this Public Address 4.0

Data Visualization

2008-05-16T15:49:52Z

I have some problems with this— it seems to me as if truly local news is as hard to come by as international news in most locales in the US. Instead, what we get is the same top stories repeated by localized talking heads, mostly because it's cheaper. This does present a great way of visualizing the problem, though.

Local news

2008-05-16T15:41:04Z

I know the winter was long, but this is more than a little extreme:

A man tried to kill himself with a wood chipper in Roseville Thursday afternoon.

The crew of a tree repair service company was clearing trees in a public area when the man appeared and jumped head-first into the industrial-sized wood chipper.

The workers immediately turned off the machines and called 911.

The man was rushed to Regions Hospital in St. Paul where he remains in the intensive care unit. Officials say he suffered severe, life-threatening injuries to his head and torso.

Roseville Police said the incident was likely a suicide attempt, noting that the man did not leave a note or any indication of his intentions.

Video story available here.

Too many screenings of Fargo, perhaps? This is too hardcore.

Boom

2008-05-13T15:43:15Z

Trippy

2008-05-11T14:28:14Z

I'm not sure we'll be able to have our usual big Midwestern trip this year. Last week, we were in the supermarket and spotted what was (to me at least) a hilarious typo on the cover of a magazine. What seems even funnier to me is that the cashier just didn’t seem to understand why I thought the use of the term “baking” as a trippy activity was funny. See Dave Chapell, I guess, for those who don’t quite get the joke.

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What wasn’t funny, though, was reading Lilek’s take on the second supposedly “drug-related” taser death so far this month: “Kid on an acid trip gets tazed, dies. Never understood the appeal of LSD.” I never understood the appeal of giving people electric shocks to subdue them—shooting them seems kinder to me; chances of survival are higher. At least the Canadians think there is a connection between tasers and death—that doesn’t enter the mind of a typical American, I guess. It helps to have a great P.R. department, or at least a more consistent message than those who are on the side of "tripping":

There is no need to rehearse again how wildly such countercultural fantasies ultimately failed, how drugs of illumination became drugs of disturbance. Huxley was more prophetic about the influence of mood-altering drugs than about mind-altering drugs. And with all the great promise of LSD, what did it leave behind? What liberatory principles were established or revelations disclosed?

Not many, except in one surprising direction. The LSD counterculture may once have attained its cultural power by dissenting from the scientific world view, encouraging a return to the natural world and stripping away the trappings of materialism. But many alumni of that era have had different ideas.

It is through technology, not despite it, that LSD visions were realized. Leary called the personal computer “the LSD of the 1990s.” And in a 2006 report in Wired magazine, many early computer pioneers are said to have been users of LSD. Steve Jobs, Apple’s presiding genius, described his own LSD experience as “one of the two or three most important things” he has done in his life. So here it is — a world in which we all do more than just inhale. It is through the iPod that, in Leary’s once contentious words, we turn on, tune in and drop out.

NYT

I find this all difficult to swallow. I'm trying hard to write a conference paper, grade, and forget that it’s mother’s day. Mom is still hanging on, tuning in-and-out in ways that I really don’t care to talk about. This is one of the cruelest springs ever.

Emotional Weather Forecast

2008-05-02T16:34:27Z

Happy Birthday

2008-04-17T04:17:19Z

My mom turned 85 today. She claims it was her happiest birthday ever. She also claimed a few days ago that my sister-in-law was feeding her black mushrooms that made her hallucinate. I chose to believe one claim, but not the other.

Dad and Mom in Mesa

2008-04-15T03:55:02Z

Dad and Mom in Mesa, AZ circa 1988-- It's strange to find all these old photographs, even the ones I shot.

Brothers

2008-04-14T16:13:50Z

I'm the victim on the left. My brother and I get along much better these days.

Facing the music

2008-04-14T14:49:16Z

In time, music in particular and culture in general would provide Adorno the perfect vantage point from which to criticize what he saw as the alienation and false consciousness of bourgeois society. This was especially the case once Adorno reached Los Angeles, in the 1940s, where he could observe the radio and film industries first hand.

Yet even Mr. Claussen is embarrassed by Adorno’s ignorant and snobbish dismissal of American popular music, all of which he lumped together as “jazz.” This “seems to be a blind spot in his work,” Mr. Claussen acknowledges; but in fact it is more than that. Adorno’s contempt for jazz and those who listen to it, his belief that popular music is simply the tool of the Culture Industry for colonizing the consciousness of the masses, is suggestive of the arrogant absolutism that characterizes his thought in general.

Because he viewed music as a Hegelian progress from Beethoven to Schoenberg, keeping pace with the inexorable alienation of bourgeois society, Adorno viewed any 20th-century music that was less alienated than Schoenberg’s as a cowardly retreat, a refusal of difficult knowledge. (This applied to Stravinsky’s neoclassicism as much as to the Andrews Sisters.) In an analogous way, critical theory attempts to explain all of contemporary history as the inevitable working-out of a historical dialectic that culminates in Nazism. Adorno is upside-down Hegel: instead of trying to prove that history is driven by the cunning of reason, he tries to show that it is marching in lock-step toward mindlessness.

The Stern German

For my love

2008-04-01T15:32:06Z

It never ends

2008-03-31T19:24:53Z

Better

2008-03-28T18:16:02Z

It’s hard to remember sometimes that I actually have my own life, my own interests outside of sitting in hospitals and nursing homes—the activity that has dominated the last month for me. I had conferences with students this week and it felt good to get back to being a different sort of care provider. Maybe it’s just that I’m in a generous mood, but the professional and technical writing class I’ve had this semester has been one of the best of my career. People are engaged and involved for the most part, and have picked projects that have some relevance to their career paths. That always makes a difference. Although Krista has taught a unit for the past month so that I could tend to my mother, I still think of them as my class.

One thing that has really made this class click is the use of more technology—I used google docs for the first time with great success, and Krista has taught the instructions module using wikis. I am a firm believer in technology in the classroom, and this has been effective both as a way of presenting material and concepts, but also in just plain getting the job done. Being separated by several states has not made me lose touch with the class at all. It may have its dark side, but I really do think that technology is mostly good.

In the shower this morning, it dawned on me that at the core I really believe that technology has the ability to tell us more about the world. The danger, ultimately, though is losing sight of the world part of that equation. Fantasy has its uses, but in the end, reality is what matters.

]]> Trying to place this in a historical perspective, it occurred to me that one sticking point is skill. When photography was introduced, it was suspect because the skill required to use it was taken as being of lesser importance (because it was “mechanical”) than the skill required of a painter. Though it might have required a significantly different skill set, there was much overlap—mostly in the arena of taste (or more precisely, selection). In other words, at least in the realm of realism, both painters and photographers had to know where to stand and when to record the moment. Reduced to this, photography was at great advantage because of the speed with which a practitioner might develop their skill—it takes much longer to create even a hasty sketch to review.

It seems clear that on one level skill (as in the complex manipulation of surfaces with pigments) was reduced, but over time and in different ways, the skill of knowing where to stand would only become stronger in the new practitioners. In fact, hybrid practitioners of the technologies of painting and photography necessarily emerge due to the unique advantages of both. Painting was/will never be dead as a conceptual and expressive apparatus, but as a technology of knowing the world painting is more limited than photography.

The creation of tangible manufactured products—(print documents) in the writing classroom does not seem to be under threat by new technologies, at least not for a long while. However the advantages of proofing, sharing, changing, and transforming these products through less tangible technologies seems assured. The question that I think we have to ask is how do these new communications technologies tell us more about the world through speed and access. And, by the same token, how is our skill at conceptualizing and expressing our reality eroded by this new group of practices?

In word, or in images, it is tough to label one technology as “better” — for the question always lurks: better at what?

Aware

2008-03-28T16:10:53Z

I think that most of us would probably prefer if death crept up on us slowly, striking suddenly when we were unaware. Being conscious of your inevitable death seems cruel, having it happen suddenly seems so much kinder. My father died suddenly, with little or no warning about five years ago. My mother is in a much different position. She was forced into hospice care about a week ago, as the cruel medical committee responsible for her care simply gave up. There isn’t any recourse to the decision—even though she cannot care for herself any longer, she was pressed into leaving the hospital.

I was blissfully unaware of the fact that there are multiple-year waiting lists for admission into the better class of nursing facilities. Krista explored dozens of options for me, and located only one place where she could have a private room (the minimum standard for a livable arrangement in my opinion). We settled her in there last week just in time for my birthday. Then the onslaught began.

“Are you aware that your condition is terminal? Do you understand what that means?”

About every three hours, some well-meaning social engineer, clergy, or counselor would enter my mothers room and announce the reality of her condition. This went on for days, until we found all the valves to shut off the endless supply of drips landing on her. My mother is a very private person, and does not want any consolation from strangers. Nor does she wish to participate in the social life of the institution she must now reside within. She mostly wants her family to be near. She just wants to be left alone, with her dignity intact. That seems to be nearly impossible.

Day by day her short term memory lapses, while her long term memory perseveres. It hurts to watch her fade out. I’m sad to see her so angry. She’s at peace with most things, but at odds with all these new people in her life’s final stage—and I empathize so much with that. Sometimes silence is much kinder than speech.

August Sander

2008-03-13T22:10:28Z

Architect, Professor Poelzig, Berlin, c.1928

Almost as remarkable as the photos themselves is the fact that this is the first ever solo exhibit by August Sander in the United States (the revered German photographer died in 1964). And for this, my fellow Minnesotans, we must thank Mr. Weinstein--because, at least for a few weeks, you don't have to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a Sander print. You merely need to make your way to Weinstein Gallery on West 46th Street (there is always parking right in front) and push open the door. Most likely, you'll be alone in the space and surrounded by the paper-people who Sander, so many years ago, labored to see "as they are and not as they should or could be." You've got until April 12th friends. It's always free. Don't miss this one.

Citipages

We didn't, and we were alone. That makes it even more affecting. The most incredible thing was Sander's Christmas card from 1939, the centennial of photography.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

2008-03-12T18:35:27Z