At least this one is, the one we can see from the little terrace of the micro-apartment DD and I are occupying during my sabbatical here in Salzburg…Kapuzinerberg, named after those Capuchins (doubtless swilling capuccino all the way). We can’t see their craggy outpost from here — a bit to the right, out of frame of our apartment block — but the hill’s pretty nice anyway. Bare trees when we got here april 1, just about all leafed out already (but everyone says it’s been the warmest april on record, we thought we were just doing a favor by bringing that L.A. sun with us…).
No sign of Julie Andrews so far, though many roaming flocks of Italian teenagers.
April 24th, 2009
How good is this. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, aka the Oscar Hut, gave that well-deserved ‘best song’ Oscar tonight to Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová for “Falling Slowly,” the lead song from that lovely little movie Once. And for the first time I can remember they brought a winner BACK on stage after they’d been ushered off (Markéta) so she could make her remarks — Hansard had made his, then they cut away fast so her comments were cut off. Not only a nice decision by the Academy members — a very classy moment for a well-deserved award.
February 24th, 2008
Well it’s a new year, and it took some technical tweaking and my usual long learning curve, but here finally is a link to the slides I put together of the work of the Amsterdam grafitti artist Laser 3.14…whew! [Click here for Laser slides]
p.s. for best (quicker) download use a high-speed connection, and open .zip file to retrieve the QuickTime slide show…L
January 8th, 2008
Well folks, while we’re waiting for that slide show to load…(right)…Yesterday in a local literary-minded bookshop I was browsing around. Nearby, checking out the fiction shelves, were a fortyish dad and his son, who was maybe 11 or 12. They seemed to be picking out a novel for someone. The boy made a few surprisingly sophisticated suggestions; but judging from his offhand comments the father seemed to have read just about everything recent and noteworthy already.
After a few minutes of taking down one book after another and putting it back, the father sighed and said to the boy,
“I can’t wait until you’re old enough to really read.”
I wondered what the kid’s been doing up to now — ! With dads like that, there may be hope for literacy yet…
December 30th, 2007
[in which your correspondent demonstrates that if she had to write to deadline to make a living, herself would have starved by now]
Decided today that it was time to tidy up the ol’ bloggish sitting room, it’s a bit dusty in here… and after looking at my last post [August, for god’s sake] I also decided that I could do a niftier job showing my loyal readers [all 1.6 of them] what Laser 3.14 is about. As soon as I figure out how, I’ll post a humble slide show. L
November 4th, 2007
In the spirit of trickle-not-surge…some August-type thoughts on a cultural favorite of late, graffitti artist in Amsterdam, nom de spraycan Laser 3.14.
Story for me goes back about four years, to Sept 2003…was in A’dam for an academic conference, traipsing around the P.C. Hoofstraat area one afternoon, didn’t know much about the burg yet, maybe my first time in town and was just taking it in, tourist-mode…a district often described in English-language guidebooks as the “Rodeo Drive” of Amsterdam (for those who don’t understand the innate tackiness involved, well…)
anyway turned a corner into a side street between P.C. Hooft and the van Gogh Museum, across from a tidy preschool playground full of lively, cranking kids. Garage door, neon paint, downstairs from a lovely townhouse, saw the tag: “they want you dead or in their lie” — and shot a picture.
I’ve been back to Amsterdam plenty since then, and have been so intrigued by these little thoughts (almost always appearing on temporary construction materials or sites) — it’s almost like the tags are saying ‘welcome back!’ I’ve collected a bunch more pictures in four years, but never actually found any background on the tagger or the work until I was just back from another trip earlier this summer, and found his very snazzy website, http://www.laser314.com, with plenty of details and scores of great pictures of the work by the artist and enthusiasts — great stuff.
L
August 22nd, 2007
Greetings from Amsterdam, where Geert Lovink and his associates are running the New Network Theory conference and we conferees are now embarked on a day-long plenary session of talks by all and sundry worthies in the net culture landscape, au courant…(I realize I did a lecture for a big undergraduate class in this very room a few years ago, strange)…
Kickoff just finished, by Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose current project (and soon-to-be book) appears to be an all-round thrashing of the ‘invisible’ damage being done to culture by Google…
His objections were all reasonable, all the usual: destruction of intellectual property and personal privacy, reshaping (i.e., deforming) authentic culture, corporate and technological opacity and barony, &c. &c. I’m sure the book will sell.
His premise was that we’ve come to talk about Google in theological terms, and that the Google folks themselves encourage this through their familiar “don’t be evil”-type approach to their public communications. He thinks their stated aim to eventually provide universal access to all information is basically cynical at worst, unrealizable at best.
Vaidhyanathan didn’t mention that this notion is hardly new; we might call it the “Alexandrian impulse” after the ancient library, a dream that is alive and well in library/archive circles. Think H.G. Wells’ “world brain,” think Paul Otlet’s gorgeously ruined “Mundaneum” in Brussels, think Vannevar Bush’s technologically-driven version, the “memex”…ideas that I dare say are still the driving visions for most designers and advocates of digital libraries.
OK, it’s idealist, it’s modernist, guilty, guilty. And it’s obviously difficult to square the Alexandrian dream with our persistent (and so American) mistrust of monopolies of any sort. Vaidhyanathan, for example, decries Google’s Book Search project (and their operation of YouTube) as ‘inviting’ a nasty copyright backlash from the media & entertainment industries. But I wonder, if the legal and institutional barriers that maintain indefensible inequities of access to information are ever to be challenged, who better — or larger — a champion might there be than Google to do the heavy lifting, with their capital, lawyers, and pro-social image to promote?
L
June 28th, 2007
Just saw a report on the BBC about the massive denial of service attack being waged by the Russians against Estonia, which has done the most of any Eastern European state to actually shed authoritarianism and enter the 21st century with the rest of us, mainly through canny development of their internet infrastructure and sheer talent. (I was really impressed by the energy and optimism of some Estonian grad students I met a few years ago at a retreat at University of Aarhus in Denmark.) The Estonians have shut their virtual borders for the moment to figure out what to do, but I’m rooting for them and have every hope that with their competence, and support from the rest of us who espouse open societies, that they can outwit these gangsterish Russian tactics.
And a pattern emerges… the Russian tendency to bully neighbors with whom they have disagreements by cutting off resources — whether natural gas or information. anybody still don’t believe that Vlad Putin isn’t the most dangerous national leader on the scene today? L
May 17th, 2007
OK. OK.
I don’t have the blog ‘habit.’ some of us will just come to it slowly, what can I say.
But trust ol’ Bill Moyers (the Jiminy Cricket of journalist ethics) to cut to the heart of the spectre that’s been haunting free speech, and get me back on the GUI page. Put differently, quo vadis you journalists? Can’t keep blaming your funk on cable comedy and bloggers forever, particularly when they’re beating your time.
Just got done watching the second Moyers PBS episode this week, and: (a) the Jon Stewart interview captured everything that makes The Daily Show worth watching; (b) the Josh Marshall (talkingpointsmemo.com) interview gives me hope that actual investigative reporting is still possible in the U.S.
OK, right, Marshall’s talkingpointsmemo.com (go look at it! as if you hadn’t already) is already known by zillions. I was certainly aware of their role in connecting the dots on the U.S. attorneys story. But Moyers’ program tells us why we have to get over the idea that the city newspaper is necessarily the soul of ‘real’ journalism, in the speaking-truth-to-power sense. The dailies were done when it became possible for “competing” papers in the same city to occupy the same newsroom (somehow I still don’t get that), when “objectivity” (aka cult of the single true account) made multiple papers in a single market rendundant.
[Heck, who needs more than one paper in a town when all the papers are objective? Who was it that said when two parties always agree, one is unnecessary?]
But anyway for the last couple of years I’ve been fretting about the prospects for U.S. journalism, not overly sympathetic to the pros who want along with going public, complained that stockholders wanted profits first…and then have carped about the ‘threats’ to all the classic journalistic norms posed by online chatter and observation.
Well, I’m feeling much better now. Journalism (at least its online form) has gone back to basics — reporting, legwork, skepticism, logic — and a good thing too.
April 27th, 2007
I am fated to play intellectual catch-up…but been carrying around this clip for a month-plus.
From the Times Literary Supplement of 1 December 2006. Well it’s a review in an outlet we pointy-heads lust after, but it could make one wonder how that shiv slid in there without one noticing. Keith Miller does the kind of long-form admiration piece on Simon Schama’s recent book & BBC series, Power of Art that anybody would love, made me regret not being over in ol’ Albion to see the show. Miller gives us a plenty to admire about Schama (whom he calls an “archive-wallah” — love that!) and the project, such as his grudging admission that, in Schama’s treatment of Rembrandt,
Prating on about brush strokes has long been somewhat unfashionable, and it’s a brave thing for Schama to do, even if he does so with a light, conversational touch (and a richness of diction that makes his scripts anything but repetitive).
But it couldn’t last, I suppose: snark to our brit cousins is like white on rice, like refrieds on the combo plate. Don’t know about you, but in the very last paragraph, I’d hate to be described as
…lounging like a leather-jacketed Diogenes on the Scala Regia in the Vatican, gazing wistfully over the rooftops of this or that city, shooting the cuffs of a Reservoir Dogs suit and generally behaving like a man in the talons of a severe midlife crisis — [which] only slightly detract[s] from the intense sustained pleasure of shared looking which Schama’s commentary, and the consistently excellent camera work, conspire to convey.
There’s whipsaw for you. Ow.
February 17th, 2007
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