bibliostructures

The Addams Family and their customised hi-fi

 

Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.

Designing a system that does that is not an electrical engineering problem. It is a social engineering problem. The best social engineers are working today on consumer facing web services. They understand that there is enormous potential leverage in those services. The creators of these services recognize that services like theirs will ultimately disrupt the economics of many, if not most, parts of the global economy in much the same way that Craigslist collapsed the multi-billion dollar classified industry into a fabulously profitable multi-million dollar web service.

So that, it seems to me, is one more reason the flow of innovation has reversed.”

Photograph by August Sander

When I was writing for Blueprint magazine in New York in the early 1990’s, I talked to Yohji Yamamoto when he was opening his store in Soho. He showed me a well-worn book of photographs by August Sander and said that he was moved by the way that people would have one suit, or coat, that they would wear with pride and look after carefully for many years. The small mends and replaced buttons would tell the stories of its life. “I want to design something that’s already ten years old,” he said.

He was saddened by the rapacious novelty that goes with the fashion system, of things being instantly outdated. I think he was putting in place the idea of a “classics” collection, classic staples — white shirts, coats, etc. that people would want to replace with something exactly the same when theirs wore out.

The story about Muji in the New York Times mentions that Yohji Yamamoto’s business partner is an adviser to the company, and brings these ethics of Yohji’s into their clothing line:

Goichi Hayashi, who is Yohji Yamamoto’s business partner and advises Muji on its fashion collection on Yamamoto’s behalf, takes a similar position. His mission, he says, is to make clothing that ‘‘someone will wear until it falls apart, and then buy the same thing again” – like a gauzy white shirt or a basic blazer. He feels that Muji’s home items offer the same kind of integrity. ‘‘They look like they are not 100 percent finished, and that is very attractive to the design community. A wooden coffee table, for example, has the screws showing – even though it would be easy to hide them – but it looks good like that. It’s honest.”
Ultimately, Muji’s goal is to let customers relate to their surroundings through the products they use. ‘‘I think people are questioning whether special design is really necessary,” says Fukasawa. ‘‘Muji’s approach is to eliminate designed-ness from all products and provide reliable choices, so labeling the brand becomes unnecessary. Simple is not a style – it is a state of harmony.”

Muji foldable cardboard speakers

A story in the New York Times Style magazine about the Japanese store Muji:

 Muji rebelled against the more-is-more credo that Western luxury houses were greedily promoting in Asia, and made a name for itself by recycling and curtailing waste: a 1981 ad for canned salmon flakes, which utilized parts of the fish that tend to be discarded, urged foodies to ‘‘enjoy every edible part of the salmon, from head to tail!” (Take that, Fergus Henderson.)
In Japan, Muji currently sells Bread Crust Snacks – packets of chips made from what you trim off sandwiches – and Pie With Eggshells, which apparently has a lot of calcium and is good for you. Colorful socks and tank tops are made from excess yarn discarded during production of other garments; a cool, crinkly T-shirt is folded upon itself to create a perfect cube, eliminating the need for superfluous packaging. Even the more upscale items, like bicycles, home furnishings and an award-winning, wall-mounted CD player, flaunt a proudly minimalist aesthetic.
Muji’s frill-free philosophy seems particularly on-target now that the design world is veering toward understatement and familiar shapes instead of the ‘‘forward-thinking” (read: overdesigned) gizmos and doodads that we have gotten so used to lately. …
‘‘People tend to look for something new or radical,” says Naoto Fukasawa, who has been Muji’s design adviser since 2002. ‘‘But I don’t think these new items can replace others with history. The fact that things last through time is their strength and value.”
To prove his point, Fukasawa recently curated an exhibition titled ‘‘Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary” in collaboration with the designer Jasper Morrison. They displayed 210 everyday objects (a Seiko watch, a plain plastic bucket, a Bic lighter) whose main appeal, according to the supernormal, sensationally ordinary paperback that accompanied the show, is ‘‘the capacity to conceal its features until they become virtually invisible.” In other words, products whose design is so instinctive that it’s as if they had never been designed at all. Not surprising, several Muji classics (a calculator, an air filter and a kettle, among others) made the cut.

When I’m in meetings with people from my bank, or real estate agents, or fabricators who might make components for my bibliostructures I use the 60 Page Book and 1 Track CD package of the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! to provide a frame of reference. Now imagine this with a superior book-structure and no clumsy pocket with a cd tucked inside the back page, I say. There will be some kind of tag that a wireless mobile phone / music player recognises, that will be where the music will be.

The Lazarus package is a small wonder. There are Nick’s doodles of the words DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! that were the beginning point for the electric lightbulb sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. The transcript of a charming dialogue between Nick and the artists, the song’s lyrics reprinted from Nick’s notebook, a couple of photographs of Harry Houdini, doodles by Tim Noble and photographs of the circuitry for the light sculpture being bolted onto the backing board by Sue Webster. And in a coincidence that demonstrates our age’s passion for magic, Nick’s initial notes were scribbled on an envelope that is franked with a postmark that advertises the imminent release of Harry Potter stamps.

Nick’s musical works have quietly been helping to create the new ecological niche – the book / record hybrid – that I‘m working within. I think his first one was a book of tour photographs by Peter Milne packaged with the first Bad Seeds Live album about fourteen years ago. The European edition of the Murder Ballads album was something I played around with in Los Angeles in 1996, the year I started the bibliostructures business. The booklet had illustrations from a German children’s book, something like the Grimms Tales, and I blew the lyric booklet up to children’s picture book size, hand-coloured the illustrations and covered the book in a midnight blue cloth and embroidered the title on the spine. At the time it was just a doodle. I only ever made two copies, one for Nick and one for me. And mine got pulled apart to re-work some of its structural deficiencies.

I’m having to make up for lost ground, now, as I followed electronic paper onto a maddeningly slow evolutionary path. Last week at the library I browsed through the two volumes of Don Martin’s collected works for MAD Magazine. If he’d drawn the history of my bibliostructures business I would have been the caveman with his back turned to the road, slaving over a book with electrified parts that didn’t gather momentum because I’d designed square wheels for it, who, in the last frame, is drenched with mud and turns around to see an iphone racing along the muddy road on round wheels, while reading a book.

The earliest scrapbooks I made were very literal interpretations of the comb-bound documents that I used to have made up at Kinkos. I was mesmerised by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’s conversations (in the television series, The Power of Myth) and carried around a pocket paperback book of transcripts. It remains a vade mecun for me. I discovered the term a few days ago in the introduction that the paleontologist Niles Eldgridge wrote for the musings about the future paths human evolution might take, in the book Future Evolution by the geological scientist Peter Ward and the painter Alexis Rockman. It’s latin for “go with me” and refers to a guidebook or manual designed to be carried around and constantly referred to. The Everyman Library publishes poetry as vade mecun’s: the motto inside the compendiums of poetry is “Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.” I followed up references and wrote quotes from books into the scrapbooks, and pasted in New Yorker cartoons, and then suddenly realised one day, hearing Nick’s Let Love In album on public radio in Los Angeles, that his songs were populated with the same symbols Moyers and Campbell were talking about. He was making reference to mythology in the same way that they were, not to define a meaning for life but to enrich the experience of life. The value of mythology is in the nourishment these old stories continue to provide for us.

One of our most powerful new symbolic works is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. Nick and Warren Ellis have been writing the music for John Hillcoat’s movie adaptation of the novel. It takes place in a world whose environment and most animal species and humans have been destroyed by what seems to have been a series of nuclear blasts. But it’s also consistent with the description of the effects of the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs that Peter Ward writes about in Future Evolution. In the introduction Niles Eldridge writes: “I wonder if past cultural extinctions, where technologically advanced and complexly organized societies have disappeared even while their descendants have persisted, living simpler lives, might not also be a source of predicting the future. The current wave of human planetary disruption might cause, not our physical extinction so much as a loss of the “high culture,” – our knowledge – if we do overrun our Malthusian limits. Loss of topsoil, lack of access to fresh water, loss of fisheries, spread of famine, warfare and disease – all the usual apocalyptic visions, all duly acknowledged in these pages – may not drive our bodies extinct, but could very well play hob with our minds, our cultural memories, our knowledge.”

From the John Hillcoat movie, The Road

In an interview in San Francisco last week Nick talked about The Road: “There’s an interesting thing happening in films. There’s a whole rash of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and with each one they seem to be less science fiction and more just a kind of numb reality. And this particular film, The Road, is incredibly moving and it’s moving because it’s showing what happened afterwards, it’s a father and his son walking through this blasted landscape, and the man remembers life before this thing – you don’t even know what it was – and you see the world the way it is now, in all its colour, and everything’s just covered in ash in the film, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to know what we actually have and how we really are prepared to just fritter it away. It’s a most beautiful film not only because of this relationship between the father and the son but because the power this film has to say what we’re actually sacrificing, in the different things we’re pursuing in this world, we’re sacrificing colour.”

The boy is sweet and spiritual. In the face of this bleakness he fashions toys out of detritus and creates his own stories around them and longs for a wider experience of love and a community. The beauty and touching qualities of WALL-E the robot come from the traits he has in common with the boy from The Road. There is also an absence of colour in WALL-E. The earth is covered in rusted garbage WALL-E has compacted, and when we see the earth, as WALL-E and Eve are flying away from it, the once bright blue marble is completely brown. It’s a myth whose beauty doesn’t come from anything visual, it’s the deep inner beauty of an open heart.

But this week there was also a vote for deep, expansive music criticism with the awarding of a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ grant to Alex Ross. The MacArthur Foundation wrote: “With a finely tuned grasp of a full spectrum of styles, he places works by a broad variety of artists – from Mozart to Schoenberg to Bob Dylan – within a continuum and sets aside categories and classifications that impede the appreciation of works on their own terms. In each article, Ross strives to demonstrate how a specific piece of music, be it centuries or months old, conveys meaning and feeling in the present.”

Alex Ross is a grade school friend of the writer (and Outside.in founder) Steven Johnson, whose “long zoom” concept of moving between scales of experience from the universal down to local, microscopic detail (as when we zoom in and out with Google maps) is the conceptual tool I apply to everything now. In admiring Alex Ross’s book The Rest is Noise, a sudy of the twentieth century through its music, Steven Johnson wrote on his blog:

It’s the history of a certain related set of sounds — atonal, twelve-tonal, serial, dissonant, random — that were more or less nonexistent in Western musical culture circa 1900 that became, if not dominant, then at least ubiquitous by the end of the century — in classical compositions, Hollywood scores, indie rock, and countless other venues. In other words, it’s the story of the rise of a certain sonic appetite for noise that would have been unimaginable to the ears of the late 1800s but that is commonplace today, in both low and high culture and all the middlebrow realms between.

What I find so fascinating here is the way Alex tries to explain how those sounds came into being — by reaching out beyond the usual biographical explanations about rogue geniuses and rivalries between them, though he has plenty of great stories along those lines as well. In reaching for that explanation, Alex does in fact pull in much of the twentieth century: political upheaval, technological developments like the tape recorder, the tragicomic Hollywood migrations of the World War II era European intellectuals. He also dives down in several arresting passages into the neuropsychology of noise and harmony, explaining how the brain translates acoustic waveforms into such emotionally charged events.

About a third into the book, Alex has a telling line where he says: “The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force.” I think of The Rest Is Noise as an attempt to bright that force to light, and in bringing it to light, explain the way in which the force is actually composed of multiple intersecting elements, many of them working on different scales of cultural experience: from neurons to individual biographies to technological innovations to World Wars. This approach is one about which Alex and I — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — have been sharing ideas over the past decade. It’s the approach I used in explaining (with much less erudition) the forces behind the Sleeper Curve in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I’ve called it various things, including systemic criticism or “long zoom” thinking, but to really understand the model in action, your best bet is reading Alex’s book.

The New York Times quoted the president of the MacArthur Foundation, Jonathan F. Fanton, characterising this year’s grant winners as “people working on the very edge of discovery and people at the edge of a new synthesis.”

Nick Cave is in tune with the creative spirit of his age. The vital insight that comes from Toby Creswell’s examination of Nick’s Murder Ballads album in his Great Australian Albums television series is how it shows Nick’s process of synthesis, bringing together his scholarly perspective and value of tradition and his appetite for change and deep curiosity that’s shown in the way that the Bad Seeds often includes musicians who are at the leading edge of experimenting with the ideas and theories emerging in science, altering the concept of what instruments are, and how music functions in culture. There’s a section in The Rest Is Noise where Alex Ross talks about the outgoing head of the Los Angeles Symphony, Esa Pekka Salonen, being inspired by the German group, Einsturzende Neubaten, which is led by former Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld. I once saw a majestic concert by Einsturzende Neubauten in a Los Angeles club, where the band was dressed in black trousers and black turtlenecks, and played their ‘instruments’ – pulled out of city junkyards – with an elegance that gave the concert the gravity of a performance by a classical orchestra. Current Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos is drawn from the experimental New York scene that included Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sonic Youth and DNA, which Alex Ross relatesto the sonic experiments of different generations of musicians mostly in the classical world, from John Cage to Philip Glass. “When I was a young boy I worked in my father’s store where he sold records,” Philip Glass told the Sydney Morning Herald last week:

“I listened to a lot of music and liked nearly all of it.” He was exposed to Mozart and Schubert, but also to Hindemith and Bartok. There was jazz, popular dance music and later folk and rock. “So when I started playing the flute and classical music, you could also tell that I liked popular music. I never saw it as slumming.”

In a story in the New Yorker in 2004 Alex Ross prefaced a story about a conference connecting academics making popular music their area of study and writers drawn from the music press with an anecdote about Duke Ellington:

“Duke Ellington once had to field a barrage of questions from an Icelandic music student who was determined to penetrate to the heart of the genius of jazz. At one point, Ellington was asked whether he ever felt an affinity for the music of Bach, and, before answering, he made a show of unwrapping a pork chop that he had stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he said, taking a bite from the chop, “both write with individual performers in mind.” Richard O. Boyer captured the moment in a Profile entitled “The Hot Bach,” which appeared in this magazine in 1944. You can sense in that exquisitely timed pork-chop manoeuvre Ellington’s bemused response to the European notions of genius that were constantly being foisted on him. He said on another occasion, “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.” Jazz was a new language, and the critic would have to respond to it with a new poetry of praise.” Alex Ross’s essays are setting the foundations for a new poetry of praise.

While I’ve drawn intellectual inspiration from Steven Johnson’s writing what’s almost more valuable has been the example he’s shown that “a new poetry of praise” needs new publishing platforms and formats, too, that are in tune with the age. His early publishing experiments on the web anticipated the rich conversational format growing out of technological developments in taking comments on blogs and making them article streams in their own right, and now, with Outside.in, to turn the “long zoom” concept into a publishing platform guided by Google maps.

And I think my contribution to music journalism is through formats and platforms as well, creating better bibliostructures and more liquid and simpler digital additions to organic books.

Suzanne Vega recalls the completely charming and bizarre story of her life, music and recordings. In the New York Times

There’s a documentary about Grove Press, called “Obscene” that’s just been released: “The documentary has a literary rock score – songs by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith – and includes, in addition to the usual talking heads, some surprising archival footage.”

“The greatest joy that came out of my life in publishing was when ‘Tropic of Cancer’ went on trial in Chicago,” Mr. Rosset said. “The judge was a friend of my father’s, and at one point when the prosecutor accused me of just trying to make money, I took out my Henry Miller term paper from Swarthmore College and read from it. I remember leaving the courtroom and somehow getting lost going home. It was snowing. But I was so happy that I thought, ‘If I fall down and die right here, it will be fine.’ “

Mr. Rosset went on: “All my life I followed the things that I liked – people, things, books – and when things were offered to me, I published them. I never did anything I really didn’t like. I had no set plan, but on the other hand we sometimes found ourselves on a trail. For example, out of Beckett came Pinter, and Pinter was responsible for Mamet. It was like a baseball team – Mamet to Pinter to Beckett.”

Mr. Rosset sipped from his drink and smiled. “Should we have had more of a business plan?” he added. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.”

Marc Jacobs Grunge collection. Photo Steven Meisel

A couple of weeks ago the venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote about being open to investing in social networking enterprise applications but he hasn’t identified any. He was noticing that people wanted to use the services that they use in their private lives in a business setting. This came to mind as I’ve been researching the equipment I need to buy to make my bibliostructures business operational again. When I bought the Sony VAIO that was my computer in America the decision was driven mostly by the need to run the book-keeping software, Quickbooks. At the time Quickbooks existed either as a stripped down application for Apple, or didn’t run at all on an Apple operating system. It was at the time that DVD’s were new, and the VAIO became an ancillary home entertainment system as well as the accounting office. Those concerns are different now.

My aim is for cloud computing and my computing devices will be divining rods pulling my data out of the ether. The bibliostructures I’m building are meant to have a symbiotic relationship with a Walkman-like device, and so far the ipod touch / iphone is the most evolved creature in this genus. So everything pointed to an investment in an Apple computer. The specific business software I need isn’t dependent on running through the Apple operating system, and I can run the open source browser Firefox, and Google’s Chrome browser along with Apple’s Safari.

I had modest ambitions for my iphone.

-           To read the New York Times online (with pictures) in a more elegant form than my Nokia iphone presented it to me. And to be able to read the blogs that open up whole worlds to me: Fred Wilson’s venture capital blog, Bldgblog, William Gibson’s blog, and Steven Johnson’s blog.

-           To be able to access my own blogs, which I use as business journals and records of my research, and to be able to post directly to them from my phone.

-           To listen to the radio on my phone.

-           To be able to use I-Tunes, and the music streaming functions of Last.fm and myspace to demonstrate what my books might be able to do with music embedded in them.

-           To be able to search for information about materials and suppliers while I’m in meetings, and to save my searches.

-           A more complex calculator to do engineering calculations when I’m making structural and materials decisions about my bibliostructures. (The Iphone’s calculator is a scientific calculator when it’s held in landscape mode).

-           To send e-mail from my phone.

-           To be able to open the PDF files in email.

-           To keep a running tally of my expenses in Google documents.

-           To find addresses and draw maps.

Two days after I got my iphone I’m doing all of those things. If I’m able to find these devices and services I may never need to buy a large computer again.

-           An infrared keyboard that projects the outline of a keyboard onto any surface and turns it into a keyboard.

-           A voice record function that I can use for interviews, that ports to a programme that transcribes the conversations into text.

-           A piece of hardware that looks like a painting that converts into a screen, that the iphone plugs into when I want to watch videos on a larger screen.

-           An audio dock with an amplifier that turns my iphone into an audio system, with wireless speakers.

-           An internet radio.

Which brings me back to Microsoft’s current marketing campaigns. I haven’t seen any of the ads, I’ve read about them. In one Microsoft addresses the nerdy “pc guy” that Apple spoofs then explodes the stereotype. Microsoft customers are incredibly diverse they assert. I believe this, but I wonder if that diversity comes from two factors that are no longer as important as they once were. That people had to buy PC’s to run business applications. And that the original Microsoft customer came to computers through being introduced to them in the office rather than at home. With a new generation that came to the computer through instant messaging and games as children, they are socially comfortable with the computer in a way that they want to bring into their businesses. As Fred Wilson is finding they may not look at business technology solutions from business back into life but vice versa.

I think it was in the documentary No Maps For These Territories that William Gibson made the observation that when he didn’t have his watch with him, or his watch had stopped, and he looked at his mobile phone to find the time, he realized that watches were now obsolete, something sentimental, just jewellery. I scanned a turgid academic essay on steampunk whose thesis was that as computers became obsolete and shrank into phones and other ephemeral devices that people become nostalgic for the machinery, and something to material to hold onto and nostalgic for moving parts and machinery that they can see working.

I thought about this today when I picked up a brochure for Sony’s Executive Mobile VAIO Z. “High craftsmanship: Clearly evident in the keyboard panel shaped from a single sheet of aluminium. … this exquisite aluminium design was created in Subame City, Niigata, a well-known industrial city in Japan widely recognized for its excellent craftsmanship.” There’s a portrait of the fan, which looks to be cast from some heavy industrial steel, with a copper detail, and the shot of the mother board could be an aerial view of a city seen from way up in space. The covers and accessories look like something from a Montblanc catalogue: a sleeve that resembles a leather writing case,

Branding is as mysterious to me these days as a foreign movie without subtitles. My interest in Sony ended with Nobuyuki Idei stepping down as CEO, and I don’t have an emotional feeling about Apple or Microsoft. Apple equipment does everything I need it to, simply, and I can hold onto my Compaq and strip it and re-build it with an open source system a little further down the track. I don’t have a loathing of Microsoft, I’m just weary. Since I uninstalled everything except for itunes and the word processing software my Compaq starts up instantly, and writing on computer is a pleasurable activity again. The ‘hawt post’ when I logged into wordpress yesterday was from a woman who wrote about moving to Apple equipment for the same reasons I am, to have the machine start instantly, and to get around problems with the internet connection. She’d upgraded from Windows XP to Vista which exacerbated her problems twofold. She likened being a Windows user to being someone who is terminally ill, there’s no longer a frame of reference for robust health, so you become grateful for small things, being able to connect to the internet for ten minutes without it crashing.

I read today about the woman who’s been running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation moving to a post at the Smithsonian Museum. She doesn’t feel that she’s leaving the foundation in the lurch because Bill is making it his primary focus now that he’s retired from running Microsoft. He’s turning his vast fortune towards saving the world, curing AIDS in Africa, funding biofuels research. On the other hand, for all of Apple’s soaring rhetoric: the logo alluding to the bite Eve took from the apple in the Garden of Eden, the identification with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi, and the Natural Geographic imagery bundled with the iphone / ipod touch, Apple doesn’t have a great environmental record and Steve Jobs is not known for philanthropy. Perhaps we’ve reached a place where identification with a brand or a corporation is irrelevant, and the smartest businessperson might be Marc Jacobs, whose sense of reverence for art and irreverence for the pious exclusivity of high fashion have made his designs for Louis Vuitton and his own label so functionally beautiful and fascinating.

I had a bldgblogian-like flash of insight when I read about the Obama street art posters that are visually unforgettable. I’ve been inspired by Outside.in’s new storyspace feature, a way for writers to present their story archives as points on a dynamic map. What about taking that one step further, instead of just indexing blogs and twitter messages and online newspaper articles, what about geotagging graffiti and op-art so that the city becomes a giant publication?

This article today, in Wired, about the street art of the Obama campaign is fascinating.

Before going into production on his first Obama-inspired print, Fairey, a fan of the senator after seeing him speak in 2004, was careful to seek approval from the campaign. “I didn’t want anything I did to be a liability or an unwanted endorsement,” said Fairey. “We had the unofficial wink and nod to do an image.”

Fairey looked to Alberto Korda’s famed shot of revolutionary Che Guevara to create his red-white-and-blue print of Obama with the slogan “Progress.” When the first edition of posters went on sale in January, the limited run sold out in minutes.

Schiller said he wasn’t surprised the Obama posters were a runaway success.

“Shepard captures an energy in his work that is extremely powerful and unexpected,” said Schiller. “When you apply it to a political campaign, the results are like magic. There’s nothing like it.”

After the success of the “Progress” print, Fairey says he was contacted by the Obama campaign to create an officially sanctioned poster in the same style — only this time with a campaign-approved photo and slogan. The new artwork featured the now-famous “Hope” slogan.

“They said ‘progress’ sounded too Marxist,” laughed Fairey, who estimated the profits from his Obama-themed merchandise topped out around $400,000. He says he donated the entire amount to the campaign.

“I have not kept one dime from the Obama [posters],” Fairey said. “I’m at a surplus; I’ve given the max amount to the campaign. Now we’re just buying billboards and postering.”

Fairey’s transition from rogue street artist to art professional hasn’t diminished his radical edge. He recently added an arrest to his already sizable rap sheet, this time for papering Denver with Obama- and Obey-themed stickers and fliers during the Democratic National Convention.

There’s a unmistakable note of glee in his voice when he describes “bombing” — or shimmying up drain pipes and scaffolding to illegally paste posters — in nearly 40 public spots around San Francisco.

“When you walk down the street and see something in a crazy spot, there’s something powerful about that,” said Fairey. “The street will always be an important part of getting art out there for me.”

“The Plastic Logic reader, left, has a screen the size of a sheet of paper for a copy machine. Center, Sony’s eReader; right, Amazon.com’s Kindle. The Plastic Logic device, which is yet to be named, can be updated wirelessly and store hundreds of pages of documents.” NY Times photo caption

One of the bibliostructures I’m making is a spiral bound book with a seriously strong spiral (a metal compression spring) and pages that snap in and out — probably using the Japanese environmentally sound polymer paper, Yupo, which doesn’t tear — and in my dreams a plastic logic reader is the front or back cover of this electronic and organic notebook.

Plastic Logic will introduce publicly on Monday its version of an electronic newspaper reader: a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look – but not the feel – of a printed newspaper.The device, which is unnamed, uses the same technology as the Sony eReader and Amazon.com’s Kindle, a highly legible black-and-white display developed by the E Ink Corporation. While both of those devices are intended primarily as book readers, Plastic Logic’s device, which will be shown at an emerging technology trade show in San Diego, has a screen more than twice as large. The size of a piece of copier paper, it can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.

New York Times

Hybrid electronic and organic publications are already happening. The New York Times also reported that Esquire is using electronic ink for a special cover for its 75th anniversary edition.

Although readers keep shifting to the Internet, Esquire magazine’s editor is sure print isn’t dying, and he aims to prove it Monday by unveiling a 75th-anniversary issue with a cover that features electronic ink.

”For the last couple of years I’ve been in search of ways to do something that shows that print is a particularly vital product,” said Esquire magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Granger. ”I really do think that print is the most exciting and rewarding medium there is.”

A 10-square-inch display on the cover of Esquire’s October 2008 anniversary issue flashes the theme ”The 21st Century Begins Now” with a collage of illuminated images. On the inside cover, a two-page spread advertising the new Ford Flex Crossover features a second 10-square-inch display with shifting colors to illustrate the car in motion at night.

”I treasure the magazine experience of, like, going into this little world that’s been prepared for you by somebody else,” Granger said. ”It’s not like the Web, where there’s just this constant cacophony of noise.”

”It was a very difficult process because at every step of the way, nobody had ever done this before,” Granger said.

E-paper, Granger said, can incorporate digital technology into magazines without making them unrecognizable. ”It preserves that experience but then it adds a little something else,” he said, ”a little incentive to spend even more time with your magazine.”

Granger predicted that Esquire will someday include e-paper displays linked to a cellular network or radio frequency, which will allow the magazine to add updates to stories during the month an issue is on sale.

”It could be a year away, it could be three years away, but it will happen soon,” Granger said.

E Ink has an exclusive agreement with Hearst through June. Granger said he hopes to use an electronic paper display again in the magazine during the first half of 2009.

”We’re already in meetings about what we can do at Esquire and throughout the Hearst magazine division to really take it to the next level and show what this technology is capable of,” Granger said. Hearst Magazines’ titles also include Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and SmartMoney.

Granger believes e-paper is the technology to finally usher magazines into the 21st century.

I was so caught up in admiration of Sony for so many years that I didn’t pay close attention to Apple. There was an Bondi Blue imac in my house in Los Angeles, that true to Apple’s assertions, was so simple to use that a ten year old child set it up and showed me how to use it. It made the internet an ordinary fact of life, and goofy, like the plastic Philippe Starck colanders at Target that looked like upturned Viking’s helmets. We also had a Sony VAIO. I was dazzled by the Apple Think Different campaign, something smarter and purer than celebrity endorsement. Admiring Picasso, Martin Luther King Jr, Einstein, Jim Henson, and Amelia Erheart (they’re just the ones I can recall off the top of my head), made Apple seem like it was reaching for something ethically substantial, if not spiritual. The ipod revolution passed me by. I was waiting for a music streaming plan and feared exactly what has happened, that my music library would be trapped in a dead format.

I thought about stripping my current computer system and loading in an open source operating system and browser, and I may well do that, but I’m a theoretical rather than a hands-on nerd, and it was all just beyond me, and fixing and upgrading this computer takes me, financially, a long way towards the cost of a Mac book, so I may as well purchase that as a capital expense for my business. I haven’t seen any recent Apple ads, but I’ve spent a lot of time at the Apple store and had fantastic service. I haven’t seen the Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft ads but I doubt that I’d be swayed by them. I came to Seinfeld late, seeing the shows well after the tv show had stopped airing, and while I enjoy and admire it, the irony seems to belong to a time that’s passed. I think that Apple understands the times we’re living in better than Microsoft. There’s nothing ironic about Apple’s products: with cloud computing, rumours of a music streaming plan, and much of the innovation being shared with the people creating applications for the Apple store, the Apple itself seems something lean and streamlined.