kami-no-michi

At present, older generations still consider the space of information as something one logs-in to and logs-out from. Our view of the world (our metaphysics) is still modern or Newtonian: it is made of 'dead' cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive, and incapable of communicating, learning, or memorizing. But in advanced information societies, what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and more responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processess, the works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time.

Such a world will first gently invite us to understand it as something 'a-live' (artificially live). This animation of the world will then, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures, which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces.

Luciano Floridi in Information: a Very Short Introduction, part of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series.

neighbors

The view from my kitchen window, right around breakfast.
Boulder, CO

a three hour tour

I knew broadcasters would not be happy. My favorite response was from the Hollywood producer Sherwood Schwartz, who named the sinking ship in Gilligan’s Island after me.

Newton N. Minow writing in the Atlantic Monthly of his inaugural public address as President Kennedy’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission fifty years ago, in which he declared -- to the National Association of Broadcasters -- that television programming in the U.S. was a "vast wasteland".

imminent eminence

Rome is a love letter to the lush, swinging sound of a vanished era of Italian film history. Ennio Morricone is the best-known composer to emerge from it but there were numerous others too, such as Piero Umiliani and Piero Piccioni, who serviced the needs of Italy’s thriving popular cinema, churning out scores to romantic melodramas, horror films, spaghetti westerns, erotica and the pulpy crime fantasies known as gialli.

From Roman Holiday, a write up of the upcoming release of Rome by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, in the weekend edition of the Financial Times.

come away with me

Hotel Plaza, Venice/Mestra (113mm x 91mm)
Originally uploaded by davidgeorgepearson

A collection of hotel luggage labels curated by the inimitable David Pearson, mentioned here before, whom AbeBooks recently hailed as a "design genius". (Their statement of fact saves me the trouble.)

we make them inside us

These lists are journalistic catnip. Fun to read and look at the pictures but I find the liveable cities lists intellectually on a par with People magazine's 'sexiest people' lists.

Academic Joel Garreau in Liveable v. Loveable: The world's most 'liveable' cities are beautiful, clean and efficient. So why does no one want to live in them? in today's Financial Times.

The title of this post is taken from the last couple lines of Edwin Heathcote's article: "Our cities are our own -- we make them inside us. No city means the same to two people so how on earth can we measure them?"

Amen.

isolated in a web of one

Obama 'watched Bin Laden raid in real-time'

P050111PS-0522
Originally uploaded by The White House

BBC headline, 2 May 2011 »

the sound of silence

via Karissa Lang

Too often the sounds people make are just waste products of their activity, discarded like trash with no regard for the environment.

Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton in a September 2010 interview in Sun Magazine.

immune to your consultations

People change their positions all the time, the way they change their wives.

Aid to Donald Trump, commenting on the would-be presidential contender's change of stance regarding pro-choice politics (Trump is now pro-life), in this week's New Yorker.

drive by

An animated gif -- or cinemagraph -- by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. Via Gawker »

make like a shaker and weave

Assembled and wove my very own Shaker barstool,
which sounds like a curious misnomer coming from
a religious sect the avoids alcohol. But the kit of
parts came from the Shaker folks all the way back in
September, which is when I made my first sad pass
at putting the pieces together. Mr. Hoo helped me at
last master the requisite sanding and dry fitting, and
then I tackled the woof and weft by my lonesome.

Comfy AND crafty. Bonus.

final dispatch

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Photographer Tim Hetherington, the maker of this short film and the director of Restrepo, was killed today in Misrata.

looking for the pony

Commentary to follow.

Snapped at the Tattered Cover, Lodo
Denver, CO

(de)livery

Austin, TX

under glass

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is connected to the Peabody by a causeway on the third floor. I wandered over yesterday after I had my fill of the Peabody's fractured casts of the stelea of Copan and their marvelous Mayan greenstone, which is not entirely theirs at all, of course, but belonged to the good folks of Honduras once, some of whom were pictured beside the booty after it had been wrested from where their ancestors placed it millennia before, just before it was carted up by the folks from Harvard and shipped back to Cambridge for study.

Which got me to thinking about our compulsion to collect. Which is a dangerous thing for a museum junkie to start wondering about.

Without museums would we have as much cause to wonder about the wider world? Would a lack of museums lead us to be insular and inward looking and unconcerned about others beyond our boundaries? This is to be avoided. But what right do we have to uproot the treasures of other cities and peoples and place them under glass?

And then I wandered into the taxidermic galleries of the Natural History Museum. Case after case of collected creatures stuffed and arrayed incongruously on display. Prey beside predator, each soul unmoved by the presence of the other, staring ahead with glassy eyes. Each unrelentingly anxious, as if in answer to my question.

Taxidermic creatures, Harvard Museum of Natural History.

the Mayan word for wind

Ik'
Peabody Museum, Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass

the universe of curves

We have something in common, which is that we are belonging to the universe of curves.

Louboutin to the architect Oscar Niemeyer, as recounted by Lauren Collins in her profile of the shoe designer in the 28 March issue of the New Yorker.

harder to run

a found poem

The bay is filled
with cars
concrete
half-sunken homes

railway line
twisted vertically
like a garden fence

Cars and motorbikes
roughly re-parked

balance precariously
on their bonnets

The young

had been able to flee quickly

Guardian correspondant Jonathan Watts filing from Shintona, Miyagi prefecture

on board the concorde

on board the concorde
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Flight deck. The plane, on the whole, is
skinnier than I expected.

Museum of Flight, Seattle