HNY

If I succumb to typhoid or pig flu during the next few days, my heirs should have a word with Air Canada about the guy who sat next to me, with an eye to suing his heirs.

Midnight came during the meal service, somewhere over eastern Quebec. The cabin crew paused and applauded, we all shouted cheery things at each other, life went on. The brevity and dullness of the celebration felt somehow appropriate.

Excellent inflight entertainment (even beyond the hacking cough of my neighbour) in the form of the film It might get loud, recommended to all fans of the electric guitar. It does indeed get quite satisfactorily loud; the interviews are interesting and the byplay between the musicians is a treat to watch; the minute-long opening scene of Jack White building a functional electric guitar from a scrap of wood, a length of wire, four nails, an empty Coke bottle and a single pick-up should be compulsory viewing for all music-geeky 12-year-olds. "There, who said you need to buy a guitar?" But why oh why is there no soundtrack CD? [Answer: because they want to sell the DVD. Duh.]

Had breakfast in FFM, walked around a little and had a coffee, realized that I was rapidly approaching the point of falling-down exhaustion, threw away my ticket, bought a train ticket and was home in 80 minutes. Slept a half-hour on the train, then was in bed within half an hour of opening the door.

Migraine today, perhaps from stress and exhaustion. Went shopping nonetheless, found myself quite unable to make change.

I hope your New Years began well, my dears.

Plus ça change...

I would blame my three-week silence on the pressures of work etc, but regular readers know that there have often been such lacunae in recent years. I apologise to everyone I've been ignoring, all the bloggers whose posts that I haven't been commenting, all the birthdays I have forgotten (or worse, remembered and then put from mind because I couldn't deal with it). My behaviour upsets me at least as much as it does you.

Work has changed direction. I stopped the translation for half a year after the mess last summer, with them wanting me in Münster and then withdrawing the offer shortly before we signed contracts. Last month I realized that I had (relatively) enormous debts and no chance to pay them back without doing more or different work, so spoke seriously to G and U about my work in their office. The theoretical 20 hours a week had been creeping upwards, reaching an average of 35, which was a break-even level but no chance to repay or save anything. I explained all this and said I'd need to cut back to a real 20 hours in order to take a second job, terribly sorry. They thought about it overnight and made a counter-offer: 45 hours a week, slight raise in the hourly rate, and a productivity bonus guaranteed for 2009 that would let me pay all my debts.

I have to admit, that option hadn't occurred to me. I took it, and am now working fulltime and fairly happily. But it means that my lovely mornings at home have gone, so I am seriously behind on my blog- and book-reading, riverbank-walking-down-to-ings, and Second Life play. A fair exchange, perhaps; in any case I was glad to take it.

With the change in hours has somehow come a change in my style and manner. It feels as though I've shifted up a gear, or crested a hill and am now running on the level. I've started taking the job more seriously, sometimes arriving first and often leaving last, and am taking on more management and steering. Much of the technical discussion with structural engineers and HVAC planners and others that ilk, now devolves to me, and to my surprise I am enjoying it.

Second Life is changing direction too. I have stepped back a bit from the meditation group discussions, which lately had been more philosophical discussion than meditation. I often couldn't follow the sense of the conversation, for example the idea that the image of a chair on a screen is not distinguishable from the one that you are sitting in right now, dear reader, and I found that stressful. I have joined some more traditional groups to get back to calm and centering: "Sit down, shut up, just breathe."

Time for work. Let me leave you with a truly marvellous video (a genuine cinema short, btw, 16 minutes long) called Validation which offers exactly what the title says. Highly recommended, do watch it!

Shabbat shalom, dear friends. I do think of you fondly, even in my silence.

Micro-career

Hanging about in the office, waiting for a software update to finish.

Let me bring to your attention something quite wonderful, and spin on what I've been thinking about since seeing it. First, the viewing: turn your speakers on and the volume up, and listen to Kutiman's collected works. Do it now, please; it's OK, I'll wait. (If you're in a hurry, numbers 1, 5 and 8 are the must-see's.)

Now have a look at the singer/songwriter featured in the fifth of those, Dadasarah. She's a housewife with a little kid, who happened to study voice in college; she's a woman with a videorecorder, writing and singing her own material for her own satisfaction.

Her twenty videos have been viewed 58,007 times as I'm writing this. Fifty-eight thousand times. Most of her videos get five-star ratings, the rest four-and-a-half.

Kutiman's eight videos have been viewed 1,696,659 times as I'm writing this. Let's say that again nice and slowly: One point seven million times. Most of his videos get five-star ratings, a few four-and-a-half, and one ugly duckling got a mere four stars. He has a fanbase whose size and enthusiasm many "established" artists would envy.

Two quite different people making music — principally for their own amusement — in quite different ways. They have something interesting and very significant in common: They are getting it presented to us, and we are lapping it up.

I think that home-brew distributed on the Internets is the future of music-making.

There is a new kind of career to be had here, which wasn't possible before. In the bad old days when music was a physical object, it was said that there were only two kinds of money that a musician could make: None at all; or More than you would ever believe possible. Getting people's attention, putting the product in their presence, was expensive as all hell. It took a team of a dozen people to bring physical music to the attention of a possible paying audience, which is why the labels took such a large slice of the pie.

Zero-cost bandwidth and immaterial distribution change all that. Kutiman and Dadasarah distribute for free, thanks to youTube; I am bringing them to your attention for free, thanks to Blogger. The only thing missing is a way to turn their talent and our attention into an income stream, but given the size of these viewing figures that is surely only a matter of time.

And when that happens, it will be possible to make a decent living with a micro-career in music. You won't be able to live the rock-star lifestyle — let's be honest though: don't we all know that rock stars trash their hotel rooms because they are lonely, bored and unhappy? — but you will make enough money to continue making music. And for people like Dadasarah and Kutiman, that is what it's all about.

If Apple continues to be as smart as they have been, they will soon let "ordinary people" post music for sale on iTunes. What will happen when Dadasarah and Kutiman get there? Say that Apple gives them half of the dollar that they charge for songs (because there is no record company's share to pay); say for the purposes of argument that they would get fifty cents per song.

If half of the people who love Dadasarah's songs had bought one of them on iTunes, she would have earned around 14.5 thousand dollars. If an eighth of the people who love Kutiman's songs had bought one of them, and if he had then paid out two-thirds of the income as royalties to those whose videos he sampled, he would still have earned around 35 thousand dollars.

This is the future, people. And I for one can't wait for it to get here.

Hot

Well, the rain that I have been praying for since a fortnight arrived today in a quite impressive hour-long downpour. Unfortunately, it appears that my prayers were insufficiently precise. What I wanted was a break in the constant heat and humidity, what the universe delivered was a sky full of falling water. Ah well. Let that be a lesson: prayers do get answered, but God has a sly and pedantic sense of humour.

I've been rising earlyish this week, trying to get some hours in while the air is still relatively cool (already 22°C as I woke, though, the nights hardly cool off at all.) I woke just before dawn as a gentle rain began to rattle against my window, smiled in my half-sleep and rolled over. I dreamed of South Kensington and my sister's family, and their dog which could talk and which was a red-haired green-eyed girl (though also a dog at the same time); a cheerful and happy dream, I woke laughing.

Survived another week at work, architecture and Münsterism both going well. Started on the competition, and received notice that we were drawn from the hat to partake in yet another, the fourth of 2008. Both are due in the same week.

Did I mention that it's very hot and humid? Quite unpleasant. My forearms are sticking to the desk, and my back and thighs to the chair.

Since Monday's music quiz has gone unanswered (barring Pacian's intriguing but sadly incorrect suggestion), I shall reveal the answer: "Slither down the greasy pipe" is the second line of the half-spoken intermezzo to David Bowie's song "Joe the Lion" (released in 1977, my gods, "Heroes" is already thirty-one years old). Insofar as Bowie's songs of the period can be said to be "about" anything in particular, "Joe the Lion" is about a performance artist named Chris Burdon, best known for being nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen and shot in the left arm during performances. A more recent piece is his Flying Steamroller, a 12 ton road-building machine connected to a pivot arm and counterweight, which becomes airborne above a certain speed (YouTube video, 3:57). Quite poetic, in an elephantine way.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Enjoy the weekend.

Not dead yet

Just checking in to say that I'm getting slowly but steadily better. Still coughing, but less often and less painfully; still tired, but not as likely to fall over sideways while walking to the corner shop for milk.

And now for something quite amusing, courtesy of the Lioness: An honest R&B song. (Harmless but nonetheless possibly not safe for work, because bosses don't like to see their employees falling about laughing.)

One down, one to go

Had the first of two appointments to fix my teeth this morning, putting a plug into the broken-off bit of a molar. Quite painless and easy, took only a quarter-hour or so. Whew. I shall now go back to bed for an hour, until the anaesthetic wears off, then to the office.

May your tribulations today be as light as this, dear readers.

In other news the storm on the weekend nearly cost 140 lives, as the wingtip of an airplane landing in Hamburg was driven into the runway by a sudden sidewind. Watch the film and shudder. [Updated] and then look at this photo and gasp. That was a very damned close call.

Stuff, part two

Following on from my earlier post on stuff and the having of too much of it, here's a marvellous video on the subject, to stir the outrage of and strengthen the desire for change among thinking persons everywhere:

[Consumption] is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it... That is why, after 9/11, when our country was in shock, President Bush could have suggested any number of appropriate things: to grieve, to pray, to hope. NO. He said to shop. [...]

Guess what percentage of total material flow through this system is still in product or use 6 months after their sale in North America. Fifty percent? Twenty? NO. One percent. One! In other words, 99 percent of the stuff we harvest, mine, process, transport—99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within 6 months. Now how can we run a planet with that rate of materials throughput?

It wasn’t always like this. The average U.S. person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago. Ask your grandma. In her day, stewardship and resourcefulness and thrift were valued. So, how did this happen?

Well, it didn’t just happen. It was designed.

Shortly after the World War 2, these guys were figuring out how to ramp up the [U.S.] economy. Retailing analyst Victor Lebow articulated the solution that has become the norm for the whole system. He said: “Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption ... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Quoted from the script. The annotations are mine.

In the immortal words of Tonto, "What do you mean we, paleface?"

Tell me again, o great capitalist, why I should make myself poor, my home a garbage dump, my neighbourhood a chemical wasteland, in order to make you a tiny bit more egregiously rich than you already are? Because I think I must have misunderstood something there.

In related news the current sidebar quote from Stephen Fry is from an essay on sustainability, climatic change and the scarcity and necessity of common sense. Long, but worth every word. Go read.

In unrelated news Theriomorph has written a marvellous, moving essay on body, embodiment and the politics of appearances. Also long, but also worth every word. Go read.

Horn, the blowing of one's own

We have won an honourable mention (and with it a modicum of fame and glory and — what was that other thing again? Oh yes, money) in the second competition. As I said on the occasion of our previous not-quite-win, we appear to be doing something right. There will be an appropriate level and kind of celebration tomorrow.

Brian Dettmer carves up old books to reveal stunning beauty within.

And now to bed, to watch "Manhattan" on DVD, an early Christmas present to myself. It's always been one of my favourite Woody Allen films, second only to "Stardust memories" in my recollection; but I haven't actually seen either of them in many years. I'm curious and slightly apprehensive to see whether the film lives up to my memory of it.

Blah

Feeling a bit miserable and sorry for myself these days, what with Christmas looming over us, and fiftieth birthdays being celebrated and my own beginning to cast a shadow over next summer, and my mother's seventy-fifth birthday today and my father's upcoming eightieth birthday in May. So much time gone by, poured away in idleness and inattention. Blah.

Go read Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech A hunger for books (courtesy of Jean).

Go see Harold and Maude (courtesy of Zhoen).

Go see this week's secrets, some of which are just heartrending. (Do watch the video.)

Progress, and unrelated matters

The first competition (as we now must call it) has reached a very interesting point. After much debate and many failed attempts, we discovered a form last night (an urban design, a shape in the landscape) which is just brilliant. Very simple: a long, low rectangle along the eastern boundary of the site; but it's just somehow exactly right. Everyone who sees it is impressed. I'm really pleased with the project now, after a week of fending off despair when it just wouldn't come together. This will be at least a third prize unless we really screw up the disposition of the rooms (and that is always possible, since the people who wrote the briefing documents are not judging the competition).

The sun was nearly setting as I walked home today at 7 p.m. Winter is just around the corner! This is probably my most favourite of favourite seasons (i.e. they're all good, each in its own way). The new year begins in Autumn for me, not in January (but then, I've written about that before).

In other news it was thirty years ago tomorrow that I first heard Keith Jarrett's "Köln Concert", at around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was during the introduction week of my first year at university, when various famous and exciting professor-types would spend an hour each telling us how lucky we were to attend that particular college. The most famous of them all, so egregiously famous that even I had heard of him, broke the mould—as he had made a career of doing—by saying nothing at all. He just put on Part II of "Köln" and started a slide-show of student work from previous years. Marvellous. His presentation is the only event in that week which I still remember.

In other, other news Dale is on a roll, his last two posts are quite brilliant. There are times when I can hardly bear to read Dale's blog, his writing is so wonderful and his insights so ... insightful that they make my own little bloggeries seem quite inadequate.

In otherest news courtesy of Joe in Vegas, a trio of videos for your pleasure and/or annoyance. The first takes on the burning, unaddressed social issue of porn for nerds. The video itself is quite funny and harmless, despite the title, but the rest of the site and in particular the ads in the right column are definitely not things you want the boss to see on your monitor. Go to Joe's and try to view it on his blog, i.e. without the unsafe ads; but it wouldn't run for me there. (It starts by asking your birthday, to prove that you're over twenty-one; just pick a year before 1996 and you're rolling. Call me paranoid, but I would never tell my birthday or any other real information to such a website.) The second video tries a bit too hard, but the third is the funniest of them all—assuming (as I do) that it's faked, otherwise one would have to think it quite horrific. Your mileage may vary.

Monday miscellany

It's Monday again. Another week begins.

Weather continues wonderfully autumnal: blue skies, warm sun, gentle breeze. The chestnuts are nearly finished, the acorns and hazelnuts have started to fall, there are berries everywhere of all colours and shapes.

My not-quite-a-cold remains just that. I am determined to ignore it.

I will be in Canada in two weeks and haven't yet written the speech I will have to give at my parents' wedding anniversary party. I've known about the party for half a year; I've known for two months (and suspected from the beginning) that I would have to give a speech. My inclination is to wing it, because I am good at speaking off-the-cuff. But that's not the reason I haven't written this speech.

This is the reason: I just don't know what to say. I cannot come up with anything that is neither a horse-laugh-inducing bromide nor a yawning platitude.

In other news after two weeks in G and U's new office, I conclude that I really like the place. It's a converted shopfront in one of the most pleasant streets in Stuttgart, a broad residential street lined on both sides by mature trees and rose bushes.



Working there feels like being in the middle of a small town. There is a steady trickle of pedestrians going by our windows, schoolkids of various ages and ordinary citizens going about their business. We were all vaguely worried about that enormous expanse of glass, fearing that we would feel like goldfish in a bowl. In fact, it's not an issue (yet, wait to see how it feels in winter when it's dark outside). The great majority of people walk past our six metre long single-pane-of-glass window without so much as glancing at it. Children sometimes stoop to look under the obscuring stripe; if I notice them in time I smile and wave.

In other, other news I continue to spend too much time in Second Life. I wrote my first object script on the weekend: a simple box that sits on the ground and greets by name people who approach it. It knows the difference between me (i.e. its owner) and you: the box turns blue if I click on it but green if you do. Simple stuff, but I was very pleased. The language is easy, it's based on C so anyone who has done any serious programming at all will feel quite comfortable working in LSL. Documentation is a problem, there's a wiki but it is quite patchy and has far too few working examples. (That's something that I could do to make myself useful in the community.)

While showering this morning I decided on a project: to make a functioning analog wristwatch for avatars. It should display either SL-time or your own timezone, and should (of course) update itself automatically. Not too hard a task—and pleasingly useless too, for the SL viewer software has a digital clock built in.

Finally courtesy of CP a very funny video to start your day with a smile.

Mellow

Or: another blue. Weather continues wonderful, today was a warm, golden Autumn day, it was probably over 24°C this afternoon. Met G and U downtown, had a cappuccino (one each, to be pedantic) on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum and enjoyed watching the streams of people enjoying the day. The weather put everybody in a good mood, I was smiled at by random strangers all day long. Enjoy, grasshopper: winter will come soon enough. Sunset today was at about 7:30, three hours earlier than in mid-July when I was in Hamburg. I can feel the days getting shorter.

I continue to spend enormous amounts of time in Second Life, being shown the ropes (and the stores, and the libraries and tools and beaches and sanghas) by M2. It's an odd experience for me to be so thoroughly out-geeked by someone, I am usually the (comparatively) early-adopter who shows others how things work. [To be pedantic again, that's not quite true: I am usually among the first wave of pragmatists.]

I am becoming fascinated by the "life" of Second Life, by seeing an intentionally-created community bootstrapping itself into existence based on cooperation and mutual trust—and a buttload of high technology, of course. There are many thousands of groups, for every possible theme and interest, plus reconstructions of significant places in the real world like the Ryoan-ji monastery garden or Cologne cathedral. The latter recently caused a furious row by banning non-human avatars from online services, which I find staggeringly insensitive and quite foolish: human avatars are every bit (ha!) as unreal as the banned furries.

Finally, here's a bit of applied commonsense to think about this weekend, and a trailer for a new film that I really want to see.

Miscellany, Saturday edition

Listening to Don Giovanni, the soundtrack to the Joseph Losey film. This is one of my many favourite operas, possibly my most favouritest after Wagner. I've heard it many dozens of times and seen it performed live twice, and it never gets stale. The Don is such a wonderful character (well: an extremely nasty, vicious bastard, but you know what I mean); Leporello is the perfect obsequious servant, a worm who dreams of turning; and oh, that final scene with the statue!

Many years ago, I saw a remarkable production in which the Don and Leporello were sung by a pair of identical twins, Herbert and Eugene Perry. They played their roles as the opposite of a split personality: One soul in two bodies. I found it a fascinating, revelatory production (though many disagreed), one of the few cleverclogs-director-productions of any opera which transcended the director's ego to achieve something truly new.

Leporello and the Don are (in any production of the opera) entwined in a relationship of almost incestuous closeness, picking the lice from each other's souls (as Vladimir would have it). Like some married couples, they would be glad to be rid of each other but neither wishes to take the first step. Leporello claims to be appalled by the Don's cruel immorality, but enjoys a comfortable life with him; Giovanni is irritated by Leporello's moralizing, but knows he would never find another servant so willing. They have come to need each other.

Finished translating the second item, which was a set of Powerpoint slides about the institution where Princess is shortly to exhibit some new works, for the annual meeting of its directors and sponsors. Should anyone ever ask you to translate Powerpoint slides, learn from my experience: It is nearly impossible to do this on your own, unless the Powerpointer is the kind of idiot who writes out his entire speech line-for-line onto zig hundred slides. Powerpoint which has been done properly, i.e. as a non-distracting adjunct to a speech, is utterly meaningless on its own! Of roughly forty bullet points, some of which were single words, I guessed three-quarters wrongly because I'd misunderstood the context.

I am now wondering how to charge for this part of the job. Normally translation is charged per word, but done by the sentence or even paragraph (i.e. in semantic units); one seldom has to look up a word in the original language because the context usually makes its meaning clear. In Powerpoint, nobody can hear you scream there is no context—it's given by the speech that you (translator) can't hear. I think I shall treat each bullet point as a sentence, and take the average sentence length from the first document to arrive at a working length and thus at the price.

A new meme is making the rounds. Courtesy of the Little Professor, I give you the Library Meme. It's a very simple one, just a single question: which books do you presently have out on loan from the library?

I've borrowed four books:

• Elizabeth George, Well schooled in murder
• Martha Grimes, Inspektor Jury sucht den Kennington Smaragd
• Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Oskar und die Dame in Rosa
• Robert Schneider, Schlafes Bruder

and reserved another:

• Alberto Moravia, Die Verachtung

There, wasn't that just fascinating? Tagged you, you're it.

On automatic translation by computer

I mentioned earlier that I've been commissioned to translate two pieces on Princess into English. Here's the first paragraph of one of them, as translated by Google:

Very harmoniously, nearly already idyllisch those work akkurat hung up einköpfigen Kakteen (O.T.) over the seat opportunities in the entrance hall of the conference center. With the oval Passepartouts and the greenish-yellow They would know background as a dwelling accessory the 60's-years apply. Also is in the sterile Lining up on the holzgetäfelten wall on to think a naturkundliche collection. Those Säulenkakteen became in the botanischen garden that Wilhelma, Stuttgart, photographed, them serve however not vordergründig as florales illustrative material. The light can deceive. The in new city Crying race born artist [Princess] would like in its similar photo work on the one hand form-giving structures and the sinnliche operational readiness level of Surface attractions catch, on the other hand one tries it with their dissecting view behind the outer skin into the inside to arrive the nature of the object. In often inflexibly and appearing stachelig meager and hides itself to aske tables desert plants soft, fleshy, juicy, vital interior life. The form vertically put on of these Kakteenart contained also the reference character on phallische Aspects; male power in their sexual Excludingness can tendentious hurting, penetrant and threateningly its. This threateningness, those appears likewise very aesthetic, becomes in that Work Pisa on the sea II ironically in Spieleri transported. A souvenir tower as landmarks of Pisa stands as symbolful with the Kakteen for that male principle. A pointing becomes with that photographed sperm obtained, in the phallischen Souvenir with largeporous openings is embedded. The work works by the photographic illustration much entrückt and becomes hermetic by the acrylic glass for the viewer seals.

Crap, isn't it? (Mind you, the German original is pretty damned obscure, I very much doubt that the average taxi driver could understand a word of it. A disappointingly high proportion of writers in German sees simplicity and comprehensibility as a sign of weakness and a betrayal of their expensive educations.)

Some of the difficulty that poor Google has with this text is due to the nature of German: as I commented to Lioness recently, it is perfectly legitimate to invent words on-the-fly by glueing concepts together as needed. The hybrid word that results is easily understandable by humans, who recognize the roots and read on with a chuckle, but to the computer it's either a typo or a brand-new word that it doesn't know, and in either case it cannot cope.

I think that non-automatic translation by human beings is going to be with us for a long time to come.

Today's Friday favourite—and my gods how quickly this week has gone by—is a quiet acoustic blues from the finest film of the year 2000. If you haven't already seen that film, then indulge yourselves with my blessings in a real treat this weekend: go and rent it. What the hell, even if you have already seen it, go and rent it and watch the film again. It's that good. Trust me.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Trivia: Wednesday edition

Winter approaches. It's only 8:30 but it is already getting dark outside; it was so cold in the apartment today that I had to find a sweater. I shall go for a walk around the Feuersee after writing this, then early to bed (with the window partway open).

Spent the day working in earnest on the database, for the first time in a month, and was pleasantly surprised to see how good it is. One spends months buried up to the armpits in the oily, gritty, stinking mechanics of a project, focussing one's entire attention on a single ball-bearing here or an electric cable there, and quite lose sight of the whole, the complex and beautiful machine of which these are all merely components. Spoke to two customers about problems they were having with the database, one through the effects of an unexpected crash, the other through the consequences of ignorance and her refusal to remedy it. The expression "your own damned fault" rose to my mind but not my lips.

In other news let me recommend to your attention Jean's series of posts about her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1996; insightful and moving, well written as always. My own trip (not a pilgrimage) tapered off inconclusively, as did my reporting on it here; I do have more to say and will say it, at some unspecified future date.

In other, other news this short film is supposedly funny, but I found it actually quite sad. [Updated] I'm not sure it was supposed to be funny. It's one of a series of five films (links on the same page above) and they're all pretty sad. Worth seeing.

Procrastination in action

Or "inaction," as the case may be. There are of course many things which are much more important than blogging, at this point in time exactly forty-eight hours before I leave for the airport; so of course I am blogging rather than doing any of them. My (call it) reluctance is in some way an expression of fear of what I will find buried and half-forgotten in the mess. If I stopper up my ears so as to hear no clucking, can the chickens be said to be home and roosting?

In other news I present for your delectation an editorial from the Portland Mercury:

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. [...]

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities. An overwhelming majority of the American popuation chooses to live in cities. And John Kerry won every city with a population above 500,000. He took half the cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000. The future success of liberalism is tied to winning the cities. An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.

Quite right. The article is less academic and more amusing (to an urban blue-state mentality) than these excerpts suggest, well worth reading.

In other, other news here is a series of wonderful Flash animations of scenes from office life using only typography. Brilliant.

On having second thoughts

I took down a post which I'd written this morning, because the first two comments (Savtadotty and Antonia) proved that it was badly written: unclear, off-topic, not thought out, factually wrong. My bad. Sorry.

I shall rewrite it and post it again, probably tomorrow.

In other news the swallows are back! I saw the first of them circling above the rooftops this evening, as I was walking around the Feuersee with an ice-cream cone, taking the long way home. They left around July 28th; this is a week earlier than their return last year.

In other, other news courtesy of the great Neil Gaiman or rather his Web Elf, the fascinating and heartwarming tale of the rat tickler.

Roundup

This is the first and probably last reference to Britney Spears on my blog: watch Craig Ferguson telling the truth, and read Dooce ditto. They're right: what she is doing is not remotely funny, and we should all stop laughing.

Teju Cole writes well about reading and writing.

As for me and my house we have spent the day producing downloadable installers for the Mac and Windows versions of both normal and Hobbyist databases, and listening to Tom Jobim and the rain, and are now going to bed at a reasonable hour as preparation for rising at a reasonable hour. I sat (meditated) this morning for all of five minutes, it's a start.

Worn down to a kind of calm

... is my mood at present. The compiled database application still doesn't run, I still can't format the C: drive, I still can't find a way to get the Windows XP Installer to use any hard disk other than D: (the drive that the computer booted from), and I still can't find any useful advice or tips on dealing with these problems. Even Google crapped out on the mysterious Error -199.

[Updated: I still can't format C: but at least I found a very helpful step-by-step guide to installing WinXP in "interactive mode" which does actually allow me to choose which disk I want it installed on.]

Of course, obviously, this is the last possible weekend to prepare the Hobbyist CDs for production to have them in the shops on March 1st. Well, whose fault is that? I've been procrastinating about this for weeks. It would still have gone wrong had I tried a fortnight ago, but I might have had a chance at solving the problems.

In closely related news I am getting pretty tired of all the whining and complaining around here. My negativism begins to bore me, and I'm sure that it palls on you too. My apologies. It's time for a change of tune.

In unrelated news I just stepped onto the balcony to blow the dustbunnies out of the carcase of the PC (I'd opened it up to check whether the second drive was mounted as a slave, which might have been the reason for the non-formatting), and noticed that the temperature has reached (dropped down to) the freezing point. We may be in for another few weeks of winter.

Something about being outside reminded me of the plastic bag scene from American Beauty (if you've seen the film, you'll know exactly what I'm referring to) and so I looked it up on YouTube. It's much shorter than I remembered, unless this clip has been edited; in my memory the bag flies around for several wonderful minutes. The song in the background is "Any other name" by Thomas Newman, and it's now on my iPod. Enjoy.



And just by the way, I was listening to the soundtrack and thought "this sounds sorta like Six feet under," so I looked that up on IMDB too. Guess who wrote (some of) the theme music to 6FU? Thomas Newman. Small world, eh?

Reading list for January 2007

I had just finished checking PostSecret for the third time, wondering when the hell Frank would get his act together, then had an awesome realization: "Hey, today's Saturday! I've got another whole day of weekend coming!" I am severely chronologically challenged after these days and weeks of the competition followed by two days off.

I bought myself the boxed set of Wim Wenders' Directors Cuts that I mentioned before Christmas, as a treat for surviving the competition without killing or even seriously offending anyone, and have already seen Himmel über Berlin (the vastly superior original of "City of Angels," everything most things of interest or beauty in that film were cribbed from Wenders. This is surely one of the very best films ever made by anyone anywhere! Go see it right now!!) and Im Lauf der Zeit which is very possibly Wenders' second-best film (after HüB).

Anyway, what have I been up to lately?

Currently reading
Petra Hammesfahr, Mit den Augen eines Kindes—still
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada oder das Verlangen—still
Terry Pratchett, Monstrous regiment

Previously read
None

Yes, you read that correctly, dear reader: it is indeed the same as last month's list. I did not managed to finish a single book during the month of January, and I am as shocked and dismayed as you must be. I even had to return three unread books to the library! Oh, the shame. I promise to do better in February.

Next month's list
Last month's list