Hermenautic Circle blog

kiameku:

Tom Friedman
Untitled
1992
Stolen balls
20 x 36 inches

—

About 200 balls, stolen by the artist over a six-month period

“same procedure as every year…”

secretcinema1:

German New Years postcards circa 1910

dynamitehemorrhage:

Kleenex - Hedi’s Head (1978) - what a fantastic clip, something I’d never seen before.

1. Sometimes you only discover you’re overextending yourself by snapping.

2. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stretch; quite the opposite.

While not a grand supporter of the fervent and ceaseless quest for self-improvement (and the chronicling of such efforts) that our  modern world so enthusiastically foists upon us, I’m also a sucker for reflection and nostalgia, and annual reviews get me a little of both. Without further bloviation, an examination of what I’ve done, what I’m proud of, and what I could have done better.

Touchdowns

There’s No One There

While actually artwork created in 2011, I was really pleased with what happened with this long running kernal of an idea long ago. After a few false starts, 2012 saw the idea kick into high gear with a collaboration with Scott Geiger and the Ninth Letter literary journal.

Some good first internet press got the attention of the Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA, where I ended up having my first museum show, which I’m totally thrilled about. A month later, they were back in New York for my first New York solo show of my work, hosted by Scott at Studio-X, where both the show and the event surrounding the release of the Ninth Letter supplement went off really well (but not before, 2 hours before show open, one of the piece crashed to the ground, shattering the glass; the work was mostly unharmed, but it result in a frantic last minute race around the city to get it reframed.)

On the art show front, I’m not sure I could have had a better year.

Mad Props: Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley, Scott Geiger, Jodie Stanley, Greg Nanney, Harry Delorme

Unbored Comix

I was so flattered that Josh Glenn of HiLoBrow, Significant Objects, Taking Things Seriously, and many other awesome projects asked me to do four double-spread comics for his new activity-and-culture book for kids, UNBORED. I’ve always thought my work was right in the wheelhouse of pre-teen kids (I draw so much inspiration from the genre!), and it was especially awesome to work with Josh and the brilliant art director Tony Leone, who gave me guidence but for the most part were completely hands off and let me do whatever the hell I wanted to do. If only all clients were like that. Go buy a copy, the book in total is just outta sight.

Mad Props: Josh Glenn, Elizabeth Foy Larsen, Tony Leone

Melville Dewey, Time Traveller

The ever-amazing Matthew Battles and his colleague Jeffrey Schnapp asked me to do a comic about a time-travelling steampunk Mevil Dewey for Harvard’s metaLab. Need I say more?

Mad Props: Matthew Battles, Jeffrey Schnapp

Strike Debt

Crusading hero Astra Taylor asked me to do a poster for her project, The Rolling Jubilee, which ended up getting a ton of great press, raising an incredible amount of money for the brilliant Strike Debt project, and, as a side benefit, also got my art in The Village Voice. Sweet!

Mad Props: Astra Taylor, Nick Pinto

Pinch Zoom

Finally, I think I can finally announce that I am officially the new Mobile Design Director for Pinch/Zoom, a mobile consultancy here in Seattle, and have been so for the past 4 months or so. I had been initially cagey to talk about it all, because, like a rogueish cad who loves ‘em and leaves ‘em, I had been an unattached bachelor in the working world for nearly 10 years, with small gaps here and there. And like any player who’s made good and settled down, I’m still a bit stunned by how much I enjoy it and my new way of life.

For some very brief background, the main principle of Pinch/Zoom, Brian Fling, is a guy I have know for a really long time; in fact, he gave me one of my first for-real illustration gigs in Seattle, after I had moved from LA, fleeing the animation world. He approached me with the opportunity after I had sought him out to kibbitz about all things creative. I think he saw in me a place where he had been: creatively exhausted, professionally tapped out, and looked for a new way to make stuff.

I am very grateful for the opportunity presented to me, not because it speaks volumes to the trust that Brian puts in me – we are a small shop, and so each action carries a lot of weight – but also that I can be in a place where I don’t have to pretend to be anything more than someone who is learning a new industry, occasionally new skills, and a new approach to the work I love to do. So. Thanks, Brian!

Mad props: Brian Fling, Mathew Wendell, Catleah Cunanan, Dave Gerton

Seattle

Let me just say this: I love New York. I. Fucking. Love. New. York. But this is kinda awesome, too:

Mad props: The little lady and the papoose.

Fumbles

Unnamed Time Travel Comic Project

If you’re lucky enough to be one of my friendly confidants or creative collaborators (or even worse, the editor of a lovely and extremely popular website whom I approached with this idea and was nothing but gracious and generous in her offer I’M SO SO SORRY), you know that I have been blathering on about this serial fiction gif-comic full of time travel and family drama FOR EVER. And I truly have absolutely nothing to show for it, besides like over 75 unusable pages, about 5 false starts, 10 discarded plot twists, and a seething ball of frustration.

I had hoped to get the first episode out the door by the start of 2013. That is obviously not going to happen. Frankly, I think I’d be proud if the first episode it out by 2014. I just feel so backed into a corner creatively on the project that I’m not sure what it will take to unstick it. In the meantime, I am going to focus on some other projects and do some light writing until it unsticks itself. It WILL get done, and out, I tell you. I just don’t know when.

Robots + Monsters

I’m calling this one like a half-fumble. Or, if the above was a butt-fumble, this was a fumble that one of my offensive linemen fell on at the last minute. To answer everyone’s question : YES, THE PROJECT CONTINUES. However, I’m not sure what form yet. As it stands, I have a new site designed and ready to go:

 

and for a while, it will function as a portfolio site for all the great work we’ve done, as well as a function merch store. Will it open back up for drawings? I dunno yet! But the functionality is being built into the new site, if that gives you any answer at all.

Lateral Passes

Then, there’s a bunch of stuff I either can’t talk about because it’s not done yet, or not pitched to the right people yet, or I’ve signed an NDA for it, or whatever. These includes an amazing animation project with Alix Lambert, a potential new comic with someone of note who have heard of before, threats of new game with Gabe Smedresman, and even an upcoming collaboration with my wife, which I have a feeling may end being the best thing I’ve ever done. So there’s exciting stuff brewing, to be sure.

Even since I was young, I heard the phrase, through my Dad, that he claims his father always said to him:

Your 20s are your yearning years, your 30s are your learning years, and your 40s are your earning years.

I think we can probably adjust that a little bit, considering our rapidly de-aging populace, but the intent remains the same. Boy, am I learning.

Happy 2013, folks.

“What’s revolutionary about [information communication technologies] is that they have restructured the very reality in which we perceive ourselves as living in, and the way in which we think about the concepts of warfare or the state. Take for example the concept of the state: we currently define a state as a political unit that exercises power over a certain physical territory. But when you consider that states are now trying to also dominate certain parts of cyberspace, our definition becomes problematic because cyberspace doesn’t have a defined territory. The information revolution is shuffling these concepts around in really interesting ways from a philosophical perspective, and more specifically, from an ethical perspective.”

- Cyber and Drone Attacks May Change Warfare More Than the Machine Gun - Atlantic Mobile

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network. See also a follow-up post: Antarctic Island Radio].

[Image: "The Trees Now Talk" cover story in The Electrical Experimenter (July 1919); image via rexresearch].

Way back in 1919, in their July 14th issue, Scientific American published an article on the discovery that trees can act "as nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army's Chief Signal Officer, made his "strange discovery," as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in "a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia," listening to signals "received through an oak tree for an antenna." This realization, that "trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature's own wireless towers and antenna combined."

He called this "talking through the trees." Indeed, subsequent tests proved that, "[w]ith the remarkably sensitive amplifiers now available, it was not only possible to receive signals from all the principle [sic] European stations through a tree, but it has developed beyond a theory and to a fact that a tree is as good as any man-made aerial, regardless of the size or extent of the latter, and better in the respect that it brings to the operator's ears far less static interference."

Why build a radio station, in a sense, when you could simply plant a forest and wire up its trees?

[Images: From George Owen Squire's British Patent Specification #149,917, via rexresearch].

So how does it work? Alas, you can't just plug your headphones into a tree trunk—but it's close. From Scientific American:

The method of getting the disturbances in potential from treetop to instrument is so simple as to be almost laughable. One climbs a tree to two-thirds of its height, drives a nail a couple of inches into the tree, hangs a wire therefrom, and attaches the wire to the receiving apparatus as if it were a regular lead-in from a lofty copper or aluminum aerial. Apparently some of the etheric disturbances passing from treetop to ground through the tree are diverted through the wire—and the thermionic tube most efficiently does the rest.

Although "40 nails apparently produce no clearer signals than half a dozen," one tree can nonetheless "serve as a receiving station for several sets, either connected in series with the same material or from separate terminals."

[Image: Researching the possibility that whole forests could be used as radio stations—broadcasting weather reports, news from the front lines of war, and much else besides—is described by Scientific American as performing "tree radio work." Image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In a patent filing called "British Patent Specification #149,917," Squire goes on to explore the somewhat mind-bending possibilities offered by "radio transmission and reception through the use of living vegetable organisms such as trees, plants, and the like." He writes:

I have recently discovered that living vegetable organisms generally are adapted for transmission and reception of radio or high frequency oscillations, whether damped or undamped, with the use of a suitable counterpoise. I have further discovered that such living organisms are adapted for respectively transmitting or receiving a plurality of separate trains of radio or high frequency oscillations simultaneously, in the communication of either or both telephonic or telegraphic messages.

This research—the field of "tree radio work"—has not disappeared or been forgotten.

[Image: A tree in the Panamanian rain forest wired up as a sending-receiving antenna; from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

In the January 1975 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, we read the test results of several gentleman who went down to the rain forests of the Panama Canal Zone to test "the performance of conventional whip antennas... compared with the performance of trees utilized as antennas in conjunction with hybrid electromagnetic antenna couplers."

The authors specifically cite Squire's work and quote him directly: "'It would seem that living vegetation may play a more important part in electrical phenomena than has been generally supposed... If, as indicated above in these experiments, the earth's surface is already generously provided with efficient antennae, which we have but to utilize for communications...' These words were written in 1904 by Major George 0. Squire, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in a report to the Department of War in connection with military maneuvers in the Pacific Division."

The authors of the IEEE Transactions report thus establish up a jungle-radio "Test Area" in a remote corner of Panama, complete with trees wired-up as dual senders & receivers. There, they think they've figured out what's occurring on a large scale, as signals propagate through the forest canopy, writing that we should consider "the jungle as a maze of aperture-coupled screen rooms. In the jungle case, the screens, in the form of vertical tree and fern trunks, and the horizontal forest canopy are of variable thickness, have variable shaped apertures, and are composed of diverse substances that contain mostly water."

[Image: Inside the Panamanian jungle-radio Test Zone; image via IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (January 1975)].

The design implication of all this is that an ideal radio-receiving forest could be planted and maintained, complete with spatially tuned "aperture-coupled screen rooms" (trees of specific branch-density planted at specific distances from one another) to allow for the successful broadcast of messages (and/or music) through the "living vegetable organisms" that Squire wrote about in his patent application.

What other creatures—such as birds, bats, wandering children, foxes, or owls—might make of such a landscape, planted not for aesthetic or even ecological reasons, but for the purpose of smoothly relaying foreign radio stations or encrypted spy communications, is bewildering to contemplate.

In any case, this truly alien vision of forests silently crackling inside with unexploited radio noise is incredible, implying the existence of undiscovered "broadcasts" of biological noise, humming trunk to trunk amongst groves of remote forests like arboreal whale song, inaudible to human ears, as well as suggesting a near-miraculous venue for future concerts, where music would be played not through wireless headsets or hidden speakers lodged in the woods but through the actual trees, music shimmering from root to canopy, filling trees branch and grain with symphonies, drones, rhythms, songs, sounds occasionally breaking through car radios as they speed past on roads nearby.

[All links found via an old message from Shawn Korgan posted to the Natural Radio VLF Discussion Group of which I am a non-participating member. Vaguely related: The Duplicative Forest and Pruned's Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network].

“John McTiernan on cinematic language / filmmaking philosophy” ➟ http://t.co/j3oMxvyc — CriterionCast.com (@CriterionCast)

“John McTiernan on cinematic language / filmmaking philosophy” ➟ http://t.co/j3oMxvyc — CriterionCast.com (@CriterionCast)

Dinner for One - Freddie Frinton and May Warden 

—OK, it’s New Year’s Eve. Who’s gonna watch “Dinner for One” with me?

On December 18th, an Instagram account in Gothenburg, Sweden ignited a media-identified riot resulting in the detention of 27 individuals. A more intensive explanation, via Free Art & Technology:

What happened this time around was that a person (a 17 yo girl attending Plusgymnasiet (The Plus High School, a privately owned and managed school) was suspected and got police protection) started an Instagram account called “gbgorroz” (“gbg” is short for Gothenburg, “orroz” is a swedishification of a turkish word meaning whore) asking people to name and shame the sluts of Gothenburg and what slutty things they have done. The account gained about 6000 followers and posted about a hundred pictures and description about “sluts” of Gothenburg (mostly female but also male, often for being “gays”. Age 12-18) and their alleged sex acts before it was shut down. In an unexpected turn of events, the last pictures posted was screenshots of the inbox of the account where you could see who had submitted what “slut” – shaming the shamers.

Somehow it was revealed who was behind the account – or at least someone was accused – and people decided to “take revenge”. A rumour started spreading that there would be “chaos” at this high school the morning after. And there was even a facebook event called “World War 3 at Plusgymnasiet”. About 500 people showed up the day after (18/12) and tried to enter the school. I guess most to just watch THE CHAOS unfold. Some were there to beat up the girl that started it (among them people who had submitted to the account and had been exposed in the screenshots). Others to beat up the people who had submitted to the account. Some even might have been there to beat up someone for what they allegedly had done. And yet more just there to take the opportunity to start some fights.

F.A.T. also provides a useful analysis of the event, suggesting that

What’s good is that most people have afterwards focused on violence, gender issues, culture around sexuality and bullying, and preventing this kind of behaviour, rather than condemning “the internet” for what happened. So I think the debate about teenagers and internet use have matured a bit. People are also very fast to report accounts (new ones have popped up), take screenshots as evidence and report them to the police. So we’re starting to learn how to react to these things without panic (except the 500 ppl strong mob, that is…).

One of the mainstream narratives concerning social media since the Arab Spring has been its revolutionary, or at least radically organizational, potential. Two years after protests began in Tunisia, social media precipitated another, perhaps more unexpected eruption of incendiary energy more in the vein of Mean Girls than May ’68. Media outlets like the Daily Mail and the BBC have focused on Instagram and Facebook’s formal role in the protest as opposed to the sexual politics at its center. Whether this will indicate a change of perspective remains to be seen. 

Laura Miller talks to Daniel Mendelsohn about the ethics of the negative review.

I have a very slight cold and (unrelatedly) got barely any sleep last night, but on the other hand I got several important errands done today, including one I was slightly dreading (taking 'new' used bike and case down to Sid's Bikes on the subway for them to pack it up for Saturday travel - my aversion to traveling on the subway with cumbersome things is sufficient that I went so far as to read the packing instructions and contemplate undertaking the disassembly project myself, before coming to my senses and deciding it had better be left to the professionals!).

Almost finished with the first volume of My Struggle. It is curiously and inexplicably mesmerizing, like the charismatic teenage love child of Proust and Thomas Bernhard!

Laura Miller talks to Daniel Mendelsohn about the ethics of the negative review.

I have a very slight cold and (unrelatedly) got barely any sleep last night, but on the other hand I got several important errands done today, including one I was slightly dreading (taking 'new' used bike and case down to Sid's Bikes on the subway for them to pack it up for Saturday travel - my aversion to traveling on the subway with cumbersome things is sufficient that I went so far as to read the packing instructions and contemplate undertaking the disassembly project myself, before coming to my senses and deciding it had better be left to the professionals!).

Almost finished with the first volume of My Struggle. It is curiously and inexplicably mesmerizing, like the charismatic teenage love child of Proust and Thomas Bernhard!

This concludes New Wave Time Warp. Our chief source for this blog has been George Gimarc’s invaluable Punk Diary, which ends at the end of 1982.

If you’ve enjoyed this blog, feel free to drop us a line (see the sidebar). And if we do something similar in the future, we’ll post again and mention it.

Thank you!

Hüsker Dü’s “Everything Falls Apart” album came out December 31, 1982. Here’s a live version of “Bricklayer” from a year earlier.

Seventh in a holiday-season series of posts that will reprint short fiction written — by twelve HiLobrow contributors — for the collection Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, eds. Rob Walker and HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn (Fantagraphics, August 2012).

The following story is by Annie Nocenti. Enjoy!

*

JFK BUST

*

I’m long off the vine. Eighty, truth be told. I refuse to be one of those biddies that dies with clutter. Found drooling in a wing-back, her thousand-strong frog collection eyeballing her. My clutter is for sale. I was a housewife in the Fifties, so there were various disappointments, which led to… various remedies. But that kind of clutter is not up for sale, and certainly not worth the price.

Let me see here… Salt Lick JFK. When I was thirty and Edith was eight, we’d go into the department store, and she’d rush up and down the aisles licking everything that took her fancy. She was a terrible embarrassment to me. I’d dig my fingernails into her until her arm glowed with a row of red crescent moons. But that little tumbleweed would twist out of my grip and be off licking a ceramic gnome or Easter egg or whatnot. I took her to the doctor and he said it was a “compulsion” she’d grow out of. She didn’t, but that’s another story.

One day Edith licked JFK and said, “It doesn’t need salt.” Turns out she had good taste. Most of the junk Edith licked turned out to be collectibles. Those pre-assassination JFK Salt Lick heads went on to be very popular after ’63. We used the head for a school report. Turns out salt licks are cosmic, from some divine cow of Norse mythology descended from one-eyed Odin. Salt licks have a certain… resurrection quality, not that that helped poor JFK. Cows quite like them. I can’t promise this one is unadulterated. But it’s got history.

*

Original price: $2.99. Final price: $26.

HiLobrow was launched — by Matthew Battles and Joshua Glenn — in the spring of 2009. Peggy Nelson became the website’s first Artist in Residence in December of that year; in 2010, she became HiLobrow’s Arts Editor. At the end of 2010, TIME named HiLobrow one of the Ten Best Blogs of the Year. In 2011, we kicked ass again — serializing two original novels, publishing the widely acclaimed KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM series, and much more.

During this past year, we weren’t able to dedicate the same time or resources to HiLobrow. At the end of 2011, Matthew Battles left us for Harvard’s metaLAB. Josh and Peggy were preoccupied, in 2012, with their own day jobs — and with various non-HiLobrow projects. For example, Josh published two books (UNBORED and Significant Objects). Also, our two advertisers went out of business! That said… in 2012, HiLobrow still kicked ass.

Here are a few highlights.

***

HILOBOOKS & HILO HEROES

The HiLoBooks Radium Age Science Fiction series (both the serialized posts on HiLobrow and the paperback editions), and the HiLo Heroes series of posts, comprised the vast majority of HiLobrow’s 2012 posts… so let’s start there.

• In 2012, HiLobrow’s contributors — Peggy Nelson, Lynn Peril, Alix Lambert, Gary Panter, Luc Sante, Jerrold Freitag, Jess Bruder, Devin McKinney, Tom Nealon, Mark Kingwell, Catherynne M. Valente, Tor Aarestad, Brian Berger, Barbara Bogaev, Franklin Bruno, Tucker Cummings, Suzanne Fischer, Mike Fleisch, Amanda French, Norman Hathaway, Adam McGovern, Jacob Mikanowski, Dan Nadel, William Nericcio, David Smay, Chris Spurgeon, and Robert Wringham — wrote a whopping 175 posts in our ongoing HiLo Heroes series. Josh, who is the HiLo Heroes series editor, wants to say how grateful he is to our contributors, who have suggested and written about an amazing crew of past and present high-, low-, and nobrow icons — including Lee Miller (shown), Eva Hesse, Dian Fossey, Sergei Eisenstein, John Lydon, Muriel Spark, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Grace Jones, Frank Frazetta, Rihanna, David Foster Wallace, Pierre Mac Orlan, Mark E. Smith, Vita Sackville-West, Guy Peellaert, Bronislaw Malinowski, Mahalia Jackson, June and Jennifer Gibbons, Karl Kraus, Jaroslav Hasek, Ai Weiwei, Rosario Castellanos, Suzi Quatro, June Carter Cash, P.T. Barnum, Geza Roheim, Eddie Cochran, Claude Cahun, Marie Curie, King Kong Bundy, and Karen O.

• In 2012, HiLobrow launched HiLoBooks — a publishing imprint dedicated to reissuing lost novels from the era of science fiction that Josh has named the genre’s Radium Age (1904–33). Josh is the series editor; Richard Nash made HiLoBooks possible; and Matthew Battles helped get things rolling. Here is the HiLoBooks homepage. We serialized and then published — in gorgeous paperback editions — the following five titles: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (Introduction by Matthew Battles; PURCHASE NOW) | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail and “As Easy as A.B.C.” (Introduction by Matthew De Abaitua, Afterword by Bruce Sterling; PURCHASE NOW) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (Introduction by Joshua Glenn, Afterword by Gordon Dahlquist; PURCHASE NOW) | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (Introduction by James Parker; PURCHASE NOW) | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins (Introduction by Tom Hodgkinson; PURCHASE NOW).


• HiLoBooks has received some nice press: “We’re extremely excited that the incredible pop culture website HiLobrow is launching its own publishing line, HiLoBooks, to bring us fascinating new serialized fiction and reintroduce the world to the scifi novels of the Radium Age,” wrote io9.com editor Annalee Newitz. “Less academic in orientation [than Wesleyan's "Early Classics of Science Fiction" series] but no less welcome in its efforts at critical salvage, HiLoBooks’s “Radium Age Science Fiction” series, which debuted this year, covers a relatively neglected period in the genre’s history — the three decades between the classic scientific romances of Wells in the late 1890s and the mature pulp era of the 1930s,” chimed in The Los Angeles Review of Books. And Neil Gaiman tweeted: “Look. RADIUM AGE stories coming back into print!”
• In 2012, we also published Jack London’s crashed-spaceship story “The Red One“; plus a few Radium Age science fiction poems. In 2013, we’ll publish another five titles — including William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (Introduction by Erik Davis; PURCHASE NOW) and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings (Introduction by Astra Taylor).

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NOTABLE POSTS & SERIES

What else did HiLobrow pull off in 2012? Here are a few of the accomplishments of which we’re proudest.

by Vijay Balakrishnan

• In 2012 HiLobrow re-visioned its Artist-in-Residence program (which is directed by Peggy Nelson) to provide a virtual studio for participants Chris Rossi, Vijay Balakrishnan, Alix Lambert, and Mike Fleisch. In addition to blogging and posting experiments and ideas, artists were paired up and asked to bracket their residencies with two versions of an Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist parlor game. The initial EQ was topic-at-large; while the final EQ was assigned according to themes that had arisen during the AiR residency. Materials ranged from screenplays, photographs, drawings, and sound work, and results were provocative, amusing, poignant, and irreverent; there were accidents. Happily!
• Exquisite Corpse #1: Low-Priority Hero
  Chris Rossi, writing, sound, vocals; Vijay Balakrishnan, photography; Peggy Nelson, editing. Low Priority Hero is an audio graphic novel by Chris Rossi; an LA Noir of hard shadows and ambiguous light. The photographs are from Vijay Balakrishnan’s ongoing photographic dérives, at once eloquently personal, and stochastically urban: New York considering, through a soft cell of self.
• Exquisite Corpse #2: Movies, Numbers, Cities
  Chris Rossi, writing; Vijay Balakrishnan, writing, photography; Peggy Nelson, editing. I love to watch them change the billboards. Cars… lite beer… cigarettes… the state lottery, some crap-ass new movie. Every few weeks… a different dream.
• Exquisite Corpse #3: Bob&Lila meet Martha
  Mike Fleisch, writing, sound, vocals; Alix Lambert, drawings; Peggy Nelson, editing. Interviews with Julia Roberts and Don DeLillo, and their characters, voiced by OSX software, gather around the storied and taxidermied presence and absence of the last passenger pigeon.
• Exquisite Corpse #4: Animals, Time, Rights & Wrongdoing
  Mike Fleisch, writing, photography; Alix Lambert, writing, photography; Peggy Nelson, editing. Point is this: the subtleties of human communication are shifting from eyebrow furrows and larynx modulation to asterisks and emoticon choices. Now, I am 7.2 years old, and I will raise and socialize any resulting offspring without assistance. Here, darling, get a good deep breath of this. Now count to ten. Okay, breathe. Now say something. Come on, say something, sugar.

Rummage around in our full Artists-in-residence archive.

• This summer, Josh edited a series of 25 posts — KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM — by 25 terrific writers, each one analyzing a single Captain Kirk scene from the Star Trek canon. POSTS IN THIS SERIES: Justice or vengeance? by Dafna Pleban | Kirk teaches his drill thrall to kiss by Mark Kingwell | “KHAAAAAN!” by Nick Abadzis | “No kill I” by Stephen Burt | Kirk browbeats NOMAD by Greg Rowland | Kirk’s eulogy for Spock by Zack Handlen | The joke is on Kirk by Peggy Nelson | Kirk vs. Decker by Kevin Church | Good Kirk vs. Evil Kirk by Enrique Ramirez | Captain Camelot by Adam Mcgovern | Koon-ut-kal-if-fee by Flourish Klink | Federation exceptionalism by David Smay | Wizard fight by Amanda LaPergola | A million things you can’t have by Steve Schneider | Debating in a vacuum by Joshua Glenn | Klingon diplomacy by Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons | “We… the PEOPLE” by Trav S.D. | Brinksmanship on the brink by Matthew Battles | Captain Smirk by Annie Nocenti | Sisko meets Kirk by Ian W. Hill | Noninterference policy by Gabby Nicasio | Kirk’s countdown by Peter Bebergal | Kirk’s ghost by Matt Glaser | Watching Kirk vs. Gorn by Joe Alterio | How Spock wins by Annalee Newitz

• In 2012, we continued to publish awe-inspiring original fiction and comics. Highlights include: “The Firefly,” TG Gibbons’s prize-winning entry in our PULP HERO MICRO-FICTION CONTEST | A nine-part excerpt from The Song of Otto, a graphic novel written by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and drawn by Frank Fiorentino | “boulevard_of_broken_code,” Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s eagerly awaited new IDORU JONES comic (NB: McGovern also contributed several HILO HERO items, a KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM post, a eulogy for Ray Bradbury, and reviews of Annie Nocenti’s new Green Arrow and Catwoman comics. Thanks, Adam!)

• According to our recent list of All-Time Top 25 HiLobrow Posts, two 2012 posts in particular made the traffic needle jump. One of these was DISCOMINIMALISM, in which longtime contributor Franklin Bruno demonstrated the mind-bending effect of playing Terry Riley’s pioneering minimalist composition “In C” (1964) simultaneously with French disco star Marc Cerrone’s 1975 hit “Love in C Minor.” The other was GUY FAWKES MASK-OLOGY, by first-time contributor Molly Sauter (whom Josh met at SXSW this year). Molly traced the semiotic import of one of Occupy Wall Street’s most striking signifiers through the lulzy culture of Anonymous to Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta and beyond that to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In doing so, she thoughtfully explicated the evolving culture of digital activism for those of us on the outside looking in.

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PEGGY NELSON

Let’s take a break from celebrating HiLobrow’s contributors, for a moment, in order to celebrate our own Arts Editor. In 2012, Peggy Nelson published the following outtasite posts, among many others. We asked her to write ‘em up.

• You Talk Some TV?
  As NTSC & PAL, I collaborated with Jimmy Kipple Sound to create Meet the New Flesh, Same As the Old Flesh, a sound suite to commemorate the passing of the analogue TV signal and the digital switch. We considered the point of view of the aliens, who may be in receipt of our 20th century emanations long before they meet us, or long after we’re gone. Who knows what alien ears our media may massage light-years from now? In Meet The New Flesh, Same As The Old Flesh, NTSC & PAL daydream about the pulses of commerce, canned laughter & cheap melodrama rippling out into the solar system & beyond; picking & flicking through the archival backwash of broadcast media as it fades & diminishes into cosmic irrelevance & sublime-banal mystery. These last bits of broadcast signal our signoff from prime time deep space. Listen up: We come in peace, to bring you terrific-tasting space dust.

• The Force was strong in both noise and signal this year.
  “I love creating feedback – it’s one of my favorite sounds.“ I profiled sound artist Christine Sun Kim, a deaf artist who investigates the communicative effects of sound on objects, people, society, and other membranes. Her work is playful, exuberant, and wide-ranging, delighting in glial leaps as she connects the attributes of sound to painting, performance, dance, and social constructions.
  
  I interviewed impresario and musician Marc Weidenbaum, whose open and Oulipo-inspired virtual society, Disquiet Junto, sponsors weekly compositional challenges in electronic music, and has successfully fomented a lively distributed community.
  And listen here to some DJunto selections we featured in 2012.

  We also noticed the noticers: new-radio podcaster Roman Mars highlighted found glitch as music, in a program about Chris Richards, pop music critic for the Washington Post, and his perspectives on squeaky escalators as ambient democracies; accidents, happy again. Just take the earbuds out, and listen to the found sound free jazz of the subway. Specifically, the screeches, whalesongs, drones and drubbing of slightly broken-down escalators. Ask not for whom the escalator squawks? Ask: it can be for thee.

• On animal planet, where there’s always more than is dreamt of in our documentary philosophies, a new analysis of cave drawings leads to… the original animated gif? Ospreys repurpose cell towers for excellent nests, interfering with reception, but perhaps they might offer a more flexible free-G solution? Artists in Venice converted surveillance cameras to spray-paint the ubiquitous pigeons, turning a nuisance into neon baroque, while an artist in the Netherlands taxidermied his cat (deceased), into a drone. The Orvillecopter, in which an ex-cat is repurposed as zeppelin. A former pet who was unfortunately run over by a car, this delirious manifestation of Derridian homophonic glee puts the taxi in taxidermy and the props in propeller.

• When Worlds Collide
  The Martian Chronicles: Our real and virtual worlds are becoming ever-closer and more strange. This year saw the successful return of the Russian Parking Lot Martians, whose virtual journey we tracked eagerly from our armchairs, as well as the serious proposal that a one-way colonization trip to Mars be funded… by making it into a reality TV show.
  
  Rolling in the Deep: Closer to conceptual home, but in a no less alien environment, James Cameron, blockbuster director of Titanic, Avatar, The Abyss, and other cutting-edge special effects vehicles, designed and piloted another special-effects vehicle to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, filming as he went. In 3D, of course.

• Sportcenter: Cyborg
  Para-, Para-, Paralympics: Finally, with the London Paralympic Games, we continued our investigation of the cyborg, the essential incompleteness theorem of what it means to be human, and our always-on, always-mutating, augmentation effects. The athletes competing in London are winning more than medals; they are encouraging us to consider a different measure of man: better, faster, stronger; even if, in some sense always, incomplete. The paradox of the cyborg is that it’s not some kind of Terminator, metallic or nanotech, engineered past human into perfection. The cyborg is us, injured, yet inspired to think beyond the gap; and sometimes because of that gap, becoming stars.

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THE FAMOUS FIVE

John Hilgart, Erik Davis, Greg Rowland, Gary Panter, and Tom Nealon are five contributors without whom HiLobrow as you know it would not exist. Here’s what they accomplished for HiLobrow in 2012.

• In 2012, HiLobrow continued its rewarding collaboration with John Hilgart’s comic-book details blog 4CP. In the winter, we published the series SUBSUPERMEN, about which John says: “These panels are at the center of the discursive Venn diagram where pulp fiction heroes, radio heroes, and comic books converged. They’re concept pitches, delivered with ‘coming up next,’ ‘don’t touch that dial’ urgency.” In the spring and summer, we published series of 30 posts — BLOW UP YOUR COMICS — in which John showed us the panels and pages wherein some of 4CP’s most extraordinary details were discovered. And this fall, we’ve kicked off a new 4CP mini-series — THE ART OF 4CP.

• In 2012 Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, Nomad Codes, [Led Zeppelin IV], and Visionary State, returned (after an extended hiatus) in order to complete his seven-part POP ARCANA series for HiLobrow. He did so with a two-part exegesis of the oeuvre of visionary Sixties artist Rick Griffin. PS: Earlier this year, HiLobrow published a ten-part series — NOMADBROW — reprinting some of Erik’s best uncollected writing.

• In addition to suggesting and sponsoring the KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM series (to which he also contributed), in 2012 Greg Rowland contributed a seven-part series — MY FIRST CRITICAL THEORY ABC — in which he introduced precocious children to Althusser, Benjamin, Cixous and 23 others… via nursery rhymes! Series illustrated by longtime HiLobrow contributor Joe Alterio.

• The visionary artist and cartoonist Gary Panter continued to explore his influences in series of HiLo Hero items. In 2012, he generously celebrated: Cal Schenkel | Eduardo Paolozzi | Yayoi Kusama | Walter Lantz | Todd Rundgren | Yoshikazu Ebisu | Jim Nutt | Judy Henske

• One of HiLobrow’s most popular ongoing series is DE CONDIMENTIS, in which our friend Tom Nealon spelunks the secret history of condiments. Tom successfully resisted our pleas for new posts throughout the fall and spring… but in June, July, and August, he broke down and gave us three: Maple Syrup | Salad Dressing | Gravy. (PS: Tom contributed a hilarious feature on the world-historical import of condiments to Josh’s book UNBORED.)

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JOSHUA GLENN

Among Josh’s many 2012 HiLobrow posts, here are a few favorites. We asked him to write ’em up.

• In BIG MAL LIVES!, I investigated the possibility that Beatles road manager and bodyguard Malcolm “Big Mal” Evans did not — as was reported at the time — die in a blaze of police gunfire in 1976. Big Mal is alive and well!

• Having been invited to join a SXSW panel on “The Secrets and Surprises of DIY Promotion,” in SCHMOOZITSU, I reluctantly divulged the five secret “attitudes” undergirding the art and science of promoting my projects. I coined the term, from schmooze (Yiddish for “ingratiating small talk”) and jitsu (術, Japanese for “art, technique”), in 1999.

• I reprinted a few long-form essays published, in 2012, in various magazines. For example, I answered the question “What is Radium Age Science Fiction?” for BoingBoing; and also — from a different angle — for the British science journal Nature. In “War & Peace Games,” published in the journal Cabinet, I looked at the theme of tabletop wargames — and gaming generally — in the writings of H.G. Wells. And I reviewed Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo, for The Comics Journal.

• I posted, sporadically, to the ongoing series SHOCKING BLOCKING — in which I analyze some of my favorite moments in the positioning or movement of actors in a movie. In 2012, I analyzed blocking in Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, The Long Goodbye, The Fifth Element, The Bad News Bears, Raising Arizona, Young and Innocent, His Girl Friday, Buckaroo Banzai, Barbarella, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Bonnie and Clyde, The African Queen, Diary of a Chambermaid, and Dazed and Confused.

• I offered HiLobrow readers an A-to-Z peek at my books The Idler’s Glossary (2008) and The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011). SEE: Alienation | Big Rock Candy Mountains | Corporation | Dawdle | Employee of the Month | Flazy | Greybearding | Hobo | Inemuri | Jack of All Trades | Knock Off Work | Lazy | Micawberish | Nobbing It | Onboarding | Pink Slip | Quitter | Robot | Stakhanovite | Time and Motion Study | Unemployment | Volupté | Wage Slavery | Xerox Subsidy | Yakuza | Zero Drag

• I reprinted the “Unbored Manifesto” — which I wrote for Unbored.net with UNBORED coauthor Elizabeth Foy Larsen — in a series of ten posts.

• I reprinted a few essays from my 1990s zine/journal, Hermenaut: “Campanile Free Fall,” by John Marr; “Zooming Through Space,” by Chris Fujiwara; “The Art of Being Uncomfortable,” by Lisa Carver; and “Apocalypse Already,” by Clarke Cooper. And I reprinted several installments from my 2002–2008 Boston Globe columns “The Examined Life” and “Brainiac.”

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MORE 2012 HIGHLIGHTS

What else did HiLobrow accomplish in 2012?

• Matthew Battles edited “Notes on the Fourth Dimension,” a post in which Jon Crabb looked at how “the last gasp of Victorian spirituality infused cutting-edge science with a certain sense of old-school mysticism.” In particular, Crabb looks at the genesis and evolution of the notion of a “fourth dimension,” a new geometry, physically existing, and even possible to see and experience…

• We revealed an encoded Masonic message in an iPhone 4s ad.

• We published a nine-part series — called “Annotated Gif” — that featured comic book covers animated by the talented Kerry Callen.

• We published what we hope is only the first of many HiLobrow posts by Diana Kimball, whom we met at SXSW. In “Amateur Magical Thinking,” Diana revisited the early 20th century craze for amateur magic, asking what it was about pulling rabbits out of hats that so appealed to American men of the time.

• Our friend John Holbo, who blew our minds three years ago this month with “Sugarplum Squeampunk,” returned with a long profile and consideration of a forgotten midcentury gag cartoonist, in “Not Trash, Pop — The Cartoon Art of Susi.”

• Peter Bebergal, who in 2011 gave us a Q&A with Denis Kitchen, and who in 2012 contributed to our KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM series, permitted us to publish his long-form interview with visionary illustrator Arik Roper.

• We published a dozen stories — written by HiLobrow contributors — from Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker’s 2012 Significant Objects book (Fantagraphics).

• Our friend Gabe Boyer allowed us to excerpt a forthcoming memoir, in a ten-part series — that takes place in bedrooms across America — titled ”Bedroom Theater.”

• Finally, we published new installments in various irregular series, including these: Skrullicism, LATF Hipster, Pluperfect PDA, Chess Match, A Rondel for HiLo Heroes, and Ceci Est Une Pipe.

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HiLobrow is grateful to its contributors, without whom none of this would have been possible; our readers; and our publisher, KING MIXER LLC.

Happy New Year!

Posted in Articles

I wrote a lot of words this year, for a lot of different publications. I haven’t actually counted up the number of pieces I wrote, but it’s somewhere in the triple digits. In the spirit of all the end-of-the-year lists that are circulating at the moment, here’s an end-of-the-year list of my own.

The Top 25 Favorite Articles I Wrote This Year, in No Particular Order

BASIC: Inside a Single Line of Code, a Labyrinth. Slate

A sprawling essay I wrote for Slate about an excellent and very odd book, which inspired me to think widely and strangely about art, vintage technology, the Commodore 64, my teenage years with BASIC, and more. Props to my editors at Slate for encouraging me to use my imagination in this nearly 2000-word piece.

William Gibson: The Wired Interview. Wired / Wired UK

Part 1: William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers are Almost Always Wrong.
Part 2: William Gibson on Twitter, Antique Watches and Internet Obsessions.
Part 3: William Gibson on Punk Rock, Internet Memes, and ‘Gangnam Style’.

When I was working at Wired.com, I would read old issues of Wired from the ’90s and think how great it would be if Wired.com tried to engage as deeply and thoughtfully with culture as the magazine did back then. To this end, I sought out William Gibson, one of my favorite people, and did a 7,000-word interview with him. The trick: to talk with him about the history of recorded sound, punk rock, Internet memes, mechanical watches, etc., and not bore him with dull, predictable questions about when the Neuromancer movie was coming out.

The response to the three-part piece was tremendous. I got letters from people around the world thanking me for “bringing it back” to the old days of Wired. I saw the interview cited everywhere. Bill was apparently quoted by South Korean political candidates, in part thanks to his comments in the third segment about ‘Gangnam Style.’ Boing Boing picked up the interview twice, excerpting it heavily, and Wired UK reprinted all three parts in full, further siphoning the page views from Wired.com. Love you guys.

Lost Cause: Beck’s Song Reader. Slate

A nearly 2000-word piece I wrote about Beck for Slate, which also folds in Bing Crosby, the histories of sampling, remixing, recorded sound, tape machines, and more. Another piece which took a lot of hard thinking. It got a nice mention at NPR.

Music To Sleep To: Brian Eno’s Lux, Reviewed. Slate

Brian Eno wrote to me shortly after this 1500-word Slate piece came out, saying it was his favorite out of the pieces on Lux that had been published so far. “It made me right proud, it did,” Eno told me, and said he was sending the link to the piece to his friends.

Conny Plank. Frieze

I interviewed Eno, and many other famous people, for this piece on the life and work of the legendary producer and engineer Conny Plank. As far as I know, it’s the first article of length to be written about Plank since the 1980s. It’s also the first time that Eno has spoken on record about his memories of Plank in detail. This article was a real labor of love for me; I worked on it at night, after working all day in the Wired trenches. Props to Frieze for believing in this article and giving it a beautiful color spread in the summer issue. The article is now getting translated into German, and will run prominently in a German magazine this coming year.

The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords. Wired

One of the nice things about working at Wired was occasionally getting to write for Threat Level, one of the best sections of Wired.com. This is probably one of the most important feature stories I did this year, in terms of raising awareness and connecting the dots about an emerging copyright issue. This piece helped set off a wave of discussions at the EFF, Slashdot, Boing Boing, and other sites; articles on the subject in the New York Times, the Telegraph, and other newspapers soon followed.

Man Orders TV Through Amazon, Gets Assault Rifle. Wired

Another feature story I wrote for Threat Level, based on an insane fluke I found out about via a chance Facebook connection at 11 p.m. One of the craziest and most widely-read articles I wrote this year.

An Interview with Laurie Spiegel. Frieze

A 3000-word feature story I wrote on Laurie Spiegel for Frieze, based on an interview I did with her in her loft in New York City this past summer. It’s a continuation, in spirit, of the massive Max Mathews interview I did for Frieze in 2011.

Deep in the Woods, A Reclusive Toymaker Builds His Robot Army. Wired / Wired UK

For this story, I traveled across the country, got lost in the deep Vermont woods, hiked up the side of a steep hill on an unmarked trail, and interviewed a guy in his four-story-high hand-built geodesic dome for several hours. Was it worth it? Sure.

Why Polaroid Was the Apple of Its Time. Wired / Wired Taiwan / Wired Japan

An interview piece I did for Wired Design on Polaroid, based on a recent book about Polaroid’s fascinating, odd history.

Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data. Wired

A fun feature for Threat Level where I finally got to use my neuroscience degree for something. Before you neuroscience pedants complain about accuracy of the headline, note that I didn’t choose the headline (I almost never do.)

Legends of Electronic Music: Tod Dockstader. Wired

To do this article, I flew cross-country to Massachusetts on my own dime and jumped through considerable hoops to land this very rare interview with the extraordinary Tod Dockstader, who is now well into his 80s. Wired did not understand why I did this, but they didn’t need to understand. Those who know, know why this is important.

It’s in the Cards. Cabinet, Issue #45 (Games)

An essay I wrote for the great mag Cabinet about Brian Eno, the Oblique Strategies cards, Erik Satie, and Satie’s performance indications. I read this essay on stage in San Francisco, at an event called “Writers with Drinks,” and it went over incredibly well–people were laughing hysterically at Satie’s performance indications, and I hadn’t realized what great comic value still exists in them.

Ben Burtt on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and the Sound of Sci-Fi. Wired

I interviewed the legendary sound designer Ben Burtt about Forbidden Planet at Skywalker Ranch. Wired.com then tried to shoehorn the interview into a Star Wars 35th anniversary package. Which is, you know, whatever. This 2000-word interview is worth reading for all the insights Burtt gives on the potent mysteries of Forbidden Planet and Louis and Bebe Barron. And the Star Wars tidbits are great too. Expect more on this in the not-too-distant future.

For Stelarc, Extreme Body Mods Hint at Humans’ Possible Future. Wired / io9

Stelarc is a legend. When I found out that he was visiting San Francisco, I knew I had to interview him. The Wired piece I wrote was reprinted in the wonderful sci-fi website io9.

Meet Kraftwerk’s Original 3-D Animator, Rebecca Allen. Wired / Wired UK / Wired Japan

With all of the renewed press attention for Kraftwerk this year, I felt that writing this article–about a woman designer and animator–was a way to get a new, and different, story. Allen’s contributions to Kraftwerk’s visual aesthetic, and her vision for the classic music video “Musique Non Stop,” tell an important story about the history of computer graphics and 3-D animation in the 1980s.

‘Pussy Riot’ Becomes a Rallying Cry for Russian Expats. Wired

I interviewed a lot of people for this piece–a lot of unlikely sources, all of them of Russian descent–to try to get a different angle on this story.

From Transistors to Telstar, Idea Factory Traces Bell Labs’ Legacy. Wired

One of the long-form book reviews I wrote this year that took a lot of thinking. I was glad to write it.

Rare ’70s Electronic Music is Hidden in The Hunger Games. Wired

This piece I wrote on Laurie Spiegel–the scoop that her music was “hidden” in the Hollywood mega-blockbuster The Hunger Games–went off the charts, page-views-wise, and also helped kick off a wave of attention, including a follow-up article in Slate.

New Video Shows Japanese Speech-Jamming Gun in Action. Wired / Wired UK / Wired Japan
Japanese Speech-Jamming Gun Designers Reveal Details, Inspiration.

These pieces also got a ton of hits, but what I thought was more important were the references I buried into pieces like these to give them more depth–Stockhausen, Muzak, J.G. Ballard, etc. I always tried to inject a bit of weirdness into my articles, even the goofy shorter ones, to make them worth reading.

Interview: Dieter Moebius. Frieze

The only interview with the fascinating, enigmatic Dieter Moebius of Cluster that has been done at this length (it’s 3000 words). I met up with Moebius on a subway platform in Berlin after visiting Conrad Schnitzler’s house on the outskirts of the city, and did the interview with him in a Berlin cafe. Happily, this also helped lead to Moebius’ appearance at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival some months later.

Embracing 3-D Printers, Manufacturer Tells Customers to Print Their Own Parts. Wired / Wired UK / Wired Taiwan / Wired Japan

A piece I wrote for Wired Design about 3-D printing and synthesizers, documenting the first instance of a company telling customers to print their own parts.

Essay: Looking Back. Frieze

An essay I wrote (scroll down to the second half of the page) looking back on music, politics, etc of the year before.

Ravi Shankar (obituary). Slate

I wish I had more time to write this obituary–I slammed it out in three hours–but I hope to write a longer article on Ravi Shankar at some point. This is a start.

Remembering Maurice Sendak. Wired / Wired UK

One of my favorites out of the several obits I wrote this year. Again written in under three hours, but I tried to pack as much research and thoughtfulness in there as I could on a very tight deadline.

A few other pieces I wrote this year

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer: Geekdom’s Power Couple on Sandman Prequel and Kickstarter Success. Wired
Control a Giant Modular Synthesizer From the Comfort of Your Home. Wired / Gizmodo
How the Artist Who Built the ‘Chuck Close Filter’ Got Slammed by Chuck Close. Wired
Got a Moment? Listen to a 744-Hour-Long Radio Show. Wired
Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express Draws Stars to MoMA. Wired
Blaming Pop Culture for Gun Violence is Just a Distraction. Slate
David Byrne Breaks Down How Music Works in New Book. Wired
Chris Marker, French Filmmaker Who Inspired Modern Sci-Fi, Dies at 91. Wired
Music: Frank Ocean’s Coming Out. Frieze
3-D For Your Ears: Building the Dolby Atmos System for Brave. Wired
Jonathan Lethem Riffs on Talking Heads in Fear of Music. Wired
Orbital Talks Vintage Synths, Throwing Up and New Album. Wired
Artist Makes Drawing ‘Bot Out of Hacked Turntables. Wired
Idle Screenings Chops Hollywood Movies Into Sea of Animated GIFs. Wired
The Long History of a Little Gadget: MP3. Frieze d/e
Remembering Disco Queen Donna Summer, the Voice of ‘I Feel Love’. Wired
Recovered 1927 Metropolis Film Program Goes Behind the Scenes of a Sci-Fi Masterpiece. Wired / Wired UK

Chantal Kelly / Interdit aux moins de 18 ans (1966) (by erikavburen) —I understand just enough of the lyrics to love this…

This started in a very different place than it ended up.

I moved in the hot summer and there are still a some boxes at the margins of the house. A few days ago I found the one with all the film cameras. Dianas, Holgas, my first 35, a Canon, my boyfriend’s Nikon, lenses and flashes, an angled mirror spy attachment I bought when I first saw Sophie Calle’s book Please Follow Me. I was 19. In the way that we sometimes repress our influences so that we can work freely, it was only today that I noticed the resonance of my own novel’s title, Follow Me Down, with hers, my story with her book’s story, how long I have been obsessed with strangers and followings. That all has something to do with what happened.

I set out to go and work on work that needs to get done. As I was walking out the door, for the first time in years I picked up my Olympus Pen. It was a Valentine’s day gift, and it’s a very special camera. A rangefinder, which means you aren’t seeing quite what the lens sees. And it’s half-frame, so that you’re taking two photos on every frame on the roll. Anything beautiful that comes cannot be planned. Unless you are meticulous to the point of absurdity, you don’t know which shots will join together until you get the film back. Along the way I was composing a little essay about the freedom of working with constraints. I wanted to describe this in terms of the known but entirely uncontrollable constraints of the particular camera I was using.

And then I got to the café.

I sat down next to two old men deep in conversation. I set the camera on the table. One of the men asked me if it was a half-frame and not waiting for an answer started talking about the one he’d had in the 60s. “It was bigger than yours. It was a wonderful camera. Then after the war, in Japan I bought my first Nikon. They had a big fold-out poster that showed every camera they made. I bought them all.”

He pulled out the camera he uses now, a thin digital thing. “I keep a diary,” is how he explains it. He takes picture every day and writes on the back what happened. I asked what he does with them. “Oh, I keep them and when I’m dead someone will find them and I’ll be famous.”

My coffee got cold. He told me his name without asking mine. We shook hands as if the conversation was over. His friend spoke for the first time. “We should let you get to your drink.” My camera man nodded, and then kept talking. His Leicas. The war.

“What did you do in the war?” It’s dicey to ask a thing like that, especially of a man who did time in Vietnam. But it was ok after all. “I was a dentist,” he said. “I took care of teeth.”

“I got back in what, 1971? I was the East Village dentist. I hung out at the Filmore East. I knew them all. Dylan, the Velvets, the poets.” He shrugged. “It’s funny, I was conservative. But you had to dress like a hippie to get a date.”

He pulled out a 40-year old ID, his hair long and shaggy, the laminated plastic peeling up. I am not the first person who has heard this story. “I knew everybody,” he said. “I knew Ginsberg. I took care of his teeth.”

The Belle Stars’ “Sign of the Times” single came out December 30, 1982.

This might be my favourite table in a scientific article ever.

From this paper by Brian Whitman and Daniel Ellis. 

Posted by @HugeAtomicFreak on Twitter, via @aanand.

The ten best personal trainers in film and television.

“

As early as 1937 the architect John Leslie Martin could be found arguing in Circle, the avant-garde casebook he edited with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, that the ‘new aesthetic’ which would provide the subjects to match new developments of modern form and technique in the visual and plastic arts was to be sought ‘in the motor-car and the aeroplane, in the steel bridge and the line of electric pylons.’ […]

The National Grid, it should be understood, was not just a network made up of steel and cable, but a high-tension system compounded of materials, electrical forces, politics, design, and cultural representation.

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- Apollo Magazine | Landscapes of Power

Sixth in a holiday-season series of posts that will reprint short fiction written — by twelve HiLobrow contributors — for the collection Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, eds. Rob Walker and HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn (Fantagraphics, August 2012).

The following story is by Mimi Lipson. Enjoy!

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HALSTON MUG

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From AW: The Lost Diaries

Wednesday, June 13, 1979

Halston was having a birthday party for the Dupont twins, so I glued myself together and cabbed to the Pierre to pick up Bianca ($5). She’s still mad at Victor about the sweater, but I think it’s really because she found out that he went to Mick and Jerry’s black-and-white party at Mr. Chow’s. Bianca’s ass is really getting too wide to wear Halston.

The party was fun. Halston had a birthday cake made up that looked like a giant popper. Victor was passing out these ugly coffee mugs that said “Halston” and had sketches from the fall line on them. Mugs, like from a truck stop. They had wavy American flags on them, too, and when I asked Halston why they had the flags, he said, “Don’t you think it makes them so much more butch?” Maybe I should get some mugs made up for Interview. Are they camp?

Thursday, June 14, 1979

Woke up tired from sleeping on my back so I don’t get any more wrinkles. I’m going use to the vaporizer instead from now on, if I remember to. And I’m still black and blue from the B12 shot that Martha Graham talked me into.

I don’t want mugs for Interview anymore. I’ve decided that they’re tacky. I thought about saving my Halston mug for a time capsule, but I gave it to Brigid instead. She’s probably just going to throw it out or give it to the Salvation Army or something.

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Original price: 39 cents. Final price: $31.

A movie that unfolds in a single day — whether Do the Right Thing or Dr. Strangelove — is often an example of synecdoche; it’s an effort to portray the tragedy and comedy of a sociocultural phenomenon (e.g., The Nuclear Arms Race, Being Young and Black) in snapshot form. However, a movie that unfolds in a single night — The Warriors, say, or Night of the Living Dead — is almost always an example not of synecdoche but metonymy. Such a movie’s contents represent an elusive phenomenon with which they may be closely associated, but of whose whole they form no part. So single-night movies aren’t snapshots, they’re moonlit summoning rituals; I’ve found that such conjurations work best when you watch them with the sound turned off. This is ironic in the case of a Richard Linklater movie, because there isn’t another writer-director alive — not even Wes Anderson — who so enjoys letting his characters jawbone. Mute Dazed and Confused, though, and you’ll discover that it’s not “about” Youth, The Seventies, or Getting High; instead, it’s an OGXer’s vision of a non-totalizing social totality. The restless, almost protean blocking via which we catch glimpses of Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) and other Youth Getting High in the Seventies is the means by which Linklater indirectly evokes an anarchic utopia the likes of which has never yet existed: one in which no square peg is ever forced into a round hole.

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MORE POSTS BY THIS AUTHOR ABOUT RICHARD LINKLATER

An occasional series analyzing some of the author’s favorite moments in the positioning or movement of actors in a movie.

THIRTIES (1934–43): It Happened One Night (1934) | The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) | The Guv’nor (1935) | The 39 Steps (1935) | Young and Innocent (1937) | The Lady Vanishes (1938) | Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) | The Big Sleep (1939) | The Little Princess (1939) | Gone With the Wind (1939) | His Girl Friday (1940)
FORTIES (1944–53): The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) | The Asphalt Jungle (1950) | The African Queen (1951)
FIFTIES (1954–63): Beach Party (1963)
SIXTIES (1964–73): For Those Who Think Young (1964) | Thunderball (1965) | Clambake (1967) | Bonnie and Clyde (1967) | Madigan (1968) | Wild in the Streets (1968) | Barbarella (1968) | Harold and Maude (1971) | The Mack (1973) | The Long Goodbye (1973)
SEVENTIES (1974–83): Les Valseuses (1974) | Eraserhead (1976) | The Bad News Bears (1976) | Breaking Away (1979) | Apocalypse Now (1979) | Caddyshack (1980) | Stripes (1981) | Blade Runner (1982) | Tender Mercies (1983) | Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
EIGHTIES (1984–93): Repo Man (1984) | Buckaroo Banzai (1984) | Raising Arizona (1987) | Goodfellas (1990) | Dazed and Confused (1993)
NINETIES (1994–2003): The Fifth Element (1997)
OUGHTS (2004–13): District 9 (2009)

*** READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE

Joshua Glenn’s most recent books (2012) are UNBORED: THE ESSENTIAL FIELD GUIDE TO SERIOUS FUN (with Elizabeth Foy Larsen); and SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: 100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS (with Rob Walker).

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“Despite its ambitious aims, Amber, like Albatross, was largely home-made by Mr Karem’s small team. It was powered by a four-stroke petrol engine developed secretly in the garage of Hans Hermann, a Formula 1 racing legend of the 1950s. Its cutting-edge electronics and remote-control ground station were assembled in the living room of another employee. “When I started, people asked why I was making a UAV with four times the computational power of the F-16, the first fly-by-wire jet fighter,” says Mr Karem. The reason was that, as any computer buyer knows, a more powerful machine takes longer to become obsolete. “Almost all of our subsystems from 1985-89 are still flying in some Predators today,” says Mr Karem, “including its 27-year-old computer and, with minor changes, the ground station.””

- Brain scan: The dronefather | The Economist

At the FT (site registration required), an interesting long essay by Hedley Twidle on his Coetzee fixation:

Since Coetzee lodged his manuscripts in Harvard and now Texas, we have learnt that he wrote his major novels almost entirely in University of Cape Town examination books. They have dull orange covers with instructions printed on them: “Peak caps to be reversed”; “Answer only ONE question per booklet”.

““The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.””

- Jobs fight: Haves vs. the have-nots – USATODAY.com

The Three O’Clock’s “Baroque Hoedown” EP came out December 29, 1982. Here’s “With a Cantaloupe Girlfriend” from it.

Fifth in a holiday-season series of posts that will reprint short fiction written — by twelve HiLobrow contributors — for the collection Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, eds. Rob Walker and HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn (Fantagraphics, August 2012).

The following story is by Jason Grote. Enjoy!

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DOME DOLL

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I wish to reassure anyone who is considering purchasing me that it is not my look of need, afflicting though it may be, that is responsible for the fate of my last three owners. For reasons that I can only imagine are aesthetic, I tend to be attractive to elderly people, specifically elderly women, and cannot be blamed for their mortality. The fate of my third owner, the young man, was some sort of freak event. I assure potential buyers that I am not cursed. At least I am not cursed in that way.

I cannot recall the specific turn of events that led to my being placed behind this glass. I have memories of walking around, of freshly mown lawns, of friendly dogs licking my hand, and of attending church services and barbecues. However, this could be a trick of memory: it is possible that I have only seen or heard about these things, and not experienced them at all. The only thing I can truly be sure of is the glass, and the dust on the glass, and what little I can see of the world beyond the glass.

I remember my first owner, and how she would return my longing gaze and sometimes speak to me. I remember how I gradually came to be ignored as part of the sad and massive encrustation of knick-knacks in her home, a home that grew darker over time. I remember her death, which I did not witness directly (it happened in a hospital, I think), but gradually became aware of as her younger relatives (some known to me, others not) gradually emptied her home. The harsh sunlight, something I had not seen or felt in years (maybe decades) seared my eyes. They tossed me in a box, among many others of my kind, and I stared up at an empty blue sky for what seemed like an eternity but could have only been a few hours.

There I was purchased by my second owner, a happy, rotund woman with a chirpy voice who loved me dearly. I stared at her from her desk for many years, and she would occasionally coo at me while she typed on an electric typewriter. I never knew what she was typing, and would imagine the contents of her letters or her novel, the types of poems she would write. Her voice was musical. She was a widow, I think, and she dated a frightening man who would scream at her television.

Her fate is too sad to bear, but suffice it to say that I wound up, along with all of her other belongings, in a Salvation Army — in an ossified part of the store where the occasional board game or ski vest might move, but which mostly enjoyed a dusty, purgatorial paralysis. It was here that I was eventually purchased by my last owner, a nasty, slovenly young man who thought he was funnier than anyone else seemed to. It is not in my nature to hate, and I cannot say that I wished for the violent fate which eventually befell him, but I will not miss looking at his thick glasses or weak, bearded chin, or listening to his non-stop, grating voice. He never bothered to dust me off, believing my filthy state to be somehow more authentic or entertaining. But circumstance (and a spurned business associate) intervened and I was not in his possession for long.

And now, dear buyer, I wish to be yours. I know that you are looking at me right now, but I cannot see you. I want to be able to see you through my dusty glass. I have so much love to give.

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Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $16.49.

From late September 2002 through early 2006, HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn wrote THE EXAMINED LIFE, a weekly three-item column for the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section; and from late 2006 though mid-2008, he wrote BRAINIAC, an Ideas section blog that was repurposed as a three-item weekly column in the paper. This series reprints a few Q&As from Glenn’s two Ideas columns. [Brainiac image via 4CP]

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November 7, 2004
THE MARKET’S WILL BE DONE

Since the 1970s, as social critic Thomas Frank pointed out in One Market Under God (2000), post-Keynesian financial gurus have worked to convince us that the market is as all-knowing as God Himself. According to Mark C. Taylor, a distinguished professor of humanities at Williams College and Columbia University, the conflation of religion and economics isn’t entirely rhetorical. In his new book Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago), he draws on complexity theory, philosophy, and the vertiginous speculations of Wall Street to argue that, ever since money has become virtual and markets more complex, economics has been a matter of faith. Taylor spoke with me via telephone from his home in Williamstown.

IDEAS: You attach great significance to Nixon’s suspension of the gold standard…

TAYLOR: It was the economic equivalent of the death of God. Formerly, the value of a currency was a function of its relation to gold, but after the suspension of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, there was no longer any firm foundation for value. Currencies began to “float” — the value of a currency became merely a function of its relation to other currencies… Today, markets have lost contact with anything resembling the real economy. There’s nothing more postmodern than the endless circulation of derivatives, virtual currencies, swaps, options, and options and options. Talk about the play of signs!

IDEAS: The rise of global capitalism has coincided with a worldwide rise of religious fundamentalism. Is there a connection?

TAYLOR: The spread of global capitalism creates the political and cultural volatility that calls forth neo-fundamentalism. I say “neo-” because this fundamentalism is symptomatic of the disappearance of the very certainties it asserts. Outside this country, neo-fundamentalists often resist globalization, which is partly why the World Trade Center was targeted. But in America, for some odd reason, evangelical Christians from Reagan to George W. Bush have also been market fundamentalists who’ve argued that globalization will make the world less volatile. … According to market fundamentalist dogma, investors are rational and markets operate efficiently in a world where every risk can be hedged. This is a religious vision — but a misguided one.

IDEAS: Your book proposes that life, like the stock market, is nothing but a “confidence game.” What do you mean by that, exactly?

TAYLOR: Any large-scale solutions to the world’s current crises will have to involve recognizing that the simplistic ideologies and instruments we’ve invented to minimize political, cultural, and economic volatility always end up increasing it. Placing our confidence in the idealized visions of neoconservatives and Wall Street formulas like the “efficient markets hypothesis” has led us to the brink of disaster. … Neither the market nor life itself are what economists call “equilibrium systems,” where the laws of probability apply. Instead they’re what complexity theorists call “complex adaptive systems,” in which unpredictable but not completely incomprehensible changes occur all the time. Life in all its complexity remains a confidence game — both a gamble and a leap of faith — and we should relish it.

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READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE

Author Tosh Berman photo by Lun*na Menoh

Painting by Lun*na Menoh

Author Tosh Berman photo by Lun*na Menoh

Painting by Lun*na Menoh

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Part 2:

Also keep in mind this is what I listened to in 2012.  I rarely listen to brand new releases.

Part 2:

Also keep in mind this is what I listened to in 2012.  I rarely listen to brand new releases.

It is hard for me to imagine anything more delicious-looking than this slice of cake.