Shooting Wide Open

There are sirens and gunshots in a song about a side hug? See ~3:30 for a demo of a narrowly averted dastardly frontal hug… “Jesus never hugged nobody like that!”

My laptop hard drive kicked the bucket on Tuesday. I’d backed up recently and had been shooting mostly film anyhow, so I have a few hours of rescanning and reprocessing to do, hopefully during Thanksgiving and Xmas, when I’ll also try to catch up on some needed blogging on the more fascinating pieces of course material. Aside from that, I have not lost much. Invest in back-ups, people! (Drobo anyone?)

In the meantime, here is a sight for sore eyes:

It turns out trampolining (?) can be an extreme sport of sorts… What I find amazing is that there is not all that much room between where his head lands and the metal bar of the trampoline. Scary! Maybe they can’t make them too big or they’ll lose their tautness?

And another kind of jumping.

This sound makes me happy. And Hutz is just an irresistable performer.

I wish I could’ve found some footage of a song that uses the girls’ legs as drums stands, but no luck. This is what it looks like. They also have a penchant for drum crowd surfing…

This one’s more indicative of their live style, but the quality’s not so hot. Hutz has said their not just a ‘show band’ but are you kidding?! CD is just not the same as live for a band like this. The recordings are just too polished, not to mention everything is compressed to the point of no dynamic range (the music industry equivalent of over-saturated colors?).

Unfortunately, now that they’re getting big, it costs $30+ to see them. Don’t get me started. Poop.

Speaking of the Innocence Project, I read this and it stuck in my craw. It is a reminder of how important it is to have journalists researching, questioning and challenging rather than just quoting and straight reporting. In a month-old New Yorker, there is Todd Willingham’s story: he wakes one night to find the entire house on fire, tries to get into his kids’ room and fails, stumbling out just before the fire reaches what’s called flashover. Witnesses report his attempts to get back into the house. Later, they change their testimony in light of arson investigators’ conclusion that he set fire to the house in order to kill his children. He is convicted and executed, but not before a concerned pen pal does some leg work and consults a munitions expert turned arson consultant who, days before the execution, submits a report to the state of Texas claiming that the arson investigators were full of shit and he is an innocent man. No dice. Willingham is treated like a child killer in prison, his ex-wife refuses to bury him next to the kids. What a nightmare.

It turns out until the mid ’90s we didn’t really know anything scientific and confirmed by experiment about fires. Read on. (Hurst is the expert, Vasquez and Fogg are the arson investigators.)

In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.” After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity.

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.”

The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

The article is really worth checking out.

File the following under: Things You Wish Would Appear Magically on Film:

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish-Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Garazito Brothers are doing the high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego.

So you’re down on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck. Both Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight down toward the crap tables – but they bounce off the net, they separate and spring back toward the roof in three different directions, and just as they’re about to all again they are grabbed out of the air by three Korean kittens and trapezed off to one of the balconies.

Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shock. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a bull-dyke and win a cotton candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99 cents your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Nintey-nine cents more for a voice message.

Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly at the window, when suddenly a vicious Nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: ‘Woodstock Uber Alles!‘

Who else but Hunter Thompson.

That seamless blend of imagery and the authorial message is something I envy in text. That ability to shfit scenes and perspectives without any discrete borders or shift in focus of the eye. There’s video, but text achieves the same effect without the specifics of real world color and settled composition, in some sweet spot of free association and directed imagination. But at the end of the day, it’s a flashy photograph that makes me feel in the world and wanting to touch everything.

“I have been through hundreds of towns and cities in every climate and against every kind of scenery, and of course they are all different, and the people have points of difference, but in some ways they are alike. American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash, surrounded by piles of wrecked automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.”

- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

Two interesting videos about stuff. First, the Story of Stuff, “a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.” Aimed at kids, but what that really means is that everything is said very simply and directly. Definitely a liberal point of view. I’m of two minds about the political spin – if they had toned that down, maybe there’d be more of a chance it would be played in more classrooms.

Second, a TED Talk featuring Jan Chipcase, who talks about cellphones and calling cards being used (and importantly, reused) as a method of transfering and loaning money with interest. He makes the distinction between the stuff that we own, carry, and use. In developing countries, a whole industry has sprung up involved in fixing cellphones and other electronics. It’s pretty telling that when I take my cheap phone or shoes or printer to a repair shop and ask for it to be fixed, the repair guy inevitably asks me why I don’t just buy a new one. Well, isn’t it obvious? Because I already own this one!

On a positive note though, I did run into a branch of the Berkeley tool lending library. (There’s also a version in Oakland.) You need a tool, you borrow it from the library instead of buying it from Home Depot for one project and then letting it sit in the garage. This could work for some types of toys and sports equipment – instead of a garage sale or hand me downs, just donate to the local toy library. This would solve the problem of kids getting bored with toys a week after you’ve bought them, and you’d only buy them if the kids break them. It seems pretty obvious – to avoid having housefuls of stuff, just share some commonly used things within a community. Why should a library be limited to books and media? Sort of like Zipcar.

Clever Crows Prove Aesop’s Fable Is More Than Fiction:

Researchers presented four crows with a challenge from Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher”: a container of water not quite full enough for the birds to reach with their beaks. Just like Aesop’s crow, all four birds figured out how to raise the water level by dropping stones into the glass. The crows also selectively chose large pebbles over small ones, and quickly realized that dropping rocks into a container of sawdust didn’t have the same effect.

(Thank, Danielle!)

Rebecca Coolidge

Held, where else, in Alaska. Please tell me someone has done a fine art series on beards.

Early in the wee hours this morning, a factual data oriented search engine cum calculator called Wolfram Alpha launched. (You can read an initial review on TechCrunch.) Instead of pointing you to webpages with information as Google does, it collates selected facts in its database and presents it to you in a page of charts and numbers. It’s mostly geared toward mathy or sciency topics. For example, you can search for a string of DNA by entering a sequence of basepairs and you can quickly see a payment plan for a mortgage with specified interest rates, but you can’t get any band fan sites or things of that ilk.

I do wonder if this will throw an inadvertant monkey wrench into math and science education. I can imagine science teachers throwing up their hands as their students use Wolfram Alpha to solve problems they would normally have to think out or solve by hand. But maybe this is what people said about the calculator. Maybe this will enable the teaching of a higher level of problem solving.

The question that comes to my mind is what you’re supposed to do with this data. Can we extract those graphs and charts easily? Google has been working on a similar app called Google Squared which returns your results in a spreadsheet. This is less visually impressive, but seems to be a more powerful if you actually want to use or manipulate the data for your own purposes.

Google is no doubt working on semantic web apps already, and I suspect they’ll swallow up the good bits of Wolfram Alpha (or any new web and info related thing that isn’t utterly groundbreaking) and implement it themselves very quickly. I can easily see a new Google tab containing exactly what WA offers. Competing with all the info on the web with curated data stored in your own databases seems to be a losing proposition. So far WA looks like an encyclopedia and calculator rolled up into one and made interactive, which is very impressive, but surely there are more interesting things to be done with the idea of the semantic web.

Anastasia Cazabon

While reading Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, I came upon the story of Kafka and the traveling doll. There is a more conservative telling of it at the The Kafka Project website, but I like how Auster tells the story:

It’s the last year of Kafka’s life, and he’s fallen in love with Dora Diamant, a young girl of nineteen or twenty who ran away from her Hasidic family in Poland and now lives in Berlin. He gets to Berlin in the fall of 1923 and dies the following spring, but those last months are proabbly the happiest months of his life.

Every afternoon, Kafka goes out for a walk in the park. More often than not, Dora goes with him. One day, they run into a little girl in tears, sobbing her heart out. Kafka asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him that she’s lost her doll. He immediately starts inventing a story to explain what happened. ‘Your doll has gone off on a trip,’ he says. ‘How do you know that?’ the girl asks. ‘Because she’s written me a letter,’ Kafka says. The girl seems suspicious. ‘Do you heave it on you?’ she asks. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’

Kafka goes straight home to write the letter.

The next day, Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her. The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.

That’s where the story begins to break my heart. It’s astonishing enough that Kafka took the trouble to write the first letter, but now he commits himself to the project of writing the letter every day. He kept it up for three weeks. Three weeks. One of the most brilliant writers who ever lived sacrificing his time – his ever more precious and dwindling time – to composing imaginary letters from a lost doll. Dora says he wrote every sentence with excruciating attention to detail, that the prose was precise, funny, and absorbing. In other words, it was Kafka’s prose and every day for three weeks he went to he park and read another letter to the girl.

The doll grows up, goes to tschool, gets to know other people. She continues to assure the girl of her love, but she hints at certain complications in her life that make it impossible for her to return home. Little by little, Kafka is preparing the girl for the moment when the doll will vanish from her life forever. He finally decides to marry off the doll. He describes the young man she falls in love with, the engagement party, the wedding in the country, even the house where the doll and her husband now live. And then, in the last line, the doll bids farewell to her old and beloved friend.

By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instad, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness.