Memory
– Lewis Carroll
Miso soup from scratch
Brief Thoughts On Maps
The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees
Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps,Times Literary Supplement, Feb 4, 1977
Sonny Rollins – Williamsburg Bridge, 1968
Three splendid ones from the quote widget this morning..
– Alice Roosevelt Longworth
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
– W. C. Fields
Jonathan Jones
Grisly litter … No Soul For Sale at Tate Modern, a festival to celebrate the gallery’s 10th birthday. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
Labour now has a unique chance to rethink its attitudes to everything – including culture. Compared with the possibility of being reduced to third place in the election earlier this month, it has had an astonishingly soft landing. What this means is that the soul-searching can be measured, rather than vicious as it was in the 1980s. But soul-searching there must be – and this should include some broad questions about the party’s relationship with the world of the arts.
Tate Modern yesterday afternoon was a good place to ask those questions. As part of its tenth-anniversary celebrations, the gallery was hosting No Soul for Sale, a festival of independents. Some critics get their words posted up outside productions of Hamlet – me, I get quoted on an advert for a bouncy castle. “People have come to expect crazy spectacle and interactive fun in the Turbine hall”, said Jonathan Jones on a card distributed by Seattle art venue Western Bridge, to promote their contribution, a silvery-grey inflatable cube in which children could jump up and down. At least it offered some good vibrations, which was more than you could say for most of the stalls or exhibits or whatever they were that sprawled along the floor of the Turbine hall like the grisly litter of a cultural meltdown.
Honestly – was this a joke? Not so much a festival of independents as a carnival of jerks, this part of the jamboree for the much-touted Bankside anniversary was a massive own-goal, a treat only for the museum’s harshest critics. NO FUN, I was raging inside. We had come for a family afternoon by the Thames. It was raining outside, so we were trapped among feedback-playing guitarists, ironic souvenirs, mashed-up magazines and all the other detritus of imaginations that have long since given up. It was like an afternoon with Bob and Roberta Smith’s less gifted mates.
How does this relate to Labour’s fall, you might ask. From its flirtation with the Cool Britannia pop scene in the 1990s to the Millennium Dome to what settled into a complacent affiliation with the hipness of contemporary art, New Labour remorselessly and desperately identified itself with cultural modernity. The lousy party at Tate Modern on Sunday afternoon felt like the spectre of the Dome, come to remind us of the strange cultural impostures of the past 13 years.
This is what Labour needs to learn about culture: the modern does not equal the radical. Nor do history, tradition and achievement equal conservatism. Rembrandt is not a conservative – but Tracey Emin did flirt with voting, and, for all I know, did actually vote Cameron. The narrow desire to be the party of Tate Modern (and leave the National Gallery to the Right) was a dry and self-diminishing discipline.
Compare this to the British Museum last autumn, where vast crowds enjoyed a celebration of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, with skeleton stilt walkers, candy skulls – and lectures that we listened to eagerly. Labour’s obsession with contemporary chic has underestimated the intelligence and curiosity of a country that can no longer be characterised, after this divided election result, as either modern or old-fashioned. In the past, Labour intellectuals claimed the inheritance of John Ruskin. They need to do so again.
Daily Mail gets it right..
Non-Apple’s Mistake
I’ve been patient, I’ve been gracious
And this mountain is covered with wolves
Hear them howling, my hungry children
Maybe you should stay and have another drink and think about me and you.
Jonathan Coulton, “Skullcrusher Mountain”The howls of protest coming from iPhone and iPad developers are loud and shrill, and are sure to grow louder and shriller as their Golden Cage grows smaller and smaller, as I’m certain it will.
The Golden Cage is indeed a cage, and a strong one. Yet it has no door. Still the poor imprisoned wretches continue, on their own free will and in battalion strength, to pack subway-rush-hour-tightly into their curious prison. I suggest that the jailbirds’ grievances should lie not with their jailers, but with the outside world, which offers them so little.
It appears that no one (not PG, either) has a grasp of the real problem behind Apple’s tyranny. At any rate, no one is talking about it. It is quite true that Apple’s new App Store policies are exactly the kind of behavior one might expect from a tyrannical monopoly. But, having cornered no markets, Apple is not a monopoly. Or is it?
I argue that Apple now has not one but two monopolies:
I) A nearly-total monopoly on computer (and pocket computer) systems designed with good taste.
II) A total monopoly on the Microsoft-free, hassle-free personal computer. [1]Mr. Jobs is indeed starting to behave like that other convicted monopolist we know and love. Yet unlike the latter, Jobs did not engage in underhanded business practices to create his monopolies. They were handed to him on a silver platter by the rest of the market, which insists on peddling either outright crap [2] or cheap imitations [3] of Apple’s aesthetic. In order to resist the temptation this worldwide herd of mindless junk-peddlers and imitators have placed before him, it would not be enough for Jobs to merely “not be evil.” He would have to be a saint (and a traitor to his shareholders.)
Imagine that every car maker save for Toyota insisted on using the infamous East German Trabant as a standard of quality – yet blindly imitated random elements of Toyota’s visual design. How long would it take for the whiners to appear on the scene and start making noises about monopolistic tyranny? How long would it take for Toyota to start living up to these accusations in earnest? And why should it not do so? What is to be gained from corporate sainthood? From a refusal to fleece eagerly willing suckers for all they’re worth? Idle threats of defection by outraged iPhone developers [4] are laughable nonsense simply because – in the two categories listed – Apple has no competition. Every commercial product which competes directly with an Apple product (particularly the iPhone) gives me (and many others) the distinct impression that “where it is original, it is not good, and where it is good, it is not original.”
Of course, Apple’s competitors cannot actually copy the secret of its greatness, because Apple is a fundamentally different type of organism. Rather than a brainless government-by-committee, it is an extension of one man’s will, projected with the aid of a small group of trusted lieutenants: no focus groups in sight. For the Apple-imitators to turn into genuine “Apples” would be as fantastic and unlikely as it would be for a slime mold to spontaneously become a true multicellular animal, equipped with a central nervous system. It is also unclear that, from their own perspective, they should want to grow brains – for a creature with that kind of centralized point of failure is decidedly no longer immortal. [5] There is every reason to believe that when Jobs dies, Apple will also die [6] – or at the very least, “diminish, and go into the West,” becoming a pale imitation of itself – like the post-Edison zombie of General Electric, or Hughes Aircraft after Hughes. Yet we, the consumers and developers, could certainly use more products from corporations endowed with an actual mind and will.
You want a non-tyrannical Apple? Rather than striving to weaken Apple so that it can be devoured by its brawny-yet-mindless competitors, do something constructive. Experiment with GUIs which don’t trace their descent to Xerox PARC. Forever renounce the idiotic practice of copying Microsoft, that cheap imitation of a cheap imitation. If you are creative, create. Otherwise, strive to find a strong-willed Jobs figure gifted with good taste, and become his loyal servant. This is how we get quality products, everywhere from architecture to operating systems. There is no other way. Creativity requires a mind, and a herd has none.
Edit:
A number of people linking here seem to think that I like Apple or forgive its sins (as if Apple needs my forgiveness.) This is a mistake. I loathe Apple products, and chafe under the straightjacket of their aesthetic whenever I use one. I simply happen to despise their competition that much more. At least Apple has an aesthetic. Its works, however flawed, are the works of a person, rather than an amorphous blob.
[1] For a variety of reasons, Apple’s OS is not my choice on the desktop. Yet my only laptop is a Macbook Air. No one else makes a portable where every hardware component simply works, including suspend mode, while entirely freeing me from Microsoft. (In an important sense, Apple’s dominance stems partly from an unholy “good cop, bad cop” symbiosis with the Redmond Tyrant.) I should also note that no one else makes a laptop whose metallic chassis enables it to pass the “Creak Test” – hold a device by two opposite corners and flex gently. Do you hear a noise of any kind? If so, you are holding a mechanically-unsound piece of garbage.
[2] The still-ubiquitous non-touchscreen phones, for instance.
[3] What else would you call this? And were it not for trademark and patent laws, I imagine that Apple’s mobile phone competitors would pull out all the stops and make outright copies without shame, just as Microsoft continues to shamelessly ape the Apple GUI – as it has continuously done since Windows 1.0.
[4] The fabled Google Android? It is entirely the piece of junk one ought to expect from a development process driven by committees and steered by non-creative minds. And it appears that many would-be buyers know it.
[5] In addition to the likely loss of immortality, such a transformation would also make a company far less hospitable to the time-servers, sycophants, and sociopaths who presently dominate American corporate culture. It would be vigorously resisted by almost everyone who is in any kind of position to resist it.
[6] Stock-holders who are outraged over Mr. Jobs’ failure to report on his failing health certainly seem to think so.
This entry was written by Stanislav , posted on Friday April 16 2010 , filed under Hot Air, NonLoper, Philosophy . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.Leave a Reply
Untitled
Dan told us he was pretty good at iPhone ping pong..
(4463 KB)
Watch on posterous
Sent from my iPhone
The shock of the old: Welcome to the elderly age – New Scientist
Untitled
Little Red Riding Hood – A Martian Perspective
By Eric Berne, M.D.
(To a Martian, this story raises interesting questions. He takes it at face value, including the talking wolf, even though he has never met one. But given what happens, he wonders what it is all about and what kind of people it happens to. Here, then, are his thoughts on the matter.)
One day LRRH’s mother sent her through the woods to bring food to her grandmother, and on the way she met a wolf. What kind of a mother sends a little girl into a forest where there are wolves? Why didn’t her mother do it herself, or go along with LRRH? If grandmother was so helpless, why did mother leave her all by herself in a hut far away? But if LRRH had to go, how come her mother had never warned her never to stop and talk to wolves? The story makes it clear that LRRH had never been told that this was dangerous. No mother could really be that stupid, so it sounds as if her mother didn’t care much what happened to LRRH, or maybe evn wanted to get rid of her. No little girl is that stupid either. How could LRRH look at the wolf’s eyes, ears, hands and teeth and still think it was her grandmother? Why didn’t she get out of there as fast as she could?
Even the grandmother and the hunter aren’t above suspicion. If we now treat the dramatis personae of this story as real people, each with his or her own script, we see how neatly their personalities mesh from a Martian point of view.
!. The mother is evidently trying to lose her daughter ‘accidentally’, or at least she wants to end up saying: ‘Isn’t it awful, you can’t even walk through the park nowadays without some wolf…’ etc.
2. The wolf, instead of eating rabbits and such, is obviously overreaching himself, and he must know that he will come to a bad end that way, so he must want to invite trouble. He evidently read Nietzche or someone similar in his youth (if he can talk and tie on a bonnet, why shouldn’t he be able to read?), and his motto is something like ‘Live dangerously and die gloriously.
3. Grandmother lives alone and leaves her door unlatched, so she may be hoping for something interesting to happen, something which couldn’t happen if she were living with her folks. Maybe that’s why she didn’t move in with them, or at least live next door. She was probably young enough to be ripe for adventure, since LRRH was still a little girl.
4. The hunter is obviously a rescuer who enjoys working over his vanquished opponents with sweet little maidens to help: quite clearly an adolescent script.
5. LRRH tells the wolf quite explicitly where he can meet her again, and even climbs into bed with him.
The truth of the matter is that everybody in the story is looking for action at almost any price. If the payoff at the end is taken at face value, then the whole thing was a plot to do in the poor wolf by making him think he was outsmarting everybody, using LRRH as bait. In that case, the moral of the story is not that innocent maidens should keep out of forests where there are wolves, but that wolves should keep away from innocent-looking maidens and their grandmothers; in short, a wolf should not walk through the forest alone. This also raises the interesting question of what the mother did after she got rid of LRRH for the day…
Alfie on the door
Er..
..I’d imagine it’s pretty clear by now that I no longer attend to this here blog much these days. Just thought I should drop a line to say that I probably won’t be doing so in the near future either. Sorry about that, time is tight and my attentions need to be a little more focussed. Thanks for coming along this far, I appreciate it – I’ll be on Facebook for the time being if you want me.. http://www.facebook.com/aconnell