It was a very good year
Six-O-Six magazine. R.I.P.
Smell me a story
Febreze, makers of perfumey aerosols that I associate with covering up the stench of cat urine, have a pretty interesting product on the market. ScentStories is their attempt at creating narrative through smell alone. The ScentStories gizmo lets you pop in discs that contains five odor zones, each of which is wafted to you in sequence every half hour. As far as riveting narrative goes you’ll probably want to stick to other media, as the ScentStories are basically meant to calm you and/or put you to sleep. “Wandering barefoot on the shore” (well, of course having your shoes off creates a different smell), “relaxing in the hammock,” (I’m visualizing Homer Simpson) “shades of vanilla,” (sounds like a painting — talk about synaesthesia!) and so on. I wonder if there’ll be third-party discs to explore the full spectrum of stink? “Trip to the farm,” “trying not to touch the sleeping guy next to me on the subway,” and “discovering you used the last diaper two hours ago” — these would be fascinating explorations of stinktales.
Still, I think this is an interesting idea. Certainly narrative can be embedded in anything, the arc of a musical composition, the flow of a buildling facade. But visiting the Febreze website you get the sense that they don’t believe they can actually pull it off. The site is drenched in ethereal, blissed-out visuals. Don’t know what a walk on the beach smells like? Well look here. This is what it smells like. And their model is clearly musical. The wafter mechanism looks like a CD-player and they’ve recruited Shania Twain to “compose” a disc of scents. I think if anything ScentStories are to traditional beginning-middle-end narrative what ambient music is to, say, sonata form. I’d have called them ScentScenes, I suppose. More like an odor tableau than a linear experience.
But then, I haven’t tried this. And I’m really tempted. I wonder if I could purchase and play a disc without knowing which story I had. To smell the next chapter and declare “why, yes, I am exploring a mountain trail!” without having previously encountered a visual or tagline to set the scene for me psychologically would be the true test.
See also: Sensory deprivation
A CTA Map for 2055
Proposed Roscoe Village Brown Line spur that would make my life approximately 1000 times easier
Craig Berman, author of the wonderful Fueled by Coffee blog, has a great piece up at Gaper’s Block. Using the CTA’s proposed Circle Line as a starting point, he meticulously outlines a subway plan for the future of Chicago.
The CTA needs to form a mass transit network — as opposed to the current radial commuter rail. Right now, all lines lead to the Loop in the morning and back out in the afternoon — these lines don’t take into account that a lot of living happens outside of the skyscrapers of the Loop. What happens when I want to get from Bucktown to Wrigleyville? Andersonville to the West Loop? Hyde Park to Pilsen? Little Village to Logan Square? These rides are a pain in the ass — they’re slow, indirect, and require multiple bus transfers. Why can’t you move from the North Side to the northWest Side without going downtown first? I want answers, dammit!
Amen, brother. Where do I sign up to help digging?
See also: Art of the subway
Subcontinental divide
A word problem for you, dear readers.
You are on Harlem Avenue in Chicago driving south near Ogden Avenue going approximately 35 MPH. You’re sipping (rather enjoying) a piping-hot venti half-decaf no-fat latte with a shot of sugar-free hazelnut when a billboard for a rock station depicting a sweaty lady in a tank top grabs your eye. You fail to see the car in front of you slow to make a left turn onto 39th street. You look up just in time, slam your brakes, crushing your latte between your sternum and the steering column, spilling hot liquid (no fat, though!) into your lap which causes you to recoil and inexplicably hit the gas again. As you look up again (crotch still ablaze) you swerve the car right (west) to avoid hitting the damn car that still has not turned left. You nail the curb, pop up briefly, and land squarely on a fire hydrant. Which explodes in two directions (roughly straight up and west-southwest) spewing a great geyser of water onto Harlem Avenue at a rate of approximately four liters per second.
Will the water that is dumping into the road end up in Lake Michigan or in the Gulf of Mexico?
A few tracks from the iTunes store for whomever gets this right first.
(Thanks for this one, Dad!)
UPDATE: Here’s the solution.
Blog readers be afraid
I now own a camera phone.
Mainly I bought it for the relatively high-res cam (1.3 megapixel) and the EDGE network access. I like poaching WiFi nodes as much as the next guy, but too often I find myself away from a jack and not in a cloud. This should solve that.
More at Engadget.
Umbrella locker in Nanjing
Note the drip runoff troughs. Nice design.
Travel tip
When the desk agent at the airport prefaces anything with “The computer says …” you can pretty much bet that your travel plans are hosed.
An example from La Guardia:
Agent: “Your flight is delayed 20 minutes.”
Me: “No problem, flight late?”
Agent: “Yeah, the inbound flight just pulled back from the gate in Chicago.”
Me: “Just left? Unless it’s a Concorde that’s a two-hour flight.”
Agent: “Well, the computer says it will be here in 20 minutes.”
At this point you can:
(1) Express overt indignation attempting to rally those around you into some kind of mini-revolt by the sheer power of your expression of can-you-believe-thisedness.
(2) Pull out your calculator and present the agent with the purported actual speed of the incoming plane and expound on the physics behind the inevitable disintegration of its airframe if it continues at Mach 9.
(3) Blame the computer and ask the agent out for a drink.
(4) Sit in the gate area and quietly fume.
That was fun, now everybody start sweeping
Though there’s still a corner of the building sticking up ominously from the rubble (bearing an unfortunate similarity to the shards that remained of the WTC after 9/11), the Sun-Times building is effectively no more. Mostly the activity outside my window is just cleanup of the mess. And ripping a building down does make one hell of a mess. I don’t need to pull the shades on the windows in the office there is such an impenetrable layer of filth on them.
My sons came with me to see the heavy machinery this weekend. Predictably, they could not be pulled away. Not only was there blow-torching, aggressive hole-digging, and manly rubble-scooping going on, but they were constructing a mighty, towering crane which to me means that construction is soon to start. I swear we saw them dig out an old train car undercarriage from the muck. (Might make sense. Train tracks used to run along the north edge of the river.)
Here’s a video timelapse of the deconstruction through Feb. 11. Is it possible that I actually miss the jaw-jarring din of the last few weeks?
Japan scares me
First it was Ringu and The Ring, now Hollywood has remade Ju-On: The Grudge keeping only the subtitle. Both these movies are terrifying remakes of terrifying Japanese films. There’s no slashing, no crazed killer, no demonic possession, and few American horror genre clichés. Though neither movie is about technology per se, everyday items of technology are the primary means of effecting the kind of frights that I am coming to associate with Japanese horror filmmaking. For instance, both films use imaging technologies — photos, video, surveillance cameras, etc. — to convey that Something Is Very Wrong with the subjects of the shots.
Photograph from The Grudge
Photograph from The Ring
Phone calls figure prominently in both films too and, while this is not unique to Japanese horror, when you step back and look at how all technologies are used in the films it is clear that this level of remove — seeing the bad thing on a TV screen, hearing the bad voice on the phone, noticing the bad person in the background of a photo — are just contemporary versions of the old “spotting the killer standing behind you as you look in the mirror” trick. The fright comes from being one remove from the killer, having some kind of mediation between you and it, and knowing that that mediation offers a false sense of security. You still gonna die.
Maybe in the hyper-technologized culture of urban Japan this technology-as-mirror motif is the ultimate scare. Seems to be for me.
Barile
My great-grandparents came to America in 1903 from a small town called Barile in the region of Basilicata, Italy — basically the “instep” of the boot. I’ve visited Basilicata twice — more on that in an upcoming series of posts — and, though it has made much progress in the last ten years, I often find myself calling it the West Virginia of Italy. Rustic and mostly arid, many of the towns in the region are built on top of or straight out from sassi, the caves carved into soft rock that have formed the homes of inhabitants since well before Roman settlement of the peninsula.
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was shot mainly in Matera, Basilicata, the town with the most striking sassi in the region. Shortly after seeing The Passion I learned that Gibson was merely following the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in shooting a life of Christ in the region. In 1964, Pasolini released Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, a cinema vérité treatment of the gospel of Matthew using non-actors from Basilicata. I’ve read that Italian audiences actually demanded subtitles because the Albanian dialect of the “actors” was too difficult to understand. There’s absolutely no dramatic flourish in the film (a path Gibson diverged from in minute one of his film). This is Christ-as-peasant-among-peasants, seen from ground level. Call it Reality Hagiography.
The sassi of Barile form the backdrop of the “slaughter of the innocents” scene. It is hard not to laugh at the centurions as they scamper up and down the hillside slashing at mothers and babies (some of whom fly out of embraces a little too easily). The film is likely to irritate modern viewing sensibilities for one reason or another, especially since the English dubbing is just awful. But I applaud the effort in the context of when and where it was made. If you’re going to shoot Christ as a man of humble origin you’ll not err in choosing Barile as a home town.
Compare the shot from the film above to a panorama of the same caves, now private wine cellars, taken last year.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
