kip/bot/blog

Tomorrow is National Punctuation Day. For the organizers of this day, it is an opportunity to ritually revisit Strunk & White, write notes in a leisurely well-punctuated fashion, and correct all those signs store owners mispunctuate and brazenly hang in their windows. (ex. Customers “ONLY” can use our dryers).

This is also a chance to take up pet punctuation peeves. I will be encouraging people to resume use of the serial comma. Others may take up the cudgels against the semi-colon, that mark despised by Kurt Vonnegut, who warned anyone against using them: “they are transvestite herm-aphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

I’m starting to think I should start expressing myself in movie and TV bits from now on:

- “Too many notes”
- “A little saucy”
- “Am I here to amuse you?”
- “We’re coming with you!”
- “There is no try. only do.”
- “He’s dead Tom. Nothing you can do to bring him back.”
- “One ping, Vasily, one ping only.”
- “We must give this _______ a wide berth”

KLPP is now on YouTube in ten short segments. A big thanks to Farrah Hassen for filming under challenging conditions (i.e., no space for a tripod, stifling heat). It’s got a nice cinema verite feel!
Capital Fringe Festival 2009 production of John Feffer’s almost-one-man play, Krapp’s Last Power Point. Written, directed, and performed by John Feffer. Audience member: Karin Lee. (I did the powerpoint that accompanies the play and vexes the one-man.)

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

Part Six:

Part Seven:

Part Eight:

Part Nine:

Part Ten:

Just saw in his blog that David Byrne has published/will publish Bicycle Diaries an account of his biking around his hometown of NYC and around countries where he’s touring and travelling. It seems kind of cool — after getting hooked on biking in NYC, he started taking a folding bike with him on his travels. I used to work on 12th and Broadway and would see Byrne fairly regularly on his bike — he was elegant, cool, looking at everything with that sense-of-wonder smile. Can’t wait to see the book. (I also saw George Plimpton and Spalding Gray (RIP) in the neighborhood a lot. Plimpton rode what we now seek out as a vintage bike with a ridiculous white basket with a blue flower on the front).

Interesting sidenote: Byrne’s book has already been published in Serbia and the UK, but will be published in mid-September quickly followed by a half-dozen other countries. One of those stars more beloved abroad than here.

Finally, here’s a video from WSJ online of Byrne’s partipation in the bike rack contest that he judged and participated in:

A colleague just sent me a link to an MIT student project/installation site, called “Personas: How does the internet see you?”, which is part of a larger exhibit called Metropathologies. You type in your name and it assesses what you are/do/care about based on on-line presence. Fun idea, great animation during the algorithm crunch, surprising results:

(Click image for larger, cleaner version.)

Amused: sports so large, fashion that it shows up at all (must be based on client lists)
Saddened: politics is so little (and in black! like a mournful armband)
Pleased: design and art seem to be big
Concerned: medicine?
Can’t tell if this blog is covered in it . . . that might explain the sports, what about flickr? Need to explore.

This summer seemed rich (or richer than usual) in social media’s provision of alternative/deeper/more thoughtful views of the 4th of July. Lots of ironic postings, flickrs, and twitpics displaying gluttony or stupid bottle rocket tricks, or song lyrics showing how the 4th, like Christmas, is increasingly detached from its original meaning.

Egalitarian Bookworm (chick?), a blog that always has something good, posted 4 poems on July 4th. Saying these poems are united in that they’re from the dissenters’ POV is too strong, though that’s the easiest category for lumping Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Walt Whitman.

Ginsberg’s line “America, why are your libraries full of tears?” was always a favorite of mine (especially in the 80s), but even that poem — a long list of things America isn’t/doesn’t/should — is as hurt and mournful as it is angry. But, thanks to Egalitarian Bookworm Chick, I’m back in touch with this passage from Langston Hughes, which seems in line with the charge to dust ourselves off and begin again:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

From today’s NYT, an article about Ray Bradbury’s ove of libraries with some swipes at the internet.

Loving him the library:

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

And being a serious hater around all things internet:

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

A Yahoo spokeswoman said it was impossible to verify Mr. Bradbury’s account without more details.

Charmed and disturbed.

Ever gotten this kind of feedback from a client, manager, colleague?

Right up there with this other bit:

Couple lines that show that we’re moving into a more thoughtful phase of thinking about markets. Rather than making them the cure-all for everything, Obama’s inauguration speech had a line many of us who respect markets but think there is more have been waiting to hear for years:

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.

But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

Then I heard Bill Gates’s TED 09 talk this morning, and he had a great line:

I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. Only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.

- from today’s NYT