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iPhone Rashomon

Sloop flatters me with his story of my tech geekiness. Like him, I have waited for over a year to get my hands on the marvelous (if not entirely unproblematic) device known throughout the universe as iPhone (now, 3G). And I'm very excited for Sloop to be able to get one, and hope that his wait goes smoothly. For my part, I'm restraining myself by not texting him daily about how I'm texting him daily on my iPhone 3G. He has no ideas how hard that is for me not to do.

Anyway, instead of responding to Sloop's eloquent post, I thought I should provide an alternative version of events; not to dispute Sloop, but to provide additional perspective. My iPhone saga goes a bit differently than his, and although I consider it to have a happier ending -- in as much as I left the store with an iPhone in my possession -- it certainly came through much more frustration than his blissfully patient meditation. I provide this account solely for the historical record.

Why we're not blogging here

Today my mother wrote to see if we were OK, because we haven't been blogging much. This, then, is the 21st century: "Now be sure to eat right. And wear clean underwear and a nice hat. And be sure to blog every day."

In fact, the reason we're not blogging much at Xark is because Janet and I are blogging/vlogging and podcasting our collective asses off at SpoletoToday 2008. Janet's in charge this year, which means her dream has finally come true: She gets to tell me what to do, and I have to do it.

Here are the videos I've put up so far...

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

The second (better) Amistad video

Amistad: Race, art, history and opera from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Meme 2008: "Control doesn't scale"

Three words of infinite simplicity and value (via Dave Weinberger):

"Control doesn't scale."

Want to understand the convulsion that lies ahead of us? The transitions in economics, technology, management, politics, media and art that must be made if we're to benefit from the new tools? The divisions that animate our "culture war" bullshit sessions? 

Three words: "Control doesn't scale."

Think that's a recipe for anarchy? Think again. Think it's unprecedented? It isn't. Think distributed control is a geektopian pipedream? I disagree.

Human beings have been giving up control in exchange for the expanding wisdom and benefits of freedom for as long as we've been a species, so there's plenty of historical precedent to instruct us on what course to follow. The unprecedented part is actually the rate of change, which means that the challenge in the scaling issue really lies in the feedback loops we imagine. We can't wait around and expect the old culture to vet new ideas for us. We'll have to invent the "new normal" on the fly, and  we'll certainly screw that up a few times.

But this is the central issue. And the other thing history teaches is that the people who have control generally don't like giving it up. So that's our short-term future in a nutshell.

Our expanded selves & The Construct

I’m not a particularly active dreamer, so when I get strong messages in my sleep I tend to pay attention. On Saturday morning I woke up with an odd idea in my head, which made me take notice. On Sunday I woke up with more of it in place, as if my dreaming self had been installing the idea in segments.

It’s a Singularity idea, although I don’t think it’s necessarily just a post-Singularity idea. And here’s the way I think I’m supposed to introduce it:

We understand cyberspace to be the virtual space between all the nodes on all our computer networks. And I’ve defined my concept of Spookworld as being everything that exists between the nodes of organized deception.

This new concept is called The Construct, defined as everything that exists between nodes of intent. And since I’m really introducing two ideas here (The Construct and “nodes of intent”), I’d better start by explaining the foundational idea: scaling humanity to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

Save (Us From) the Children

When did holiday visits become all about the children? When did holiday cards become all about the children? When did our friends and family begin to presume that we don’t really want to see them (in person or in their holiday cards) but really only want to see their children?

This Thanksgiving one of my brothers and his wife and their two year old came to visit for four days. We love my brother and sister-in-law—they’re smart and fun and easy to be around. We love their two year old as well—he’s smart and fun and precocious. But it seemed as though, from the moment they arrived, that the purpose of the visit was not to catch up with my brother and his wife, and enjoy their company, but to interact and bond with their child. I still feel guilty that, the first evening they were here, I suggested that maybe the toddler could go to bed so that we adults could spend some time together. Turns out that he stays up later than I thought, so they (unsuccessfully) tried to put him down an hour and half before he was used to.  Not only that, but my brother kept encouraging me to play with my nephew more, as though I wasn’t doing my part. I felt as though I was failing the auntie test.

And I think that kid is great, but he’s two.  Of the 12 hours he was awake every day he was here, I was in his company for almost all of them. I admit it—I wanted to talk to his parents more than I wanted to talk to him. I have nieces and nephews that range from age one to age nineteen, and I want to talk to all of their parents more than I want to talk to them.

Brooks chases his Long Tail

This morning's confounder? A David Brooks column that ran locally under this headline: "Once-unifying music fragmented by society and technology."

The gist? Hipsters and technology are ruining the country. And the Long Tail (Brooks doesn't capitalize it, or explain it) is bad for the culture.

There is just so much here to discuss that perhaps a fisking is in order. But for those of you with lives and/or better things to do, I'll state my conclusions first:

Brooks' true subject isn't music or  economics or technology or even the "hipsters" who seem to bother him so much. What he's really writing about is the desire for a world that is simple, a world mediated by trusted gatekeepers and ruled by institutions that set the boundaries of everything from legality to morality to taste.

That Brooks could write this piece without even mentioning the monopolization of commercial radio betrays his selective myopia. But for the love of Gawd how do you write about "all-purpose" Rock and Roll as some canonized marketing wing of The One True Establishment without even a trace of irony?

Brooks is popular because he speaks to a common anxiety: The world is spinning out of control. Then he provides a reassuring answer: People like you who remember the old values have the right answer. He explains how things got this way: Hipsters and elites have caused a general breakdown of authority and good order. And he prescribes a solution: Stop it!

But here's the way it's going to be, folks: The world is going to change. Rapidly. More rapidly than you remember. More rapidly than you may be prepared for emotionally.  Values and ethics and cultural connections are going to be hugely important to us, as they are now, but they must be portable. Offering them as talismans against change will fail to prevent change and succeed only in damaging the very concepts you claim to hold in such esteem.

Imagining alternatives to your accepted reality is uncomfortable, but it's an absolute requirement for staying relevant in the 21st century. Our country's established conservative voices seem intent on disqualifying themselves from credibility with the next generation, and believe it or not, that's going to become a problem soon. We're going to need conservatives who understand cultural symbols, technology and change as a force of history. But that's a topic for another day.

Fisking after the jump...

Hoping for Redemption

Warning:  Contains minor Michael Clayton and Rosemary’s Baby spoilers, as well as some grossly massive overgeneralizations.

Over the past week, my Bonnie and I went to see the new George Clooney vehicle, Michael Clayton, and—in her ongoing attempt to educate me about movies made before 1985—we watched Rosemary’s Baby at home.  For very different reasons, these were both interesting experiences for me.  In the case of Michael Clayton, we have an intriguing, emotionally heavy, and complexly constructed legal narrative with some career-worthy acting performances (Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton had exceptional turns, and George Clooney keeps getting better, and more subtle; kudos as well to Sydney Pollack).  While Roman Polanski’s direction of Rosemary’s Baby somehow seems dated (or maybe it’s simply Mia Farrow’s “I’m a dumb little girl” acting that bothered me), the story—and the pacing of the story—kept me intrigued.

I’m coupling these films together, however, not because I’m endorsing each of them—which I am—but because I want to talk about the role of redemption, and my reaction to it, in each film.  At the conclusion of Rosemary’s Baby, I turned to Bonnie and observed that I thought it was a gutsy movie because it ended without redemption.  If anything, the only traditionally redemptive character in the film gave in to the particular forces of evil in the narrative.  You cannot leave the film feeling as if the forces of good won out (well, I suppose you could if you’re particularly fond of shouting heavy handed stuff like, “All hail Satan”).  After I made this comment, Bonnie made the claim—and I have no idea about its quantitative truth although it seems right—that classic popular films were always less redemptive than contemporary films. 

Changing Krishnamurti's Name & Other Ways To Heaven

Earlier this month I was able to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. The "Book Messe" is the world's largest book show and an amazing cultural experience, bringing together 20,000 people from over 100 countries all talking, thinking and printing in multiple languages and cultural paradigms. The one thing everyone in Frankfurt has in common is they want to sell something. Not right then, very little actual commerce happens at the fair (until the end when they want to sell the books so they don't have to ship them home), but meaningful relationships are built on the premise of increasing visibility of specific pieces of media and making money together. That is what we humans do.

One of the meetings I had was with the director of publications for the Krishnamurti Foundation of America (KFA). Krishnamurti, for those who may not have encountered him, was a renowned spiritual teacher throughout most of the 20th century. Originally from Madras, India he was spotted by the leaders of the Theosophical Society and selected to be the vehicle for the return of Christ (talk about pressure!) and a world teacher. He was one of the most powerful teenagers on the planet in early 20th century (this was before TV) -- a true anointed one.

His popularity with the Theosophists declined when at a huge conference set up to honor his assuming the title of "world teacher" at age 18, he brazenly declined the role and the entire organization. Declaring truth was "a pathless land" he stunned his followers and becoming an unexpected embarrassment to the Theosophists - his position of prominence quickly ended.

Moultrie: The full package

The long-anticipated unveiling of Charleston's new statue of Gen. William Moultrie, the Revolutionary War hero of the Battle of Sullivan's Island, finally took place in June, and by all accounts the city's seer-suckered elites were suitably thrilled.

The eight-foot bronze atop a marble pedestal looks as if it could have been proudly cast and displayed in the 19th century -- or earlier -- making this one modern monument that got made without any any annoying input from those modern art smartasses, Bauhaus Marxists all...

Not that there was zero oversight. Back in 2000 Moultrie backers had to win approval for their concept from the city's Commission on Art and History, which wanted to see how the thing would fit in at White Point Gardens, better known as The Battery. Proponents propped nine feet of painted cardboard atop an existing (and since removed) monument to give the boardmembers some sense of its scale, then stood in serious contemplation while confused tourists tried to figure out why these locals were so interested in cardboard.

I had assigned a reporter to cover this event. At one point, a 6-year-old tourist boy standing beside the reporter turned to his parents and said, "That looks like a giant green penis."

Which, by the way, happens to be the smart-ass modern art/architecture critique of most heroic sculpture: It's phallic, intentionally projecting power and authority and control. Hence, smart-ass intellectuals and children see penises everywhere, while people who like such sculpture tend to be offended by the mere use of the word "penis" in public.

But I digress.

I finally stopped by to take a good look at Moultrie on Thursday while shooting a nearby artifact,  and something struck me: It seems the artist has endowed Charleston's defender with a bulging manhood that would make the members of Spinal Tap weep with envy.

Has it always been thus?  Perhaps. But what I see in this statue is a 21st century imagination of a 19th century work of kitsch -- blissfully inhabiting  an irony-free world that  refuses to acknowledge the miseries and awakenings of the 20th century.

Hence, in this one bronze we see the martial romance of the 19 century, plus the penis-size obsession of the 21st century.

Can a heroic figure today be truly heroic without the full package? One suspects Michaelangelo's David would bear a distinct resemblance to Johnny Wad were he to be carved in this horribly conflicted decade...

Celebrate "Croc Absolution Day"

We here at XARK have known for some time that Crocs were the ugliest footwear ever invented; now we learn that Crocs are crippling children.  As a result, I am hereby calling for "Croc Absolution Day."  On Saturday, September 22nd, if you dispose of each and every pair of Crocs that you or your family own, the Xark Style Police will forgive you.

People with even the lowest levels of aesthetic sensibility will thank you.

IvoryTowerz: Burning Man diary

IvoryTowerz is publishing a multi-part diary from this year's Burning Man Festival, which wrapped up earlier this month. I can't get enough of it.

I also dig this video...