I just got done watching Life in Wartime

And as usual went on my spree of reading reviews, and found an interview with the director, Todd Solondz. The second page is packed with some quotable quotes:

Just over a decade later, the indie-film business is held aloft by tasteful crowd pleasers like Juno and The Kids Are All Right—”movies that would have been produced by studios in the old days,” Solondz notes—while audience-agitating auteurs such as himself plug away on the margins.

and:

“I never thought, in a million years, I would ever want to teach,” he says. “Then I learned that they could give me a generous arrangement, and it could make my life much more manageable. It’s strange, because they have a school in Singapore, so I teach there in the fall for six weeks and then I teach in the spring for 12 weeks in New York. Singapore is a lot like Boca Raton, Florida—only instead of the Jews, you’ve got the Chinese.”

Foodies are the complete opposite of culture snobs

The CBC's Jian Ghomeshi tweeted today about an interview he's doing on his radio show Q with some authors who claim foodies are culture snobs, and it struck me as wrong.  And not just wrong, but completely wrong; in fact, I actually think that it's the other way around.  What some have termed foodie culture — the obsessive blogging, documenting and photographing of meals, the fetishistic love of cookbooks and fanatic devotion to particular chefs — seems less about the cool, aesthetic taste of snobbery and more to do with a kind of mainstream trendiness that can't distinguish fad from food.

If anything, I'd consider myself more of a food snob in the "culture snob" vein than a person toting a camera to a restaurant and raving over another variation of French/Italian cuisine.  I don't care about where I eat my food — a hole in the wall or a high-class Michelin-starred resto — as long as the food is interesting, tasty and unique.  The "foodie" (a term that should rightly be termed an epithet in my mind) is someone who spends more time admiring the environment of a restaurant, the expense of kitchen knives and accessories and the photographic arrangement of the food they're presented with, than the food itself.  And to me that is not culinary snobbishness, but cultural tourism.  It's like going to Paris and snapping pictures of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre because everyone goes there and it's a masterpiece and — well, what about the beautiful piece of art at the gallery in the Marais?

If anything, foodies are victims of marketing.  What might have started as an appreciation of culinary skill and a fine dining experience has become an easy way to signify one's breeding and sophistication, in the manner of people becoming wine aficionados by adopting the terminology and attitude of so-called "wine experts".  For the restaurant world, it's been a gold mine, after years where working in a kitchen was the domain of the criminal and the immigrant.  Chefs are celebrities, knowledge of food commands high prices and "opening a restaurant" is a goal and not the newcomer's economic foot in the door.  People ("foodies") dream of culinary school, working in top kitchens, and yet… it all seems contrived, just another calcified genre with its tropes: think Tuscan cooking vacations and "Northwest Cuisine", charcuterie and "tasting menus".

There's a woman I know who got into wine.  She bought a wine fridge, splashed out regularly for $50+ vintages, hosted a blind wine tasting at her home with some friends.  With this hobby came an attendant interest in food and cooking — she had a stack of cookbooks and a little kitchen herb garden.  One day she made a meal for me and my wife, supposedly an Italian pasta dish, where she dumped a bottle of Ragu in with some cooked shrimp to make the sauce.  I knew then that being a "foodie" was like a coat that one could put on, something that might be fashionable for a few hot seconds, and that could be discarded quite easily.  This woman never talks about her planned trip to Tuscany anymore, and there aren't any more wine tastings.  The last thing I saw in her fridge was a nacho cheese dip from Safeway.  Perhaps she comes off as a snob to some, but to me it's just the veneer of the tourist.

Brushes paintings

Posted via web from Longform

Digital hoarding, Apple and its Taoist roots

A lot has been made about hoarders, after the A&E show of the same name.  At its extreme, the physical retention of so much sheer stuff in a steadily dwindling space is a horrifying kind of thing, some kind of Ballardian fetish made real.  Nowadays, though, digital hoarding is probably more prevalent, given the decline of hard drive price and terabyte storage, so that anyone among us could be holding on to huge storehouses worth of film, music, books, emails and other data.  The guy next to you could have a decade's worth of porn, making Larry Flynt look like a small-timer, and it'd all be handily pocket-portable.

But that's not the kind of digital-age hoarding I'm talking about.  Watching Steve Jobs' interview at AllThingsDigital's D8 conference , where he opined about Apple's philosophy of dropping support for obsolescing technologies, like CD-ROM drives and serial ports, I started to think that this was perhaps an ever worse form of digital hoarding.  I'm not one to hoard much myself, in any form — I "roll compact" as  KRS-ONE once notably said — and I feel that it's been a healthier existence in all ways.  The Taoists spoke about detaching oneself from things, a sensibility that was melded with Buddhism into Zen, and perhaps ironically, I feel a strong bond with that philosophy.  (What does it mean to be so strongly attached to a philosophy of detachment?  Perhaps that's perfectly in keeping with the nature of Tao.)  I have few prized possessions, and when I sell my car or a piece of equipment breaks down, I don't feel any particular twinge of sadness.  Collecting things never really appealed to me, whether comics or cards, and losing an entire library of music hasn't gotten more than a sigh out of me — I usually look at it as a good way to start exploring new music.  Each wipe of the slate is a rejuvenation.

So it's sort of understandable why Jobs — an avowed Buddhist — would be so willing to drop support for old technology and erase the tablet (pun intended).  By not tying Apple to old ways, and "this is how we do it, this is how we've always done it" philosophies and making very clean breaks, he allows the company to grow and develop and innovate.  Much like the startup that he claims Apple to be, it's about breaking with past patterns and traditional models, and always trying to approach with an open, new mind.  This is what makes him unusual in the technology business world, which for a long time seemed to often prefer accruing gains incrementally and was often about protecting what one owned, one's property, and maintaining what was.  These companies thought like hoarders, unwilling or unable to throw out the old until the moment when someone from the outside came in and saw the crufty mess and told them they had to toss it or risk total collapse.  So even though I haven't been a steady Apple user over the years, I admire where Steve Jobs and Apple are coming from (and to some degree, by extension, all startups).

Next up: Why Apple ISN'T like a startup, and why that's good (hint: it's got something to do with taste).

Vancouver Olympiad

It’s a strange thing to watch the Olympics when it’s hosted in your own city, especially when you witness the bulk of it on television.  I’ve lived here for nearly five years now, in neighbourhoods right downtown, in Fairview, Kitsilano and now the furthest reaches of East Vancouver, bordering the suburb of Burnaby.  I daresay I know more about Vancouver than many of the people who were born and grew up here; I barely know the history of the place I grew up in, but I’ve found as I’ve gotten older, knowing about where I live has become very important to me.  I wanted to situate myself here as quickly as possible, get myself up to speed, even if I had never shown any interest in Vancouver prior to moving here.  Somehow, Vancouver tantalized me and captured my interest in the end.

When I first arrived here, all I knew was the downtown and the various streets and paths that connected by workplace in the financial district to my home on the other end of the peninsula.  I only knew the downtown core, and any foray over a bridge required planning and forethought.  But I walked a lot, eventually over those bridges, and started to explore further and further afield.  I discovered a lot more character than what I found in what I found to be a pretty vacuous downtown core.  I discovered the neighbourhoods of Vancouver’s West Side and East Vancouver — Fairview, Shaughnessy, Mount Pleasant, Commercial Drive — attractive enclaves that I don’t think many Olympic tourists even got to.  I started to see the bigger picture of Vancouver, not the tightly focused and heavily edited version that got broadcast on CTV and NBC.  The Olympic organizers seemed to have spent their time highlighting the least interesting areas of downtown, and even classic tourist destinations like Gastown and Granville Island found it hard to attract the interest of visitors due to this narrowed focus.

Perhaps visitors to Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics felt similar emotions.  They came here, not knowing very much about the city and primarily for the draw of the sports extravaganza, and then discovered what was on offer here.  Maybe over the duration of the Games, they managed to get beyond the Olympic Zones to explore more hidden corners of the city?

On a busy Sunday during the Olympics, my wife and I got out to see the big crowds on the street, taking the Skytrain down to Stadium station and then walking to the epicenter of the action at Granville and Robson. I knew many of these streets well, having lived and worked in the area for several years, and yet I found it gave off an artificial impression of my city, one where interest was generated simply because of the unusually large crowds of people (by local standards).  We visited the newly-built plaza where the Olympic flame burned, surrounded by hordes of people trying to get pictures and at least a portion of the excitement seemed to come from being surrounded by these hordes — the flame felt almost like a sideshow.  Just a block or two west, there was barely anyone around, and the streets were as barren as they usually are on a typical February Sunday.  It was really odd to contrast that with the reporting and media coverage that seemed to indicate that the biggest party around was happening in town, but I guess it’s no surprise: that’s what publicity is all about. For all the talk of excitement and crowds though, the atmosphere seemed to pale in comparison to the endless crowds of cities like Hong Kong or New York, where points of interest aren’t contrived and indicated by signposts but derive organically from the city’s own personality and people; the artifice of Vancouver was clear to me in those moments.

Living out here in an East Vancouver neighbourhood called Killarney, with its ugly, pushed-together architecture of Vancouver Specials and decrepit 60s-era bungalows, and then turning out the television to watch the gleaming depictions of various locales around Vancouver I knew very well, I felt disconnected from the whole experience.  Was this really the Vancouver I know? I walk around the neighbourhood, now that the flame has been doused and the guests have gone home, and still see signs of Olympic boosterism: Canadian flags hanging from poles, Olympic slogans temporarily painted on window glass.  I often wondered how the people who live here felt, so close and yet so far from the corporate sponsorship and the custom-built sets of the broadcast centre; how was it that they managed to feel such a part of the experience?  Was the city they were seeing represented on the screen the one that they knew and lived in?  Or was it some iconic representation that was being committed to tape and hard drive?  Even the depictions of the protests and the homelessness and drug culture of the Downtown Eastside seemed like a token, a quick nod to objectivity.  The rest of Vancouver, from Point Grey to Collingwood, seemed to get short shrift.

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected differently.  Tourism and hospitality is often about putting on a shiny face for travellers.  The constant smile, the conveniently located point of interest.  It’s why I’ve never loved travel as much as when I’ve been able to put down roots — whether it’s to live for a week in Mexico in a little apartment, cooking my own meals, or spending months in Beijing exploring my neighbourhood — and why when I moved here, to Vancouver, I was so eager to delve into the history of such a young city. It’s too bad that for most who came, they barely got a glimpse of it.

What makes us happy?

A tremendous article from The Atlantic that digs through the files of the longest running study of a group of men, from college-age to death, to get a glimpse of what makes a life and what makes happiness, with a bit more of a skeptical eye than the typical “positive psychology” literature. This reminds me a little bit of famed The Up Series, where a group of British children were initially chronicled at age 7, and have been revisited every seven years since until the age of 49 thus far. (I’ve seen them all, and it’s a terrific series, although the later films spend a bit too much time rehashing the previous installments, so you get less of a current view of their lives.) It’s amazing to be at the far end and to collapse the telescoping existence so that a whole life can be surveyed succinctly, but so much must be left out.

Photo source: daverton

I’m John Lennon in sixty-seven

An interview with some thoughtful answers by Rick McGinnis who until recently wrote a column for the Toronto version of Metro, which along with laying off journalists, has lately been selling off its assets to pay the bills. I met him once or twice through a mutual friend and found him very intelligent and perceptive.

Some interesting CBC and Canada-related stuff at the end:

I actually think CBC Radio is in more viable, but I think they should pare down to one, very basic national station focused on news, weather, and the most politically neutral current affairs programing possible. It sounds unexciting, but providing the country with the most utilitarian radio service imaginable is the essence of their mission. The rest of their programming – all the music and arts and cultural chat show stuff – should go into internet radio channels and podcasts.

I used to work in a record store classical music department back in the ’80s, when classical music aficionados were replacing their LPs with CDs, after which the classical market collapsed. It’s a niche musical interest, and it’s most economically served by small, local broadcasters in cities, not a national, publicly funded radio network.

Basically, I just don’t think you can legislate culture, or fund an audience into existence. We’ve been doing it for years, and there’s never been any kind of unqualified success story; the movie industry has been an exercise in producing films for the smallest possible audiences, and CanCon regulations in music have become completely irrelevant in the internet age. We have to grow up, and the first thing we have to do is shed these old, counterproductive habits and assumptions about building culture, which barely made sense forty years ago, and have become anachronisms today.”

I disagree with the interviewer’s contention that the sitcom has gone the way of the dodo, though. Using Seinfeld as the high water mark for sitcoms seems kind of bizarre given the rise of modern sitcoms like The Office UK (not sure about the American version) and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which in my mind are just as good if not better than Seinfeld, but sure, they don’t use laugh tracks and three-camera setups, so does that mean they aren’t sitcoms?

Chaos. Sheer chaos.

From The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman, originally published in 1990 and revised in 2002. I like how this quotation prefigures everything that is important in the digital world today: information delivery and its cost and the rise of search engines and their importance as gatekeepers of information.

Now consider the information world of the future. The modern laser disk is capable of holding billions of characters of information.[13] This means that instead of purchasing individual books, we can now purchase whole libraries. One compact disk can hold hundreds of thousands (even millions) of printed pages of information. Whole encyclopaedias can be available at our fingertips, through our computer terminals and television screens. And when every home is connected to a central computer system through improved capacity telephone lines, or the cable television wire, or a rooftop antenna aimed at the neighborhood earth satellite, the information of the world is available to all.

There are two costs for these pleasures. One is economic: it may only cost a few dollars to manufacture a compact disk that contains the contents of one hundred books, but the cost to the consumer will be measured in the hundreds of dollars. After all, each book took an author several years of effort and a publishing house with editors and book designers another three to nine months. Connection to the world’s libraries through the telephone, television, and satellite lines of the world cost money to the telephone, cable, and communication companies. These costs have to be recovered. Those of us who use the computer library search facilities available today know that it is most convenient to have them available but that each second of use is marked by the tension that the costs are piling up. Stop to reflect on something, and your bill increases astronomically. The true costs of these systems are high, and the user’s continual thought that each use exacts a cost is not reassuring.

The second cost is the difficulty of finding anything in such large data bases. I can’t always find my car keys or the book I was reading last night. When I read an interesting article and store it away in my files for some unknown but probable future use, I know at the time I stick it away that I may never be able to remember where I put it. If I already have these difficulties with my own limited possessions and books, imagine what it will be like when trying to find something in the libraries and data bases of the world, where the organization was done by someone else who had no idea of what my needs were. Chaos. Sheer chaos.

The society of the future: something to look forward to with pleasure, contemplation, and dread.

Perfectly sufficient

From our man in Honolulu, an interesting article on the man who first came up with the 160-character text message limit. Thus spake Twitter.

Teller Mind Tricks

A Wired interview with Teller of Penn & Teller that discusses the current collaboration that has been occurring between magicians and neuroscientists, a welding that some have called “magicology”. Along with behavioural economics, I’m loving all these areas of study that are focused on perceptual weaknesses of the brain.

Oil detection technology makes your voice sound better

Pretty good overview of the most overused vocal effect by the Village Voice. I’m still loyal to the timeless appeal of vocoders over this FAD!

The sun don’t sleep

I never used to be a coffee drinker, and I still mostly drink it for the flavour and less for the effects that I get from it, like a more pronounced acuity or focus when reading or doing tasks. Too much, and I’m twitchy and my hands get cold from the blood vessels constricting. I don’t think I could ever use drugs of any sort to enhance my functioning intentionally, but here’s an article from the New Yorker about those who use drugs like Adderall and modafinil to increase their productivity and fight off fatigue.

It all sounds a little sketchy to me, but given how many people use caffeine for the same reason, and how many societies in the past have used coca-based drugs or potions to achieve various mental states, I don’t know if this is surprising news. Like most things, I doubt there is a free lunch — even those drugs that claim no side-effects don’t have the ability to really foresee what those really are. They might not have near-term effects, but it’s fair to say they can’t predict the long term consequences or effects.

The woman who remembered too much

I remember hearing about Jill Price, perhaps while she was still using a pseudonym, a few years ago. She’s a woman who has an incredible memory for events, dates and experiences she’s had, enough so that scientists have chosen to diagnose her with a newly-dubbed syndrome (“hyperthymestic” for her exceptional memory). Here’s a detailed Wired article on her by a cognitive psychologist that goes behind the media hype and figures out the real shape of things.

If Price’s memory of her own history is so precise, why is it so average for everything else? Or, more to the point, if her memory for everything else is so ordinary, why is her memory of her own history so extraordinary? The answer has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with personality.

Context is everything

I saw Joshua Bell play with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra tonight at the Orpheum. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but my girlfriend was blown away by his performance, which seemed impressive but not quite worth the extended standing ovation that the crowd gave him in my opinion. But I’m a hard one to really impress, and don’t give out praise as easily as some. My girlfriend and I spent some time mulling over why she was so taken by his virtuosity — perhaps she had seen enough mediocre violinists growing up with a family that liked to go to the symphony, or maybe I just didn’t really like the violin that much? — but in the end, we had our own opinions.

I did look Bell up though; strangely enough, I had never heard of him before until my girlfriend pointed out his concert tonight. Somehow, the world’s greatest living violinist (to some) was completely off my cultural radar. That seems strange. But it somehow connects to this Pulitzer Prize-winning article that Gene Weingarten wrote in the Washington Post, that explores the subjectivity of beauty and the contextual requirements for its recognition. Joshua Bell dresses as a schlub and plays six of the greatest works of classical music in some non-descript subway station in Washington, and is almost completely ignored by passersby. Is it because they don’t recognize great art when they hear it? Is it because they’re intent on their destinations at jobs that they can’t be late for?

At tonight’s concert, I dropped my cellphone in the darkness under the seats and for a time, thought it was lost. I spent the last several minutes oblivious to the encore Bell was playing, hoping that I wouldn’t have to replace my cellphone and mentally retracing the steps I had taken during the intermission. Had I dropped it while in the lobby? Meanwhile, he was delighting the audience who was paying attention, who had it in their mind that the great Joshua Bell was in front of them and that all focus must be placed on him. But I didn’t care — that thing was going to be a bitch to replace!

New York: A Documentary Film is red hot

I was skimming channels on the television a while ago, which is a rare enough occurrence given the amount of excellent video available outside of a cable subscription and the shoddiness of the basic package I have (if I could figure out how to stream daily local and national news to my television I would probably have unsubscribed long ago), and found myself watching a bit about the Roaring 20s on the Knowledge Network. I got so engrossed by the story that I watched the whole thing, which ended up being about two hours, and ended with “To be continued…” — obviously it was a part of a much larger series.

Turns out it was an eight-part documentary called New York: A Documentary Film directed by Ric Burns, the less-famous brother of Ken Burns (who made those epic docs on the American Civil War and baseball). Originally seven episodes, an eighth was made after the September 11th attacks. I’ve managed to watch a good portion of them and though it occasionally drags and repeats itself, as anything that is fourteen hours long might, it’s a really detailed and wonderful exploration of the culture and mythology that has built up since the city of New York (then, New Amsterdam) was founded in 1625, told through interviews with historians, writers and other, more famous, talking heads. The first episode I especially enjoyed because of the broader sweep it encompasses, as the city moved from Dutch to British to American hands — the fact that the Bronx was basically the land of Jonas Bronck’s family (hence “The Bronck’s”) makes me sort of giddy, imagining how it was so utterly transformed from hinterland into hip hop’s birthplace.

I have an indifferent relationship to New York. I’ve only been once — visiting a grand-uncle in Chinatown and his family in Long Island — and barely remember anything except the interior of the brownstone in which he lived. Being from Toronto, multiculturalism and skyscrapers isn’t a huge attraction to me, and the fact that it was in relatively easy driving distance from my home made it seem somehow less interesting. With the constant demolition and rebuilding in New York, it doesn’t sound like it has the appeal of a real old-world city, or even a place like Montreal, with its religious roots. So I’ve never really felt the siren call from New York City like others have, and have passed aside numerous offers from friends there to visit. Even when I visited London in 2007, with all its history, it held much less charm than Paris, because of the amount of new building and change. I was left a little disappointed because of this — there was nothing really London about London. In the future, all cities will look the same. But this documentary did a great job of bringing the character of New York to life, making New York seem unique, and doing what the best documentaries do, which is planting a seed of interest that didn’t exist before. I might even visit someday.