The unintentional gothic poetry of disgraced New York politician Carl Kruger

A brief but evocative tale of his rise from difficult circumstances; his pleasureless grasping at power; and his eventual fall from his perch can be read over here. I’ve just quoted the poetic manner in which he expresses his impressions of this experience:

He choked back tears and boasted about his rise with pride. “If you were to take my life and bottle it, and drink what was inside that bottle, it would be like a cough medicine,” he told me. “It wouldn’t taste very good, but it’d be good for you.”

The bottle was empty now. In late December, he pleaded guilty, as did Turano, to engineering yet another Albany corruption racket.

“My world is over,” Kruger told me. “I’m frightened of the future. Just frightened. And that’s very hard for me to say, because I was always the guy that you came to to sort out your problems, then sweep up the floor and leave. Now my floor is swept up, and I’m part of the sweepings.”

Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis  

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I aspire to take photos that have not been taken

I aspire to take photographs that belie this quote from Geoff Dyer’s unique & inspiring book on photography, The Ongoing Moment:

That’s what this book is trying to do also: to find out what certain things look like when they’ve been photographed and how having been photographed changes them. Often it turns out that when things have been photographed they look like other photographs, either ones that have already been taken or ones that are waiting to be taken.

I aspire to take photos that have never been photographed before. For the most part, I don’t think the images hit the mark; rather I just end end up having fun with my cell phone… (Not a bad thing!)

But rather than mull on that, let’s linger a second on Dyer. Perhaps “unique” does a disservice to his talents. Many creative people are praised as being unique, but he actually deserves the adjective. See, too, his book But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. I find myself purchasing it (or almost purchasing it) as a spontaneous gift for various friends & associates & new acquaintances at least once a year.

Dyer writes books that have never been written before. My hallowed view of the people who make photographs that have never been photographed before extends to people who are able to write books that have never been written before. More snaps after the jump…

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Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis  

Tags: But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer, Photographs, The Ongoing Moment, The Problem With Nostalgia, The Problem with Originality

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Random bit of beauty

A picture by Paul Klee (via Cité de la Musique).

Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis  

Tags: Cité de la Musique, Paris, Paul Klee

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The ever more subtle distinction between reality and fiction

That distinction is well demonstrated in these two videos. The first is a real crowd pleaser which has already made its way around the internets. The second is more of a slow grower. At first it seems like a lo-fi amateur video but it quickly evolves into something more probing: an investigation of screens & perception itself.

Bearded Dragon playing Ant Crusher

The Notwist: “Good Lies”

Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis  

Tags: Ant Crusher, Bearded Dragon, Screens, The Notwist, The Problem with Technology, Viral Video

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European vacation summation: Blackie Books, NextNature & deep thoughts on email (from Jacob Palme) and fireworks (from Amsterdam)

Back on the grid again, after a holiday week in Amsterdam & Barcelona. For the most part devices remained out-of-sight if not entirely out of mind. For example, my reading material was James Gleick’s The Information which, in a not-so-roundabout way, is all about the items we use to analyze, access & overwhelm us with said information. Instead of digital data, I tried to focus on physical stuff, like this:

But more on that in a second. Let me first discuss my lapses. I’ll admit to heavy use of GPS, and a few bursts of excitable iPadding to pursue various touristic & location specific sub-interests. In Amsterdam, trying to get a bead on design & design-thinking trends, I fell into a Google hole reading up on Koert van Mensvoort and the NextNature organization. (Sorry no actual deep thoughts on Koert or NextNature; you can consider the prominent use of his name as my amateur attempt at SEO.) In Spain, I was frustrated by the lack of internet presence for Blackie Books (their website reads “Estamos haciendo una web nueva muy bonita. Muy pronto, aqui,” which I’d invite you to Google Translate); however, I was equally blown away & entranced by the lovely production sensibility of the books themselves. I wish I could find a definitive Google Image but instead I’ll leave you with this video which, sadly, Google Translate cannot translate…yet:

Nicest of all, during the break my own personal internet traffic seemed to fall into a pleasant holiday lull and, today, I’ve returned to a mere 500 emails requiring attention, pruning, disinterest, fervent attention or otherwise.

Let’s circle back to the beginning of this post for a second, and consider what it means to get 500 pieces of “mail” over a one week period. (“Mail” in scare quotes because, if ever there was a bad metaphor for electronic communication, it is the inherent physicality & consequence of the concept of mail as it was understood until about a decade ago…) Now before I digress entirely into crankiness, here’s one of my favorite quotes from The Information, which quotes in turn the Swedish computer scientist Jacob Palme, whose thoughts on email I plan to spend more time with in the new year.

Electronic mail system can, if used by many people, cause severe information overload problems. The cause of this problem is that it is so easy to send a message to a large number of people, and that systems are often designed to give the sender too much control of the communication process, and the receiver too little control…

People get too many messages, which they do not have time to read. This also means that the really important messages are difficult to find in a large flow of less important messages.

In the future, when we get larger and larger message systems, and these systems get more and more interconnected, this will be a problem for almost all users of these systems.

As you prepare to re-enter your own personal information scrum, assuming you too work in an office & with a computer, keep these words in mind.

To wrap up I’ll explain the photo at the top of this post — it’s a group of dudes in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve, setting aloft a crude hot air balloon, I believe a device used mostly by stranded sea vessels. The photo is the result of some inadvertent research done in Amsterdam which proved that certain phenomenon still happen entirely offline — in this case, a previously unknown side-effect of the city’s laissez-faire attitude toward public-order laws, which is to say, two or three day of non-stop firework use culminating in a sense-expanding, limits testing, city-wide 360° rat-tat-tat of small explosions. To summarize it in a few words it was fucking crazy, and no joke it brought to mind a warzone. You may find that characterization a bit strong and admittedly I missed the full aftermath as my flight was early in the day on January 1, but the first website I could find on the matter more or less bears out my words: “Fire fighters were busy putting out fires around the country. In several cities cars and rubbish skips were set ablaze. Seventeen cars went up in flames in and around Utrecht alone. In Amsterdam, four cars and two lorries were set alight.”

And with that, I wish you a happy new year and a fresh reminder that neither offline or online is inherently better. It’s all in how you use it.

Posted by Alec Hanley Bemis  

Tags: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Blackie Books, Email, Google, Jacob Palme, Koert van Mensvoort, NextNature, The Problem With the Avant Garde, Vacation, Wikipedia

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