Just when I thought I’d missed it, The Laurelhurst Theater here in Portland brought Blade Runner: The Final Cut back around (I wasn’t here when it first played, and somehow, I missed the movie’s original release, though during that same time I managed to see all three original Star Wars movies as they came out). Thankfully Ridley Scott’s upgrades are subtle. He didn’t feel the need to George-Lucas it up with obvious and jarring new scenes and CGI. The changes are relatively seamless. Continue reading “Blade Runner Redux”
The Architect’s Brother Revisited
Robert and Shana ParkHarrison‘s exhibit, The Architect’s Brother, has been one of my favorite statements on our relationship with our technology and our planet since I first saw it in San Diego almost four years ago. This time around, I caught the display — including several pieces I hadn’t seen before — at The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallhassee, Florida. Continue reading “The Architect’s Brother Revisited”
Four by Two: dälek and Jesu
Looking back over the music of the year, it struck me that two of my favorite bands released both proper records and compilations this year, and that all four were among my favorites of the year. With the music industry currently shaped like a big question mark and all of the nay-saying about creative churn, I just thought these two (groups of) creators and their creations deserved an extra mention. Continue reading “Four by Two: dälek and Jesu”
Year End Top Ten, Ten Years Ago
In the late 90s, my friend Mark Wieman ran a record-review website called Pillowfight. It was the pre-Pitchfork pulse of Indie-rock. I contributed quite a lot of reviews to the site during its end-of-the-millennium reign, and along with reviews, come year-end top ten lists. Continue reading “Year End Top Ten, Ten Years Ago”
Radiohead In Rainbows: A Review of Sorts
My In Rainbows discbox arrived almost in time for my birthday, and it’s a big, beautiful slab of music and packaging. Though I’ve been listening to the record for months now thanks to the download that came with my pre-order, writing about it has eluded me. It seems that “a review of sorts” (thanks, Dave) is all that is possible. Continue reading “Radiohead In Rainbows: A Review of Sorts”
Digital Media Demo Day at Georgia Tech
I ventured to Atlanta again this year for Georgia Tech’s Digital Media department‘s Winter Demo Day, and it definitely re-greased the mental wheels. When you’re stuck while thinking about technology and media, an event like this is sure to shake things loose.
The Digital Media program at Georgia Tech spans the spectrum that runs from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to film production. Students and faculty come from all points on the spectrum as well, thereby making the input and the output of the department is as diverse as its people. Their semiannual Demo Days allow them to strut their wares, from fully immersive digital environments and emergent games to interactive TV and experimental film, from completed works to projects-in progress. A loose theme this year could’ve been merging the virtual with the corporeal: There were lots of projects bridging bodies and avatars and several others exhibited new approaches to haptics. It’s very difficult to keep a summary about such an event brief, but here are a few highlights.
Kenny Chow’s Generative Visual Renku project uses Fox Harrell’s GRIOT System to create a digital environment for collaborative, linked-poetry using pictographs. Renku is similar to Haiku except that it is a form of linked poetry. Chow’s project allows groups of people connected via a network (e.g., the internet, an intranet, or a social space such as Facebook) to collaborate on pieces of artwork using icons. In the process, GRIOT and Chow’s Renku system create a visual grammar by which the artworks can be built and interpreted.
Over the past couple of years, Susan Robinson has been quietly remediating her Oscar-nominated film Building Bombs (which is now available on DVD) into an interactive piece, the engine behind which manages the relationships among the various personalities and issues in the film. By dragging pictures and icons around on the screen, the user can see how they react to each other and watch video clips from the film. It’s much more impressive and interesting than I can make it sound here.
Space Vectors by Ari Velazquez, Jimmy Truesdell, and Kurt Stilwell is a tabletop video game for up to four players. Each player has a base to protect and three types of space vessels — controlled by tangible objects placed on the tabletop — with which to protect it and attack the others. As it stands now, players set up initial conditions, press “start,” and watch the game unfold. Eventually, Ari says, the game will be very active over the course of play. The interesting thing about Space Vectors‘ current state is how complex the game play is given its relative simplicity. Set up a few pieces, let the game go, and watch to see if your strategy works.
Notably missing this year — or maybe I just notably missed them — were Brian Shrank and company and their Mashboard Games (one of my favorites from last year, which explores haptics by mining affordances from the standard QWERTY keyboard). Also M.I.A. were Ian Bogost and Eugene Thacker. Next time, guys…
Other highlights included Second Life/Augmented Reality (which involved combining physical actors with digital avatars), Mermaids (an MMOG that explores the emergent behavior of large groups), Flourishing Future (an interactive children’s tangible-object tabletop video game involving making a city more environmentally friendly), and Machinima Futurista (which uses the Second Life/Augmented Reality project to recreate the 1916 Italian Futurist film Vita Futurista), among many others.
If any of you get a chance to attend GA Tech’s Demo Day and see what they’re up to there, I strongly recommend doing so: good food, good people, and lots of great ideas. Many thanks to the presenters, and Susan Robinson, Jay Bolter, and Janet Murray for making us feel welcome and for making it another brain-sparking good time.
Too Much Information: Four Recent Books
In his 1995 book, Being Digital (Vintage), Nicholas Negroponte drew a sharp and important distinction between bits and atoms, bits being the smallest workable unit of the digital world, and atoms being their closest analog (no pun intended) in the physical world. In the meantime, this distinction has become more and more important as our world becomes increasingly digital or reliant on digital technologies.
As an over-simplified example, shelf space in a regular “bricks and mortar” bookstore is limited, but online it isn’t. In order to pay its rent and stay in business, a physical bookstore has to carry books that sell at a faster pace than an online store, which can afford to carry books that sell less often. The latter is called “the long tail,” and it’s how Amazon was able to stake its claim as “The World’s Largest Bookstore” and eventually to expand into every other product line one can put in a box or an inbox. When it comes to purely digital artifacts and products (e.g., digital file sharing, music downloads, ebooks, etc.), the power law on which the long tail is based isn’t truncated (as it is eventually in the Amazon example, and sooner in the traditional bookstore example).
Chris Anderson admittedly didn’t invent the idea (Jeff Bezos for one has been making millions with it for years), but no one else has covered it like he has in his book. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006) is the concept shot from every angle, through every available lens. The idea is that blockbusters, hits, best sellers form “the short head” of the graph, and the niche items, cult phenomenon, lesser sellers form “the long tail.” Our culture is moving down the tail (i.e., it has become “niche-driven” as opposed to hit-driven) and off the shelf (online as opposed to in the store). Most retail stores only have room to carry items in the short head, while online “etailers” can carry items further down the tail. And when it comes to digital products, shelves are no longer an obstacle, in more ways than one.
When products move from shelves to databases, the way they can be organized changes. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, 2007) is David Weinberger’s take on Web 2.0’s tags and folksonomies, set in contrast to objects in physical space (bits vs atoms). “Orders of order” he calls them. Items on shelves are limited by the rules of the physical world. Items in a database are not. The former can be filed in one category, on one shelf, in one place (the first order of order). The latter can be searched, browsed, alphabetized, tagged — all at the same time (the third order of order). These orders of order also apply to encyclopedic information — Wikipedia’s bits as opposed to Encyclopedia Britannica’s atoms — and the way it is created.
In Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford, 2006), Cass R. Sunstein continues some of the work he did in Why Societies Need Dissent regarding deliberation, group polarization, and emergent knowledge. The most obvious and most successful example is Wikipedia. Whereas mindless mobs wait at the bottom of many collaborative slippery slopes (see a sharp antithesis to Wikipedia at Urban Dictionary), Wikipedia is frighteningly accurate. My friend and colleague Tim Mitchell proposed a great test of Wikipedia’s success: If you doubt the site’s aggregate knowledge, check its information against something you do know, as opposed to something you don’t. Sunstein’s book goes a long way to explaining the ins and outs of why collaborative filtering might provide the best method for knowing things.
Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload (Good Experience, 2007) approaches the infoglut from more of a self-help angle, proposing an ambitious plan for getting things done and getting things organized in the digital deluge. It’s not quite the panacea it purports to be, but useful ideas abound. Finding signal in the noise — especially in the noise of your own email, photos, files, to-do lists – is what bit literacy is all about.
As bandwidth increases, Negroponte’s observation from over a decade ago is finally showing its impact. The distinction between bits and atoms is an important one, and perhaps more important than we previously realized, whether we’re trying to find something or just find something out.
Recurring Themes, Part Five: The End of Humanity
“Through fiction we saw the birth
Of futures yet to come
Yet in fiction lay the bones, ugly in their nakedness
Yet under this mortal sun, we cannot hide ourselves”
— Isis, “In Fiction”
There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone I watched as a kid that stuck with me. I don’t remember all of it, just the end: There’s a man, a bibliophile, he’s the last person left on earth, and he’s ecstatic because he’s surrounded by books. Then he breaks his glasses.
Since first seeing Children of Men’s vision of humanity without hope about a year ago, I’ve been spotting eschatological themes everywhere. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress are a couple more examples from my recent reading. The release of the film I Am Legend marks another for the pile.
Though both movies depict a dystopian picture of humankind’s future, Director Alfonso Cuarón said that he envisioned Children of Men as the “anti-Blade Runner.” He told the set designers, “I don’t want inventiveness, I want reference,” adding “Don’t show me the ‘great idea’, show me the reference in real life.” The result is not only a very gritty and real feeling but also a very possible one, a feeling that our world could look like the one in the film sooner than we care to realize. Wholesale infertility notwithstanding, indeed, a lot of what is depicted in Children of Men is happening right now.
In a talk that should certainly be included in future printings of his recently reissued Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992), philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek describes the infertility in Children of Men as “spiritual infertility.” Just as the works of art collected in the museum in the movie lack their historical context, so do the citizens lack hope. Most of their spirits are blatantly suffocated by its absence. This hopelessness is evident in nearly every aspect of the movie, from the government-sanctioned “suicide kits” to the stagnation of technology. The lack of offspring produces a society with no need for maintenance (Though national security is of the utmost concern in Children of Men, the deterioration of the infrastructure couldn’t help but evoke to me James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency [Grove Press, 2006], in which he cites strip malls, suburbs, and big-box retailers as signs that we’re building “a country not worth defending”).
Among the many visual metaphors in the film (e.g., the many animals, Theo’s lack of shoes, etc.) is the boat in the final scene. Zizek interprets the boat as a metaphor for humanity’s lack of roots in the movie. The refugees in captivity, the artwork in the museum, and — even with the hope of Kee and The Human Project — the extant populace of Children of Men’s world are set adrift on a sea of existential uncertainty and spiritual bankruptcy.
Similarly, the man and the boy (they’re not given formal names) in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are adrift in a post-apocalyptic world with nothing but what they can carry or scavenge to live on and nothing but their wits to protect them as they trudge farther and farther down a road. The road is apparently leftover from a decimated infrastructure, a lone strip of asphalt plodding toward the sea like a geographical lifeline. Steven Shaviro pointed out a perfect example of their dire situation in the line “Mostly, he worried about their shoes” (funny that a similar metaphor was evident in Children of Men).
“There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.” — from The Road
The Road’s agoraphobic landscape leaves one aching for shelter. Its mise en scène is one of nonstop exposure and unknown dangers lurk seemingly at every point along the road. In the same way that silence can be deafening, McCarthy’s economy of prose only adds to the feeling of stifling openness. There are no lush turns of phrase, no whimsy in words just as there is neither lushness nor whimsy in the world described.
David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress depicts a similarly desolate world, though the narrator seems much more sanguine about it. She roams from place to place, taking what she needs from abandoned households, borrowing vehicles as needed, and pausing intermittently to type her story on a typewriter. It’s a beautifully written and intricately realized story.
The end may or may not be coming, let’s just be careful with those glasses, just in case.
Car-Race Meat Spiral Chief Restaurant Snail Button
No, it’s not some new awesome, all-purpose web widget. That was the subject line of an email I just received. The next one read “Butterfly Drink Book Army Data Base Aeroplane Space Shuttle,” and “Worm Data Base Rainbow Jet fighter Compass Pocket Telescope” was after that. They were spam of course, and, as much as it still frustrates me that there’s an entire industry dedicated to intruding my inbox (and phone line, and hard drive), I’m trying to see the positive.
The subject lines above are perfect fodder for Mind Hack #19 [Seed Your Mental Random-Number Generator] from O’Reilly’s Mind Performance Hacks (edited by Ron Hale-Evans). I mean, you can make that stuff up, but randomness is easier if it just arrives via email.
Another one I use a lot is Hack #27 [Play Mind Music]. Though I still often play Hip-hop when I work, I’ve been listening to more and more instrumental music. Here’s a sample of my recent playlist of “mind music”:
- Explosions in the Sky All of a Sudden I miss Everyone, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, Friday Night Lights OST
- Cliff Martinez Solaris OST, Wicker Park OST
- Pelican City of Echoes, The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
- Red Sparowes At the Soundless Dawn, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun
- Main Hz, Motion Pool
- Mogwai Zidane OST, Mr. Beast, Happy Music for Happy People
- Peter Gabriel Long Walk Home (Rabbit-Proof Fence OST), Passion (The Last Temptation of Christ OST), Birdy OST
- Brian Eno Eno Box I: Instrumentals, Music for Airports, Apollo, Discreet Music, etc.
(Brian Eno might be the best creative catalyst available, what with his cannon of ambient music and his co-creating the Oblique Strategies [Hack #23]). Mind Performance Hacks has nearly a hundred tricks and exercises to rattle your brain out of its usual patterns.
I also just read The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown) by Tim Ferriss and am in the middle of Daniel Pink‘s A Whole New Mind(Riverhead), both of which have exercises that will make you think differently. The former has more for achieving personal goals, delegating responsibility, and getting free of your work, while the latter has more regarding cognitive and creative concerns. Pink contends that the next revolution will come not from left-brained engineers and accountants but from right-brained creative types like designers, teachers, and storytellers (good news for artists that want to be formerly known as “starving” — thank you, Govone), and his book is rife with exercises for your right hemisphere.
Anyway, I’m now thankful for weird subject lines in spam messages. Anything that makes me think about things in a different way is welcome.
What tricks do you have for tackling problems creatively?
Summer Reading List, 2007
We’re late again with the summer list, but here it is. Thanks to all who participated, including newcomers Dave Allen, Howard Bloom, Alex Burns, and Calvin Johnson, as well as veteran contributors Mark Pesce, Patrick Barber, Steven Shaviro, and Gary Baddeley. As this list proves year after year, there’s a lot of good stuff out there to read. Enjoy.
Mark Pesce, Author, The Playful World
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Arthur A. Levine Books): I must be the only one reading that.
Philip K. Dick The Zap Gun (Gollancz)
John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Wiley): Highly recommended!
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous (Times Books)
Richard Vinen A History in Fragments (Da Capo)
John Henry Clippinger A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity (PublicAffairs)
Dave Allen, bass player, Gang of Four
You know I often ramble on about the collapse of music sales as people stop buying CDs, and of course the first to suffer there are the music retailers — farewell Tower Records for instance — but it’s amazing to me that bookstores still abound given the fact that I never set foot in them any longer — all my purchases are through Amazon. Anyway, I discovered this weekend as I worked on restoring my motorhome (another story, to be continued) that the mailman/woman/person has been dropping books off at an alarming rate. Here’s the list of my unread pile that accumulated during May, without review, of course:
Jon Savage Teenage: The Creation Of Youth Culture (Viking)
Don DeLillo Falling Man (Scribner)
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books)
Martin Amis House of Meetings (Vintage)
Simon Schama Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Harper Perennial)
Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (Mariner Books)
Philip Roth The Plot Against America (Vintage)
John Gray Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New Press)
Gary Baddeley, Publisher, The Disinformation Company Ltd.
Roy, as usual my summer is largely taken up with our own books, especially the new edition of Graham Hancock’s Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers of Mankind. Also in my pile are Mick Farren’s Who’s Watching You? and Thom Burnett’s Who Really Rules The World?
The best fiction I’ve read recently was Vikram Chandra’s long but always engaging Sacred Games (not one of ours — I get to read fiction just for pleasure!).
Next month we’re publishing Russ Kick’s new book Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, with contributors like Neil Gaiman, Richard Dawkins, Doug Rushkoff and Erik Davis, and I think it’s really going to cause a stir. I can’t wait!
Howard Bloom, Author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain
Lewis Thomas The Lives of A Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (Penguin): This book is 20 years old, but is still one of the most provocative reperceptions of science I’ve ever read.
Gregg Easterbrook The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (Random House): A book that cuts down every preconception you’ve been fed about the economic progress of the West and replaces today’s dour notions of scarcity with a hearty report on how, in fact, humanity has enriched itself vastly during the last 150 years — and may well continue to do so.
Barack Obama Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Three Rivers Press): One of the first books on the experience of a new breed of Westerners — the meta-racial cosmopolites — a generation of mixed-race and mixed-culture kids who are the gifts of the last 50 years of globalism.
Thomas L .Friedman The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Picador): The most encyclopedic vision of the new globalism I’ve seen.
Steven Johnson Everything Bad is Good For You (Riverhead): Another book that turns commonplaces on their heads. Johnson hypothesizes that pop culture is a “collective-perception and processing-power” expander. He goes on to posit that the “garbage” of pop culture is responsible for “The Flynn Effect” — a measured growth in individual IQs during the past 90 years, a rise of brain power whose origin has baffled the scientific community.
Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media): This book is tough-sledding, but presents an old idea from the 1980s in a brand new way. The idea? That the cosmos’ mysteries can be cracked not with Newtonian and Einsteinian math, but with a cellular automata model. In other words, the cosmos may have started with three or four simple rules, than have gone through so many iterations of those rules that the results defy belief. Wolfram presents unequivocal evidence that repetition of simple rules can even produce what looks like utter chaos.
Alex Burns, Editor, Disinformation
C. Otto Scharmer Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (MIT Society for Organizatzional Learning): My fellow alumni in Swinburne University’s Strategic Foresight program have been raving for the past 2 years about Scharmer’s Theory U as the cornerstone for blind-spot analysis and self-reflective practices. In essence Scharmer has developed a framework that might explain initiatory knowledge – to directly re-experience being and essence – for a contemporary business audience. It’s a call to self-reflection that cannot specify the reader’s aims: Scharmer’s readers might create the next Castalia, Second Foundation, Players of the Godgame… or Aum Shinrikyo.
William C. Martel Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge University Press): Martel’s academic level text explores a Theory U blind-spot that is missing from debates about the Iraq War and the War on Terror’s grand strategy: What does victory mean, exactly? His survey of strategists such as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Bernard Brodie, and Martin Van Creveld is a succinct journey through the jungles of military strategic thinking and forceful change writ large. Case studies include the major wars, humanitarian interventions, and stability operations of the past two decades. A good structural model for a PhD and an excellent primer to debate with military strategists and policymakers on their own turf, rather than as activists who can be marginalized in street protests [Excerpt here].
Tim Weiner Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday). The perfect book to read alongside the CIA’s “Family Jewels” and before seeing Robert De Niro’s film The Good Shepherd (2006). Weiner shows how intelligence’s analytical process — like the initiatory orders in the Western magical tradition — can potentially be corrupted by structural secrecy, information silos, organizational politics, and subgroup coalitions. The anecdotes range from operations failures to how old boys’ networks become an in-group elite that is shut off from change. Thus, whilst the intelligence community will debate the validity of Weiner’s research until 2012, this is also a good book for would-be change agents and project managers on what can go wrong without self-reflective practices such as Scharmer’s Presencing and Theory U.
Don Webb When They Came (Henry Wessells). When I first came across him in the mid-1990s, Webb was one of the guiding forces behind Austin’s FringeWare Review and shortly afterwards became High Priest in the Temple of Set. On the surface Webb’s collection is a variation on the mythos of Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, and others gathered from the press, zines, and eldtrich Internet sites. Webb’s deeper purpose is to offer teaching stories — like the path notes of martial artists or Idries Shah’s Nassrudin anthologies — about the psycho-cosmological insights of spiritual dissent. Webb’s essay “Fictive Arcanum” explains how he uses the form of Lovecraftian fiction to communicate initiatory knowledge.
Michael Rosenbaum Kata and the Transmission of Knowledge: In Traditional Martial Arts (YMAA Publication Center): Rosenbaum addresses how martial arts practitioners use patterns to capture ‘tacit’ insights and for ‘tacit’-to-‘explicit’ knowledge transfer. Martial arts “kata” provides the form and self-reflective methodology that then becomes the basis for a sustainable tradition — usually only revealed as fragments in path notes. This is one of the hermetic secrets of George Gurdjieff’s ‘legominism’ for inter-generational and transcultural transmission in his Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950) — although Gurdjieff cited and used practices from dance, carpet-weaving and mythological symbolism. It underpins why ‘agile’ evangelists including Kent Beck and Alistair Cockburn use martial arts frameworks for software engineers to develop self-mastery.
Simon Reynolds Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin) and Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip-Rock and Hip-Hop (Penguin): Reynolds fills an important gap between the Sex Pistols’ demise, the rise-and-fall of Public Image Ltd, and the explosion of hip-hop and new wave in the early 1980s. One of the “strange loop” lessons in Reynolds’ stylised prose is of how innovators pick up on the signals, patterns and sub-currents to create new subcultures — Lovecraftian fiction begets Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge. Rip It Up sent me scurrying back to Gang of Four and Pere Ubu whilst Bring the Noise revives the precise style of NME album reviews. Reynolds succeeds in the benchmark of good music journalism: to inspire you to discover or revisit the artists he profiles, and appreciate the cultural impact of their music.
Garry Mulholland Fear of Music: The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk and Disco (Orion): Mulholland sets out to challenge the classic rock canon with his reviews of Joy Division, New Order, Husker Du, Public Enemy, Portishead and others. Mulholland — like Reynolds — is heavily influenced by the post-punk and new wave genres. For Reynolds and Mulholland, it’s a form of Lorenz imprinting or Anton LaVey’s erotic crystallization inertia. There’s a micro-trend in music journalism here that would be even more interesting if other authors did a similar book on the ’00s and digital natives. Anyone wanna help me convince Disinformation’s Gary Baddeley on the publishing “business case” for this?
Calvin Johnson, K Records
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding The Blank Wall (Quality): Even the most conventional life can take on a frightening edge.
Joyce Cary The Horse’s Mouth (NYRB Classics): Every artists story.
Patrick David Barber, Designer
We just moved across town so it’s been all I can do to keep up with the weekly New Yorker. I dug the recent fiction issue, particularly the Junot Diaz story. Also, a recent Mother Jones issue has a good, long article on species extinction.
Last month (before the move!) I read Michael Chabon’s new one, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins), and enjoyed it a lot. It’s a fertile blend of prefigurative dystopia, noiresque detective pulp, and homey Jewish culture study.
Next on the list is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins). I have a pretty good idea how that one turns out, but it’s important to keep up with my fellow locavores.
Speaking of which, if you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin), well, you’re late, but not too late. This was the book of the year last year and it might just be the book of the decade, all in the As Far As I’m Concerned department. Read it!
I’m also reading The Design of Everyday Objects by Donald Norman (Basic Books). You’ve probably read that one already, but it’s the first time for me. I am enjoying it not least because it was written in 1988 and most of his improvements to things like phones and personal organizers have come true. Yet his advice and analysis are still salient. We may now have phones with digital readouts and synchronized calendars, but a lot hasn’t changed: you can go anywhere and watch your average wired citizen struggle with an
ambiguously designed door handle.
Steven Shaviro, Author, Connected
Warren Ellis Crooked Little Vein (William Morrow). The first prose fiction by comics writer Ellis is a hoot. Sort of like noir detective fiction meets a Hunter-Thompsonesque journey into the heart of American weirdness and depravity. Everything from Godzilla bukkake to saline testicular injections to the creepy, sexually exploitative practices of the very rich. Yet the novel ends up being an inspirational fable about speaking truth to power and about the Net as a potential tool for freedom.
William Gibson Spook Country (Putnam): Science fiction about the recent past (2006). Varieties of stealth and disembodiment, from locative art to cryptography to drug hallucinations to GPS tracking, and the materiality (CIA black technologies, and shipping cargo containers) that underlies it all. Narrated in Gibson’s spare, minimal, yet telling prose: every metaphor is a precise observation.
M. John Harrison Nova Swing (Bantam): Science fiction about the nostalgia for the recent past. It’s the 24th century, and people are still fascinated by the stylings of the 1940s and 1950s. The novel is a spooky, and somewhat morbid, meditation about the mystery of otherness, the allure of self-destruction, the packaging of nostalgia as an illusor comfort, and the ways in which commodification has left us with just the empty shells of experiences we imagine other people to have had.
Roy Christopher, Editor frontwheeldrive.com and Follow for Now
Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books): Explicitly returning to the themes he originally tackled in Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic, 1979), Hofstadter seems happy to be back, like a child returning to a playground after a lengthy hiatus. Not that he hasn’t been flogging these concepts in the meantime in such books as Le Ton Beau de Marot (Basic, 1997), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (Basic, 1995), and Metamagical Themas (Basic, 1985), but he hasn’t approached them this directly since GEB. I Am a Strange Loop is not nearly as splayed or as sprawling as GEB. It’s more springing and spiraling, written with more levity and lilt, more depth than breadth.
James Inman The Greyhound Diary (Lulu): Thank all that is evil that James Inman got on the wrong bus. If he hadn’t, then we wouldn’t have this book. The Greyhound Diary is On the Road for the homeless, Oh, The Places You’ll Go for the chronically mentally ill, and The Grapes of Wrath for people who would never read that book in the first place. It’s a sweet, sloppy slice of America’s yawning underbelly.
David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books): David’s new book became part of my terministic screen when Ryan Lane and I interviewed Peter Morville a few months ago. Since then, it’s been popping up everywhere, so I copped a copy. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s near the top of the pile.
Cormac McCarthy The Road (Vintage): The Road had been on my list since Steven Shaviro wrote about it late last year. Then Brendon Walsh told me he was reading it, then it won the Pulitzer and Oprah endorsed it, so I finally snagged a copy. It’s a bleak and harrowing tale so far, written with a claustrophobic economy. I’m already tempted to say it deserves the attention.
Richard E. Nisbett The Geography of Thought (Free Press): I’ve often wondered what it is about Japanese culture that spawns musical acts like The Boredoms, Melt Banana, Space Streakings, Merzbow, and K.K. Null. I’m not sure if The Geography of Thought is going to solve the mystery, but so far it’s helping. I’m only halfway through it, but Nisbett’s book is an interesting analysis of the fundamental and historical differences between Eastern and Western thought.
A few others in the to-be-read pile:
Amy Cohen The Late Bloomer’s Revolution (Hyperion)
Adisa Banjoko Lyrical Swords: Hip-hop and Politics in the Mix, Vol 1 and 2 (YinSumi Press)
Paul Virilio Speed and Politics (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) (with a new introduction by our friend Benjamin Bratton)
Tibor Fischer Voyage to the End of the Room (Random House)
David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive)
[Above, Jessy browses the stock at Red House Books in Dothan, Alabama. Photo by Roy Christopher.]