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-John Alderman

In a funk searching for the best spot to sit underneath the sakura? This map (with pictures) tracks where and when the blooming trees have been spotted.

Does it make it better if a sound is being pestering you in your own cultural context?

Japan’s Oki Electric Industry Co has developed a 32 polyphonic sound generator LSI, the ML2874, for the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) markets. This is the world’s first chip equipped with prosodies to play unique traditional instruments widely known in the rapidly growing BRIC countries, which include the Vina and Zither from India, Cavaquinho from Brazil, Balalaika from Russia, and Bawu from China. The chip is due for production in April.

From moconews

Just watched the superbowl halftime performance by the Stones. We’ve known for years that they’re shells of their former selves, but I was really surprised that Jagger was looking like a shell of someone else…Arnold Schwarzenegger. Strange, I know, but that’s what I saw when I looked past the prancing and into the face and eyes.

Why this would be, I have no idea.

At The Design Observer, Momus has a nice posting about how the Web (along with digital media in general) is taking on the role of top medium, with the accompanying presumption that all other media are less transparent, less direct. The good news, for those who have an interest in the beauty of artifice is that taking this role away from paper frees paper to loaf and invite its soul.

The consolation prize for not being the Universal is getting to be the Particular. The consolation prize for not having power is having flavour. The consolation prize for not being transparent is being opaque. Just as photography freed painting to do what it did best—be paint on canvas rather than a “window on the world”—so computers are freeing paper to be white stuff with marks on it. Paper is getting to “spend more time with its family”.

This also, the article explains, leads to the new medium absorbing and playing the role of the old.

Bringing us to a story today at We Make Money Not Art: On display at Aichi is a huge electronic newspaper.

“Yomiuri Global Newspaper - Electronic Paper” a wall-sized (2.2 meters high and 2.6 meter wide) newspaper utilizing E Ink Electronic Paper technology exhibited by Toppan Printing at EXPO 2005, Aichi.

LCD video monitor for pictures, combined with 272 Electronic Paper tiles makes one big paper. Not very convenient for personal use, I’m guessing.

The Observer has a great list from Tom Waits of twenty of his favorite albums (plus nine more at the blog).

18 Houndog by Houndog (Sony) 1999
Houndog, the David Hidalgo [Los Lobos] record he did with Mike Halby [Canned Heat]. Now that’s a good record to listen to when you drive through Texas. I can’t get enough of that. Anything by Latin Playboys, anything by Los Lobos. They are like a fountain. The Colossal Head album killed me. Those guys are so wild, and they’ve gotten so cubist. They’ve become like Picasso. They’ve gone from being purely ethnic and classical, to this strange, indescribable item that they are now. They’re worthwhile to listen to under any circumstances. But the sound he got on Houndog, on the electric violin … the whole record is a dusty road. Dark and burnished and mostly unfurnished. Superb texture and reverb. Lo fi and its highest level. Songs of depth and atmosphere. It ain’t nothin’ but a…

(via Nude Highway Driving)

In Aichi, Toyota is showing off a new “personal mobility” device, the i-unit.

The “i-unit” is a form of “personal mobility” that seeks to attain a greater balance of meeting individuals’ wishes to enjoy freedom of movement, harmony with society, and harmony with the Earth’s natural environment.

Concept
“Expanding Human Abilities”
This union of driver and vehicle is intended to expand human abilities and possibilities.

Is this because the Segway did so well? Or the designer wanted to say “unit”?

No, it’s because they wanted to express themselves and dance in tight, action hero-style suits.

Complete with live-human “robot” performers!

Hurray!

There’s some great travel advice in smaller newspapers; stories written for travellers moving within a certain realm take a regional understanding for granted, and are full of insights. There’s a great story in Bangladesh’s Independant that draws attention to Sarawak, Malaysia.

In Sarawak the day begins not with the humdrum sound of the cockerel crowing, but with the haunting melody of the gibbons in the jungle singing to the dawn. From that moment, every minute brings a fresh wonder. A single hectare of the ancient forest contains more varieties of trees than a thousand different types of insect. High up in the green canopy exists a unique world with a wide variety of different species of monkeys, flying lizards, spiders which eat birds (harmless if you don’t happen to be a bird), and all sorts of unlikely things that fly, including squirrels, lizards and frogs… Admittedly, they don’t actually ‘fly’; they glide by using flaps of skin linking their front and back legs. As Somerset Maugham once said, things are just different in Sarawak.

So many things in Sarawak are either the biggest or the smallest in the world. You’ll even find a tiny owl only six inches tall. Some of the butterflies are bigger than that. Other animals just vie for the title of plain oddest. We have all seen pigs before but in Sarawak they sport beards and swim across rivers! Some of these unique bearded pigs have been known to reach into the lower branches of the cocoa trees to steal the fruit. No less unusual are the termites which farm mushrooms by depositing chewed leaves on the roofs of their dwellings. As the vegetation decomposes, tiny mushrooms sprout to provide the termites with a ready supply of food.

I was skeptical about the Go East Young Man series of articles Henry Blodget is writing for Slate about The New China. But as it continues, I’ve come to enjoy them. Today’s report is about a subject I’ve been into since I was a wee bumpkin: maglev trains. Specifically, Blodget writes about the new fastest-in-the-world train, built to shuttle travelers to Shanghai from its regional airport.

Inside the car, you expect to see seat belts and shoulder harnesses (for all the good they would do in a derailment or collision at one-third the speed of sound), but, instead, find only normal seats. The doors shut, and the train accelerates like a skyscraper elevator, silently, smoothly, and rapidly, and by the time the last car leaves the station you already seem to be going 50 miles per hour. Four minutes of gravity-simulator-style acceleration later, in which the taxis on the parallel highway lose ground slowly, then quickly, then disappear as fast as if they were parked and you were whipping by at 220 miles per hour, you reach the peak speed for the tiny 20-mile run.

Transrapid claims that the maglev is quiet and glassy smooth, but, on the contrary, when the speedometer at the end of the cabin reaches its apex, you are distinctly aware that you are speeding. The car jerks from side-to-side like a jet in turbulence, the air outside whistles in protest, and the growl beneath the floor becomes a full-bodied roar. Just after the speedometer tops out, there is a pop and blur as the maglev headed in the other direction blasts past at an aggregate speed of 534 miles per hour, approaching that of a 747 at 35,000 feet. Then, with about seven miles to go, it’s time to hit the brakes, and a few miles later, when you’ve slowed to a mere 150 miles an hour, you feel as though you are strolling.

While I’m praising Slate, I’m glad to see Paul Boutin take a fairer look at anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey. Especially since Technology Review’s cover story was such a slam. (In fact I’d even say it approached the level of being editorially irresponsible—not a happy start to the re-launch.) Called “bitchy” by Boutin, that story and its twin editorial seemed offended by the very idea of their subject, and editor Jason Pontin slapped de Grey on the magazine cover in a pore-exposing high-contrast light and then railed on him for dressing badly, drinking too much beer, wearing a beard and looking old. Then, quoting the author of the story, Pontin pontificated, “As Nuland remarked to me, Aging is not a disease. Aging is the condition on which we are given life.” No wonder they’re so harsh on de Grey, evidently they’re used to talking with god. Though his story is much shorter, Boutin, thankfully, considers the merits without the absurd, hammer-the-nail-that-sticks-up approach that seems so odd in a science magazine, espcially from MIT.

-John Alderman

Old friend and New York Times writer Shaila Dewan (who years ago made great efforts documenting Houston’s artistic treasures) has a great story about a Georgia hunter who claims to have bagged a 1000-pound wild hog.

Mr. Holyoak has a knack for publicity, and has a wall of articles about his efforts to raise bullfrogs in captivity and his record-breaking fish breeds, like one he calls the Georgia Giant Hybrid Bream. He has theorized that Hogzilla grew so big by feasting on the special fish food used on the farm.

Mr. Holyoak, who also operates hog hunts on his land, allowed National Geographic to dig up Hogzilla because, he said, he wanted the free advertising, and he thought the hog might be a world record.

A thousand pounds is not extraordinary for a pen-raised hog. But a feral pig or a true wild boar -characterized by tusks, black hair and long legs - would top out closer to 500 pounds, and a typical one of each weighs in at about 150 pounds. Interbreeding with farm animals is, of course, a possibility.

If you ever go to Houston, boy you better walk right. And you better make point of visiting the Beer Can House, a beautiful piece of soft metallic architecture, featuring long curtains of pull tops and walls of aluminum siding purchased by its builder’s six-pack-a-day habit.

Now, thanks to a $125,000 grant to the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, which controls the house, it is being restored.

According to the Houston Chronicle:

Once a working-class enclave of single-family homes, the neighborhood in recent years has experienced rampant redevelopment. The Beer Can House now is flanked by multistory townhomes, one of which was erected about three feet from the property line.

With new development blocking sunlight, a once-sparkling fence studded with colored glass marbles has gone dull. Theis said plans call for installation of lighting to again illuminate the fence. Plans also call for a vine-covered trellis at the building’s rear to suggest the greenery of trees that have been removed as adjoining property was developed.

The Orange Show better be pretty close to top of your list of Houston stops, too. You can read all about it and the Beer Can House at the Roadside America web site, where I got the image.

(via Boing Boing)

A new building designed by starchitects Herzog & de Meuron is set to open October 15 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

The SF Chronicle has a story with pictures of the final touches.

The new museum is about 25 percent bigger than the old one. But it occupies an acre-and-a-half less land because its first floor was built below ground. A chevron-shaped stairway connects the lower and main floors, flowing along a vast glass wall looking into the nearly 200-foot-long fern garden. Visitors cross this garden and the eucalyptus garden on the west side of the building on glassed-in bridges. The park’s giant pine and cypress trees, as well as the palm-studded Music Concourse, can be seen through floor-to-ceiling windows throughout the museum.

“Everywhere you look there’s natural light, which is controlled to protect the art,” said Jim Roux, the Fine Arts Museum’s on-site construction consultant, standing outside the 20th century galleries on the main floor.

Bringing the countryside close to you. And under you.

The Asahi Shinbun reports:

An old bank vault, in the basement of a skyscraper in the heart of Otemachi, will soon be filled with a new kind of green as a “vegetable factory.”

The underground plant factory, computer-controlled and pesticide-free, will even have its own “sun” in the form of light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

The first produce, expected to be harvested in spring, will go straight to the building’s cafeteria.
If the vegetables catch on, the “fields” will be expanded to other buildings, and the factories will gear up for large-scale production to supply restaurants throughout the city.

A few young people, all former part-timers who were job-hopping from place to place, will be tending the first batch of crops.

That brings to mind a nice image of buildings as self-sustaining spaceships. Like Earthships, even.

Via we make money not art

Huschang Pourian is a designer living in Tokyo, with whom I had the pleasure of working last year. He’ll have a show of his photographs of air conditioners tomorrow (Monday, March 14) at the sign gallery in Gaienmae.

For those of us not in the area, or anyone in need of a preview, I made a slideshow of some of the photographs in this show, and the show flyer, using bananalbum.

Here’s what Huschang has to say for himself:

I came to Japan at the end of 2003. The only things I knew about Japan at that point were movies like Samurai Fiction, Wild Zero and Tokyo Four Eyes. Ultraman, Domo-kun and Gamera were my heroes. It was the Japanese world of manga with all the characters, the crazy TV shows and colourful advertising that fascinated and attracted me. But Japan is so much more. At that time, my digital camcorder was my daily companion. I filmed everything. The refrigerators in the supermarkets, the escalators in the train stations, the blue tarp tents in public parks, the dogs in handbags… Searching for details in displays made me addicted, and when I found myself searching my footage, separating the videos frame by frame (at 29.9 frames per second) trying to find even more detail, I decided to switch from video to still photography in the form of digital snapshots. After a long period of observation, I finally discovered an interest in Japanese architecture and housing. I realised that even though there are a lot of earthquakes on this island, traditional house-building seemed to avoid using diagonals which would strengthen the structures. Based on the inner unit of tatami mats, everything was following the right angle and parallel lines – Japanese order for body and soul. But I also found elements like tubes and wires destroying this order, going through walls, spreading chaos and confusion. Connected to these were white boxes with fans inside. I suddenly fell in love (visually) with these air conditioners and started chasing them. The result of this hunt you will see in this exhibition.

To work out the the structure that arises between the air conditioner and its surroundings, I cut the images in the middle and put one piece below the other. Eliminating the green channel gives the image more contrast and reduces the motif to its basic content. To tone down the technical / industrial impression, I used light flag cloth as a presentation material. Each piece regains its lightness by hanging in a room, surrounded by air.

But air conditioners are not just beautiful. Beside the fact that they make our lives much more comfortable, they also have a dark side. Their high energy consumption causes the well-known “Heat Island Effect”. Tokyo is especially affected by this. In summer, the air temperature might increase between 2 to 4°C. With my work I would also like to motivate people to take care of our environment by turning down their air conditioners by just 1°. You can not imagine how much energy we would save by doing this.

Aircon -1°

Thank you.
Huschang

Should be great.

-John Alderman

Exhibits tour, so why not the museum itself? OK, don’t answer that, but cast doubts aside: A cool-sounding museum, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to display the work of Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert is now open in New York. Ban is known for his use of interesting materials, notably paper.

The Chicago Tribune says:

“It was important to be able to put it not just in an urban setting but also a natural setting,” he said. “You could set it up in the Serengeti during migration or at the Grand Canyon.”

The unheated museum, whose $3.5 million construction cost was financed by Swiss watch maker Rolex, accomplishes what few museum installations could, plunging viewers into an ethereal space that is part warehouse, part cathedral.

Arranged on either side of a 12-foot-wide wooden walkway are more than 200 monochromatic photographs of elephants, whales, cheetahs, eagles and other animals that Colbert has photographed in Africa, Asia and Antarctica over the last 13 years.

. . .

Shigeru Ban, the nomadic museum’s architect, noted that one advantage of using cargo containers and paper tubes is that they are standard materials, found worldwide.

To subdivide spaces within the museum, he created reddish brown curtains by joining together thousands of used tea bags. All of the materials in the museum are either recycled or reusable.

New York Times also wrote about this last month, before it opened.

Godzilla vs. Skateboarders, an exhibit “making the rounds of Canadian art galleries since 2001″ shows what architects and city planners can learn from skateboarding.

The Dominion writes about it today:

The show offers many potential avenues of exploration for architects and city planners. From public housing with integrated skater-friendly half-pipes to art that “subverts the cliches of a formalist organic ‘modern’ sculpture,” the overarching suggestion is that the relegation of skateboarders to skate parks and their marginalization by bylaw is a suppression of a potent critique and a source of linguistic, artistic, and architectural vitality. Quite simply,the show asserts that cities are choosing to reject skateboarders when they have the opportunity to learn from them.

What to do when pitching visions of the future to a world audience increasingly jaded by them? This is the dilemma facing Japan as it gets ready to host the world expo Aichi 2005, which opens March 25. Recent world expos have been met with disinterest, a far cry from the past when glimpes of promised utopias inspired legions.

The answer: change the theme to Nature’s Wisdom, which, a story in The Australian points out,”might cause some wincing among the Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians, Thais and Malaysians who have asked to use their pavilions to raise funds for post-tsunami relief and rebuilding.”

The skyline is deliberately modest, especially by the standards of previous world expos. There is intentionally nothing to rival Crystal Palace (London 1851), the Eiffel Tower (Paris 1889), Montreal’s spectacular but madly impractical monorail (1967) or Taro Okamoto’s magnificent “Tower of the Sun” at Osaka 1970.

There will be futuristic transport at Aichi — a fleet of Intelligent Multimode Transit System driverless buses running on compressed natural gas will ferry an estimated 3.6million people around the site. But developer Toyota’s IMTS is well on the road to becoming a viable mass transit system of the near future — rather than an embarrassing Jetsons-style blind alley like the monorail.

There will still be robots, including a marching band, presumably moving in step with nature’s rhythm.

R.U. Sirius interviews Tom Frank in a new, liberal news portal, The Raw Story

RU: Perhaps the big mistake made by counterculture in the late sixties/early seventies was in thinking that it should be a revolution against capitalism in the first place. I still lean a bit to the left of the Democratic Party myself, and stand by my previous inquiry, but I think we can both agree that there ain’t gonna be no revolution. If capitalism, amidst the painful vulgarities of its media, tends to breed a desire for a certain type of personal autonomy, encourages independent thinking, creative competition, inventiveness, and so forth, perhaps we should be saying “one cheer for capitalism.”

TF: Well, I would say that but everybody else is saying that these days and my natural contrariness and individualism makes it hard for me to go along with them. So instead I will say this: For reasons of its own, reasons that have little to do with human liberation, today’s capitalism deals in cultural revolution, and to supply its need for constant overthrow and obsolescence it has settled on youth culture and pseudo-counterculture as the symbols of the day. (For all I know, it will discard them tomorrow.) Ironically, American capitalism has done these things – has become infatuated with cultural revolution – at precisely the same time as it has become more brutal and more elitist than it was previously. In the 1950s, say, when capitalism was boring and gray flannel, it also paid workers a lot more and CEOs a lot less. Pointing this out doesn’t mean I think counterculture sucks; it means I think we have to be critical about the world around us…

The Bangkok Post spills the goods on the the over-the-top obsession for “boutique”-anything that has hit Thailand.

The interior of the so-called boutique bowling alleys have been changed to emphasize entertainment instead of the sport itself: there are glow-in-the-dark marking units and playful furniture; the design of the bowling shoes is more fashionable and the food is fusion; the music is current hits and the service is claimed to be equal to that of a five-star hotel.

I’m all for the boutique spirit (who would mind a personal touch in anything?) but it strikes me that many of these places are not so special. A few months back, I stayed next door to one beach hotel profiled, Veranda, near Hua Hin. Sure, it looked nice and all, but I don’t see what Panton chairs arranged on a standard, if tasteful, deck have anything to do with a personal touch. Just money. -John Alderman