Photos

Taking photos is a huge part of any travel experience. I have personally been guilty of trying to sit family members down to a veritable shitload of photos, guilting them into viewing each, complete with explanation. I get the impulse.

However, we have added a complicating component to our previous photo-taking practices with the presence of the cloud. The urge to ensure that we never lose a photo led many of the young people on my trip to back up all of their photos to those anonymous servers in the sky immediately, a practice that served some well when they had problems with their phones.

Forgotten gardens of memory

As someone who is older, a bit more tech-savvy, and a *lot* more paranoid, though, I try to be very judicious with what I send to the cloud. I barely burned through a gig of data in my long stay ai Roma, and almost none of that came in the form of photos. The young ‘uns, on the other hand, burned through their allotted data in about a day and a half with their desire to make sure that every photo was instantly available on FB and/or Instagram.

That need for immediate validation reminded me of Teju Cole’s arguments about the “memorial impulse” that this sort of photography implies. In a 2015 essay in the New York Times, he argues that

But just as nothing can be permanently retained, nothing is ever really gone. Somewhere out there, perhaps in the cloud or in some clandestine server, is the optical afterimage of our interaction: the faces, the shoes, the texts. In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable. Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: We need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.

The simultaneous desire to open and close experience strikes me as a particularly useful way to think about what taking a photograph means in our own lives. There’s an element of being willful participants in our own surveillance to all of this phone camera usage, and the spaces that we don’t allow to fill in by our own memories seems to me to be part of the loss that Cole is speaking of. Those spaces (and that loss) often manifests itself in nostalgia, and nostalgia has a different edge in a world where memory is subject to corporate control.

As much as I want to frame this conversation around that old 80s theme of selling out, as Cole and many others make clear the equation is not nearly that simple. It’s more of an algorithm, which might simply be an explanation triggered by my inability to think outside of that data processing framework. Still, the calculations that I often go through in my head as I try to determine (or perhaps over-determine) which actions are moral and just often leave me dizzy. I’m just hoping that I can resist the impulse to simply what the fuck and go with the easiest option.

Pop culture libido

 

James S.A. Covey – Persepolis Rising

Persepolis Rising is the seventh novel in The Expanse series by the pseudonymous James S.A. Covey. There is chatter about it being the first novel in the final trilogy, and if that breakdown helps readers place it more effectively than I can only encourage them to adopt it. For me the series makes sense as written, in an almost-too-straightforward way.

Observations:

• Giving up the Rocinante is as hard for Covey as is it clearly is for Holden and Naomi. ‘Nuff said…
• This series has such been such a page-turner for me that I worry that I’m missing lots of the science that’s going on. The military seems to come directly from the world of Battlestar Galactica (at least until this novel), but the descriptions of astrophysics and their effects on spaceship movement are really interesting but get in the way of my enjoyment of the plot (that’s a self-deprecating remark – they shouldn’t). Wish I had time for a re-read…
• I think what’s most interesting to me is the way that this feels like a space opera, with relatively easy-to-recognize combatants, until the protomolecule appears. The authors keep it hovering in the background, and they don’t reveal much about it until it changes everything.
  • As someone who is always looking for that Gibsonian moment when-it-all-changed, I’m intrigued by the alien stuff. Again, it’s perhaps not as interesting from the perspective of identity (like BSG), but what it neatly derails I think is the narrative line in which human exploration of the galaxy continues at a steady pace, and the universe looks very much like a place that is friendly for humans.
    • Star Wars, for example, cannot imagine a planet that has harsher terrain than bitter cold or desert. Star Wars, of course, is a Western set in space.
    • Even Star Trek cannot imagine truly alien worlds. The alien species that humans encounter are recognizably anthropoidal, and what we think of as alien is actually very close to us.
• I’m especially curious to see if the very specific reading of Darwin that Covey does (survival of the fittest is the basic principle) changes as the series finishes. I wouldn’t be surprised – the authors are clearly holding a lot back about the protomolecule and what its presence says about the universe, so a change to that specific reading of Darwin might well be in the works…

Legacies and Nostalgia

I visited Berlin last weekend, and I had so much fun that I’m still recovering.  A warning though:  this post is not fun, so read at your own risk.  A couple of observations:

• Proverb of the trip:  “The thing about most Europeans is that they will all tell you about that one thing about other Europeans (especially those from another country)” True dat – and Americans do it too methinks…having been in a country for eight weeks I can tell you everything you need to know about it, and more, and three days was more than enough time for me to completely understand Berlin.
• I’ll blog about this observation in more detail but walking through Berlin, and particularly the eastern side, was fascinating and a bit troubling. The streets are often named after intellectuals – Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and I think I even saw Einsteinsteinstrasse. On the eastern side it was even odder – there’s a street named after the Paris Commune of 1871, which as I remember from Zola’s novel La Debacle is a particularly complex celebratory moment for German communists since it was put down initially by Prussian troops (French regular army finished the job).  I even saw at least one portrait of Lenin still standing. I should applaud this, I think, especially as a celebration of intellectual culture, but I’m troubled in ways that I can’t completely explain.
  • Perhaps my unease comes from the creeping nostalgia for East Berlin that appears now and again and that I’ll talk about later in this post…
• It’s not like Germans are unaware of this – read any of the literature, talk with Germans, ponder on the fact that drawing a swastika anywhere in the city is a hatecrime, and one is quickly realizes how much of current German politics is driven by this awareness.  That’s an enormously difficult legacy to live with, and I admire a country that actively tries to wrestle with the legacy of that madness. The parallels to the US are obvious and frightening, especially as some parts of my country “celebrate” Confederate heritage day, a day that I thought should be marked by the public shaming of those who want to go back to the time of traitors and slavery.
  

  Mural on Uhlandstrasse – 2004

• One of my favorite phrases is “ridiculously idealistic,” two words that in my vocabulary are usually followed by an apology for how being this way is all right. I felt the phrase invoked in my mind when I toured the Bundestag/Reichstag, a solemn ode to the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  • It’s a free tour, but the visitor needs to sign up (I arrived on a Friday night and had to wait until the next afternoon for an available space), and it’s a relentlessly serious trip.
  • Once my time slot arrived, I waited for the rest of our group. We were then escorted to the security area by a young person in a light blue jacket (the jackets were ubiquitous, as there seemed to be dozens of young people speaking all the languages of the globe waiting to answer questions and to escort us).
  • At that point the serious security took over – this is the parliament building after all – and we were whisked to the top. At that point we were handed audioguides based on our language (there didn’t seem to be a choice), and allowed in.
  • The guide was fascinating. It incorporated a tour of the city with a history lesson that helped explain the reunification by using city landmarks. It also explained how carefully the architect (who was British, I guess another nod to European wholeness and solidarity) had worked to invoke the principles that reunified Germany was determined to stand by as the ruptures from the past forty years were healed.
    

    Closer up

• Despite all of these conscious efforts to incorporate and perhaps learn from the past, Germany is facing the same issues that the rest of the industrialized world is facing – “populism,” which seems to be code for a lot of anger that feels misdirected, is on the rise, and the fact that it is illegal to use the swastika in any form doesn’t mean that there aren’t Nazis. There is nostalgia even for East Germany, taking the form of longing for days that weren’t so materialist and that seemed cleaner somehow. I hope that comes from a sense of knowing who the enemy is, but I don’t think that human motives are ever that clean. Or intentional.
  • Long live, however, the ridiculously optimistic.

Steven Erikson – House of Chains

I have already written on this novel once, but a re-read has been rewarding (an odd adjective I think), and I thought I’d add a few comments below…

• This re-read helped me realize just how little I took away the first time. I didn’t realize that Tavore didn’t know she killed her sister (the knowledge was hidden from her, and her sister was wearing full armor), that the Bridgeburners had been born in Raraku, that Onrack was the reason that Sha’ik came to be, that Leoman simply left, that Korbolo Doom was returned to the Empress, and that Karsa returned to camp to kill some of the bad mages. Yep, I missed a lot.
• It also helped me think about the amount of testing that goes on in these novels – no one is ever fully trustworthy except immediate comrades-in-arms, especially if they’re Malazan…
• The nobility is uniformly despised as being worthless – even Paran has to prove himself, as much by attitude as by prowess and strategical abilities…a lack of productivity seems to be the biggest sin for Erikson.
  • only in Darujihistan do they get anything done, and that’s mostly to finance the Malazans and coalition who stop the genocide of the Pannion Dominion.
• The mysteries of the warrens are still mysteries – I am not much closer to figuring out their mechanics, but I do understand that they’re channels, and they seem to channel energies in ways that feel damn near cosmic…
• Finally, the earlier reasons I attributed to gods’ wanting to ascend are not complicated enough. Kellanved explains a bit about wanting to take the Shadowthrone – he wants to maintain the balance that he sees as a natural order, one that he thinks light and dark are always threatening. Balance (not harmony) and symmetry are two of the only virtues in this series. That and treating children well…

The evolution of Comic-Cons

As I have already blogged about, I had fun at the Romics convention, and I managed to talk to several folks without making them too ill at my poor Italiano…

In my previous post, though, I didn’t mention the e-sports exhibition hall. The competition was fierce and the crowds were huge (it was easily the noisiest hall), and I spent way more time than was healthy there.

Comic and gaming communities have been integrated since the beginning – by necessity, when games became reliant on graphics (with 2d, heavily pixelated characters) they owed a lot to comic books and comic book plots. The limitations of software tools made realism impossible to capture (I still remember watching The Incredibles and taking nothing away from that film except that their hair moved), and while the art in comic books blew away anything that could be produced on a tiny greenscreen dumb monitor, we could still connect to what we saw on those screens with what we grew up with in the comic books.

If this is what your screen looked like it was too late…

The integration feels almost seamless now, which brings me to the title of this post. At Romics there was an aircraft hanger-sized room devoted to eSports, and there were two tournaments happening – League of Legends and FIFA soccer. Both had prize money, huge audiences, teams playing, and announcers breathlessly explaining the action.

The virtualization of soccer was pretty wild too. The action was more individually focused since there were no big teams playing (FIFA soccer is player vs. player, not team vs. team), but there were just as many people playing as there were at the LoL tourney. The action was more difficult to follow because a) soccer (not as many points) and b) with so many playing there wasn’t a single screen for the audience to focus on. I didn’t hang around for the finals, so I’m guessing that with just one match being played there was a bigger crowd.

The LoL tourney was easy to follow, even if there were multiple games going on, because of the announcing and the single screen showing just one game. The fact that the tourneys are 5v5 probably helps as well – the number of teams gets whittled down quickly. I don’t know what the qualifying criteria were for this tournament for either game, so I don’t know where they started at numbers-wise, but the combo was fascinating to watch.

I’ve written on sports games before (co-written with one of the Monsters of the Midway of game studies), so the evolution of sports games to this point isn’t a shock – sports games have been huge for a long time. At one point there was an argument made that Tony Hawk was the most widely-recognized athlete in the world because of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater developed by Neversoft and published by Activision for the PlayStation (remember those?), news which must have come as a shock to Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and his popularity came from the fame he received from this line of games. The LoL piece has surprised me, though, in part because I do not personally like playing PvP and associated it with 11 year olds tea-bagging each other and bragging about their e-peens. PvP though has become a thing of its own, and the gaming world has moved far beyond folks like me who don’t want to play so they can build up other player’s stats, of course.

At this point I could quickly dive into the weeds of the South Korea Warcraft competitions, so I’ll back away gently. Still, there might, just might, be something to all of this…

San Nilo

I was lucky enough to visit the monastery at San Nilo, founded by Saint Nilus the Younger, and I have the pics to prove it. Thoughts below:

• The Abbey here celebrates the Byzantine-Greek rites. It’s Catholic, but the worship rituals follow those that the followers of Catholicism who were in Greece and the Byzantine Empire practice. I was a bit confused by this (I kept thinking that this church was Greek Orthodox) at first until the differences were explained to me by our director. 
• This place is ancient – founded on the death of Saint Nilus the Younger in 1004. The original chapel is still extant, and it contains a component still used in Easter rituals. 
• As have the vast majority of churches here it has been added to, refurbished, and redone multiple times. Some famous artists have worked here, and it shows both remnants of older, Byzantine paintings and ones done by counter-reformation artists. The mix is pretty amazing, and reminds me of how artists, no matter how far separated by time, speak to each other through their work.
  

  Floor mosaic

• We came in as a caretaker was sweeping leaves from the floor after Palm Sunday services, meaning that the church is not a museum – active worship happens here. In fact, the priest who comes to our campus to deliver mass on Wednesday mentioned that he has been here several times.  There are only five monks left, though, which makes me kind of sad.
• I am guessing that part of what draws him is the library, which I totally geeked out over. Among the many texts that they had I saw (under glass) a prayer book written in a Greek script that I have never seen. I always assumed that Greek didn’t lend itself to different fonts, and certainly not to script, and I was plenty surprised to see that once again I’m sort of a moron. I didn’t get a picture of it for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I tried to recreate what I saw and I will post that when I get it scanned.
  • I’m reminded of the first time I realized what part of the tasks of these monasteries was, to record what we knew. This epiphany came to me as I was reading A Canticle for Lebowitz, by Walter Miller. I read it as a teenager, and the idea of post-apocalyptic monks desperately trying to record scientific knowledge so it wouldn’t be lost as civilization disappeared under the nuclear fires started my lifelong obsession with scifi. #nerdsftw
• I’m a bit disappointed that my photo of a side chapel didn’t come out. It had a couple of amazing frescoes that depicted scenes from this abbey’s history:  the first showed the first meeting of Saint Nilus and the local noble who gave the land to the monks under the Saint’s care (I guess he was way too modest to ever claim that he led them), and the second showed the building of the chapel at the abbey, featuring a scene from the construction in which a pillar broke from the lever system that was being used to put it into place, only to be caught and held singlehandedly by a monk. Yikes…
  • The work felt influenced by Raphael, with those light Tuscan colors and its lively, energetic scene. Of course, the painter included his own face, along with a couple of those who assisted him.
  • It reminds me of one of the many oddities of being a US citizen in Europe – I simply do not think in terms of nobility, even as we teeter on becoming a feudal society in 2018. The idea that rich families could control so much of other people’s lives through the accident of birth is something that I struggle with. For all our faults we have striven mightily to create something marvelous, or as Abraham Lincoln says, government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
• We also several visitors, folks who came a long way out of their way to see this site. I don’t know if their motives were religious or otherwise, but the fact that they had stepped beyond the standard tourist sites to find this abbey made me smile.

 

Idyll Spaces

I spent a delightful day with a comrade from the States wandering Atlas Obscura’s Rome, and one of the sites we visited was the Villa Torlonia, a green space with multiple buildings not too far from Piazza Mincio. The Torlonias are a long-time Roman noble family intricately interwoven with the history of the city, and the Villa is an interesting collection.

We particularly enjoyed the Casina delle Civette, and I have the photos to prove that enjoyment. I’m a sucker for stained glass, and this house, set off from the main house by a small hill and just a few dozen meters, was immersed in it. As the title of this post implies, it felt like an idyllic space, one that a wealthy, politically involved family could retreat to after a day of wrestling with the various political factions present in any major city.

Side door

The house wound in among itself in a way that felt comforting, almost like a hug

Birds are a theme

Go swallows, eat mosquitoes, go swallows, eat mosquitoes

Yes, I felt a little creeperish

Peacocks roamed the grounds back in the day

Cresting wave – no idea why this image would show up on my blog

 

 

Casa Masca and the future of agriculture

Our recent visit to Casa Masca confirmed some of what I think I know about our relationship with food – it’s complicated.  Casa Masca is a zero kilometer farm, kitchen, classroom, and laboratory, and I hope it’s what food production will continue to be – intentional, concerned with sustainability, focused on education as much as production, and done with a sense of joy.

Our hosts at Casa Masca welcomed us with a lesson on grains, a chance to make (and eat) gnocchi from scratch, a delicious lunch that started with said gnocchi, and a lesson in pizza-making. The day finished with piping hot pizzas cooked in a wood-burning oven. All of the food we ate was produced on their farm, all the way down to the wine we drank and the olive oil we used both to cook and to dress our salads.

And of course I have thoughts:

• Sustainability is not just a US thing. This might be a surprise to the DFHs among us, but Europe has been thinking far longer about these issues than we have, mostly because land is not as freely available here as it is in the US. Perhaps that explains why farmland here is not being carved up into malls and big box stores, at least as rapidly.
• All of those cool silicon-valley type technoculture organizations will still need to feed their people. Indeed, when observing their promotional videos it seems as if all employees do is eat (and perhaps drink delicious coffee) when working at said companies. We can slide very quickly into a Maoist-nightmare if we pursue this line of thinking too far, with all of us on subsistence farms designed to teach us high-falutin’ intellectuals the value of work, but I hope that these cool companies also offer folks a chance to produce food of their own.
  • And so the Altered Carbon question remains – do the rich continue to meritocratize their way to palaces in the sky?  Can we bring everyone along? Should we?  And what does bringing everyone along mean?

Casa Masca offers an answer that looks mighty appealing…

Ready Player One

This will be quick, because Ready Player One is a particularly Spielsbergian piece of fluff that (SPOILER ALERT, BUT NOT IF YOU READ THE BOOK) ends with the good guys winning and all of us ready to forsake the machines and only live in OASIS part-time.  YAY (and END SPOILERS)

Thoughts:

• The tweaks on the book were interesting – they use The Shining to stand in for a whole bunch of 80s trivia. The book tended to drown in that, so I was okay with those decisions.
• The visuals were amazing, especially with the ways in which the OASIS is portrayed. They even carry the story a bunch, as is best evidenced by the ode to GTA that is the first part of the movie.
• The nods to various pieces of software felt great until they weren’t – it’s weird to see anachronistic product placement that probably works (I’m thinking Minecraft).
• As seems to happen with these films, the reasons why we now live in dystopias are simple and we own them. In this case, we simply stopped living outside of OASIS (I guess because it’s so good), for entirely predictable reasons.
  • Thus the solution – we have log out on Tuesdays and Saturdays – will fix what ails us.
  • I know Cline has a writing credit, but I can’t believe he’s completely okay with this. The evil corporation in the book is pretty evil, and the crazy inventive genius who manages to set up the ultimate game but still almost gives everything away to the evil corporation comes across as much crazier than he appears here, in which he essentially knew how things were going to end all along, in an EFF-for-the-win way.

 

Altered Carbon

I finished this series two nights ago but haven’t blogged about it yet. I loved the first two episodes, got bogged down in the middle of the series, and then finished it when I had the realization that perhaps my expectations were a bit skewed by what I thought it was about. Some observations below…

• The world this series is set in is one in which people can live literally forever via the combination of cloned bodies and a disk that is set in their spine and that instantly downloads their entire experience into the cloud.
  • As one might guess this arrangement causes problems. It also, however, raises some interesting questions, ones that folks like Ray Kurzweil and the Futurists might have skipped over. For instance, what does it mean to capture our experience?  Where does that reside?  Does whatever the ‘it’ is have to go through the brainstem?   How does muscle memory work then? And how do white blood cells function (for instance)?  Where is the lymph in all of this?
• The series focuses on class structure. Those who can afford to relentlessly recreate themselves, amassing vast amounts of wealth. The rest of us get poorly-suited “sleeves” (new bodies) if we get anything at all.
  • The rich also live on mansions in the clouds, literally untouchable without an intense effort that requires a lot of specialization and hacking. The rest of us live on an earth that looks to have perhaps sort of stabilized into a world of unrelenting concrete, buildings, rain, and food grown in vats and on top of buildings.
• As I began the series I was excited by how fully it seemed to realize what I think of as William Gibson’s cyberpunk vision. Gibson’s world is full of death and destruction and the sort of cynicism about space opera scifi as well as the future that fit well with my life as a computer programmer in the early and mid 80s.
  • Programming was becoming increasingly dumb, and ways to fight that dumbing down were not apparent – the DFHs had soured me on the ability to protest effectively, and I wasn’t sure my fellow nerds could agree not to eat sugary, food-industry-derived confections from their childhood for dinner let alone band together enough to fight the machine.
• As the series started to feature long expository speeches that filled in the background of the world of Altered Carbon my cyberpunk cynicism twitched – I didn’t want to have Envoys putting up an ideologically-pure resistance that attempted to embrace humanity – I wanted cynical detectives and high body counts.
  • Interestingly the series offers both of those, but it goes beyond them. The main questions it asks are ones that I think the ancient Greeks asked, and that feel more relevant now with advances in technology, about what happens when mere humans have what are essentially godlike powers of life and death.
  • It reminded me of one character in Neuromancer (Dixie Flatline) who, while completing a mission in which his simulation has been woken because Case needs his hacking expertise, tells Case that after this run is done to be sure to unplug him. Endless life in a construct might not be that great.
• It also had a hotel run by an AI named Poe that was pretty amazing. I will say no more…
• It also turns upside down the hard-boiled detective plot that Gibson used. The detectives don’t negotiate the dregs for us middle-class folks afraid to venture into the city; instead, they investigate for the rich, who are already comfortable walking into the dregs because they know they can’t die. The rich folk in question here like the monkey parts of our brains, doling out violence and sex in particularly nasty ways. These are certainly not beautiful utopic creatures of pure light.
  • And Kovacs, as detective, essentially investigates for those of us who want to rebel. That’s sort of a refreshing change.
    • The fact that it ended (SPOILER ALERT) with the detective simply making the case, and the police arresting the rich folks (all of them) is not the way these are supposed to end in a postmodern world. (END SPOILER ALERT) Instead, cynically, it probably should end like The Wire, with half-assed convictions and the deaths of anyone trying to do the right thing.
    • The fact that it doesn’t feels right somehow, upon reflection.
• I will need to come back to this because this post is getting way too long, but the questions this series asks about identity are fascinating. It also questions how we think about ideas like emotional literacy and shame, and again I will have to come back to these. I look forward to it.