Archive for March, 2010

Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na…

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Bat Fest!

This is one of those “only in Austin” stories. The mayor is proposing an event to celebrate Austin’s bat population, even though we’ve had an event for the past five years. However, the existing event has shut down the Congress Avenue bridge, which is a major artery, for anywhere from a day to a weekend: the mayor’s proposal would only shut down the bridge for a couple of hours on Sunday night. Plus, the mayor’s plan doesn’t involve charging admission; the existing festival does charge, although the promoter has said he plans for it to be free this year.

As part of the “Night of the Bat” celebration, Adam West , star of the 1960s “Batman” TV series, will attend a June 6 Paramount Theatre screening of the 1966 film “Batman”; RunTex plans to hold a bat-themed run/walk June 6 ; and the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau will host a private “Batini” contest for local hotel bartenders.

Obit watch: Jaime Escalante.

I’ve been neglecting the Nets. Sadly, they’re now 10-64, and out of record contention.

The WP has an article about the new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, devoted to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1976 “Running Fence”.

Radio, radio.

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I wanted to call out this James Rainey column in the LAT, about LA’s Pacifica affiliate, KPFK, and the infighting there.

There’s two money quotes in this piece, both of them talking about early evening host Ian Masters:

He also has been outspoken in rejecting KPFK programming, and especially fundraising, that he sees as increasingly taken over by fear-mongering and conspiracy theories, like the 9/11 “truther” movement. In a speech a few months ago at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Masters derided fund drives that he said recommend “communing with extraterrestrials and munching mung beans and colonic irrigation and drinking liquid silver and not immunizing your kids is the way to a more sustainable and spiritual Pacifica.”

The other quote:

“It seems to me,” one member of the vanguard wrote last year, “that Ian Masters does not believe the United States is really that bad.”

Three no trump.

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

This one is for Andrew: northbound Highway 45 bridge in Milwaukee closed after highway department discovers the bridge is falling apart.

I haven’t found any good photos of the actual structural cracks yet, but I’ll update this post if I do.

Art, damn it, art! watch (#8 in a series).

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Because I know Lawrence is endlessly fascinated by the work of Frank Gehry, here’s a link to the LAT and Gehry’s preliminary designs for the Eisenhower Memorial. (Also, I’ve added a new “Gehry” subcategory to the “Art” category.)

Meanwhile, the NYT has a nice article on the art and music scene in Burma Myanmar .

This doesn’t really fit into the “Art, damn it, art!” category, but I do want to throw in a link to the complete 6 part LAT series on Philip K. Dick in Orange County.

Art, damn it, art! watch (#7 in a series).

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

My checking of the NYT on weekends is somewhat iffy, so I missed this piece about the Marina Abramovic retrospective at MoMA until Lawrence mentioned it.

…a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.

More:

Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them.

And:

Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)

Here’s a link to MoMA’s webpage about the exhibition. I find it interesting that the NYT refers to the artist as “Abramovic” and MoMA refers to her as “Abramović”.

Obit watch: March 25, 2010.

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Robert Culp.

At the Movies“. I gave up on the show when Roper and his rotating cast of guest hosts left; there was no way I was going to watch the pulsating ball of suck that was The Bens. I’d heard that Phillips and Scott were a vast improvement, but I couldn’t bring myself to start watching it again. It didn’t help that the show was usually on in the early early morning here, and was frequently postponed due to sporting events.

I can’t say that I’ll miss it, but Ebert’s been hinting at a new television project: I do look forward to that.

Edited to add: Ebert’s latest blog post does more than hint.

Ten Books.

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Patrick over at the excellent Popehat blog has picked up on Tyler Cowan’s “Ten Book” meme, and posted his own list of ten books.

This seems like an interesting idea for a post, and I have much respect for Patrick (as well as the other Popehatters), so…why not? Ten books which, from the original Marginal Revolution post, “have influenced your view of the world”.

  • Restoring the American Dream, by Robert J. Ringer. Other people came to libertarianism through Ayn Rand, or Milton Friedman: I came to libertarianism through Ringer’s book, then read Rand and Nozick and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and all the other classics.
  • Neuromancer, by William Gibson. This is the book that restored my faith in science fiction, which I felt had become stagnant in the early 1980’s. It also made me want to be a Gibsonian protagonist, but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman (with Ralph Leighton). At one point in my life, I wanted to be a physicist. For various reasons, this didn’t work out, but Feynman’s approach to looking at the world was still a major influence on me. (The link above is a bit of a cheat, as it goes to the more recent omnibus that contains Surely You’re Joking, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and some extra material. If you happen to know a smart high school or junior high student, you could do a lot worse than to buy two copies of this book; one for you, and one for them.)
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy. I hope someday to build something as cool as these people built, and this is one of the best books ever written on the true hacker mindset.
  • Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett. Cheating again, but the complete Hammett novels were a Christmas present one year. Hammett’s work, especially Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, got me back into reading mysteries, and are a major influence on my own writing.
  • The Survival of Freedom, edited by Jerry Pournelle. I read this not long after Restoring the American Dream. Pournelle got laughed at a lot in the mid and late 80’s for his militaristic SF anthologies, like There Will Be War, but The Survival of Freedom is a shockingly strong anthology. It contains classic stories by William Tenn, Larry Niven, and Harlan Ellison (“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” was the first Ellison story I consciously read.), essays on libertarianian and anarcho- libertarianian philosophy by people like David Friedman, and even some great poetry. (This was also the first place I ever ran into Robinson Jeffers: “The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean” is still one of my favorite poems.)
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks. At the time I read this, I was very interested in artificial intelligence, and had this idea that we could understand and develop machine cognition by understanding how the human mind worked, and especially how it failed. That didn’t exactly pan out, but the work of Oliver Sacks started me on an amateur interest in neurology that continues to this day.
  • The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. Donald Norman is a personal hero of mine (as is Dr. Sacks). This is the book that got me started thinking seriously about human interface design. Oddly enough, Norman’s work (especially the essay “Coffee Cups in the Cockpit“) was also one of the things that started me thinking about leadership.
  • The How and Why Wonder Book of Guns. As a little kid, I loved the How and Why Wonder Books, and this was probably my favorite of the lot. I owe my fondness for firearms at least partially to this (and partially to growing up around guns).
  • The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. When I was a little kid, I also hated fiction. I remember my elementary school teachers laughing at my comment that “Fiction is gross.” But much of the fiction targeted to people of my age at that time was “gross”, for values of “gross” that include “boring and condescending” (I didn’t know the word “condescending” at the time): it wasn’t until after I became an adult that fiction for kids and young adults began the great movement in the direction of dealing with the real world. The Day of the Jackal was the first fiction book I remember reading that had that feeling of “making it seem real like”. (I was also unfamiliar with the word “verisimilitude”.) Forsyth and Arthur “Airport” Hailey were pretty much my entire fiction diet for longer than I care to remember.

Honorable mentions: Edward Tufte, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which taught me that (in the immortal words of the great Lester Freamon) “all the pieces matter”. Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, which I’ve mentioned in passing before, and will probably come back to later. I’ve deliberately avoided mentioning the Bible and other religious texts, as I feel this violates the spirit (if not the letter) of Cowan’s meme. And Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.

Edited to add: And, dammit, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How could I forget that?

Sensei.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

When I was a teenager in the suburbs of Houston, there were three people who, more than anyone else (except my parents, who I’m excluding from this list), influenced the development of my taste in movies:

  • Jeff Millar, the long-time movie critic and columnist for the Houston Chronicle (and the guy who writes “Tank McNamara“). The HouChron hasn’t had a better critic since he retired; Mr. Millar, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you’re having a wonderful life.
  • the late Gene Siskel.
  • and Roger Ebert.

This was in the days long before the Internet. Actually, it was mostly in the days before I had a personal computer. My exposure to Rog and Gene was from “Sneak Previews” on our local PBS station (and, later on, “At the Movies” in syndication).

This was also in the days before home video changed everything. We had VHS tapes, but access to foreign and obscure stuff was iffy; that kind of thing wasn’t well stocked in our local video stores, and NetFlix didn’t exist yet. Rog and Gene were pretty good about including those movies on their show (and my mother used to gripe every time they did) but the art film theaters in Houston were a good drive away.

(more…)

I hear that train a’ coming, it’s rollin’ round the bend…

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Capital Metro rail service from Leander to downtown Austin started yesterday.

How’s the ridership?

Day 1:

Capital Metro first said the morning boardings were 672, then later updated that (without explanation) to 716, based on an eyeball count rather than the electronic counters in the train car doors.

Day 2:

Capital Metro reports morning boardings on its nine MetroRail runs today was 547, down from 716 on opening day Monday.

Note that these are just the morning boardings; the Statesman writer comments that afternoon ridership “tripled” yesterday.

Obit watch: March 23, 2010.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Wolfgang Wagner, former director of the Bayreuth Music Festival, and grandson of Richard Wagner. The NYT obit gives a good overview of the bizarre world of Bayreuth:

In 2008, Bayreuth announced the appointment of Eva and Katharina — half-sisters more than three decades apart in age — as the festival’s co-directors. In keeping with longstanding family tradition, they had not spoken to each other in many years.

Also among the dead: Robert M. White, former X-15 pilot:

On July 17, 1962, he flew the rocket-powered X-15 plane to an altitude of 314,750 feet, or 59.6 miles, almost 10 miles above Earth’s atmosphere.

(Edited to add 2: Better obit from the LAT.)

Edited to add: Sort of an obit, anyway: The Hump, aka “that place that served whale sushi“, closed on Saturday. Their website makes this sound like something they did voluntarily; I am not convinced of this. The Hump was a tenant at Santa Monica Airport, which is owned by the city. The city was apparently looking into pulling The Hump’s lease. Plus there’s the whole thing about the fine for violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the possible prison time. Plus there’s the whole question of whether people want to eat at a place that buys meat from a Mercedes parked behind the restaurant, instead of a legitimate restaurant supply house. (Hattip: LA Observed.)

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

By way of the NYT, we learn that the U-2 is still flying recon missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The U-2s used in Afghanistan and Iraq commute each day from a base near the Persian Gulf, and the trip can last nine to 12 hours. Pilots eat meals squeezed through tubes and wear spacesuits because their blood would literally boil if they had to eject unprotected at such a high altitude.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Pinky?

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

I am emphatically not a Star Trek fan, but I feel like I have to note that tomorrow, March 22nd, is the Second International Talk Like William Shatner Day.

Especially since this particular holiday was invented by the great Maurice LaMarche.

(Hattip: Roberta X.)