for the excessively affluent

Well, I thought I would just point out that my Amazon wishlist is all upto date, and ripe with things I covet… Not that my upcoming birthday should have any bearing on that infomation. Just putting it out there, you know.



oog. Now I feel all dirty.

its alive

So a month or so back I went and took a notion to building a PC. It came out pretty slick, and made me realize how obsolete my old machine was. Anyway, I have posted pictures of the process, and a parts list for anyone who is interested.

geek love

Just got this from my pally Marion this morning-



«Hi there you two, I thought I'd let you know about a cute thing that happened the other day. John pointed out a new addition to the lego snow village he had made a few weeks earlier.»



«I keenly observed that it didn't look very Christmasy.»



"What's he doing, anyway, diffusing a bomb? Opening up a safe?"»



«And then I spy John on his knee to my right. "Oh wait, what is that? Is this for real? ARE YOU SURE?"»







A big congrats to Marion and John.

Kitsch

So I have read up quite a bit on Apple's new announcements yesterday- the new iLife '05, iWork, the iPod Shuffle, and the Mini Mac. All very cool and covetable. But the thing that struck me the most was how iLife and iWork give the tools to people to make the most god awful media. Next Christmas, instead of home photoshopped Christmas cards and newsletters, I expect to start getting home made DVD's with soundtracks and video montages.



This is not a happy thought.



in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera defined Kitsch as "an absolute denial of shit." Other theorists have defined Kitsch as "seeking to make something of beauty, rather then something of truth." or "Art of totalitarianism- the supremacy of rules over ideas." In general they are getting at the idea that when art becomes a commercial commodity, a product, it becomes refined to the point that it satisfies the marketplaces tastes and no longer challenges. That is kitsch



If it looks like art, then it must be kitsch.



Anyway, I bring this up, because Apple is democratisizing kitsch production... Just look at the themes offered in the new Pages WP application, or in Keynote, or even iMovie. Now anyone who buys into the apple 'lifestyle' can buy a Mac and a black mock turtleneck, and start making stuff that 'looks like' art.

a little clarification

Just so you know, I support the troops.





  • I support the troops by appreciating and recognizing the sacrifice they and their families make in serving in our Armed Forces.
  • I support them for risking their lives for the national security of our nation.
  • I support them BY opposing the scandalous policies of the Bush Administration in Iraq.
  • I support them by understanding that they are not to blame for the Iraq Debacle, but among its victims.
  • I support them by opposing the Bush policy of torture and suspension of the Geneva Conventions.
  • I support them by denouncing war criminals, because to do otherwise is to dishonor our troops.




Sorry I don't put a little sticker on my car, but I don't drive, and I don't think that would all fit.

mmm... crack

My pal Danny has a nice post on the wonders/dangers of Flickr over on his blog. He sums it up pretty well. There are some photstreams of people I don't know here in NYC, who operate in the same social zone, but in different orbits. It is fun to see when were have been to the same places on the same weekend. I should try and meet some of these folks sometimes, but on the other hand it is nice to be part of a vague collective.



Working on the next interview, which should be up soon-ish. Came up with a new questions set, out of respect to Souris, and her hard work for her own interview project.



In other self related news, I just got my spiffy pair of Kensingtons. Those are Birkenstock dress shoes, which I had no idea existed. But I suspect that a fair amount of my cynicism toward the universe steams from foot pain, so we will see how this goes. I have worn Doc Martins since way back, so we will see how this goes. I also finally got a pair of Justin Ropers which is about the only boot my grandfather ever wore. My Dad has a pair he got back in 1969 that are still going strong. So the upshot is that I am doing pretty good in the footwear dept- this year.

whitney stone: a saucy young hoyden




Whitney Stone



Note: this is the first in a series of interviews I plan on featuring on my site, about the various brilliant people I have had the benefit of knowing. This idea was jacked from Miss Souris.


How many careers have you had?


10 I think, so far.


What is your current title?


My job title is Exhibits Curator for the State of Louisiana and that falls under the curatorial department of Interpretive Services. Interpretation and communication is really what I do- through design and the cunning display of various artifacts, it is my job to tell the stories of history, through mounting an exhibit. What does this mean to anyone else? I do what amounts to theatrical planning. Narrative is the most powerful and easily absorbed method of learning information. I construct narratives from various scholarly sources (yawn) and objects and churn out something that will hopefully fascinate and teach. It is my dream job. Always something new.


With my job it seems that I am encountering new things and learning all of the time. I have worn a hard hat, a boardroom suit, welding goggles, a life vest, and a climbing harness in the process of doing my job. So you never know, the list keeps growing…


What project will you be working on next?


For the next few months (through next September) I'll be working on the exhibits to go in our new museum in Baton Rouge.


OK here's waaaaay too much information about the project:




The Museum: A state-of-the-art museum highlighting the history of Louisiana with emphasis on the major events and persons who impacted our state and country with special focus on the distinctive aspects of the state's culture that define the Louisiana experience and make Louisiana unique to the rest of the world.


The Museum architecturally is designed to complement the layout of the new state capital as well as other buildings in the new Capital Park project.


The Collection: The museum seeks to highlight those aspects of Louisiana's history that have impacted the past of the nation and the state and those distinctive characteristics of the state's culture that define the state's experience and make Louisiana unique.


Number of Exhibits: 11 unique exhibits will occupy the new museum including a Changing Exhibits Gallery for new exhibits.


The Exhibits:The Mississippi River, Louisiana Purchase, Louisiana at War, Huey Long and Louis Armstrong, Slavery, Civil Rights in Transportation (Plessy vs. Ferguson, Baton Rouge Bus Boycott,) Natural Abundance, Poverty Point, Louisiana Roots, Music, Mardi Gras




Your house is burning down. What one possession (aside from human/animal life) would you grab on the way out?


I have no idea. It's such a traumatic thought!





When and how did we meet?


A long time ago, through a mutual friend who I was dating at the time.


How did you end up in New Orleans?


Ah, how does anyone end up here? Attracted to inhabitable spaces below sea level? Alcoholism? No, actually I got my first "professional" type of job here after I graduated from college. It was already the location of choice for me though!





You've been in New Orleans for a long time! Is there another place that you'd like to make home base someday?


Hmmm. Sometimes I get fed up with this city, but I can't imagine living anywhere else in the United States in as much comfort and with as much freedom as I enjoy. Of course if I suddenly became very wealthy, it would make other possibilities more palatable.


I would consider retiring to someplace like Mexico or France.


What is the last nice thing someone said to you?


My Mom said she was so happy to visit me.





When I first met you, you unabashedly reveled in being an artist. Since then I have the impression that your love/hate relationship with the art scene has changed your attitude to art. Do you still call yourself an artist?


No, I don't. And you are soooooo right about the love/hate thing. I hate scenes in general- what ever they are about. I do however love so much art! maybe I relate more to craft than art when it come to my own work, but it's the emotion that is in art that can be so transporting.


I don't like it when artists use they status as "artist" to behave with theatrical affectation- or as an excuse for being poor at taking care of their business (what ever that might be) or as an excuse for being horribly behaved or rude "artistic temperament"


What is the last song that you shamelessly repeated more often than you'd like to admit?


Filthy Gorgeous by the Scissor Sisters (I was a little loaded)





Your great project has been the renovation of your house down near the French Quarter. What has this experience taught you?


One person can do what another can do. Even rocket science breaks down to simple stuff in the end. It's all human inventiveness.


I have so much respect in general for people who make things. It always take longer than you think it will.


What three tools can't you live without?


Pencil, Bicycle, Knife


Name and describe the 3 favorite vehicles you have owned.


The Orange Bug, '56 Chrysler New Yorker(wagon), My Bicycles...tied with Babe the Blue Toyota

cultural heritage

The joke runs, that in Kentucky college basketball isn't a religion— its Serious. Think Futbol in Brasil, or Baseball in NYC. When it is in season, how the team is doing directly controls everyone's happiness/misery.



"Hey, how are you doing?"

"Dude, the 'Cats lost last night."



Anyway, back home, the well being of the wildcats permeates the air, the drinking water. It is so pervasive, you only notice it when you are outside the state, and you realize that there seem to be things more important then who is starting in the Sweet Sixteen.



And in Central Kentucky, there is no greater enemy then the U of L team, and no man hated more then Rick Pitino. Pitino was a hot shot Coach that came in the 90s, to bring back the Wildcats, after a devastating corruption scandal had the team banned from playing for 2 years and the team in shambles. Pitino did so, and was the adopted favorite son of the bluegrass. My Mom lived in his neighborhood, and they had a real problem of people driving down the deadend street, just so they could see the coach's house. After Pitino won their second NCAA, he left Kentucky, to go Pro, coaching for the Boston Celtics. People at UK were sorry to see him go, but he was a yankee, and a little hard to deal with. But Multimillion dollar a year pro players are different to coach then college players, and Pitino never succeeded in Boston. So after his contract was up, he began looking coaching at the college level again. He ended up taking the job over at the University of Louisville. Needless to say, the fact that he had gone over to the other side did not go uncommented upon in the eastern half of the state. In fact everyone took it rather personally, in that of all the places he could have gone, he went to the UofL. Sure Hussein and Bin Laden are bad men, but Pitino is evil.



So here is the story of what is going on back home. Long story short, last minute free throw by a UK player wins the big game over UofL, and insures a Merry Christmas across half the state. That kid now has a guaranteed political future in that state.

…this monkey's gone to heaven…

Ears still ringing from the Pixies show last night at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Great show, and still louder and rawer sounding then about any band out there. Felt like '91 all over again.



Noticed in the crowd the scattering of little lighting bug momentary glows- tiny LCD screens. I guess it is the new concert phenomena, of people holding up their camera phones to snap a shot.



The neat thing about flickr.com is that I knew that today I could do a search and find images of the Pixies shows(s), posted by the collective.




Kim Motherfucking Deal
Originally uploaded by Heart Made of Bones.

games

So I have been playing alot of Battlefront and Halo2 lately. I will probably start playing some World of Warcraft here sometime over the xmas holidays. I also just got Katamari Damacy in the mail, and I am looking forward to playing around with that. (Check out the nifty wallpapers they have for the game)



I just took a look at the worlds smallest website, guimp.com which is a very cool little site. 18x18 pixles small, that is. And it is a complete site- it certainly shows someone showing off their ID chops. Check out the tiny games on it.

under re-construction

Hey there, notice anything different about this site?



no?



great!



I just rebuilt the template, so that it should look exactly the same, except now its not using frames. (you should not be able to see anything different)



I have no idea why I used frames before… Except I guess the idea of regenerating a WHOLE page every thing I wanted to change an entry seemed somehow…? wasteful? So having a frame set and only changing one frame seemed more proper somehow. Well it was a big headache, and was silly. Also the Flickr.com images to the right could not link out properly… So in the end I just needed to rebuild the whole thing.



Actually I am thinking that it is well past time for an overhaul of this whole site, and get some new bells and whistles on here, as well as better flash, and less of this pop-up business. Its soooo 2001… :sigh: Also I am thinking of perhaps going in a less green sort of direction. Let me know of you have any thoughts on that.



Life here is good. Had a new idea for adding content to this site. We will see if I follow up on it. Currently in full on xmas mode, and got some significant parts of the christmas shopping done today. Huzzah! I'm poor.



roommate is in Bangkok till the new year, and I have pieces of the printing press cluttering the floor in the apartment, for me to trip over in the dark. Will have to get those cleaned and oiled before the roommate returns, or there will be some sort of Buddhist hell to pay.



I have been voratiously reading the Judge Dee detective novels lately. Chicago Press has been reprinting them all of late, and they are cool little chapbooks, with the original illustrations. Sort of Agatha Christy crossed with Kung-Fu Theater. Great stuff, well worth checking out.



damn, Life Aquatic opened here on Friday- really want to check that out. Loved the old Cousteau show, love Wes Anderson, and so I am looking forward to this. I hope the film convinces PBS to start re-running the old 1970s series.

So it is a cold and nasty damp day here in the big city, so its a perfect time to blow off work, enjoy a coffee and a black and white, while updating the old blog.



This week I have been obsessing over my new computer that I assembled two nights ago, and am just about to the point of installing the OS. (I had to dig out my old install disk, and then call Microsoft to get them to reset the hardware authorization, since my new machine is only carrying over the floppy drive from the old one.) This has bout of technical creation has been confounded by a very busy work week, and the release of Halo 2, which is has been super addicting. Ah, well. When it rains it pours. The advantage of building your own machine is that it is suprising cheap, if you shop around for the parts. Unfortunately it also can get really expensive, since you, (well I did anyway) start obsessing about each part and being unable to sacrifice quality on the least little thing.



I am sure it is the exact same gene that makes men build hot rods in their garage. I am sure you could build a car pretty cheaply, but in a way, it is not about the finished product, but the experience of building it that is the important thing. And the experience is so much better if you are working with top quality materials. But again, the whole thing can balloon out of control if you don't use self control, like I did. For maybe the first day or so. yep, eating a lot of Ramen this month... sigh.

fate accompli

Well it is 7 days to the election, and I hope everyone out there who is registered to vote goes and votes. I am fairly amazed that this election is so close, compared with where things were a year ago. That in a way is enough for me.



9/11 was a difficult thing to deal with- I had to cope this profound idea that everything had changed and nothing would be the same ever again. I was incredibly frustrated and depressed, as I had no control over this thing that affected my life so greatly. Finally, along around this time 3 years ago I had a break through- I realized that the only thing that had changed was TV.



This sounds both cold and naive, but at the end of the day just a couple of buildings had fallen, and there were some tragic deaths. Unfortunate yes, but physically it had no more effect on this country then the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. America was no more or less powerful then before. What had changed? Extremists overseas hated Americans? That was nothing new. The economy was tanking? The bubble has burst months before the buildings collapsed. The post 9/11 world was exactly the same as the pre-9/11 world, except for the fact that TV, (and newspapers, and radio…) were all acting like it was different. That realization allowed me to be able to cope- to see all this hoopla for what it was- theater. So I bought myself an Xbox, and ignored it this new TV, like it was a bad reality show.



About a year after that, during the run up to the war, I had to cope with a different form of depression. This was related to the fact that the media, and every talking head was accepting the huge lies being used by the administration. All the facts were there in the public space for someone who wanted to look, but it was like everyone was choosing to be blind to it- they just wanted to jump behind the administration, like it was ID4, and the evil aliens were attacking. For the first time I knew how it felt to be going crazy.



When you know something to be true, Know it to be true, and everyone around you holds a contradictory point of view, its very stressful, since your mind wants to reconcile the disconnect. (There are 4 lights!) There are forms of neurosis that develop when someone can't disprove either of the contradictory 'facts' staring them in the face. With the media and everyone ignoring the facts about the WMDs and the reasons for going to war, it was very difficult to watch. The nagging feeling that I was wrong, and the Neo-cons were right really ate away at my core, and made me very disengaged. It really not until I went to the March 15th antiwar rallies, and saw that I was not isolated in my disgust with this fake reality being pumped out, that I began to be able to deal with what was happening.



The fact that over 1000 soldiers have died in Iraq, and it has gone disastrously wrong is an amazingly tragic. But it gave me perspective enough to see that the thing I believe are not just my opinions, but are facts. The fact that the administration, despite their complete control of all branches of the government, still could not pull off this war shows that their viewpoint if fundamentally wrong. Even the most powerful man in the world cannot order the sky to stop being blue. This realization has given me confidence in my convictions- something I never had before.



I don’t know what will happen next week. If Bush wins, he will pack the supreme courts with radical rightwing justices, and we will be dealing with them for decades. He will bankrupt Social security, as part of the whole ‘Starve the beast’ initiative. He will fan the flames of xenophobia, to keep Americans fearful, and isolated, and funding an even larger military. As a lame duck president he will be free to pursue his radical Christian agenda as he sees fit.



If Kerry wins, then he will not have an easy time of it. He will have a big mess to try and clean up, and a terrible situation in Iraq to sort out. He will more then likely face a hostile congress, and (unless it is a landslide) his presidency will be surrounded by rumors of voter fraud by the republican noise machine. He will face a conservative controlled media that has been muzzled for 4 years, suddenly let off the leash. A movement to have him impeached will be started before the last ballot is counted, impeachment for any reason that can be found. And since his administration will be coming in with inexperianced new people- there will be mistakes, and leaks and errors of judgment that will be seized upon instantly. It is going to get ugly, and ugly fast.



But I am hopeful either way. I have survived the doubts and uncertainties installed in me by these bums, and I know that I am not alone in my values. With all of their advantages and power to control the message, they are barely neck and neck with their challenger. In the end it is all smoke and mirrors, and I am greatly heartened that at least half of Americans see that. This actually gives me hope for this country, no matter what happens after next week.

snaps

So I have added a Flickr badge to the right of my site, showing the recent pics from my cameraphone. The linking is still not correct, and I am talking to them about a solution. If you want to see a picture, right-click or control click the image, and choose to open the link in a new window. I will try and get this fixed shortly.

Offog!

Not much happening these days, since lil left for SP. (and thus the long gap in my posts.) Summer is rather abruptly turning into fall, with an alarming thud. My big project at the moment is to try and build a new computer- but I will be sure and bore you with that over the next couple of months.



Here is a classic short story combines Sci-Fi and inventory control to make a gem of a tale. Check out Allamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell.

its Clue with guns!

While I have not been doing much PC gaming lately, I have to appricate The Ship, which is a clever Half-Life Mod. It takes the alien blasting FPS, and converts it into a T.A.G. style assasination game along the lines of Clue or one of those murder mystery parties. Set on a 1930s crusie ship, each player can see an idicator that shows which other player they are supposed to murder while no one else is watching. Killing them lets you inheairate thier target, and so it goes, until I guess it is down to the last two people hunting each other.



Pretty darn cool idea.

Deadwood

Well this week I was able to borrow the first season of HBO's Deadwood, and have become immediately hooked on it. Sure there is blood, nudity and copious amounts of swearing, but that is just the extra. The town set up is gritty, and rife with interesting characters, this sure isn't Miss Kitty's Saloon.



The plot could have been used to create a middling made for TV oater, with a reluctant hero going up against a town run by a powerful and corrupt man. But this is more like a soap opera, in that each episode builds upon the last, and it can take 2 or 3 episodes just to get through one day in the town. And as such, you get to see how such a situation plays out, when you are not stuck with the filmatic requirement of a resolution after just 2 hours or so. Al, the main villain, is fascinating to watch how he keeps his little frontier syndicate running- and it keeps him on his toes. (Crime may pay, but it seems like Al spends most of his time cleaning up after the messes made by his collection of thugs and whores. No rest for the wicked, apparently...)



Meanwhile seeing how the reluctant hero gets pulled into the conflict reminds me of Yojimbo/For a few Dollars More, except that he seems to be always at the wrong place at the right time. So far he has not even understood a quarter of what Al is up to, but just his presence already has Al planning on how to get rid of him.



Like I said, I am rather hooked on it, and am looking forward to seeing where this goes.