reading from my work

First public reading – this is going to be interesting. Not sure i advocate writers reading their work themselves. Wouldn’t mind hiring people to do the reading for me…

new yorkers – rude?

new york may be the capital of rude, but it has its excuses for being so; poverty, megalomaniacs, careeroholics, an incessant stream of immigrants learning the ropes and a fair share of people who are insane. Being rude is the equivalent of a social short cut, and perhaps it is more a matter of directness rather than rudeness.

Perpetually under the time pressure of individually determined deadlines – the job, the apartment, the lifestyle, nirvana – new yorkers rid their conversation and actions of the superfluous with a remarkable discipline, and perhaps it is this shedding of unnecessary semantics that seems to pare every interaction down to an action. It is not always pleasant nor appropriate, but it has its peculiar beauty and for those who can manage the city’s energy, it is fantastically liberating – a kind of prerogative, this instantaneous translation of thought into action, which establishes its own social protocol.

It is the apotheosis of agency – instant gratification for action junkies; I do therefore I exist. This sort of shortcut is appealing to some, frightening to others, but in any case the constant ability and willingness to act it demands is exhausting.

europe’s most dangerous volcano

And the title of most dangerous volcano in europe goes to: Italy’s vesuvius, or vesuvio in italian.  Who knew? And what happened to la dolce vita?

The vesuvio, classified as a complex volcano by what i’d call volcanologists, is famous for incinerating Pompeii and Herculaneum in a violent eruption dated 79 AD. Since 1944 the Vesuvio has remained dormant, but is being continuously monitored and for good reason. Despite its threatening presence, the area just below the volcano is densely populated, with more than half a million living in its jagged shadow – and that’s not counting Napoli, which boasts another million people or so. 

Looking for the marvelous

NY Times’ chief architecture critic Herbert Muschamp stated about Libeskind that “if you’re looking for the marvelous, here’s where you’ll find it. Daniel Libeskind’s project attains a perfect balance between aggression and desire” .

In fact, the labels aggression and desire might be applied to the architect himself. Libeskind is known to have the promotional skills of a politician and perhaps the same appetite for influence. Both will be indispensable in seeing his project realized, especially after his selection.

la famiglia versus la nuit de varennes

Scola’s movies are prolonged conversations.

In la famiglia it’s between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, sisters and cousins and everyone else remotely related – the entire gamut of connections that make up the web of family.

In la nuit de varennes the talk is between social classes, aristocrat and revolutionary, artist and bourgeois, but also moral classes, libertine and conservative, or gender: men and women. The conversations are always anchored in one place, a turn of the century apartment in la famiglia, a postal carriage in la nuit de varennes. the camera and characters travel through through the rooms and corridors of the former in repetitive patterns that both signal the passage of time and underscore the cyclical nature of it.

the pianist at work

maurizio pollini is a slight man who becomes a giant at the piano, hammering down the keys with unsuspected ferocity. but removed from his instrument he shrinks into a humble, white haired figure that evokes chaplinesque or perhaps keatonesque associations; his back turned to the public, waddling off the stage, the tail of his Frack trailing after him.

at this particular recital his gala tailcoat looked too large on him, hanging loosely from his meager shoulders, investing his humility with a kind of unexpected pathos for a man with such a patrician face. At the piano, however, not an iota of pathos or comedy or, for that matter, humility. the small, somewhat lost man who shuffles across the stage and fiddles with the curtains before finding the opening and slipping backstage, that small man turns into a swaying, arching, curving, lifting being of singular energy and purpose.

It’s the body, not the face, that follows every swerve, softening and acceleration of the music, marking the grand chords with little, bird like hops; the pianist is airborne, his bent legs off the floor, his arms and hands in the air, his entire body hovering above ground for a fraction of a second, before he comes crashing down into the keys, sometimes with such force that the audience gives an un-voluntary start.

lorraine hunt lieberson

 

mezzo soprano lorraine hunt lieberson died in July of this year. her death was completely unexpected: she was only 52, but apparently had battled cancer since 2000.  the new yorker has a profile and a commemorative audio piece up on its site this week:

Alex Ross offers an audio tribute to the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

PLUS: From this week’s magazine, Ross remembers Lieberson; from 2004, Charles Michener’s Profile of the singer.

Ever since first hearing her rendition of the Bach Cantatas,  I have looked forward to one day see her perform in the flesh. she was reputed for her on stage magnetism and her full, vibrant voice. that day will now never come, but her voice lives on thanks to the few recordings she left.

Find Lieberson recordings on Amazon.

katrina: power failure

the US continues going down the drains in front of television cameras from around the world. some europeans seem surprised at the third world poverty that katrina has unearthed in the supposedly richest country on earth. for those who’ve lived in the states though, the existence of this level of poverty is nothing new – it’s part of daily life.

that there’s a huge gap between rich and poor in the USA is common knowledge, but perhaps the extent of this gap is only now seeping into public consciousness. even during the booming 90s, when cities like new york were awash in cash (pardon all the water metaphors), the gaps remained glaring. the excess wealth never trickled down to the poorest strata, but with most people insulated by an unprecedented economic bonanza, nothing was done about it.

business (and art) in china

watch the trailer for a herzog/meuron documentary on you tube

The New York Times Sunday Magazine runs a story on how two Swiss architects got grey hairs doing commissions in China. Herzog & de Meuron got sucked into the vast, murky, elusive web of Chinese business and politics when they won the bid to build the Olympic stadium. They deny the grey hairs being a result of it, but the shock is palpable in de Meuron’s unvarnished words:

“This was a very enriching personal experience,” he says — but like many such experiences, it was also exhausting and painful. “I am the sort of person who tries to find a solution,” he explains. “You bring me problems, and de Meuron tries to solve them. It is too much money, or you can’t do it for this building code, or the client wants concrete, not wood — I find another way. This is how it worked for me up to now. In China, it was very different. That was a challenge for me, not only as an architect but as a person. To have someone on the other side and they are experts in misleading you or trapping you. It is never one to one when they say if they like it or don’t like it. They played with me.”

heading to london for we media

morph is about to close and many of the contributors are heading to london for the we media global forum, including this contributor who’s been recruited to be an online curator. in every day speak that means i’ll be glued to the conference chat screen tyring to make sense of comments and conversations threads while the debate rages onstage. or so they tell me. if you’re wondering what this conference is about and have never heard of social media or social technologies or citizen media or the consumer web or web 2.0, you might want to read this first and then browse through the media center blog. The topics reflect some of the issues that will be discussed at the forum. if you don’t have the time / inclination to do extensive reading, check my summary on SHORTCUT:

how does social media impact women?

This entry was posted in morph, the mediacenter blog.

Cherchez la femme. That’s what the French say when they want to imply that there’s a woman behind something or other.  In WEEK 7 of our Morph efforts, we’ll be doing exactly that: looking for la femme in social media. How does social media (or web 2.0 applications) impact women? Is it boosting careers? Is it leveling the playing field? Or are the boys running the show here as well?

A look at current bloggers and web entrepreneurs yields plenty of active women: Morph contributor Katie Lips runs technology start up Kisky NetMedia; Liza Sabater cooks up a storm in her Culture Kitchen; Arianna Huffington snags a piece of the political action with her Huffington Post blog; and earlier this year Google’s Marissa Mayer lectured the business elite on how to nurse a “healthy disrespect for the impossible”.

depress-moi

 

the new york times taking a stab at European modern dance mannerisms. they do this surprisingly often:

The most complete blend came at the end, in the weakest piece of the night, “Phrases, Now” by Andonis Foniadakis. Mr. Foniadakis spent two years with Maurice Béjart in Lausanne, Switzerland, then six with the Lyon Opera Ballet. Europeans seem to like their music loud and their lighting stark and dark, and Mr. Foniadakis did not disappoint. Set to an annoyingly simplistic (if loud) score by Julien Tarride, the dance consisted of four City Ballet men — Tyler Angle, Craig Hall, Sean Suozzi and Mr. Millepied — and one woman, Ula Sickle, who has worked in mostly modern companies all over Europe.

read the whole thing here. there certainly is a tendency in Europe to consume modern dance that is morbid, stark and primarily intent on shocking (but usually just bores). i’m glad to report there are exceptions: danish choreographer anders christiansen - yes,  i’m a board member for his company! – weaves technical savvy, humor and theatricals into bare sets. his uro mangel last year was a delight.

visit morph blog

if you haven’t yet, you may want to: morph is a collaborative project launched by the US based media center and brings together 50 contributors from around the globe who weigh in on technology, media and society. the conversations are centered around weekly topics and five main themes: we live, we imagine, we influence, we inform and we lead.

the output by such a diverse slate of people makes for interesting reading and can jumpstart ideas if you’re in need of any during a slow business day. just take 5 minutes, browse and get hooked. or search for specific topics and get opinions on anything from where storytelling is headed to how we parse information and what innovation means in an age that seems to  generate it every day. here’s a sample by Ogilvy Creative Director John Bell:

First there were three broadcast networks in the United States. Then cable gave us a greater selection which quickly snowballed into the promise of 500 channels. Let’s forget that little burp that was Interactive Television which I worked on at AT&T and Viacom in the early nineties. Now we are talking about a long tail’s worth of “broadband channels.” Today the New York Times talks about the “Slivercast,” lots of niche channels that could not exist within the metrics of cable. The real excitement is not that there is sail.tv (or motherload or more versions of Discovery…) but that the means of production and distribution is in the hands of a myriad of new “microcasters” – small business people trying to reach a small yet valuable audience.

battlefield culture

 

Why is American (pop) culture so popular? 

Philip thinks it’s the ready absorption of foreign talent. He also points out that Japan exports a lot too: but its exports are limited to specific niches, like technology, food, manga, rather than the export of wholesale cultural values the US seems to specialize in. Gloria thinks this is still an after effect of WW2, when victorious American troops exported American values for the first time on a global scale. They never left (The values. Whether the troops left is still a matter of debate). France, that hothouse of critical thinking, points the finger at the US’ excessive economic clout, which in the case of movies rakes in 85% of ticket sales worldwide.

How come then that often I can’t see the American movies I’d like to see here in Europe?

olympics: “survivor” for nations?

this article is also posted on morph.

To be frank i didn’t realize the Olympics were on, not even when i came across Sophia Loren on TV, wrapped in a white coat and big hair, carrying a huge banner in front of a background of large letters announcing: TORINO.

What’s this? I asked my boyfriend. What’s Sophia doing in Torino?
It’s the opening ceremony. he said. I drew a blank. Opening ceremony for what?

The Winter Olympics! came the astonished and astonishing answer.

Aha.

So there you have it. It’s possible to be connected, interlinked, digitized, blogified, rssed and cable TVed, and still completely miss out on what most people would rate as essential information. At first I wondered, is it them or is it me? That is, I don’t watch much cable TV, which arguably is the main advertiser of an impending Olympics. So was there a lack of of coverage of the Olympics in my feeds and general reading material – anything from the New Yorker to the Copenhagen Post? Or was I just not particularly interested in Winter sports and therefore able to erase any news about the upcoming Olympics from my cognition?

data gluttony

How do we cope with choice? Brian Reich in his response to Judy’s choice conundrum makes the point that he doesn’t want to choose, but to engage. He writes: I don’t want to choose. Why not? Because there isn’t one source of information out there that gives me everything I want.

It’s an interesting premise and I agree with the motivation that fuels it: Expanding your horizons involves tasting from a broad data menu. An open/liberal/broad-minded attitude to information demands that we absorb as much as possible and from as many sources as possible. We want to reconstruct the truth of an event ourselves from the myriad pieces available. But to think that we’re not actively making a choice is an illusion:

business and the blogosphere

The economist takes a look at corporate trepidation about bloggers and blogging, and concludes that business is better served by embracing “the enemy”:

Kryptonite, a firm that makes high-priced bicycle locks, also learned the hard way how important blogs can be. In September 2004 word spread quickly through the blogosphere that U-shaped locks by Kryptonite and other firms could be picked, quickly and easily, using only the plastic casing of a Bic pen. Then somebody made a video showing how to do it, and posted it on the Engadget blog site, one of the most popular on the internet. After Kryptonite discovered the problem, it came up with a plan to take care of its customers and improve its locks. But Donna Tocci, Kryptonite’s media chief, says that she now checks 30-40 blogs every day.

It seems self-evident that corporations should be running to harness the power of the blogosphere as best they can for branding, research, damage control and other purposes, but out on the corporate playing field that seems seldom the case.

a view from denmark

As very likely the only Copenhagen-based Morph contributor, I thought it useful to post about the local perceptions of l’affaire cartoon (note: I am not Danish). First, let me confess that this is the first time in my media consumption career that I have relied more on blogs than on mainstream media outlets in following a story.

Why?

Because blogs seemed to have the answers long before the traditional heavyweights, and often with more accuracy and more (linked) sources. For example: blogs like Brussels Journal, reported – long before the BBC or CNN did – that Danish Imams, on a tour last year in the Middle East, had added fake drawings to their cartoon portfolio, and that these fake cartoons were far more inflammatory in content than anything actually published by Jyllands Posten.

let them eat blogs

this entry is also posted on mediacenterblog.org

Too many blogs, too many voices, too much confusion, less or more transparency- I’ve read several interesting comments on the chaos of information that seems to emerge with the explosion of blogs around the world.

But then, i can already see plenty of tools being developed to order and organize and prioritize these information bits, engines like technorati obviously, but also wikis and tagging tools like delicious and furl, not to mention customized search engines like swicki. 

cartoon wars

some danes are expressing dismay at what they perceive as an unsupportive stance taken by Britain and the US. denmark is one of the few european countries that supported the war in Iraq and that sent troops to Bush’s self-styled “coalition”. but now the denmark has become the target of muslim outrage – and subversive incitement – both the UK and the US have remained on the sidelines, watching.

although both have condemned the violence and threats against Danish institutions, US media has taken an implicit stance by not showing the controversial cartoons, while public figures like ex-president Clinton have criticized the decision to publish racist and insulting material. In the UK, many media outlets and editorials have expressed similar views, perhaps minding their large immigrant muslim populations.

for denmark though, which took a lot of heat for its decision to support the Iraq war, the lukewarm response from its war allies is like a cold shower, and some local politicians have vented their displeasure on national television. it’s unlikely that this displeasure will escalate into actions that would later be regretted, but it shows another interesting divide, one between continental europe and the (in the french sense of the term) anglo-saxon world.