Hermenautic Circle blog

I say “sorta” because although there really is a contest, the winning story won’t be posted to eBay. Why not? Because the Scottish Doll was thrown away, and therefore can’t be sold on eBay.

Read about the Scottish Doll’s fate here, and then post your 6-word story to the comments section of that post. (Not this one!) At some point soon, a winning story will be picked, and a prize will be awarded.

[Image: Photo by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times].

There are two photo-essays circulating that benefit from juxtaposed browsing. On the one hand, you've got a series of images taken by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times of Dubai in decline. This, of course, comes as Dubai's debt obligations have become so unmanageable that the city-state is actually causing trembles in the entire global economy.

[Image: Ad hoc infrastructure: "A convoy of sewage trucks removing solid waste from the city center. The current sewer system cannot handle the demand." Photo by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times].

Indeed, financial historians are living through an extraordinarily interesting time, I have to say; the complex instrumentation of money has never been so Baroque or histrionic. Calculations are made so fast now that the physical location of buildings, vis-a-vis the speed of the data signals they receive, can actually impact urban geography. Call it nanofinance. More to the point, earlier this week the Guardian had this to say:

The Dubai crisis has also thrown a new name into the lexicon of toxic instruments. Just as credit derivatives helped to exacerbate the sub-prime crisis by obscuring who was ultimately exposed to losses, the use of Islamic finance has complicated the reckoning. "Sukuk bonds" are designed to get around religious laws banning the payment of interest for money lending. But one of the most volatile debts in the Dubai World standstill is a $3.5bn Islamic bond due to be repaid in December.

It's not just comparative religion, in other words, it's comparative religious finance.

But view Greenfield's images alongside an equally memorable group of photos, this time documenting drug wars in Rio de Janeiro, that future Olympic city plagued—like New York City—by the occasional blackout.

[Images: (top) "A BOPE unit, the elite special forces of the military police stands guard during the operation in Favela da Grota. BOPE is a small group of well-trained officers infamous for their brutality. They are renowned for not carrying handcuffs." (bottom) "A BOPE officer takes a defensive position to cover his unit as they pull out of the Grota slum." Photos by João Pina for the Guardian].

The article that accompanies these images is less compelling, even for its descriptions of "the favela—a mess of slapped-up houses of corrugated tin and unpainted brick, dreadlocked tangles of pilfered electrical wiring, and graffiti-covered walls and alleyways where little shops and rudimentary bars selling beer and cachaça jostled for space with storefront evangelical churches."

But these contrasting images of cities gone wild—one lost in a kind of financial syncope, a rococo without reference to manageable interest or ground plane, the other made politically incomprehensible by the overlapping invisibilities of heavily armed, microsovereign warlords, whether under government control or not—show us global urbanism as it steps into a surprisingly dark maturity in this second decade of the 21st-century.

(Article about "Sukuk bonds" found via @nicolatwilley).

[Image: Christmas trees for sale outside St. Mark's Church in New York City; a video-still taken November 30th, 2009].

"The most surreal part of Christmas," architect and blogger Sam Jacob wrote two years ago, "is the migratory forest that pops up all around us for three weeks."

It's a long forgotten middle European folk-rite that has become buried deep in our seasonal behaviour. Now, thousands of years later, we re-enact this midwinter over and over again in a thoroughly contemporary manner. Christmas trees now may well be entirely and unashamedly artificial objects: pink, fibre optic, colour-changing nylon. Real organic trees appear in the most surreal of locations: strapped to the cab of a crane high above the city, in arrays over the facades of department stores, in the sterile shiny lobbies of corporate institutions, and in the front rooms of homes sitting on carpets which, if you think hard enough, become the mossy floor of a forest...

It's an image that has stuck with me: Christmas and its ubiquitous tree treated as a kind of vernacular landscape practice—or folk forestry—more than a religious event with Rapturous implications.

"Perhaps Christmas trees are a ghostly return of the mysterious ancient forest," Jacob suggests, "a rolling back of the mechanisms and constructs of civilisation that addresses the Big Bad Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood inside us all."

I did not imbue the hot dog with major significance! (See list item 99.)

Home from Thanksgiving wanderings. Very weary. But...

... "I don't carry Redrock into the food area because people think it's unsanitary" (FT site registration required).

Philip Kennicott says Black Friday marks its beginning:

A spectacle of commerce and crowds, consumerism and credit cards, a day structured like a poll (vote with your pocketbook) on the state of the American economy? Is Black Friday the perfect and most fabulously self-reflective, narcissistic American holiday we've invented? … Christmas isn't devolving from some Christian fantasy of love and regeneration. That ship has left the harbor. No, it's evolving into the perfect, five-week spectacle of Americana, with all our best American gadgets and gizmos on display, with all of our basic habits of the heart--desire, acquisitiveness, competition--perfectly exercised. Black Friday is the first day of the American Saturnalia, a festival of capitalism and technology and American self-love all rolled into one.

It’s been a good long while since I’ve used this blogospace to talk about other blogs. I still read a lot of other people’s news in the form of twitter, facebook and yes, blogs. Rafe Colburn pointed me to something I never would have seen otherwise, a post on a NY Times sports blog where Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick talks about why he moved back to Indiana. Since I’m one of those lucky people who could probably live anywhere in the world, people sometimes ask me what I’m doing here. This guy’s answer resonated with me.

I’m really all Bay Area at this point. I’m loving it out there. In the course of this dinner, Tom tells me that he’s moving back to Detroit. I said, ‘That’s crazy, why are you doing that?’ He said: ‘If you can live anywhere in the world, you ought to live here, because it’s fantastic. It has all this natural beauty, and the weather is great. As a consequence, so many people who live here don’t have a reason to be somewhere else. They’re attracted by those thing as opposed to something else.’ He said, ‘I need to be someplace where there’s a sense of community because that’s what motivates me.’ That was an absolutely light-bulb moment for me. I said: ‘That’s me. That’s what motivates me.’ On a dime, I switched and said, ‘Where can I get involved in the community?’

It’s not so much that I think Randolph, Vermont is the only place for me, or that my family has been here for generations or whatever. It’s that I really like living in a small town, where I have a special job to do and where people still need to learn the sorts of things that I teach. And I like living in the woods and despite my grousing about the mice, I like living close, really close, to nature. I like having a short list of options even though I’m aware it’s a sort of artificial constriction of the whole list of what’s possible. There’s always the larger bloggy world when I need to go someplace I’ve never been before. Thanks, Rafe.

A famously off-color line by the Roman poet Catullus is, surprisingly, generating news in England. (A hedge-fund manager who has been accused of sexual harassment quoted the line in an email to a job applicant.) In the Telegraph, Harry Mount (of "Amo, Amas, Amat and All That: How to Become a Latin Lover") discusses the role half-remembered Latin phrases and allusions play in public discourse in the U.K., while Mary Beard (of Cambridge at the TLS) says there's more to Catullus's "complicated little poem" than that one obscene insult.

I don’t like to brag, but I have the best dreams about celebrities of anyone I know. Close friends know about my infamous Pamela Anderson dream of a few years ago (trust me, it was intense) … others have heard me talk about my recent Lil Wayne dream (yes, I was hanging out with Lil Wayne, yes it was great).

And now, I’m pleased to report a new addition to the canon: Last night’s amazing dream about Hollywood superstar Sharon Stone!!!

Okay, so in the dream I had just finished mowing the yard. Sharon Stone helped me carry the lawn mower into my parents’ basement in North Carolina. No biggie, right? Then … umm … not sure how to put this … but Sharon Stone and I started KISSING ON THE LIPS in my parents’ basement!

After a few moments of ECSTASY, she said something like, “This is why I like kissing– because it keeps changing. At first when you kissed me, I thought ‘he’s not a very good kisser,’ but your more recent kisses have been really good.” (This is after kissing for all of ten seconds!)

WTF and LOL, right? “Tell me how you really feel, Sharon!”

And by the way, in case Sharon googles herself and is reading this … she should know that in my dream, her skin was really sweaty and kind of splotchy, so yeah … might want to look into getting a new dream-stylist.

But overall, a pretty cool dream! I was stoked! Because: Sharon Stone, people! “That’s how I roll.” Now China’s all mad at me, I bet.

Artist Harrell Fletcher sent me this call for proposals for Open Engagement, a three-day conference at Portland State University (May 14-17, 2010), exploring the role of the artist in socially-engaged art.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2002 I knew nearly nothing about the city and knew nearly no one except for a few friends from college. Roaming town alone, between the L.A. Times newsroom and my corporate apartment, I'd go see my homie Valmiki, Guatemalan American and L.A.-raised, and he'd take me to parties, parks, and places to eat. First in Northeast L.A., then in Boyle Heights and East L.A., then in Silver Lake and Echo Park and downtown.

Little by little, L.A. began to map itself for me.

The bridge, in some respects, between both my college experience in the Bay Area and my early experience in L.A. was the band Ozomatli. I saw them play at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus, where I first watched their traditional enter-from-the-audience exit-through-the-audience, a genuine gesture of solidarity, un-self-conscious and sincere. Valmiki and I then saw them about a year later at a community event in Boyle Heights, the downtown skyline rising elegantly against the sunset.

Among those folks, among those sounds, I remembering for the first time feeling ... at home.

On Sunday night when Ozomatli played at the FIL in Guadalajara, I felt an enormous wave of nostalgia for my L.A. days. I have to admit it: my heart ached a little. I know that in more cynical L.A. mindsets Ozomatli is seen as a self-repeating, or even a cliche, but one of the nice after-effects of moving to Mexico and living among "regular people" here is that you can get a refreshing new perspective on notions of community and justice.

Ozomatli as a collective of musicians are clearly committed to both.

Fifteen years later, they're still at it. That means something, beyond their ground-breaking and infections mix of musical genres. You could feel it in the sense of unity among the youth and families dancing last night. Ozo, I thought, are a true treasure of Southern California, and of the bridges possible between nations and borders.

* Previously, "Los Angeles: The future, today?" "The sounds of the barrio, from L.A. to India,"

Hey everybody, this week’s PUNCHLINE POLL is now up and awaiting your vote at True/Slant. This week’s joke is called “The Afghan Classroom.”

Please take a minute to read the joke and vote on your favorite punchline! Winning punchline advances to next week’s joke!

Polls close Thursday evening.

Many thanks from your humble servant,
David Rees

After several days of scrutinizing price data, it’s time to scrutinize the stories themselves. While Josh added “tags” in real time describing each object, lately we’ve decided it might be useful and interesting to add tags that describe narrative elements and tactics.

Here are some we’ve come up with — but what we really want is your suggestions. What other story/theme/style tags should we add? (Anything here you think we should delete?)

Adolescence, Anthropomorphism, Bad Parents, Bad Spouse/Partner, Celebrity, Christianity, Christmas, Contemptuous of Object, Dead Relative, Death, Exposition – Classification, Exposition – Descriptive, Exposition – Sequence, Family Secret, Father, First-Person Narrator – Crazy/Unreliable, First-Person Narrator – Pathetic/Loser, First-Person Narrator – Well-Adjusted, Funny, Grandmother, Historical, Judaism, Magical Power, Murder, Object is Alive, Object is Cursed, Politics, Purple Prose, Religion, Romance, Sex, Thievery/Theft/Stealing, Third-Person Limited Narrator, Third-Person Omniscient Narrator, Uncle, Unhappy Romance, Workplace.

LOL, this guy has mastered the subtle art of verbal diplomacy! Let’s drop him into the middle of delicate geopolitical negotiations and see what happens! “What kind of shitty name is Ashgabat?”

The Book Cover Archive Blog presents its choices for the best book covers of the '00s (a winner for each year and a runner-up). It's hard to top the design for Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, designed by David Pearson and published in '08. Book Cover Archive Blog's vote for the best cover of '08

No, I did not just randomly slap my hands against my computer keyboard … “Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov” is someone’s actual name … and that someone is the president of Turkmenistan!

Remember crazy ol’ Turkmenbashi, the “Daddy of Turkmenistan,” who re-named the months of the year after his family (true) and built a statue of himself that always rotates to face the sun (true) and all that stuff? Anyway, he died. And Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has replaced him. Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov is not as harsh as Turkmenbashi, but he (Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov) still has some issues. Basically, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has promised a bunch of human rights reforms (haven’t we all) but has been a bit slow in actually gittin-r-done.

On the other hand, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov recently met with Henry Kissinger at the Plaza Hotel! So maybe he’s serious about human rights after all, LOL!

In cleverly devising a way of dealing with the Duration Factor, Josh addressed the potential effect on prices of both increased demand (as more people learned about the project) and dwindling supply (as we ran out of objects). It’s assumed that this Duration Factor caused prices to drift upward over time.

But in a comment to that post, reader Mimi offers theory she dubs “the Metal Boot Peak Effect.” Basically it suggests that the auction for Metal Boot With Story By Bruce Sterling, for $86, was a kind of turning point for the project, sparking a “process of disinhibition” that set the stage for much higher peak prices than we’d seen in our first three weeks. “I think,” she concludes, “these post MBPE peaks may be skewing your week-to-week averages.”

Well, enough speculation! For starters, what was the overall price trend? Here’s one answer in the form of a chart showing the average (or more precisely, the arithmetic mean) price paid, by week. (More charts and analysis after the jump.)

Let’s just say the results here aren’t quite as clean as what a Wall Street chartist would prefer. It’s pretty spiky. On the one hand, you can look at the first three weeks vs. the final three weeks, and the general upward drift is there. On the other hand, it’s probably an oversimplification for us to imply that prices simply rose week after week, given the extreme highs and lows in between.

In fact, it looks as if we were on the verge of peaking a mere week after the Metal Boot auction, when prices declined in Weeks 6 and 7 after a Week-5 high. Then weeks 8 and 9 were gangbusters — but week 10 saw a drop to one of the lowest averages of the entire project!

Week 10 was roughly our halfway point. Interestingly, it looks to me like that low point was followed by a relatively orderly rise. (The slip on Week 19 is a complete mystery to me)

Two questions: Does the actual time of year make any difference here? And: Would the results look similar if we used  median (middle value), rather than mean (average), weekly sales figures.

Here you go:

By and large the average and middle value mostly correlate. The biggest disparity is in fact in Week 4 — Metal Boot week! The average price that week was $42.66, whereas the median was $17.82. The unusually high price for the Boot is part of the issue — but only part, since Sheila Heti’s Porcelain Shoe story also went for an unusually $77.51 that same week (in an auction that actually closed before the Boot.) Possibly, then, the unusually high average for that week is explained by the convergence of determined buyers not just on one object, but two that happened to go on sale days apart.  Barefoot Buyer Syndrome, anyone?

Second, the time of year issue: I’ve listed the dates of the weeks that objects went on auction — meaning the sales closed the following week. So Week 7, one of our low points, was made up of auctions closing the last week of August. A time when lots of folks are away? We’ve speculated about that in the past. But Week 10 looks even worse on this chart, and those auctions would have closed in the latter half of September.  So maybe time of year is a non-factor.

Mimi’s point about the MBPE got me curious about weekly high prices. I remember when I really didn’t think anybody would beat the $36.88 paid for Necking Team Button with Story by Susannah Breslin, from Week 1. (It’s easy to forget, but we really didn’t know how any of this was going to turn out; we were thrilled to get prices in excess of $20 back then, given what we were selling.)

This chart reminded that Duck Tray With Story By Stewart O’Nan, from Week 3, actually preceded both the Metal Boot and the Porcelain shoe as the object to break the Necking Team Button record, and moving us into a whole other realm of prices, selling for $71. Even so, my read is that I don’t think the high auctions for the Boot, the Duck Tray, or the Porcelain Shoe, were game-changers for the entire project. Subsequent results just seem to have too many choppy moments.

I do think it’s probably fair, as Mimi suggests, that some of the very earliest Significant Objects were, in effect, undervalued. I suspect this is partly because of the Duration Factor addressed by Josh, but also because in the early days we not only had a smaller audience and more objects to go around (the first week in particular, we put a whopping 13 items and stories on sale, in an effort to give readers a lot to sink their teeth into right from the start), we were also basically unproven. That first month was in a way one long proof of concept to readers and potential buyers. Who knew if we were really going to pull this crazy idea off, anyway? Who knew if anybody would buy anything? By the time the Metal Boot went on sale, I think we’d answered those questions.

Beyond that, I think these charts leave a lot of open questions, and suggest that maybe weekly averages don’t tell us enough. Stay tuned.

Turkmenistan is a country in Central Asia. They have lots of gas. Europe wants the gas to heat its bistros and cafes and tapas bars and whatnot. But Turkmenistan is a leeetle bit sketchy.

Ladies and gentlemen, do we have a moral dilemma on our hands???

Short doc on the protests in California.

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