jedmc

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.

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.

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."

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.

Saw a latino man driving a truck on the manhatten bridge this morning. I was riding the Q train as ususal, and when it goes over the bridge it is right next to the center lane of traffic. (the manahtten bridge is layed out a bit strange, as it was orginall envisioned as having 4 subway lines going over it, and 2 lanes of traffic. but this was before WWII, and the american love affair with the car happened. Now they have 4 lanes of traffic and 2 subway lines, in a rather strange configuration.)

One thing I have been thinking about are notions of people’s filters. Modern humans are tuck in a sea of data and experiences- more then ever before. And while people are instinctively about pattern recognition, to do that we also have to be able to focus and filter out the noise. I think of a primitive hunter listening for the tell tale rustling of his dinner in the bush- and filtering out the other forest sounds. His ability to filter out the extemporaneous, and piece together the relevant sounds into a pattern allowed him to know where to strike, and thus feed his family.

Right interesting post by Momus on Post-Capitalism and the creative class. It is kind of about those hip neighborhoods, where people seem to get by jobless, or freelancing, and always seem to be working on their own projects. Generally the problem with those neighborhoods are that the rents have to be low enough to support the so-called 'slacker' lifestyle. So then demand for apartments quickly outstrips the supply, and the creative types quickly get priced right out. SoHo, Dumbo, and Greenwich Village are all examples of these ex-bohemian conclaves here in NYC.

Really cool little read on neomarxisme, about the revival of popular cultures in Japan.

« …we have to recognize that there's no other sophisticated consumer market on Earth with less exposure to the original adopters than Japan. Not only did the Japanese not have a mass hippie movement in the 60s, they were spared all the residual hippies of the 70s. And accordingly, "the Sixties" as a cultural format is worshipped more in Japan than anywhere else in the world. »

—except for certain neighborhoods in Eugene, Oregon. But that is more of a great celebration of the post- post- hippie lifestyle. Second or third generation hippies busily creating something that bears little resemblance to anything the Japanese would recognize.

Walking to the subway after work last night 10pm, I noticed the Xbox logo flashing on the Samsung screen in Time square, and I stood waiting for the loop to repeat to find out why Samsung was pushing the xbox. (Although Samsung is Sony's other big rival, so enemy of my enemy....) Duh- the Xbox360 special had just aired. Good thing I set it to record. Well sort of.

So Speaking of movies, I thought this NY Times article was rather fascinating. I found it funny, because the box office slump they are talking about started around the same time I stopped going to the movies very often. Back through the 90's I went to the movies almost weekly, no matter what showing. I had a group of movie buff friends who (as Joss put it) go see anything that had a spaceship in it. And if it stunk, we would have a great time in the parking lot afterwards ripping it apart. Now I go to the movies maybe 5 or 6 times a year- and then only to see something I am really interested in.

So a thought that has been bugging me for a while is this. Photography has a transformative power, in that it is a hard copy of what we see. More then see, it is a copy of what captures out attention. Which is fine and cool, and all that, but the thing is by photographing something, we imply a certain amount of significance to that moment/composition.

The upshot of this is that photography has the power to make the ordinary extraordinary, and the extraordinary ordinary. (yeah, it's glib)

I can recall as a kid getting into an argument with someone about whether vanilla was a flavor. I wanted a vanilla ice cream cone, and they were baffled by that- to their thinking, vanilla ice cream was simply the default, the black canvas upon which other flavors would be delivered. Don’t recall if I won that argument, but I always liked vanilla- and one of my strongest memorys as a child was sneaking a sniff of the vanilla extract bottle from the spice cabinet.

The real world is Janky. Jenky is a great word I picked up recently. But I have been looking at mySpace of late, and the one thing that strikes me is how much effort people go to screw up their profiles. As a designer that is horrifying and fascinating.

Remember how in the 1930s, people payed $.10 for a good cup of coffee, but we don't think twice about spending many times that now a days for the same thing? That is called inflation, and and has been a side effect of our goring economy. Now just as people earn more now, (causing prices to rise) people are also living longer. People are spending more time in school in their youths, they are waiting longer to have kids, and are are being active later and later in life. It used to be that making it to the retirement age of 55 was a tough haul, but now companies are having to force people out at age 65 or even 70.

Marxy has an interesting post about the diminishing returns of cultural works, and points the finger at blogs. Basically the immediency and redundancy of newsblogs diminishes the the
value of a piece of art, a band, or a film. And yet he didn't talk about how Movies used to have weeks of time in the theaters- but now movies make the bulk of their grosses on the opening weekend. You can't go see a film in a theater multiple times, since it is typically gone in 10 days.

I had the thought the other day that the reason that fundamentalists seem to be so hung up on apocalyptic visions is that they see human history to be like a novel, with a definite beginning, gradual ramping up, and then a big fiery conclusion, and a nice big THE END. Especially when the plot is centered around them- their struggle is the main struggle of the world. They have an almost pathological fear of being bit characters, or irrelevant to the story. So have a need to keep trying to hijack history, and keep the spotlight on them as they wait for the big ending.