Q: When your cable modem drops its DNS settings, and your wireless network connection goes out while you’re away for a few days, how many voicemails requesting you call your damn ISP can your neighbor leave before committing a breach of wi-fi netiquette? Does this number vary by coast?
Or is this the karmic price for your own use of the wi-fi connection you find blazing through your window when you’re away?
And Also From The Guardian,
“When I snap my fingers, the box office will magically increase… image:guardian.co.uk
This interview with a philosophical Steven Soderbergh. Seems Full Frontal didn’t even open in the UK, even though Miramax covered their own butts, cost-wise, by pre-selling the foreign rights.
First, Let Me Say, Daniel, We Loved Your Idea
And (according to the Guardian), we’d really like to move forward with it. We made just a couple of notes, ‘Kay?
On Museums On eBay
This AP story [via the cool Scrubbles.net] from Indianapolis sounds like the tip of the iceberg: museum curators using ebay to add to their collections.
My conversations about eBay with various curator friends all follow a predictable a trajectory: surprise that we’re both eBay whores; polite envy over what the other scored; caginess over what we’re looking for now; relief when we find out we’re looking for different stuff; quick detente and an exchange of usernames when we find out we’re buying the same stuff.
Of course, now eBay’s gonna turn my butt in to the Feds, as the EFF reports they’re all too eager to do.
On Wooster Collective
As I arrived at Gawker’s launch party last week, I ran into some friends from my old consulting days. (I guess it’s Nick’s job to know everybody, and he does.) Anyway, their shoutout just before the elevator door closed, “we have a weblog, Wooster Collective” should be nominated for Undersell Of The Year.
Wooster Collective is a hoppin’ arena of grafitti, stickers, stencil art and other street art, with updates coming more frequently than the 4-5-6 train at rush hour. In a remarkably short time, they’ve tapped into a sprawling network of artists and fans who contribute great stuff from far beyond Wooster.
Some highlights: Posters of sidewalks by Gucci, et al; Peter Coffin’s barcode stickers [Peter, you gotta tell me about this stuff…]; and Dan Witz interview, whose trompe l’oeil graf works are stunning.
As If greg.org Needed Another Matthew Barney Reference…
Yeah, I want a Cremaster belt buckle, but not if it means
getting executed in a salt arena… image: guggenheim.org
‘cuz it’s gonna be all we talk and hear about for months (at least until Matrix Reloaded comes out). We’re just suckers for an entirely fabricated, all-encompassing, and disturbing worldview. (What, the imagined world of Wolfowitz ain’t scary enough?)
Anyway, in the Times, Michael Kimmelman gets all sticky for the Cremaster show, which opens today at the Guggenheim. Note to all: Fridays through June 6, are hereby set aside for watching the entire 5-film Cycle, in order. You will be graded on this.
Note to MB: If Prada teaches the world anything, it’s to actually have a site up when you go wide with a marquee URL.
Uh-Oh, Canada
First, sorry I couldn’t get this story out in time for Canadian Flag Day (Feb. 15, if you didn’t know, and chances are, you didn’t.) As every Canadian unlucky enough to cross my path the last couple of weeks can attest, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the well-known but underexamined “Canadian Flag On Backpack” (CFOB) technique of terror preparedness. It’s Canadian Common Sense: when you travel abroad, sew a Canadian Flag on your backpack, and everywhere you go, everyone will treat you with friendly kindness. And let you sleep in their barn.
To this embattled American, the explanations I’ve gotten range from the naively implausible (“It’s gratitude for all our peacekeepers.”) to the blindingly obvious (“It’s so we’re not mistaken for Americans.”) to what I thought was the same thing (“It’s just Canadian Pride.”).
Yeah but how’d it start? Look at the built-in assumptions: 1. You travel with a backpack 2. You travel with a backpack. My guess: It’s a generational thing. The Maple Leaf flag was only adopted in 1965; Gen-X are the first to grow up with it. When they go abroad junior year, they take the flag with them. Douglas Coupland should be able to clear this up in no time.
Interesting in peace-ier times, but only as much as it sheds light on the sudden surge of references I’ve found– from far-flung media sources– to Americans abroad using the CFOB technique to protect themselves from terrorists (or argumentative Old Europeans). As this MetaFilter thread shows, these “Canadians” are not a new phenom, either. Hell, when Americans could care less, like, say during the Kosovo crisis, big-time experts casually recommended Canadian drag, or at least avoiding American symbols (both clothing and TGIFriday’s, I guess.)
But the US administration seems to have set its sights on Canada now, which may bring an end to the benefits of posing as OR being Canadian. BoingBoing points to a story about a Canadian who had her passport shredded by the INS and who got shipped to India. Danny O’Brien writes about a Canadian they shipped to Syria, where he sits, uncharged, in jail. There’s nothing on Ready.gov about CFOB, either. And since the insidious PATRIOT II act being proposed sets a far lower threshhold for stripping an American of his citizenship, who knows if sporting a Maple Leaf is enough to classify you as an “enemy of the US.” My advice, if you’re gonna be “Canadian” while you’re abroad, fine. Behave yourself, make our northern neighbors proud. Just ditch the patch before you come back.
[A heady read: Sean Maloney’s Dec 2001 paper, “Canadian Values and National Security Policy: Who Decides?”]
Style Guides
Matt Webb posted a nice collection of style guides.
An addition, while not a style guide, per se: having Netscape crash and take your in-progress post with it can help you pare down later drafts to the bare essentials.
“A Thin Line Between Film and Joystick”
My bad. If only I’d watched Access Hollywood before posting about Gerry. Michel Marriott has an article in the NYTimes about the convergence between video games and films. Actually, it’s about Enter The Matrix, the video game.
If anybody gets it, it’s the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the game script to intertwine with their upcoming films. (Matrix sequels a-comin’, get on board, li’l chill’n.) The actors and sets carry over, too, into the hour-plus of filmed scenes and cinematics. The Wachowskis are hardcore gamers themselves, and their vision of The Matrix is comprehensive, almost unnervingly so.
It’s expansive enough for assimilated video games, a world large enough for other directors to work freely within it. Animatrix is a collection of animated shorts from six directors (including the creators of Akira, Cowboy Bebop and Aeon Flux). The first of four to be released online is Mahiro Maeda’s touching, cautionary Second Renaissance, Part 1 a/the machine creation myth, complete with circuity goddesses and mecha-Adam and Eve.
By the end of the year, The Matrix will be so pervasive, it’ll give new meaning to the throwaway Hollywood line, “We’ll all be working for you someday.” [images: thematrix.com]
Shipping Containers, v. 3
A sporadically recurring topic here at greg.org, the non-shipping use of shipping containers. [Instigating post here, extensive post here.]
Shipping container used in an illegal Israeli outpost, image:nytimes.com
Samantha Shapiro’s NYTimes Mag story, “The Unsettlers,” profiles young, militant Israelis who pioneer illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Shipping container used in an illegal Israeli outpost in the Jordan Valley, image:metropolismag.com
Stephen Zacks’ review in the Feb. 2003 Metropolis of a (cancelled) exhibit on architecture and urban planning in the West Bank, where Israeli hilltop settlements use suburban sprawl to control the surrounding territory. Architect Eyal Weizman: “It’s almost like you have a model of the terrain and you cut a section at say six hundred meters, and everything that’s above is Israeli. What was created was an incredible fragmentation of the terrain into two systems that work across the vertical axis.” The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has published Weizman’s exhaustively documented settlement map of the West Bank.
For all your settling needs, illegal or otherwise, the Shipping Container Store: passing the mountainous container landscape along the NJ Turnpike, I saw Interport Maintenance Corp., which sells shipping containers. Delivery is extra.
E+D: Phone Home
Today’s Guardian asks twelve actual historians to lend their authoritative-sounding accents on politicians’ arguments that Iraq is the next [check all that apply] So what about 1914? The strongest military power in sight (Germany) is made to feel insecure by a terrorist outrage. Instead of confining its response to the known source of the terrorism (Serbia), it lashed out at one country, which it suspected of abetting the terrorists (Russia), and then at another country (France), which was linked to the first. Then it lost the plot. Worst of all, it calculated that the war would be won by Christmas. Forget Rupert’s minions walking in Foxstep, Code Orange, duct tape, Sadaam-huggers and cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Thanks to this one-day storm, you’re gonna have to pry our SUV’s from our cold, dead hands.
Elmgreen & Dragset, a pair of artist friends, have a show up at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, called Phone Home. Five answering machines on a pentagon-shaped table in one gallery record the conversations from five working phonebooths in another. Another friend‘s very cogent writing puts the piece in context.
They were nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize, and just won the Hamburger Banhof Prize (from the museum in Hamburg, you see). I included a piece of theirs in a show I curated in 2000-1, but a friend jammed and bought it before I could close the deal.
Update: The artists will talk about their work Thursday evening, 2/20 at 6:30.
If Ric Burns Calls, Tell Him You’re Busy.
1939 Germany
1956 Egypt
1967 Israel
1991 Iraq
1963 Vietnam
1899 South Africa
1936 Ethiopia
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away Naboo
As someone who made a movie (S(N01)) about looking at the past (WWI) to make sense of the present (Sept. 11), I’m interested. One big lesson is best expressed by Simon Schama: “I’m allergic to lazy historical analogies. History never repeats itself, ever. That’s its murderous charm.”
Another: historians are almost as likely as politicians to slip from historical analogy to histrionic advocacy. For example Andrew Roberts‘ unsubtle derision: “The League of Nations, on the morning after Poland was invaded, had on its urgent agenda the standardisation of European railway gauges. Today’s United Nations is fast shaping up to be equally ineffectual.” (See if you can read between ‘ lines.)
And even though it would catapult S(N01) up the relevance scale, I hope Norman Davies is wrong comparing Iraq to 1914 Russia: Location, Location, Location
shot
Our street gets relatively little through traffic. The result: it’s usually an oasis of easy parking, and it’s tertiary (at best) on the snowplowing list. After opting for the garage, last night, though, this Mercedes pulled into our favorite spot (the one right in front of our house, duh) as we walked back. (That’s an S-Class buried there, btw; I can’t tell the make of the car being snowblown under across the street.) This morning, I’m free of the twinge of regret that comes with losing a sweet Manhattan parking spot.
TO: Arianna, FROM: New Yorkers RE: Abetting The Terrorists
Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood v4.0
Like the $20 tickets for Rent, you had to get there early if you actually wanted to reach the site of today’s protest rally in NYC. By the time I printed out my sign at Kinko’s (above, made in Powerpoint, thank you), the rally became a march and the march came to us. We never got closer than 3rd Avenue and 55th street, and spent a crowded hour+ getting back to Bloomingdale’s, five blocks away. It was like the Saturday before Christmas shopping-meets-WTO; stores were open everywhere, and full of consuming marchers. The beverage of choice for NYC peacelovers: Diet Coke. I’d have had an easier time finding a roll of duct tape in Arlington.
Our calculation of the crowd size, using Prof. Clark McPhail’s technique: 250-300,000, which turns out to be low.
While exhilarating, no one really got my sign, which is fine. It means I < heart > Old Europe. But when an art world friend saw it, he first thought it meant, “I < heart > Olafur Eliasson.” [Which I do, don’t get me wrong, Olafur…]