‘nuf said…

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.”

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…

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

Bearded Dragon playing Ant Crusher

The Notwist: “Good Lies”

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.

And read more about it at NPR. Or don’t.

Because someone would be clicking it right now.

Not as good as the song above — but even more interesting — is her covering Interpol:

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Such characters in colour dim I mark’d
Over a portal’s lofty arch inscrib’d:
Whereat I thus: Master, these words import.

(via Phrases.org.uk)

I post these two passages side-by-side because they’re more connected than you might imagine.

First, a rant by the eminently make-fun-able (but still preeminent) music industry firebrand, Bob Lefsetz.

Once upon a time, centuries ago, when we all lived in little villages, you had your fame. You were the blacksmith, the singer, the storyteller. You had a defined role and if you did it well, you received accolades, everybody in your hamlet knew who you were. As far as worldwide fame goes, most people had barely been to the next town, the concept of spreading your ideas far and wide didn’t even cross your mind.

And then came modern transportation and media and suddenly, you could reach everybody.

This was a thrill. Not only for the performer, but the audience. Instead of being restricted to the talent in your local burg, you could be exposed to others, with a different voice, a different viewpoint, in many cases with superior talent.

And by time we hit the era of network television, there were very few slots, and if you made it through, you’d truly made it. That was the goal, to make it.

Artists want to be heard by as many people as possible. If someone tells you they’re satisfied with a tiny audience, they’re lying. Art is expression. It foments understanding. You’re filling a hole inside yourself and the satisfaction comes when you realize you’re filling the same hole in others. And no matter how many holes you fill, you still feel empty, it’s the artistic temperament.

And then the filter was tightened even more, during the MTV era. It was harder to make it, harder to get your video on television, but if you did, you were instantly nationally famous. You achieved that goal of mass exposure overnight.

But now that’s impossible. Unless you stab or shoot someone, commit a crime. If you do something outrageous, there are Websites devoted to exposing you, never mind YouTube. But shy of that, it’s nigh near impossible to reach everybody.

And this has got all artists scratching their heads.

A next a passage from The Geography of Nowhere, the similarly excellent, albeit similarly ranty book by James Howard Kunstler.

For all practical purposes, Schuylerville became a colonial outpost of another America. Its impoverishment is one of the untallied costs of the policy of limitless “growth.” The leading business establishments in Schuylerville these days are the two convenience stores, each operated by large chains — call them X and Y. The main east-west road through town, Route 29, has become a major “feeder” for Interstate 87, and the convenience stores were built to take advantage of that traffic. They sell gasoline, milk, beer, cigarettes, soda and snacks. Plenty of local dollars are spent at the X and Y stores too — at times, the whole population of town seems to subsist on Pepsi Cola and Cheez Doodles. Perhaps in the future people will look back at convenience stores with fond nostalgia, because they are the late twentith-century successors to the old general store that sold a little bit of everything. But there is one big difference — the X and Y stores are not owned by local merchants.

The X and Y corporations pay property taxes to operate their stores in Schuylerville, and a percentage of the county sales tax they pay is returned to the village via a rather abstruse political formula. The stores also furnish a handful of minimum-wage jobs. But what they take away contribute to the town is far less significant than what they take away: the chance for a local merchant to make a profit, to keep that profit in town, where it might be put to work locally, for instance, in the upkeep of a hundred-year-old shopfront building downtown, or a Greek Revival house on Pearl Street, or in the decent support of a family. But that profit does not stay in town. Instead, it is funneled directly into distant corproate coffers. The officers of the X and Y Corporations, who do not live in Schuylerville, have no vested interest in the upkeep of the 100-hundred-year-old shopfront buildings or the Greek Revival houses there. (They may not even know what they town looks like, or a single fact of its history.) Their success is measured strictly by the tonnage of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi Cola they manage to move off the shelves. The income they derive from their jobs is spent supporting and maintaining distant suburbs — and the cost of that is fantastic. The presence of convenience stores has eliminated many other local operations — the newsroom, several lunch counters, mom and pop groceries — which couldn’t compete in volume of sales. The volume of sales is the sole measure of what makes Schuylerville a worthy community from the point of view of the X and Y Corporations. So no local businesses thrive and the old buildings fall increasingly into disrepair.

The buildings that the X and Y Corporations put up express the companies’ attitudes perfectly. They are cinder-block sheds that have no relation to the local architecture. They do not respect the sidewalk-edge of building fronts that line Broad Street, but are set back behind parking lagoons. Their garish internally lighted plastic signs tower above the town’s rooflines, and the mercury-vapor lamps in their parking lots cast an unearthly pinkish-green glow far behind the edge of their properties. What they contribute to the village visually is ugliness and discord. The people who design them and build them do not have to live with the consequences of their shabby and disruptive work.

Today, many of the old shopfronts along Broad Street stand vacant, or have been rented by marginal businesses — a tattoo parlor, a room full of video games, a store that sells dented cans and damaged boxes of food at cut-rate prices. Quite a few shopfronts were converted into cheap apartments — dingy curtains hang across the old display windows — because the Saratoga County Department of Social Services uses Schuylerville as a welfare dump. There is a system in which landlords get grants from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to fix up their property on the condition that they rent to people on public assistance. The people on public assistance often wreck the apartments, for which new grants are then obtained, and so on in a downward-spiraling cycle, until the buildings are finally trashed beyond repair. For the landlords it is a sort of extractive process, like mining buildings for profit, with the same kind of destructive consequences as strip mining coal.

The people who live here are losing ground steadily and drastically. Their institutions have failed them. Two generations ago, they were hardworking mill hands who earned decent wages and looked after their families. Now people don’t work, or only sporadically, at lower pay, and in any case, no longer in town. They commute to Saratoga, Glens Falls, Albany — an expense that only puts a further drain on their finances. The $4500 it costs to own and operate a car each year could cover a year’s payments on a $30,000 mortgage. Often, it is absolutely necessary to keep two cars operating in a family so that two adults can drive long distances to work low-wage jobs. The cost of driving everywhere, to work, or to obtain the necessary goods and services of life, impoverishes families. It makes it impossible to own their own home.