a + 30 + a’
I hadn’t read John McDaid since his seminal hypertext fiction Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse helped push me out of traditional literary studies onto the track I’m on now. Eight years ago maybe? Then this week Boing Boing enthusiasically blogged “Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals,” one of McDaid’s short stories. Since it caught me in that rare moment when I have just finished a book on the train to work and have nothing to read on the ride home and it was available for download I thought I’d give it a try. Well well well. I gotta agree with Cory. This is one hell of a story. You have to think McDaid is familiar with Richard Power’s Goldbug Variations (especially given his epigrammatic mention of gene sequences), the only other story I know so self-consciously influenced by Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I dare not try to wring a synoposis from either. Suffice to say that McDaid ably turns the reader into a rapt listener at a futuristic piano recital. It is a beautiful, lyrical story. Frankly I don’t remember his prose being so textured, but maybe that’s because I was too enamored of the medium back in the Uncle Buddy Hypercard days. In any event, this is worth your time. Pop Glenn Gould on too, if you have it. Download here.
Speaking of lake views …
Up until last week, I didn’t have one from my cubicle. Now, thanks to the strange progress of the dismantling of the Sun-Times building I have been granted a little portal to the east. (Note: if you look closely through the building you can see the bridge from which the enterprising gentleman from yesterday’s post was evicted.) Granted, I’d prefer a cataclysmic immolation of the building like you see on TV (mostly because the building is an architectural abomination), but that’s really not possible with the river right there. Still, that’s got to be safer than what they are doing now. I’m no OSHA supervisor, but should you really be using a frontloader to destroy the roof that is the only thing keeping you (and the frontloader) from plummetting to the next floor down? Oh, and Mr. Worker-Guy who randomly destroys things on the roof with a giant axe: I want your job.
Wheels and towers
Daniel Libeskind became a celebrity when he was selected, amidst much controversy and eventual, bitter infighting, to provide the master architectural plan for Ground Zero. But before that, he was a minor hero of mine for orchestrating the construction of a funky 16th century contraption called the “reading wheel,” basically a precursor of modern hypertext. Libeskind’s studio took great pains to reproduce this machine:
“To try to become the pure medieval craftsman — that’s really the object of this exercise … So we did it that way. We got up at the crack of dawn, four o’clock in the morning. We built this machine in a small place without any power tools, just with hand tools; with no electricity, just with candlelight. We went to bed early because with candlelight you can’t work late. And we did it in silence because there is nothing to talk about when you work like that.”
One wonders if real students of Libeskind’s style and oeuvre could chart a linkage between his interest in the reading wheel and the twisting, aerie-like Freedom Tower. Perhaps it is the turbines in the lattice at the top of the structure? (Not sure about that one; didn’t Skidmore add that?) Who knows, but I like the tower better for it.
The wheel itself, though not Libeskind’s version, pops up from time to time in literature and art. Richard Lester used some version of the wheel as a pratfall prop in his Three Musketeers. And, most recently, in The Confusion Neal Stephenson uses the wheel, called a Bücherrad, as a literary device (literally) in the lab of Gottfried Leibniz. Wheel on over to Amazon and read a bit.
Elegantly primitive, technologically advanced, but most of all beautiful in how it addresses a simple need, the wheel is truly captivating. If Libeskind achieves half that with his tower at Ground Zero he’ll have accomplished quite a lot.
Available: loft apartment w/ lake and river view
Some people outrun drawbridges, others live in them. For three years Richard Dorsay has been living in a makeshift home amidst the girders under the upper roadway of the Lake Shore Drive bridge that spans the Chicago River. The media is calling him homeless but he apparently had rigged electricity from the bridge allowing him to have a TV, microwave, and Playstation in there! He even washed in the normally-empty control-house that operates the bridge’s ups and downs. Best of all, Mr. Dorsay would ride the bridge as it went vertical to let the sailboats through. The cops evicted him Sunday after a former roommate — bridgemate, girderpal? — ratted him out. This guy deserves some sort of ingenuity award from the city — and a warm place to live.
Little Glimmers
It may not be a Miracle on 34th St., but the annual CTA Holiday Train is fairly amazing. I happen to love this little tradition. The L adds a flatbed car and lets Santa and his reindeer and elves ride it. Each of the passenger cars is extensively decorated and staffed by CTA volunteers dressed as elves. Holiday tunes are piped in. The best part of it all is watching kids on the street look up and spot Santa and his crew flying past on the elevated tracks — as close as they will ever come to actually seeing the sleigh airborne, I’d wager. Note that this is wintertime Chicago. The wind on that flatbed car has to slice through the volunteers like so many daggers. Yet, they are all cheer.
This year the effort was unusually heroic because of the financial straits the CTA finds itself in. First they cancelled the special train over guilt at the operational costs and in light of upcoming layoffs. Then they reinstated it after the public made it clear that this was unacceptable. I believe the CTA came to realize that their efforts at winning the hearts and minds of its riding public in the PR war for better funding was ultimately more important than the costs involved.
For me, the once-yearly sight of a car full of passengers actually smiling and speaking to one another — rather than diligently avoiding eye contact as is normal behavior on the L — in itself is a great thing, a gift of sorts.
Jewelboxed
There’s little I love more than when someone takes a simple idea and makes it extraordinary through attention to detail and good usability. That’s precisely what Coudal Partners, a design firm in Chicago that made a bit of a name for themselves with Photoshop Tennis, has done with their side business called Jewelboxing. They were unhappy with the packaging available for CD’s and DVD’s so they did something about it. I used their system to package the annual year-end mix I give out to my friends. Kudos to Coudal. Highly recommended.
New media everywhere
Matt Kirschenbaum asks “What if new media simply became a part of what writers and artists did, not something special or new?”
Well, first thing you’d need to do is stop calling what we do new media, but that’s peripheral. I’d tweak Matt’s question just slightly to ask: What if new media — or whatever name we give it — is just something that people do? Not artists or writers, per se, but people in general. New media is, after all, just expression, creation, manipulation using a computer. Some of it is mundane (e-mail), some of it is beautiful though perhaps not art (elegent code)*, and some of it would qualify as art because of the way it partipcates in an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the viewer/user. Digital communication today is a completely normal mode of human expression for most people. Very little is ‘new’ about it, even if it is very young medium. So I’m with Matt. Let’s ride that bandwagon of normalcy. If we ply our trade well it will be highly considered, irrespective of medium designations.
* This is a topic for another day. I’m not so sure code isn’t art.
Flipbook
Moving files from one computer to another I came across this gem. In the summer of 2002 my brother and I took a trip to NYC and we visited the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. (Which I highly recommend, by the way. There’s a persistence of vision demonstration using strobe lights and a giant whirling contraption that is worth the price of admission alone.) One of the interactive exhibits allowed you to act in front of a digital camera that snapped images to create a printed flipbook. We digitized it, of course. Click the image to see the animation.
Once a hardware company, always …
Well, it’s official. IBM is selling its personal computing division to Chinese computer-maker Lenovo. The ubiquity and sometimes-elegiac tone of the coverage of the transaction points to a fact that I live with every day: people still think IBM is a hardware company. I have come to see the futility of trying to overpower that meme. No matter that over 60% of IBM’s revenue comes from services and consulting. When IBM does something again as revolutionary as invent a personal computer then maybe the public perception will shift. Until then — even after IBM is long out of the personal computing market — people will think it outrageous that I work on a Mac at the office and find it odd that many IBM client solutions have no IBM hardware at all in them.
‘Course, I use a ThinkPad too and I think it is a superb machine, the best PC laptop made. And I thought that well before I took a job with the big ‘BM. That’s the only part of the sale that gives me pause. I certainly hope Lenovo can keep up the quality. By the way, did you know the ThinkPad design was inspired by a traditional Japanese lunchbox?
And, no, I don’t believe the Apple rumors. It just doesn’t make sense to me. But hey, strange bedfellows abound.
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.
