The ebb and flow of public spaces

A slow yielding of public to private spaces led to a tremendous opportunity for Starbucks in the early 1990s: not to sell coffee but to rent public space.

To rent a Starbucks public space you purchase a disposable token (a white Starbucks coffee cup) and place it near your person. The cup contains a complimentary drink. The tokens are uniform in outward appearance but can be filled with various liquids which are sold at different prices to allow the consumer to signal who they are. The liquids may be consumed.

It’s understandable that Starbucks would attempt to program a discussion of race throughout its chain of “public squares.” The effort failed but I bet they’ll try again, perhaps by allowing regional or individual stores to set the agenda and partnering with established brands.

I was reminded of Starbucks’ trade in public spaces by this short history of anti-theft devices in medieval libraries.

By way of analogy, the author asks : “Do you leave your e-reader or iPad on the table in Starbucks when you are called to pick up your cup of Joe?”

postscript

Mick Stevens, The New Yorker – December 1, 2015:

mick-stevens.new-yorker

business

a functional object

All models are unique, mostly handmade and may slightly differ from the models shown in the pictures. All our products are designed as works of art and are sold as such. The orderer is expected to regard these products as works of art. In the event that these works of art are used as functional objects, they shall not be subject to the usual requirements of a functional object. We therefore accept no liability arising from any use of these products other than as works of art.

Den Herder Production House

art

confessionals

Confessional – Wikipedia

The priest and penitent are in separate compartments and speak to each other through a grid or lattice… The priest will usually sit in the middle and the penitents will enter the compartments to either side of him… Confessions and conversations are usually whispered. Sometimes a confessional will be built into the church walls and have separate doors for each compartment; other confessionals can be free-standing structures where curtains are used to conceal penitents (and even the priest in some confessionals) from the rest of the church.

selfie-confessional

art/ideas

the selfie market

New Apple patents seek total dominance of selfie market – The Guardian, January 13, 2015

But on Tuesday, a series of Apple patents surfaced online – and one of them would allow iPhone users to take remote pictures from a mounted camera, controlled from a watch. The patent specifically mentions weaknesses in the GoPro product.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror – John Ashberry, 1974

The glass chose to reflect only what he saw
Which was enough for his purpose: his image
Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle.
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.

ideas

competition

An intrepid researcher has mapped some of the microwave towers being used to conduct high-frequency-trading around the world.

HFT requires competitors to use cutting-edge technology to see ahead. It has antecedents:

Height, then, played an important part in facilitating that speed. A trader’s physical height became an advantage, which is part of the reason some traders were former basketball or football players –“taller traders were easier to see”. In the 1990s, some traders wore high heels in the pits to trade faster, and inevitably experienced injuries due to lack of balance. This prompted the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to impose a ruling making the maximum size of platform heels two inches in November 2000.

via Alexis Madrigal.

Speaking of antecedents, one of the cons lovingly illustrated in the 1990 movie The Grifters involves exploiting time delays to make money on financial markets. The con involved selling the promise of that grift, not actually carrying it out. Brilliant.

business/people/power/technology

Balls

Ev Williams is a 42 year-old billionaire and one of the founders of the company that created the popular communications tool Twitter.

Recently, Ev Williams posted a five-second video on Twitter implying that Human Rights Watch (HRW) should be embarrassed because one of its pieces of marketing was made in China.

continue…

business/people/power

The eyes of the other

John Lahr profiles actor Al Pacino:

To Pacino, there is no such thing as a fourth wall. “The audience is another character in the play,” he said. “They become part of the event. If they sneeze or talk back to the stage, you make it part of what you’re doing.” Once, when he was performing “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” the first play in David Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy, in Boston, in 1972, Pacino made a strong connection with a pair of penetrating eyes in the audience. “I remember feeling a focus I never experienced before—intense, so riveting that I directed my performance to that space,” he said. “I found at curtain call for the first time that I needed to find out who belonged to those eyes. So, as we were bowing, I looked over to the space where I believed the look was coming from and there it was, two seeing-eye dogs still looking at me. They must have found the curtain call as engaging as the performance.”

people/play

The heroes we get (summer of 2014, continued)

Guardians of the Galaxy is full of clever jokes and features a disarmingly charming actor as its protagonist. It was made by extremely talented people but its greatest achievement is to leaven the emotional impact of a plot that hinges on a nonstop parade of death and destruction. (Update below.)

Guardians presents as its hero a man-child whose emotional development is arrested by the absence of a father and the early death of his mother. Where a normal child would have had to adapt to reality, this hero is kidnapped from Earth (reality) and is thus free to develop outwardly, physically, without developing inwardly, emotionally. In a fantastical version of space, he enters into a prolonged adolescence of sexual experimentation and solitary expeditions based on role playing (“code names”). He is without society. He is blissfully ignorant and thus boundlessly optimistic.

At the end of the movie, when his moment of emotional reckoning finally arrives, when he unwraps the lesson / gift of his dying mother, it is empty*: a song that promises only a future tale. The prospect of growing up has been deferred and we are meant to revel in that postponement. He lives to grieve again.

continue…

art/business/movies & television

like prepared microscope slides

Dustin Yellin
Psychogeographies

dustin-yellin-Psychogeography-43-60-2014-72-x-27-x-15-in-Dustin-Yellin-333x500dustin-yellin-Psychogeography-detail

“Yellin’s figures grow from thousands of antique clippings assembled in dense, tangled cellular silhouettes, as if man himself is no more than loose, disconnected images, a knotted form animated by partial truths.”

David Altmejd
the flux and the puddle

david-altmejd-juices-designboom-08

david-altmejd-juices-designboom-07

“seemingly infinite layers of matter are contained within the translucent, reflective and stacked structure, housing various information and media used throughout the artist’s oveure such as werewolves, plaster figures, bird men, heads, smashed mirrored panels, and explosions of resin fruit. ”

Chris Dorosz
Paint drop sculptures

03_Stasis Series Installation at Scott Richards

“changing ideas of human physicality in an age pushing towards virtual reality”

ideas

Apeface

dawn-of-the-tropes

Many film critics, including some of the most astute, have written praises for the 2014 movie “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”. I greatly enjoyed a few scenes and marveled at many shots that are visually stunning. I also found it an offensively lazy and shallow commercialization of its predecessors. This is why.

In the 1963 novel “The Planet of the Apes”, the society of humans has regressed such that men and women live like foragers while the society of apes has advanced such that it has stratified into “aggressive gorilla soldiers, pedantic and politically conservative orangutan administrators, and liberal chimpanzee intellectuals.”

Written by Pierre Boulle, who also wrote about a society in crisis in The Bridge Over the River Kwai, the original “Planet of the Apes” is a satire of ideological blindness and post-war European society. When Boulle’s novel was adapted into a movie by the gifted polemicist Rod Serling, it became a critique of progress: a stark reminder that human society does not always advance.

continue…

art/business/ideas/movies & television/power

The campaigns

I was reading about the person who inspired the poem Ozymandias when I came upon the headline:

“First Syrian Campaign.”

Huh, I thought, so he also went to war in Syria. Interesting. Let me scroll past the war to another highlight.

“Second Syrian Campaign.”

Oh, I guess it didn’t go so well the first time. Let’s keep scrolling down to the next part.

“Third Syrian Campaign.”

Jesus, OK. They really had to get that done. Let’s keep scrolling down to see what happened next…

“Later Campaigns in Syria.”

Ok. I’m seeing a pattern here.

Keep scrolling.

“Peace treaty with the Hittites”

Done. Apparently, the first peace treaty in recorded history: “Its 18 articles call for peace between Egypt and Hatti and then proceeds to maintain that their respective gods also demand peace.”

That “their respective gods also demand peace,” is an interesting turn of phrase. In liberal societies, we talk about the role of religion in instigating war but we may not spend enough time discussing how religion can inspire peace. We may be underplaying the role that theology can play in the political process.

ideas/people/power

Who let the bots out

Today I had occasion to contact roughly two dozen friends via the message or chat tool on Facebook.

When first contacted, two of them replied by asking if I was a bot – if I was software –  before accepting that it was really me.

I don’t think anyone I contacted 10 years ago via email or even instant messenger would have wondered if I was software impersonating a human being. That was before Markov text generators and chatterbots became commonplace.

Computerized communication is largely a wonderful innovation. It is convenient to conduct our conversations via the “on-demand” platforms of email and SMS, whereby we choose when to read, when to reply, etc.
Emojicons and animated GIFs have made sophisticated, nuanced visual communication possible for millions. There are many creative benefits to playing rhetorical games, en masse, with 140 characters or less.

But when we narrow communication to the computer realm, we open the door to having computers enter into those conversations. We let the bots in by choosing to conduct so much of our socializing via the most “efficient” route. That’s their – the computers’ – domain, not ours.

ideas/people/technology

The Management of Feelings

soundtrack

Feelings by Morris Albert

art

Standard Loneliness Package by Charles Yu

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Charlie Kaufman

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

commerce

Affective Labour, Pret a Manger and the political economy of post-recession England by Paul Myerscough

AKB48 member’s ‘penance’ shows flaws in idol culture

Private Dancer by Tina Turner

Beautiful Agony by Richard Lawrence and Lauren Olney

science

Humors

Oxytocin increases trust in humans by Michael Kosfeld, Markus Heinrichs, Paul J. Zak, Urs Fischbacher and Ernst Fehr

Professional sociopath Rush Limbaugh admits to OxyContin use

Scientology by Lawrence Wright:

To advance such lofty goals, Hubbard developed a “technology” to attain spiritual freedom and discover oneself as an immortal being. “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life,” a church publication declares. This guarantee rests on the assumption that through rigorous research, Hubbard had uncovered a perfect understanding of human nature. One must not stray from the path he has laid down or question his methods. Scientology is exact. Scientology is certain. Step by step one can ascend toward clarity and power, becoming more oneself—but, paradoxically, also more like Hubbard. Scientology is the geography of his mind. Perhaps no individual in history has taken such copious internal soundings and described with so much logic and minute detail the inner workings of his own mentality. The method Hubbard put forward created a road map toward his own ideal self. Hubbard’s habits, his imagination, his goals and wishes—his character, in other words—became both the basis and the destination of Scientology.

Technologies of Self by Michel Foucault:

My objective for more than twenty-five years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific “truth games” related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves.

As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these “technologies,” each a matrix of practical reason: (I) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

Science and History of Treating Depression

An antidepressant like Paxil or Prozac, these new studies suggest, is most likely not acting as a passive signal-strengthener. It does not, as previously suspected, simply increase serotonin or send more current down a brain’s mood-maintaining wire. Rather, it appears to change the wiring itself.

art/business/ideas

Do we need a House of Lords?

Perhaps, this could be the future of the GOP:

Yet though the role of the House of Lords was historically conservative and reactionary, and thus an easy target for criticism, the argument in our previous book, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, suggests that it may have also played a useful role: in the sense that the House of Lords had the veto power against very radical redistributive programs may have made British elites more secure that the new democracy would not threaten their interests too much, and thus more accommodating to democratization at first and the rise of the Labour Party later.

previously and elsewhere

power