Category: ultracultural

10 Commandments

Gilbert & GeorgeI quite like, but I do not necessarily love, the work of Gilbert & George. It’s cheeky, it often looks great, it’s interesting, and all, but it can get a little heavy-handed now and again, and I really think they went off the rails visially once they got their hands on a copy of Photoshop. But whatever: these things happen. There are very few artists of any kind who manage to produce work that feels just as fresh and resonant all the way through their careers.

I do appreciate a number of the themes that run through what they do, however, many of which are summed up nicely in this manifesto-slash-list of commandments-slash-performance piece:

  1. Thou shalt fight conformism

  2. Thou shalt be the messenger of freedoms

  3. Thou shalt make use of sex

  4. Thou shalt reinvent life

  5. Thou shalt create artificial art

  6. Thou shalt have a sense of purpose

  7. Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it

  8. Thou shalt give thy love

  9. Thou shalt grab the soul

  10. Thou shalt give something back

To the aerojets!

I usually like steampunk better in theory than in execution. I mean, it works well on paper: I love the mashup of historical and futuristic ideas and technology, and I’m certainly a ardent supporter or artisanal crafts and gadgetry. (Not to mention a man in goggles.) It’s a groovy idea, but as a subculture it generates so much kitsch. And not the good kind. It’s so often too earnest for its own good, with just a touch too little awareness of the inherent fantasy, despite the fun of it all. But when it’s good — when it’s really original and when it works on more than one level — it’s so unbelievably cool, like the work of this guy:

[Above: “Raptor” Fighter Pilot Mask by Bob Basset]

We Americans Abroad

I’ve had this TImes article sitting in a tab in my browser for the last day because it rang true in so many ways and I wanted to write about that, but frankly I don’t have the time or the energy (which is another lengthy post in itself, really). In short, though: I prefer living over here and a lot of Americans get on my nerves when I stumble across them, but until I read this I was having trouble articulating what I actually liked on the whole about Americans, and what Europeans always try but fail to explain about what they like about Americans. So good work, Mr Dyer.

My American Friends, by Geoff Dyer

Non-Latin domain names coming soon

Wow, this’ll be a huge change. ICANN is getting ready to allow internationalized domain names — web-site domain names that use non-Latin character encodings instead of the regular western alphabet.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names represented by local language characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese). Many efforts are ongoing in the Internet community to make domain names available in character sets other than ASCII.

These “internationalized domain name” (IDN) efforts were the subject of a 25 September 2000 resolution by the ICANN Board of Directors, which recognized “that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set,” and also stressed that “the internationalization of the Internet’s domain name system must be accomplished through standards that are open, non-proprietary, and fully compatible with the Internet’s existing end-to-end model and that preserve globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space.”

You can read this BBC story for the more easily digested version:

The internet is on the brink of the “biggest change” to its working “since it was invented 40 years ago”, the net regulator Icann has said.

The body said it that it was finalising plans to introduce web addresses using non-Latin characters.

The proposal — initially approved in 2008 — would allow domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts.

My head is swimming with questions. A lot of them are about the specifics of getting this to work, considering how complex it still is to handle a lot of non-Latin writing systems with current fonts and technologies. There’s still a big divide between encoding the characters and representing them visually with a lot of scripts, and still only limited solutions for handling that. With Indic scripts, to pick an example I’ve been rather deeply immersed in lately, the way the Unicode-based characters are typed in is just the first step: rendering names or words in a way that makes linguistic sense requires a little extra software processing, and some carefully built fonts. So are the address bars in web browsers going to handle OpenType substitutions to make that happen? Or is there going to be a different encoding solution that’s a little more WYSIWYG when it comes to typing in non-Latin addresses? I’m guessing a lot of those issues have come up in the ICAAN proceedings, so I suppose it’s time to wade through them and see what the deal is.

In one sense, of course, this is brilliant. Domain names are part of our online identities and brands these days, and people should be able to use their own languages and writing systems to identify themselves online. It’s only fair, and it shows respect for the huge sectors of the world that don’t use our alphabet everyday. Hopefully this will also encourage more technical support — and type design,if we’re starting to think about web fonts, too — for non-Latin scripts. (Trust me, it’s a typographic desert out there in the non-Latin world.)

But there will also be a certain amount of balkanization that’s likely to come of it, on top of just the language barrier. Linking to non-Latin domain names will require extra know-how about how to key in those names. It will require some understanding of encoding versus representation, writing direction, and even sensitivity to the differences betwen one character and another in an unfamiliar alphabet. Again, these are things that would all be good for people to learn, but we can’t even get people to use nice, clean HTML all the time. It would be a shame if the extra complexity keeps people from bothering to connect to the internationalized portion of the web. I suppose some sort of transliteration layer will spring up, but again…so many questions!

Pernicious race of little odious vermin

A nice tidbit From Gulliver’s Travels, circa 1726:

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Fringe Cuisine

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On a lighter note, I’m strangely pleased to see the Times do a nice round-up of affordable, exotic dining options on Staten Island. Although I’m not likely to ever get a chance to explore any of these places, it’s nice to take a moment to reflect upon the positive aspects of the place where I grew up for a change.

Trivia: that article quotes a food editor at the Staten Island Advance on whom I had a brief, unrequited, adolescent crush. I note that she apparently never left the Island, at least not for good.

Additional trivia: the Staten Island Advance is Staten Island’s local newspaper, whose offices and plant were just up the street from where I lived until I left for college. Most kids in the neighborhood hung out at some point in the woods around there or in a little spot beneath an overpass in their parking lot, but it was lame.

Oh! And another thing: The Advance seems to have a Gay and Lesbian Life section now. Huh.

Photos officially OK in NYC

Finally, common sense prevails over security theatre and knee-jerk paranoia:

Faced with complaints from photographers and tourists alike, the NYPD has issued a department order reminding cops that the right to take pictures in the Big Apple is as American as apple pie.

“Photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City . . . and is rarely unlawful,” the NYPD operations order begins. [From the New York Post]

[Click the image above to enlarge and print for yourself to carry around, if you’re so inclined.]

Let’s hope they finally drop the anti-photography here in the UK one of these days.

Crap Rotation

I’ve had analog stuff on the brain lately. I may be someone who’s been online for a long time, and who stays tethered to the internet throughout the average day in one way or another, but I’ve always been a little ambivalent about the medium. And I don’t just mean how much I hate building web sites, despite running one (or a few, usually) for such a long time. I guess my ambivalence is more about the culture of the medium, more than the platforms themselves. I’m always fascinated by how the online world changes and surprises me, but I’ve been at it long enough to miss some things that have gotten further than what I liked about them. It was a lot more fun to participate when online life was an immature mess that was in the middle of sprawling outward.

I used to make stuff — actual, physical stuff, like zines and mixtapes and paper and postcards — a lot, and the tactile aspect of that was a huge part of wht I liked. I don’t make so much stuff anymore, and I miss the way I enjoyed the making and the sharing of it. I stumbled into the web because I was curious about this new thing that was emerging, and it was easy enough to tinker with it and feel it out. Throwing up a web page built with Mosaic was also a cheap alternative to putting out the slightly ambitious zine I had been making, so the first pages I made were supposed to be a staging ground for what I’d publish the next time I had a little extra scratch lying around. Then they became a repository for stuff I was posting on discussion groups, and then a repository for what I’d published in my zine, and then Blogger happened and then GreyMatter and then Movable Type and then Flickr and then Twitter and other stuff and it became more and more and now here we are. Now, I find myself constantly expanding and contracting in the online world — testing new things, leaving them when they don’t give me something I like. I don’t really like the endless networks that can spin out in all directions. I like a smaller net with edges that are just blurry enough to leave room for serendipity. I like a bit more community and a bit less…well, a bit less onslaught of everything, I guess.

Continue reading “Crap Rotation”

Louche decadence

As far as cultural commentary goes. I realize that I’m really grabbing at the low-hanging fruit to point out that Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch auction is a long-awaited glimpse at the sheer, unadulterated crazy that is the King of Pop’s approach to life. The gallery of selected offerings scratches the surface of a story about questionable taste, obscene wealth, stunted maturity, and an attempt to keep reality at bay.

Michael Jackson's auction

The thing is, the story of the Yves Saint Laurent auction has a lot of parallel themes, although I’d venture to say Laurent’s taste was infinitely better, and there’s a very different vibe to an estate auction in comparison to a living person auctioning off the trappings of a chapter in his life he wants to forget. (And honestly, Michael, I can sympathize with that.)

There’s something very enticing about this description of Laurent’s things from a photographer reviewing them: “I have an affinity for louche decadence, which is one of the things on view here,” Pierson says. “There is a very opium-den quality — all those tables full of objects one can peruse in a haze.” It’s less enticing to picture Jackson’s “armour, display cases of custom-made crowns and an ornately carved throne with red velvet upholstering in his bedroom.” However, reading about the two auctions made me feel a bit sad, and I saw some eerie parallels in the way two very different, very wealthy men seemed to rely on so much stuff to keep at bay an overwhelming world around them.

“The innumerable representations of serpents and birds that Saint Laurent amassed, symbols of an obsession with a natural world from which, toward the end of his life, he became increasingly removed” do not seem so altogether different from Jackson’s infamous menagerie. “Saint Laurent was not the first person to apprehend that genius can often be a curse. Neither was he the first to withdraw from society, in all its disappointing dimensions, into the fixed and reassuring company of things.” Also, clearly, he was not the last.