[dovate.com] » 2008 » January
Today I offer video. Not just any video. Below are 2 Local News broadcasts featuring the Toynbee tiles and the Resurrect Dead documentary team. Also included is a Chicago story and a link to an NPR segment featuring tile nut and documentary co-collaborator, Justin Duerr. NPR’s Morning Edition ran the tile story nationally on a Sunday morning in September of 2006. After it aired I got emails from Maine to California. Although David Mamet makes some shit up in his NPR interview, it’s the best media treatment yet given to the tiles. I recommend a listen.
Philly:
Extra unaired footage from Philly:
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Chicago:
* This broadcast led to the destruction of the Chicago tiles.
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NPR:
[article] with audio link at the top of the page.
In the mid 20’s Pole-Sitting swept the nation. Much as the name suggests, Pole-Sitting was the popular pastime of sitting on top of a pole for extended periods of time. What I’m saying is, fads come and go.
The start of 2008 has seen the emergence of 2 such crazes. I’m of course talking about Neti Pots and ball waxing.
Before I go on about these things I have to say in no uncertain terms:
1. The Neti Pot is a good idea. I’ve considered using one for years, but have never actually gotten one. I – like many Americans – suffer from sinus problems. Each morning I use a sterol saline spray and recommend that you do the same. Although I don’t use a Neti Pot, I hold no ill will towards anyone who does.
2. Ball shaving/waxing is wrong. Just wrong.
But anyway, what do these fads say about us collectively?
Neti Pots have that air of nonwestern medicine to them. Why spray a physically addictive chemical steroid into your head when an ancient little pot from some place full of aged and wise nonwhites does a better, cheaper and healthier job? Sounds like a good idea, no? It does… but not $25 Neti Pot from Whole Foods good. How can you not feel like an asshole buying that?
Ball Shaving: At my office Christmas party a non-colleague who happened to be hanging out in the same bar tried to pick up my co-worker. Along with his refusal to share his name and his casual acknowledgment of the girlfriend he was trying to cheat on, part of his game was slipping in how he shaves his balls to make his penis look bigger. It’s a line few men can pull off and smooth sack went home alone that night.
Since I was caught in the crossfire of his unique pick-up attempt, I pressed him a little on the ball shaving. Apparently it’s quite popular among the 20-something condo set. Who knew?
Since that night, I haven’t gone 3 days without hearing about ball waxing in the popular media. After a little research I discovered that (as I suspected) the whole fucking thing started in LA. The ungodly nexus of porn culture, mass media and David Beckham’s waxed nutsack just couldn’t be stopped. Now engineers down at Comcast and “accountants, stockbrokers, teachers, boxers, models” in London are getting “Boyzillians.”
I kind of miss Pole-Sitting.
Last week I got all caught up in the History Channel’s Life After People special. The show explained the fate of human civilization in the event of our sudden extinction.
If you’re a fan of humans, the outlook was bleak. Within 100 years nearly every car on the planet will have disintegrated and most roads will have already disappeared. In a few centuries all digital information will have been corrupted, bridges collapsed and skyscrapers fallen. It turns out that steel frame skyscrapers, left without constant maintenance and upkeep are pretty shoddy structures. Within a thousand years Manhattan will look much as it did 1000 years ago. So it goes.
The only buildings that have endured and will continue to do so are those ancient structures that have already proven themselves. The pyramids of South America and North Africa and a few scattered stone structures around the world will be around for a while longer.
Which all led me to the astounding conclusion….
What’s the largest and tallest load bearing, habitable stone structure on the planet? What building has no steel frame and won’t suffer the same fate as every feeble steel frame skyscraper? What building took so long to put together that no engineer in their right mind would ever attempt to build something like it ever again? The answer:
Philadelphia City Hall may well be one of the – it not the – last skyscraper. When LA is underwater, New York is a forest, DC a swamp, Las Vegas buried in sand and the rest of Philadelphia left to trees, meadow, rivers and streams, City Hall (may) endure.
Through the great forest of the Delaware Valley, one giant phallus will continue to rise proudly above the poplars and spruce. To a visiting alien civilization, City Hall may be one of the only pieces of evidence that any marginally intelligent species once lived on the land mass once known as North America. Of all the records that City Hall boasts, I think this may be its most impressive.
But who the hell am I to make these pronouncements? To test my theory I ran it by University of Arizona professor Alan Weisman. In 2007 Weisman published The World Without Us, the book that inspired Life After People.
Of the City Hall question Weisman inconclusively stated: “I think it has a good chance of being what you’re hoping it is, but without researching it, I couldn’t and wouldn’t say.” More concrete… or actually more solid mineral conclusions need to be based on answers to the following questions:
1. What’s the situation with the building’s foundation especially when it comes to running water and the alluvial flows of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers? I also wonder what the nexus of underground tunnels beneath the building’s foundation might do if left to collect groundwater for a few hundred years.
2. What type of limestone was used to build city hall, soft sedimentary or metamorphic granite?
3. What type of mortar was used in its construction and how well has it been maintained? (uh oh)
My completely uninformed and uneducated opinion is that the flood risk posed by the rivers is negligible. Sitting in the geographic center of Philadelphia’s downtown, City Hall is as far from each of the rivers as it can possibly be. The conglomeration of underground subway, trolley and light rail lines sitting directly or almost directly under the building is a much bigger concern.
The city isn’t prone to earthquakes or other Armageddon causing natural disasters, but an ice age would bulldoze over us without a hiccup. The last ice age stopped at Bucks County, but the next one makes no promises.
Overall I’m hopeful that City Hall will live on for hundreds and possibly even thousands of years.
The only prediction Weisman (aka the actual expert) was willing to make was to the endurance of William Penn. While something like an ice age might eventually carry him south to DC, he’d probably end up surviving the trip.
Imagine some tribe of super-smart apes or birds or stumbling across a towering statue William Penn all Planet of the Apes style. Until then…
Way back in 2003, just before the start of the Iraq War, news of a talking carp “splashed” across headlines around the world. (haha)
But seriously, this was the story:
The scene is New York’s New Square Fish Market. The players are a Christian a Jew and a fish. Just as the Christian is about turn the carp into gefilte fish, it starts shouting out prophetic messages in Hebrew. The Jewish guy hears the fish, understands his message (Repent! The end is near!) and freaks out. The fish then identifies himself as a recently deceased hascidic local. The Christian, assuming the fish is the devil, kills it.
At this point, things get hazy, but I’m guessing that the fish was eaten during a seder in Queens.
But anyway, the story is picked up by the New York Times, the BBC and a ton of other news outlets. Since then, the carp has faded into obscurity. And with good reason. Fish or not, here we are. (Here’s the BBC link.)
The war in Iraq is clearly a clusterfuck, but end of the world it isn’t. I guess there’s still plenty of time for the world to end. In captivity, a carp can live for close to 4 decades. You’d just think that if he was saying the end is near, the end would have been nearer. I guess what I’m trying to say is:
I believe that the spirit of a dead man can inhabit a carp and spew messages in a NY fish market, but I don’t trust him any more than any living man.
The other night I’m walking up JFK Blvd. near 15th street. Near the corner of 16th, I see 5 cops huddled close to each other looking at something between them. I don’t think much of it, but as I get closer I start to wonder what they’re doing. They all look serious and even a little suspicious. There was a lot of shifting and glancing over each others shoulders. Whatever it is they have, they’re being careful to hide it.
As I approach, the cops shift around to block whatever it is they’re doing from me. I try to catch a look, but I’m boxed out. I’m about to look away and forget about it when one cop moves, opening a clear window to the center of their attention.
One of the cops has an I-Phone and they’re all huddled around it watching porn. That’s all for now.
I’ve become completely addicted to the flickr album cover meme. What is it?
Here are the rules:
1. Use Wikipedia’s Random page selector; the article title is the name of your band.
2. Use the Quotations Page’s random quote generator; the last four words of the very last quotation is the title of your album.
3. Use Flickr’s Most Interesting page; the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Put them together, and post!
Since one of the human brain’s favorite activities is recognizing patterns and drawing connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information, this meme is incredibly entertaining. Hitting those 3 links is like playing the slots. A synchronous trio is the payout. Here are a few of mine. I did not ‘cheat’ on any of these:
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*Also, sorry for using people’s photos without credit… but this is a random type meme. Here are more of them:
As a former history major, I understand that writing about crows on MLK Day might symbolize something inappropriate and wrong, but in my defense I have to say that this is a post about crows, not Jim Crow.
With that said, this photo (photographer here) inspired me to write about the bird, crow.
I’ve loved birds since childhood, but I’ve never trusted crows. It’s not the color of their feathers, but more the content of their character that’s bothered me. They’re devious assholes. Crows are smart. National Geographic reports that they may be as smart as the Great Apes. That means that they rival chimps and gorillas.
What do they do with this great gift? Generally they use it to live in every environment and to kill. Crows are waterbirds and desert birds. They’re omnivores and they can kill predators twice their size. If captured and trained, they can learn to talk like parrots. I don’t trust them, but I respect them.
I recently saw a rough cut of the first 15-20 minutes of Resurrect Dead: the mystery of the Toynbee tiles. The movie is real and it’s in production. I loved it, but I’m biased.
But believe it or not, the tiles aren’t the purpose of this post. I was asked to watch the movie, think about what I saw and offer my suggestions. One tiny detail bothered me. While I’m guessing that only 1 out of 10 people would notice it and maybe 1 out of 50 would be bothered by it, I’m also guessing that with a weird, slightly obsessive tile-fan audience those numbers might increase dramatically.
What was this troublesome detail? Imagine this sequence:
It’s 1996 and a young tile fan goes to the library. He’s never used the internet, but has heard rumors that everything is on it. The first thing he does is open up google and type in: “Toynbee idea in Kubrick’s 2001…”
Catch that? Google? No one was using google in 1996. Altavista, lycos, yahoo even, but no google. Believe it or not, the popular search engine wasn’t even around until late 1998.
But that’s not the end of the problem. Lycos looks nothing like it did 12 years ago. Neither does altavista or any of the other search engines. These days they’re all tricked out with crazy graphics and fancy interactivity. By comparison, look at this screen shot of 1998 google. What did they use Photoshop 5 to add a drop shadow to their logo. Were there graphic designers in 1998?
But anyway, where in do you get a 12-year-old page from altavista.com? Answer, the same place I got that 1998 google, or:
The internet archive wayback machine.
The site holds more than 85 billion archived pages. What was on the front page of philly.com on October 5, 1999? No new trial for Mumia and wawa is on strike.
Great resource.
I usually don’t perpetuate email forwards, but this one is actually funny. That and I have nothing else to write today:
Somewhere in the course of internet history, Michael Reichmann got famous. He and his site, luminous-landscape.com have become a preeminent authority on digital photography and all the technical issues involved with it.
Reichmann has earned his reputation by providing accurate and helpful information in easy to follow prose. He’s not the end all or even the standard, but he’s definitely a well-respected voice.
For the entire digital era, Reichmann has shot almost exclusively with Canon, feeling that their top rival Nikon just couldn’t compete in a few critical areas.
But that’s changed.
The release of the D300 and the D3, Nikon regained Reichmann’s attention. And it’s not just him. Nikon has gotten a lot of people’s attention. With these 2 cameras, they’ve successfully met an even exceeded Canon’s ‘historic’ advantages.
So Reichmann switched. He bought the D3 and the D300 and many thousands of dollars worth of glass. (jealous of his flexibility here) He got to know how the ‘other side’ has been shooting all these years and he wrote up his thoughts in this very interesting review.
review of the review
What the review isn’t, is a comparison. With these 2 cameras, Nikon has proven that it competes with Canon technically. Reichmann didn’t match the D3 up against the 1Ds Mark III or the D300 against the 40D/5D, he compared the Nikon system against the Canon system. He looked at ergonomics and features. The review isn’t about statistics and charts, it’s about what it’s like to use that ‘other’ brand. Imagine a P.C. user switching to Mac and comparing function. That’s what this review is.
“…Canons are the best cameras available designed by engineers, and that Nikons are the best cameras one can buy designed by photographers.” is a fair quote to sum up his conclusion. Nikon kicks Canon’s ass in function, while Canon’s latest models still may, barely if even at all hold onto technical supremacy. Yes at twice the price, the 20+ megapixel 1Ds Mark III is overall a ‘better’ camera than the D3, but the D3 does has serious advantages at half the price.
And here are some other form and function perks offered by Nikon:
Dual CF cards (Not the nonsensical CF/SD combo offered by Canon’s top-of –the-line models) Auto ISO, (not to mention the D3’s 25600 ISO setting) An internal level with display in both the LCD screen and the Viewfinder; and these are just a few of the functions that jumped out at me. Most of Nikon’s other advantages were features I’d use less often… but I’d still use them. Things like the internal intervalometer, multi-exposure shooting, voice note recording, simple mirror-lock-up, functional live view. (Autofocus doesn’t work with Canon live view)
Designed by photographers indeed. Frankly, now that Nikon offers all these perks AND image quality, speed and performance that rivals most things that Canon does, I’d say it’s way past time that Canon step up their game. The “5D Mark II” (which may be formally announced as soon as January 24th) won’t make or break the brand, but it better offer something to knock the D300… and maybe even the D3 off it’s high horse.
When I switched to digital 3 years ago, I chose Canon because of its low light performance. If I were buying today, I’d have a much tougher decision.
With all that said, my 5D is old, slow and has a ‘print button’ but the image quality is about as good as it gets… Canon, Nikon or whatever. The original 5D is an instant classic and the 5D with the 24-70 f/2.8 L is a fucking awesome combination. No complaints. That’s all for now.
Everyone knows that Philadelphia suffers from an inferiority complex. We look to New York and Washington and see what we once were and what we could have been. For a few fleeting decades, Philadelphia was the capital of the world. We were the Athens of the 18th century. We were the largest and most exciting city in the most radical corner of human civilization. The world’s greatest political minds gathered here to change the course of human history. Since then, not so much.
By the early 1800’s New York’s population passed Philadelphia’s. The federal government packed up shop around the same time, heading up to NY and eventually settling down in D.C.
How do we get over this loss? So far we haven’t. For more than 2 centuries, Philly has both prided and derided itself as a grungy little backwater. But I think we’re looking at this in entirely the wrong way. We compare ourselves to New York. That’s just stupid, and here’s my suggestion. Ask yourself this:
What’s worse than being the city between New York and Washington?
Being Baltimore.
click image for source
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Remember them? Neither does anyone else. Baltimore was never anything to anybody. From a skyline that you might mistake for Wilmington Delaware to a murder rate that makes Philly look like Toronto, Baltimore is a place that we can proudly look down on.
If New York is the stud and Philadelphia is it’s scrappy, punch drunk uncle, then Baltimore is the neighborhood crack whore. Think about it. What does Baltimore have? Crabs.
Now while Baltimore does have a waterfront and an aquarium, Philadelphia has all those things that Baltimore doesn’t have beyond the waterfront and aquarium. We kick that shitown’s ass up and down I-95.
Nothing boosts the civic ego like looking down on someplace else. The problem is, when we look down on New York, we just look stupid. It’s time we picked on someone smaller and weaker. If Rocky fought Woody Allen instead of Apollo Creed, what do you think would have happened?
That’s all for now.
I won’t bother trying to credit everyone involved, because I’d leave someone out and it would somehow get back to me and I’d get yelled at for leaving someone out, but basically:
Three years ago a bunch of artists, an ethnographer, some organizing forces and a lot of money went into Nicetown, Kensington, El Norte de Filadelfia and Strawberry Mansion. Three years later, they’ve left behind a bunch of murals and collected a lot of stories.
Those stories were put together with accompanying portrait photography by my old colleague from UPenn, Sabina Pierce. All of that was and into a book which was released today.
For me, the most exciting thing about all of this is my own mural photography, which is scattered throughout the pages of the book. From a piece of the cover and 2-page spreads, to the tiny bits that help build the visual narrative, my photos are there, with credit. While my work for the book was more utility than creative, it’s still neat to see it in there.
At only $15, the book is a steal. Order here.
Brought to you by Lawrie Barber.
Every once in a while I resurrect one of my phony product reviews from the website epinions.com. From 1999-2001 during slow time at my job in an animal ER, I used to write things like this review for a strap on catheter:
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How my life has changed since I discovered the Netti One-Leg Stocking. This nifty little device makes conventional toilets obsolete. I’m not incontinent, but what’s it matter with convenience like this? The Netti One-leg Stocking is the bathroom you strap to your leg. Anytime, anywhere, there it is.
I know you’re skeptical. You’re probably reading this and thinking, is this guy for real? I must admit that when I first came across this product, I had the same objections to the whole concept of peeing into your leg that you’re probably having right now. But you need only to cross a small mental barrier in order to see the light.
The beauty of it is that you aren’t really peeing on yourself. In fact, the urine never touches you. The product is clean, easy to assemble and cheap. The practice of using only a conventional restroom is an entirely culturally based construct, and if I might add, just a little bit snobbish. If you break the hegemonic relationship between yourself and your bathroom like I have with the Netti One-leg Stocking, imagine the quality of life you will gain.
In the car, at the movies, everyplace you have wished you could urinate at will, you can! And I won’t lie, there’s a certain satisfaction gained in peeing comfortably while interacting in otherwise normal circumstances. Just the other day, I was urinating while I asked out an attractive young woman. You can’t even come close to imagining the added sense ease and comfort brought on by the relief of a good urination in such a situation. The same holds true for job interviews, uncomfortable holiday get togethers and pretty much any other high stress situation. The Netti One-Leg Stocking is a therapeutic device as much as anything.
The other day my boss was coming down on me hard for not getting a proposal in on time. Instead of fumbling for words, like I used to do, I smiled narrowly, initiated a steady flow of urine and calmly explained exactly why I was unable to meet the deadline. He appreciated my frank demeanor so much, he gave me a promotion! When I heard about the promotion, I peed ecstatically.
(And by the way, the date with that attractive young woman went so well that I had to exchange the urinary condom that I regularly wear, for… well, you know.)
Think of it.
The Netti One-Leg Stocking has given me comfort, time and increased my productivity. It saved my job and even granted me a promotion. Because of it, I have a steady girlfriend and am on the whole a much calmer person. The Netti One-Leg Stocking has paid for itself in more ways than I can list. This thing is just great. I can’t say that enough. In fact I love it so much… I’m peeing right now. Aah, sweet satisfaction.
