oddbill

Some thoughts around a theme.

I read somewhere once, and it strikes me as very true but seldom recognized, is that publishing on the web isn’t really “publishing”, it’s “broadcasting”, and different expectations determine it’s success.

In a series of brief ruminative posts, comics writer, novelist, blogger, and general internet scourge Warren Ellis has been toying with concepts around an idea called the papernet. This is something like a notion to lay out versions of web content so it can be printed as something like a onesheet or tabloid, and distributed by enthusiasts in the physical world on paper, like the broadsheets of the enlightenment era.

He also has been anticipating 2009 as the Year of Print On Demand (POD). Two fantastic emanations from his sporadic mental exercise:

1. A message board thread full of detailed and useful recountings of various peoples experiences with POD press production.
2. A concept he has give the place holder name of ROTOR, which is sort of a set of rules to structure a group blog which will update frequently enough with enough content to keep a significant audience, and which is arranged so as to allow longform work to accrue in daily bursts until complete, at which time it would be printed POD under a group branded imprint and sold as a physical object.

Looking at this ROTOR post in the context of his recent run of papernet tagged thoughts, I’m thinking the kernel here is trying to work out how a POD model could be dovetailed with serial online publication to produce a new publishing model outside of the withering traditional one. The proposed structure seems to be reaching for something like what fiction anthologies or fiction magazines once were, a churning, lively forum to get shorter works by many authors in front of readers and nurture careers. The difference is that the authors themselves become responsible for the mechanics of publication, for enforcing their own deadlines and professional discipline. I’m thinking the concept serves authors best when seen in that light, as a machine made of rules designed to grow disciplined professional writers. Your chances of success within it increase the more frequently you write, the more preparation you’ve done and the more of your piece you have in the can before publication begins.

And, since nobody has figured out a way to make good money off of stuff like this online alone, the POD goal at the end adds a potential revenue stream as a carrot.

All of this can be seen as an instance of a larger movement, of which other obsessions of mine, such as Make and Craft magazines, Instructables, Etsy, the resurgence of a craftsman’s ethic with a 21st Century flavor. It’s another outgrowth of empowering amateurs.

It’s the new old way of making culture.

Neal Stephenson said in an interview last year:

“Hey kids, don’t listen to your friends who try to tell you that it’s all about bits and bytes. Information technology will only get you so far. Making things in the physical world is where it’s at.”

All of this has led me to a rough concept that, at the moment, I’m calling Printcasting. At a first pass, printcasting is:

• Simultaneous multiple format serialization
• Blog style daily posting
• Audio podcast reading of daily posting
• Cumulative audio podcast of whole work to date, updated daily
• A weekly one-sheet printable zine compiling that week’s updates
• Final Project ebook for sale
• Final Project complete audiobook – probably free
• Final Project Print On Demand physical book

Jared Axelrod, who did something like this under the title 365 Tomorrows, upon reading Warren Ellis’ ROTOR thoughts posted this advice:

First off, we’d finish all the content before we started. This is the major problem we ran into our first year, and why so many similar projects crash and burn… And we’ll pre-load those suckers, so the site updates itself. Because when the site starts up, we don’t want to focus on it.

Instead, we want to focus on the 5 POD books we’ll be making with this content. Contacting illustrators, adding extra material, designing a visual look for all 5 books. Make them real works of art in their own right. In other words, make them worth buying. That’s not going to be difficult, but it is going to take time, so we might as well start on that as soon as possible. Plus, we’ll also be busy creating content for the next year. So, you know, the more the site can do without us watching it, the better.

This seems like solid advice, so I’m adopting it as a printcasting ethic. Don’t start printcasting until you have the full piece written/produced. Load it all and let it automatically update itself reliably and regularly. Spend the rest of your time while it is printcasting sorting your final, physical, purchasable products into the best objects they can be.

So what am I reaching for in jumbling all these references together in a post? Not sure. I don’t want to lose track of these trains of thought, and I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing here online and here in the world. It’s something about writing and something about drawing and something about small scale broadcasting and maybe there is something in all this for me.

If that turns out to be true, whatever form it takes, it’ll show up here.

Just finished Cyberabad Days, it was much much better than I anticipated, and I had high expectations already.

Although this was a short story collection, and although the short stories were scattered through the years predating and postdating the year 2047, which was the year the associated novel River of Gods was set, the stories were so dense, and circled around several linchpin events (the damming of the Ganges, the adoption by different subcontinental nations of the US sponsored Hamilton Acts, the advent of genetic Brahmans) that the whole collection takes on the feel of a full second novel. It was easily that layered and rewarding, and actually advanced the narrative past that of the novel that spawned it.

Well, well worth it. I haven’t read near future science fiction this complete and natural seeming since Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars colonization books.

Now, I’m moving on to The Road. Want to read that before the film comes out. In between I’m reading a book called Schuyler’s Monster, which is an autobiographical memoir of a father learning how to raise a daughter who can’t use language. This is a really good book, well written and compelling in an everyday life kind of way.

After that, I must decide – back to Infinite Jest in an attempt to plow through to the end, or start a project I want to complete this year: reading all of Thomas Pynchon in chronological order. I’ll probably do Jest first, just to get it out of the way.

Trying to get words around what I dislike so much about Infinite Jest – it seems largely pointless. A jumble of excruciatingly long sentences with no destination in sight. There is definitely a lot of world building going on, and that’s something I usually respond well to. Footnotes that lead to greater depth of setting and character, a detailed fictional history built in and around the familiar. It’s actually a bit science fictional in several ways. But somehow all of this seems to be in the service of crude, unimaginative satire. That’s a shame, because the characters aren’t, for the most part, simplistic, and the quality of observation in the author’s voice is many times profound. But somehow, in this book, it all seems squandered on tarted up teenage angst and insecure sniggering mockery. I’m about 100 pages in and I just had to set it aside because it was making me tired and bored. I’ve been told it becomes worth the effort after 200 pages or so, and I’m likely to at least push through that far, but I’m not convinced any attraction to the text at that point wont simply be evidence of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome taking effect.

My old physics book club is coming back to life, thanks to a referral to a new meeting place I got from one of the members. I’m really excited about getting this going again. Check out our club’s meetup page:

Reading Physics in LA

We’ll be reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe:

We’re going to be meeting this time (and hopefully for the foreseeable future) at the Echo Park gallery of Machine Project. If you don’t know what that is, from their website:

When we opened Machine Project, we liked the idea that a space could be a machine for producing culture. We feed in ideas, people, resources, and through the social and philosophical mechanism that is machine project we produce art, experiences, and ways to understand the world. We view what we do as an alternative to the traditional art space, which serves primarily as a container for art produced externally. But you know, we also teach electronics and computers and such so it’s not surprising that people get confused. Even we’re confused.

I really like that as a mission statement. A gallery not to contain art produced in the outside world, but to serve as an engine to produce art and experience that will spill out into the the outside world.

In earlier posts in this blog I talk a lot about the idea of empowered amateurs as an engine for wealth creation, and wealth in the wider sense of richness of lived experience more than in the limited sense of monetizable material objects. The Physics club has always been something in that vein, an attempt by amateurs with access to books and each other to bootstrap up a better understanding of the more complicated aspects of this science.

Machine Project as an organization has also always been something in that vein as well, and I think we’ll fit in well there.

If you live in the Los Angeles area, you should sign up for the meetup and come read. It’s free! If you don’t live in LA but are interested in reading along, sign up and participate in our discussion board.

No child can outlast me. I have the inexorable dedication of purpose that nature has only otherwise granted to glaciers and the withering sands of the Sahara.

East Side Foodies Need Men!

The pool here is strangely coffin shaped. Otherwise the ambiance is very life affirming.

A sure fire gift: Winter Wet Suit.

And, a brief, improvised dramatic performance via Facebook:

Yousha: Yousha is restless.

Oddbill: Me too – lets go punch some strangers.

Yousha: Haha that’s exactly what I feel like doing…how did u know? I shoulda came for a drink but I was working : (

Oddbill: Maybe it’s good you didn’t, the both of us punchy, it would have ended up like an old west saloon. Someone would have gone through the plate glass window.

Lien: Ok. William I don’t know you, but that is the funniest comment I have read in long time. kick some booty Yousha!

Oddbill: If you want, Lien, you can start punching them from the Bay Area and head south, Yousha & I will swing and bludgeon our way north, and wherever we meet up, we’ll get a drink there.

Yousha: Bill-we are fun drunks. We would punch people and then run away laughing : )
Lien-the word ‘booty’ is even funnier than Bill’s comment. Yes! We’ll meet in Pismo Beach!

Oddbill: All the clams we can eat!

Yousha: Don’t make me take off my stiletto…someone might end up with it in their skull around the central valley area!

Oddbill: Whoever gets the stiletto heel to the skull, I’d like to see him explain THAT to his wife when he gets home.

Yousha: LMAO, he’ll have some splainin’ to do!

Oddbill: “Honest Honey – two crazy people from Los Angeles came punching their way up the coast looking for clams!” “Tell it to my lawyer, dear.”

Lien: the word booty makes every conversation better, more interesting and in one-on-one combat, a hell of a lot more fun. Stilettos also add to the je ne sais quoi.

Yousha: Well I’ll resort to using my arse, stilettos, and clam shells to throw at and punch people with!

Lien: Thats the fighting spirit!

Fight on, good readers. Fight on.

What are these things? Photo-sketches, I guess.

I’m going to ramble about a book for a little bit. A few days ago I started reading Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s madhouse of a semi-satirical epic. I’ve heard nothing but praise for this book, but frankly I’m not enjoying the experience of reading it. I’m something like a hundred pages and several multi-page endnotes into a thousand page commitment, and so far I’ll be damned if I could say with any confidence who anybody is or what is happening. It’s not that the prose is opaque, it’s more that the segments about wildly different and unrelated characters jump threads from one to another with seemingly arbitrary whimsy, and each of these threads consists mainly of incredibly long-winded rambling descriptive passages that just give you nothing to hang anything on.

World-building in a novel is a plus for me, and this one certainly has that. It may be that nothing much concrete has happened because there is a lot of world-building groundwork to lay. I’m giving it the benefit of good recommendations and plowing forward in the hope that this is what is going on. But another annoyance here is that the world-building is largely satirical, which almost automatically makes me less than interested. It’s not that I can’t appreciate the cleverness of satire, it’s that satire tends to counter my ability to intellectually invest in any of the characters or arguments the book might advance. It’s as though the pose of disdain required for satire causes me to take the author himself less than seriously, and I guess mockery comes easily, and suggests shallowness.

Not that I think this book is callow. From all I’ve heard it is profound and moving. I just haven’t come across the profundity yet, and I’m very far from moved. It is really a chore to pick up again. This is definately a case, I think, of an author’s style working against his intelligence as far as my engagement with the piece is concerned.

Thomas Pynchon is another one who I’ve been unable to penetrate as a result of the fog of his style. I’ve got two of his books lined up to try tackling again after DFWs. I must be feeling masochistic.

An interesting side-note to this: When I’m reading a book that is either amazing or confounding, I’ll usually Google around looking for people’s opinions to see if they help me figure out where I stand in relation to the piece. It’s usually eye-opening, there are usually facts or observations I did not know of that deepen my understanding. So, though it’s early for it, I did this for Infinite Jest and found a couple of blogs that people set up to journal their reading of this book.

A little later, unrelated to this book, I came across a couple of blogs journaling readings of the equally challenging idiosyncratic comic book epic Cerebus by Dave Sim.

The idea of blogging your way through a reading of a large, difficult book is interesting. Sort of like a critical seminar of one. I imagine it must really help to assemble a lasting understanding.

There is a large art show in Los Angeles every year – it used to be held in a couple of hangars at the Santa Monica Airport, but this year it was down the street from me at the LA Convention Center. I’ve missed too many interesting things at that Convention Center since I moved in here over 2 years ago, so I walked down to see it.

I didn’t take too many pictures, as there was a “No Photography” sign, though I probably could have. I’m kind of glad I didn’t though, since taking pictures often causes me to not really look at things until later, when I’m going through the photos. Then, it’s generally too late, as all the valuable lessons are really to be had from looking at the paintings and sculptures in person.

There were some really wonderful things there. In particular I loved Khang Pham-New’s sculptures. The large one they had there was Escutcheon, and it really is mesmerizing to look at up close.

There were both contemporary and antique dealers there, and I was surprised to find three actual Bouguereaus on display! I’ve never seen any of these paintings in person, and they were magnificent.

There was also a dealer who handled prints of old botanical illustrations. Those were gorgeous, but the way she had them framed was almost better than the drawings themselves. There were several galleries with pieces that took advantage of optical illusions, or the texture and shadow-casting of different materials (some fine-mesh wire horse bas reliefs with oblique lighting were stunning). There was also an abstract wood sculpture of a woman running with a horse that was stylized in a way similar to something I was doing in a sculpted bottle design for a client late last year. That design has remained a set of drawings, but seeing this sculpture really makes me want to bring that bottle into three dimensions.

I was struck by how high quality everything was, and not in a safe, tedious way (or at least not got the most part!). There was really good work on display. I’ve been going to the Downtown Art Walk here in LA for over a year now, and I rarely see work this skilled or fully formed at any of those galleries. I don’t know how to define it, but these pieces had substance.

It was a good couple of hours.

On the way back home, since I didn’t get to take many pictures at the show, I decided to try a couple of self portrait experiments.

This one is built out of a snapshot of my reflection in the convention center doors. I was going for a kind of playing-card feeling:

And this one I tried to make somewhat unsettling. I think of it as an illustration of a conscience:

After watching this:

I started reading Clay Shirky’s book: Here Comes Everybody.

In there is the following quote:

Wikipedia invites us to do the following disorienting math: a chaotic process, with unpredictable and wildly uneven contributions, made by nonexpert contributors acting out of variable motivations, is creating a global resource of tremendous daily value.

Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky – pg. 139

Which reminded me of something Wallace Shawn says in the film My Dinner With Andre:

Well, the meaningless fact of the fortune cookie or the turtle’s egg can’t possibly have any relevance to the subject you’re analyzing. Whereas a group of meaningless facts which are collected and interpreted in a scientific way may quite possibly be relevant. Because the great thing about scientific theories about things is that they’re based on experiments that can be repeated.

My Dinner With Andre – By Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory – Film by Louis Malle

Both of these quotes are getting at something important that I haven’t figured out how to articulate well yet. There is a way, somehow, that intelligence can derive meaning out of meaninglessness. Something like that. It’s something that no other process we have yet observed or devised can do. It’s a bit circular, I suppose, in that it is only intelligence itself that seeks meaning – so that I guess you could define meaningfulness as “stories that satisfy intellectual curiosity”, but it really seems more fundamental than that.

To me, at least, this still seems like maybe the defining mystery in sentience. There is a way in which it transforms mere consequence into structure. I wish I could say this better. I’ll probably keep taking stabs at it here until I get a good formulation.

Since I started writing again, I’m trying not to do too many miscellaneous posts that amount to nothing more than “Hey! Look at this cool stuff I saw online!”.

But, well, look at this cool stuff I saw online:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

I could watch this all day. I want it to just keep going and getting bigger. It’s really mesmerizing, and it has these moments that border on revelatory, you know? You feel like something significant is about to be communicated, almost, if you could just understand.

And, in a complete shift of gears, I moved a large entertainment center shelf in my apartment because I wanted more wall space to hang pictures on, but now the TV and audio equipment is just stacked in an unattractive pile on the floor. I’ve been wanting to do something artful with it, that won’t block out the regained wall space.

I remember an old friend from college who was taking an architecture course, and was given an assignment to use a piece of cardboard to build a structure that could support his own weight for something like 30 seconds. Apparently, many people’s more elaborate attempts collapsed under them before the clock ran out, but what my friend did was just cut the board in half, put half slits in the middle of each piece and slide them together as an X. This supported his weight for over the given time.

A few years later, for another friend I spent several weeks building weird costumes out of cardboard, duct-tape, crepe-paper and Elmer’s glue, and then painting them. The end result was pretty cool.

Which is all a long winded way to say I’ve been thinking about making something out of cardboard and some combination of interesting finishing process to sit the electronics on top of. Cardboard is surprisingly sturdy if constructed intelligently, and can be made to look surprisingly good with some creativity.

Case in point, I came across this stuff today:

cartonnistes diy cardboard furniture

How to design your own cardboard furniture

Let’s see if I can muster up the energy.

Maybe if I start taking anti-narcoleptic drugs. (That’s not a drug ad, it’s a link to an interesting blog post by someone who decided to experiment with taking a prescription anti-narcoleptic to enhance his mental acuity. It makes a rather persuasive case in favor… interesting read.)

This is partly expanded on an email I wrote to someone, but the ideas have got lodged in my head and I need to type them out.

There is a magazine called Dwell. Since that magazine came out I’ve gawked enviously at the open gorgeousness of the houses photographed in there, but I stopped reading it a while ago out a an odd frustration.

The editors promote a philosophy based on affordable sustainability married with clean modern elegance, and I’m there totally with that, but then month after month the magazine seems to mainly feature expensive one-offs, tiny vacation houses that you couldn’t really use as a full time residence, or else graduate architecture experiments. Actually obtaining or living in a house like most of the houses they feature is almost as out of reach as a more extravagant mansion. They seem to get tied up in what I can only think of as a sort of virtuous opulence – and though the virtue is great the opulence part sends the affordability (and the effectiveness of it as a design movement) out the window.

Which is frustrating, you know? I’d done a bit of deeper searching online for groups or even other individuals who might be devoted as amateurs to something more reachable, but hadn’t really had much luck. I wanted some kind of open-source modern house project… something that had some or all of the following things as organizational ideals:

1) Build it with the least amount of materials necessary

2) Keep all components simple and easily accessible / repairable / replaceable. I mean, electrical wiring, plumbing, etc. doesn’t really HAVE to be complicated. Construction doesn’t HAVE to require large numbers of on-site contractors. It doesn’t HAVE to be that hard!

3) Use the climate and landscape of the area to the structure’s energy advantage

4) Make aesthetics a consideration in every stage of the design

5) Aim for construction that can be done well by a dedicated amateur

6) Aim to bring the total cost of materials in under $100,000.00

7) Keep an updated building code by region wiki-style resource to help people figure out what can be done where, and what they may have to go through to get something unusual approved.

It seems like that could be done. I had hoped Dwell would incline more in that direction, but it hasn’t.

So my correspondent pointed me at this site:

http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/

At first glance I thought, well, neat! But it seemed fairly sparsely fleshed out, and seemed to concentrate mainly on Third World structures, so it wasn’t quite what I had in mind. But that is because I was looking at this page:

http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/resources

Where I neglected to look at first was here:

http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/projects

That is much more like it! So – there is some delving to be done there.

Now, to tie this thinking in a bit with the subject of my last post – one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is that it’s fairly easy to build a low energy consumption house in the southwest US, as the climate is favorable to human life pretty much all the time. But what about places like Buffalo, where it is mostly cloudy year ’round, often very cold, and frequently precipitating? I understand the Netherlands, and Northern Europe in general has a strong movement of sustainable architecture and design, so more aggressive climates can be negotiated, but I don’t know much about what that really takes.

One of the things I think will eventually happen with wind turbine generators is someone will someday devise a simple-to-assemble backyard kit. This kit will be sold at Home Depot for under $1000.00. It won’t be anywhere near powerful enough to power a whole regular suburban home, but what it will do is take a bit of the edge off of electricity consumption in the winter months.

This picture of a wind turbine atop a building roof in Chicago (ironically featured in an issue of Dwell!) linked to from dane brian’s Flickr photostream, he owns the picture; made available under a creative commons license, some rights reserved You can read more and get a better view of the actual turbines here.

In the cold climate, it’s this winter electricity and heating usage that really causes financial pain when utility bills arrive. Homeowners in these regions will be very open to anything that shaves some palpable fraction of this cost away, especially if it’s easy to set up and they see some of their neighbors doing it without undue trouble. The second winter after these are introduced they will fly off the shelves, and every year thereafter they will get better and more efficient, and before anyone realizes it, suburban houses in the north latitudes will have wind turbines as often as they have swimming pools and satellite dishes. They don’t have to power the whole house – they just need to cut the winter power bill by enough to offset their purchase price in the first half of the winter, and then save their owners an amount equal to their purchase price for the second half.

Houses in Buffalo are pretty cheap right now. Property values are down, and there are many abandoned dwellings.

An interesting experiment might be to buy the most inexpensive house there that can be found, and try modifying it to be both comfortable, stylish and use as little energy as possible without sacrificing luxury/necessities like cable TV, Internet access, refrigerators, washing machines, climate control and lights. Keep all the details about the endeavor publicly available online – show the costs and track them over a 3 or 5 year period. Make it as easy as possible for someone reading to replicate or riff on the experiment elsewhere, and share the details of what they did too.

Grow an open source home conversion project, and concentrate the initial examples on places with more extreme environments. Try to keep the crunchy out of it, make them support the kind of life people mostly really want to live. Not one of deprivation, but one of modest luxury.

Can it be done in a normal house, in an average neighborhood in a locale with a challenging seasonal climate? I bet it can. I kind of want to try it.

It was Mother’s Day this past Sunday, and consequently I called my mother. In among the updates on weather, the stray cat that lives on the porch and the shocking lack of yard space in front of townhouses by the river, she mentioned something that turned our conversation in a direction I rarely go with the parents.

Apparently there is some large amount of effort going in constructing manageable small homes for the elderly. Now, the region we’re talking about is Western New York, the area around Buffalo and Niagara Falls, where I grew up, and where most of the clan still resides. This region boomed in the era of the Erie Canal, when all of Canada’s cut lumber came down through on it’s way to the St. Lawrence Seaway. Later, it boomed again when the steel industry thrived. I understand why the canal sparked a boom, I’m not as clear on why the region was advantageous for steel. But what happened after steel is that everything more or less crashed, and has been sliding into senescence ever since.

The largest single employer there now is the State University. Graduates don’t stay, though, the area does not welcome or support innovation, the arts, ingenuity or entrepreneurial experiment. The kids who can, leave. They don’t come back. Many of the kids who can’t, stay, have kids too young, and deepen the cycle of decline. Some good, creative young people stay and labor mightily to keep the machinery of community there alive. But very few stay. The average age keeps ascending, it’s becoming a sort of lost land of the elderly. Empty, abandoned houses are a problem.

So now they’re building to house the old folks more easily. When that generation passes, there won’t be many left. I’ll have to do a little work and check for numbers on these trends – but my experience, and that of others I know in the region still, is this – the population is graying and there is nothing to attract youth or energy to the region.

Why?

Because here’s the thing – Western New York could be the Saudi Arabia of alternative energy. This is a region that endures gales out of Canada over the Great Lakes, which are shallow enough to construct massive offshore wind farms in. It has giant freshwater lakes and the massive Niagara River the falls of which already have a hydroelectric power plant which I imagine could be improved or expanded so as to generate a lot more energy than it already does. It endures an overwhelming excess of water in the form of snow through the winter and rain for the rest of the year. Residents would be happy to have a bit less of that water coming out of the sky all the time.

I currently live in Southern California, and I’ll tell you what the southwest doesn’t have. Water! People keep moving here, las Vegas spreads out as far as the eye can see in its corner of Nevada, and every time I see it I just can’t understand where everyone thinks the water is going to keep coming from! I’m sure some massive redistributive water pipeline from the northeast to the southwest is not really feasible, and would have undesirable consequences, but I’m sure there are other ways to reallocate some of Western new York’s massive water wealth to the area’s financial benefit.

Maybe when the aging population is reduced enough by time and the dwindling economy to no longer be an effective force in NIMBYing any transformative ideas into unfeasability, and if oil remains prohibitive, some real vision will take root there and the wind, rain and river will bring another boom.

If I knew how to do it myself, I would. It’s like gold just laying on the ground, waiting to be picked up!