Life is weirder, better and more successful than a business plan can predict
Suzanne Vega recalls the completely charming and bizarre story of her life, music and recordings. In the New York Times
Should I tear up the business plan?
- Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, in 1967, in a scene from the documentary “Obscene.”
I’m working on my business plan to present to someone from my bank very soon. The outline encourages studying businesses one admires according to their marketing strategies. All the businesses I admire lead with their heart, provide something of substance and lasting value (not a sticker on the box that says “collectors item”). I suspect that if any of these risk takers, that have endured, had quanitified their insights and inspiration with a set of numbers and projections, a bank assessor would probably have said, “are you nuts?”. I admire Grove Press. I don’t know if they publish hardbacks. I’ve only ever seen monochromatically cool paperbacks, in that democratic deluxe model invented by Penguin. They’re cerebral books, sexy and brave. The New York Times today has a story about a new documentary about the Grove Press’s publishers.
“In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch,” writes the New York Times today. “The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.”
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.”
My Office is an iphone
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.
the city as a bibliostructure
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 Dream Lives
“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.
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.
A computer about nothing
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.
The Voluptuousness of Seriousness
Painting by Peter O’Doherty
In the last couple of weeks, as banks have failed around the world and the stock-market has sunk, I’ve been setting up the foundations of my business. I opened a business bank account but the banker who filled out the form made a spelling error that means the card has to be re-made. I picked up an armload of brochures from the taxation office so that I could set up my record keeping files (which I’m doing in Google docs spreadsheets). And I’ve been researching the capital investments I need to make. When I returned to Australia from America I bought a computer and the first 3G phone I saw without thinking the purchases through. I had a Sony VAIO in Los Angeles and bought the nearest thing to it (in appearance) that I found, a Compaq Presario. And I took an instant dislike to the Nokia phone for entirely superficial, but lasting, reasons. Both devices are on the wrong side of an evolutionary divide. Small of memory, slow of operation, limited of function, and there’s no way to lift them to a higher order of machine. I grew to loathe Windows: my music library is marooned within an old version of itunes. I read many horror stories about upgrading to itunes 7 with Windows XP, and now even that’s gone, given way to itunes 8. No wi-fi modem was bundled with the machine, so I can’t easily work with Google docs and am reliant on the woeful word processing program provided by Windows that isn’t even comfortably compatible with Microsoft word, and the virus protection program became a voracious memory hog and made the machine function in slow motion. Now the disc drive in the computer is malfunctioning so I can’t watch the handful of NTSC DVD’s I own (some of them small dance films made by my friend Dana Gingras’s new dance company Animals of Distinction.)
I had appointments at the Genius Bar and with a Personal Shopper at the Apple Store in Sydney to look toward buying an Apple computer system. There are parts of Sydney that remind me of New York, or perhaps, since I lived in Sydney first, Sydney anticipated New York for me. The new Apple store on George Street, which is a three storey rectangular glass box, reminds me of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as much in the experience of going there as the appearance. Two flights of glass stairs give the appearance of floating in space and unadorned metal walls and surfaces are the kind I envisaged for my bibliostructures. The Genius Bar feels like a real bar: I keep expecting to be offered a martini made from an exquisite Japanese rice vodka. The serious elegance reminds me of the aesthetics of the NeXT computers, which was exactly the kind of computer that Mies van der Rohe would have created. Just about everything I admire these days is seriously elegant and complex, but subtle: Nick Cave’s songs, William Gibson’s novels of the twenty first century, Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron’s retooling of Interview magazine, Peter O’Doherty and Alexis Rockman’s paintings, Al Gore’s reinvention of the stewardship provided by a public figure.
There’s something Leonard Cohen said in the New York Times in 1996 that keeps coming to mind:
“How do we produce work that touches the heart? We don’t want to live a frivolous life, we don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness has a kind of voluptuous aspect to it. It is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight.”
Trying to decide what computer to buy made my head spin. By default the iphone I bought yesterday has become my primary computer. I didn’t intend to get an iphone. I didn’t think I made so many voice calls, but the preparatory work for my business had seen me make what is usually a month’s worth of calls in a day. And I need to be able to search for information on the fly: the Nokia just didn’t present websites well, and I couldn’t open PDF documents in my emails. The best upgrade solution from my phone service was their iphone pagackage: So I now have a 3G 16gigabyte black iphone. The network at my service provider’s store was down so I went to the Apple store (one block away) and they activated my phone for me and showed me how to use it. A salesman (although I think they have some more benign title like customer care operative, or team member) imported my contacts for me, set up the synchronising of my e-mail with my phone, and showed me how to set the alarms and all of the simple functions. Everything felt right, and inevitable. I suddenly understood why the Windows system and the Nokia’s functioning bothered me: it was all tricksy, trying obvious things with the technology to spin out sales, and larding up the systems with every feature imaginable, hoping that a few shiny trinkets would capture our attention , without linking them to how human activities were changing through technological developments. There’s still a purity about the Apple vision, their machines fulfil one of the functions of mythology, that the information that we take in ties what’s eternal about the stages of human life, to our times.
image from Sony Qualia video
The Sony Walkman was the first piece of technology that captivated me: it was unprecedented and perfectly prescient. The end of the great age of Sony fascinates me, the development of a robot dog to be “man’s next friend”, the linking of computing and gaming, and the flawed Qualia concept are fascinating. Qualia seemed to come out of nowhere at the time. I think the line was launched in 1999. Like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel imagining that Charles Babbage succeeded in creating his computer, The Difference Engine, the products anticipated steampunk. They were phenomenally expensive and housed in finely tooled boxes made of wood and metal, and sold in rarefied stores that had their own perfume pumped through the air. (Although that’s not as unusual as I once thought it was, many companies “brand” the air their customers breathe.) At the time I found it bizarre and eccentric that Sony was creating tools for contemporary Charles Darwin’s and Captain Cook’s, enlightened scholarly generalists and explorers with a spiritual streak.
Qualia is a term from neuroscience — I’ll need to look it up again to properly describe it — that relates to how we experience experiences. The dictionary in this woeful word processor gives this definition: “essential quality. a property of something, for example, its feel or appearance, rather than the thing itself.” I thought that Sony was trying to suggest that their products allowed people to create and store experiences that turned the home entertainment environment into an equivalent of natural history museums and private cabinets of curiosity. The product literature mentioned leaves in rainforests and fine wine. Now it’s evident that Sony was just early, that Nobuyki Idei was a seer: the steampunk aesthetic has now taken complete hold. I went to pick up my mail at the post office in Potts Point yesterday and stopped for coffee at Toby’s estate, organic coffee, organic soy milk, in a French style bowl. And I saw a sign for what I thought was a real estate agent and followed it to a store tucked behind a parking lot that mixed minimally ornate Edwardian-seeming estate jewellery and diminutive antiques, with pure fibre sensual clothing: plain cashmere and silk jersey, and haute-simple baby toys and archly plain ceramic mugs and bowls and plates. There were also artworks: butterflies laid out on paper, in glass boxes. The customers of this store would have naturally gravitated, now, I think, to Sony’s Qualia range of electronics.
Left: Apple iphone wallpaper
There’s a Qualia-quality, sweeter, more democratic and warmer, in the Apple products. I’m almost more taken with the quality of the packaging than the phone itself. A black box that feels like cashmere and matte black dividers in the box: if it weren’t opaque it could be a display case at a natural history museum. The wallpapers loaded into the phone are classic pre-modern paintings — the Mona Lisa, a Cezanne still life, a Degas, Van Gogh’s Starry Night — alongside images that could have come from National Geographic (a lotus flower, peacock‘s fan of feathers, section of a rainforest plant, autumn trees, a frog, a monarch butterfly,), and earthrise, the photograph taken looking back at earth from the moon’s orbit, by the Apollo 8 astronauts, that Joseph Campbell believed infinitely expanded the horizon for mythology. The ringtones are all drawn from life, snatches of oral history: machines (motorcycle, an alarm, pinball, robots), animals (dogs, ducks, crickets) and pure, generic music (blues, harp, xylophone, piano riff). These aren’t abstractions and metaphors but field recordings by made by the computer out in the world.
I reinvent steampunk
Yesterday I visited a metalworking shop in the inner city Sydney suburb of St Peters. My new bibliostructures are vastly different from those I made during the L.A. period. I want them to be snapped together from pre-fabricated parts and I don’t want to use any glue at all. I had a vision of a book with a metal spine and covers that’s inspired by a “floating” steel table by Junya Ishigami. I want one of these tables for the warehouse space I’m looking for. It’s extravegantly long — perhaps as long as three regular tables — and thin, merely millimetres. It looks like a sheet of steel paper levitating at table height. It’s exhilarating, like a magic trick.
I’ve been reading a lot about magic lately. Nick Cave’s albums are bibliographies as well as musical works for me and the latest Bad Seeds album has led me to the Robert Fagles 1996 translation of the Odyssey as well as the biography of Harry Houdini by Larry Sloman that the song DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! was inspired by. At the Kings Cross library I found a book called The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects by Norman Klein.
“In 1993 I visited the Luxor in Vegas soon after it opened. Luxor was billed as “the first pyramid in 2,600 years.” While I leaned at the entry, a chunk of the front wall broke off in my hand. It was weightless, made of stucco, chicken wire and Styrofoam. For years, I kept my chunk of the Luxor on a shelf near my computer, beside a piece of the Berlin Wall; next to broken pottery shards from Armageddon (I had found them in a parking lot in Israel, at Megiddo, the spot where Revelations promises the world will end); and finally, near some tattered editions of pulp novels from the fifties (urban ruin as special effects).
The metalworking shop could have belonged to one of William Gibson’s gomi non sensei. The firm specialises in making metal furniture for architects. There were curlicued gates and panels being sanded and polished by the front door. Everything in the shop has an intense patina: drill bits are stored in ancient powder-coated tins. Sheets of various metals are propped up against the walls, hinges are sitting haphazardly on shelves. Arcane tools are fanned out on the tables. At one point a fine down of dust sank through the air until the worker opened the back door to let the air circulate.
From Steampunk magazine.com
The metalworker looked at my sketches and gave me specifications: the side of the spine will need to be about 4mm to allow the hinges to hold when they are drilled in. I’ll need a plate with three holes if I’m to pin the pin the signatures inside the spine, and I’ll have to have some way of reinforcing the edge of the covers that the hinges screw into. The thinnest metals and aluminium that’s standard won’t hold up to the kind of wear and tear I want to put a book through, and the surface will look ruined and beat up rather than charmingly weathered. So we discussed softer metals that are easier to work with and show the marks of aging and use more attractively. I came out of the meeting with a list of brass and copper crescent mouldings and butt-hinges to acquire to make test models with. It struck me that I no longer have something coolly futuristic with a reverent nod to modernism but something Victorian, utterly steampunk. A couple of months ago I read an article about steampunks in the New York Times. The protagonist dresses in Victorian suits with tall top hats and has had an articulated brass casing made for his ipod. In a roundabout way I’ve re-invented that brass encased ipod.
Hanging Out My Shingle Again
How High The Moon
I declared my bibliostructures business officially reopen for business last Tuesday. For the last month I’ve been at the State Library of New South Wales looking at modern architecture and design books for reference points. Sketching the hinges on the Barcelona Chair and Shiro Kuramata’s wire mesh club chair, How High The Moon. I’ve been copying down specifications for advanced alloys: metals that bounce like rubber, light emitting concrete. My clients and collaborators are musicians and dancers and roboticists. Music is a large component of the books and I’m trying to figure out (with the help of the i-phone I acquired this afternoon) how to place an electronic tag on the paper that an i-phone might read in i-tunes. Serendipitously last.fm and myspace are making advances towards music streaming, and the intelligent playlist feature in the new edition of i-tunes is a useful step towards more complex and subtle ways to align and relate music beyond the current simple musical taxonomies.
The first phase of the business ran for nearly ten years in Los Angeles towards the end of the twentieth century. My roboticist friend Ken Goldberg described the books I was making as “bibliostructures”. I felt way out in orbit, shooting off towards the future. My inspirations only went as far back as Mies van der Rohe. My books had slender spines that owed more to the Golden Gate Bridge than the Victorian corsetry of the bookbinding craft. Then I spun off on a tangent, I was chasing what I will now admit was an impossible dream, the paperback electronic book. Just as Penguins had transformed the book publishing world with cheap, smartly designed paperbacks I wanted to create simple, cheap electronic books. Computers were doing increasingly wondrous things: we take Google maps for granted without stopping to be amazed that we have the navigational devices for NASA’s moon missions in our phones. But computers never mastered what I imagined should have been the simplest task of all, still text on many paper-like flexible screens bound together as a regular book would be.
I wandered away from journalism for a time as well. I managed a landscape design business. I taught myself to cook (rearranging the covalent bonds in food molecules) well enough to construct canapés at a few catering firms where the food is taken seriously. And I followed, again, what had been the intense interests of my childhood: natural history and cosmology. Discovering Alexis Rockman’s paintings has been one of my greatest joys so far in the twenty first century. And Carnivorous Nights, the story of his trip through Tasmania with Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson, in thrall to the thylacine, is one of my favourite books. And I’ve been methodically reading all of the books of the paleontologist, explorer and biologist, Tim Flannery. I moved to Sydney last year and came out of hibernation to discover that natural history is everywhere: books are being written in giddy admiration of Charles Darwin. The Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) is being cloned. Desperate measures are being taken to save the Tasmanian devil. Steampunk is the trend du jour. And the great media dinosaurs are facing extinction.
sharp detail
Photograph by Chester Higgins Jr.
Put the cylinder into the slot, and the power comes on. Take out the cylinder on your way out, and the power goes off.
SEAN MacPHERSON, the New York hotelier, has been to Europe dozens of times. And he knows that across the Continent, many hotel rooms have master switches that help reduce power use.Usually, a guest inserts a card into a slot when entering the room to turn on the electricity. Removing the card (which doubles as the room key) on the way out the door shuts off the power….
At the Jane, the master switches are not controlled by key cards, which Mr. MacPherson said “seem impersonal and corporate.”“We wanted to do it in a more stylish way,” he added.
So Mr. MacPherson had a metal shop make small brass cylinders, which he attached to each of the Jane’s key chains. Place the cylinder into a slot near the door to your room, and the power goes on. Pull the cylinder out, and it goes off. Mr. MacPherson’s team rigged the switches, he said, from standard electrical parts.
As recently as two years ago, he said, guests might have been put off by the enforced conservation. Now, Mr. MacPherson said: “The world has shifted. If you do the right thing, people pick up on it.”
The New York Times. August 3. 2008
