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richardthinks' LiveJournal:
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| Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | | 12:07 pm |
ttfn
see you guys after July 10th | | Friday, June 19th, 2009 | | 5:02 pm |
| | Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | | 8:49 am |
test concluded: twitter does trivialise discourse
...not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that. I aim to continue following stephenfry, for instance, and may continue to post stupid things of my own. I am convinced, though, that adding a twitter stream to, for instance, government and politics, is a bad thing: it amplifies all the stupid knee-jerk moments, helps communicate confusion, and illuminates very little. Oh alright. I haven't done any science here; in fact I'm just confirming my prejudices. But really, of all the stupid memes and chain letters everywhere, this has to be the most asinine: Here's an idea: show support for democracy in Iran by trying to understand what the hell is going on and then sending material support to the side you think needs it. Alternatively (and I know this is a heretical move), consider that the fight for power in Iran may legitimately reach a conclusion that isn't based on Anglo-American models. | | Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | | 10:34 pm |
I really want to go to St. Helena
and not to see Napoleon's prison, either, but because for 200 years it was "the healthy island," "the happy island" where sailors would much rather stop on their way to India than in smelly old Cape Town.
Now it's not really needed for refilling water vats or coal bunkers. Google maps rather poignantly captures* its quiet, lingering importance, however: one the one hand Jamestown, the only real settlement on the island, gets map data at a much higher resolution than any of the surrounding sea, on the other hand, it's one of the few places on Maps that's wreathed in clouds, and the sketched line of the roadmap is woefully off-target.
I just want to see it for the same reason I want to see South Georgia: because it's spectacular.
* go on, just for fun click the map link and then zoom out and out and out, to get a sense of the scale of the thing. I promise, it's quite something.
** another really quite peculiar google map: note the airbrushing of the sea, especially just south of Melaka, the evident multiple datasets/levels, the clouds, the weirdness around the Sumatran seashore...
| | 3:13 pm |
PSA: where to get inflatable hattifatteners
Apparently, Kiddyland, in Harajuku, Tokyo (of course). Also, it seems, "outside Shibuya station on the ground floor of the Tokyu mall" and "in the mall next to Tokyo Dome." Disclaimer: I've never explored Tokyo except for one corner of the airport. Don't blame me if you get harvested for your ridiculously cute stoneage fashions by cosplayers, forcibly tanned, and/or recycled as bits of plastic sushigrass and obsolete pop culture, or whatever it is those wacky Harajukistes are doing these days. | | 12:34 pm |
| | Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 | | 10:44 am |
| | Friday, June 12th, 2009 | | 11:01 am |
Ethnicity in Central Asia
The award for most overwrought voiceover goes to: the British Museum for Shah Abbas. If I were going to London any time soon I would certainly go see this show: Safavid art is some of the most astonishing and under-exposed Islamic art there is. But were Abbas and his Safavid line Persian, Turkish or Azeri? Does it make any sense to ask the question anyway? The Brit seems to be comfortable with "Iranian," but the RA recently flirted with "Turkish" (sorry, Azeris: sponsor a big show and you might get to tell your story). Back when the RA show was on, I spoke with a well-known figure in Islamic architecture, who described the exhibition as "insolent" - a cultural land-grab by the Turkish government, which appropriated all the landlocked cultures of Asia, including much of the Chinese, and packaged them to appeal to Europeans, as part of the ongoing negotiations for EU membership. Which makes me wonder what the agenda is with the Brit. Also, apparently Neil Stephenson has my number: Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.
Nicely put. Except I don't really deplore Victorian hypocrisy. Via Boingboing. | | Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | | 5:05 pm |
Wonderful world of 17th century Dutch
So I'm trying to read the VOC's rules and regulations of 1617 and it's slow going. On the one hand, spellings like sulcx (such) quickly lose their charm when they ramify into stuff like insgelycxs. On the other, there are some truly lovely Dutch words out there: Overtreders, or misdadigers - criminals/offenders. Lit. in the first case "those who overstep the mark," in the second "those who enact misdeeds." It's delightfully direct. Likewise Halssaken - capital offences. In English we so often resort to some sort of Latin to sanitise our language; we might talk about someone being "dependent" on someone else, while in Dutch there's no evasion, they're "afhankelijk" (lit. "hanging off"). So a capital offence is literally or figuratively something related to the head - either "the head of crimes" or "a crime for which you'll pay with your head." But Dutch goes straight for the throat; halssaken - "neck-matters." And finally, tsamenrotting – plotting together. I can't help thinking of Terry Thomas whenever I read this; what a tsamenrotter. ...and it really is alarming just how much Stephen Fry sounds like my father, here. He never used to. | | Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | | 3:23 pm |
by the way...
has anyone been able to watch this week's Colbert Report, which he's doing from Camp Victory in Baghdad? I managed to watch the first 5 minutes of Monday's but I was repelled by Colbert's ingenious use of his character for ironic, or non-ironic, depending on your inclinations, framing. He opened by saying he wasn't going to pander to the audience of troops because... they were too good for that. And I wondered, as so many before me have, if irony actually is any use at all as political commentary. If my understanding of his message was in fact the right one, or if the text rather than the subtext is supposed to be the take home for part of the audience. If anyone has been glued to it, I'd love the benefit of your read. | | 11:17 am |
Star Trek after 9/11
One of my ongoing backburner projects is trying to understand the construction and recognition of political actors and the concept of valid social groups and their rights. I realise this is a bit like saying I'm casually interested in genome mapping, but it's pretty important to my interest in ships and mutinies: I'm interested in the mutinous ship because it's an emergent polity, in which power relations and authority have to be negotiated "in real time," as it were. ( genocide, terrorists, mutineers and the Borg. You know this can't be pretty. )Update - what I'm really interested in here: It occurs to me that the Borg example points up a necessary double action in the recognition of group-actors by the sort of liberal-enlightened attitude we could christen "the Star Trek pespective." The Borg as unity is judged less deserving of rights than the mass of individuals that might be sprung out of it: this implies that its "collective" nature is unrecognised - it is treated, for want of a better term, as a single "soul." Perhaps for group rights to have any force, the group identity has to be partly or surreptitiously denied - recognised as only an umbrella for many individual persons. Perhaps in thinking this I am merely falling back into my comfort zone, since I dislike talking about group entities as if they had real existence. | | 9:58 am |
Bouchet gets lucky (though he should've asked the Dutch)
I agree with Bldgblog wholeheartedly: Bouchet's sculpture for the Venice Biennale - an American suburban house that floated briefly at the Arsenale - is, like Duchamp's Large Glass, now complete, and very much the better for it. The original gesture - placing a cookie-cutter house among the palazzi - was somewhat interesting, partly because of Venice's harmonised rooflines and the seriality of its Grand Canal frontage, and the Arsenale's place in the history of industrial capitalism and the production of standardised units and all that. Now, however, it resonates with the recent history of floods and hurricanes, and with the one fact we all know about Venice: that it's sinking. The American house is merely doing it while exhibiting that most American of virtues, speed. My only question now is, who will clean it up? Will there be wrangling about whether the artist intended to have the piece sink all along, and was less than forthright about the real costs of display? After all, it's not as if there's no proven technology for this. | | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | | 3:48 pm |
pseudonyms
A curious thing. Recently a political blogger who posts under his actual name "outed" another who posts under a pseudonym, drawing a great deal of protest by doing so.* The "outer" has been accused of acting out of spite, but I wonder if he's not just reflecting a shifting set of norms. I note that many of the people on lj post under pseudonyms, but both twitter and facebook seem to be overwhelmingly actual-name (either as the main ID or with the real name appended to the ID, which seems kinda redundant). Is this to do with the ages of the accounts on both services? Were we all more wary about hanging out our laundry in the earlier days of internet chatter, and now we've got over that wariness? Is it like the shift from more data to more focus? Are we more aware of the costs of maintaining multiple names, when people from different parts of our lives want to search for us? I've been toying with dropping my pseudonym: it's not very good, and I suspect it might make me more inclined to write incautious things. I don't really believe in the anonymity it's theoretically supposed to afford, anyway. The thing is, pseudonymity only works as long as it's common; if having a pseudonym attracts attention then it's already failing as a means for maintaining pseudo-anonymity. Eventually the internet pseudonym could become a sort of trenchcoat: a marker that the person has something (shameful) to hide. Still, I'm wary. * In comments to the post linked, another actual-name blogger said things she might wish had been protected by pseudonymity, further down the line. I don't think this one's settled, by any means. | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 6:54 pm |
| | 4:59 pm |
once-in-a-lifetime green tea
I have come by a mysterious green tin containing some ludicrously super-elite green tea. It's slightly bitter, and has a very mild flavour of oily fish, common to many green teas, but unusually, here, not unpleasant. I'm not sure what it has to do with Antarctica, but if I suddenly turn into a barrel with fan shaped appendages at each end and long leathery wing-bits, consider this my final missive. | | 8:45 am |
Intuition is weird
I wonder what Edward Tufte would make of this spacetime chart: the population centre of the US. The description of how the result is produced suggests a fairly complex operation, and yet the image itself seems really very clear to me. I can even rationalize to myself how the lever principle would factor into the presentation, suggesting something about the investment involved in living far from the metropolitan centre, the reach of culture, the social value of exploration. That is, I get a feeling of clarity from the graphic, even if I don't really know what's going on. So is that good or bad? What, actually, is the purpose of the chart? What would one for the whole world look like - or, better, two: one covering 5000 BC - 1700 AD, the other 1700 - present? Also, why do I feel strangely guilty laughing at ifightrobots? Also also, I was startled to learn that Zeppelin are still going, perhaps less startled to learn that you can buy Graf Zeppelin Schnapps. For that floating feeling without a giant bag of hydrogen. Still here? Then enjoy Lore Sjoberg finally laying to rest D&D alignment. | | Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | | 6:18 pm |
Duuuude. Robert Downey, Guy Ritchie,
Sherlock Holmes. Rumoured bartitsu scene (over Reichenbach falls?). I am so sold. Allegedly this year, too. Isn't it wonderful when you abandon all your standards for plot and character in favour of one moment of cinematic excess? I'll even put up with Jude Law as Watson (is this the most trousers-centric Holmes ever? Can we still hope for a Keanu Holmes?). I blame the parkour scenes in recent Bond flicks for drawing me away from valuing the whole film as a work of art/lit. Or maybe youtube. Current Music: (Doing The) Bird Cage Walk - Jools Holland | | Friday, June 5th, 2009 | | 4:25 pm |
reputation, character, villainy
There are some kinds of dirt that stick no matter how carelessly flung. One such is the accusation of autoerotic asphyxiation: it really doesn't matter how well regarded you are, what your social capital is, how your friends and fans might believe that they "know" you: if it is reported that you died from autoerotic asphyxiation then the world will conclude that they didn't know you all that well after all, and that your case, beyond some uncomfortable prurient interest, is not worth pursuing. If I were writing, for instance, a Bond plot in which the villains aim to thoroughly discredit our man, this is how I would have them do it. On the other hand, it's also brilliant cover for a suicide, if your main fear is that your loved ones will be devastated by guilt, incapable of getting past asking themselves why you chose to take your own life. It would carry its own payload of pain, of course, and no doubt anger, but as a kind of self-inflicted accident it really lets your nearest and dearest off the hook. By train of association, I found myself thinking again about Quantum of Solace, and I realised something that's probably very old hat to any comics afficionado: the fantasy that Bond, or any superhero story, peddles is not really of the one man - the hero - who can put it all right and restore the status quo. The fantasy is really that problems can be turned from general behaviours or ubiquitous patterns of interaction into graspable, understandable, thwartable persons. In the hero fiction rhizomatic, deep social or corporate structures become individual villains - they are given heads, so that they can be decapitated. QoS demonstrates this more clearly, I think, than any previous Bond film: here the villain is novel and despicable because he seeks to control "the world's most valuable resource" - not oil, as everyone thinks, but water. His control consists of withholding it to blackmail governments: by diverting it to his own uses he inflicts suffering on the mute and simple people, as a way of placing indirect pressure on his business partners. This is indeed novel and diabolical in Bond's world, but quite familiar in our own - Coca Cola and Nestle do it all the time, although their goal is market share for drinks products, rather than blackmail as such, while the effects down in the village are identical. So Bond in fact has only to do the work of a ritual knife, in order to cut the Gordian knot of greed, injustice and exploitation. The rest of the work, that of assembling diffuse injustices, cultures of rapacity, and a whole economy (of people virtuously doing their jobs to support their families at th expense of faceless brown bystanders) into the form of a knot, is carried on the shoulders of the villain. All that complex intermingled virtue and violence is resolved into the villain's excessive or deviant sexuality; the structures of exploitation on which we all depend are resolved into the villain's ingenious but reprehensible plan, located safely in the future of his intention. In the end this, I think, is the important part of the story. Not the denouement, but the set-up. | | 2:35 pm |
longhouse?
Sleepy this afternoon I decide to fortify myself with a walk, exploring the hill behind my house for the first time in 6 years of living here (!). After the road narrows and becomes steeper and twisty, I find an offshoot, with a row of 60s/70s bungalows (sorry, "ranches"), lawns and driveways making lilypads in the woodland. All thoroughly unremarkable until I come to a freestanding garage, just off the highway, raised on a gravel hillock. And behind it what I can only describe as a mansion: wooden, with 3 storeys of balconies and a lawn that stretches maybe 4 acres into a private hollow hidden from the road and the valley below. So I'm intrigued; I start to speculate about how many bedrooms, and as I come around to the front side of the house, I discover it has 4 garages, with individual doors, side by side, and a door for humans dwarfed at the end of the row like a postern. 4 garages, and they needed to build a 5th. And while I'm puzzling over that one, a big honking truck draws up on the driveway in front of the freestanding garage, and the driver gets out and heads off across the grass down the hill. He leaves the truck in front of the garage because it's too big to fit inside. It's not flats, I'm pretty sure of that. If this were England I might guess it was a sanatorium or an old folks' home or something, but no. I'm pretty sure it's a private house. Curious. | | 9:38 am |
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