Category: Arts and Culture

Hoping to enjoy the game with the guys this year, I read the rules in advance and developed what I thought was a pretty good working knowledge of football before the game started. It didn’t help. Understanding in the abstract what was supposed to be going on did not help to discern where the ball was or who was in possession of the play at any given moment. All I can ever see is a blooming, buzzing confusion of bodies. I can’t tell who has the ball until the play has ended.

After five years of trying (granted, not trying too hard), I have come to the conclusion that the excitement of football is permanently opaque to anyone who didn’t grow up with it. I was as confused at the end of the game as I was at the beginning, despite the bottomless patience of friends. Still, it’s a good opportunity to eat hot dogs and guac and enjoy good company. If I could only grok why it is they whoot! when they do. I’d just love to be able to relate to my father-in-law on this count.

Dylan Tweney has posted an excellent interview with Cory Doctorow on the release of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.” His thoughts on “the tragedy of the commons” and how the situation is reversed in the digital age are especially interesting.

If it’s valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted]. Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn’t a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep s*** grass — where the more you graze, the more commons you get.

He goes on:

The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier — television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.

Just finished watching Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about the invention of modern skateboarding in Santa Monica in the 1970s. I didn’t grow up in LA, but did surf and skate the 70s away, worked in a surf shop throughout my teens, and spent a lot of time reading Surfer and Skateboarder magazines (and later Thrasher). The scene was so different than it is now, and that’s a hard thing to communicate – the zen and the style and the pure inventiveness of everything that was going on in the skate world at that time. Skating is more radical today, but the pioneering part of it is mostly gone. This movie communicates the vibe of the time period so well, it’s eerie. It’s a look at a part of the 70s that never really gets talked about, but that pretty much was my life. Amy didn’t skate a lick, but totally loved it. You just want to grow your hair out, cut an oak deck out of a desk drawer, glom on some urethane Cadillac wheels, and drain a pool. The soundtrack is absolutely righteous.

Amy received some sad news today – photographic historian and friend Peter Palmquist was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Emeryville today. Probably never knew what hit him.

Palmquist had created the world’s largest collection of photographs of early California, and had catalogued and described them meticulously. He was in the process of turning his immense collection over to Yale University. We visited Palmquist in his home in Arcata last July, and spent days going through his amazing archives – he had built six libraries on his property just to house the collection.

He also sponsored Amy’s book of photographs, Surrogate, simply because he believed in her and her work. He chose one unknown artist per year to sponsor, and asked nothing in return.

Amy has had a difficult evening. So many true and poignant cliche’s here, about the way the people who contribute the most to the world are taken from us before their time, about the need to carpe diem because tomorrow you may be hit by a bus, about the tenuousness of life, about the need to tell people whom you appreciate how much you appreciate them…

Palmquist is one of those people most will never hear of but who made their lives count, and who enriches the lives of generations to come by his contributions.

Quite a bit of interesting discussion tagged onto the end of my Unreal Tournament post. Without trying further to identify ambiguous forces like “the cause of violence in America” (note that I never said “the cause” but only implied that it was undoubtedly a cause), I want to ask an honest question of everyone who thinks it’s acceptable for children to play violent video games:

What’s worse: Rape or murder?

If you think murder is worse and you let your kids play games that involve pretending to murder humans or humanoids by the hundreds, then surely you would have no objection to a video game where your character ran around raping women or girls, right?

Those of you who have posted here in defense of murder games: I would very much like to hear your defense of rape games, and to learn why you intend to let your children play them.

The other day I spied a young buck outside The Berkeley Bowl with his pants around his ankles, waddling in boxers, and realized that the detestable fashion of wearing trousers pulled half-way down the butt had finally reached its inevitable conclusion. I’m actually surprised it took this long to happen.

You’d think we would have had enough of Survivor after five seasons, but it’s a guilty pleasure. Once again, I come away from the season with two core observations:

1) Everyone (not virtually everyone, but everyone) looks better with a few days stubble, no makeup, a natural tan, their hair unkempt, a chilled out ‘tude, and no shoes on their feet than they do when they get back to the studio for the follow-up, when you see them in their hair-dos and Sunday-Go-To-Meetings.

2) Democracy is the ultimate leveling mechanism, shaving off both the weak at the bottom and the strong at the top. Trimming out the strong personalities, the good fighters, the smart puzzlers. The winner is always nice but not too nice, gentle but not too gentle, helpful but not too helpful, etc. The winner is, almost by definition, above average, not exceptional. Survivor is a microcosm of our own political system.

For reasons that are opaque to me, an inordinate number of people without basic grammar skills go into, of all things, sign-making as a profession. The result is the ubiquitous phenomenon of quotation marks used inappropriately for emphasis. I was on a Muni train today and saw a professionally printed sign reading:

“WARNING”
You are being videotaped.

In other words, the San Francisco surface rail system is not really warning you – just air-warning you. Pretending to warn you. Mock-warning you. “So-called” warning you. Got to joking with a MacWorld editor about this phenomenon and he turned me onto The Gallery Of “Misused” Quotation Marks, an archive of misused quotation marks in the wild. Hilarious.

Was also amused by the resemblance of this site’s name to my own Archive of Misheard Lyrics.

National Geographic has begun to place their amazing 114-year history of photographic images online in low-rez, watermarked format. I’ve always had a special connection to National Geographic — my parents subscribed throughout my childhood, and I took in much of the world beyond through its pages. This is the kind of database project I would love to have worked on.

I have a few problems with the site, such as the fact that they call the shopping cart the “Product Cart” (like the music biz, all the heart and soul of the artist is boiled down to simple “product”) and the server timeouts calculating totals. I like the concept of having a “lightbox” to store the images I’m interested in.

If you follow through to the shopping cart, you’ll find that you’re charged according to the kind of use you intend to make of the media. I told them I wanted to use an image for a Web editorial for up to five years and was asked to pony up $240.00. Which seems like a lot in the context of a web culture where everything is (seemingly) free, but is really not much when you consider the real and authentic art of the photographers and the integrity of the publication that makes it happen.

In any case, it’s great to see this archive become available.