International Chicago Design Overthrow: Sonnenzimmer
Written on February 11, 2008 at 1:54 pm, by Paul M Davis
By Nadine Nakanishi |
Chicago enjoys one of the most visually impressive art and design communities I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. Maybe it’s the brutal weather that forces people to hole up inside 65% of the year, or the ingrained Midwestern work ethic, but one mere Chicago block boasts more visual design prowess than most other cities manage in their entire municipalities.
Whether you’re partial to the postpunk aesthetic of Jay Ryan’s The Bird Machine or Steve Walter’s Screwball Press, the folk-art inspired artistic anarchy of Tony Fitzpatrick or Mekon Jon Langford, or even the post-web 2.0 graphic design refinement of Coudal Partners and Gapers Block majordomo Andrew Huff, the city is awash in visual art and design that is distinctive, refined, and brilliant. Urban renewal of the highest order. Read more
Lego is our Rosebud: Recursive Nostalgia and the Web
Written on February 1, 2008 at 12:36 pm, by Paul M Davis
Lego turned 50 on Monday, a fact that was discussed on many blogs and in comment sections, allowing me–and those of my generational range–to bathe ourselves in recursive online nostalgia, gazing back at minutiae long forgotten and worlds of possibility long closed to us. I admit that I indulged–hell, I bought myself a Lego advent calendar this past Christmas season–though not without a fair amount of sadness and something approaching embarrassment.
This sense has stuck with me for days, driving me to ask myself and others: Has there ever been a time during which adults gazed at their own navels and and tried to recapture their youth as the Internet era?
Four Tedious Online Arguments To Abandon in 2008
Written on January 4, 2008 at 1:15 pm, by Paul M Davis
French poet French Valery famously said, “everything changes but the avant-garde.” The same could be said of the recurring pet arguments online. The same debates have raged seemingly since the turn of this century, with floods of armchair lawyers dispensing legal advice, dismissing political institutions out of hand, and proudly declaring the end of whatever institution rubs them the wrong way. It would be laughable if these ideas weren’t only growing more entrenched and persistent with time. Below are five glib, spurious or just plain boring arguments I’d like to see put to rest this year.
Can't Tie a Bow Around A Pile Of…
Written on December 13, 2007 at 2:13 pm, by Paul M Davis
Continuing in their initiative to brand media and the social web as if they it was a mouse or a scanner, Microsoft has chosen to rebrand their abandoned DRM format Plays For Sure (also known among bloggers as “Plays For Shit”) to the snappy “Certified For Windows Vista”.
A little history on Plays For Sure via Wikipedia for the 99.9% of the world that doesn’t closely follow developments in DRM:
Microsoft Plays For Sure was a certification given by Microsoft to portable devices and content services that had been tested against several hundred compatibility and performance requirements. Plays For Sure certification was required for portable media players, network-attached digital media receivers, and media-enabled mobile phones seeking the “Designed for Windows Vista Premium” logo. “Plays For Sure” no longer exists. “It is now Certified for Windows Vista.”
The most commonly referenced requirements include the ability to play files encoded in Windows Media Audio or Windows Media Video format with Windows Media DRM digital rights management, used by Windows Media Player versions 10 and 11.
Zune is also Certified for Windows Vista, but it is important to note that former “Plays for Sure” music does not play on a Zune (even though both are “Certified for Windows Vista”).
When Microsoft introduced the Zune, they opted to create an DRM format incompatible with the DRM scheme they had launched only a year earlier, locking out Plays For Sure users and guaranteeing that the technology would no longer be a Microsoft priority. Considering that the format was rarely adopted except by also-ran hardware makers and that Microsoft is quietly putting the format to bed, it’s likely to be yet another dead-yet-locked format within a couple of years. Anyone who bought audio via Plays For Sure services were largely hosed by the introduction of the Zune, though I imagine you’d be hard-pressed to find any of those folks–though I’m sure they do exist, and have become just more victims in the recording industry’s campaign to punish any individual who still has the temerity to pay for music nowadays.
You May Be Right, But You're Still An Asshole
Written on December 11, 2007 at 1:57 pm, by Paul M Davis
The title of this post is one of my favorite lines for The Big Lebowksi, a film full of brilliant one-liners. You may have noticed the line in the comment section of this site, as it seems to be an appropriate response to 95& of most online discourse–well, at least the second part of it–but more increasingly, it seems like an appropriate response to the resurgent atheist movement.
I say this, mind you, as a second-generation atheist myself. My father was a staunch believer in science and reason and passed those values down to me, and in these frightening times of religious extremism around the globe, I share the desire to push back against reactionary religious forces, ignorance and hate, homophobia and fear, holy war and Jihad.
But responses such as this suggest that the resurgent atheist movement has gone off the rails:
The sturdy white sign in Rockville’s Central Park asking passers-by to “Imagine No Religion” has generated some calls, a few of them angry, to town hall. There have also been calls to local clergymen and discussion in businesses along Rockville’s West Main Street.
The sign
How do you map your community or your life?
Written on December 4, 2007 at 2:12 pm, by Paul M Davis
Pumpkins, originally uploaded by officialthisamericanlife.
I listened to a fascinating episode of This American Life this past weekend about different modes of mapping–in the show delineated by the five senses in a discussion of the many different roles that maps play and the many things they can communicate.
The most interesting speaker was Denis Wood, a cartographer who believes that maps in aggregate can create a form of narrative and has been mapping different elements of his community of Boylan Heights, NC, for decades–the city pipes, which houses have received the most coverage in the local paper, and even the map above, of the jack o’ lanterns in the neighborhood. Over time, Wood has discovered fascinating pieces of synchronicity between the maps of seemingly disparate objects and concepts. As the TAL site notes, “In short, he’s creating maps that are more like novels, trying to describe everyday life.”
It’s a fascinating thought–how do we map our communities and, indeed, our entire lives? What is revealed when you remove the streets from a map and instead map other elements? This episode, recorded a decade ago, poses a great number of questions about the nature of maps as a way of communicating not only practical information but also abstract concepts and even narratives. It seems to me, in this time of Google Maps mashups and geotagging, that there is a collective move towards expressing all sorts of disparate ideas via maps, but most examples I’ve seen are primarily ways of communicating practical information. What are some fascinating ways you can think of that maps (or map mashups) are being used to convey ideas or narratives with the current technology?
Listen to This American Life’s “Maps” Episode
Songbird: So Much Potential, So Far To Go
Written on December 3, 2007 at 11:51 am, by Paul M Davis
There’s a lot to want to like in permanently-in-pre-release-beta audio playlist software Songbird, an open-source challenge to iTunes that includes all the post-iPod expected functionality and interfacing, along with a robust mp3 blog searching engine that’s built on top of Firefox. Songbird holds a ton of promise–being able to head over to Fluxblog or the Hype Machine and listen to the tracks as if they were a radio, for example, is pretty cool–and then being able to integrate those mp3′s into a playlist along with music on my hard drive. In concept it’s seamless and brilliant–in fact, the built-in Firefox functionality enables you to scroll through any website, and the mp3′s embedded on it, like you scroll through your own personal mp3 collection. Brilliant.
The bad? Like Firefox, with which I am quickly losing all patience, the software feels like you’re navigating an Abrams Tank: it’s slow, cludgy, and prone to crashes. Like Firefox, you love all the functionality, but can’t help feeling like you could be doing everything you want to be doing much quicker if the code was a ton leaner. Firefox’s unresponsiveness has been driving me increasingly to Safari (even the buggy XP version), which is quick and clean despite far less functionality (the lack of del.icio.us plugin and Gchat support has always been a big dealbreaker for me with Safari.) All the same, Firefox’s behemoth system footprint on both my PC and Mac is growing all the more frustrating, and the thought of using an audio program that somehow is built on Firefox and is even less responsive makes it a tough sell for now.
I have a lot of hope for Songbird–it’s the kick in the ass iTunes desperately needs. iTunes was innovative in its simplicity and usability in its first three or four iterations, but has only grown more maddeningly slow and weighed down by unwanted features. What Songbird needs to do is tighten its code up a ton, and focus on the two things people want: an intuitive audio database for their mp3 collection, and a way to surf audio online, within the same application. Cut out the dross, make it fast and responsive, and the developers will have an open-source iTunes killer on their hands.
Cheney's War Against the Constitution
Written on November 29, 2007 at 10:32 am, by Paul M Davis
Nothing in it is revelatory, but “Cheney’s War“, a Frontline documentary detailing how Cheney used the weight of his special council David Addington and a number of Justice Department cronies to levy the President’s power, is absolutely gripping, and at times shocking in its narrative. A few years back I’d be loath to consider Richard Ashcroft in any positive light, but the hospital-bed showdown in which he, James Comey and one-time-head of the Office of Legal Council Jack Goldsmith shot down Bush, Cheney, Addington and Alberto Gonzales is almost inspiring in that it demonstrates that though there are no good men in DC, there are at least a handful who may still respect the rule of law.
The documentary runs through the countless instances of legal subterfuge that has marked the never-ending war on terror, and the truly terrifying, anti-democratic legal precedents that have been put in place. What is most troubling to me, however, is not merely what has passed–at this point, it’s almost redundant to continue handwringing about domestic wiretaps, for example–but the precedent that has been placed down for the future. There are scandals aplenty in this Administration, but whoever succeeds the current criminal regime will not pursue prosecution out of fear of the potential political blowback, and are unlikely to seriously undo the Constitutional damage that has been done by this Administration–once again, out of fear of political harm, in addition to that Administration’s own self-serving considerations.
The extent to which the current administration has undermined the Constitutional system of checks and balances and the authority of Congress, while transferring near-dictorial power to the Executive Branch, is nothing but a travesty. I find it terrifying to think that no matter who enters office in January 2009, there will unlikely be enough political will to refute the allegedly legal documents that have established such a distorted interpretation of executive power. And so those precedents will remain, waiting, for the next generation of Cheney acolytes to pick up on them and continue the work of this Administration come 2012, 2016, 2020.
History Lesson: the Tastes Like Burning compilation, ressurrected
Written on November 18, 2007 at 6:49 pm, by Paul M Davis
Ah, the heady days of 2002. A time before Bush’s re-election. A time when political engagement was still valued in some social circles. A time before independent rock bridged the gap punk rock had worked so hard to create, by allowing hippies into the tent (see: freak folk). Good days indeed. Still, at the time, my nutrition primarily came from Budweiser and vodka and day-old bagels, and I spent my hours more pissed about asshole customers than media consolidation and the increasing synergy of independent and corporate culture.
Out of personal torpor and an antsiness that defines both of our personalities, my good friend Pete Bernhard and I organized Tastes Like Burning, our first CD-R comp of indie, punk and folk bands from the Santa Cruz local scene along with a number of like-minded folks from other West Coast areas.
Few of these bands exist anymore, though a handful do. The obvious historical quirk is the inclusion of a couple demos by our friends-of-a friend in The Thermals, who have gone on to a well-deserved measure of success (including releasing one of last year’s most critically acclaimed albums). There are some great nuggets in here by musicians who’ve gone on to bigger things (such as Pete, with the Devil Makes Three) as well fantastic songwriters and bands that deserve a bit more historical re-estimation (including great Santa Cruz indie popsters Sin in Space, brilliant songwriter Boaz Vilozny who gave up music for organic chemistry, and Sweatitout, an amalgam of ’80s metal and the Cars that would have made Brooklynite hipsters swoon if they’d formed on the other coast.)
The other day, this blogger Steve, who runs the great Cover Freak blog and had ordered the other two CD-R comps I put together after Tastes Like Burning, sent me an email asking if I had any copies of this comp left. Unfortunately, I only have a couple copies kicking around the apartment anymore, both of which are slowly submitting to the decreptitude that awaits CD-R’s and home-silkscreened covers. His email inspired me to rip the tracks and archive them while I still could, scan the art, and post it all online for posterity.
So I offer to you, gentle readers, a .zip download of a small footnote in Santa Cruz (and west coast) DIY history. For people put off by the 120 MB download, please note the mp3′s are all ripped at 320 kbps VBR, or take a listen to a couple of the tracks first:
Sweatitout – “Takin’ Forever” mp3
Boaz Vilozny – “Waiting All Night” mp3
Download Tastes Like Burning .zip file (120 MB, 320 kbps VBR)
After the jump, the track listing and links to the current musical projects of the bands and musicians involved.
