Velo, Rapido: Going Places

My cousin is coming to town and she wants to go to a play. Fair enough: I live in New York City. I ought to be able to hook that up. Only, I don’t go to plays and the people I know who do fall into difficult categories. Either they love Broadway (I don’t) or they are so immersed in theater that they don’t have a good answer. They don’t know what to recommend because they don’t know what to suggest. No one knows how to say “Well, I’ve been wanting to see …” There’s no Good Reads for theater, where I can skim my friends favorites. Which is part of why I can count on one hand the number of staged performances of anything that I’ve seen in the last decade. Actually, that is totally not true. I see more live performing arts than that.

It is too easy to say “gahh, not Broadway” but what I really mean is that I don’t want sparkly musicals. When I was 10 I loved Cats. I also loved Les Miserables. I probably would have loved anything other big bang musicals at that age. It was like the circus, only better. People like what they like and there’s nothing wrong with that (she says with a snicker) but it won’t make me happy to go see Cats today.

Broadway is more complex than that. I saw Angels in America with May and Kiffy. I don’t actually know if it was the Broadway cast but it was a short run in San Francisco. It was great and I’d see it all over again. On Broadway if that is where it was playing.

I loved the Berkeley Rep production of Bright Room Called Day. I do like more than just Kushner, honest. If someone were to stage a production of The terrible but unfinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia I would probably faint. I would certainly go. I came across it ten (sneeze. really? yes. ten.) years ago when Jason and I tried to write a play about Cambodia that got as far as Henry Kissenger before we discovered that we weren’t very good collaborators just as our respective lives were intervening to flummox the project anyway. He went on to become a famous playwright. Me, not so much. Pipe Bomb Sonata was excellent, though I never saw it staged, just read it. If I were a more dutiful friend I would have more to say about the rest of his resume but … oh nevermind.

I would have loved to go see Tanque on stage. I don’t actually know why I didn’t. Ganso bought tickets. A whole posse went. We’ll get back to that, later, my inability to just plug in when I know I’d have a good time.

To entertain my cousin I have to look forward, not back. It doesn’t have to be straight theater. Performance art is cool. I’d gladly take Gabriela to see the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea sail down the Hudson, but the flotilla’s nearly mothballed by now. Once upon a time, I went to some spaghetti dinners at PS 122, where I first saw Coco Rosie. They made me weak in the knees. Great Small Works last updated their schedule in 2003, so I’m guessing there are no spaghetti dinners coming up. Everyone else might be over her, but I still think that Laurie Anderson is a genius. Moby Dick was genius. Actually, it wasn’t. It was just good, but I loved it.

On the other hand, family friends took us to see Love, Janis in the West Village whenever it was that it was plastered all over busses and playing in the West Village. It was painful. I might have loved to read her letters home, but seeing them staged all sugar coated was just weird. Also, no one sings like Janis Joplin. Staging a performance based entirely around covers of Janis Joplin is bound to be agonizing. I don’t think better singers or better acting would have improved it. I still think about it a lot. I have it filed away with The Cockettes in my personal history of the San Francisco my mother lived in when she was my age. Except she wasn’t my age yet. She was a lot younger. She’s going to call me up and tell me that actually her life wasn’t nearly as tragic or arty or drug addled as Janis Joplin or Sweet Pam, but I still like to imagine that San Francisco swirling around her. What I’m trying to say is that I got a lot out of Love, Janis, but I would come up with about eight excuses to avoid seeing it again.

Glengary Glen Ross, which we really did see on Broadway, was excellent. But I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have because we saw it on Broadway and I wasn’t in the mood for the neighborhood and the whole sensibility of going out for proper theater. Plus there isn’t anyplace that I’d want to eat anywhere near 42nd Street. It isn’t a scene that works for me. It wasn’t for me, though. It is N’s favorite play and the tickets were his birthday present. So I shouldn’t be whining. Plus, on account of it being his favorite play, we own the DVD and I’ve watched it a hundred times and it isn’t my favorite play so the 101th viewing was just that.

I know that atmosphere matters to me. So does location. I don’t want to be treated like royalty, I don’t want to feel like I’m dressed all wrong or everyone around me is going to drive back to Connecticut later. I’d like to be able to see the stage. I’d rather not be way the hell up town. Brooklyn would be great. Some of these things are contradictory, I realize. There’s as much society at the Soho Rep as anywhere on 42nd Street, but it is a society I feel a lot more comfortable with. Or a little more comfortable with. Walking distance from home trumps everything else. BAM or a smallish downtown theater, is what I’m saying.

Facebook reports that Jason is planning to go see Oh What War, and Tanque has tickets for A Kite Cut Loose in the Middle of the Sky which is damn useful information to have. Jason’s blog is useful, too, he posted about Blasted at the Soho Rep. Only Oh What War is an option for 9/26.

Creative Time has a whole festival in progress coming up. Some talks about art and politics, which isn’t exactly theater but it is something to do. Good luck figuring out when anything is happening, their website is to sexy for a schedule.

Eyebeam (also too avant garde to offer a usable website. Though they do have a decent calendar.) has some interesting work up but they’re art, so their openings are on Thursdays. Lucky for Gabriela, they won’t be hacking Linux onto PDAs until later in October. I’d ditch her for that. I want a mood tracking database on my Treo.

Between the Lines is back at BAM. Let me know if you want to come: Oct 16, Nov 6, Dec 18.

Other places I sometimes go but haven’t in a while, most of which don’t have anything on tap for the 26th:
Galapagos,
Free103point9, Not an Alternative (okay, NaA is different but I can’t take a cousin to Jelly. BAM

Seriously, though: back to theater. Where do you look? Are there plays or other staged performances you’ve been wanting to see? Thinking of seeing?

A casual acquaintance (his father married us, which is not especially casual, I guess) traveled a semi-public breakup on Facebook. First his relationship status changed (”is no longer engaged”; “is single”) and then his status went through a bit of a wringer (”I thought she loved me back _UCK!!!!”;” _UCK! _UCK!_UCK!”*). I pointed this out to N. who called it weird. It is. It is also nice to know that if you choose to “befriend” me on facebook, you’ll have to decide whether to pretend you didn’t notice that I went through a wringer or to say something kind about it. I suppose you have other options, but I’m lucky to be old enough that most people seem to sit on that particular fence and not the one down the road between “say something snotty” and “take advantage of the situation”. What is also nice is that when the Rabbi’s son finally did send round a note about how he’s looking for a place (less than a grand a month, share okay, he has a dog and a bike or two and he’s a genuinely nice guy; anyone?) he didn’t have to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is worth a lot.

We’ve all been through wringers, and when someone you love is attached to a lot of tubes it is really really nice to know that everyone knows. That little bit of “okay, I don’t have to explain.” smooths some rough edges in the rest.

My point is, that Calc’s date functions are sorely lacking (hah! you thought I was going to talk about life, didn’t you?) as far as I can see. Read the rest of this entry »

The thing is, this is my fault. Or halfway. I didn’t say “well, if you want to run Windows I don’t know what kind of machine you should buy but I know you need to buy it with it’s proprietary operating system pre-installed.” What I said was “eBay is rotten with open-box resellers. Get a ThinkPad.” When he said “I have Windows XP I can install.” I didn’t say “That isn’t how it works, honey. It won’t work and you won’t be able to get support and I don’t really know the first thing about troubleshooting Windows anymore and I don’t really have anyone I can ask because the people who I know who are willing to go out of their way to help me figure out my Ubuntu installation are doing it because:

• They like me. People like N., too. So someone ought to be able to help him get his laptop running?
• They believe in software freedom. And they know that helping me iron out the creases in my own machine will make it that much easier for other people to run Free Software. Because together we report bugs and sometimes even propose fixes to them, we offer to help other people over their own hurdles. And because here, in the notebook, I write such brilliant and useful advice about how to use your Free Software better yourself. And that is worth something to all of us because it makes our software better.

So who gains when I spend a day (two, going on. Gah.) figuring out where on earth to get the device drivers that a Lenovo ThinkPad needs to run the version of XP Pro that came with a Dell tower. Most notably, he’s missing functional networking drivers. Which makes it really hard to get online and figure out what else is missing. N might gain (he’ll have a usable machine), and Microsoft will gain (I’m assuming that Consigliere is phoning home). And I’ll gain a little knowledge. Next time someone I know wants to install XP on a laptop that came with Vista, I’ll know what they need to do to get it working. Which makes it easier for people to use Windows. Which helps Microsoft.

The real question is this: of all the people who I ought to be able to persuade that Ubuntu is worth the extra work (extra work for him. Windows is just extra work for Moi since I’m the one doing it. And eventually I will have worked it out and that will be that. Or: maybe I won’t. You can’t run Windows Update without a good product key for XP. I’m not sure we have that.

What I’m kind of thinking of doing is saying, look here: I know you need this laptop. How about I partition it, put Hardy Heron on one partition, put your thieved XP that was only ever meant to be installed on the Dell desktop it came with.

PS, speaking of fools … I’m just wondering (I know I said the same last night) when we can get back to that conversation about privatizing social security. Because it sure seems like an excellent idea to me right now.

Reposting from the IdeaLab. Most of what I write there is either drivel or a comment, and I think I write sharp comments but they’re not really that intriguing out of context. What I didn’t say on the idealab was that I’ve noticed these trends, one being a fascination with aggregation that comes early in a person’s introduction to the vast world of internet resources out there. Aggregation without human intervention. Aggregation like “what if you could subscribe to all the action alerts about polar bears in the whole world instead of engaging with an organization and building a long term strategy to help Americans rethink our relationship to nature.” Except that second clause gets lost in the translation. Also, the people who want to talk about emergent behavior and the wisdom of crowds. And then they show a picture of some bees, and they don’t point out that hives have Queen Bees. And Queen Bees posses intellectual superiority. So do good organizers. Just data, data without analysis, is not superior. It is just data. Smart people, maybe people with communities that make them smarter by challenging them, but smart people are the ones who make things happen. Is what I say, but didn’t say because somehow I don’t know how to say that in a language that is professional enough. This will forever be my challenge, I am guessing.

I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we’re passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC’s astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more.

While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live data feeds and maps, and has mandated that no city agency may acquire software that cannot publish to the data warehouse.

Two hundred sixty one and growing, while the British Government’s Power of Information Task Force is sponsoring a contest with a $35,000 prize to the best idea on “how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds.” To get folks started they’ve put together a comprehensive list of public data sources in the UK.

The data that Washington DC makes public is the same data that city agencies use internally every day. Unfortunately, it seems to be so obvious to the current administration that this is public information that they don’t have many insights about how other cities might find the political will to follow suite. One interesting observation: that DC has managed to sell the data warehouse as a way that the city can retain control over data. By providing the data as feeds that civic projects can re-purpose, the city has the power to correct data and see those corrections percolate out in a way they never could with figures published in hard copy.

Other tasty morsels from Websites Without Walls? NPR’s API is up and running and mighty robust, Stephanie was the most used word in congress on Monday.

Another challenge: I ran into a thousand people I know and love at the landing of the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea on Sunday night. Because my old networks have come unraveled, I don’t really see Jenny or Joe Tuba or Ashira or Will or Aresh in any natural or organic way. And so I run into them at things like that and we say “it is so great to see you” and then we go back from whence we came. But in between they ask me what I am doing and I don’t know how to say that I’m obsessed with data driven local media. It doesn’t seem all that interesting with Swoon’s work towering over us and the Swimming Cities rocking gently on the pier. I don’t know how to reconcile these things.

What if I had a shitton of ancient shtml files that all, somewhere near the top of the body, contained a line like “BEGIN MAIN CONTENT”?

What if I wanted to wipe everything above that and substitute some include script? I’d use sed, right? Read the rest of this entry »

Between work, @fakejohnmccain and @fakesarahpalin I so do not have time to be reading about GM Foods, but the kid brother says these are worth a looksee:

AB 541 could mean that farmers can’t be sued by Monsanto when GM seeds blow into their fields and end up in their harvest. No word on whether farmers can sue Monsanto for contamination. And, a District Court judge in San Francisco actually stood up to Monsanto.

So things aren’t all hopeless, even if we are looking down the nose of an anti-choice veep who is nonetheless proud of the choice her own daughter has made. Not the one to throw years of abstinence-only education down the tubes, mind you. A friend of mine was, recently, talking about her grandmother’s abortions (several, each in a regular old hospital) and how profoundly those compared with her mother’s abortion (for which she had to leave the country). At the risk of restating an obvious point, I’d love to be able to say that everyone should just leave Bristol and Levi alone to live their lives except that I would really like Commander of the Alaska National Guard Palin to go out on a limb and tell us all whether she has any new insights on the general effectiveness of abstinence-only education.

Back to work, though.

So fascinating, so not surprising … that in the days before the RNC the homes being raided are media crews. What do they have planned that they can’t have iWitness documenting, is what I want to know. Except that I already know, and so do you.

In 1999 I was in Washington DC, watching the news on the eve of a massive protest over World Bank and IMF policies and watched with my own two eyes as the cops displayed a makeshift gas mask — plastic soda bottle cut in half with a wet rag stuffed into it, vinegar soaked, they were supposed to be, as I recall — something to put over your face and filter the tear gas — and the police stood there and announced they’d found molotov cocktails and evidence (duct tape, card board tubes, pocket knives) of bomb making from homes where protesters were staying. Not one reporter present asked whether a molotov cocktail doesn’t need a glass bottle to be effective. Not one reporter said “huh, but that smells like vinegar, not gasoline.” Not one reporter asked why the bottom of the bottle had been cut off. They all just accepted it.

This morning, listening to the news on the radio, I heard that they’re planning to deploy the National Guard in New Orleans “to prevent the kind of looting that occurred in the aftermath of Katrina.” I’ve said it before, but you really should go see Trouble the Water if you have started to forget a little bit that “looting” after Katrina was pretty isolated, while starvation, dehydration, people sitting in the sun for days without any aid or assistance whatsoever: those were rampant. NPR did observe that the local authorities had dismissed rumors of the squalid conditions at the Superdome until news crews confronted them with evidence to the contrary.

We need more than independent media, we need media that has the wherewithal to question authority and not just eat whatever is fed to them. Chew it up and feed it back like worms to baby birds.

Irony might not be the right word, but I’m watching choppy video of activists in St. Paul navigating commando raids on houses they’re staying in and then down on the right hand side of the screen, an ad for Changing the Present … “Your Wedding Registry can make the world a better place.” and I’m thinking about a thing I have been having a really hard time putting into words about media and press and funding for news and the idea that news will make itself and the need for a lot more documentation of repression. It is necessary. But then I go to mainstream media conferences and hear people talking about how professional journalists are becoming vestigial appendages, leaches for wanting to be paid for work others will do for free and there is a particular extension popular among the Personal Democracy that says that what we need isn’t professional journalists at all. That we don’t need journalists who make a living at journalism because the IMCs and iWitness and independent media projects have filled the gap, and that is the kind of “bridge will build itself” thinking that seems pernicious to me.

So yeah. Make the world a better place.

VOICES OF AMERICA
Aug. 25, 2008 – Nov. 5, 2008

free103point9 is pleased to host, Voices of America, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, a US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. The new site and custom application will launch in late August, 2008. Here’s how it will work:

* RECORD up to one minute samples of election coverage on an over-the-air Voice of America station
* UPLOAD and TAG your recordings
* DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings
* REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website
* LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at the Audacity of Desperation exhibition at the Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles on Election Day

Voices of America (VoA) is created by Lee Azzarello and Sarah Kanouse. VoA is happy to be a participant in The UnConvention, a project of Art Through Technical Alternatives, Carleton College, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Minnesota Institute for New Media Studies, and the Walker Art Center.

OpenOffice has a database app. It has come a long (long, long) way over the last few years but uff is it ever just not there yet. I do need the query browser. Things you can’t do with OOo Base include add a fulltext index. Not with the gui because the gui doesn’t know that much, and not with the query browser because it balks. CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX `FILER_NAME` ON `commcand` (`FILER_NAME`); gets me an error (”syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting BETWEEN or IN or SQL_TOKEN_LIK”) in Base’s interface (”Run Query”) but worked just fine at the mysql command line. Same for “SHOW INDEX FROM tablename“. Works fine at the command line, OOo balks.

So OOo Base isn’t just translating between the two.

I’ll probably update this post as I come up with more new and different things to complain about.