School of Perpetual Training . . .

for an exciting career in the computer game industry, here. Follow all instructions literally; it's horribly hilarious. The bottom pic shows my score after my first session in "Global Shipping" (click on images to enlarge). Created by Stephanie Rothenberg.

Police Tweets

here.

Name Unofficially Denton
Location Denton, TX
Web [Police Mugshots (working title)|Spring 2009]
Bio The unofficial Denton Mugshot twitter for Denton, Texas. Programmed by a UNT art photography student, drawing attention to how much public info we put online.

The artist explains further,

"When I stumbled upon the Denton Police Department City Jail Custody Report page, I was surprised to find that the name, age, charge(s), and mugshot of everyone currently in custody was available to the public. I got to thinking, what if someone I know gets arrested? I wonder if I could be notified of that somehow.

"At the same time, we had been learning about New Media in my photography classes. Projects like We Feel Fine and Listening Post especially caught my attention. The live nature of the work was especially interesting to me.

"So, when I found Twitter and TwitPic, I saw how they could be a good medium to connect to the Custody Report. Once operational, things started to change due to the increasing importance and power of social media (SM) platforms today, such as Twitter. Half a dozen friends following the twitter feed turned into nearly a thousand followers, and tens of thousands of page views.

"The project had changed from its original intentions to an illustration of the power and importance of SM today. It's clear viral marketing techniques and SM are giving the public an easy and powerful way of reading and creating news, in one centralized place for the first time."

YouTube Hilarity

David Lynch's Positivistic Relativism

Thinking about Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire . . . .

To oversimplify somewhat, it seems clear that each of those movies is a collection of versions of "reality," some of which are more "real" than others.

The main give-away to me was that some scenes are grossly clichéd in content or style, or over- or badly acted, while others aren't -- there seems to be a range. Also, some scenes clearly seem like fantasies in which certain elements from more "real" scenes are transformed and glamorized.

I want to say each of these movies is structured like a torus, although that's more hunch than something I've confirmed. But near the centers of both movies, we encounter one scene that seems perhaps more "real," at least in some respects, than the others: the center of the donut.

In Mulholland Drive, there's a scene near the center of the movie when the young blond actress auditions and meets The Director, an unprepossessing fellow who as I dimly recall (it's been year(s) since I've seen these movies and I saw each only once) was pretty much run over by his producer and investor(s). The Director and everything else in that scene seemed not at all glamorous but almost disappointingly pedestrian. It also seemed likely that the figure of The Director was meant to connect somehow to Lynch himself, or at least to his position in some version of reality. So I figured the info in that scene re- the other characters might be more "real." And that led me to suppose that the young blond actress really is struggling, and perhaps many of the more glamorized, melodramatic, or clichéd scenes were her fantasies.

There were also several versions of a blue something-or-other -- in one or more scenes, it was a very ordinary key, or a glamorized version of a key, or a box. And this "key" was itself a key to understanding that in someone's imagination (probably the blond's), an object in some fairly pedestrian, possibly more real scenario was being transformed into a similar object in some less real scenario (possibly serving metaphorically similar functions there?).

I found Inland Empire considerably more Byzantine, although maybe I was just more tired when I saw it -- but I saw similar patterns. Again, clearly, some scenes seemed more glamorized, melodramatic, clichéd (take that, Hollywood!) And again, somewhere near the center of the movie, there's a scene that seems closer to "reality." Jeremy Irons as The Director has a conversation with the guy doing the lighting. I'd never heard Lynch's voice at the time, but my sig. other said he thought the lighting guy's sounded like Lynch's. Irons was asking the lighting guy to change something, and the lighting guy kept getting it totally backward. (I hope I don't have to point out how hilarious and significant that concept is.)

In Inland Empire, the "key" object(s) is(are) red rather than blue: someone is stabbed (I think? or wounded -- again, it's been a few years) in the stomach; while in a more pedestrian, possibly more "real" version, someone accidentally shoots himself in the stomach with ketchup; also there's a red lamp, etc. (Sorry, didn't find any stills of these red "keys" online.)

So, the point.

I am a relativist. I don't believe there is any such thing as absolute truth. There can be no description of reality that perfectly represents it, at least not without perfectly and entirely replicating it.

But that doesn't mean some descriptions can't be more accurate, or at least more useful for certain purposes, than others.

If we throw up our hands and cry, it's all lies! we may be correct, but we're giving up on life.

Our task is to distinguish as best we can which fictions are more "real" than others, at least for our purposes; or more accurately, which work better, and for which purposes. (That is, as in science, which hypotheses provide greater predictive power.)

I'm thinking this is part of what Lynch is trying to shed light on (reference intended).

Another Good Article on Causes of the Economic Crisis

– which must be understood in order to fix it – by Michael Collins, who's boiled the history down to its essentials while identifying the key players. A few excerpts:

Our financial system looks ruined beyond repair. The credit default swaps crisis is 40 or so times bigger than the real estate meltdown over subprime derivatives. The top 25 banks in the United States are loaded down with $13 trillion in credit default swaps and the deal is coming unraveled. If we accept the highly dubious assumption that the debt from the financial meltdown needs to be repaid by us [i.e., us working stiffs, rather than just letting the players who made these risky bets absorb the losses], we're looking at $43,000 [per] citizen right now. And we're just starting.

It didn't get that way by accident. There was special legislation that enabled the current crisis.

This was classic Money Party strategy and tactics.

* * * * *

The baseline requirement for the era of greed was satisfied in 1999 when Congress repealed key provisions of the Glass-Steagall act. That law was established during the first Great Depression. It tightly restricted the opportunities for reckless speculation by banks.

* * * * *

Credit default swaps and other derivatives had been illegal for decades. In 1981, specific rules were set up to tighten restrictions against these schemes. But all that changed on Dec. 21, 2000 when the lame duck Congress passed the "Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000'" making these products legal. The legislation also barred the gathering of information that would serve as early warning on the legalized gambling on credit worthiness.

More here.

Nouriel Roubini, an NYU professor who predicted the current crisis, mentioned in a recent talk that throughout history, there's been a more or less regular cycle of economic bubble-and-bust every ten years, with only one exception during which we managed to prevent such crises from arising for a solid fifty years: the fifty years while Glass-Steagall was in effect.

Meanwhile, banks are still buying and selling credit derivatives and swaps.

Geekfarms of Yesteryear

Eric Eberhardt's 5th grade writing assignment (click on the image for a larger, more legible pic), via Dork Yearbook, which mostly contains pretty hilarious photos of child geeks. Eberhardt adds, "[r]ecently I purchased the entire 1994-1997 run of WIRED magazine from a variety of sources on eBay. I know the articles are free online, but without all the ads for 56K modems and The Sierra Network, what’s the point?"

I guess artifical intelligence capability could be handy in 5th grade.

Mars Dunes

It's worth clicking on the image for a close-up; more info here (thanks, Ben!)

Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX

I've begun my usual obsessive analysis to figure how I can see as much of the stuff I think I'm most interested in as possible, and it's a challenge because it looks like there'll be lots (Festival schedule here).

I've already come across at least a couple of participatory works that you might want to take action on more or less now (in addition to procuring Festival tix).

One is GuruGuru, the description of which reads, "Five participants (each receiving different instructions via their earpieces) talk together with a televised character whose role flicks uncannily between spiritual and marketing guru. Revelling in the absurdities of marketing technique and group therapy, [the artists] Hampton, Koyama and Khroustaliov reverse the awkward history of consumer research by allowing their audience to create their own animated therapist – by means of a focus group!" (If you've been reading this blog, you know this would sound interesting to me; see, e.g., this.) The installation will be ongoing for the duration of the Festival, but since only five people can participate at a time, reservations are recommended.

The other is 12:19 Library, which you can participate in remotely at any time (until they close it, as I assume they will at some point?) "The 12:19 Library invites people from all over the world to chronicle a single minute of their lives, 12:19 to 12:20 PM, on any day of their choosing . . . . Make some sort of image . . . a photo, a video, an audio file, a text file, a map, whatever you like." The lead artist is Ron Berry, who I understand to be the driving force behind this Fest.