art

I went to see The Examined Life last night, a really, really good film about … philosophy. Wonderfully done. Interviews with eight philosophers (Zizek, Cornell West, Judith Butler and more) about their thoughts and work.

It’s no easy feat making an entertaining feature-length talking-head documentary, especially about philosophy, but Astra Taylor succeeds in this one. Not sure if/when it will be available online, or where you can see it, but here is the trailer:

My big question though is when are the action figures coming out? Cornell West vs. Peter Singer throwdown!

From an old unpublished novel, for a lark, here is Chapter 3:

Vivianne stood inside the walk-in refrigerator, with her back to me, her small wiry body tight and ready to pounce, her mass of curly blond hair bobbing with her head. She wore her crisp white chef’s jacket, with loose-fitting black-and-white checked pants, held a note pad and pen in her little hands. She swore in creative flourishes, in English and French, at the produce.

“Nothing,” she said, turning to me finally, “is personal in my kitchen. There’s no such thing as private personal business in the kitchens of Révolution”

Genevieve, the manager responsible for scheduling had failed to accommodate my request for time off for driving classes; she had referred my application for Tuesday nights off to Vivianne. I pressed my case. She walked past me out of the refrigerator.

“This is a collective kitchen. We,” she continued, sweeping her hand around the room, as if showing me her kitchen and staff for the first time. Julie rushed into the kitchen, taking her pink, puffy winter jacket off and she hurried by us, muttering an apology for her tardiness, which Vivianne ignored. “We are a team, a unit,” she continued. “One for all, Oscar. It’s like a, like a … battalion in, you know, a … an army here. The marines. No man left behind, that sort of thing.”

[more...]

Previously, on Blind Spot:
Chapter One
Chapter Two

Have I ever mentioned that I wrote a novel? I finished Blind Spot in 2005, sent it out, got a stack of rejections. It’s been sitting in various formats of a drawer for years now, and I figured it was time to release it into the wild.

The about goes something like this:

A novel about learning to drive, dying student drivers, terrorists, the CIA, an anarchist driving instructor, and one, or more, murders.

And here is the beginning of Chapter One:

He talked about the car crash all through the evening shift. Sylvain was shaken, true, but there was something reverential about his tone, as if he felt honoured to be the universe’s first chosen beholder of these deaths, and now that the two of us were alone, finishing the last of the kitchen clean-up, he grew more animated in his descriptions, more precise, more excited. His eyes sparkled as he spoke.

It was incredible, he said. Just incredible. The blood, the bone fragments. The damage done to a human body.

The sound of the crash had woken him at 7:12 a.m. that morning, and he had rushed out of his Villeray apartment, wearing only a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, despite the cool of the October morning. He expected survivors, he said, and took his cell phone with him, dialing 911 on the way down the stairs. The little red car had smashed head-on into a poorly-placed concrete divider, and as he rushed towards the steaming metal, Sylvain lost hope of finding anyone alive. The damage done to the automobile was frightening, and he braced himself for the carnage he would find inside.

“Have you ever seen a really bad car accident?” he asked me, suddenly. “I mean close up, I mean with the bodies, I mean before it gets cleaned up? Have you ever seen what actually happens to people?” He wasn’t interested in my answer to that question, and he pushed on with an uncomfortable mix of glee and horror, giving me more details I didn’t want to hear. The smashed windshield, jutting bits of metal, and descriptions of blood and bodies, the angle of one of the victim’s arms. “Pointing in all the wrong directions,” Sylvain said. “It was so weird.” He rested his chin on his mop, sombre and somehow pitying my lack of knowledge of the world. “You have no idea, Oscar,” he said, and the lights glinted off the shining tile of the floor, “how terrible it really is. How really terrible when you see it up close like that. These were people talking and breathing and all of a sudden they’re gone. I’m not religious,” he continued, cleaning again as he spoke, paying close attention to the floor, moving the mop in slow figure eights, the cleansing symbols of infinity, over and over in front of him. “But it’s scary seeing a body moments after the soul disappears. You have no idea.”

I did have an idea but instead of saying so, I just nodded. [more...]

It’s available in multiple formats:

• I’ll be publishing chapters weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• I’ll be podcasting each chapter weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• You can download the pdf (free!), or epub ebook (free!)
• You can buy the softcover.

I’ll be exploring more channels for getting it out there (Smashwords, Shortcovers, Podiobooks etc.) in the coming weeks.

And of course kind feedback is always appreciated.

From Superbomba’s superb flickr stream.

From Oren Lavie:

Oren Lavie’s flash site (sigh).

And a live set on Morning Becomes Eclectic.

[via @mdash]

Knitted animation, a music video of the song Les peaux de lièvres, from Montreal band Tricot Machine… wow:

[via Knitguy]

Wi-fi structures and people shapes, from Dan Hill:

One of the ideas I’ve been exploring relates to how urban industry – in the widest sense of the word – in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today’s information-rich environments – like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office – are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing. [more...]

My friend Oana Avasilichioaei recently released her latest book of poetry, feria: a poempark (amazon link):

Oana Avasilichioaei deftly dismantles language and landscape in a whirling collection of poetry. feria is a poetic frolic in Vancouver’s Hastings Park eluding boundaries of landscape, time and narrative. Avasilichioaei writes and rewrites over this image, interpreting its evolving layers. Park and book coincide, and the author finds herself asking what is natural, what is language, and whose voices are we listening to. This is a book that pulls the reader into a wild ride, leaving you breathless but exilirated by the end.

Part of the project included shooting a beautiful film, which was done by another friend of mine, Theirry Collins:

I’m at the annual conference of the Open Content Alliance, hosted by the Internet Archive. They’re just launching their open source Flip Book. Very nice, and you can embed it in your site, to whit:

Pretty neat, eh?

What a wonderful site is BibliOdyssey … :

Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart….eclectic and rare book illustrations derived from many digital repositories, accompanied by some background commentary.

A cornucopia of eye candy for biblionerds. You can buy the book too. Pure visual joy.

Last Friday, I went to the premier of the fabulous NFB film, Memoire des Anges, by Luc Bourdon (thanks, Matt). The movie is a love letter to Montreal of the 50s and 60s, and to the brilliant film-making that came out of the NFB at the time. It’s made up entirely of footage from NFB, an impressionistic collage of the city in the past, through the eyes & celluloid of the grand men (and some women) of innovative documentary, Gilles Groulx, Hubert Aquin, Richard Notkin, Suzanne Angel, Claude Jutra, Jacques Godbout, Arthur Lipsett, Denys Arcand, Tom Daly and scores of others.

Bourdon avoids all sentimentality, and instead gives us the faces, hands, feet of the people of the city, the roadways, bricks, snow, sun and chairs that define a place. There’s no narrative to speak of, though clever bits of story are peppered into the whole, often by splicing footage from numerous films, black and white to colour, a decade or two apart, to make something coherent, if fleeting.

For Montrealers, there is the added fun of picking out street corners and buildings treasured, hated, or gone. But the film works on its own as a document of a time gone, rooted in the look and sound of a city, the voices and faces of its inhabitants, and as a piece of art beyond all the bits that went into it. It’s really a marvel, not least for the rich sound of Paul Anka melting the hearts of the girls in the audience.

And with all the talk of cutting arts funding, I can’t help look to the NFB of the past, the creativity and innovation that forged in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of our country. More of that please, less mediocre crap.

So to Federal Arts funding I say: less Pit Pony, and more (old school) NFB.

Ah, art, I love you sometimes:

This is a cover of Kate Bush’s 1978 (!) song, Wuthering Heights, about Emily Bronte’s book.

Jeremy Mayer’s typewriter robots:

[link] [via JacketCopy]

Covers is a beautiful weblog dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design, run by Fwis, a design firm based out of Brooklyn, NY and Portland, OR. They post pics of covers, comment on them, and invite outside commentary.

Some other nice covers can be found here and here.

[via spectraversa]

Matt just released his beautiful new book, Ojingogo. (I don’t think you can buy it online yet.)

I’m not a great reader of graphic novels, but I must say I love Drawn & Quarterly’s store on Bernard, and the attention graphic novelists, their publishers, and their readers give to the object of the book. The D&Q bookstore exudes a love of books, everything about them, that’s rare to see these days. Why not pop in and browse for a while, before buying a few books, especially Ojingogo?

This American Life can be a bit much at times, but some wonderful radio/podcasting comes out of the show. Ira Glass and gang often manage to get such moving stories out of people, with an underlying concept that people on the radio and in podcasts should sound like people.

I’m a very minor closet Phil Collins fan (Against All Odds and In the Air Tonight), but even if you HATE Phil Collins, check out this piece with him on the show.

It’s extraordinary audio. It starts with a silly premise, heartbroken girl wants to talk to Phil about heartbreak, then weaves its way from mildly cringe-inducing humour into something else altogether. By the end, all sorts of barriers have come down, and its turned into one of the most personal and moving interviews about loss and art I’ve ever heard.

Download or listen to it quickly: TAL’s podcasts are up for a week only, and this came out last week sometime.

[LINK]

Humans are gone. The city remains. 23 Skidoo is a beautiful and chilling 1964 short, by Julian Biggs, from the NFB’s beta screening room. Wonderful sound track (Kathleen Shannon and Ted Haley) to go along with the lonely images.

For those wondering, “23 skidoo” is a slang term from the 1910s meaning, more or less, to leave suddenly (so says Wikipedia in any case).

The National Film Board of Canada has launched their beta player, with a cornucopia of wonderful documentaries, shorts, animations and abstract films. Established in 1938, and then reincarnated in the 1950s, the NFB was one of those great Canadian enterprises from a time when Canada was interested in doing new and challenging things. The NFB explored new territory and set the standard in documentary-making and animation. So we applaud their efforts to get these treasures in front of people again. Congrats to Matt & the team.

Here are some of my recommendations:

• Golden Gloves, Gilles Groulx, 1961, 27 min 43 sec
  A beautiful documentary about a young black Montreal boxer, Ronald Jones, and others in the Golden Gloves competition. Main problem: this is the English dubbed version, not the original French. wtf?
• Bill Reid, Jack Long, 1979, 27 min 50 sec
  A film about Haida sculptor, Bill Reid.
• Le merle, Norman McLaren, 1958, 4 min 39 sec
  The master experimental animator, playing with a Quebec folk song.
• Debout sur leur terre, Maurice Bulbulian, 1983, 54 min 19 sec
  Life in three Inuit villages in Quebec.

And of course, The Big Snit:

See some more recommendations at MetaFilter.

DadaDodo works rather differently than Dissociated Press; whereas Dissociated Press (which, incidentally, refers to itself as a “travesty generator”) simply grabs segments of the body of text and shuffles them, DadaDodo tries to work on a larger scale: it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.

The theory here is that, with a large enough corpus, the generated sentences will tend to be grammatically correct, but semantically random: exterminate all rational thought.

[link]

Youtube has just launched the Screening Room, “connecting films and audiences in the world’s largest theater.” They launched with the truly fabulous NFB short animation, The Danish Poet (what’s not to like about Norway, poets, true love and falling cows?).

I’ve been waiting for more of this kind of thing for a few years now, and very happy that NFB is part of it. I just hope they make more and more available to us.

The Smithsonian is putting a collection of public domain photos on Flickr, part of the Flickr Commons project.

Here’s an example, with this curious description:

After parcel post service was introduced [in the US] in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Wordle.net is fun. Here is this post wordled:

We just hit 1,500 items in the LibriVox catalog. The lucky audiobook is: Four Great Americans, by James Baldwin.

This was the 96th book published in May, and we are on track for a 100-book month, which would smash our previous record of 77 books set in July 2007.

Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life….
Art as the redemption of the man of knowledge–-of those who see the terrifying and questionable character of existence, who want to see it, the men of tragic knowledge.
Art as the redemption of the man of action–-of those who not only see the terrifying and questionable character of existence but live it, want to live it, the tragic war-like men, the hero.
Art as the redemption of the sufferer–as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, diefied, where suffering is a form of great delight.

Friedrich Nietzsche in Will to Power, fragment 853

Dante’s Inferno: Cori reads; Gustave Doré illustrates; and lucid videoifies.

Dan Hill has a wonderful posting of Monocle design notes. There’s much good and thought-provoking stuff in there, particularly if you are interested in text as a medium, and the thinking behind the next generation of media, which sees web and print as different, and complementary, and builds both accordingly. This struck me particularly for some reason:

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment – whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online – with clean, permanent URL structures – thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites. At some point, we could begin to aggregate responses to Monocle editorial, Technorati-style, perhaps (it’s a development of a strategy I’d outlined at the BBC, which there was also predicated on ‘tear-off strips’ of content as well, enabling people to grab BBC media and build a blog entry around it).

Adam Greenfield wasn’t so taken by Monocle, which echoes my reaction years ago to Tyler Brulé’s previous magazine venture, Wallpaper: basically, a fancy mag for rich people who like to covet well-designed, and really expensive, things, and travel to exotic places to have experiences other people aren’t smart/rich/good-looking/adventurous/enlightened enough to contemplate. (Which is fine, but usually doesn’t interest me for all that long).

I’ve never read Monocle, and though I admire the web site, it’s never pulled me in for whatever reason. It might just be because the bespoke tailoring is for a kind of suit I don’t like to wear.

Since we were kids, most of us got emotionally attached to things that aren’t real: cartoons, teddy bears, and talking cars, for instance. Usually these attachments are built on the stories that surround, for instance, our teddy bears – stories we create. In the case of cartoons, it’s other people’s stories.

But there’s something different, exciting, and scary happening here. Watch this, and tell me what you feel when a) the guy kicks the machine, and b) the machine slips on the ice.

I found it heartbreaking watching the machine try to keep its balance on the ice. “Go little guy, go!” I thought. And I thought the guy was a real jerk for kicking it… yet I’ve kicked many a machine that hasn’t done what I wanted it to do.

UPDATE: zeke points out that this is a military robot…I know! That’s what’s crazy, but when those feeble feet were skidding on the ice I reacted – involuntarily – with pity.

Here’s another one that really got me emotionally:

The movements of these giant contraptions are so organic that it’s hard *not* to think of them as sentient somehow, and to react accordingly.

Finally, here’s an amazing CGI woman, not quite lifelike, but damn close.

So what’s striking about all this is how important movement is in our emotional reactions to things. Part of that suggests that we’re getting closer to loveable robots. But another thing is to consider the information that gets lost in text-based communication.

from the onion:

LOS ANGELES—The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

The strike, which scholars say could be the longest since 1951, when American novelists may or may not have voluntarily committed to a six-month work stoppage, has brought an immediate halt to all new novels, novellas, and novelettes from coast to coast, affecting no one.

ha. great.

[via Matt]

MontrealTechWatch has a few pics from YulGeek entrepreneurs’ desks, including mine.

Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor. Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a sculpture powered entirely by wind:

See another vid. And from TED.

A good friend of mine is a documentary film maker; more than that. His latest film, about violinist Malcolm Goldstein is a challenging and brilliant work of art in itself, much more than a typical portrait documentary.

The market for a film like that is small – a few festivals, hundreds, maybe a few thousand people will see it in a theatre. TV will never pick up something like this, not even arty cable. Certainly no commercial movie houses.

A movie like this — based so much on sound, and on the scale of the image — ought to be seen in theatre, where the full work of art can be appreciated and experienced as it should be. Big screen, big sound, silence, darkness.

That’s true enough.

Still, as a filmmaker, you are stuck in the constraints of festivals and distributors for your distribution; yet the film is made, and there are people – like me – who would like to see it, but cannot.

This is a ramble, and it’s obvious where I am going with it. But I just watched this beautiful documentary yesterday, on Vimeo – a free service – and what can I say? OK, it’s not the big screen, but it is beautiful, moving, fascinating. If you’re a film maker, put your stuff online, like this [best to watch it full screen]:

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

Sometimes I wish I was still a kid:

[via: infosthetics.com]

Chris Hughes wins with his entry of Life is Life, by Opus. Truly the worst song in the world.

Beer and cookies will be offered, for free, next time Chris is in Montreal.

From Infovore:

I’ve written before about how wonderful Twitter can be as a messaging bus for physical objects. The idea of overhearing machines talking about what they’re doing is, to my mind, quite delightful.

So when I found an untapped data source for such an object, I thought it was worth having a poke. Half an hour of scripting later and Tower Bridge was on Twitter. It tells you when it’s opening and closing, what vessel is passing through, and which way that vessel is going. The times are determined by taking the scheduled time for the “lift” and subtracting five minutes for the opening, and adding five minutes for closing – the official site suggests that, at rush hour, lifts should take five minutes to open and close tops.

Follow the Tower Bridge on Twitter.

I don’t know what to think of this, exactly, but it’s kind of neat. I wonder what inanimate object I’d like to hear from in Montreal?

A Rails conference, in Toronto, says:

RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture. We’re sick of the sold-out and over-sold labradoodle shows that are now staged with alarming frequency. In response, we’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.

Nice poster.

Footloose is surely one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1980s, but these years later it’s not Kevin Bacon “dancing away oppression” that we remember most, but rather the searing sounds of Kenny Loggins’ unforgettable theme song, Footloose, which surely was the soundtrack of a generation of youth who were “yearning burning for some/ Somebody to tell [them] / That life ain’t passing [them] by …” I was one of those youths who yearned. Burned.

I always assumed that the great Loggins wrote that song after a long cocaine bender had eaten up all cash reserves and back taxes were due, but it turns out the story behind the classic songsmithing is much, much, much more inspiring.

Here is a documentary film called: Jimmy Buffet & Footloose.

[via: wfmu]

From an article by Andy Rutledge, about design & martial arts, but applicable to anything related to life, I think:

In short, it is simply not enough to be highly competent under the best of circumstances, when you’re filled with inspiration and all the gears are turning. What matters most—and most often—is how competent you are when things are not going well.

[more...]

This week’s Wednesday Picks from earideas include: the democratization of innovation; the scientific genius of Leonardo da Vinci; and master short story writer Mavis Gallant.

Check it out.

From Matt:

I’m not a gadget/gear junkie, but the mechanical engineer in me (I didn’t like much of my engineering courses, but I enjoyed fluid dynamics) thought this photo was pretty darned neat:

A closeup [below], notice the visual distortion caused by the shockwaves… cool huh? The jet is not yet supersonic, but is in the transonic region. The air around the plane is accelerated to supersonic speed when it encounters an obstruction (like a bump on the fuselage). Shocks within the supersonic flow (often causing it to decelerate to subsonic conditions) produce large gradients in air density and index of refraction, bending the light differentially on either side of the shock. Those pressure waves can be seen radiating from specific points on the aircraft (including the canopy). The above was compiled from various people who emailed me!

[photo by BZ]

Never seen a shot of the city from this perspective:

[pic by caribb; via spacingmontreal]

Something like this maybe?

see more here.

great parallel video(s) about the creation of the universe:

[via infosthetics]

Ever wonder what those wifi and rfid and gsm waves in the air actually *look* like?

Sorta like this:

See more fictional radio spaces here.

[via infoesthetics]

David Byrne talks about music and business in a great article in Wired.

What is music?
First, a definition of terms. What is it we’re talking about here? What exactly is being bought and sold? In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn’t take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that’s not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory.

Technology changed all that in the 20th century. Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — became a product, a thing that could be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. This upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact. I spend plenty of time with buds in my ears listening to recorded music, but I still get out to stand in a crowd with an audience. I sing to myself, and, yes, I play an instrument (not always well).

We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

All this is what we talk about when we talk about music.

[more...]

As far as I know, this is the first youtube vid using LibriVox audio. This is DE. Wittkower reading Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism. Music is Richard Wagner’s Rheingold. I’m not sure the providence of the images.

I haven’t been posting much to my project poetic spam, since I found out there are many spam poem sites out there. But I just published one today, which I thought was pretty moving:

I used to believe the stock market
would make me rich.
All I needed
to do was pick the right stock
and I’d be a millionaire.

In March
of 2000,
I decided
that stock
was PALM,

which I bought the morning
it went public.

Within days
my $1,000 investment was worth $600,
and my fantasies of instant
wealth
were swept out the door.

My mistake
was a desire.

I think the first “serious” novel I read was Mailer’s Naked and the Dead.

In the past year, Mailer gone. Vonnegut gone. Bellow gone. I wonder which high school favourites are left? I’ll have to think about that one.

RIP, mr. mailer.

Dear Mr. McGuire,

Thank you for your submission to House of Anansi Press. Anansi has been experiencing a severe backlog in submissions that has resulted in very long delays. We apologize for the wait.

After careful consideration and considerable review, our editorial board has decided that, although you demonstrate writing potential, Blind Spot does not suit our current list. Please feel free to submit again if you have another manuscript for us to consider. We wish you all the best in finding a suitable publisher for your work.

I sent Anansi a query (standard cover letter and 30 page sample of the novel) in September 2005 (two years ago). They responded to the query asking for the full manuscript in October 2006 (one year ago). And this arrived a year later. To recap: submitted the novel 2 years ago, finally got rejection today.

Question: is this a standard form letter or is it encouraging. I *think* it’s just a form letter, though I might call them to ask.

This is the last response I was expecting, so now I can go ahead with my plans to publish Blind Spot online, (free audio, free bloggy-text, free pdf, and bound copies from lulu.com for anyone who actually wants to buy it). Stay tuned for news.

And I have started editing Novel Number Two … it’s coming along well. Hope to have it in shape by the end of December.

Matt sketched barcampmtl#3:

That’s me yammering about data.

In the past couple of weeks, I went to see some public lectures at McGill and elsewhere: the first was Amy Goodman, of DemocracyNow, giving the keynote at the ReDefining Media conference. Then I went to see cognitive psychologist, Stephen Pinker talking about language and the human mind. Finally, I saw management guru David Maister (choice quote: “just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s easy”) at PodcampBoston.

All three were good, interesting, intellectually stimulating.

But, the question is, given that I can (and do) see Amy Goodman on the net, whenever I like; and given that I can see Stephen Pinker present in video in, say, TEDTalks; and given that I could just read Maister’s book & blog posts; why do I want to go to physically see them? What is the value that I get by actually being there?

I had dinner during PodCampBoston2 with a good group: Sylvain Grand’Maison, Neil Gorman, Julien Smith and Anita from LibriVox. And we were batting around ideas about why that physical presence brings more to you than just reading text, listening to audio, or watching a video.

Some theories:

1. 2-way experience
Being there means that you are somehow engaged (or think you are engaged) in a two way communication with someone. I wonder though, in a big lecture hall (both Goodman & Pinker were speaking to hundreds, and I certainly had no sense that they were communicating with me, much less that I was communicating with them) whether this applies. Maybe our subconscious minds trick us into thinking we’d be able to really communicate, even if our conscious minds know that’s unlikely.

2.sharing the experience
Maybe somehow you “get” “more” (more what? how?) from seeing a person live with a group of other people. Is it that you will later be able to discuss it? How does this work?: if you go alone, and don’t know anyone there who you will discuss with later, this one doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’s something though about being a part of a greater community that shares knowlege? collective unconscious? Hmm, I don’t know about this – though certainly if people you know are going, you’d like to be there too.

3. more information
In person, “more” information is transmitted. This one gets my bet as the most likely, though I don’t quite know what it means. but beyond the explicit information (ie, “here are 7 ways be be effective: make a list, make deadlines…” etc), seeing someone live transmits a richer breadth of information. voice, body, brainwaves… i don’t know. somehow information is transmitted more easily (for me) and with a sort of 3 dimensional context that you can never get from text alone, but more information as well, not contained in the explicit info; for me personally audio is a better way to understand concepts (probably that’s not true for everyone; and for detailed knowledge, text is always better); and video is “better” I think, though I prefer the flexibility of audio – you can listen while you do other things. But live, has something more than all that.

Probably it’s a mix of all three, but i think #3 is the most interesting. But the question is what exactly do you get that is *more* … ? any ideas?

Other ideas:
* seeing someone famous or smart in person gives you some perceived smartness and famousness in the eyes of others … when you tell others about the smart/famous person you saw.
* smartness and famousness actually rub off on you – and you get smarter and famouser by seeing someone smart/famous
* seeing someone live *forces* you to pay attention … you don;t have the same distractions as you would when reading, or listening at home (computers, other people etc).

Any more ideas?

Warning:

Transcriber’s Note: These memoires were not written for children, they may outrage readers also offended by Chaucer, La Fontaine, Rabelais and The Old Testament.

Found that on the Gutenberg page for The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova … I owe the audio of chapter 10 from vol 1, over at LibriVox.

From the Telegraph:

All the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize could be made available online in a radical move being considered by publishers, it was reported today…

Negotiations are said to be in progress with the British Council to digitise the six shortlisted novels so they can be downloaded in full, all over the world.

It is hoped the initiative will capture new audiences – particularly in Asia and Africa – who may be unable to access the actual books….

Those behind the venture hope it will boost, rather than detract from sales of the hard copy as readers who download the novel online, may be inspired to buy a paper version for themselves.

More than 10,000 publishers have already signed up to Google’s book-scanning project, which makes part of selected books available online. Initial results from the programme have suggested that publishing the tasters has increased sales of the books.

Note: emphasis added.
Questions/comments:
-does that mean online for free?
-hey, googlebooks (maybe) proves the point that giving it away might sell more (will be nice to have more than doctorow’s anecdotal evidence)
-I was just saying the other night that the open movement is not/will not be successful for any moral reasons, but because it will be better at doing certain things.

(vie michael geist)

The Facebook Review:

The first … Literary Review that uses Facebook as its means of publishing, of marketing, and of editing. We are essentially an online magazine with the (titular) difference of location. Our manifesto is humble and somewhat weak-kneed. Apologies. All we want is to publish the best work by Facebook members and to do so free-of-charge, free-of-cost, and completely within the confines of the Facebook network and software environment.

Mostly, nice, I think. Suggestion: make a parallel site on the real Internet. Interesting, though.

Small World 2007, Nikon’s microscopic photography competition:

First: you can get updated about new releases via twitter, by following http://twitter.com/librivox (seems not to have updated today?)

Next: The last few LibriVox releases are all pretty cool.

South! The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917
by Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton’s most famous expedition was planned to be an attempt to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic, to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, by way of the Pole. It set out from London on 1 August 1914, and reached the Weddell Sea on January 10, 1915, where the pack ice closed in on the Endurance. The ship was broken by the ice on 27 October 1915. The 28 crew members managed to flee to Elephant Island, bringing three small boats with them. Shackleton and five other men managed to reach the southern coast of South Georgia in one of the small boats (in a real epic journey). Shackleton managed to rescue all of the stranded crew from Elephant Island without loss in the Chilean’s navy seagoing steam tug Yelcho, on August 30, 1916, in the middle of the Antarctic winter. (Summary from Wikipedia)

As the last section of this project we include a short original recording by Ernest Shackleton about the expedition.

Democracy in America Vol. I
by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he found a thriving democracy of a kind he had not seen anywhere else. Many of his insightful observations American society and political system, found in the two volume book he published after his visit, still remain surprisingly relevant today.

Star Born
by Andre Norton

Andre Norton’s “Star Born” pictures a human colony in another galaxy, driven away from Earth generations ago by a repressive government. Considered outlaws, the colonists are in permanent hiding.

They have developed friendship and cooperation with a local race of “mermen” who are equally at home on land or sea. But that race only took to the sea to escape a malevolent power that hunted them and killed them violently for sport – Those Others.

With a global decline in the population and reach of Those Others, contacts are few and the humans have no direct knowlege of them. So it is a major surprise when Dalgard, a human scout on his coming-of-age expedition, along with his “knife-brother” Sssuri of the mermen, run into a party of Those Others who are bent on reclaiming hideous weaponries left behind in one of their abandoned cities… and find that they are being aided by new arrivals from Earth!

OK so I said a while back that if I have not heard from the publisher about Blind Spot (my old, fatally-flawed first novel; i have a newer one to shop around now) by the end of September, I would do something with it. Options:

1. make an audio version (maybe with some LibriVox friends) and podcast it (say a chap a week)
2. publish it in sections online – in serial format (say a chap a week)
3. do a print-on-demand lulu.com version, for friends who want to buy a hard copy
*4. publish online in a wiki – so that either: people can easily copyedit for me (ha!), or, more radically, the text could be modified substantially (????)
5. a combo of the above

Votes?

*Note: I have some hesitation about 2 & 3, because I will soon be shopping around a second novel to publishers – and I think maybe that publishing the other one online/with lulu might be considered poorly by publishing houses. Self-publishing still carries a stigma. So I don’t want to be tarred with a Vanity brush. Maybe that’s silly.

And maybe I should put my money where my distributed media mouth is, suck it up, and put it out there.

The fabulous Nora Young has just launched a new podcast (that also happens to be a CBC Radio* show), called Spark. Covering technology, art, society, it also aims to get more interactive feedback from the net. Comments, participation, stories and the like. As with all of Nora’s radio work, it’s good good stuff.

The next episode has a segment about the Warbike:

Did you know that almost anywhere that you go in a city you’ll be sharing space with someone’s private wireless computer network? All of their personal communication—e-mail, love messages, bank passwords, credit card numbers, and bizarre surfing habits—will be passing through your body without your awareness. Who are they, and how do you feel about sharing space with their personal life?

The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?

So, have a listen, and go comment on their blog (to help show CBC management that people on the web care about content).

UPDATE: also forgot to mention, they’re using podsafe/creative commons music on the show. sweet.

*NOTE: Radio shows are just like podcasts, except that you have to listen to them at specific times (often based on a “schedule” that a small group of people determine arbitrarily), and instead of being able to hear them on your computer, or put them on your portable mp3 player, you have to buy a special “radio receiver.” Radio receivers are devices that pick up radio signals (much like wifi), but are usually single-purpose machines – ie for audio only, no email, internet etc.

Normally Saturday Night Live music performances are pretty terrible (don’t know if the show’s even still on? do they still have bands?) … But I’ve seen a few good/impressive ones.

Sugarcubes: Birthday
This was the first time I’d heard Bjork, and I thought what the hell is this? I’d never heard anything like it.

Neil Young: Keep on Rockin In the Free World
Normally SNL performances were insipid affairs, but check out how Neil just rips it up on this one, just gets more and more intense, till that solo at the end. Man. That’s Rock n Roll. And he was an old man even then (sometime in the 90s I think).

Soundgarden: Burden in My Hand
I was hoping to find the Butthole Surfers, and then Pearl Jam’s crazy performance where Eddy Vedder climbs all over the amps and makes a pro-choice speech, but couldn’t: here’s Soundgarden instead!

(thanks Kara)

The New Yorker has a fascinating story, about the “discovery” of a 75 year old virtuoso, genius pianist, Joyce Hatto, that turns out to be a hoax. What’s so interesting – to me anyway – is how the internet – and brilliant grassroots marketing, fraudulent tho it was – created the myth bought by many mainstream music journalists.

The whole thing, rather than being tawdry, is somehow touching, romantic, sad, and beautiful in a perverse sort of way.

Here a podcast interview with the writer of the story.

Hey, sweet. Montreal video maven Casey McKinnon, of Galacticast and A Comic Book Orange, has an article in the (UK) Guardian, How Do You Beat Youtube, about what needs to happen in the online vid platform space.

Congrats.

UPDATE: Mat has an interesting response, from a consumer’s point of view. And he’s right on.

Every time I get a nicely layered Laika coffee, and watch the beauty of that first stir, I think to myself: If I ever make a movie, this will be the opening shot. Today I realized that with my little macbook pro isight camera, I could film it, and get that first shot I’ve always wanted. Now to make the rest of the film…Hmm there’s a nice gimmick boing boing would like: a full-length feature film, made entirely with a built-in MBP isight camera. Who’s in?

Stirring coffee @ Laika from Hugh and Vimeo.

See some static pics of laika coffee at the new photo sharing site, flickr.

Tom Waits: Take Me Home

Randy Newman: I Think It’s Going To Rain Today

Elton John: Tiny Dancer

Michael Geist on HMV’s decision to drop the price on back-catalog CDs:

This week, HMV announced that it was reducing the price on hundreds of back-catalog CDs generating a surprising amount of news coverage (Post, CBC). The move is good for everyone – the recording industry gets an important retail outlet to reduce prices on increasingly hard-to-find CDs (their largest retail outlets such as Wal-Mart do not carry many older titles), HMV gives a boost to music sales at a time when digital downloads, DVDs and video games command a growing share of the market, and consumers may find that the $20 sticker shock on some older CDs disappears. Yet leave it to CRIA to use the opportunity to spin this as a copyright reform story. HMV said absolutely nothing about the issue, because high-priced, older CDs have little to do with P2P file sharing or copyright law. CRIA’s Graham Henderson claims, however, that “it’s an effort to stem the tide of illegal downloading that threatens retailers and everyone else in the recording industry” and argues that other countries have reduced P2P through copyright reform while “a succession of Canadian governments have sat on their hands and done nothing.”

[more...]

So from a Canadian perspective in all this music biz debate about P2P/copyright/downloading, the real question ought to be not: how much money are record companies making/losing? but rather: how many active “professional” music artists are there in Canada now? Is that number increasing or decreasing? If it’s increasing (which I think it must be) then we should ask why? As in: does rampant P2P have a positive or negative impact on the number of professional musicians in Canada? And if it’s positive, then you’d have to conclude that there is an overall benefit to P2P, regardless of what the CRIA and others on the business end have to say, since really copyrights are theoretically about creating incentives to make art. Negative, and you’d have the opposite conclusion. (Assuming you could get the “right” conclusions out of your data).

I have no idea what the stats are on professional musicians (do any of you?). And how would you define that? The number of musicians who make money from their work (many)? Or the number who live off their work (fewer)? Or the number of millionaires (very few)? It would be interesting to see these stats.

Does anyone know of such stats?

Shoot, when I did my “research” before putting up poeticspam.com I didn’t find any sites dedicated to the poetry of spam. Or at least, I didn’t think I did.

I just came across spam-poetry.com … which appears to have been at it since 2003 (!). And now I find spampoetry.org AND poemsmadefromspam.blogspot.com/ AND spam poems

What the hell was wrong with google that day? or, what the hell was wrong with me?

Ah well, surely there is room in the world for more than a few online spam poetry journals? A technicality: spam-poetry is poetry composed of the subject lines from spam. Whereas poetic spam maintains spam in its purest form.

But to all of you: please consider submitting a few spam poems.

When I was a kid I spent summers at my uncle’s farm in Ontario. All my cousins are older than me – and the youngest was Moira, so she spent the most time with me I guess. In 1980 I was 6 years old, and Moira was probably in her late teens, and I remember memorizing (some of) the words to the Billie Joel tune, Still Rock n Roll to Me, which played on the radio all that summer. Later, in 1983-84, another cousin from Ontario, Rose, lived with us for a year in Montreal. When she left, she gave me two tapes, the first I ever owned: David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, and Queen’s The Works.

And so, here are some more musical memories from childhood:

Billie Joel: It’s Still Rock n Roll to Me.

David Bowie: China Girl
[Note: I think this is the stranges video I've ever seen. UPDATE: and that's stevie ray vaughn on guitar, by the way]

Queen: Radio Ga Ga
[Note: as I write this, the radio tells me that guitarist Brian May was awarded his doctorate today in atstrophysics, from Imperial College London, with a dissertaition titled: "Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud"]

So I just started a new little project, a literary journal called Poetic Spam…deets:

Poetic Spam is a literary journal that celebrates the poetry of spam.

Submission guidelines:

1. poetic spam submissions must be legitimate spam (email or comment), whose poetic quality glows through its spamminess
2. you may submit spam snippets, rather than the enitre spam message
3. you may reformat the linebreaks etc.
4. you may NOT add or remove or rearrange words
5. all poetic forms (sonnets, haiku, free verse, etc) are accepted
6. if you wish to be credited, please include your name and URL

Please submit your poetic spam to:

submissions [AT] poeticspam [DOT] com

submissions are open, so send em along if you got em.

Sometime-Montrealer, occasional yulblogger, and fiction-writer Jon Evans has an article in the Walrus, called: Apocalypse Soon: The Future of Reading, about books, ebooks, the Internet, and publishing.

Starting para:

A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

Bit late for the Friday Youtube Mixed Tape, but here it is anyway. Tacky tearjerkers from mid-eighties, that are still fun to listen to (for a while anyway):

Foreigner: I Wanna Know What Love Is

Corey Hart: Never Surrender

And, of course:
Bonnie Tyler: Total Eclipse of the Heart

Reuben did a roadtrip through the States, and among other things, took pics of Church billboards. Fruits of his (and God’s) labour include: “Our Church is Cool with AC and JC.” And:

See the slideshow here.

A short work of genius:

The Dove (short), 1968 (mp4).

(via Martine)

Says da boing:

The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print any of over 200,000 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron.

[more...]

Me too.

Link

This weeks theme: genderbending.

Rough Trade: High School Confidential

Lou Reed: Walk on the Wild Side (Live, Brussels, 1974)

The Kinks: Lola
(Check out how excited the drummer is to be playing. It’s all he can do not to yawn!)

Beautiful!:

more at controlman, a blog about urban exploration.

[via mtl city weblogs]

LL Cool J: Mamma Said Knock You Out
(east coast)

Ice T: I’m Your Pusher
(west coast)

Maestro Fresh Wes: Let Your Backbone Slide
(north coast)

The Mirror’s got an article on the Atwater Digital Literacy Project, nicely done. Here’s the lede:

Give a kid a video camera and they’ll fiddle around with the buttons, but teach a kid how to make movies and they’ll be feverishly posting to YouTube in no time—or at least that’s the idea behind the Atwater Library’s Digital Literacy Project.

[more...]

Thanks Tracey!

Man, it is a brave new world. What do you get when you mix: Youtube, Second Life, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr? This:

Here is the text that goes with the interview:

In August 2006, the national, weekly public radio program, The Infinite Mind, made broadcast history as it aired a four-part special taped inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. Among those interviewed in front of a live, virtual audience was author Kurt Vonnegut. The 40-minute conversation with Vonnegut was the author’s last sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind’s John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio where the program was created. This is a machinima video of Vonnegut’s interview, taped at the 16-acre virtual broadcast center in Second Life built by Lichtenstein Creative Media, which produces The Infinite Mind.

Stay away from Youtube. There is too much good stuff on there.

This week’s theme: 70s Proto-Grrrl Rock.

Pretenders: Brass in Pocket

Patti Smith: Gloria (live)

The Runaways: Cherry Bomb

Heri whipped up a great little map of montreal’s web scene, surely missing all sorts of stuff, but it’s still a great visualization of many of the people I rub shoulders with, drink coffee with, and occasionally quaff the odd pint or two with. Missing, I note, is Collectik (tho we are in quiet retooling mode, so that’s OK):

Would be nice if the stations and lines were live links.

Canadian 80s new wave:

Canadian 80s garage rock:

Canadian 80s arena rock:

Here’s what Trent Reznor thinks of how his record label prices his record:

The ABSURD retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, UMG. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne’s record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US).
By the way, when I asked a label rep about this his response was: “It’s because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out – you know, true fans. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy.”
So… I guess as a reward for being a “true fan” you get ripped off.

[more...]

Some updates on the story of Zeke & Mr. Tremblay (see my previous post for background). The court session was held June 21, arguments were made, and now … we wait again till September 7.

• For a good review see: Fagstein: Zeke maintains status quo in court.
• Also interesting, Pierre-Antoine Tremblay has reached out to the blogosphere, here: Michel Leblanc: Affaire Zeke’s Gallery, le point de vue de Tremblay

I’ve had a few discussions with people about this and, there are a few points worth considering:

1. be careful how you phrase things: the case here seems to turn on Zeke suggesting that Pierre-Antoine Tremblay was associated with the mafia, for which I gather there is no evidence. that’s a serious (and dangerous) sort of thing to suggest. my understanding also is that the original post was unclearly written, which is where the problem may be. bad syntax … but just pay attention to your words, you are responsible for them. morally and legally.

2. It’s interesting to note the power of blogs now. As Julien said in his Podcasters Across Borders presentation, you are who Google says you are. And for someone who isn’t online, and doesn’t have some google linkjuice protection, one post from a relatively well-ranked blog might just end up defining who google thinks you are.

3. Mr. Tremblay’s plea to the blogosphere, (linked above) goes like this:
-he’s not rich, just a guy who works in a gallery, is a writer, poet artist [relevant for PR, but not the case]
-he’s sad to see people write nasty things about him (quoting some blogger, not chris) [relevant as proof that some people are jerks, but not the case]
-he’s upset that zeke brings up the lotto quebec forgery case [this is the one that gets my goat: this lotto quebec forgery case is IN THE PUBLIC RECORD ... if the charges were all untrue, if the case was settle out of court, it sucks that mr. tremblay got tarred by the story, but Zeke is fully within his rights to say: Mr. Tremblay got taken to court for (allegedly, counsels my lawyer to write) selling forgeries to Lotto Quebec. That it's a chapter Mr. Tremblay wishes to forget is unfortunate, but it's still a fact, and you can still read about it at Devoir, Radio-Canada and a Lotto-Quebec press release!
-he's upset that zeke suggests he was linked to the mafia [for this he would have a legitimate beef, if indeed zeke did so]
-he states that zeke should have contacted him before writing [this is just odd...]
-he states that this has nothing to do with free speech [a bit more on this below ...]

so, to me, all the stuff about who zeke is and who tremblay is… is beside the point. The question is, why should Zeke be forced to take down posts that state and link to facts that are in the public record?

The answer of course, is that the court injunction serves as a means to stop any potential “crimes” until such a time as the court can decide (now delayed to September 6). again, i’ll bet that zeke made some wrong moves in the early days … and i’ll bet the whole thing more or less goes away without much impact on you or me.

but it’s not irrelevant, and it is important, and it’s worth paying attention to.

so good luck chris.

mitch joel – videoblogger from Hugh on Vimeo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_2m-4e4tyA (embedding disabled!)

The Canadian military, specifically the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts , has put out a novel called Crisis in Zefra (pdf) to explore how emerging technologies might impact on combat. Written by Karl Schroeder
.

Here’s a quote from the novel, for Boris:

“A number of young men and women are approaching your position,” shesaid. “They appear to be unarmed mobloggers,” she added.

“Video scavengers,” said Monet. “This will be all over the world in five minutes.”

They also talk about news aggregators, smart mobs, text-messages, among other things (no mention of Collectik tho).

From the digital dust jacket:

Crisis in Zefra is a fictional narrative designed to illustrate emerging concepts and technologies that could become part of Canada’s Army of the Future. Set in 2025, this story follows what starts out as a routine patrol mission through the streets of war-torn Zefra, but the situation quickly degrades into a ‘three-block-war’ scenario.

The aim of this publication is to stimulate both interest and debate on the conceptual development of Canada’s Army.
Readers are encouraged to refer to the Canadian Army publication Future Force when reading Crisis in Zefra,
although it is not required to enjoy this publication. This publication presents a fictional scenario only and should not be quoted as an authoritative source for any detail of policy, doctrine, technique or procedure in the Canadian Army.

Find more Canadian military scifi here.

Yulblogger, podcaster, ilesansfiler, and art gallery/space guy Chris Hand, aka Zeke, has had his blog shut down (UPDATE: possibly permanently???) by a court injunction.

The Montreal and Canadian blogging, free speech, rational people communities ought to be up in arms. I urge everyone to at least write about this to get this info out. It’s a real danger to all of us who write what we think online.

The story, as I understand it, is this:

1. Radio Canada, National Post, and Le Devoir ran stories about alleged art forgeries sold to Loto-Quebec by a local art dealer whose name will remain unwritten, lest I too get sued …all links still live.

2. Loto-Quebec issued a press release about the incident … link still live.

3. Zeke, who runs a blog about art in Canada, wrote a number of posts about the incident, linking to the articles above (the posts have since been excised from the web – tho the articles he based his posts on are still up). Also, due to some vague language, suggesting that the man in question had been somehow affiliated with the mafia.

4. The fellow mentioned in articles (still available online) by Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, and Loto Quebec sued Zeke for $25,000 in damages.

5. Zeke was told to change the wording of the posts (he did).

6. Zeke posted about the threats from the other guy’s lawyer.

7. A court order required Zeke to take down the relevant posts (he did).

8. Zeke posted about the court order.

9. A second court injunction appears to have shut down Zeke’s blog altogether
UPDATE: it seems as if this injunction may only last “until after the next court hearing, June 21″

10. Zeke is no longer posting.

Here is a Globe and Mail article about the events.

Those who know Zeke know he’s loud, opinionated and something of a loose cannon. He’s also a stalwart of Montreal’s blogging/podcasting/art/arts scene, and a good guy.

But regardless of Zeke’s personality, and given that:
a) the articles Zeke linked to, and based his posts on, are still on the net in the public sphere, and
b) Zeke is now under threat of $25,000 in damages, and
c) Zeke’s blog has been shut down by court order

how do you, as a reader of blogs and citizen of Canada and Quebec, feel about freedom of speech in your country?

Chris, what can we do to help?

MORE UPDATES:
- Heri’s take
- Fagstein’s review

In celebration of Bloomsday, 2007, LibriVox is releasing the long-awaited audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses

The work comprises more than 32 hours of audio, and the project took a year-and-a-half to complete, with scores of volunteer participants. Started in November 2005, it is one of LibriVox’s longest-running projects, and is also the longest text we have recorded.

The LibriVox Ulysses project had a few special rules: readers were encouraged to read in groups, in public places, and no editing was required. And yet some of the sections (notably, sections 15 c,d,e,f and 18) have been done with extraordinary attention to detail and creativity. The audiobook can be downloaded here.

Bloomsday also sees the release of another Joyce novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

There is some rumbling within the LibriVox community about trying to produce a new audio version of Ulysses every two years.

here’s a good guide, I think (slightly paraphrased):

if it’s the kind of the thing I’d be happy to buy – it’s something I’m happy to sell.

from Matt.

All the legalese is a bit much for me this morning, but it seems as if Chris Hand of Zeke’s Gallery/Blog/Podcast is in some trouble for writing about some allegedly shady dealings in Quebec’s art world. Court injunctions, cease and desists etc. Read more here here, here and here.

Heri has a review of the case here. It really seems crazy: Chris is getting in trouble for posting about news stories that appeared in the Le Devoir & Radio Canada.

So: why does zeke get smashed, but Le Devoir and Radio Canada get to leave their articles up? Because Zeke doesn’t have expensive lawyers. And how the hell did the judge come to his conclusions? That’s what I don’t get. If Devoir & RC write about something, it’s in the public sphere, and bloggers should sure as heck be able to write about it.

… LibriVox began in a vibrant section of Montreal called the Plateau, where 32-year-old Hugh McGuire lives with his wife…McGuire hangs out at Laika, a café and bar around the corner from his house that is popular with Montreal techies. At Laika, open source gurus, community WiFi evangelists, and A-list Web designers drink coffee, eat brunch, work on their laptops, and swap ideas…

Apparently in the print version of the mag, there’s a big pic of Laika – I’ll scan & post it when I get it (coming in the mail). See:

The Wealth of LibriVox:
Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production
by Michael Erard

(thanks to Heri for the heads up).

Musica para 6 baterias y 1 apartamento – ZappInternet

Vonnegut is dead. I scoured my shelves for a copy of Palm Sunday to quote some gems about writing well, but I could not find it! … Must have lent it to someone? But here is the passage about writing an anti-war book:

I said [I was writing a book about Dresden] to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

Here is a wonderful interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., aged 82, on the great Australia Radio National show, Late Night Live, with Phillip Adams.

Touch, Listen (2007)
Dennis Yuen & Morry Galonoy
Bookcloths, Davey board, decorative paper, linen threads, ink, long-stitch binding, voice XML, PHP, syndication from [b]LibriVox’s [/b]public domain podcast stream of audio poetry

Books are meant to be touched.

Poetry is meant to be listened to. Tel: (617) 850 9366

Each is an art form that should be experienced intimately and personally through our senses.

Touch, Listen explores the book as a tactile art object meant to be held, touched and physically interacted with, and its hypothetical content, in this case, poetry, meant to be performed and listened to. Separating the forms allows us to experience each one as an extension of our ideas, thoughts and feelings, as well as content to its own form.

April is national poetry month.

see: Touch, Listen (2007)

Maurizio has a great post about the dismal quality of mp3/ACC audio, and the parallels in crappy video. Actually the problem – for audio at least – is far worse than just the final format:

Dynamic range, warmth and depth have all but disappeared it seems in today’s music recordings. Music is compressed in recording, in mastering, in broadcast; often at all three stages. The loudness effect is ubiquitous. Broadcast audio is so pumped that it never seems to vary more than a few db. What results is music that is shallow, cold, harsh and without any kind of imaging or space.

[more ...]

I’m trying to read 52 books in 2007, a book a week. I’ve still got a little cushion, but I’m slowing down. Been lucky, with lots of good books. Here’s a list, with a one-line review, link to more detailed review. Starred books are particularly good.

52 Books in 2007 – Q1 Results

1. *A Clockwork Orange (f), by Anthony Burgess
   Wonderfully inventive, dark satire about a hyper-violent future.
2. Kafka on the Shore (f), by Haruki Murakami (review)
   Disappointing outing, tho still worth a read for Murakami fans.
3. The God Delusion (nf), by Richard Dawkins (review)
   Cheap, lazy book by a once-great author. Please: more science, less pop psych and bad philosophy.
4. *Programming the Universe (nf), by Seth Lloyd (review)
   Is the universe a big computer? Fascinating book.
5. *Lullabies for Little Criminals (f), by Heather O’Neill (review)
   Beautiful novel about kid growing up in the skanky streets of Montreal.
6. A Beginner’s Guide to Anarchism (nf), by Ruth Kinna (review)
   Decent intro to anarchism, but missing key connections, especially to the hacker world.
7. Now is the Hour (f), by Tom Spanbauer (review for Books in Canada)
   Coming-of-age-in-the-small-town-60s story of a teen figuring out he might be gay.
8. The Human Stain (f), by Philip Roth (review)
   Slick and assured writing by a great American novelist, lacked something, not sure what.
9. Prochaine Episode (f), by Hubert Aquin (review)
   Twisted tale of a Quebecois spy, or a writer, or a lunatic, or all three.
10. King John of Canada (f), Scott Gardiner (review for Books in Canada)
    Canada gets a king. Satire ensues.
11. *The Wealth of Networks (nf), by Yochai Benkler (review)
    The text to read for a comprehensive and detailed study of the open movement in all its guises.
12. Slow Man (f), J.M. Coetzee (review)
    Man gets hit by car, loses leg. Metaphysical musing, good Coetzee; not great Coetzee.
13. Crazy about Lili (f), William Weintraub (review)
    Fun fluff about a young McGill student in the 1940s, and his friendship with stripper Lili L’Amour (a fictionalized Lili St-Cyr).
14. America at the Crossroads (nf), Francis Fukayama (review)
    Maybe the neocons were a bunch of idiots after all. So says a former neocon.
15. *A Complicated Kindness (f), Miriam Toews (review)
    Mennonite girl smokes pot and screws. Funny, sad, and fantastic.

Some fellow named “Bopuc” linked to this vid, of
dan le sac VS scroobius pip, which is, really, quite great:

I thought dan le sac (or scroobius?) might change his mind when he got to the Clash, but he didn’t, and i was happy. courage of convictions.

I did a video interview of Montreal hip hop artist Boogat, for the National Arts Centre’s Scene Quebec programme/podcast. SceneQuebec is an arts festival in Ottawa/Gatineau, April 20-May 5.

Here’s the boogat vid.

There are a few more vids by me coming out too, some about theatre, and another about the classical music programming.

You can find the scenequebec schedule & tix here, the podcast here, and check out Alexis O’Hara’s vid – great stuff.

Matt asked me for some LibriVox recommendations for a long drive to Toronto. I whipped up this list, and, well … it’s not authoratative or anything, but if you know about LibriVox and are wondering what to listen to, here are some that I have enjoyed (I’ll update the list periodically):

NON-FICTION

• God and State, Mikhail Bakunin (solo)
  seminal anarchist text, v well-read.
• China and the Chinese, Herbert Allen Giles (solo)
  Wonderful exploration of Chinese culture, beautifully read.
• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  classic political text, still relevant.
• Poetics, by Aristotle (solo)
  the great Greek gives you the low-down on how to write a story. Wonderful idiosyncratic reading.
• Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo (solo)
  a meditative book on tea, flower arranging, art, life, zen, and more. published in 1906. beautiful.

FICTION

• The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells (solo)
  Alex Foster’s great rendition of curious Wells tale of the nasty man who disappears.
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (solo)
  RLS’s cautionary story of scientific hubris.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (solo)
  dashing adventure in the age of the French Revolution.
• Parenticide Clube, Ambrose Bierce (solo)
  very funny, but very very dark.
• Heart of Darkness (solo)
  conrad’s tale read by a young woman w american accent. odd but it works, somehow.
• Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, John Cleland
  very saucy Victorian pornography.
• War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (solo)
  the great sci-fi adventure.

NOTE: I love the collaborative projects (read by many different people) but a well-read solo book is probably a good place to start with LibriVox.

Stephan, a hard-core LibriVox volunteer/admin (maker of the LV poster), has launched a new exciting project: pdsounds.org …(pd for “public domain”). About:

With recording devices and microphones pdsounds volunteers acoustically discover the beauty of the world. From the million sounds of things to the pure waves of sinus. Our goal is to record it all and make it available for free.

The project looks great (and the design looks familiar! ;-) ) … and it should be a welcome addition to the free audio world. There are a few other such libraries around, notably freesounds …but the main difference here is license: while freesound uses a creative commons license, pdsounds is all public domain – that is, can be used for whatever reason with no attribution, no worries about commercial/non-commercial etc. There might be some other differences.

Anway, I have contributed my first sound (thanks to Jer’s coffee making skills).

Here is a list of free audio books released by LibriVox … in the Month of March!!!! (books of particular interest are in bold):

1.Lines Written in Early Spring by Wordsworth, William
2.Byways Around San Francisco Bay by Hutchinson, W. E.
3.Clue of the Twisted Candle, The by Wallace, Edgar
4.Twilight of the Idols, The by Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ludovici, Anthony M.
5.Pollyanna by Porter, Eleanor H.
6.Contes en vers by Perrault, Charles
7.Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers by Lea, Elizabeth E.8.Ideal Bartender, The by Bullock, Tom
9.Sense and Sensibility by Austen, Jane
10.Otto of the Silver Hand by Pyle, Howard
11.Ballads of a Bohemian by Service, Robert W.
12.Legend Land V 1 & 2 by Various, LYONESSE
13.Épîtres de Pierre by Anonyme
14.Plague Ship by Norton, Andre
15.Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush by Moodie, Susanna
16.Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome, Jerome K.
17.Story of the Middle Ages, The by Harding, Samuel B.
18.Hound of the Baskervilles, The by Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
19.Hollow Needle, The by Leblanc, Maurice
20.Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Einstein, Albert
21.Master Key, The by Baum, L. Frank
22.West African Folk Tales by Barker, William H.
23.On the Popular Judgment: That may be Right in Theory, but does not Hold Good in the Praxis by Immanuel Kant, D.E. Wittkower, ed.
24.Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books by Kant, Immanuel
25.Ring o’ Roses: A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book by Brooke, L. Leslie
26.At the Back of the North Wind by MacDonald, George
27.Ghost Story Collection 003
28.Familiar Letters on Chemistry by Liebig, Justus, Gardner, John (ed)
29.Letter Concerning Toleration, A by Locke, John
30.I’m Nobody – Emily Dickinson
31.Jack and Jill – Alcott , Louisa May
32.Omnilingual – H. Beam Piper
33.The Sign of the Four – Arthur Conan Doyle
34.The Iliad for Boys and Girls – Alfred J. Church
35.Short Poetry Collection 026
36.The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius
37.The Antichrist – Friedrich Nietzsche
38.Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges – Gerard Manley Hopkins (Robert Bridges, ed.)
39.Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Edith Oenone Somerville
40.Fables de La Fontaine, livre 02 – La Fontaine, Jean de
41.The Devil’s Pool – George Sand
42.O, it was out by Donnycarney – James Joyce
43.The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Emmuska Orczy
44.Collected Works of Saint Patrick – Saint Patrick
45.The Spinster Book – Myrtle Reed
46.The Glugs of Gosh – C. J. Dennis
47.Thurley Ruxton – Philip Verrill Mighels
48.Miracles – Walt Whitman
49.Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
50.The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
51.The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
52.On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
53.Candide – Voltaire
54.The King in Yellow (part 2) – Robert W. Chambers
55.The Autobiography of Mother Jones – Mary Harris Jones
56.Short Poetry Collection 025
57.The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
58.Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope
59.Moby Dick, or the Whale – Herman Melville
60.Ophelia – Walter de la Mare
61.Bohemian San Francisco – Clarence Edwords
62.The Sayings of Confucius – Confucius
63.The Monkey’s Paw – W. W. Jacobs
64.Librivox’s Short Story Collection Vol. 011
65.The Island of Dr. Moreau – H. G. Wells
66. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, by Immanuel Kant
67. Oomphel in the Sky, by H. Beam Piper
68. ?
69. ?
70. ?
71.The Junior Classics (Technically April 1, but it was ready March 31 and the servers weren’t cooperating)

and here is the catalog.

LibriVox had a March Madness campaign – a concerted effort to finish as many public domain books as we could in the month of March.

We finished SEVENTY!

Yes, 7-0 works of great literature. That’s pretty crazy. I didn’t do much to contribute, I must say, but I am proud as punch.

Illustration by Matthew Forsythe.

(PS Matthew, I’m using the image on your server, but I don’t think I have enough traffic that it should be a bother, if it is, let me know and I can host locally).

First watch the video:

[link]

Julien posted about this vid, and I watched, and listened, and had a visceral reaction … which, when I later read Julien’s comments, turned out to be very similar to his.

There are so many things to love about this vid, and much to make you ponder about how we react to unfamiliar situations – even such wonderful ones.

First off – what a great rebuilding of an old classic Phil Collins tune, given a whole new life & spirit from this performance. It’s something so much more – or at least so totally different from the original. New art builds on old art, so lets be careful about how we treat our art. Next, why do we prefer to buy music than make it? And why does music in public places make us so uncomfortable? Look at all those stiff people being treated to a truly fantastic musical performace, and how long it takes them to loosen up (note that even the song is built to shake them lose … there’s that pause when people think it’s over, and then they start up again, and people are finally grooving). But watching this (I’m one of those awkward guys, who gets nervous when stuff like this happens), I kept thinking, man these guys are bold. I’d be staring at my shoes – even if I were in the band. Other notes: do you miss Video Hits? Or do you think this is a better way to find new music? (I mean the youtubes of the world, not the Parisien metro).

Now:

Watch the Fancy Produced Video. Which do you like better? Why?

By the way, the band is Naturally 7. Question: do you think their music career has been hurt by putting this video up on the net for free?

First, Ira Glass, the force behind This American Life, is, to me, something like a proto podcaster. That NPR radio show is just what I imagined podcasting would become, a collection of the stories of the world told in the voices of real people. And that was before I had ever heard This American Life (though I had heard Wiretap, done by Jonathan Goldstein, who worked with Ira on TAL). Here are some videos, that any artist interested in story, should absorb.
(thanks maurizio)

Next, Freebase.com, which is “an open, shared data-base of the world’s knowledge.” I have not looked yet, but seems interesting.
(via chris)

this vid made me laugh out loud several times: S.H.R.T.M.S. – ep. 2

Testi-CRACK!

I was at podcamp in Toronto last weekend (check out the archive of videos of the presentations), and ran into a number of people doing great things. From the start I was excited by podcasting not because of the obvious things it would do, but the things that aren’t so obvious. The obvious thing is to create an army of radio hosts who imitate other radio hosts. The non-obvious things are happening and more and more is going to be rolling out in the coming years. Such an exciting time if you think that communicating ideas is an important thing for humans to do. So, here are a few people who were at the unconference whose projects impressed me:

• Sonya Buyting: Sonya is the Sassy Scientist, a science journalist and newly-minted podcaster she’s worked as a broadcaster for Discovery Channel among other things. I personally like my science podcasting dry and academic, or at least in the sober public radio mode. Sonya’s stuff is a lot more bouncy (music + science = sassy) … so I think her market is not so much stuffy 32-year-old grouches like me, but a younger audience. Which is laudable, considering the questionable state of science education, and declining interest among the young in that stuff that happens to allow us to live the way we do. In any case this is a sharp and professionally-produced podcast, and you’ve got to hand it to her: the first episode includes an interview with Sir Richard Branson, playboy billionaire owner of Virgin Airlines and recently announced climate-philantropist; and, even better, an interview with Seth Lloyd, writer of the best book I’ve read so far in 2007, Programming the Universe. Sonya is not a Montrealer. But she IS from New Brunswick, which gets her some extra points.
• Casey McKinnon & Rudy Jahchan: Galacticast is one of the most-watched vidcasts, certainly the top in Canada. Their take on making it in mainstream was pretty great: basically, bring it on, but we’re keeping all the rights to our stuff. That represents such a huge shift in the way broadcasting is going – and why music cos, and mainstream broadcasters are worried. Because the mainstream disseminators have less and less of a role to play: distribution channels aren’t limited anymore, so broadcasters and music companies haven’t figured out what they’ll be good for when art and media can sell itself. In the mean time, people like Rudy and Casey are out on the edge figuring out how this will work. Rudy and Casey are Montrealers.
• Julien Smith: Julian is a good friend and I see him pretty regularly, and I’ve probably posted about him a fair bit here. But still: I am always impressed by how well he understands the back-end of the net and how net-relationships are changing the way we do things. I understand all these things, but he lives them in a way that I don’t. He’s the longest-running and most popular podcaster in Canada, not by accident. It’s been interesting, too, to listen to his stuff evolve over the past year or so, and get more heavy, but still stay raw, and somehow fun. It’s an odd and compelling mix. He bares his soul online as a matter of course, which has some interesting by-products. He’s also got this other fantastic project that he’s nudging along to success, Listen to Your Kids. It hasn’t quite picked up yet with the kids, but it will. It’s just too cool an idea, and the sort of thing that makes me smile about podcasting. Julien is a Montrealer.
• jim milles: jim runs the really great UB Law Podcast, that “features conversations with University at Buffalo Law School faculty and other prominent scholars on cutting-edge research and important ideas in law and society.” This is such an obvious use of podcasting, and every university should have something similar. UC Berkeley, and many other universities, podcast course lectures, but that format doesn’t quite work for the general public (I’ve tried a number of lectures and though I’ve liked them, they don’t quite grab me). Better to do as Jim has done, get scholars to talk about their areas of expertise, in a conversational format, and record it. A perfect way to get this knowledge outside the walled world of academia, and to the rest of us. Jim is not a Montrealer.
• Matt Forsythe: Matt is an artist who works at the National Film Board, on a number of things including the almost-excellent CitizenShift. He’s also involved with the Schwartz movie, (check the fantastic trailer on Youtube). We had a long talk about digital media and analog institutions like the NFB. There seems to be such resistance to freeing all this content that sits collecting dust in the basement, watched by no one. It’s very puzzling to me that makers of media — especially non-commercial, publicly-funded media makers – are not clamouring to get all their media out to the wold in digital format. Any worries they might have had about bandwidth etc in the old days has been killed by all the vid services out there: blip.tv, googlevideo, youtube, not to mention the non-commercial options like Internet Archive and iBiblio. Yet all the wonderful wonderful work done by the NFB is inaccessible to me because so little of it is online. How great would it be for everyone – NFB included – if everything they made was available online. Matt is a Montrealer.
• mitch joel: I kept hearing about Mitch from different directions, and we kept missing each other at events. He works for digital marketing/branding company Twist Image, but it was funny, the thing that won me over was when he told me he worked for fifteen years writing music columns for Hour. I guess I have a natural mistrust for the corporate world, but when I hear that someone has put so much energy into something like writing music for a small community paper, it puts me at ease. Anyway, Mitch gave what was the slickest and most impressive presentation(.mov) I saw at podcamp. maybe I say that because the topic – more or less, branding you – is something i have been scratching my head over for the past month or so. I have been circling around doing so many things, and I need to start thinking about focusing my professional life better, and sorting out just what the hell I am going to do when I grow up. Mitch is a Montrealer.

I’m going to toss LibriVox into the ring, and suggest there is some hot stuff happening in Montreal.

But the million-dollar question I had coming out of podcamp was: how do I monetize my grouchiness?

(for those counting: 2 women, 5 men.)

Ben’s the once-great Montreal smoked meat resto, is no more. I took some photos there late one night a couple of years ago.

See the rest here.

I love wikipedia, but there’s a glaring problem, something I’ve noticed more of late: the writing is often terrible. If you wanted to learn how to write good clear prose, Britannica is as good a model as any. Wikipedia is … not. Or, usually not. On the surface that doesn’t matter, since the primary objective of both Wikipedia and Britannica is to deliver information. As an information-delivery system, wikipedia wins out for me, because it is free and accessible. Britannica loses because it is not free, and therefore inaccessible. And for my purposes, Wikipedia is usually a good place to get what I want, or at least to find out where to get what I want.

But as a model for good clear writing it is a miss, with the occasional hit. To some degree this is true on the net in general. I am certainly more sloppy in a blog post, a forum post, an email than I would be with a document that will be printed. I let mistakes go that I would never consider letting go in physical writing.

I wonder if this matters? Does “writing well” matter? Yes, I think that it does. In my life experience, in engineering, in corporate policy, in finance, in fund-raising, in project management, and of course in writing, one skill I think I have is the ability to express ideas clearly and well. That still has great value, and that, I think, is why good writing is important, even if it is not really valued as such by our market society. Most writers, for instance, get paid pennies. But probably people who can express ideas clearly often move beyond “mere” writing, to use that skill for other things.

So this is one area where Wikipedia might cause harm: it is a bad model for how to write.

Still, the blogs I read – the very few professional ones, and the handful of blogs by friends of mine – tend to be well-written and clear. Mistakes are rare. Is that because their writers are products of a time when books were important? Or is the value of good writing inherent in the net where, despite the technology used, we’re still mostly writing words for people to read? Will the grown-up MySpace & Wikipedia generation pay as much attention to grammar and (yikes) spelling, as us older folk? (Even if we are often, like me, more careless on the net than we would be elsewhere? especially with spelling).

These thoughts were spurred on by some bad writing in wikipedia, not sure what, but there is much to choose froml; and by this curious video, which I loved, and which was in response to the now famous: the machine is us/ing us.

I have a job for a good photographer, easy work (I think), a pretty good sized check (USD) for an hour or two (or less) of work, and in exchange you have to buy me lunch or something.

Let me know if you are interested, or if you know anyone who might be. Send me a link to some photography work too – so I can check it out.

Robin mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and I think I posted already, but I met Freddy last night. He’s making a fantastic graphic novel of Orwell’s 1984 (see: gutenberg australia’s ebook).

Freddy is selling these posters for $12 a pop:

And here is the opening scene (you can get it in B&W or colour):

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I haven’t written a ramble in a while. Here’s one:

I had an impromptu drink with Boris the other night – unfortunately the other brain I seem to be feeding off of a lot lately wasn’t there.

We rambled about art, data, open source, society, flexibility, stability, evolution to touch on a few things.

My experience with the open project LibriVox has been very interesting, and has influenced my thinking about a lot of what we talked about: it started small, and grew and grew; in about four places it encountered major environmental challenges – mainly having to do with putting together the structures to let the project accomodate more volunteers, and more projects. At 10 people and a couple of projects it was OK with me running the thing, and some help on the website design; then it went up to 50 volunteers and 10 projects, and I needed help, and a new mode of managing people and projects; the help appeared. It cranked up to 250 volunteers, and 40 projects; more help & organization was needed; it appeared. We’re now up to 1000+ volunteers and something like 150 active projects. Needing more structure and more support. It came.

Because the project was open everytime a major problem presented itself, someone seemed to be there who had just the skills needed (designing the site for clarity, setting up a forum, cataloging, documenting, setting up a wiki, a promo poster, catalog software). Like an organism encountering environmental challenges, LibriVox was flexible and open enough to easily evolve into something able to handle the new demands. One hopes it will continue to do so.

Is there anything in the little microcosm of LibriVox worth thinking about in a bigger context?

Boris gave this interesting visualization about society. (Boris can you draw it so I can link to a pic?) Imagine a bell curve, moving from left to right along a time axis. Stick a couple of wheels under the middle of the curve: the wheels are industry – driving things forward; the big hump is regular society who go along with things; and the front angle part of the bell-curve/snowplow are the out-there artists at the far tip, and then creative types who interact with industry making up the rest of the angle. There’s some interaction between the two. The artists are at the forefront, are misunderstood, and suffer the greatest amount of attrition because they are battling directly against the universe – in a way they both lead the way for the rest of society, and introduce us to, and protect us from, the new. You can go on about this metaphor, but probably there’s an optimal steepness of the curve – steeper meaning more arty & creative types.

I’ve seen two arty shows recently: Marie Chouinard’s dance show Body Remix/Goldberg Variations; and Anslem Kiefer’s Heaven & Earth. Neither was “beautiful” in any standard sense, but in both cases my mind was flying the whole time I was experiencing them. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but these two big shows — both very intellectual, and very abstract — had my mind whirrling around at top speed. There was something about the depth of the data transfer to me — chaotic and not really articulable by me — that influenced me in profound ways both times. And I think this is what Boris was talking about, about art, especiallly challenging art, communicating information about the universe that we are not really able to comprehend in any systematic way: we can take a bash at it, we can define & systematize, but the chaotic and big nature of out-there art is precisely powerful because we can’t describe it properly. By it’s nature it’s beyond a complete intellectual definition; so much data referring to so much, interacting with our own particular data processing systems. But somehow there is great value in that process, because it forces me to *try* (we are, after all, so earnest we humans) to process the data, and in doing so I reform my brain paths, and evolve my brain to try to cope with a changing universe.

And this, maybe, is why the free software/open source and open data movement is actually of huge importance. An open source approach to problems, along with an open data approach to the world will allow “us” to a) have access to the data we need to solve problems and b) allow all of us to contribute to the solving of these problems in open source projects.

I have a feeling that the world will become more chaotic soon. Two things in particular make me worried: climate change, and oil supplies. Those two issues are catastrophic in ways that most people aren’t willing to admit: human civilization has developed over a small band of time, the last 10,000 years, with relatively warm & relatively stable climate (scroll down to chart: “Temperature of Lower Atmosphere Last 400,000 years“). If things get unstable, we’ll be in trouble. As for oil everything in our modern world is based on cheap available oil, particularly our food-supply system. Without cheap fuel for farm equipment, and food transport, we’re in big trouble.

So if you consider that:
a) major environmental challenges (ie. global upheaval) are on the way
b) successful organisms are those that best adapt to environmental challenges
c) providing the maximum amount of data to maximum number of people will allow maximum adaptibility
d) and supporting open source solutions to problems is the most flexible & adaptable approach

Then any society that does not support open access to civic data; and open source solutions to problems … is likely to have major troubles soon. This is the next level of democracy … data democracy, and is I think crucial for our survival. Maybe that’s too much; but a country (say Canada) that embraces data democracy, will inevitably become more flexible, more nimble and more innovative in its solutions.

Do you think our politicians are at all ready to think about this? There’s a new, not yet public project, called civicaccess.ca, that will try to convince governments to start. Good work Mike.

So a few Montreal geeky types convened at the Office (aka Laika) for a sort-of impromptu discussion to try to figure out what the hell is going on in the world, and specifically what this “Open Movent” might be, and what connections we can draw (if any) between it’s various strands: that is, are there any connection between:

• Software: Free Software/Open Source (eg. FSF)
• Data: Access to Government/Civic Data (eg. Howtheyvote)
• Art/Media (eg. Creative Commons, LibriVox)
• Infrastructure (eg. ilesansfil.org)
• Hardware (eg. $100 laptop)
• Information (eg. wikipedia)
• Scientific Research (eg. open journals)
• Education (eg. UC Berkley podcasts, MIT OpenCourseWare)
• Patents on Life – and those opposing it (eg. GRAIN)
• What else should I add here?

The group was mainly geeks, and unfortunately Devlin couldn’t make it. That’s too bad because Devlin isn’t a geek, and works in agricultural IP issues, mostly in the South (ie developing countries) and his take on things might have helped us find the root we couldn’t grasp: biotech/IP issues are important in those countries because they have a direct impact on farmers’ choices about how they feed their families, how they live – if they can feed their families – and so are, in some sense, more critical than what we were talking about.

But I feel that there is an important link between all these things, a link that is very difficult to articulate because all these “sectors” talk in very different words, and are motivated by very different things. The hard-core geeks and the creative commons artistic freedom fighters are not necessarily talking about the same things, and probably wouldn’t agree on much.

Julien assigned me the task of summarizing the 1.5 hr discussion, but I don’t think I’ll do that. It would be a disservice, and I’m much more interested in what those attending have to say themselves (get writing!) than trying to interpret what they had to say, and butchering their thoughts in the process. Still, what I’ll try to do is summarize my perspective of things, after trying to absorb the discussions. I’ll probably leave out things like “I think” and “in my opinion” and “as steve said” etc…Take what comes below as an open reflection that could encourage comment & discussion, and not exactly my categorical statement of Reality in the Universe (although it might sound like that).

To start with, there are links, they are important, and figuring out what those links are is important. But all these “new movements” are in fact not new at all: the various principles the intellectual movements are built on (say: freedom, equality, access to data/information) are all old successful ideas. Ideas that are compelling because they appeal to successful and enduring notions in many cultures. For instance: sharing is good (kindergarten class #1), everyone should have access to knowledge (public libraries, public schools), a society should try to give everyone the same opportunities – ie you shouldn’t be explicitly barred from doing something because of race, creed, colour; but we might not do too much to help you.

These ideas are not at all universal, but just happen to be prevailing ideas of our particularly successful (ie good at economic & military dominance) western liberal democracies. We happen to be at the top of the heap right now. Meaning we’ve been successful, but not necessarily meaning that the Universe has designated us Kings of the Planet.

Note also: Not everyone is motivated by such abstract ideas. This is something that Mike speaks of with great passion from his experience at ISF: many people are involved because they like coding, they like wires & antennae, they like fiddling with projects, tinkering, building. That they’re doing something for the “good of humanity” (freedom etc) might be important to some, but it’s certainly not the universal motivator. Some couldn’t care less.

So here’s what I think: Humans are programmed to find ways to overcome environmental challenges, and to get pleasure from overcoming them (which encourages them to overcome them). If you look at the history of human civilization, you could look at it as a series of problems: access to water, access to food, access to heat/energy, access to clothing, access to shelter, access to mates. “Civilization” is an evolving process which morphs based on a lack of any combination of those, and cultures develop as codified ways to meet those needs, in more and more complex ways, generally for more people. Wars start when one culture’s need for one thing rams up against another culture’s need for another; successful cultures are the ones that win wars, and gain access to what they need; or cultures that succeed in negotiating in some non-war way. Unsuccessful cultures don’t win the wars, and get denied access to varying degrees. Similarly within a culture you’ve got warring factions all fighting for bits of the stuff that satisfies those needs. And the drive for wealth, the drive for power etc. is a sensible thing to have within the system of a culture because it means that the culture, as a system, will be driven to maintain access to the things which fulfil those base needs. As the world & it’s cultures get more complex, this need is abstracted out to other things. So you get art, computer games, religion etc. But in a way that’s just a fetishized expression of the same thing. (That guy’s pyramid, whatever his name is). Even when you have all the water, food, mates etc you could possibly want, your drive to solve those problems is still there; your drive to solve problems full-stop is still there. Otherwise you would fade away. That drive to solve problems manifests itself in art, in the joy of coding, in building bookshelves…anytime you “do” something, accomplish something, build something, and you feel good about it, you’ve filling that need; and the pleasure you get out of it is a genetic signal that you’re a functioning human. There are of course exceptions, but bear with me.

So: Humans are happiest when they build things (whether that’s a poem, a bridge, a printer driver code, or a field of corn, a new way to generate energy, a library, a community of freedom-fighting geeks). Let’s say we are genetically (culturally?) programmed to get satisfaction from completing tasks, making something. Some tasks are more fulfilling than others, but in general even completing excruciatingly boring tasks results in a pleasing feeling. You can describe this in many different ways, but we generally feel pride and happiness about accomplishments.

We use various tools to accomplish these tasks, to build things & do things. Hammers and ibooks, and apple scripts, paintbrushes, shovels, encyclopedias, calculators. And people who are driven to build things (say, the tinkerers, the programmers, the car buffs and the CEOs, the politicians & the activists) are pretty pissed when they are told that they cannot make the tools they use better. So when, for instance, a software company gives you a tool to do a job, and you say to yourself, this is OK but what I really want is THIS; but the software company says: you cannot change the tool to do THIS, you can only do THAT. Well that pisses off someone who has a job to do, an inefficient tool, the means to make that bad tool into a good tool; but gets artificially prevented from improving that tool by IP protections. That, I think, is the root of the Free Software movement. That a non-free software system that doesn’t allow tool users to use tools the way they want, and to improve those tools offends their general desire to build things and do things. If you have a bad tool and the means to make it a good tool, it’s really shitty not to be able to make it a good tool.

Now you can abstract THAT out to everything else related. Art, data, scientific research, education, seeds etc. are all tools used to solve problems. Those problems could be very base & important (how do I feed my family), or very trivial (how do I make a better songlist in iTunes), but we are driven to DO these things and build these things and solve problems; and that we are driven this way means that we as a species are good at overcoming environmental challenges. ie It has been essential for our survival that this be the case.

So I *think* this open movement is about something very fundamental to the survival of the human species, that is: we want the ability to get and use tools to solve whatever problems we deem worth solving.

The free movement is about defending this fundemental need of humans to use tools as they wish, for purposes they wish, and with whatever modifications they wish. And the different strands grow out of different people’s interest in different tools (encyclopedias or bits of code, or music samples). So we are against:

• DRM that says you can use this piece of art only like this
• proprietary software that says you can only use this software the way we want you to use it, and you cannot make it better to do what you need
• closed government data systems that say, we will manage & interpret the data for you, the way we decide to do it
• IP protected seeds, that say you may plant these seeds only as we tell you, and if you pay us
• closed scientific journals that say: you can get access to this scientific knowledge only if you pay us this much money
• information/education systems that say: you can only have this knowledge under these conditions
• communiction infrastructure that says: you may exchange data and information like this, and with these charges associated

And we are for: Allowing humans to use their tools as they see fit, and to modify their tools if they want to modify them so that they are better at solving problems. By “opening” this stuff up, we give humans access to more data and more ability to solve problems (trivial, critical) in creative ways. The Open movement has huge implications for the future survival of cultures, and perhaps the species.

NOTE about participants (ie people who happened to be there): brett (videoblogger & film maker), mike (isf founder & general free movement spitter), robin (anarchist software developer), steve (builder of opensource tools for scientific collaboration), julien (ace podcaster), and me (in my LibriVox hat, I guess). Ella, an artist & blogger and non-boy popped over to our table a couple of times, but I think we were stupidly much less welcoming than we should have been – more out of intentness of our conversation than anything conscious – and I would like to personally apologize for that.

Brett issued a challenge in his last vlog, which was a response to the recent intense discussion we had at Laika about the open movement, what’s going on and what it all might mean. I wrote a long post about that discussion below, and here is my effort to make a vlog about my thoughts. Some notes:

• I ripped off Brett’s walking & video style
• I am as long-winded in video as in writing – it clocks in at 15 minutes & about 30 MB
• I should have edited one more time to cut it down a bit more – but crashed half-way thru first edit & couldn’t stomach another run-thru
• The sound is crap
• When I am talking about torture, I am not saying that I think current torture practices are legitimate, but rather that if your suvival is at stake, then questions of morality fall by the wayside. You will do whatever it takes to survive, and morality seems like a luxury for other people. In the case of the current US policy on torture, I a) don’t think US suvival is at stake, and b) think that torture is hurting their long-term security and not helping (that’s just my opinion).

Recorded Sunday March 26, 2006 at 8:15-8:45am while walking around my home at de Bullion & Pins in Montreal. It was a bit wierd talking to myself while walking around with a camera in my hand.

In this video I refer to this post about our Laika meeting here; and my description of Boris’s snowplow analogy here.
And, here is my first vlog:
openmovement-hugh.mov

Posted on the LivriVox forum, but I thought it was worth repeating here on dose.

One of the things I (personally) like about many podcasts is how … crappy! … they are. I don’t mean the facetiously, I mean that very honestly. I like that people cough and you hear the trucks roll by, and things are messy and badly-produced etc. It is like real life, unlike the polished stuff you get on TV and Radio & movies, which is fantasy.

And this is something I love about LibriVox. It is a bit of a revolutionary act to say: I wish to listen to a book recorded by a bunch of people, only some of whom are good readers! I want to listen to the words, and to the voices of these average joes & janes reading, the same as I remember my mother reading to me as a kid, and the librarian who used to read to us in school. It’s a rejection of the need for polish, for perfection, for style; choosing instead the substance of the text, and the reality of a real real flawed person like me doing their best to read something they love.

And I think this notion is not so easy to understand – why would I want to listen to something imperfect? Well, for me, because that perfectiion is a sham, and it’s unnecessary and it distracts from the text in a way.

I have a friend here who is a improvisational jazz violinist, Malcolm Goldstein.

the first time I head him play I thought “what the HELLL is this? It’s noise!” But what he’s asking you to do is listen to OTHER things, not the melody & harmony and all the easy things we associate with music, but something else, the underpinnings of the sound, the textures of the noises, the surprise, different cadence. And this is tied in with what the world is really like: it is not so ordered, so clean…it’s very messy and chaotic, but we are trained not to like this aspect of the world, not to like the flaws and imperfection. One reason we are taught to want perfection is that if we don,t like flaws we are easier targets for corporate marketers who sell perfection. Yet there is such beauty in that mess, if you pay attention to it in a different way, there is so much to be learned from chaos and flaws and mistakes. But you have to unlearn how to listen for it.

In the same way, I think (and this is just my personal take) LibriVox is a place that celebrates the flaws, the beauty in chaos, the messiness of life, but interpreted through the great works of literature of the world. we take raw materials and build with our voices something different, but I think something revolutionary, and we say: because it sounds like THAT over there, does not mean it has to sound like that here. We give you something different, and you can give something different too.

I was asked to write an article in Reading Montreal. Go check out the site. But here’s the text, and a photo (by Nika Vee):

In the mid 1840s, Sir James Alexander proposed that Mount Royal should be turned into a park, and twenty-five years later, 1869, the City of Montreal amended its charter to approve a $350,000 loan to purchase the land. At the time Montreal, population 112,000, was confined to ten city blocks by the river, and many city councilors argued that the Park was too far from the border of the city to be useful. But Mayor Aldis Bernard pushed for the project (as well as Ile St-Helene, and Parc Lafontaine), and the land was purchased, with a final bill of $1 million, an extraordinarily hefty sum for the time. The park wasn’t inaugurated until 1876, by which time the city had expanded significantly. A few decades later, the park was surrounded by houses and development: if the city had waited, the land would have been too expensive to buy. If Montreal had waited, Mount Royal would be a condo development, and not a park.

Yet the value of the Park, however you want to define the word value, is incalculable. The value to ordinary citizens, the values of properties near the park, the value to the city as a tourist draw, as a hallmark of world-class status. If you could quantify the economic returns from the park, I’m certain you would find it had paid for itself many times over. And if you just measured its value as benefit to the people of the city, that million bucks would be a trivial steal.

We are currently at a turning point in the history of human knowledge, and clear battle lines have been drawn. On one side (let’s call it EVIL) you have those who think information should be controlled and parceled out based on various criteria: money, for instance, and the ability to pass entrance exams at certain universities. On the other side (we’ll call this side GOOD), you have the people who think information should be available to anyone who wants it: the wikipedians, the audiobook makers (disclosure: I am one) and their text-based ancestors, the creative commoners, and the free software crusaders who did much of the philosophical and legal thinking behind this exploding movement of internet do-gooders.

Web2.0 is one of those marketing-phrases that doesn’t mean all that much, and annoys those who have been citizens of the net – not just consumers, but creators – for years. But fundamental things have changed: everything got easy, everything got free, bandwidth all of a sudden got cheap, and kind folks made hosting space available for those who wanted to give their content away. All of a sudden we have blogs, and wikis, podcasts, vidcasts, and scanned books. We have universities committing to put everything online; we have scientists dedicated to explaining complicated issues properly, in public; we have communities writing text-books; academic journals opening themselves up to the world. Among thousands if not millions of other wonderful projects.

What had been the internet mall (or you could call it Web1.0) was opened up to the people, and they said: we want a vibrant city (Web2.0). And this isn’t just about the internet, it’s about all the sources of information you might imagine. It’s about Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. We’re just starting to see what this new city might look like, but certainly it will be a vibrant place, because, so far anyway, it’s got a big park in the middle of it. And the value that creates – economic or otherwise – will be, like Mount Royal, incalculable.

Yet there are forces pushing in the other direction. Forces who wish to influence our governments away from letting the internet be a park, and a market, and a sidewalk, and a home, and everything else a vibrant city is. There are forces who want to keep it as a mall.

London and Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Sydney Australia, New York, and certainly Montreal, offer a mix of commerce, food, art, parks, public space, business, transport, relaxation, all in one place. The components of one add to the others, and make an integrated whole. Each of those cities have their own particularities (the pubs and pin-stripes of London, the Bistros and buildings of Paris, the cafes and churches of Rome, the butchers and chaos of Hong Kong, the taxis and galleries of New York, the terasses and staircases of Montreal). But all these cities give the sense that life is happpening, before your eyes, that you are in the midst of a place alive. Either by design or history, life is encouraged to happen in public.

In his book, The City After the Automobile, Moishe Safdie writes at length about Le Corbusier and other architects of the 20th century city, who laid the foundations for our lifeless, particularly North American cities, designed for cars, not people; arranged around unusable and unused public space, parking lots, highways, and commerce; the desire to close the formerly public within private walls; and the separation of the different bits of life into their component parts. That is, confine big commerce within malls (with no natural light to distort things!), with few controllable entrances, and no life to speak of outside; keep the schools over there and the churches over here, the business parks isolated, and the housing developments somewhere else altogether. And certainly no small shops anywhere near where people live.

In other words, among other things, the design of these cities took all the component bits of life, separated them, removed the “need” for public space, and sterilized everything, killed everything. The result everyone knows: cities no one likes, but which provide relatively large yards.

Public Space, and Public Domain improves life for everyone — even the rich who can afford to finance their own, sterile versions of life as they wish it. This is why vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods (such as Montreal’s Mile End) attract artists and students, and subsequently the rich. People like to live in places where life is happening. And life happens where there is public space for all the elements of life to intersect. New York’s East Village, for instance, is an astounding place (increasingly less-so, it’s being mallified slowly), and nothing is more wonderful than the those spaces squeezed between two tenement buildings that have been transformed into tiny community gardens, some of which have become the home to chickens! In downtown Manhattan.

The planners of Montreal were smart enough to buy Mount Royal when they still could. It was a fantastic amount of money at the time, yet Montreal is unimaginable without Mount Royal – just as New York is unimaginable without Central Park. These public spaces are the foundations on which the wealth of these cities is built. Today, we all need to be vigilant with our politicians, our governments, and with ourselves, to make sure we keep the internet a vibrant city, and not let it become a strip mall. Again.

OK, I’ve just launched a little experimental project, let’s see how it goes. It’s called LibriVox:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?
LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

There some more info here.

So if you know any podcasters, literature buffs, actors, librarians, teachers, readers, writers, radio announcers, or anyone at all who might be interested in donating some time to read a chapter of a public domain book and record it to the net, please send them to LibriVox. If you want to get directly in touch, try: librivox(at]yahoo(dot]ca.

So this is for all you bloggers who read and comment on this site occasionally: (eponym, fling, andre, mike l, martine, seb, wirearchy, danielle and the rest)…

let’s see where it all goes!

IT conversations, a site that broacasts talks by leading thinkers on all things informational-technology-y, brings this (awe)-inspiring talk which argues that everything, every book and every song & movie, every recorded lecture, everything ought to be, and can feasibly (!) be put online, for anyone to access.

Brewster Kahle, currently leads the Internet Archive (and various previous successes), a repository of everything media, which, among all sorts of amazing things, offers stogage space, for free, for life, for anything published under a Creative Commons license. Among the many many great things in this very brief talk, Kahle mentions, the IA’s collection of lego movies.

If you worry about your ideals, and think the Machine is too big to fight against, listen to this and have some hope. Universal Access to All Human Knowlegde. A worthy, and you will be convinced, possible goal. The question is how many of you will help push for it? (Me included).

The amazing thing, though, is imagining how anyone could argue against this project…but I am sure the lawyers are lining up.

Kahle gets extra points for suing the US goverment to allow out-of-print (but copyrighted) books to be scanned and put online, but even without extra points, he makes it to the top of my “most exciting audio streams” list for 2005.

this is just one of those cool things that the universe likes to throw out at us to remind us that everything, in the end, is related to everything else: Flickr Tokyo Photo Surpise.

Update: O! Ye non-believers, with hearts of cold and minds closed to the Truth, behold: Evidence.

Says one fella in the thread, eloquently and with a hint of the pargmatic philosopher about him:

Whatever your thoughts about coincidences, there appears to be a broad consensus that they occur more frequently on Flickr than they do in our day-to-day lives. I think that says something very interesting about the structure of Flickr, the way it allows those connections to happen. And it has potentially profound implications for Flickr-like systems in general.

It may just be that flickr helps us notice coincidences more often — but that doesn’t make them any less coincidental, now, does it? and maybe it even makes flickr interesting for new and different reasons.

I posted a while ago about nietzsche and blogging, and then after a reminder from sen no sen, I dug up some more nietzsche, all of which amounted to a few observations, summarized a bit crassly here:
1. blogging can be a way to transform ones life into something more (art)
2. seeing ones life as art is a means to transform suffering into something meaningful and positive
3. if one is driven by art, one should strive for art
and finally
4. one should equate ones life to fate, and love that fate, whatever it might be

You may have seen this intense video by Justin Hall (via i never knew). Hall has chronicled the last 11 yrs of his personal life online. The video, titled aptly, “I sort of had a breakdown in January 2005″ is a cringe-inducing or gut-wrenching 10-minute peek into the soul of a blogger mid-meltdown, a very strange place to peek. Commenters are split between: “I feel your pain,” and “Wait wait wait WAIT ONE FUCKING SECOND, You’re 30 years old? What the fuck, dude!” Anyway, Justin Hall’s dilemma: his meaningful relationships are with that wide web of the internet, his writing (and his camera!); and his candid online writing about personal life taints his personal relationships. So he’s alone. Blogging and art, or or real connection; he thinks he can’t have both.

The video makes painful watching–it’s not the sort of stuff you see too often, but it’s fascinating are really weird, and you can watch real-time as Hall consciously translates this breakdown into a video. At one point Hall, with a wry chuckle, choked in tears, says something like: “If I’m going to go through this crap, I might as well make some good media with it.” I laughed out loud when I head that, but he’s right. Isn’t that, really, what art does? It transforms our lives, experience and our (possibly self-absorbed) torment into something more, something wider, something that other people can connect with? (I used to have a prof in university who constantly quoted CS Lewis: “We read to know we are not alone.”) Whatever you think of Justin Hall’s misery, he took it and transformed it into something for the rest of us to consider, and it probably did him some good. Nietzsche:

Art as the redemption of the sufferer–as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, diefied, where suffering is a form of great delight.

Blogging as problem and solution, maybe.

I was thinking about Justin Hall as I hopped into a taxi tonight. It’s rare to find a cab driver in Montreal who isn’t mid-argument, or mid-plea with some friend or lover on his mobile while driving you from place to place. A good thing, probably, at least for taxi drivers: talking makes their shifts pass faster, and you hope it helps them better develop their own relationships. But that technology cuts completely my interaction with the driver: I give my destination, and pay my bill. In the past you could count on every fouth taxi ride providing some entertaining conversation–rants about the mayor and bicycles, or just pleasant weather-talk–and sometimes some great human interaction. Now it’s one out of ten, because of mobile phone technology, which occupies the driver with other things. So the crazy taxi conversation fades from our world; what was once a social and commercial transaction becomes nothing but a commercial transaction. I don’t begrudge taxi drivers their mobile converations, but I miss the crazy-talk. I’ve lost out a bit, and I think society has lost out a bit too – though probably the taxi drivers have gained, which is fair-enough as far as trades go.

Blogging’s got some of that calculus as well: you gain in interaction with a community of like-minded individuals spread through the ether of the net, but your flesh n blood interactions can suffer. I notice this in a very small way with myself and others. The trade off. Maybe it’s a bit much to call blogging art, and maybe recording a tantrum isn’t art either; but it’s engaging, I was drawn in, fascinated, and decided to write about it, which gives it some more value, at least to me.

I am slow to get used to blogging, where I should probably be putting out more thoughts, half-cocked if need be, rather than just letting them simmer, trying to get them right. Well, here are some neither fully-formed, nor coherent, but what follows is the begining of some thoughts on Nietzsche and Art and blogging:

Friedrich Nietzsche in Will to Power, fragment 853, outlines the importance of Art in an existence that Neitzsche calls “frightening,” where Truth (God is dead) has been toppled, and we struggle comprehend what it means to live in a world where we have no objective (God) to appeal to in questions of consequence. Says Nietzsche:

Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life….
Art as the redemption of the man of knowledge–of those who see the terrifying and questionable character of existence, who want to see it, the men of tragic knowledge.
Art as the redemption of the man of action–of those who not only see the terrifying and questionable character of existence but live it, want to live it, the tragic war-like men, then hero.
Art as the redemption of the sufferer–as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, diefied, where suffering is a form of great delight.

OK now all this has something to do with blogging, I think. Nietzsche’s general gist is that with the loss of faith in anything beyond human consciousness, humans can go down two paths: one is pessimist, and sees disaster (chaos will result); the other optimist (sort of), the path of the overman (Übermensch), who sees this loss of objective Truth as liberating… a realization of the creative power of humans to form truth (small-T) around principles of their making. He sees this as a sort of Art — not just artistic art, but life as art, where forming the principles of one’s own morality becomes a creative exercise, and living itself becomes Art. So if you live your own life as a kind of artistic creation, then you manage to acheive a life Nietzsche would be proud of (well probably not, since he was Nietzsche…).

This process of transforming life into art is a magical sort of thing: anyone who has written a brilliant poem after being spurned by that cute girl in calculus class–no matter how poorly the stanzas stand-up to time–can attest to the power of that creation. In producing Art we transform our own existence into something more, and somehow that enables us to turn “suffering into great delight.”

And more, we take even greater pleasure in sharing that with others. I was discussing capital-A Art with with a writer friend over coffee, and he said, more or less, “Art just is, don’t worry about whether it’s important or not. Birds sing, people paint and write and make art. We are creatures who make art, so don’t spend time humming about why that is important.” I agree, though I think Art is important for specific reasons (another post sometime) … but the relevant thing is that humans like to create, we derive benefits from creating, and we like to share our creations with the world. Anyone who has built something, anything–a bookcase, a great script to track who’s bookmarking urls in del.icio.us, a newly landscaped garden, or a novel–can attest to the pleasure not just in looking at one’s own work, but having a close friend admire it as well. Strangers are even better.

Blogging is particularly important because it allows, and encourages, anyone–as long as they have access to technology, never guaranteed–to easily transform bits of their lives into Art which they can share with others, a life-affirming sort of thing that Nietzsche might be happy about. Particularly since blogging by its nature tends to diffract the capital-T Truth that other forms of controlled media try to sell us. (The subject of a future post).

All this is just more rambling, except that it provides some context for a couple of specific projects I am developing, and I encourage any blogger to consider as well: working with groups of people who are often marginalized to help them find the pleasures, and the Nietzschean benefits of blogging, of finding Art in their lives, and finding an audience for their Art in blogging. More on these projects later.