how we could get anywhere near a Transhumanist ideal of preserving our thoughts, memories, and personalities in such a way as to afford "eternal" life with continuity of consciousness, without first addressing immediate concerns about reliability.

Moore's law hoodwinks Transhumanists into believing that eventually all mundane problems of computing capacity will "solve themselves" with time, but I contend that these pragmatic issues of computer hardware and software development pose a far greater challenge to Transhumanism via uploading than the dyed-in-the-wool idealists are willing to accept.

Even without taking into account Transhumanist fantasy, the problem of system reliability is a very real and pressing issue as our society becomes increasingly computerized. Transport, medicine, finance, the military, and law enforcement all rely heavily on computerized systems. These are systems upon which lives, sometimes millions of lives at once, utterly depend. Reliable systems engineering is an incredibly boring area of research, which also happens to be utterly essential if we're to continue to expand the degree to which we rely upon technology to maintain our way of life, and indeed life itself.

Social Futilities

There are too many social networking sites. Enough that there are emerging, competing standards for a universal login / universal online ID like Open ID and Friend Connect, so that you are have one ID for all the myriad sites that want you to have an ID. I have even tried Gravitar (I don't like it -- the restrictions on nicknames are arbitrary and stupid).

But what is the point of all this divergence and reconvergence and redivergence -- and so on? How many social network utilities does one need? I am already a member of MySpace, Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut, Tribes, Notch Up, Naymz, Twitter, Flixster, Good Reads, vfxConnection, Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.ici.ous, Flickr, YouTube, Live Journal, and of course Blogger (and probably a dozen others I'm just forgetting about). I was gung-ho about social utilities for a brief period, convinced by friends and the media that they provided good value in terms of fun, meeting people, and career opportunities. However, I quickly realized this was just another "history repeats itself" moment for the Internet -- social utilities are just Web user interfaces slapped on old ideas that have been around since my BBS days. Even Digg and Twitter are just interface updates of the original core concept of the BBS -- a bulletin board. People invite me to join new social utilities at least once a week. I literally can't keep track of them all, and considering how little value they provide, why bother?

I rarely log-in to most of them. I just don't have time to compete with, for example, the seemingly full-time Diggers, in terms of becoming a popular contributor of articles. (And, like being a DJ, I'm unclear as to why merely presenting the creative work of other people earns respect in the first place.) I certainly don't have time to take random stabs at befriending people who happen to like one of the bands I like. Indeed I don't have time to do much of anything online these days except write. My life outside the Internet, the actual physical life of food and wine and travel and art and literature and myriad other interesting things, which we're supposed to be living, takes precedence these days over jostling for virtual position with people who have too much time on their hands. And the irritable idiots who patrol the Internet looking to assert themselves in their self-appointed roles of cybercop (for all manner of "infractions" usually related to their disagreeing with something you think) just aren't worth the bother. When I was a teenager it seemed like grand fun, all this online arguing and jostling for the role of minor digital celebrity or king of some obscure corner of the networks (when I was a teenager, there wasn't a single monolithic Internet -- things like FidoNet and Compuserve were still separate worlds). Nowadays, it's dull as dirt.

I could look at the explosion of these sites as information overload, but the problem is that many of them don't really have much in the way of information. At least, not any that's useful to me. For all the effort some people put into social networking, what rewards do they reap? It's difficult to say. The occasional Internet phenom gets their Warholian 15 minutes and perhaps some cash, but people also still can get their moment in the sun doing decidedly old-school things like writing books -- on paper. What sites to engender success of some kind are the ones which are most focused on having something to say (mostly blogs, art/photo portfolios, and plain old hand-built websites).

The majority of social networking sites, like Facebook, do not facilitate anything but time-wasting. Facebook's stock in trade are games which are actually less fun than the old mail-order, turn-based games of the 80s on which their gameplay style is based. Old promises of the Internet being interactive, and therefore engaging people in new ways, seem to be broken most hypocritically by social utilities, as these sites all promised that their raison d'etre was to revitalize that aspect of the Internet. Most of them serve primarily as engines for passive fandom, combined with the same kind bickering that has been around since BBSes and Usenet. Media stories explaining the necessity of having such a "presence" uniformly fail to explain why, other than that this is the latest fad in herdlike conformity to sweep through the human race. It is very primal, the urges that play out in social networking. Each page is like digital urine on a virtual tree, marking territory and announcing to all sniffers-by that you are the alpha dog of a whole realm of Web pages.

But there are no trees, and the territory is free. It's a safe, non-zero-sum game of territorial conquest. Sure, occasionally the ego-bashing Vandals swarm through your digital space, stabbing at everything they see with all the elegance of a ruptured sewer pipe -- but there's no real territory for them to seize, and anyone with any sense merely ignores these intrusions (or, if you're sufficiently bored, they are generally easy to make sport of as their own egos and IQs are nothing to write home about). The toothless predators are safely ensconced in their mothers' basements, and only those chronically predisposed to being victims are ever victimized by them. But other than the chance at an occasional dull fight with a halfwit, or to waste time deleting spam, what exactly does digital social networking provide its users?

Once upon a time, it was a decent way to expand one's network of actual friends. I've made friends -- the kind I'd at least e-mail off-system, if not get to see in-person -- both on MU*s (Qwest, then Delusions, in particular) and Orkut. But, since then, all this social networking just seems to serve to either amuse or annoy people I already know. Nearly all of my connections on Facebook, for example, are people I know. By force of pure number of users, I have managed to reconnect with old friends through Linked In, Facebook, and MySpace -- so that was a genuine benefit -- but I still immediately try to shunt those conversations to real-space or e-mail rather than use the slow, buggy, clunky and advertising-laden interfaces of any of these sites. And how I'd get to know people I don't already know on Facebook or MySpace is uncertain, because their message boards are either nonexistant, not nearly as active as they once were on Orkut (before exhaustion at dealing with spammers drove most people away), or active but vapid (no creative role-playing, or joke telling, or word games, or exquisite corpses, or even debating science or politics -- just the same boring trolling and arguments about sex and fandom that have been rehashed over and over since at least the early days of Usenet). Sure, MySpace is ok for finding out about bands I'd never heard of before -- but frankly, even though I can hear tracks for free on MySpace, I still think magazines like Maximum Rock N' Roll or review sites like Heathen Harvest do a better job of organizing and presenting information about what bands and albums might be worth hearing.

Blogging (words or photos or videos) has its benefits, in at least it requires thought and activity on the part of the individual to create the material. Much of what is presented is not worth a first look, never mind a second, but I can't criticize people for at least trying. What complaints I do have about blogging will come with more details in a follow-up post some time soon, but let me state that it revolves around the problem of totally devaluing content, and leaving only advertising as a means of compensation for content creators. Eventually there will be nothing left to advertise, because people will come to expect to get everything for free (even physical goods) in return for watching ads.

Even with social utility sites, the cost of all this "benefit" is non-stop advertising (or, in the case of Facebook, invasive datamining and targeted spamming). I'm not opposed to the idea of social networking on-line, indeed I did some pioneering work in this area as a software developer in the 1990s, but before I sign-up for one more social networking site, whoever invites me better be able to explain what conceivable benefit will come to me, and at what cost before I even bother to spend the time necessary to fill-out the sign-up form.