*michael parekh on IT*

ON ART LIKE TWITTER

HISTORY REPEATING

Thanks to some friends, I had a chance to attend an unusual art event in Laguna Beach California called the "Pageant of the Masters".  Understanding the concept behind this event at first was kind of like first encountering Twitter, the communication service that has enthralled most geeks everywhere.  It initially takes a little experiencing to get at the heart of what it's really about.

This Wikipedia entry explains the Pageant as follows (image source):

"The Pageant of the Masters is an annual festival held by the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California. The event is known for its tableaux vivant or "living pictures" in which classical and contemporary works of art are recreated by real people who are made to look nearly identical to the originals through the clever application of costumes, makeup, headdresses, lighting, props, and backdrops.

The first Festival of Arts occurred in 1932, and the first presentation of the Pageant occurred in 1993. Since then, the two events have been held each summer, apart from a four year interruption caused by World War II. "

This year represents the 75th Anniversary of this unusual Art Festival.  Each staged piece is accompanied with live orchestral music from the period, and a narrator explaining the context of the piece for about 90 seconds.  It reminded me of the 140-character limit on putting up a message on Twitter.  You either get the piece in that short period or not.

It may help to view this 3:40 minute behind-the-scenes video of the Festival to get a better sense of what's special about the experience (embedded link not available unfortunately).

The whole thing is experienced in an outdoor amphitheater, with a live orchestra playing under the stars as various famous works of art through the ages are cleverly staged on the various outdoor stages (image source). 

The whole thing is about reliving something called the "tableaux vivant" experience, which as this other Wikpedia entry explains, was really how people got entertained for centuries, long before we were spoiled by radio, TV, and the internet.

"Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of colour reproduction of images the tableau vivant (often abbreviated simply to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings "on stage", based on an etching or sketch of the painting.

This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a "live" theatre performance. They thus 'educated' their audience to understand the form taken by later Victorian and Edwardian eramagic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrative comic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s)."

An amusing part of the history of this type of art involves Victorian censorship:

"Since English stage censorship often strictly forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, tableaux vivants also had a place in presenting risqué entertainment at special shows.

In the nineteenth century they took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as The Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London. Other notorious venues were the Coal Hole in the Strand and The Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. In the twentieth century London the Windmill Theatre (1932-64) provided erotic entertainment in the form of nude tableaux vivants on stage."

As long as the performers were perfectly still, but nude, the work was considered "Art", and was OK to be shown in public.  But the slightest physical twitch by a performer could get the actor and the producers thrown in jail for breaking the public decency laws.

And we thought our rules and rulings around "wardrobe malfunctions" were draconian.  History just keeps repeating itself.

ON CHINA'S ARCHITECTURAL RENAISSANCE

NEXT IN LINE

A few days ago I posted about a unique building going up in Beijing, the new CCTV tower designed by Rem Koolhas, with critical praise by Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker. 

Today, the New York Times has a feature piece on the architectural renaissance going on all across China, lead in many cases by prominent architects from around the world.  The piece also has a great picture of the Koolhas building in the context of the Beijing landscape around it (featured here). 

The piece starts with a powerful introduction:

"If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.

The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.

Designed by Norman Foster, Beijing’s glittering air terminal is joined by a remarkable list of other new monuments here: Paul Andreu’s egg-shaped National Theater; Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest; PTW’s National Aquatics Center, with its pillowy translucent exterior; and Rem Koolhaas’s headquarters for the CCTV television authority, whose slanting, interconnected forms are among the most imaginative architectural feats in recent memory."

But the piece also offers the negative side of these dramatic architectural changes:

"Yet your sense of marvel at China’s transformation is easily deflated on the drive from the airport. A banal landscape of ugly new towers flanks both sides. Many of those towers are sealed off in gated compounds, a reflection of the widening disparity between affluent and poor. Although most of them were built in the run-up to the Olympics, the poor quality of construction makes them look decrepit and decades old.

It’s the flip side of China’s Modernist embrace: tabula rasa planning of the sort that also tainted the Modernist movement in Europe and the United States in the postwar years. China’s architectural experiment thus brims with both promise and misery. Everything, it seems, is possible here, from utopian triumphs of the imagination to soul-sapping expressions of a disregard for individual lives."

What struck me about these two paragraphs, is that one could probably have made the same societal observations about New York and London when they were going through their early periods of dramatic architectural changes,  a hundred and two hundred years ago respectively, driven of course by the dramatic economic growth of the nations they represented. 

The difference this time with what's going on in China is likely the scale and the pace, spread out across so many cities across China each with burgeoning millions in population.

But China is going through a time-honored phase of fast developing global nations.  The architectural "monuments" are merely a way to keep score in the cycle.

ON DANCING AROUND THE WORLD

GOOFILY GREAT

I hadn't heard of Matt Harding or his viral internet video of dancing goofily around the world, until this New York Times piece yesterday, so I'm the five or ten millionth or so person to come across it thus far.  As the piece explains:

"“Dancing” shows a guy dancing: a big, doughy-looking fellow in shorts and hiking boots performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could charitably be called goofy. It’s the kind of semi-ironic dance that boys do by themselves at junior high mixers when they’re too embarrassed to partner with actual girls.

The dancer is Matt Harding, the 31-year-old creator of the video, and with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background, he turns up, grinning and bouncing, in 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he performs the dance in zero gravity...

"...The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting."

It apparently took him 14 months with travels to 42 countries to make, and the NYTimes has this part right about it:

"However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier."

For that reason alone, it's worth watching it for even a fraction of it's 4 minutes and a half minutes. For me it really picks up around he 50 second mark, where people start to join him in his crazy dance.

Here's another one a little under 4 minutes, with even more places he's dancing around it...he does get around.  I even enjoyed the out-takes.

It's kind of a real-life version of that Cisco "Human Network" commercial from a while ago.

Dance, and the world will dance with you, it says.  Someone has just got to go out and do it first.

ON DARK SUMMER THRILLS

NO JOKING MATTER

So this Friday, we've got the new iPhone 3G release from Apple to look forward to, but what about next Friday?  What can we look forward to then, to give us a break from the dog days of summer? 

Why, "The Dark Knight" of course, the next Batman movie.  This time, the caped crusader goes up against The Joker, played by Heath Ledger in his last role before his untimely death.  Time magazine already has a review up and this is what they have to say:

"The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's second chapter in his revival of the DC Comics franchise, will hit theaters with all the hoopla and fanboy avidity of the summer season's earlier movies based on comic books.

It's the fifth, and three of the first four (Iron Man, Wanted and Hellboy II) have been terrific or just short of it. (The Incredible Hulk: not so hot.)

It's been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn't disappoint. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger's Joker, spectacular chases — including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels — and lots of stuff blowing up."

So they like it, and it'll likely join a string of Super-hero movie hits from this summer.  But here's where the review really got my attention:

"In its rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity..."

Whoa, they compare this to The Fly, one of my all-time favorite sci-fi movies, where Jeff Goldblum puts in one of the best performances of his career in the title role.  And think it can share that company.

Now I've definitely have to add this movie to my "must-see" this summer list.

ON UNIQUE ARCHITECTURE IN BEIJING

BOXY PRETZEL

It's refreshing to see that not every major city in a fast, growing, developing country is racing to build the tallest skyscrapers around. 

There's a unique form of skyscraper going up in Beijing that will be re-defining how we think of skyscrapers.  This New Yorker piece by Architect critic Paul Goldberger explains:

"(Ole) Scheeren is the co-architect, with Rem Koolhaas, of the most eagerly awaited building in Beijing, the headquarters of the Chinese television network CCTV, a monumental construction that has become world-famous long in advance of its completion, scheduled for late this year.

A vast structure of steel and glass, it is a dazzling reinvention of the skyscraper, using size not to dominate but to embrace the viewer.

The building will contain more office space than any other building in China and nearly as much as the Pentagon, but, as skyscrapers go, it is on the short side, with just fifty-one floors.

Looking from a distance like a gigantic arch, it is a continuous loop, a kind of square doughnut."

Or a boxy pretzel...pick your snack food.

Mr. Goldberger goes on to say:

"When you get closer, you see that each horizontal section is made up of two pieces that converge in a right angle. The top section, thirteen stories deep, is dramatically cantilevered out over open space, five hundred and thirty feet in the air, and it seems to reach over you like a benign robot.

The novelty of the form—some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts—takes time to comprehend; the building seems to change as you pass it. “It comes across sometimes as big and sometimes as small, and from some angles it is strong and from others weak,” Scheeren said. “It no longer portrays a single image.”

This gentle giant of a structure, when finished, will have about 4.1 million square feet of office space, a little more than the Empire State Building (2.8 million sq. ft.) and Chrysler Building (1.2 million sq. ft.) combined.

They're racing to finish it in time for the Summer Olympics in Beijing, which kick off in less than 40 days.  It's definitely going up on my list "must visit" places, on the next trip to China.

ON STAR TREK MUSICAL "MALARKEY"

REMEMBERING

Like millions around the world, I've been a life-long fan of all things Star Trek ever since the original series launched on TV in the 1960s.  So this sad weekend development deserves to be noted and remembered in my book.  Here's the headline item from CNN.com:

"LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Alexander "Sandy" Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranEdit Post | Post | *michael parekh on IT* | Your Weblogs | TypePadger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic "Star Trek" TV show, has died. He was 88."

Don't remember the original Star Trek music theme?  Let me help you with this one minute clip from YouTube:

Now Mr. Courage obviously accomplished a great deal more in his life than just this iconic theme that went onto the be the basis of every Star Trek music piece over the last four decades.  But this piece of course is what he'll be most remembered for in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, how the piece got developed is an interesting story in itself.  Here's an account from the Washington Post:

"His fanfare-style introduction to "Star Trek," eight notes played by the brass section, followed by the wordless melody with a prominent soprano voice won him enduring recognition among generations of "Trekkies" and even casual viewers of the science fiction show.

"Star Trek" originally aired on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and has been in perennial syndication.

He told an interviewer that he never was a science-fiction fan. "I think it's just marvelous malarkey," he said. "So you write some marvelous malarkey music that goes with it."

Apparently, the show's creator, the legendary Gene Roddenberry, didn't want any modern electronic music.  So Mr. Courage had to look elsewhere for inspiration.

"To write the "Star Trek" theme, Mr. Courage thought back to a pop song from his childhood that conjured images of going into the far distance. He came up with "Beyond the Blue Horizon," popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, and featuring a fast, train-like rhythm pulsating beneath the soaring melody.

Mr. Courage adapted the idea to the "Star Trek" job, which he completed in a week. His vision of the music included a soprano singer (Loulie Jean Norman), a flute, an organ and maybe a vibraphone. But he said the show's producer, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to accentuate the female voice. When Roddenberry was done, he said, the music "sounded like a soprano solo."

And like most great show biz stories, there's an interesting twist about money, as the Washington Post piece goes on to explain:

"Burlingame, author of "TV's Biggest Hits," said Roddenberry went further to annoy Mr. Courage by adding words to the instrumental theme. The lyrics begin: "Beyond the rim of the star-light/My love is wand'ring in star flight."

"It was horrible," Burlingame said. "Courage was never consulted, but Roddenbury from that point on was entitled to take 50 percent of royalties. . . . This upset Courage, understandably, not that he wrote a lyric, but that he wrote a lousy lyric that would never be sung anywhere."

Exploiting that loop-hole, Gene Roddenberry managed to get a 50% discount on the theme for a long, long time.  Given that this is the music business, it's not anywhere that others have not gone before.

ON LONG-AWAITED SEQUELS

MOVIE MAGIC

Indiana Jones fans of course will be lining up this holiday weekend to catch the fourth installment of the franchise, given that it's been two decades since we saw the last Indy flick back in 1989.  Regardless of the reviews, which have been lukewarm to positive, it'll be on the must-see list of even the most casual Indy fan.  As the New York Times reminds us:

" “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is a movie for boomers of all ages, though you can bet the bank that plenty of tots will be tagging along with Mom and Dad, Granny and Gramps.
Like the 1981 blockbuster “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the first in a monster franchise that has spawned two previous movie sequels, a television series, comics, novels, video games and Disney theme-park attractions, this new one was directed by Steven Spielberg, cooked up and executive produced by George Lucas (with Kathleen Kennedy) and stars Harrison Ford as the archaeologist-adventurer-sexpot with the sardonic grin, rakish fedora and suggestive bull whip."

The movie apparently brings lots of old characters back, along with a sprinkling of some new faces:

"The bad guys this time are cold war Reds first seen poking around an American military base and led by Irina Spalko. A caricature given crude, playful life by Cate Blanchett, Irina owes more than a little to Rosa Klebb, the pint-size Soviet operative played by Lotte Lenya, who took on James Bond in “From Russia With Love.”

Dressed in gray coveralls, her hair bobbed and Slavic accent slipping and sliding as far south as Australia, Ms. Blanchett takes to her role with brio, snapping her black gloves and all but clicking her black boots like one of those cartoon Nazis that traipse through earlier Indy films. She’s pretty much a hoot, the life of an otherwise drearily familiar party. Among the other invited guests are Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt, the young sidekick onboard to bring in those viewers whose parents were still in grade school when the first movie hit. Karen Allen, who played Indy’s love interest in “Raiders,” is here too, with a megawatt smile and a bit of the old spunk."

But speaking of long-awaited sequels in movie mega-franchises, we all have a new Terminator movie to look forward to soon, as Gizmodo notes:

"Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins has started production in the New Mexico deserts, with Christian Bale and Sam Worthington on board to star in the film as John Connor and Marcus Wright, respectively...

"Terminator Salvation will be set in 2018 where John Connor is fighting Skynet to ensure the future he's destined for..."

""Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins" marks the latest installment of the multi-billion dollar Terminator franchise and will be the first film in a new Terminator trilogy. The film is scheduled for a North American theatrical release May 22, 2009."

Hopefully, the second and third movies in that trilogy won't keep us waiting for a couple of decades.

ON A BIG CHANGE AT COLUMBUS CIRCLE

EXTREME MAKEOVER

There is no doubt that Columbus Circle in New York, around 59th Street and Broadway on the West side, has seen architectural change and substantial improvements over the last half a decade, both with the arrival of the Time Warner Center complex and the re-design of Columbus Circle itself.

One element that has however remained a fixture, is the infamous and controversial Edward Durell building on the south corner of Columbus Circle, which most visitors know has the "Lollipop" building.  It often puzzled outside viewers with it's sheer exterior white walls where windows ought to have been, so as to allow enjoyment of the presumably spectacular Central Park views from that unique geographical vantage point.

Well, the building is finally getting a long debated and anticipated re-do, and the New York Times has a succinct article and interactive feature about it that's well worth reading.  As it explains:

"New York may not be able yet to place the name, but the lollipops will certainly be familiar. So will the shape and the pale color of Edward Durell Stone’s Gallery of Modern Art, built at 2 Columbus Circle in 1964 to house Huntington Hartford’s art collection.
Almost everything else has changed, however, with the transformation of the building into the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum), designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture..."
Stone’s design, initially disparaged, gained admirers in recent years, including Tom Wolfe; the architectural historians Vincent Scully and Robert A. M. Stern; and Herbert Muschamp, former architecture critic for The New York Times. Their pleas could not move the Landmarks Preservation Commission to hold a hearing on whether to designate the building.

So the transformation went ahead.  [See the interactive feature.]

Though the museum is four months from opening, the new facade has now emerged from its construction cocoon."

The short and well-prepared interactive feature is particularly helpful , in that is shows the historical evolution of the building in it's architectural context, especially the various constraints and realities.

As a New Yorker for over quarter of a century, I've lived within ten blocks of this building for much of that time.  My initial reaction, subject to change, is that the new design is a substantial step forward in enhancing Columbus Circle.  Look forward to the completion of the project, and seeing the changes inside.

At the very least, it should hopefully reduce the controversies over the original design.

ON AN IRON-CLAD REDEMPTION

SEQUELS

One of the summer movies I'm looking forward to is Ironman, which opens in theaters on May 2nd.  This is due not only to the fact that I was a long-standing fan of Ironman comic-books as a young boy, but also because the lead is being played by the talented Robert Downey Jr., who has a controversial past to say the least. 

I'm a fan of his work as well, and also look forward to his performance in the upcoming war comedy Tropic Thunder, where he plays an Australian method actor who plays a black American soldier in Vietnam.  It's a role that brings with it some controversy, could possibly bring Mr. Downey an award or two, after everything is said and done.

The New York Times goes on to explore the redemption of Robert Downey Jr. in detail in this weekend article, laying it out as follows:

"LOOK at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man with nary a trace of human frailty.

A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big play in your newspaper came when he was on a perp walk.

Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios  to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, “Iron Man,” it bet on Mr. Downey. He is not only back in the game but at the top of it. Is this a great country or what?"

It goes on to emphasize the point with this anecdote:

"His romance with mood-altering chemicals didn’t end after he got out of prison. By 2003 he was an uninsurable serial relapser famous for being pulled out of hotels or other people’s homes in an addled, disheveled state.

As a movie star with a lot of pals, he lived a life beyond consequence until he finally wore out the endless mercies of the entertainment business. After he was fired from his spot on “Ally McBeal,” the bottom finally came, at a Burger King of all places.

On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done.
This being America, five years later you can walk into that Burger King, and if you order a Kids Meal you can get your own Robert Downey Jr. action figure, wrapped up in gadget ware."

Now that is an American happy ending, true Hollywood style.

ON CREATIVE ENDEAVORS

SPARKS OF SUCCESS

My sister mentioned in a casual phone call yesterday, that her six-year old son came home from school the other day and announced that he wanted to be an artist. 

Of course, that is about the most traumatic thing an Indian mother could hear, especially from a son, regardless of age.

She of course immediately tried to convince him on the merits of a career in engineering, business, medicine, or even architecture, like his Dad.

But young Neal wasn't having any of it.  He emphatically kept repeating, "I like to draw".

I tried to console my sister that times had changed, that yes, it was possible for artists to be millionaires.  Sometimes.

It's a sentiment eloquently captured in this cartoon by Hugh McLeod, who in a recent post announced he was writing a book.  It builds on an online work he published some time ago on "How to be Creative".

Like so many of his fans, I was introduced to Hugh's work via blogging, and am a keen follower of his writings and trademark back-of-a business card cartoons. 

My business card sports one of his cartoons.

I wish Hugh all the best in his current endeavor.  And look forward to his success as both an artist and a businessman.  How could he not, given this eloquent summary of his upcoming work:

"If I had to condense the entire work into a single line, it would read something like, "Work Hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Be nice. Be polite."

A role model indeed for young Neal to follow.

ON A BRAIN BUSTING KICKOFF TO TED 2008

MIND TRAVELS

TED 2008 kicked off it's five-day conference strong in Monterey, CA and Aspen, CO yesterday, with presentations by folks like Stephen Hawking and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (the spiritual leader, not Ravi Shankar, the musician. and father of Norah Jones).

You can get a good sense of the proceedings from the TED blog here, the Twitter feeds by many attendees here, and this terrific rundown by Bruno Giussani here.

One of the most powerful presentations of the afternoon for me was the one by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who gave an incredible, personal account over an 18 minute presentation of her own stroke almost a decade ago, and the long path to fully recovery. 

Like so many others, I have a loved one (my mom), who experienced a stroke a few years ago, and have struggled trying to understand what something like that really involves since then.

Bruno describes Jill's presentation well with this passage, along with a picture of the real human brain she used to explain what was going on where:

"Jill Bolte Taylor is incredible: she's a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who has suffered a stroke and studied it "from inside", as it happened, while her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness.
It took her eight years to recover, and to become a spokesperson for the possibility to come back.

"I studied the brain because I have a brother who's been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals diagnosed as "normal" and those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?
On the morning of December 10 1996, I got my own mental illness: in the course of four hours I watched by brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. I could not walk, talk, think.

If you've ever seen a human brain (she shown a real human brain -- picture above): it has two hemispheres.

The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. So they process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things, and I would say that they have very different personalities. Our right  hemisphere is all about this very moment, right here right now. It thinks in pictures, Information in the form of energy sterams in simultaneously through all of our sensory system and then  it explodes into what this present moment feels like. I'm an energy being connected to the energy alla around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. And through that we are all connected. And in this moment we are perfect, whole, and beautiful.

Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It's all about the past and about the future. It's designed to take that collage of the present moment, and pick out details after details, categorize them, associate them with all of what we have learned in the past, and project into our future possibilities. It thinks in languages. It's the internal chatter that connects us to the external world. It's the calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. And most important it's the voice that tells me "I am". And as soon it says that, I become separate from you. That's the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On that morning I woke up to a pounding pain on the back of my eye. It just gripped me, then released me, then gripped me, then released me. I got up trying to perform my usual routine, jumping on my exercise machine, and I realize that my hands look like claws. It's like as if my consciousness had shifted away.

I got off the machine and walked and realized that my body had slowed down, every step was very rigid. I stood in my bathroom ready to go into the shower and looked down at my arm and realized I could no longer define the boundaries of my body, of where I begin and where I end, the molecules of my arm were like blended with those of the wall, am all I could detect was energy flowing.

Then the chatter in my brain went silent. For a moment I was shocked to be in the total silent. Then in an instant my left hemisphere came back online, and I realized that I needed help; then I drifted out again, into "la-la-land"; then in again. I was walking around my apartment, telling to myself: I have to get to work. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: wow, this is so cool, how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside?

But I need to get help. I get to my office, I pick up a card, I can't figure out what's on it, my brain is back in la-la-land. Then I have a wave of clarity. Drifting in and out. (She goes on describing the difficulties of dialing a phone number and communicating to get help, unable to read the number, "because the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background"), and then I would wait for a wave of clarity. It took me  45 minutes to find the right number.

I'm in an ambulance towards the hospital and I realize that I'm no longer the choreographer of my life. Maybe the doctors will give me a second chance, maybe not. And right there, I just feel my spirit surrender -- I say goodbye to my life.
When I awoke, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. My life was now suspended between two strains of reality: information streaming in but I could not pick voices out from the background noise. Sounds were so loud and chaotic. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space. I felt enormous and expansive, and my spirit soaring.

I found nirvana. I remember thinking: there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside my tiny body. But then I realized: I am still alive. And if I found nirvana, then anyone who's alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world full with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate people who knew that they can come to this space at any time. What a gift a stroke can be to the way we live our lives. That motivated me to try to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and removed a blood clot the size of a tennis ball. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we?

We are the life horsepower of the universe, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who we want to be in the world, we can choose the consciousnesses of our right hemisphere or that of our left hemisphere.

These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe the more time we spend choosing the peace of our right hemisphere, the most peace we will project into the world and more peaceful our planet will be."

I've excerpted the full presentation from Bruno's post to try and convey the emotional impact of a presentation like this.

It was a riveting presentation, and I'll put up a video link from TED when available.  It really is a big step towards not taking one's brain for granted.

By the way, I'll be twittering (aka Twitter blogging) a fair bit from TED most of this week, joining in the conversation by many other TED attendees who're also twittering the conference.  This list by Austin Hill is a good place to keep track of these tweets.  My twittering of the conference can be accessed at my Twitter link here.

More to come.

ON THE iPOD AND THE SHARK

FORCE TRAPPED

That's the thought that came to me when I first saw this work of art by New York artist Billy Chasen.  Engadget explains it as "iPod explodes:  Gets trapped in resin":

" Sure, your iPod is portable, lightweight, and easy to use -- but it's not exactly special is it? 
Perhaps you should be thieving a page from a young man named Billy Chasen, who has decided to rip apart his 4G player and encase it in a brick of translucent resin. 
Here's the best part: it still works. By also including the dock internals in the project, he's able to charge and control the exploded device. Practical?
Not really, but that's art for you. Damien Hirst would be proud... or is suing."

It even uses Lego blocks for legs...cool. 
More pictures from different angles here.

You can check out more of Billy Chasen's work at his site. 

I also like  his Self-Portrait and the Weight of Words.  Still trying to get my head around Neuron Drive.

Engadget is right in that it is a riff off Damien Hirst's work, recalling this piece as described in Wikipedia:

"His iconic work is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

Its sale in 2004 made him the second most expensive living artist after Jasper Johns."

Evoking the iPod and a tiger shark in this way is apt, given what the former has done in it's waters.

ON A VIDEO HIT AND A VIDEO MISS

THE GOOD AND THE BAD

Didn't know what to quite expect from this Will Farrell video bit made for the web, but was intrigued by Valleywag's introduction:

"The Landlord, the showcase clip on Will Ferrell's new comedy site, has clocked an impressive 2 million downloads since it went up on Thursday.

It looks like the comic actor, star of movies such as the Wedding Crashers and Blades of Glory, has, with the Funny or Die property, a web hit on his hands.

As does Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture firm which quietly backed the online comedy project."

I clicked on the link with low expectations, and was utterly charmed by the star of the 2 1/2 minute clip.  Hint:  it isn't Will Farrell.

Hollywood, you'd better sign up this up and comer quick. 

My one criticism of the clip and the Funny or Die site, is that the video is set for auto-play, giving the viewer no chance to decide WHEN they want to watch a clip. 

Regular readers know that this is something I've criticized in the past.

Although the Funny or Die site does provide the ability to embed the video in a blog post like this one, the clip plays automatically when the blog is loaded.

As a result, I've removed the embedded clip, but you can click on this link to view the video.  It is funny and worth watching if you haven't seen it yet.

They really should let the viewer opt to play it, and it's an obvious attempt to goose their "download" and viewership numbers.

So, although I liked the clip this time, the site gets a C for implementation.

ON SELF-ASSEMBLING FURNITURE

COME TOGETHER NOW

If you're like me and try to avoid buying furniture from catalogs listings that say "some assembly required", technology may come to our rescue.  NewScientist.com has an interesting piece on the "self-assembling" chair:

"It's an art installation and built by Canadian artists Max Dean and Matt Donovan, and that the chair has yet to make its first "public appearance"."

As this site indicates, the artists hope to complete the project later this summer.

There's even a short video to see the thing in action.  It's almost as cool as watching the Terminator pulling himself together after losing some pieces.

Wireless, self-assembling, robotic furniture.  Now that's a clever way to get geeks interested in art, don't you think?

ON INGO'S WORLD GLOBES OF ART

"SEE THE WORLD, MY BOY!"

Every once in a while you see a work of art that truly makes you see the familiar in an entirely new way.

That's how I felt when I first saw Ingo Gunther's WorldProcessor series leafing through Wired magazine on a flight this weekend.  In a mini-article titled, "Think Globally", the artist is introduced as follows:

"Thomas Friedman says the world is flat. Ingo Günther proves otherwise. In his Worldprocessor series, the New York artist maps geosocial and scientific data from newspapers and NGOs onto 12-inch-diameter plastic globes.

The result is part infographic, part networking diagram, part humanistic commentary. So far, Günther has crafted some 300 globes, more than a third of which go on display in August at Kyushu University in Japan.

His biggest challenge? Keeping his worldviews up-to-date. Because the underlying statistics are always changing, Günther's work can be quickly rendered obsolete, so much so that he rarely sells it. "I once considered putting expiration dates on the pieces," he says. "I'd rather lease them and then retrieve them for updating."

The article then has SOME pictures of his 300 globes.  An example:

Moody's Ratings (no. 163-2), which colors the world's nations by their Moody's bond ratings...lower the rating, darker the color, until the lowest rated countries literally "disappear" from the globe. 

Other titles include:  Life Expectancy, Asteroid Impacts, One-Taiwan Policy and my favorite, Company vs. Country, where if a country's GDP equals a company's gross income, the name of the country is replaced with the name of the company.  So Pakistan suddenly becomes Sony.  Mongolia becomes Viacom.

Now let me explain...I'm a map nut and and a globe nut.  I love maps.  When as a kid, my Dad encouraged me to see as much of the world as I could over time, I took it both literally and figuratively.  I started collecting maps and Atlases of all types.  Even got a globe for a birthday present.

And I still can't get enough of them. 

So after reading about 300 such creative globes, in a static magazine on a plane, with no Internet access, I couldn't wait to land...get to a broadband Internet connection and search this artist and find ALL the globes.  Alternatively to book myself on the next flight to Kyushu to see the exhibit (image via Wikipedia).

Luckily, a quick Google search upon getting home from the red-eye, gave me his site, which happily turns out to be Worldprocessor!  And it's got links to most of the globes.  It was a great way to start off a Sunday.

There's a link to a great picture of an installation of his work, shown here (click for larger image).  The artist, Ingo Gunther has been doing these since the 1980s.  And it looks like his collection may be available in a book later this fall.

Now of course, being a geek, I'd love to see his globes with live, updated data feeds in two ways:

1. On the web-site, each with its own blog, with comments and TrackBacks enabled,
2. And in globes, or a SINGLE globe, available for sale.  Of course, this globe would be able to toggle through each of the 300 globes at the touch of a button (maybe even a remote?).

I wonder if the artist would be amenable to an open-source version of the globe on a web-site, with APIs that would allow folks to create their own new ways to see relevant information in a global way.  Maybe even mash-ups with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! Maps.

I even have an idea for a globe that I'd like to see...a globe with representations of all the "walled garden" Internet networks in the world, both wired and wireless shown in gradations of color.  The more walled the garden, the darker the color, thus disappearing from the backdrop of the open, connected global internet. 

It's something I've written about before, often in fact, but would be great to see on a world globe.

I know, I know, Mr. Gunther's globes are an on-going work of art...to be contemplated, appreciated in serene moments of reflection within hallowed halls of art museums.

But they're also a wonderful way to shake up the way we see the world and ourselves...and to make us see and think out of the Globe for a change. 

RECOMMENDED.

P.S.
Other blog posts on Worldprocessor that I found that are worth looking at if you want more to see and read on these globes:

1. Worldchanging blog.
2. Bookofjoe blog.

ON THE POWER OF GREY

GREY WORLD

Another extraordinary photograph that gets you right there, from my favorite photo blog Daily Dose of Imagery, by Canadian photographer Sam Javanrouh.  As usual, the comments are entertaining and informative to read.

Perhaps this appeals so much right now because of the very grey and thunder stormy skies in New York of late.

P.S.

My previous picks from Sam's work, as noted on this site.

ON FREEDOM TOWER ARCHITECTURAL POLITICS

PLAYING NICE

This article by Christopher Hawthorne, the Architectural critic of Slate gives a sometimes hilarious peek into the political shenanigans between the two primary architects, Libeskind and Childs, responsible for the "final" Freedom Tower design.  A taste:

Libeskind sent staffers to SOM to take digital photographs of the Freedom Tower models—which they did over the protests of employees there—ostensibly so that Libeskind could go to New York Gov. George Pataki with visual proof that Childs was hijacking the design.

Though Libeskind's office has downplayed the incident, saying it has been misreported, some in the Childs camp reportedly dubbed it "the Watergate break-in."

It also gives some clues that the design may not be so final as well.  Recommended for those into a geekier architectural look at the Tower.

ON FINAL FREEDOM TOWER DESIGN IN NEW YORK

You'll see a lot of stories on the new, and presumably final design, for the Big Apple's "Freedom Tower", to be built on the site of the 9/11 acts.

This one, by the architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff at the New York Times, resonated with me.  It speaks of a final design that is defensive in nature.  I'm posting the piece here for reader convenience, and expresses a relevant opinion on a structure we'll share with the world for generations to come:

The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world.

The new design by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is a response to the obvious security issues raised by the New York Police Department, specifically the tower's resistance to car and truck bombs. The earlier twisted-glass form, a pastiche of architectural visions cobbled together from Daniel Libeskind's master plan and various Skidmore designs, lacked grace or fresh ideas. The new obelisk-shaped tower, which stands on an enormous 20-story concrete pedestal, evokes a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top. (The toothpicklike spire was added so that the tower would reach its required height of 1,776 feet.)

The temptation is to dismiss it as a joke. And it is hard not to pity Mr. Childs, who was forced to redesign the tower on the fly to meet the rigid deadline of Gov. George E. Pataki. Unfortunately, the tower is too loaded with meaning to dismiss. For better or worse, it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how we are reshaping our identity in a post-Sept. 11 context.

The most radical design change is the creation of the base, which will house the building's lobby and some mechanical systems. Designed to withstand a major bomb blast, the base will be virtually windowless. In an effort to animate its exterior, the architects say they intend to decorate it in a grid of shimmering metal panels. A few narrow slots will be cut into the concrete to allow slivers of natural light into the lobby.

The effort fails on almost every level. As an urban object, the tower's static form and square base finally brush aside the last remnants of Mr. Libeskind's master plan, whose only real strength was the potential tension it created among the site's structures. In the tower's earlier incarnation, for example, its eastern wall formed part of a pedestrian alley that became a significant entry to the memorial site, leading directly between the proposed International Freedom Center and the memorial's north pool. The alley, flanked on its other side by a performing arts center to be designed by Frank Gehry, was fraught with tension; it is now a formless park littered with trees.

The interior, by comparison, holds a bit more promise for the hopelessly optimistic. Visitors will enter from north and south lobbies, where they will have to slip around an interior partition set just beyond the revolving doors - yet another concession to security concerns. If the configuration of windows could somehow be improved, one could imagine, with some effort, a sealed cathedral-like room with heavenly light spilling down.

But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer's architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.

At a recent meeting at his Wall Street office, Mr. Childs tried to deflect this criticism by enveloping the building in historical references. The height of the tower minus its spire (1,368 feet) matches the height of the taller of the former World Trade Center towers and is meant to re-establish a visual relationship to the nearby World Financial Center, which was exactly half that height. The fortresslike appearance of the base was partly inspired by the Strozzi Palace in Florence, the relationship between the base and the soaring tower by Brancusi's "Bird in Space" sculpture.

But the tower has none of the lightness of Brancusi's polished bronze form, let alone its sculptural beauty. And the Strozzi Palace's rough stone facade is beautiful because it is a mask: once inside, you are confronted with a courtyard flooded with light and air, one of the Renaissance's great architectural treasures. What the tower evokes, by comparison, are ancient obelisks, blown up to a preposterous scale and clad in heavy sheaths of reinforced glass - an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power.

This obsession with symbolism extends all the way up to the tower's spire. Mr. Childs has long been itching to reposition the original spire, which, as Mr. Libeskind envisioned it, had to be set at the edge of the tower to echo the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. In the new version, the spire rises out of the center of a tension ring mounted atop the building, an abstract interpretation of Liberty's torch and a concept that, like Mr. Libeskind's, has more to do with pandering to public sentiment than with any big architectural idea.

All of this could be more easily forgiven if it were simply due to bad design. But ground zero is not really being shaped by architects; it is being shaped by politicians. Soon after the new security requirements were announced, it became clear that the entire building would have to be redesigned. That could have been seen as a last chance to repair what had become a confused master plan, one that had little connection, except in the minds of Mr. Libeskind and Governor Pataki, to the original. Instead, the quality of the master plan has been sacrificed to the governor's insistence on preserving hollow symbolic gestures.

Absurdly, if the Freedom Tower were reduced by a dozen or so stories and renamed, it would probably no longer be considered such a prime target. Fortifying it, in a sense, is an act of deflection. It announces to terrorists: Don't attack here - we're ready for you. Go next door.

There is an accompanying slide show and video that are also available as part of the New York Times coverage.

I've posted in the past about the need to make our embassies abroad more engaging with most of the world who would love to interact with us given an easier opportunity. 

With the redesigned tower in my home of almost 25 years, I feel we may have very well encased that same fear of the world we project abroad into this monument to a tragedy here.

Begging your indulgence, I'll repeat myself from one of those posts:

"It's time for us as a people, a country, and a government, to go from being scared and defensive, to being smart and proactive, about ALL our interests."  We need to live up to the name of the Freedom Tower, and start being freer of fear. 

The first definition that pops up in dictionary.com on the word "freer" is:

Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty.

On the eve of the weekend celebrating our nation's birthday, I point to the hope in Thomas Jefferson's words, "The Spirit of 1776 is not dead", especially in a tower that we are so painfully making sure rises to 1776 feet.

 

ON BLUETOOTH "ULTRASWARM FLOCKS" IN THE SKIES

COME FLY WITH ME...

One of the most popular posts on this site since its inception was a piece titled "On Google Taking to the Skies".  It talked about the mapping race being engaged in by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! et al, gathering momentum. 

It's in that context that this article by David Pescovitz in thefeature.com (courtesy of Boing Boing), caught my eye...with a title like "Flocks of flying bluetooth robots may soon take to the skies for a distributed bird's eye view", how could it not?  An excerpt:

A typical flock of 2,000 starlings contains as much brain tissue as a single human being. Of course, you can't link together bird brains. Not real birds, anyway. But a small group of roboticists at the University of Essex are designing a system to wirelessly network a swarm of tiny, Bluetooth-enabled unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) into a cluster of flying computers acting as one processor more powerful than the sum of its bots.

Someday, flocks of shoebox-sized UAVs called UltraSwarms could act as a distributed eye in the sky, monitoring highway traffic, aiding in crowd control or even entertainment at massive sports arenas or, of course, embarking on military surveillance missions. Much of the data they gather -- video from onboard cameras, for example -- will be dealt with in the sky, delivering only "news you can use" to a central command.

For any of these applications to fly though, the researchers must weave together two threads in computer science research: cluster computing and swarm intelligence. They're presenting a scientific paper (PDF) about the project at the 2005 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Conference this week in Pasadena, California.

Google is already raising the ante according to SiliconValleyWatcher.com in the 3D mapping race:

Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.

The move would trump Amazon's A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets.

The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google's Keyhole satellite photo application.

The goal is to create similar 3D online versions of other cities in the US and overseas.

Given this interest, the portals could soon be creating their own ultraswarms around these scientists across the pond.  And then, we could see these search swarms crawling the skies much like the search crawlers swarm the web today...

 

 

ON GOOGLE LOGO FOR FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT BIRTHDAY

"the next one"...

was the apparent reply when Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867-April 9, 1959), when asked about his favorite project.  In time, there'd be over 420 buildings to choose from, and Google has picked two of my favorites to adorn their logo today on his birthday.

I've written in the past about Google doing cool logos on special days, but they've outdone themselves here.

FLW's Guggenheim Museum (1959) in New York, and Falling Water (1935) in Pennsylvania are likely the most recognized of his works (see originals below).  As Answers.com notes,

Wright practiced what is known as organic architecture, an architecture that evolves naturally out of the context, most importantly for him the relationship between the site and the building. In this, he was heavily influenced by American furniture maker and architect Gustav Stickley.

Stickley, who was a furniture maker, famous for his Mission Revival Style, as well as an architect.  Again, from Answers.com, Stickley believed:

• A house ought to be constructed in harmony with its landscape, with special attention paid to selecting local materials;
• An open floor plan would encourage family interaction and eliminate unnecessary barriers;
• Built-in bookcases and benches were practical and ensured that the house would not be completely reliant on furniture from outside;
• Exposed structural elements, light fixtures, and hardware are all considered to be decorative; and
• Artificial light should be kept to a minimum, so large groupings of windows were necessary to bring in light.

A lot of this may seem commonplace and common sense today, but was a radical departure from conventional thinking in its time.

Both men's work have been long-time favorites of mine and have influenced all the places I've called home over the last 25 years.  Luckily, my wife likes their work as well.

If you'd like to learn more about FLW, here is a good selection of books from Amazon, as well as a cool site to explore.

ON A JAZZY RAMAYANA RE-DO

SEEING THE OLD THROUGH NEW EYES...

Every Indian born over the past few thousand years has likely grown up hearing wonderful, exciting, scary, mind-blowing and funny stories from the epics of Ramayana and the Mahabharata at his or her parent's lap or a grandparent's knee.  These epics make up a big part of what India's main religion Hinduism is all about. 

There have been a number of good books, movies and theatrical productions that introduce some of these stories to western audiences in recent years.  From Wikipedia's summary of the Ramayana:

The Ramayana (Sanskrit: vehicle of Rama) is part of the Hindu smriti, written by Valmiki (c.250 BC). This epic of 24,000 verses tells of a Raghuvamsa prince, Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is abducted by the rakshasa, or demon, Ravana. The Ramayana had an important influence on later Sanskrit poetry, primarily through its establishment of the Sloka meter. But, like its epic cousin, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana is not just a grand epic. It contains the teachings of the ancient Hindu sages and presents them through allegory in narrative and the interspersion of philosophic and devotional discourse. The characters of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Bharata, Hanuman and Ravana (the enemy of the story) are all fundamental to the grander cultural consciousness of India.

The Ramayana contains seven chapters, or kandas.

With the advent of the web and its plethora of cool technologies, it was only a matter of time before we started to see some of the stories re-told in this medium.  It's just surprising sometimes where these things come from.

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