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“But Look Again, And This Clearly Isn’t Italy”

July 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The soon-to-open Fortune Hotel in Lavasa. (Image by Ankur P.)

In a smart Atlantic article, “India Invents a City,” Jeremy Kahn looks at Lavasa, a planned, high-tech hilltop urban development which may or may not be a model for Indian cities of tomorrow. The opening:

“At first glance, this could be Italy—the promenade, the sidewalk cafés and ice-cream parlors, the streetscape of conjoined little apartment houses in mustard, terra-cotta, ocher, olive, or beige. Even the name of the place, Lavasa, sounds vaguely Italian.

But look again, and this clearly isn’t Italy. It’s too clean, too new. There are too few tourists. There are hardly any people at all, actually. Which only makes it all the more improbable that Lavasa is, in fact, in India—land of auto rickshaws and slum dogs, of sweat and dust and litter. With only a handful of residents, Lavasa is a city-in-waiting. But its corporate backers believe it will soon represent nothing less than a new model of urban development and governance in India—a country where the phrase city planning has long been a contradiction in terms.

Lavasa sits in the Western Ghats, some 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, and 40 miles west of Pune, a growing hub for software programming and computer animation. If all goes according to its master plan, Lavasa will eventually house more than 300,000 people in five distinct ‘towns.’ It will also have a world-class medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools, sports academies, a Nick Faldo–designed golf course, a space camp, and, its developers hope, animation and film studios, software-development companies, biotech labs, and law and architectural firms—in short, all of the knowledge industries at the heart of the ‘new India.’ Those industries have yet to buy in, but residential sales have been brisk: in Dasve, the first of Lavasa’s five towns, scheduled to be completed this year, the houses are almost sold out.”

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The good people at the Lavasa Corporation are building you a lovely home:

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The Strange Persistence Of “Dead” Media

July 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Many types of ghost media (telegrams, telex, etc.) that have been seemingly made obsolete by the advent of broadband still actually soldier on. An excerpt from a piece about so-called dead media at Ars Technica:

“Few people send out messages via Morse code any more. But the basic telegram concept—a missive spoken to an operator, then transmitted across wires or wireless, then hand-delivered to a recipient—is alive and well.

In fact, as in the nineteenth century, Telegrams Canada will write your telegram for you—or at least suggest gram language for appropriate occasions. The ‘Get Well’ suggestions include ‘The office/this place is just not the same without you,’ and ‘Your many friends here are hoping for your quick recovery.’

The service isn’t cheap. A same business day telegram costs CAN$19.95 plus 99¢ per word. ‘Quebec usually next business day,’ the company advises. ‘Rural routes and post office boxes may take longer.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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Balki receives a vital telegram:

Stephen Colbert euolgizes the Western Union telegram:

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“He Slipped Onto The Sidelines During A Football Game Between The Dallas Cowboys And The Washington Redskins Dressed In A Custom-Made Cowboys Cheerleader Outfit And A Blond Wig”

July 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Barry Bremen, who just passed away from cancer, was a suburban Detroit toy salesman who spiced up his life by being a “professional impostor,” sneaking past security at sporting events and Hollywood ceremonies to become part of the show. From his New York Times obituary:

“By most accounts, Mr. Bremen’s exploits began in 1979, when he managed to sneak onto the floor during warm-ups before the N.B.A. All-Star Game in Detroit, wearing a pilfered team uniform.

Mr. Bremen, an athletic 6-foot-4, took several shots before being recognized as an intruder and ejected.

The same year, he slipped onto the sidelines during a football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins dressed in a custom-made Cowboys cheerleader outfit and a blond wig. (He had dieted and shaved his legs for this one.) The Cowboys kicked him out and sued him but later let the matter go.

In his more conventional life, he represented toy and novelty manufacturers in their dealings with retail stores while living in the Detroit suburbs with his wife and three children.

‘He was just this guy who sold novelties out of a cluttered office in suburban Detroit, and this was his way to be something different,’ said Neal Rubin, a Detroit News columnist who wrote several columns about Mr. Bremen and kept in touch. ‘He never hurt anybody. For Barry, it was all about the moment.’

The only stunt Mr. Bremen expressed some regrets about was his 1985 visit to the Emmy Awards, when he almost walked off with the best supporting actress statue awarded to Betty Thomas, who played Officer Lucille Bates on the police drama Hill Street Blues.“

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Barry Bremen accepts an Emmy:

Another impostor post:

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“He Was Contemptuous Of Most Hippies, Whom He Saw As Freeloaders And Dizzy Peaceniks”

July 12, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Lawrence Wright’s 1985 Rolling Stone article about the death of writer Richard Brautigan:

“The old Beats looked at Richard with envy and surprise. The Beats were out of fashion, and Bunthorne was all the rage and he was rich, too, thunderously rich by their standards. Ferlinghetti had been the first to publish parts of Trout Fishing in his City Lights Journal, but like most Beats, he had never taken Richard’s writing seriously. ‘As an editor, I always kept waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer,’ he says now. ‘I never could stand cute writing. He could never be an important writer like Hemingway — with that childish voice of his. Essentially he had a naïf style, a style based on a childlike perception of the world. The hippie cult was itself a childlike movement. I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a nonliterate age.’

But it was an extraordinary time in every other respect. Cultural forms were exploding in the face of furious experimentation with drugs, art, sex, music, religion, social roles. Richard’s attitude toward all this, however, was ambivalent. He was widely credited with being the voice of the Summer of Love, but in fact he was contemptuous of most hippies, whom he saw as freeloaders and dizzy peaceniks. He had a horror of narcotics that seemed fanciful to his friends everybody used dope in those days except Richard.

His passions were basketball, the Civil War, Frank Lloyd Wright, Southern women writers, soap operas, the National Enquirer, chicken-fried steak and talking on the telephone. Wherever he was in the world, he would phone up his friends and talk for hours, sometimes reading them an entire book manuscript on a transpacific call. Time meant nothing to him, for he was a hopeless insomniac. Most of his friends dreaded it when Richard started reading his latest work to them, because he could not abide criticism of any sort. He had a dead ear for music. Ianthe remembered that he used to buy record albums because of the girls on the covers. He loved to take walks, but he loathed exercise in any other form.”

Another Richard Brautigan post:

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“Once Upon A Time There Was A Little Princess”

July 12, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Errol Morris’ new film, Tabloid, opens this Friday.

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Official trailer:

Morris discusses Tabloid in 2010 at Toronto:

More Errol Morris posts:

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“In The Last Hundred Years, Since Radio And Television Created The Modern Worldwide Mass-Market Entertainment Industry, There Have Been Two Scientific Superstars”

July 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson, who worked on nuclear-propelled spaceships among other great and scary things, reviews two new books about  Richard Feynman (one, a gekiga). In the piece, he ranks science icons of the last century. The article’s opening:

“In the last hundred years, since radio and television created the modern worldwide mass-market entertainment industry, there have been two scientific superstars, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities.

On the whole, the public shows good taste in its choice of idols. Einstein and Hawking earned their status as superstars, not only by their scientific discoveries but by their outstanding human qualities. Both of them fit easily into the role of icon, responding to public adoration with modesty and good humor and with provocative statements calculated to command attention. Both of them devoted their lives to an uncompromising struggle to penetrate the deepest mysteries of nature, and both still had time left over to care about the practical worries of ordinary people. The public rightly judged them to be genuine heroes, friends of humanity as well as scientific wizards.

Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar.”

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Dyson talks science at the Big Think:

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The Many Possibilities Of Plastic

July 12, 2011 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Alain Resnais’ 1958 Technicolor paean to plastic is a great find by the Documentarian. No English subtitles, but none needed.

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“The Citizens Of This Little Village Have Created An Oasis Of Prosperity And Comfort That Is The Envy Of The World”

July 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Making any economic system work is trouble enough, but creating a socialist collective that produces great wealth is particularly elusive. The Chinese village of Huaxi is an exception, however, with its shared wealth and opulent new skyscrapers. Every villager owns a house worth at least $150,000 and at least one car. An excerpt from Michael Wines’ New York Times piece about a tower soon to open in Huaxi:

“Huaxi’s so-called New Village in the Sky — at 1,076 feet, a bit taller than the Chrysler Building in Manhattan — is getting finishing touches this summer in preparation for an October opening. Among other attractions, it will have a five-star hotel, a gold-leaf-embellished concert hall, an upscale shopping mall and what is billed as Asia’s largest revolving restaurant. Also, it will have five life-size statues of a water buffalo, Huaxi’s symbol, on every 12th floor or so.

That this half-billion-dollar edifice is a good 40-minute drive from a city of any size is part of the plan. For though not many foreigners have heard of Huaxi, Chinese far and wide know it as the socialist collective that works — the village where public ownership of the means of production has not just made everyone equal, but rich, too.

Two million tourists come annually to view the Huaxi marvel, no small number of them officials from other villages who yearn to know how Huaxi did it. The enormous skyscraper, topped with a gigantic gold sphere, will never win architectural awards. But it will add to Huaxi’s allure, the village fathers confidently predict — and soak up tourist money as well.

‘We call it the three-increase building,’ said Wu Renbao, 84, the town’s revered patriarch, meaning that it will increase Huaxi’s acreage (by half), increase its work force (by 3,000) and, hardly least of all, increase its wealth.

If he is right, all 2,000 villagers will get a little richer. They all own a piece of the building — just as they own the town’s steel mill, textile factory, greenhouse complex, ocean shipping company and other ventures. That is Huaxi’s carefully curated narrative: by rigidly adhering to socialism with Chinese characteristics, the citizens of this little village have created an oasis of prosperity and comfort that is the envy of the world.”

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China’s richest village:

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The National Anthem, Then And Now

July 12, 2011 in Politics, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Former major leaguer Bernie Williams played a beautiful rendition of the National Anthem on guitar over the weekend in Phoenix for the minor league Futures Game. The first time an American artist played a personal version of the Star-Spangled Banner, before Hendrix or Gaye or anyone, it was also at a baseball game. At the 1966 World Series in Detroit, Joes Feliciano turned out a gorgeous, touching take on the song–and his career was nearly ruined.

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Jose Feliciano has no idea at the time that his reading of the National Anthem will cause a furor in Vietnam-era America:

The full version of Feliciano’s soulful 1968 song:

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

July 11, 2011 in Misc., Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"What a great move by the Colonel."

The End of The KFC $5.00 Meal

It was the end of an era last week when KFC decided to discontinue its 5 dollar meals and raise them to 5.49 and up. What a great move by the Colonel; just when people were getting used to enjoying an economical meal that is much cheaper than the4r competition. Now while they are still cheaper the gap has narrowed. With tax it is almost a 6.00 meal now. Also, KFC has been bragging about its Grilled Chicken coming in larger pieces now. Of course- and the price is going up so who are they kidding? Whats next- the end of the 5.00 Subway footlong? 

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Soviet Union KFC ad from the 1960s:

Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: They Came Back (2004)

July 11, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Ambling clumsily, languorously, emotionlessly from graveyards all over the world, seventy million corpses have suddenly, inexplicably risen from the dead, filled their lungs with oxygen after an extended exhale and shuffled back into their mortal coils. Roughly 13,000 of these taciturn zombies slowly stream back into the small French city which was formerly their home, and the locals have to figure out how to accommodate the return of their dearly departed. “The unthinkable has happened,” says a bureaucrat, stating the obvious, to his colleagues. The newly immortal, disoriented and barely capable of speech, are warehoused in empty government buildings until they can be re-acclimated and reclaimed. But most people aren’t eager to reunite, even the aforementioned official whose wife is returned to his care. “I can’t stand her sweet smiles anymore,” he guiltily admits. “They scare me.”

In his 2004 avant zombie film, Robin Campillo turns out an arch allegory about how relationships can stagnate and love run cold, but he’s also examining the nature of neurology, how the brain adjusts to surprising situations and creates new realities as a means of survival. Scientists (and art critics) have noticed that the first time someone hears atonal music or sees a surrealist painting, the experience can cause emtional turmoil. But after the initial jolt, what’s unthinkable becomes acceptable. First you shock them, and then they put you in a museum. The same goes for shocking emotional episodes. In these cases, the brain is its own electrician, rewiring our ability to view the world.

The movie, while suitably somnambulant, doesn’t fully exploit its fantastic set-up, but it does make some provacative points, most notably that the zombies aren’t the only ones who’ve been altered by death. The survivors have grieved and mourned and moved on. Even if they were stuck in the past, that past isn’t what came home to them. That’s gone forever.

“His reality will never be yours,” says a doctor to a woman who is having trouble adjusting to her returned husband’s cold embrace. But you can’t really blame the zombies. They simply aren’t who they were. None of us are.•

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“Far Stranger Fighting Machines Are In The Works, Like Swarms Of Lethal ‘Cyborg Insects'”

July 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Barbara Ehrenreich’s new Guernica piece on whether the human face of warfare has reached a point of obsolescence:

“An alternative approach is to eliminate or drastically reduce the military’s dependence on human beings of any kind. This would have been an almost unthinkable proposition a few decades ago, but technologies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan have steadily stripped away the human role in war. Drones, directed from sites up to 7,500 miles away in the western United States, are replacing manned aircraft.

Video cameras, borne by drones, substitute for human scouts or information gathered by pilots. Robots disarm roadside bombs. When American forces invaded Iraq in 2003, no robots accompanied them; by 2008, there were 12,000 participating in the war. Only a handful of drones were used in the initial invasion; today, the U.S. military has an inventory of more than 7,000, ranging from the familiar Predator to tiny Ravens and Wasps used to transmit video images of events on the ground. Far stranger fighting machines are in the works, like swarms of lethal ‘cyborg insects’ that could potentially replace human infantry.

These developments are by no means limited to the U.S. The global market for military robotics and unmanned military vehicles is growing fast, and includes Israel, a major pioneer in the field, Russia, the United Kingdom, Iran, South Korea, and China. Turkey is reportedly readying a robot force for strikes against Kurdish insurgents; Israel hopes to eventually patrol the Gaza border with ‘see-shoot’ robots that will destroy people perceived as transgressors as soon as they are detected.”

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Cyborg insect demonstration:

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“But What Could Ever Be Half So Mad As A Dash-Mounted Turntable?”

July 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"There is quite possibly only one man left in the world still pressing records for the Highway Hi-Fi." (Image by Bill McChesney.)

Starting in the mid-50s, some Chryslers had record players on the dashboard, called the Highway Hi-Fi, as chronicled in a new piece in the Believer. Of course the discs skipped no matter how good the car’s shock absorbers, and the automaker ceased manufacturing them in the 1960s. But some car collectors have maintained the systems, even though only one person still creates the special records they require. An excerpt:

“In the end, the RCA Victor Auto Victrola had an even shorter run than the Highway Hi-Fi, vanishing by 1961. The following year would bring the next serious attempt at car audio, a precursor to the 8-track deck by inventor Earl Muntz—’Madman’ Muntz, as he was known. But what could ever be half so mad as a dash-mounted turntable?

 There is quite possibly only one man left in the world still pressing records for the Highway Hi-Fi, and he lives in Minneapolis.


‘I first had a guy come to me years ago who had an old Highway Hi-Fi, asking about making a record,’ says Kim Gutzke of Custom Records. Vintage car owners email Gutzke a music file, and he custom presses whatever they want onto a 16 2⁄3 rpm acetate disc. And what they want, he says, is simple: ‘’50s rock and roll. Not the crappy music Hi-Fi put out.'”

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1960 Plymouth Fury with a Highway Hi-Fi:

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“David. Leaving Work. Home In 45 Minutes. Sophia Comes To Dinner At Eight.”

July 11, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

David’s appliances function without him. (Thanks Krulwich Wonders.)

Futuristic Firing Range In Germany

July 11, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Ridiculously, chillingly elaborate.

“The Players Personal Lives Are Their Own”

July 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

One of the strangest chapters in baseball history took place during the early ’70s when Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich swapped families–wives, children and dogs. The episode has been revisited recently because Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are trying to make a movie about the tabloid-ready trade. An excerpt from the March 5, 1973 Toledo Blade:

Teammates Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich of the New York Yankees have “traded lives” through a mutual agreement that calls for the pitchers to exchange wives and families.

“It was not a wife swap,” said Peterson, “but a life swap.”

The situation developed last summer when the Petersons, Fritz and wife, Marilyn, and the Kekiches, Mike and his wife, Susanne, were drawn together and began discussing the possibility of an exchange.

‘There have been laughs, screams and tears throughout this whole thing,’ said Kekich.

Marilyn “Chip” Peterson and her two sons, Greg 5 1/2, and Eric, 2 1/2, changed places with Susan Kekich and her two daughters, Kristen, 6, and Reagan Leigh, 2 1/2. The arrangement apparently has worked for Peterson and Mrs. Kekich who are still together, but not for Kekich and Mrs. Peterson, who have separated.

In Rockford, Ill., Mrs. Arthur Monks, Marilyn Peterson’s mother, said: “Marilyn is not happy about this at all. She has started proceedings for a divorce, but only because he (Fritz) wanted her to. Mike Kekich has made no plans for a divorce.”

“Susanne was a perfect person for me,” said Peterson. “We will file for divorce in New Jersey under the no fault clause.”

“Pete and Susanne are great for each other,” said Kekich.

“I thought Chip and I were perfectly suited but things developed and we began to butt heads. She would have been the first of her family to get a divorce. It became too much for her and she began to worry.”

The two families switched places at the end of last season and then briefly returned to their original situations. After about 10 days they exchanged places again, this time permanently.

“The point of no return was reached December 14,” said Peterson. “Marilyn and our boys flew West to join Mike in California and Susan and the girls flew East to me. They must have passed mid-air.

“This was the biggest decision of my life,” he continued. “I’m not going back. I can’t go back.”

Peterson and Kekich have been Yankee teammates for four years and the two families have always been close.

When the exchange developed the two players advised the Yankees of the situation and General Manager Lee McPhail asked if they felt they could still function as teammates. They said they did and that satisfied the club.

“The players personal lives are their own,” said Manager Ralph Houk.•

Willie McCovey hits a frozen rope against Peterson at the 1970 All-Star Game.

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“As A Child, I Was Impressed By Machines That Try To Explain The World Around Us”

July 10, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Vincent Fournier makes amazing space-travel–themed photos.

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“The Focused Worship…Affects Real-World Events By Weakening The Demons And Strengthening The Angels That Swirl Among Us”

July 10, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"The incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days."(Image by Jonathan Baldwin.)

Strip mall turned faith center, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City is an evangelical and charismatic haven that was founded in 1999 by a self-styled reverend named Mike Bickle. At the heart of the growing perpetual prayer movement in America, IHOP has been criticized for its cultish end-of-days prognostications. An excerpt from an Erik Eckholm article in the New York Times:

“The International House of Prayer is ‘an important example’ of the proliferating nondenominational charismatic churches, said Catherine C. Bowler, a religious historian at the Duke University Divinity School. From megachurches with tens of thousands of members to more intense and unusual ministries like Mr. Bickle’s, these churches, which practice faith healing and speaking in tongues, make up one of the fastest-growing segments of American Christianity, attracting millions.

The staff and students here are required to spend at least 25 hours a week in the prayer room, and they also engage in weekly fasts of a day or more. The focused worship, Mr. Bickle says, affects real-world events by weakening the demons and strengthening the angels that swirl among us. Most important, he says, the incantations, multiplied worldwide, may help usher in the long-awaited final days: seven years of bloody battles and disasters that will end with the Second Coming, with true Christians spirited to eternal bliss and everyone else doomed to hellfire.

‘The Second Coming will probably happen within the lifetime of people living today,’ Mr. Bickle said in an interview — the sort of prediction that leads some pastors to say he is overstepping and using apocalyptic predictions to seduce eager young believers. Mr. Bickle adamantly rejects such charges, as do followers like Mai Fink, a woman in her early 20s who was helping to run the church summer camp. She and her husband moved to Kansas City, she said, because ‘the prayer makes our hearts come alive.'”

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IHOP, where the prayer never ends:

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Robot Soccer Is Pretty Incredible Now

July 10, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Formerly lame, now amazing. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)

“The British Graffiti Artist Banksy Likes Pizza, Though His Preference In Toppings Cannot Be Definitively Ascertained”

July 10, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The perfect opening of “Banksy Was Here,” Lauren Collins’ excellent 2007 New Yorker article about the inscrutable artist:

“The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint.

The creative fields have long had their shadowy practitioners, figures whose identities, whether because of scandalous content (the author of Story of O), fear of ostracism (Joe Klein), aversion to nepotism (Stephen King’s son Joe Hill), or conceptual necessity (Sacha Baron Cohen), remain, at least for a time, unknown. Anonymity enables its adopter to seek fame while shielding him from the meaner consequences of fame-seeking. In exchange for ceding credit, he is freed from the obligations of authorship. Banksy, for instance, does not attend his own openings. He may miss out on the accolades, but he’ll never spend a Thursday evening, from six to eight, picking at cubes of cheese.

Banksy is a household name in England—the Evening Standard has mentioned him thirty-eight times in the past six months—but his identity is a subject of febrile speculation. This much is certain: around 1993, his graffiti began appearing on trains and walls around Bristol; by 2001, his blocky spray-painted signature had cropped up all over the United Kingdom, eliciting both civic hand-wringing and comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Vienna, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Paris followed, along with forays into pranksterism and more traditional painting, but Banksy has never shed the graffitist’s habit of operating under a handle. His anonymity is said to be born of a desire—understandable enough for a ‘quality vandal,’ as he likes to be called—to elude the police. For years now, he has refused to do face-to-face interviews.”

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Banksy’s very dark Simpsons couch gag:

Another Banksy post:

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Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla!

July 10, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The greatest electrician of them all, who died poor and alone at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan in 1943, was born on July 10, 1856.

More Nikola Tesla posts:

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Classic Film: The Rapture (1991)

July 9, 2011 in Film, Videos | Permalink

What if yet another seeming half-mad charlatan announced that the end of days were upon us but that person was actually correct? That’s the premise of writer-director Michael Tolkin’s fearless 1991 drama, The Rapture,  one of the most uncompromising films to ever come out of Hollywood.

Sharon (Mimi Rogers) is a Los Angeles telephone operator who interrupts the mundanity of her life with lascivious outings with Vic (Patrick Bauchau), an operator of a different kind. Vic is a sleazy swinger who looks like he makes his money by selling Amway to pornographers. He trolls airport bars to find couples that want to get down and dirty. The amoral encounters begin to take their toll on Sharon, though, and her suicidal thoughts are only put to rest when she has a religious awakening and is born again. But born into what?

Sharon becomes a part of a quiet but intense Jesus cult that believes the end is near and has members that babble incessantly about “the Boy” and “the Dream” and “the Pearl.” She marries one of her former hook-ups (David Duchovny) and the pair raise a daughter while they wait for the four horseman to ride into town.

Six years pass and the Boy announces to the followers that the end of days is finally arriving. A true believer, Sharon gathers her daughter and heads to the desert to await God. But their wanderings in the desert are disatrous and Sharon’s faith runs dry just as the Rapture truly does arrive.

Tolkin, who also singed Los Angeles life as screenwriter of The Player, understands the pseudo-religious fringe of the city and recreates it with a flesh-crawling verisimilitude. But while the film gets its milieu from L.A., it boldly looks for universal truths. While Sharon is an anti-hero, the villain, audaciously, is a needy, vicious God who demands a faith that has not been earned.•

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Recent Film Posts:

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“Soon They Will Sell All Kinds Of Wearable Computing Devices”

July 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A discussion about wearable computing from Andrew Goldman’s smart interview with Silicon Valley bigwig Marc Andreessen, in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

“People view you as an oracle in the valley. I was hoping you’d blow my mind with something you see in the future. 

Gordon Bell at Microsoft is working on wearable computing, where it literally records everything around you all the time — video, your conversations. He wants to get to where it’s like a pendant around your neck. We also have a company called Jawbone that makes peripherals for smart phones and tablets. Today, they sell Bluetooth headsets and speakers, but soon they will sell all kinds of wearable computing devices.

Will we soon be dealing with antigaming laws so that drivers can’t play wearable video games while driving down the highway?

That assumes they’re driving. Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don’t have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you’re like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers. Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.”

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Gordon Bell records his whole life:

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“We Would Always Have The Option Of Bailing Out On Our Lives With Each Other”

July 8, 2011 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sherry Turkle, who is fond of robots, opines on identity in the Internet Age.

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“Inmates And Their Guests Jostle To Place Bets At The Prison’s Raucous Cockfighting Arena”

July 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Margarita Island: Trouble in paradise. (Image by Spazzaven.)

Venezuelan prisons are often run by well-armed inmates, but the San Antonio penitentiary on Margarita Island is essentially Spring Break with Uzis and cockfights. The opening of Simon Romero’s stunning New York Times report:

“On the outside, the San Antonio prison on Margarita Island looks like any other Venezuelan penitentiary. Soldiers in green fatigues stand at its gates. Sharpshooters squint from watchtowers. Guards cast menacing glances at visitors before searching them at the entrance.

But once inside, the prison for more than 2,000 Venezuelans and foreigners held largely for drug trafficking looks more like a Hugh Hefner-inspired fleshpot than a stockade for toughened smugglers.

Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavors the air. Reggaetón booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison’s raucous cockfighting arena.”

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