kip/bot/blog

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

Studs Terkel slowly became a hero of mine, in the years when I was moving towards union work. I saw him in Eight Men Out playing a cigar-chomping sports writer covering the Black Sox series, and read excerpts of his book about World War II, one of the first celebrations of the “greatest generation”, but one which didn’t shy away from some of the grittier, nastier realities of the war.

He took a much greater space in my heart and mind when I saw him at Central Park Summerstage in 1989. He was ‘performing’ with John Sayles, who read from his fiction, including a scene of wives and girlfriends riding a bus to prison to visit their men (something which he handled with incredible warmth, sensitivity, and taste, as opposed to the hideously overwraught bus scenes from Oz).

Studs read from Working an oral history of employment in the US, conducted in the 1960s. One of the pieces he read was of a waitress he met in a restaurent. He introduced the piece by talking about Five Easy Pieces and the scene where Jack Nicholson harasses an uncooperative waitress (”what should I do with the chicken salad?” “carry it between your knees” with the soon-to-be-trademark Nicholson hiss.) After describing a bunch of younger people who hooted and whooped at Nicholson’s put-down, Studs got almost angry (but he was sparkly and elfin so it barely felt mad), “you damned little solecistic punks” I remember him saying and then he described the interview. Up on stage, he described the waitress as having a movement in her work that was like a dance (which he started to do), punctuated by small talk with regulars and kitchen staff. Then he read the piece which included details about her family, how she cared for her body, punished by work — it was moving and the thousands in the park were entranced. He went onto tell other stories including that of a 60+ year old couple who protested nuclear weapons and were serving time in separate jails — it was a ‘real love story’, according to Studs.

Listening to him talk is a treat — how he describes people, the stories he has, his own views on American politics, society, jazz, and baseball. What a treasure.

WFMT - Best of Studs Terkel

Until I got my kindle, I never read letters to the editor. I still don’t really, but with the kindle it’s faster to page through them then navigate around them. So, sometimes a letter catches my eye, like this one. The lead prosecutor in William Ayers’s 70’s era trial, William C. Ibershof was expressing S&O (shock and outrage) at attempts to link Ayers to Obama. While he “desperately” wanted an indictment, he had moved on and was glad to see Ayers leading a productive life. But the last sentence was weird:

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

Watergate ghosts of AG Mitchell and Deep Throat . . .