Flanerie

Evgeny Morozov's opinion piece, "The Death of the Cyberflaneur." Also, a cat.

The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

...in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind

You may rest assured, readers, no matter what manner of frictionlessly shared future Facebook designs for us, I will remain, at heart, a flaneur (both virtual and actual), cultivating "the gastronomy of the eye," "taking turtles for a walk," celebrating "solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking," and, generally, making it my goal "to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, [and] its cosmopolitanism."

Because as much as I love listening to music with friends, sometimes it's nice to put on a pair of headphones and live alone in the music.

Because as much as walking, and traveling, with friends is great, there's something necessary and nourishing, at least for me, in the solitary stroll, the one-man adventure, and the random joy of meeting new people along the way.

Because, as much as I love going to see movies with friends, sometimes I love watching them alone with strangers.

Because sometimes I know not everyone wants to watch that 4-hour Japanese cinematic opera of kung-fu upshots and true love I keep going on about.

Because spending time alone makes being with people better.

Because I don't want a single portal to the world wide web, especially Facebook, no matter how much I love my friends. You are all brilliant, lovely people, but you do not know everything. And I don't expect you to.*

So, don't worry.

Flanerie lives. Tell your friends. Write it on the subway walls. Meet me at the arcade. But don't say hello. Just nod and stroll away. We'll know each other by the silly hats we wear.


ttfn, readers.


*Twitter, with it's original and intended emphasis on following people of interest--and not just friends--seems to encourage a certain amount of cyberflanerie, which is quite nice of them, really. It's possible that, like Twitter and now Google+, Facebook will also cultivate (will want to cultivate) such broader concepts of connection. We shall have to wait and see. One portal will always remind me a bit too much of AOL, though. I love the wander of things, and I'd rather not give that up.

History and Piracy: A History

Benji Edwards writing for Technologizer.

And what about cloud software? If all of our software tools become centralized and run over the Internet, it will be hard to pirate them, which also means they won’t get preserved. That’s bad for history.

When paleoanthropologists wonder if a 13,000 year-old Clovis point can take down a Bison, they tie one to a spear and let it fly. If spear points had been automatically cloud updated over the course of their development, however, we would only know of the most recent iteration in the design process. Clovis points wouldn’t exist today, and we’d be wondering how ancient Native Americans managed to hunt game with uranium-tipped bullets.

I had never thought about software and games, and the like, quite in the way of Beowulf and arrowheads before. Now I have. My brain is a better place for it, too.

Also, in light of a possible, eventual, transformation of the paper book industry to e-books, there's this to think about.

Current U.S. copyright laws have good intentions, but they ultimately jeopardize the survival of digital property because they do not take into account the rapid pace of digital media decay and obsolescence.

Our body of copyright law makes a 19th-century-style legal assumption that the works in question will stay fixed in a medium safely until the works become public domain, when they can then be copied freely. Think of paper books, for example, which can retain data for thousands of years under optimal conditions.

In the case of digital data, many programs will vanish from the face of the earth decades before the requisite protection period expires (the life of the author plus 70 years in the U.S.). Media decay and obsolescence will claim that software long before any libraries can make legal, useful backups.

Consider: Will an e-book of today run on an e-device 100 years from now? If only e-books are published, how will we archive them?


ttfn.

Soon I won't be here...

Hello, readers.

It's snowing outside. A flat-bed truck is selling vegetables. Jonathan Franzen believes e-books are bad for society.

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model 

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring.

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough...

Also, I will be leaving Seoul soon. This city has given me more than I could have asked for. New friends. Old friends newly made. A collection of students that have blown my mind with their hearts, their brains, and their tendency to give presents and sing songs on the last day of class. We all had a good cry that day. The Doctor couldn't have asked for a better send-off.

In March, if all goes to plan, I'll be in India. There will probably be pictures. That's how these things work.

love.

ttfn.

p.s. I have a lot of time right now. I might use it to blog. I might use it to Google+. I might watch what I've left of Community, Misfits, Mad Men, various K-dramas, and snow. It's really quite nice.

2011 in Words

Hello, readers.

Sometimes I read. This year was no different. Here is a list of things*.

Enjoy.

1. Things of the Novel and Whatnot Variety Published In, or very Nearly In, 2011:

Habibi by Craig Thompson**

Bossypants by Tina Fey**

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Swamplandia by Karen Russell

The Arctic Marauder by Jacques Tardi


2. Things of the Novel and Whatnot Variety Published in the Past, in One Golden Age or Another:

Infinite Jest** by David Foster Wallace

Complete Shorter Fiction** of Oscar Wilde

40 Stories** by Donald Barthelme

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor

Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

River of Gods by Ian McDonald


3. Some Selection of Things of the Longform or Longreads or What-Have-You Variety

Ray Kachel (photo by Wayne Lawrence)

"All the Angry People" by George Packer (one man, among many, at #OWS)

"Why Science Fiction Writers are Like Porn Stars" by Charlie Jane Anders

"Unspoken Truths" by Christopher Hitchens

"Pre-Occupied" by Mattathias Schwartz (on the origins of #OWS)

"Outsourcing Jobs" by Gary Sernovitz (on Steve Jobs, China, and Apple)

"Wall Street Isn't Winning -- It's Cheating" by Matt Taibbi

"The Last Movie Maestro" by John Jurgensen (a profile of John Williams)

"Stumptown Girl" by Margaret Talbot (a profile of Carrie Brownstein)

"The Han Solo Comedy Hour" by Frank DiGiacomo

"Al Goldstein: The Pornographer in Winter" by Lili Anolik

"Just Write It" by Laura Miller (on George R.R. Martin and fans)

"You Say You Want a Devolution" by Kurt Andersen (Except he's wrong. Mostly. Partly. The world of fashion, technology, and art has changed. Take the ten year old me and zap him 20 years into the future, and he would notice a difference. Trust me. He was a sharp kid. But, the article is an important one to remind you that some people's eyes go old before their time).

"The Writer as Detective" by Roger Rosenblatt

---

ttfn, readers. Happy reading.


*Note, that ** will be used to indicate these books may have changed my life and/or will probably be returned to, or thrust upon people, for a variety of well-intentioned reasons, as time goes on.

**See above.

2011 in Sound

Hello, readers.

In 2011, I listened to things. Here is a list to that effect.


1. Things named after themselves

Bon Iver, Bon Iver.




Cults, Cults




2. Songs more beautiful than their name would lead you to believe





3. Bands that reaffirmed their awesomness


The Whole Love begins and ends with different sorts of long, meandering, wonderful. Well done Tweedy, and company. Well done.








4. Bands who reaffirmed that they're just having a bit of fun at this point.









5. New friends







6. Best use of a suicidal squirrel

7. ttfn, readers

Aetataureate

Hello, readers.

Happy Christmas. And New Year. And/or what not.*

As we reach the end of the year, you might be interested to know that several people are lamenting and debating as to whether or not our culture has become a prisoner to nostalgia or our nostalgia has blinded us to the new ways of being encultured.

See, for example, Kurt Andersen's "You Say You Want a Cultural Devolution" in Vanity Fair:

Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. It’s the rare “new” cultural artifact that doesn’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes.

Maria Russo's response at Salon,

New technology, he [Andersen] writes, has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze. He’s not the first to note that nostalgia is pervasive at the moment, with virtually everything ever produced in any medium so easily accessible, so primed for re-discovering, that it’s tamping down our desire to produce and consume newness. But there’s more going on than that. Hasn’t technology also made HBO and Showtime and AMC possible? Cable television has made what we watch in 2011 dramatically different, and dramatically superior, to what we viewed 20 years ago.

and this new entry, also at Salon, "Nostalgic for Everything" by Matt Zoller Seitz

“Nostalgia is denial — denial of the painful present,” says a philosopher (Michael Sheen) in Woody Allen’s surprise hit “Midnight in Paris.” “The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking**: the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one [that] one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

If nostalgia is indeed a flaw, it’s one that many 2011 films and TV programs shared...

Andersen's article, while being in some ways completely wrong (mid-90s Wilco is the same as Ghost is Born Wilco? Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is in no way dated? Erm...), remains a fascinating entry into the conversation of how current cultural production is being perceived by those above and below a certain age.

In commenting on lifestyle and fashion, Russo seems onto something in her wondering as to whether or not, with so much of the conventional mores abolished as far as fashion (no pants for women, no piercings for men) and so much of our interactions occurring in virtual space (with our iPod, iPhone, Macbook, Android thing), fashion might have necessarily paused in the sort of fast-forwarding that occurred through the 20s, 40s, 60s, and on. People can wear whatever they want now, for the most part. And so they do. Or they don't. It's no big deal.

Generally, I find myself recognizing the intense, crafted nostalgia of things, especially music and film, of current chillwave, beach garage, and certain trippy, 80s relic, synth dance tunes. But, then again, I'm not confusing Josh Ritter with Dylan (as Andersen does), or Gaga's transgender anthems with Madonna's now  (as Ms. Russo points out) almost passe (but still catchy, "Like a Prayer," anyone?) odes to a a more generalized sort of sexual freedom. Nor, am I worried that Midnight in Paris, or Super 8, or any of the other nostalgically flawed gems mentioned by Mr. Seitz, signal any kind of death of artistic evolution.

Most likely if you looked at any year's list of cinematic or televised product, you'd find plenty of nostalgia. 1981, for example and also the year of my birth, included such nostalgic endeavors as Chariots of Fire and Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What interests me, more than anything else--as a boy on the cusp of emerging into a displaced generation--is the loss of tangibility Mr. Seitz talks of, as marked by the end of film and records and, one day, perhaps, books.

It is not a bad or good thing. It is just a thing. And it is interesting. And if, in my old age, I gather around me a library of smelly, crackly, nostalgia, or curl in a chair-bubble with a make-believe paper copy of Michael Chabon's latest ode to the latest Golden Age***, I imagine I'll just be happy to still be kicking about.



ttfn, readers. Enjoy your burrito.


*If your holiday is not listed here, please also enjoy it. If you are not a holiday person then, as Marc Maron suggested, at the very least try to enjoy a sandwich. If you are gluten-issued, there are sandwiches for you (and me), too.

**Actually, according to Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it would more accurately and nonce-ly be referred to as, "the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion."

***See above.

Nice.

Art by Christian Jackson. More pictures and interview here.