kip/bot/blog

NYT article today about the last pinball machine manufacturer. One of those articles that makes me love living in NY and love the Times. The article is a reporter’s dream: a small world of pinball fanatics (including a “historian of the sport”), a 62-year old owner who yells at his employees for not playing enough pinball and bruised a rib snowboarding in December, really cool pictures of the craft and the mass of the enterprise, and fun quotes like a bug list which includes the comment “flipper feels soft.”

This article also highlights how well the Times has evolved into its digital presentation of itself. I’ve been getting caught up on my podcasts and just listened to a conversation about Eric Alterman’s New Yorker article on the death of newspapers. Articles like this show that, on the content side at least, that some papers are finding ways to embrace the medium: interactive slideshows that highlight photography and have a slightly different narrative arc, the nice incorporation of sound files into an otherwise conventionally formatted article, the use of thumbnails on the top page to pull people in (the two pics above are intriguing at thumbnail size).

David Brooks doesn’t usually inspire me, or inspire me to even read him with the chance of getting inspired, but a piece that he did yesterday, describing the modern depletion of imagination, was terrific and made me want more, but now I’m adrift and have much too much work to do to get it.

The article centered on a piece about C S Lewis:

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I’ve been trying to work through Bullfinch’s Mythology recently, in an effort at self-erudition. One of the disturbing things about reading the book is its rationale:

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which enlarges our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no that appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Without a knowledge of mythology, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

This is the constant sell of Bullfinch, that if you read the book, you can understand references in poems and decode their meaning. Not to unlock their magic, feel what it’s like for absurd but wonderful images to mean something deep and emotional, or tap into stories that tap into obscured parts of our psyche — but to understand poems and literature which are almost as removed from us as the mythic stories they reference.

On the rare occasions when I read Shakespeare, I am always struck by how alive the 16th century was with magically powered plants. References to properties of plants abound in Shakespeare, and I think how cool it would be to walk in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and to see flowers which are pretty, smell nice, and have medical/magical/(al)chemical properties. How much more alive and rich the place would be. But that’s gone to us.

So . . . When I see a passage about how night skies used to be magical and once inspired wonder, I want more. Brooks goes on to tantalize even further:

The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time. As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity.

(Tantalize comes from the story of Tantalus, who as a punishment for stealing ambrosia, was put in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree. Whenever he bent to drink the water would recede away from him, whenever he reached up for fruit, the tree branches would move just out of his grasp. I knew that without looking it up, but I also know it because I learned a bunch of Greek myths in High School so I could be clever and witty in Extemporaneous Speaking.  I’m not sure if that’s good or not.)

At the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator tells of a couple who suffers from this post-medieval condition:

A moment later, the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite

Yeah, so I want more out of this Brooks column and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t provide a link for the Ward essay, which seems selfish for one who is lamenting the closing of our imaginations, “many historians” gives me nothing, and oh, how I wish there were some implicitly titled “If you like this or care about the night skies, you should check out…”

The internet’s best contribution to this dilettante’s life is “More…” and I have none.

I’ve been seeing a lot of steampunk pics and references in my web trolling lately. Despite being a fan of the aesthetic, the not the fiction so much, I was stumped to see this one at Steampunk Workshop:

It’s a Mac Mini inside an old-fashioned (circa: steampunk) tin.  The picture below of modded headphones also comes from the Steampunk Workshop. But they strike me as pre-atomic-era SF, sitting more comfortably next to an oscilloscope than a brass input device.

Why are designers are getting such a kick out of steampunk mods of Apple stuff? The ultimate design objects being modded and retrofied to the place where there original design is not only lost, but are pushed in a distinctly mechanical direction?

The charm of steampunk for me is that it hearkens to the last great age of the renaissance person: late 19th century Europe, especially England. It’s a time when people could still dabble in many fields and make contributions in them: astronomy, electricity, biology, studies of the ether, psychology were all still open enough that, dare I say it, amateurs could still make discoveries or meaningful contributions in those fields while writing lame poems and playing the pianoforte after dinner for guests.

Or maybe it’s the time of the literary engineer — someone out of a Jules Verne novel who knew the classics, might quote Shakespeare, and still be able to improve on a thermal combustion engine and then house it in a mahogany case with brass fixtures. Sherlock Holmes is the quintessence of the literary scientist. Despite some embarassing gaps of ignorance, Holmes was a chemist, a historian, and a supremely gifted violinist who lived surrounded by those same brass-handled cabinets filled with news clippings, biological samples, ashes from cigars, shag tobacco, and sheet music.

This is the appeal of many adventure games, particularly Myst (all about the brass and amateur science), Jules Verne, the emerging adventure game sensibility in Dan Brown and other ‘manuscript’ genre novels. Even Bioshock with its emphasis on an aether-like technology and art deco setting, hearkens back to something more steampunk than cyberspace.

My enjoyment of steampunk is probably due to the demise of the literary engineer. There’s just too much to try and know and lifehackery has us focused on efficiency. I regularly see people on Facebook proclaiming that they don’t read, or don’t read fiction. I have friends who find literature inefficient and while they care about aesthetics, it feels like an efficient post-Swiss design nod to the finer things. The Mac Mini setup above has flourishes and embellishments — its charm is in its non-cleanness. Its celebration of artifice makes it tactile, places it in the realm of the craftsmen, implies the odors of wood and metal polishes, even celebrates its intricacy. By inviting us in to the mechanical intricacies of an object, steampunk acknowledges that we understand it and turns that understanding into something aesthetic.

Some time last year, I got sick of listening to people complain about the negative effects of technology.  It may have been when I got my Sony book reader, but I think it goes back earlier to when some ninny sent me a Thomas Friedman column, in which Friedman suggested that we had gone too far with technology.  The column was nauseating NY liberalism at its snooty self-important worst:

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.

When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.

There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.

It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”

I found this infuriating.  The assumption that a cab driver is just dying to be a reporter’s ‘vox populi’, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to entertain himself on the job (presumably Friedman doesn’t listen to music while he writes or watch TV while doing email at night), or cabbies choosing not to talk to a passenger who means nothing to him was somehow wrong, clearly, as indicated by the incoherence of the sentence, bugged me.

What bugged me most, though, was the way Friedman was judging another person’s use of technology through his own lens.  So the Jan Chipchase article in today’s NYT, has a great, liberating moment:

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

Finally.

NYT as an article about the brand identity of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.  The creator, Brian Collins, keyed off of Gore’s use of the phrase of “we the people” in his book, and then went a step further to see the me that makes up the we.

“What’s good is that the idea of ‘me’ — and personal initiative — still lives inside the idea of ‘we’”, he says.  It is also a word game that forces the ‘reader’ to decipher, and, once that is accomplished, makes the logo even more memorable.

Zzzzzz.  Mii/Wii, Women’s entertainment network, yawn.

But.  The reason to note it here is that this is Muhammad Ali’s coinage.  At the end of When We Were Kings, George Plimpton tells a story about Ali’s enduring charisma.  Ali is at Harvard commencement, he is sick and has slowed down.  While giving his talk, someone yells out “champ, give us a poem”.  Ali points to his chest, says “Me,” points out to the crowd, says “We.”  Plimpton, smiling with delight at memories of Ali throughout the interview laughs, says he looked it up and it is in fact the shortest poem known.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Interesting memory exercise.  I saw the movie a few years ago (it’s fantastic, I had forgotten what an amazing force Ali was) and I very distinctly remember Plimpton describing the poem as a union of audience and speaker.  Wikiquotes, however, has it as “While I’m talking to you I’m thinking up the greatest short poem of all time. This poem tells how it feels to be great as I am: Me — wheee!”
Until I rewatch the movie, I prefer to rely on my memory.  I think, and hope it’s better than the champ saying wheeeeee.

I just had my first twitter exchange of real, compelling value. Whitney Hess, whom I know only by reputation (she gets lot of trackbacks and twitter-points from my network) is responsible for it.

It started with me twittering something like: “Just put Shirky’s new book in my bag. That’s a pretty good first step toward reading it.”

The twitters continue:

To which she responds:

A collaboratively generated insight and gag. These twitter people might be onto something.

While going down chess memory lane in previous post, I found this article on BBC News, about how movies use chess. The best part of the story is the helpful sidebar, explaining what chess scenes convey:

Romantic interaction?!!?(*) Turns out that Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway played a steamy game of chess in The Thomas Crown Affair. The only other sultry steam I associate with chess is Ben Franklin playing chess with bathing French prostitutes, an image of decidedly confused signals that I picked up as a teen in some history book.

Reasonably sophisticated story, recognizing that “check” is a bogus dramatic element, that chess boards are often set up wrong, and that “checkmate” in a high level game is just bullshit . . . no one is ever surprised by checkmate (as happened in the otherwise basically OK Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The best part of the article, though, is the total dorking out of the readers in their comments. It’s chess/fanboy/nerd-dom at its finest.

(*) ?!!? is a chess notation joke of the highest order. ?! is a dubious, highly speculative move, while !? is an intriguing move with possibilities, but not without risk.

Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night, I had some musical moments that brought me much joy. They involve Patrick Doyle, a wonderful and rarely trumpeted movie music composer.

The first moment came during the scene in Goblet of Fire in which Harry enters the ballroom. The fanfare sounded really, really familiar to me. I listened to it twice more until it hit me: it’s like Claudius’s entrance fanfare in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet! (This is one of my all-time favorite movies, like top ten, and blah blah blah about his lips and the spittle, just go away.) I looked it up on IMDB and sure enough Patrick Doyle did the music for Goblet of Fire. I take great pride in little catches like that, I drive people nuts when I obsess over where I’ve seen bit actors before (and those that love me have learned to pretend they find it useful).

One of the things that’s interesting about Claudius’s march is Doyle’s thinking behind it. In an interview on NPR, Doyle said he wrote the fanfare to indicate a time of hopefulness: there was a new king following the death of a beloved one, and people’s support for this new one was a sign of great hope and averted crisis. This plays right into the strength of the Branagh Hamlet: the recognition that killing a king is a dangerous and difficult thing to do, that it is, in fact, treason and potentially disastrous for a country. The Oedipal, ennui-ridden interpretations of Hamlet’s difficulty in acting is a recent thing in the play’s history — going back to Freud mostly, and somewhat to Nietzche. Branagh’s Hamlet is set in a 19th century court and in a castle court lined with mirrors and filled with false panels, secret passages and a two way-mirror, highlighting the danger and duplicity of court politics and taking us out of the realm of the psyche and placing Hamlet’s dilemma in a very real world of court politics. While most movies introduce Claudius as a villain and an incompetent, Branagh introduces him as a sign of hope, and shows him forcefully negotiating with Fortinbras (the dramatic tearing of the letter causes great patriotic cheering in the hall). So, when the king enters the court, and confetti falls, people cheer, and the fanfare is buoyantly optimistic. Hamlet’s darkness and isolation are immediate and palpably felt. (The black clothes in a well-lit room helps too.) In that same interview, Doyle noted that he paid special attention to Hamlet-Ophelia music and worked hard to make it a love theme for a couple that could have been quite happy and would have been wonderful to see - not the doomed lovers in Hamlet’s angst-ridden world.

But where Doyle’s music really shines is in support of the the spoken word. Possibly because Doyle has been an actor (he has some lines in Branagh movies), or because his first gigs were for Shakespeare movies, there’s a wonderful connection between the words and the music that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. So much so, that I will sometimes play the music just so I can read along (out loud or silently) with it.

The best moments for me are from Henry V and Hamlet not surprisingly — Shakespeare comedy is even harder to hold onto than most Shakespeare.  So, a call-out to best word and music moments in Patrick Doyle’s work:

• Crispian Day — duh, but seriously, reading along with the music and doing so to support the transition to the rush to battle that abruptly cuts off the speech adds depth to my appreciation of the movie, the play and the music.
• “I loved you once” The last moment of tenderness between Hamlet and Ophelia. (* extra tidbit below)
• “Oh what a Noble Mind” Immediately following the scene above, Kate Winslet is on the floor weeping not only for Hamlet’s rejection of her, but for the loss of Hamlet and all that he was.

The “Now could I drink hot blood . . . my thoughts be bloody” music is pretty rousing, too. I expect someday soldiers and football players will use that to get pumped up instead of “Ride of the Valkyries”, but the three above are just killer.

(*) This scene has a favorite, non-verbal, acting moment that always amazes me for its power and acting genius. When Ophelia attempts to return Hamlet’s letters (or tokens), Hamlet’s line is “Ha, ha! Are you honest?” Branagh does a beautiful thing here. He slaps the letters away and holds her arm, the eyes tear up, and for the line “Ha, ha!”, he makes a quiet noise, twice, questioning her, asking what she’s doing. It’s not an attack on her, it’s not anger, it’s the bitter sadness of having his happiness betrayed, and not even necessarily by her, but by the court and the world that he lives in. It’s the most heartbreaking line/noise ever.
I like to compare that moment to one in Emma Thompson’s Sense & Sensibility when Edward (Hugh Grant) bumbles through his “my heart is and always yours” explanation and Elinor (Emma Thompson) waits a beat and then goes into a glorious release of sub-lingual sobbing and exhiliration. For some reason, I always fantasize that Thompson and Branagh, as young RSC fast-trackers, thought about trying this.

Damn. All this from my least favorite Harry Potter movie.

A chess site by two Columbia students, called Masters and Hustlers focuses on chess in New York City. It’s a great, romantic, and powerful idea and a good watch (there’s lots of video).

During my first post-college job, at a Quaker peace group, I worked with a middle-aged black guy who did counter-recruitment (see note below). When chess came up, he said, “chess, it’s a bloody, bloody game.” I had no idea what he was talking about — this is the King’s Game, the ultimate contest of brain against brain, where is he getting this “blood” thing from? He told stories about playing chess on the hood of cars in Harlem when he was growing up, and when he and I finally played (with a clock, 5 minutes each side), he slammed, slapped, and pounded pieces, took my moves like a body blow, and brought the game to a whole new level of fun for me. (He didn’t trash talk . . . this wasn’t Laurence Fishburne in Searching for Bobby Fischer, but the postmortems were a blast.)

Chess in NYC has loomed large in my mind since I was a kid. Bobby Fischer, the brilliant, gawky, charming, mostly sane one of 1972, was one of my heroes, and during my first trip to New York, in 1979, when I was 14 I only wanted to visit two places: Tannen’s Magic Store, and the Manhattan Chess Club, home of Bobby Fischer. When I first moved to New York about 9 years later, I never went to the Village without stopping at the Village Chess Shop. It’s still one of the most New York spots I can think of: a mix of old and young, every ethnicity imaginable, ranges of competitive talk from Yiddish kvetching to rhyming to outright trash, bad coffee, absurdly worn down plastic pieces, inventory covered with dust and stacked to the ceilings, and the constant sound of ticking clocks and pounded pieces. I also played in Washington Square pretty regularly. The ritual was to win the first two games (hustlers were good enough to suss you out and let you think you won a tough fight) in order to set up the hustle and then fighting for my life on the subsequent moneyed games.

The energy that I discovered at the chess table with my chess-bloodied friend and learned to love in NYC, is what’s great about the site. It pays homage to both sides of the NY chess world: the elegant world of the Marshall Chess Club, which claimed Marcel Duchamp as one of its team members, and where Jose Raul Capablanca played his famous match (just saying the name fills you with old world chess romance . . . Pete Martell anyone?); and the gritty, hyper-competitive, hyper-passionate and very good chess of the city parks. They have a great interview on the site with a chess hustler showing pictures of his hustling days going back to the 1970s.

I hope that they keep adding stuff to it.

And I can’t talk about the “fight” in chess without noting one of the best chess articles ever, by Martin Amis. It’s findable in Finding Mrs Nabokov, and focuses on the second Kasparov-Karpov match (a weird time for chess, the peak moment of politics, bad Soviet-era forms of play, and wacky paranoia among its players. Kasparov winning this match would restore chess to an era of intelligence and class that it hadn’t had in years and hasn’t since, sadly.)  Amis knows his chess, being a skilled player and writing about it in each of its novels in all its forms — the pretentious game of kings played by swots, the gritty battle of smart yobs, and the beautiful fight. And it ends with a paragraph that I have to quote in full:

“Chess is like life” said Spassky. “Chess is life” said Fischer, who paid the penalty for his obvious mistake. Chess has been called an art, a science, a sport. it can’t be an art because every brilliancy depends on the fuddled collusion of the opponent: even “the Immortal Game” would have died the death if Black had had his wits about him. It can’t be a science, because, simply it has no content: the singularity of chess is not its readiness but its refusal to serve as a matrix for anything else. And it can’t be a sport, not quite because it is both infinite and precise; every game is recoverable; every game can be re-experienced through the markings on a page. “It’s definitely not an art”, says [GM] Nigel Short. “If I have the choice between a beautiful combination and mundane way of wrapping up the game, then I’ll wrap up the game. You must win. It’s not an art. It’s a fight. It’s a fight.”

And yet, even my limited chess mind can play over a game by Capablanca or Fischer and see something brilliant and elegant in the pummellings they gave their opponents.

(* Counter-recruitment was and I think still is a mode of peace and justice activism in which people talk to kids about the realities of recruitment. In the 1980s, this meant debunking the myths of career training and post-military job opportunities, and talking about the brutal realities of service. My chess-playing friend Allen, was a Vietnam vet who did two tours, covered both sides of that story in schools, at churches, and community centers.)

at least in the last 25 years . . .

When I was trying to think of things that really jazzed me in interactive, I had trouble coming up with recent items.

My problem was predicted by User InfoTechnoDemo, an interesting little book, or MEDIAWORKBOOK, by MIT Press. It has an early passage that we’re kind of creatively stalled on two visual concepts. The passage is good, arguably arguable, and worth tussling with:

Our visual culture remains trapped in a relentless present idly circling itself as if waiting for inspiration it doesn’t expect to come. For good or ill, the high-modern period offered a succession of startling visions of what was to come, indeed, the future seemed assured precisely because the scenarios themselves were so hetergenous. … I lay blame for our 21st century inability to imagine anything beyond the moment on two, almost perfect visual systems, both moving into their third decade. …

The two concepts are Blade Runner and the GUI metaphor. Fun to try and think about things that aren’t in that vein: Minority Report is still a GUI, Battlestar Galactica is pre-Runner in its SF book cover planets.  Are we stuck, as the book says, in a “permanent present”?  Is that why I have such trouble finding things that are crazy cool?