arik.org

20 Years Ago I Saw Pink Floyd In France

2008-06-08T19:24:00.003-04:00

I spent the summer of 1988 in France, and one of the highlights was seeing Pink Floyd at the Stade Municipale in Grenoble. All these years later I've searched high and low for a recording of that show, and I know one exists because someone created cover art that is available for download, but no torrent containing the audio for downloading. But I did just find this clip on YouTube of the first few minutes of the show. Here the band is playing "Run Like Hell," from "The Wall." And somewhere in that audience is a 17-year old me.

The final act of the show was "Comfortably Numb" and I found a video that was making the rounds that year and was shot on the same tour. I remember a very bright orb emerging from the stage, and as it rotated it opened up into a star-like shape and got only brighter. You can see it here, but it doesn't look very bright. Still and all, it was a great show.

The View From Belvedere Castle

2008-05-07T19:42:00.001-04:00

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

Creativity In An Age Of Imbecility

2008-04-19T20:29:00.028-04:00

When I was a boy, I was often asked by adults and occasionally by other children what I wanted to be when I “grow up.” My answer shifted over the years. There was the fireman phase, the paramedic phase, the policeman phase, the pilot and astronaut phase. Among my playmates I knew kids who wanted to be mechanics, gas station attendants, doctors, veterinarians and aeronautical engineers. Now all anyone wants is to be famous.

Now there's a collective mania about fame and the Internet. Build a blog, the thinking goes, and by self-indulgently examining the unremarkable minutiae of daily life or creating contrived situations in order to document them for the imagined amusement of others, and you too can be famous.

By one estimate, the number of people writing blogs, sharing photos and video streams, and producing other forms of so-called user-generated content was 77 million in the U.S. last year and will grow to 108 million by 2012 or roughly a third of the population. That's a lot of useless junk that any ignorant wretch can push out to the Web with minimal effort.

Contrast this with Maggie's experience in producing Maggie's Place during 2004. (Images that link to her section of this site are sprinkled throughout this post.) Blogging itself was still new. Blogging with video and audio was all but unheard of. When the conventional wisdom on the Web said that one doesn't make the user scroll, she wanted one long scroll, not unlike what you find on the pages of certain popular social networking sites these days. Before video was freely and easily embeddable (YouTube and the like didn't exist yet) she wanted video directly on the page. Hence the embedded Quicktime files. When she wanted not only embedded audio, but user-controllable audio embedded in specific places throughout the page, we lucked into Hipcast, and I learned about the IFRAME tag. Her artistic vision for what she wanted to execute predated much of what is now de rigeur on the Web.

Digital cameras that use computer chips to produce a perfect picture with every click of the shutter have turned day-to-day photography on its ear, turning anyone who in the age of film would take the occasional red-eyed ill-focused snapshot into people who not only take lots pictures, but who are willing to publish them for all the world to see on services like Flickr and Picasa. The removal film and paper from the photographic paradigm has had an unintended effect: There are no limits to how many pictures you can take, and few limits on how many you can store. All the more to share photographic evidence of every vulgar waking moment within a Flickr stream.

This rise of the faux-creative class is cultural catastrophe that is cheapening the value of the truly creative. The barriers to entry are as low as they’ve ever been. Anyone with a Wordpress account can be a “writer.” Anyone with a Lulu account can become a “published author.” Substitute camera and Photoshop seat and you have “photographer.” A Flip video camera and a Vimeo account makes you a “filmmaker.”

How might Picasso, Jackson Pollack, or Richard Avedon or Miles Davis have fared in this age where every child is told by their parents that they’re talented, and every high school stoner who picks up a guitar is instantly branded a musician? I fear that today they’d be drowned out by the rabble of the faux-creatives, the cultural curse of the imbecilic, fame-obsessed, Internet age.

I say this all having watched my own in-house artistic genius (pictured) energetically create an enormous and brilliant body of work. A year before widely available Flash tools permitted anyone to embed video and audio within a blog post, she innovated her own multi-element approach to the blogging medium, forsaking text that at the time of its conception in late 2003 and early 2004, when blogging was largely experimental and text-driven with some photos, she pioneered an approach what would in time become the norm, well before the means were widely available to the masses.

The result is a series of intensely personal essays that combine photographs, video and music in a manner that today would be expected on any one of billions of sites, but in 2004 was both technically difficult for a Web layperson like myself to carry out, but also in its conception fundamentally different from what was being done at the time. In essence she envisioned then what everyone else is doing now. Her motivation was neither fame nor money, but to give people a chance to enjoy her art. Fame found her.

Where I'll Be Friday Night

2008-03-30T17:28:00.009-04:00

It's been more than a fracking year, but this Friday the wait will pay off. I'll be parked in front of a TV set watching the opening of Season Four of Battlestar Galactica. I've not written about it here before, but it is in my estimation, the best thing ever put in television, easily outdoing everything that has come before it in the science fiction genre, and a substantial portion of everything else. For once a show that happens to have to be set in space has been created under the assumption that it can and will be enjoyed by adults of higher than average intelligence.

There are no silly pseudo-scientific solutions to the problems faced by the characters, no last-minute inventions based on theoretical particle or temporal physics. It is instead a basic human drama set in a time of catastrophic events, not so unlike what we've come to experience and imagine to be plausible in our own reality, or perhaps in the reality that has been visited upon others. In one sequence of episodes, a planet settled by the human protagonists is occupied by the antagonistic, genocidal Cylons, leading the humans to struggle with the idea of, and to ultimately carry out suicide bombings as a means of resistance.

The plot arc of the first three of four planned seasons have covered topics ripped from the streams of cultural and political consciousness: Stolen elections, war crimes, trust, marriage, family, and a peculiarly thoughtful twist on the old boilerplate of science fiction television, what constitutes being human.

Season three climaxes as four core characters discover suddenly that they are actually not humans as they’ve long assumed but Cylon sleeper agents of unknown purpose, it made my very skin crawl. After hating Cylons all their lives, they suddenly are Cylon robots made to appear and act human. The philosophical implications for the current political culture are staggering. When terrorists are the ultimate villains, what happens when those who fight terrorism are viewed through other eyes as terrorists themselves? Down becomes up; heroes, villains, and so on. The moral clarity through which one might wish to see the vital polemic struggles of the day are oddly clarified because there are no right answers. Show runner Ron Moore constantly asks the simple question What would real people do in the given situation? Answer: The best they can, which often isn't enough.

It has been criticized as being a liberal-motivated allegory about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, yet reaches no firm conclusions, leaving the messy moral ambiguity of it all unresolved. Eventually humanity escapes its occupiers in an impressive and complex military operation so richly imagined by the show’s writers and so masterfully filmed in a combination of live-action and CGI special effects that it looks as though it could have been taken from combat footage on CNN.

Battlestar thankfully lacks the stupidity that so often infects nearly all television drama, but is instead played straight by a powerful ensemble led by Mary McDonnell who will for the remainder of her career be best remembered by the honorific “Madame President.” Her ruthless portrayal of the cancer-stricken President Roslin, head of the 50,000-odd survivors of a human population that once numbered in the tens of billions has been daring. It is jarring, when a female head of state, who can’t help but be compared to the real-world counterpart who would be president of our own republic, it is jarring when she orders the summary execution of an enemy agent. Edward James Olmos as the worn-out warrior Admiral William Adama is the opposite of the moralistic philosopher of Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard. He’s instead a soft-spoken leader who not only doesn’t have all the answers, but when pressed isn’t above blatantly lying to motivate the people he leads.

The show is a remake of a forgettable 1970s TV travesty, and the title still tends to trigger memories of Lorne Greene as Bonanza’s Ben Cartwright transplanted to spaceship. The unfortunate circumstance of its title tends to color people’s reaction when I tell them the title of my favorite show. There must always be an explanation. This show is nothing like the original, except in the most basic of plot premise elements: The remainder of humanity stuck on spaceships looking for a planet called Earth they know of only through myths and legends. Eventually they’ll get here. What they’ll find when they do – they may arrive on Earth during the time of the dinosaurs, or in the wake of a latent environmental collapse – is the question that Battlestar Galactica fans like myself will be pondering now through over the course of the next fracking year.

A great start. The car

2008-01-14T06:29:00.003-05:00

A great start.

The car just had a flat. Luckily we're on the Triboro Bridge at the toll booth. The people are helping.

Yeah, Sure. I'm Getting Out Of Here On Monday.

2008-01-13T22:53:00.002-05:00

This is what the satellite pictures show of the Northeast tonight. In a few hours I'm expected to board a JetBlue flight to San Francisco for MacWorld. Given the image at right, what are the chances that I make it? Pretty poor. I spent the better part of the evening calling all over the city for a car service that wasn't booked solid. (Who knew lousy weather prompts people who would otherwise take the subway to work suddenly think it makes sense to spring for a car service? I certainly didn't.) In any event, I'm expecting Monday is going to be a one-of-a-kind travel adventure, fraught with long lines, impatient waits on the runway, and the kind of fun and games that only JFK International can deliver when the weather goes to Hell. To keep it fun and interesting (for myself at least) I'll be blogging via Blackberry along the way. Stay tuned. My car arrives in only a few hours!

Scrabulous, Game Six

2007-12-23T15:06:00.003-05:00

I don't do much on Facebook, but I've become addicted to playing Scrabulous, an online version of Scrabble. I have been over the last few months, battling through a best-of-seven series against Shel Israel, co-author with Robert Scoble, of Naked Conversations, who I've known since I wrote the series of stories on Jambo for Forbes. We're now into our sixth game: I'm leading three games to two, and as of this writing am ahead by 31 points. Here's a link to the game. Shel blogged about our match when it was only two or three games old here.

Rebuilding The Archives, And Thoughts On PR

2007-12-18T22:32:00.002-05:00

Yes, I know I practically never write anything here these days, but it's not as I haven't been busy. I've been, among other things, rebuilding my Web clips file, and so far I've got three quarters of 2007 done, after which I'll go back and do similar pages for 2006, 2005, and then the FDC years (2000 to mid-2005) all following the same format. After that I'll go through the years at EN, IW, NCN, and if time and resources allow, digitize the stuff from before that. (No small feat, that.)

But so far this year, and not counting anything from the first quarter, I've written 63 stories, 14 Byte columns, five magazine stories and recorded 40 videos (not counting the one I shot today). Look for yourself:

Second Quarter

Third Quarter

Fourth Quarter to date

Of course none of this reflects what I really spend most of my day doing: Deflecting PR pitches from industry neophytes who haven't done their research into what I cover, but figure since I cover "technology" that I'll naturally be interested in their client. They're the ones who clearly haven't read any of my recent stories because for some reason they don't think its necessary because my name is on some list their boss has given them and as such they're expected to call me, but not smart enough to speak up and say "Hey boss, I don't think this is Arik's cup of tea." Yes, they're the same ones who are audibly irritated when I tell them I've never 1) heard of their client, and 2) have no use a meeting as there's zero chance I'll ever write about them and 3) try to find some "angle" that they think will keep me interested, all the while running up the bill they'll submit to their clients. And yes, I'll admit: I can sometimes be quite harsh in my rejections, and think nothing of hanging up on an unprepared PR flunkie mid-pitch. It isn't pleasant, but I have a lot to do, and limited time.

In any event, the above scenario should be less frequent as I finish the build-out of the archives. Even the laziest of PR professionals can Google my name, click on the first link (or third; it varies) and navigate to the "clips" section, and find an itemized list showing what I've written recently, and for that matter, in the distant past. Or at least that's the idea. So ever so slowly, I'll get these pages built, if only to give the flacks a crutch, and maybe spare myself some unnecessary phone calls.

Some of the Hooker I Promised

2007-08-28T21:59:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, I tried to put up a live stream of some John Lee Hooker tunes I have stashed in my iTunes playlist (8 hours worth!) using a program called Nicecast. It didn't work, despite my best efforts to figure it out. So here's the next best thing, a couple of live tunes from my bootleg holdings. So here at least is a sample of what I had in mind. The first track, Serves Me Right To Suffer is taken from a 1976 session in Chicago. The other is a 13-minute rendition of Boogie Chillin' from a performance in Montigny Les Metz, France in either 1981 or 1983. So, at least now you have an idea of what I had in mind. And yes, it still seems like a good day to play the blues.

Seems A Good Day To Play The Blues

2007-08-25T14:40:00.000-04:00

I got your blues right here. How's about a heaping helping of Hooker?

Just for the weekend, I've created "Serves You Right To Suffer Radio."

Tune in here. It should work in iTunes.

Update: No it didn't work. See above.

Summer Reading report

2007-07-21T22:06:00.000-04:00

Got back from the annual trip south this week, and spent a good deal of the time reading, and when not doing that, acquiring more stuff to read. We stayed first at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. More on the trip and maybe some pictures later.

But there sitting by the Relaxation Pool (where the lifeguards actually enforce a rule requiring patrons to speak quietly and to forgo wireless phones) I worked my way through the second half of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It's an utterly fascinating if dense read. Essentially what Tuchman does is tell the story of Europe during a period where the entire continent was, putting it lightly, down on its luck. Starting with a climate change now known as The Little Ice Age which had begun in or about the year 1250, the weather began to cool and agriculture became problematic. This followed a period of unusually warm weather which had been favorable to farming and so had encouraged a period of population growth. With less food to go around, life became harder for average people, who were generally shackled by the rules of the feudal system. Against that backdrop came The Black Death which killed some 20 million people in Europe, and some 75 million worldwide. The population of England is thought to have dropped from 7 million to 2 million by 1400.

And if the plague didn't kill you, war might. England and France began what we now call The Hundred Years' War which actually lasted 116 years. Meanwhile other wars minor wars were fought in Italy, in the territory now known as Switzerland, and in Spain.

And if war didn't get you, then marauding gangs of out-of-work mercenaries might. These "free companies" were generally made up of men who had been employed in the private armies assembled to fight in the various campaigns. But when the fighting would pause, they instead sack whatever village or town happened to be nearby.

And if that weren't enough, there were various political upheavals, a papal schism (two competing claimants to the throne of St. Peter, one in Rome, one in Avignon), and more than few popular revolts, such as the Jacquerie in France.

Tuchman tells the story largely through the eyes of one person, Enguerrand de Coucy who was an important French nobleman, and sire of a domain in northern France called Coucy now in the department of Aisne in the regions of Picardie. (See some fabulous pictures of the original castle at Coucy, or rather what's left of it, here.) His mother was a Habsburg -- a fact which later caused him to lead an ill-advised war to claim some Austrian land he thought should be his -- and his first wife was English. In fact she was the daughter of the King of England, Isabella, and he met her while serving five years as a voluntary hostage in English custody on the orders of the King of France. (Long story.) Through this marriage he became in addition to a titled French Sire, also an English Earl, and as such was in the unique position of owing allegiance to both kings. Given that the two countries were engaged in an epic war, it was, shall we day, a little awkward.

With all this trouble brewing, no one in Europe gave much thought to the problem of the Turkish invasions. What we now call The Ottoman Empire was on its initial rise at this point, and its eyes were set on Eastern Europe. Western Europe didn't give much thought to it, though every King went to great lengths to talk about how important the idea of "crusade against the infidel" -- that is against Islam -- was to them, they rarely did much about it. Enguerrand was twice involved in rare occasions when one king or another decided launch a crusade, first in Tunisia, and then later in Hungary, where he was ultimately taken prisoner at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396.

The story of any century is always a complicated one and sorting out the many moving parts into a coherent narrative is no small feat. Tuchman spent seven chapters building a foundation and setting the stage so that the life of Enguerrand and his place in the many events that shaped his time can be placed within the massively complex context. The modern reader can't help but find it challenging to keep track of the many crowned heads and ever-changing alliances and loyalties, deals, betrayals, claims and counter-claims as well as all the realms, territories and fiefdoms. The idea of nationalism -- a shared cultural identity -- was a new one that hadn't yet taken hold in France and Italy, but England was already English. As such there is no such thing as a national army in this time period, and for every royal act that on its face seems to make sense and which is enacted for the "good of the people," there are 10 or 20 such acts that are carried out for the good of the king taking the action and his many nobles seeking his favor and offering money, material and other such things necessary to carry out the war of the moment. A present-day reader's head can't help but ache at the neglect of the common people and the sheer idiocy of fighting endless wars amid such economic and social instability.

Tuchman tells a compelling, if disturbing and downright depressing tale of a miserable time and the people who couldn't -- or wouldn't -- do anything to make it any better.

California Dreamin'

2007-01-29T21:24:00.000-05:00

Here's the view from the hotel room at the Desert Springs Resort in Palm Desert, Calif. The weather, temperatures in the 70s, certainly compares favorably with that of New York today though it should be noted that New York's winter, thus far has been relatively balmy and notable for it shirt-sleeved temperatures well into January.

Arrived in Palm Desert Sunday after a weekend in Los Angeles, my first trip to that other cultural capital of the world, and I have to say I like LA, especially Beverly Hills. Having had two breakfasts there, I can honestly say I think that Nate'n Al is the very best diner/coffee shop/deli in all America and nothing less than a national treasure. Never mind Spago, or Trader Vic's, if you haven't eaten at Nate'n Al, you haven't eaten in Beverly Hills. End of story.

Also visited Mann's Chinese Theater (originally Grauman's) in Hollywood, and snapped this detail of Leonard Nimoy's hand print with my phone.

On The Wings Of.....Me?

2006-11-05T14:17:00.000-05:00

Web access logs are a funny thing, when you own your own domain. You get to look at a lot of interesting information, such as the domain names from which people visit your site, but also a little about how they get there.

I look at them from time to time, and occasionally find some odd things vaguely related to things I've written about and the articles I host here. There are lots of hits from people searching for information about Bungee Jumping. No surprise there. Or there's people looking for information about computer hackers. Again, no surprise there.

But three were very curious. They were Google search requests with the syntax "www.arik+air" and then another "arik+jobs+publish" and finally, "on+the+wings+of+arik".

Having explored the peculiar history of my first name, I figured I'd see where these searches led and plugged them into Google myself. It turns out there's a new twist: Arik Air is an airline.

Somewhere over the skies of the African nation of Nigeria, there are airplanes bearing the name Arik. According to its corporate history, it emerged in part from the liquidation of that nation's national airline. A local businessman, stepped up and purchased one of its aircraft for his personal use, and soon word spread and private citizens in the gas and oil industry were using his plane to fly around the country. It wasn't long before he bought another, and then a few more. I don't know where the idea for its name came from.

I Happen To Like New York, My Home Sweet Home

2006-09-11T00:07:00.000-04:00

I'd like to forget this, if you don't mind

2006-09-06T22:59:00.000-04:00

I get irritable at the end of the summer. It wasn't always that way. I liked the fall, liked the transition to the new season, a shot at a fresh start whether academically or at work. September always seemed like a clean slate. Now I dislike it, in no small part because of the insisten cultural pounding that always starts toward the end of August around Sept. 11. The image pictured is pretty much what I saw that day, and it seared itself into my brain as I stepped out of the subway tunnel at the 22nd St. and Park Ave. and walked west toward the Flatiron building.

This is the time of the year where people ask me "where were you when it happened?" I was underground, okay? I didn't actually see the planes hit, but I saw the buildings fall. I stopped to vote. The primary election for mayor was on that day, and I stopped as I left home, first thinking I wouldn't bother, as everyone knew that Bloomberg was going to win in the general election. Then I remembered how much I really disliked Mark Greene and figured I'd go to the trouble of voting for Alan Hevesi, not that Hevesi stood the slightest chance of winning or anything, but it seemed important at the time. If I hadn't stopped to do that, I'd have seen the whole thing, not that I would have wanted to.

I remember the subway ride was uncharacteristically slow, but nothing else about it. I wasn't terribly eager to get to the office, and it was an incredibly beautiful day, the kind of day that makes you depressed that you have to be cooped up inside doing things that seem important but really aren't.

So I got out of the subway and walked west, crossed Broadway and noticed something I can only really describe as a buzz around me. I didn't hear anything that told me something was wrong, but it was just a sense of something out of place, of people agitated for some reason, but I couldn't place it and from where I was, couldn't see anything amiss. The first clue was people looking at their wireless phones, that look that says "I'm trying to make a call but can't get through, let me look and see how my signal is." Two or three guys were doing this, and as I pressed on in the along the south side the Flatiron building a woman, walking east who seemed to know the guys walking near me, said "This is just insane."

At this point my pager went off. I reached down to grab it and looked south, at 22nd Street and Broadway. I don't remember which came first: Did I read the pager, or did I see the holes in the towers? The message was a news alert from CNN that arrived at 9:12 AM. It read: "World trade center damaged; unconfirmed reports say a plane has crashed into tower. Details to come." I could clearly see that there were two holes, one in each tower, and couldn't figure out why that would be caused by one plane. Of course by this point the second plane had already crashed into the towers ten minutes prior. CNN got around to "alerting" me to the second plane by 9:22, by which time I was already in my office.

From that location I was one of several who watched the towers come down from Jim Spanfeller's office. Someone hadn't paid the office satellite TV bill, so I and my colleagues couldn't watch TV news like the rest of the world. We didn't really need it.

That's the gist of my Sept. 11 story. I'm not terribly interested in observing the 5th anniversary of what was for me a really unpleasant day with the rest of you. Images of that day on TV make me shaky. Seeing the trailer for that Oliver Stone movie made me mad, but I was glad to see no line outside the Zeigfeld theater where that cinematic calamity happens to be playing as I walked home tonight.

I want to get over it. Its the rest of the country that insists on dredging up old video tape and pictures and survivors tales and permeating the media with it all. I don't want to weep and shed tears while watching stupid movies made by and for stupid people about it. I'd like to forget it, and frankly I wish those of you who insist on partaking in this cultural weepfest, buying special anniversary editions of magazines and watching TV documentary specials about it all would find something else to entertain yourselves. I have a better idea: Go rent "The Cruise" instead. I found a clip from that neglected 1998 documentary on Youtube, and it appears below.

Testing Writely As A Blogging Tool

2006-09-03T13:16:00.000-04:00

This is a test posting. What I'm testing is whether or not Writely, the Web-based word processor, is a suitable method for writing and posting blog entries. Typos and proofreading are a real hassle in the traditional Blogger interface, and often I write first in Microsoft Word, then cut and paste to Blogger. But since writely lets you publish directly to Blogger (both are owned by Google after all), I figure why not try and save myself a step. So here goes.

On The Telly Across The Pond

2006-08-05T22:29:00.000-04:00

The phone rang late in the morning as it often does. I expected the usual -- some PR person looking for a little attention for a client. It was a PR person, but was actually one who worked for my own outfit fielding a request from an outside outfit needing some comment on the latest corporate happenings at a certain computer company. A TV news crew wanted to chat with me on camera.

"Great," I said. "When do they need me?"

"They're setting up now. Can you be down in five minutes or so?" was the answer on the other end of the line.

So that's how I happened to appear on "the telly" in London and throughout the UK last night.

I've appeared on BBC TV a few times over the years, most recently in a live shot from its studios on the West Side of Manhattan, but almost never been able to see the segments. This week's slot on the World Business Report was a little different, as the network streams the show online in Real Video format. But what it doesn't let you do is save the file as it streams to your computer. So how did I get the video above? Well it was a bit of a hack....

This turned out to be an excuse to try a new program I just learned about called Display Eater which captured the video, sort of. What it appears to have done is capture a long string of still images, which it then converts to a Quicktime video clip.

I thought this was all well and good, until when I played the resulting Quicktime clip and learned that Display Eater doesn't record audio. Here, the solution was to turn to my favorite, app, Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro which saved the audio stream of my segment into MP3 format.

Armed with a silent video clip and an MP3 sound file of the segment, I poured both into iMove HD, which would have seemed to be a straightforward operation. All I had to do, it seemed was synchronize the sound file and the video file as best I could. Simple right? Wrong.

As interesting and potentially useful as Display Eater is, it doesn't come close to capturing the full video stream, but more an approximation of it. The result I had was a video clip that was not only out of sync with the audio, but actually shorter than the audio clip that accompanied it.

So at least now you know why the audio and the video are not synced up right.

One interesting bit of trivia about this clip: Steve Jobs appears once late in the segment giving one of the keynotes for which he is famous. But he actually appears twice, though its kind of hard to spot him. Can you guess where it is?

So what's my problem anyway?

2006-06-10T21:00:00.000-04:00

Silent in this space now these 71 days. It's not as if I've had nothing to say, rather that I've been saying it elsewhere, where my words pay my bills.

This is of course the curse of blogging. In order to make it seem worthwhile you have to feed the beast regularly. This of course takes effort and time, the latter of which is in critically short supply these days it seems.

The onset of summer hasn't done much for my time budgeting. Perhaps better calendar management will help. I'm somewhat encouraged by what I see of the new Google Calendar service. It seems that with a little outside help, it will sync up with the Outlook calendar on the Windows machine at the office, and thus bridge the gap with the iCal calendar on the Mac, all the while creating a long-term record of where I go and what I do.

Will this magically create some kind of quantum singularity through which I can pull additional time which I can use for writing pointless screeds here? Certainly not.

The key is to simply waste less time, though one could argue that blogging is itself a waste of time. There certainly appear to be a lot of people with opinions on that very subject.

I have been at times variously inventive and not with how I've been wasting my time these 71 days. There have been a few too many hours playing "Command and Conquer: Generals", another set of lost hours downloading Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker concerts (see sample below) from Dimeadozen and trading them with the folks on the Vantrades mailing list.

Intermittently I've devoted some hours to raising money for the Columbia's J-School Annual Fund, an effort to which I have committed five years of my life.

But mostly the hours are tied up with the job. Its as simple as that. It's now been almost a year since the big change and there hasn't been a single nanosecond of regret or second-guessing. I guess that, coupled with the lack of personally blogging, combine to be a pretty good sign.

Enough about that. Here's a shot of Hooker from '76.

The OQ Peice on HST

2006-04-01T17:56:00.000-05:00

It's been about a year since this was published, but I'm just now getting around to posting it. Below is the text of the peice I wrote on Hunter S. Thompson for the summer 2005 issue of Oregon Quarterly, (cover at left) the magazine sent to alumni of the University of Oregon. It's a more concise version of the blog entry I wrote on Feb. 26, 2005. I offered it up to OQ editors Guy Maynard and Ross West on a lark, and they were kind enough to publish it. Sadly OQ never published the text online, so here it is.

MEMORY

Going, Going, Gonzo

Six-thirty came and gave way to 7 o’clock as I anxiously paced the hallway of the University’s Sweetser dormitory. Five friends were coming down to Eugene from Corvallis, and they were appallingly late. The date was Feb. 28, 1991, and we had to get to the ballroom at the Eugene Hilton by 7:30 in order to get seats at a lecture given by the outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

I shouldn’t have worried about running late. Just as we sat down a woman, presumably with the UO Cultural Forum, which had invited Thompson to speak, took the microphone and apologized for this tardiness. Last seen at the hotel bar, he had disappeared.

Thompson was governed by his own twisted version of the circadian rhythm. If his daily routine, as described by his biographer E. Jean Carroll is accurate Thompson, would typically lunch around 7 p.m. on cheeseburgers and fries, several bottles of Heineken, followed by carrot cake or ice cream, a snort of cocaine, and a "snow cone" — a glass of shaved ice flavored with a generous pour of Chivas Regal. No wonder he was late.

An hour late. Ken Kesey ’57 and Ken Babbs made a brief and disastrous effort to sate the increasingly impatient audience by telling a few choice anecdotes about their friend. The effort was cut short by a surly heckler. Right about then Thompson emerged from wherever he had been hiding and sat down at the table from which he’d speak. In his hand, he held a yellow plastic cup filled with Chivas and ice — perhaps the remnants of a "snow cone." He opened by mumbling incomprehensibly into the microphone.

Drunk and likely stoned, and with no prepared remarks, he rambled for about ten minutes. This changed when someone in the audience called out a question. Thompson perked up. His voice became clearer. He seemed to draw strength from two-way dialogue.

There was much in the news to talk about. Operation Desert Storm was winding down, Kuwait having just been recaptured by U.S. forces the day before. "I have the tape machine running back home recording the whole war," he said. I piped in with a strangely prescient question of my own: Should we go in and get Saddam? Answer: "I don’t see what difference that would make." Ever the political junkie, he described then-President George H.W. Bush as "the meanest yuppie who ever lived." He predicted that the 1990s would be "like the 80s but without the money."

At one point, one of my friends approached the stage and casually tossed a small plastic bag of marijuana into Thompson’s lap. This started a stream of other ever more interesting tossed gifts: More grass, several sheets of LSD, and a mysterious paperback book offered by an agitated long-haired chap who insisted it was "extremely important" that Thompson read it.

Later Thompson received a strange visit from a local homeless woman known popularly around campus as Hatoon (see sidebar). Entertained, Thompson let her try to make a speech on the peril of water in campus drinking fountains, but she struggled and sputtered. Seemingly frustrated, she said, "If you could point a laser beam at my brain, you might understand." Thompson smirked, and pulled a laser sight — the kind used on rifles — from a pocket and pointed it at her as she had described. She didn’t like this and fled the stage.

Throughout the course of his sometime variously incoherent and eloquent ramblings, emerged the kernel of the message that runs through his published work: That the American Dream is nothing if not ambiguous, uncertain, and for far too many elusive. Chronicling "the death of the American Dream" was his journalistic mission, despite the inconvenient fact that through his own success he proved his entire premise false.

As Thompson’s talk wrapped up, the crowd — including me — rushed forward in search of his autograph. Someone standing next to me reached through the scrum and swiped Thompson’s cup of Chivas, still about a third full. While he wanted the cup as a memento, he was kind enough to let me drain its remaining few ounces of watery Scotch. Perhaps I hoped it to be an elixir, that might mystically convey a touch of Thompson’s gift for powerful prose.

I wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear that Thompson had turned a gun on himself on Feb. 20, 2005. Watching his father die after lingering powerlessly in a Louisville Veteran’s Administration hospital in 1952 would have left an indelible scar upon Thompson’s then 14-year old psyche.

A piece he wrote in 1964 for The National Observer on the 1961 suicide of Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho is about the closest thing once can find in the Thompson oeuvre to the kind of self-reflection his readers hungered for, particularly in his later years. And it’s also easy to see it as a blueprint for the exit Thompson would choose for himself forty-one years later.

It opens with a quote from a neighbor describing Hemingway in his final days as "That poor old man. …He was so frail and thin and old-looking that it was embarrassing to see him."

"Frail" was no adjective for Thompson. He knew the clock was running out. Approaching his 68th year, various health problems had started to mount. He sometimes used a wheelchair after breaking a leg last year, had recently acquired an artificial hip, and was at the time of his death recovering from spinal surgery.

He was far from the man who a little over three decades earlier had written his last great book, the one Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern’s campaign manager in the 1972 presidential race, often described as “the most accurate and least factual book" about the election. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail, 1972, a dazzling and disturbing indictment of the dirty business of presidential politics. In it, we see Thompson at the height of his power, flexing his strange muscles for the polemic and inventing fictitious anecdotes that in fallacy contain more truth than most meticulously fact-checked news reports.

This made the terse news reports that first revealed his death that cold Sunday night all the more unbearable to read. They unflinchingly called it a "self-inflicted gunshot wound," robotically reciting the unforgiving clinical facts, with neither texture nor style. How might Hunter Thompson have described the scene of his own final exit?

The indignities of human age had launched their final, unshakable assault upon his body, and he would deny them their prize. Seated at his kitchen "command post" before his typewriter — the word "counselor" cryptically typed on the center of the page — he paused mid-conversation to set down the telephone receiver, his wife Anita on the other end of the line. Then he wrapped his lips around the barrel of a .45 caliber pistol, and figured he’d see what happened next.

==

Hatoon

On March 1, fourteen years and one day after her encounter with Hunter S. Thompson, Hatoon, a colorful campus figure for more than three decades, died after being struck by a motorist while riding her bicycle across Franklin Boulevard. Hatoon, whose given name was Victoria Adkins, had lived on a bench near the UO bookstore since early 2000 and before that kept her possessions in front of the Knight Library. News of her passing rippled across campus and an impromptu memorial sprang up outside the bookstore, followed days later by an on-campus memorial service attended by many friends and acquaintances. Her death followed Thompson's by only nine days. Both were sixty-seven years old.

Hello to the New Media Workshop

2006-03-02T01:54:00.000-05:00

As I write its about 1 AM and I feel like a grad school student again with much to do and precious little time for niceties like sleep.

First of all, thanks for having me in advance. I always like visiting with the class every year, if only because it gets me back up to campus.

As you know I was in the class of 1997, way back in the dim mists of history for the new media workshop days. In fact those days are such ancient history that the school stopped storing the archives of our projects sometime in 1999 or 2000 when the server they were living on crashed.

I’ve been slowly and painstakingly re-assembling the projects from the shreds that remains, in a project I’ve come to describe as digital archaeology. I use the piecemeal pieces of the projects, luckily preserved at The Internet Archive to put them back together one file at a time. With my job schedule and so on, I don’t get much time to work on this restoration project. But here’s a few things you can look at. First is the NMW home page from 1997. This was the first year that Dean Sreenivasan taught the class with a chap named Andrew Lih, who now teaches in Hong Kong. Andrew used what I think was the first commerically available digital camera -- made by Apple oddly enough -- to take the picture of me on this page in late 1996.

I don’t know what it was like this year, but the New Media Workshop was the hot ticket class in 1997. After the bubble burst in 2000, I noticed the class size tended to shrink, and so I’ll be curious to see how full the room is tonight. It tends to ebb and flow with the perceptions of students that the Internet is where the jobs will be after graduation, or not. We should talk about this.

So far I’ve only had time to pull together two of the old projects: The one on the drummer Babatunde Olatunji by Danielle Fino and David Mark, and my first project.

If you’re interested in the historical perspective of the class you’re taking, I’d encourage you to check out what’s available from The Internet Archive. You might also find this early iteration of NYC24 interesting as well. I’ll talk a bit more about the history of NYC24 later tonight.

I point out all this ancient history because I think in those days we focused a lot more on the nuts and bolts of production than on compelling storytelling. In 1997, we hand-coded the HTML almost 100% of the time, and had never heard of Dreamweaver and knew nothing of Flash. Creating an audio file – what we now in some instances might call Podcasting – was a rather involved affair involving cassette tapes borrowed from the radio folks, a trip to the radio lab, a session in ProTools, and so on. Today I could speak into the Mic on my iSight camera, record an audio or video stream, edit it in a few minutes with Audacity, or iMovie and publish it in another two or three minutes via Audioblog. The tools we dreamed of then are common now. As John Prine so famously sang: “We are living in the future.”

What else would I like to talk about tonight? What life is like on the job as a reporter for an Internet publication. I’ve worked for a few of those over the last decade or so. And speaking of a decade or so, what was I doing 10 years ago tonight? Probably writing a weekly column that appeared in the paper I was working for at the time, predicting that within 15 years most of the paper of the newspaper industry would be gone and we’d be reading digital tablets. Well, how far off the mark was I in 1996? We can talk about that. I’ll be very interested to know where you think digital media is going, where it should and should not go, how your media consumption habits differ from mine. I’d like to know what you’re reading, watching and listening to, online, in paper, and in whatever other forms of media the engineers are dreaming up these days.

Other things you should remind me to talk about: Internships, and other situations that might be available with my current employer. The strange realities of Internet journalism, how a guy like me ended up as a business reporter, what I think makes for a good story, and whatever else comes to mind. And I’ll be interested in hearing what you all have to say, so come to class ready to talk back and forth. Duy tells me to be prepared to talk for 45 minutes and leave 15 minutes for questions. We can also talk about your pitches for the next issue of NYC24 if you like.

If you’d like to know what I’ve been working on recently, here are some links:
AMD Plays Offense

The Media’s Crush on Apple

Spitzer Gets On Sony BMGs Case

Rambus And A Price-Fixing Tale

And some stuff from the old place:

Star Wars Galactic Dollars

Big Brother Isn’t Here Yet

History Lessons For the Grokster Age

Taking The World By Hand

See you in about 16 hours.

Hey, it's snowing.

2006-02-12T17:43:00.000-05:00

The National Weather Service just declared today’s blizzard the biggest ever in New York City history, with a snowfall of 26.9 inches measured in Central Park.

As it happens, Central Park was where I ventured out today on foot, and with camera in hand. Here’s a sampling of the shots I took along the way, starting with the scene outside the building.

A commercial or two to remember

2006-02-11T20:36:00.000-05:00

So if you're flipping channels sometime and notice a commercial with a red piggy bank rolling around the screen sucking in dollar signs with wings, you may like to know who did it. His name is Joe Burrascano, and he's a computer animator, and he's soon to be part of the family. See the ad here (Click people, then "joe" then select "HSBC".) His reel is worth a look too, as it contains snippets of other memorable TV spots he's worked on.

The Name

2006-01-02T18:14:00.000-05:00

A few times every year I get random inquiries by email about my unusual first name. They seem to occur near the holidays for some reason that doesn’t make much sense to me. This year was no exception.

Last week I received an email from someone in Sri Lanka saying they had given the name Arik to a newly born boy, and asking if I knew anything about its origin. I had to say I really didn’t, which I found rather unfortunate given that I’ve lived with it, and spelled it for people in person and over the phone several dozen times a day for the better part of four decades.

I really don’t know much about my unusual name. I have a little script I go through which everyone who sits near me at the office can recite from memory after only a few weeks. “A like in Apple, R-I-K. No, no C. K. Yes, that’s an A, not an E. Yes its pronounced like plain old “Eric” or “Erik…” at which point the person I’m talking to will either ask after its ethnic origin or comment on having seen the name spelled in some other variation or both. I have little patience for these conversations, because I’m usually in a hurry.

So back to my Sri Lankan interlocutor. I replied, saying that regrettably I couldn’t offer much on the history of the name Arik. The next day he wrote back shedding some light: “The name Arik is a variation of the name Aryeh, which is Hebrew for a lion.” The name also appears as Arieh, which is the name of an officer of king Pekahiah in the Old Testament.

I have to confess: It's not that I knew nothing about the history of my name. Just that I know precious little. I neglected to mention that according to some obscure reference of which I have little memory, the name in English means “sacred ruler.” The German tradition translates it as “noble ruler,” while the Norse comes down as “rule with mercy.”

One thing I have learned about the name since I moved to New York a decade ago, is that Arik is a fairly common name in Israel, though I think in this particular case it’s pronounced “Ah-REEK” and not “AIR-ik” as in my case. Someone with the name has registered the domain name arik.co.il though, since I don’t read Hebrew, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about him. Still, many people, upon seeing the name written, will ask if I’m Jewish.

Ariel Sharon (born Ariel Schienerman), the current prime minister of Israel uses it as a nickname, and so occasionally I will see the name Arik used within the pages of The New York Times, or other international news organizations. Another prominent Israeli bearing the name is Arik Vardi, who with friends Sefi Vigiser and Yair Goldfinger founded the instant messaging company ICQ, which is now owned by Time-Warner’s AOL.

Still another notable Ariks in Israel include: a pop singer; a painter; an Olympian Judoka (a participant in Judo) a soccer player and another painter.

I’m not sure precisely why people who know no more about me other than what I publish here on the Web site expect that I’m some sort of authority on the history of this name. But perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’ve registered so many variants of the name on the Internet. Obviously I have arik.org, but I also have arik.net, arik.name and arik.info.

But these domain names are notable for what they are not: arik.com. I sometimes wonder how much email intended for me gets misdirected to a guy from India, who lives in Washington DC, professes to suffer from attention deficit disorder, and who apparently goes by the nickname “Riki Tiki,” an apparent reference to the Rudyard Kipling tale about a mongoose.

The arik.com domain had previously belonged to a commercial enterprise of some sort calling itself the Arik Group Ltd. in Sofia, Bulgaria. It can’t have been all that successful. I originally wanted the .com domain, but didn’t notice it had come available and then found to my dismay that the current owner has the registration sewn up through 2009.

Then there’s the mysterious arik.us which is in Spanish. I have no idea who “pops” is, but in this case, Arik is his last name, at least according to the whois registration data. His registration expires in 2008.

I made a concerted effort to get arik.net some years back mainly so that I could have a fallback domain in the event that some bureaucrat ICANN decided that org top-level domains were to be for non-profits only. I wasn’t truly worried, but figured it best to hedge. Its previous owner pointed it to a Web camera in Vilnius, Lithuania. Someone who also has Arik as a first name recently asked if I would be willing to part with arik.net, promising in some attempt at jest to use it for spam, a Phil Donahue fan club, or two other things so obnoxious I can't print them here. I declined his overture.

Now what I find so interesting is the ethnic dispersion of people using the name. I’m of Scandinavian extraction myself. My family hails from Minnesota, and Denmark and Norway before that. (My folks have traced the family origins to 1654, and possibly further back than that now.) But here I’ve seen my first name in use all over the world.

Others outside of Israel bearing the name include an Economics Professor at Georgetown University; a furniture designer in Paris; A graphic artist; A professional wrestler; A Web artist; A character on Star Trek; A director of a Seattle talk radio show who blogs and podcasts; And an Elvis impersonator.

Ariks also appear in history. There was a King of Assyria, which is in the northern portion of modern-day Iraq, named Arik-den-ili ruled from 1319 to 1308 BCE (though I’ve seen different references as to the dates of his reign, some saying it was as late as 1295 BCE.)

Another Arik – or Ariq – was a grandson of Genghis Kahn. Arik Boke was youngest son of Genghis’ son Tolui, and a brother of the better-known Kublai Khan who was the founder of China’s Yuan Dynasty, which lasted from 1271 to 1368. Arik was a rival of Kublai’s, and had been the commander of the Mongol homeland while Kublai was campaigning in China. In 1259 he made tried to make himself the great Khan. Kublai then cut short the Chinese campaign and in 1260 had himself elected Khan. This led to a series of battles between them, which culminated in Arik’s capture in 1264. He died in 1266.

This particular reference caught my attention because of a comic book I once bought during my college years called “Arik Khan.” I had never seen it before and have never seen that title since. It turns out the character is the creation of a Filipino comic book artist named Franc Reyes. According to one source, he created the character Arik Khan for Andromeda Comics, a Canadian comic publishing concern, in 1977. Reyes was also one of a long series of artists to draw Tarzan for DC Comics in the early 1970s. The character appears to be similar to the tradition of “Conan the Barbarian.” Lots of swordplay, violence, you get the idea. Reyes went on to work for Disney on Brother Bear and the short John Henry.

The name also has many variants: The one I find most entertaining is the Swedish one: Jerk, though I would guess the correct pronunciation would be closer to “yurk.” Still, I can imagine a few people who might think me aptly named and preferring the English pronunciation of that spelling.

And so, that’s about all I know about my first name.

Strike Day

2005-12-20T20:41:00.000-05:00

At least someone had the gumption to hand it to the TWU today. A judge has imposed a $1 million per day fine on the strikers, and even the International TWU has disavowed support of this strike. I hope the TWU local members send their leadership packing the next time they have an election, because this current batch isn't doing them a lick of good.

Transit Strike In 10 Minutes

2005-12-15T23:21:00.000-05:00

Nothing like the prospect of a transit strike to bring out the inner John Bircher in me. I really dislike how a bunch of misinformed people unhappy with their employer can hold an entire city of 8 million hostage. Transit workers are squealing about losing pension benefits and health care benefits when those issues are not even on the table. What they're angry about having to contribute part of their salary toward their own health care benefits, like everyone else who works in America does these days. They're also unhappy about the idea of raising the retirement age from 55 to 62. I have a really hard time feeling sorry for the transit workers.

When cops are unhappy with their contract terms, they don't walk out. Neither do the firefighters. Whatever it is that makes the transit workers think they can defy the law, and walk out, I find it reprehensible.

Gothamist notes that Mayor Bloomberg is heading to the Emergency Command center. Gabe Pressman remembers the 1966 transit strike.

Under the law the strike that now seems about 30 minutes away is, patently illegal. This time I hope the state and the city crack down on the union. Let them walk out. Every day they stay off the job, they sacrifice two days of pay. By my count, five days off will cost them a full pay period's salary, and ten days will cost them a full month. Why not double the fines each day? The strikes third day would cost them eight days pay. The fourth, 16 days, or a full month in total.

It seems to me that it is an accident of history and geography that makes New York more reliant than any other in America on its intricate public transportation system, and therefore, transit workers have the power to walk of the job and bring the commerce and activity of this city to the kind of screeching halt that only Karl Marx and a chorus of marchers chanting "The Internationale" could consider a good thing.

My contributions to human knowledge

2005-12-11T17:55:00.001-05:00

In a strange fit of fascination with the Wikipedia Web site, I decided to write a pair of articles there about things I know. I expanded the article on Garmin, the GPS company. Then I found an old paper I wrote for a journalism history class in college and wrote an entirely new article on The Corvallis Gazette-Times, my old hometown newspaper, and the place where I started my professional career as a reporter in 1989. (I was a sports reporter in those days. Weird, no?)

It's amazing what you can find out from this thing. I looked up "Yorkville" which is the name of the Manhattan neighborhood in which I live. Now I know the area was home to a lot of German immigrants, but yikes.

A few pictures

2005-12-06T21:40:00.000-05:00

I'm a little late in getting around to posting these. I took them a month ago to the day. They're a few samples from my latest explorations of Central Park.

For references here's a link to an aerial view of roughly where I was. These three shots were taken around the area labeled "The Pool."

Directly north of that, is an area known as "The Great Hill," and while walking around certain parts there, I got the feeling that if you were dropped down there without so much as the slightest clue about where you were, you would not immediately be able to tell you were New York City. It was quiet, there was almost no sound of cars (though there was an intermittent noisy helicopter, it being Marathon Sunday at the time) and there were almost no people around. Accustomed to crowds, I found it a surprising respite from the city's usual bustle. At first glance at least, it looks almost as wild as some of the places I used to hike out west, right down to the dead trees left to rot. There was almost no visual evidence that I was in a major metropolitan area, until I saw a sign that broke the illusion in a very New York kind of way.

A little something from the archives

2005-12-03T15:11:00.000-05:00

This week I did a short appearance on CNBC. It's the sort of thing that goes with the job. You write about technology, when TV shows want to cover technology, sometimes they call you to play the expert. But this week I happened upon a VHS tape from a dozen years ago that contains my first TV appearance, from the summer of 1993.

First here's the setup: That summer I was an intern for the Chamber of Commerce in the tiny Central Oregon town of Bend. It's primarily a tourist destination where in the winter you ski, and in the summer you play a lot of golf or go whitewater rafting. My internship involved writing a public relations plan for the Chamber. This in itself was unusual because while I was a journalism student at the University of Oregon, where the curriculum includes, among other things a section devoted to PR. I scored the internship despite not having taken a single PR class.

Anyhow, on the second day of the internship I volunteered to help write and research the copy of a brochure for "The Heritage Walk." The Chamber had teamed up with the Des-Chutes County Historical Museum (the county is officially called Deschutes, pronounced deh-SHOOTS, but the museum for some reason insists on the hyphenated name) to create a walking tour of some of the historically notable buildings around town, including a few houses that were built in the early days, like the Sather House, the Allen Rademacher House, the Lara House and commercial and civic buildings like Pine Tavern and among more than 40 others.

My personal favorite was the O'Kane building, and sadly I can find no suitable link to good information about it. It was in my time, the home of Cafe Paradiso, a European style coffee house with couches and chess boards, and also of Stuft Pizza, a respectable Pizza joint and pub. Apparently the location of the old coffee house bears the obnoxious-sounding name "Soba Noodles" while the old Stuft Pizza location is now Bend City Grill having changed its name from O'Kane's Grill after a dispute over the use of the O'Kane name with the clearly obnoxious McMenamin's chain which apparently operates some arriviste establishment bearing the name.

Anyhow, I got involved with the effort to not only help draft the copy, and to help do some of the research on some of the sites, but also to promote the Heritage Walk itself by getting the local media interested, which was pretty easy given that it was August and there were no other major local stories going on.

So there I was, all of 22 years old, and the local morning gab fest "Central Oregon Today" -- it was a short local segement that showed during a break-away from NBC"s Today Show -- needed a few people to talk about the Heritage Walk "kick off" event which was taking place over the weekend. So here I am, on TV for the first time, with all the cheesy local TV production values and the host's loud clothing preserved for posterity in Quicktime format.

What's New

2005-10-31T23:00:00.000-05:00

The latest addition to Maggie's blog is up. Have a
look.

So Gerry, how do you live there?

2005-10-30T11:50:00.000-05:00

"It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."

"How can you live there?"

The two statements above are variants of something that has really come to irritate me in the nine years I've lived in New York. People from elsewhere, primarily mid-sized cities on the West Coast reveal themselves to be jealous idiots by dissing the the most important, lively, and safest place in the world.

The latest case is someone hailing from my own home state. Gerry Frank is an octagenarian gadabout who lives in Salem, Oregon, chairman of the Oregon Tourism Commission, who is best known for his travel guide "Where to find it, buy it, eat it in New York."

Profiled earlier this week in the Metro section of The New York Times, he lets fly with the most typical of back-handed insults against the place he claims to love. In the third graf he proudly admits to thinking that "New York City 'is a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there,' adding, 'I love Oregon.'"

Funny how that works out, Gerry. We don't want you.

What bothers me most about people who visit New York, praise it as a tourist destination, and then slam it as a place to live, is that in my experience people feel allowed to say this about New York and nowhere else.

This is a strange social rule. People can insult New York by saying "I could never live there," but if a New Yorker were to say the same thing about some outback town in a fly-over state, they'd be panned as an elitist prig.

I grew up in Oregon, and I know enough about Salem to call it was it is: A place that revels in its own irrelevance. Nowhere else can you find a population so arrogant, yet having so little to be arrogant about.

Apparently Frank's tenure on the tourism commission hasn't done much. Personally I never hear of anyone visiting Oregon for any reason, personal or business. And the numbers bear this out. The commission reported last year that tourism grossed the Oregon economy $6.9 billion. Compare that to neighboring Washington State, which brought in $11.6 billion in direct travel spending. Apparently Oregon is neither a nice place to live, nor does anyone visit.

That dig about "I couldn't live there" contains a few layers of meaning. One is about the perceptions of safety in New York. But let's look at Salem. In 2003, violent crime in Salem was more than twice what it was in 1985. That makes for a crime rate of 360 per 100,000, versus 250 in 1985. In 2003, Oregon had the fourth-highest rate of propertly crime in the nation.

For the same period, safety in New York improved, and not just a little, but substantially. In 1985, out of every 100,000 people, 1,881 were the victims of violent crime. By 2003, that number had fallen more than twofold to 734. Still higher than in Salem, but improving constantly. Meanwhile Franks' utopia of Salem seems to be more crime-ridden by the day. Given its c current rate of increase, and the persistent rate of New York's decrease, Salem's crime rate per 100,000 citizens will be on par or slightly higher than that of New York by the end of this decade -- and that says nothing good about a city of less than 150,000 inhabitants.

These backhanded insults are silently yet inexplicably tolerated when said about New York, but of nowhere else. New Yorkers abhor the senitment greatly -- the Times reporter knew to ask Frank about it. If you're not a New Yorker, you should never say anything like "I couldn't live there," because it makes you look stupid. And these comments are rooted in simple failings of human emotion: Raging jealousy and envy, and no small part of ignorance. More often than not, people dismiss what they can't have in order to disguise the fact that they wish they could have it. By saying he "couldn't" live here Frank is revealing a great deal about his emotional state on the subject. Change the word "couldn't" to "can't" as in "unable," or more precisely "circumstances beyond one's control."

He doesn't live here for some unknown reason. Yet the in the Times article, he says he visits the city for one week every month, or more than a quarter of each year. (Is this even appropriate for someone who actually has a job promoting tourism somewhere else?) It may be financial -- maybe he has a really bad book agent -- or something else. Maybe he's afraid that he doesn't have what it takes (or at his age, never had it) to "make it here" and thus prove, as Sinatra so famously sang, that he could make it anywhere.

Meanwhile, look at who does live here. Pick a musician, performer, writer, composer, producer, politician, philantrophist, philosopher, poet, painter, sculptor, financier, entrepreneur, or pretty much anyone you've ever heard of. Chances are they live here, lived here, are planning to live here, or wish they did.

The only person I've ever heard of hailing from Salem is Gerry Frank, and that's only because he's riding on the coattails of a city which by his own admission is one in which he wouldn't live.

The next time someone ever says to me any variation of "How can you live there?" referring to New York City, I'm going to turn the question right around to them, and ask them how they can live where they do. When I travel, I see how other people live. After nine years of living in the best city in the world, I can't imagine living anywhere else, and find other places intolerable, inhospitable, and unsafe.

Maybe I could use a few connections, get an invitation to dinner at Gerry Frank's house in Salem, and on my way out the door, tell him "It's a nice house, but I don't think I could live here." How socially tactful is that?

The same rules of propriety should apply to people visiting New York. Don't come here if you're going to insult it. Show your respect, and remember that the reason it exists has nothing to do with you, but rather because of people who could choose to live anywhere else in the world, not only "can" live here, but do. When you say you "couldn't live there" you reveal yourself as one of those lesser beings, who indeed "can't" live here for reasons that are beyond your control.

A look at the new office

2005-10-27T22:47:00.000-04:00

This is a 26-second taken with my mobile phone of the new office and the view out the windows. It's really just an experiment to see how video from the phone interacts with the Audioblog service. Don't expect much. This clip is really just about my curiousity more than anything else.

Do You Know What It Means....

2005-09-04T00:43:00.000-04:00

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day

I know I'm not wrong... this feeling's gettin' stronger
The longer, I stay away

Miss them moss covered vines...the tall sugar pines
Where mockin' birds used to sing

And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi...hurryin' into spring

The moonlight on the bayou.......a Creole tune.... that fills the air
I dream... about Magnolias in bloom......and I'm wishin' I was there

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart

And there's one thing more...I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans

The moonlight on the bayou.......a Creole tune.... that fills the air
I dream... about Magnolias in bloom......and I'm wishin' I was there

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart

And there's one thing more...I miss the one I care for
More.....more than I miss.......New Orleans

Blog Post on HST makes it to print

2005-07-23T20:49:00.000-04:00

I almost forgot to say anything about it here but I adapted the posting from 26 February into an actual magazine peice. It appears in the "Old Oregon" section of the current issue of Oregon Quarterly, (cover at left) which as far as I know is sent only to University of Oregon alumni. Sadly they haven't posted the text online.

Though at least one anonymous blogger in Oregon has noticed the strange coincidence I detail in the piece concerning Thompson's encounter with the late UO campus personality known as Hatoon whose death roughly coincided with Thompson's. They were the same age, and her death -- she was struck by a car while riding her bike -- followed Thompson's suicide by nine days -- and occurred exactly 14 years and one day following their strange meeting. Maybe Doc needed some weird people to keep him company in the great beyond.

Five Years, Two Months, 19 Days

2005-07-19T22:44:00.000-04:00

I'm not going to say much in the way of details at this moment, but today I resigned from the job I have had for since May 1, 2000, and will start a new one soon. I feel good.

I'm in Key West

2005-07-05T14:48:00.000-04:00

I'm in key west
Originally uploaded by ahess247.

This is the view from the terrace of the Ocean Key resort in
Key West, Fla.
I took the shot with my phone and sent it directly to the blog.

First Time On Public Radio

2005-07-01T00:35:00.000-04:00

I've done a lot of media appearances because of the job -- TV, radio and the like -- but I've never done public radio. That changed this week when I was asked to talk about the Grokster case on WNYC's daily music program Soundcheck. I grabbed the stream of the show and trimmed out the other segments, and you can hear it below.

She Just Walks That Way

2005-05-14T19:45:00.000-04:00

Over the years I've had to get used to the fact that when I go places with Maggie, guys just can't help themselves: They're going to look at her. This fact was reinforced last January when we were in Las Vegas for the International Consumer Electronics Show. One night we had booked reservations for dinner at Delmonico's, a steak house at The Venetian. Dinner was excellent and we were lucky that the place wasn't crowded given that it was CES week. The only crowded table was one round table in the corner to my right as we ate. Out of nowhere I caught the sight of Steven Tyler flashing through the place, and before I could even say anything to Maggie, he was gone behind a door in the back. I knew he was in town, and had seen him earlier in the day on stage during the keynote address given by Craig Barrett, the CEO of Intel. Tyler coaxed Barrett to try and keep up with him on "Walk This Way" as part of his presentation. Intel had also hired Tyler to play their CES party that night, which was taking place somewhere inside The Venetian. I figured he was on his way there and using some back-way entrance to get there. It turned out he was just using the restroom and a minute or two later sat down at that crowded round table.

We ate, had dessert and then I called for the check. Maggie stood up to go to the ladies room and walked away from the table. She was quite a sight, as usual, wearing a mini-skirt and boots and strode across the room with her usual confidence, a visual tempest. Tyler not only noticed, but made no attempt to be subtle about the fact that he was watching her.

I of course had expected this, and instead of watching her, watched him, watching her. As she disappeared from his view he looked back over at me, caught me looking at him, grinned and nodded, not sheepishly but with understanding, and a bit of envy on his part. I grinned and nodded back in acknowledgement, and in appreciation, and considered myself the luckiest guy on the planet.

First Steps On The Net

2005-04-23T19:43:00.000-04:00

I'm constantly fascinated by the stuff that Google has stored in its archives. Today I dug through its archive of Usenet postingsand found what I think is my first public posting on the Internet from 10 Oct. 1993. I had been puttering around the Internet for months by this time already. I had gotten my first email account, I think sometime in late 1992, but I didn't start saving my messages with any regularity until late 1993 or so. At the time that I would have posted this message, I was a student getting ready to graduate from the University of Oregon, working for the Oregon Daily Emerald covering such things like earthquakes and arrogant architects.

Aside from email, I know I had also started playing around with Internet Relay Chat, only to find it an addicting waste of time, and before that had started exploring the pre-Web system called Gopher and found it tantalizing but confusing. Then a guy I knew named Richard Fong who was an aide at the student computer lab at the Erb Memorial Union. I had been chatting him up about all the cool things I was finding on the Internet. He fired up a program called NewsWatcher on a Mac that was already very old, even for 1993, and turned me loose on its strange taxonomy of 20,000 or more subjects. Fascinated, I looked around for something I was interested in: Star Wars.

Now in this posting, (that's a screen-grab of the headers above) I relate that I have a copy of something called "Fall of the Republic" which is written to look like a script treatment for a Star Wars movie. Keep in mind that in 1993, George Lucas' plans for the film franchise were far from clear. It had been ten years since "Return Of The Jedi" but following the 1991 release of "Heir To The Empire" the rumors had been rife about the possibility that new movies -- prequels -- telling the back story of the three existing movies were under development. Well we all know how that turned out.

In any case, another friend had given be a copy of this 26-page printout of this "Fall of the Republic" treatment, and I thought I had found some top secret document which someone had circulated against Lucas' wishes. I figured the folks who read this the Star Wars newsgroup I had just discovered would want to know about it. So that's what my first Usenet posting was about.

They not only knew about it, but informed me that it was peice of fan-fiction that had been circulating for about 10 years. I was a bit embarrassed, but stuck with the newsgroup, and became a regular poster over the course of the next several weeks. Here's another posting from a few days later, wherein I'm still sticking to my guns that FOTR was legit. Finally by Nov. 8, nearly a month a later, I had seen the light.

Rhody Style: Just Say No

2005-03-30T19:41:00.000-05:00

No, no, no, Wolrich. I will not "Kick it Rhody Style" as you say. If you do too much of that Rhodey Style stuff, you'll end up like this guy.

Yes, Professor, I'm Really Calling From The Daily Show....

2005-03-26T18:27:00.000-05:00

...no, no, Professor Pavlik. We're really not going to try to make you look silly....really.

Link goes to a Quicktime video. Get Quicktime here

Thought For The Day

2005-03-25T17:03:00.000-05:00

"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Walter Bagehot, English Journalist (1826-1877)

Thoughts On Hunter

2005-02-26T18:12:00.000-05:00

I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it - a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures.
— Hunter S. Thompson

Part of my weekend ritual involves reading “The Economist” back to front. I start at the back because my favorite feature is the Obituary, always about someone interesting, always smart, always crafted in a masterly way that I admire, and its always in the back. And I always look there first in part to see who among the notable deaths of the preceding week has been selected.

There was no doubt in my mind that this week the selection would be Hunter S. Thompson. I have loathed the simplistic, trite and hackneyed obituaries written about him since he pulled the trigger on his .45 Caliber with the barrel pointed squarely into his mouth last Sunday. They are written mostly by people who know maybe a fraction of the writer’s work. Thompson, to them is the drug-fueled fiend of “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas,” and perhaps the rampaging, Nixon-despising head case of a correspondent in “Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail, 1972.” Most obituary writers have found little depth beyond that, leaving most people unfamiliar with Thompson’s oeuvre the image of a two-dimensional, drug-addled, freaky nut job with a serious jones for firearms.

"We had two bags of grass...."

I met Frank Mankiewicz in 1997. Today he’s vice chairman of Hill and Knowlton’s Washington D.C. office, but in 1972 he was a campaign manager for George McGovern, and as such did battle with Thompson on a regular basis. I met Mankiewicz as part of a class visit to Washington D.C. during my year at Columbia. I took the opportunity to ask him about Thompson, and about how Thompson portrayed him in the book. He uttered, what I now know is a standard line he uses about it being “the most accurate and the least factual” book about the 1972 presidential campaign. It’s been quoted in many of the obituaries, including in “The Economist.”

Mankiewicz then went on to say that he and Thompson remained friends through the decades. “He still comes to stay with us once in awhile,” he said. “I usually know that he’s on his way when I start getting his mail.” He said Thompson at the time was “still in good shape,” and healthy.

Another friend, Lew Koch, a journalist out of Chicago known for being one of the founders of the Chicago Journalism Review related this story.

During a period when he was director of a journalism fellowship program at the University of Chicago, Koch arranged to have Thompson come and deliver a lecture. Koch met him at O’Hare where he “walked off the plane carrying an open bottle of Wild Turkey and a closed canister of nitrous oxide.”

The lecture was, as Thompson’s college lectures often were, a disaster. The plan called for a closed-door session with the program’s fellows and then a university-wide lecture that would include a Q and A. Koch described the scene:

“Thompson met with all Fellows for a couple of hours, offering one-sentence responses to questions, followed by a swig or sniff; he had a few bites of food at a closed dinner with the Fellows and a few faculty members and mumbled responses to questions put to him. Thompson's University-wide lecture was a disaster. He went on stage with another bottle of Wild Turkey and the canister of nitrous oxide, alternating between swigging and sniffing. The students were not amused. The ‘lecture’ ended after about 30 minutes.”

“Afterwards Thompson was in a mood to continue drinking so I took him to Ricardo's, the journalists bar in Chicago where I had previously spent significant amounts of time with other journos rehashing the events of the day….

“But there we were at the bar — Hunter Thompson and me — and I thought it was time to ask about "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," a copy of which I had in my hand. For some reason he switched to a very serious mood, shaking his head, dismayed that his readers, including other journalists, haven't figured out that there was no way in hell that he or anyone else, could write a book like that while indulging in huge quantities of alcohol and narcotics. They just don't get it, he complained, it's a put-on. We drank for a while and talked about nothing in particular. Before we parted I asked him to inscribe his book and this is what he wrote: ‘I. O. U nine Ballantine ales — send the bill to Random House. HST Chicago's Ricardo's 8/4/72.’”

My own stories about Hunter S. Thompson are much more humble. I had been aware of his work since high school. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was a book that the stoner kids I knew passed around with a laugh, all of them assuming incorrectly that they were in on the joke.

But in 1991, about the time that Operation Desert Storm was still running very hot and very heavy, I was a student at the University of Oregon. And Hunter S. Thompson was on his way to deliver one of his infamous college lectures at the downtown Hilton in Eugene.

It was to the uninitiated, which at this point I still was, an organizational mess. Thompson was late as always, by something like an hour. One of the program’s organizers said Thompson was had been last seen drinking at the hotel bar, but then disappeared, and was nowhere to be found. Ken Kesey (1935-2001) and Ken Babbs took the stage to try and keep the crowd sated for a few minutes by telling allegedly funny Hunter stories. It didn’t work. Some worthless pain in the ass stood up and screamed that he had paid to see Hunter, and not Kesey, who was at the time a somewhat overexposed local celebrity. Kesey was offended. “Somebody give that guy $20 and get him the hell out of here.” Kesey then reached for his own wallet, pulled out a twenty and handed it to him. The jerk stormed out holding the bill up high over his head like it was captured booty.

The one story Kesey related about Thompson which I remember was one in which he and Thompson were guests at some swanky party given by a publisher in New York. It was the kind of pretentious affair where pseudo-intellectuals try to act smart in front of writers and famous people, while they sip fashionable drinks and make small talk about how they’re spending their money. As I remember Kesey telling it, Thompson showed up late as usual, and didn’t say a word to anyone after arriving. He surveyed the scene, and left. Shortly thereafter a delivery arrived courtesy of Thompson: Cheese sandwiches and a case of Heineken. He did not return.

Thompson finally did show up at the Eugene Hilton, and did give a rambling talk about the war, about the president, about his adventures covering the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, and the usual thing, and at one point recited the trademark quote of these types of talks: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”

I attended the proceedings with some old friends from my days at Linn-Benton Community College. They were all people I had befriended on the staff of The Commuter the weekly student newspaper there.

They had brought with them a rather sizable stash of pot (not my idea) which they intended to smoke afterward. But during the speech, one of them – we called him Paco – seized the dope, quietly walked up to the stage and tossed it directly into Thompson’s lap.

The talk got better after that. Thompson was on stage sitting at a table, sipping what was either Wild Turkey or Chivas Regal out of a yellow plastic cup. More on that cup presently. Audience members started shouting questions getting answers. When the topic turned to the war he said: “I have the tape machine running back home, recording the whole thing.” More shouted questions. I joined in with my own asking: “Should we go in and get Saddam?” Answer: “I don’t see what difference that would make.”

Later a few other far-sketchier characters handed him what I think was a few sheets of LSD, but I wasn’t sure. Thompson later asked for an envelope, placed Paco’s bag of dope and the other mysterious object inside, and addressed it to himself at his home in Colorado.

The other notable weirdness of the evening came when one of the local street people, a woman I had seen skulking around the UO gym a few times — she was wearing a weightlifters belt — stormed the stage and started ranting about something that was terribly important, to her. It had already been a pretty weird evening and Thompson was no stranger to weirdness. He approached her and tried to shake her hand. At the time Thompson was wearing a wrist brace on his right arm. She wouldn’t shake what she called “the hand with the tendonitis in it.”

She tried to rant a little more but couldn’t quite figure out what it was she wanted to say. “If you could point a laser beam at my brain, you might be able to understand,” she croaked. Thompson, still amused, reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a laser sight, the kind used on a handgun, and pointed it at her, just as she had described. She didn’t seem to like that and was off the stage in seconds.

I don’t remember much more about the talk he gave. His words by themselves weren’t the part that was meant to be memorable. What was memorable was the spectacle or weirdness that accompanied the entire scene. When he decided he was done talking, some two hours after he had started, the audience rushed the stage. I did too. Everyone wanted some personal contact, a book signed, a ticket signed, a hand shaken tendonitis and all. One guy in the huddle next to me reached through the mob and snatched Thompson’s yellow cup, Chivas and all. He wanted it as a memento.

I looked over and said: “You can keep the cup, but I’ll drain it for you.” He handed it to me and I downed about six ounces of whatever liquor it was as though it were apple juice. True to my word I handed it back to him. As far as I knew he kept the cup, and that was the last thing I knew about it.

Outside the hotel, I noticed this multicolored old bus was parked out front. I was only 20 years old, and so I didn’t yet know my cultural history all that well, but I knew enough to realize that was Kesey’s infamous bus – or rather the copy of of the infamous bus – from his Merry Prankster days.

What happened next is where my part in the story really ends, because I wasn’t there though I wish I had been. Zane Kesey was, and recounts it here in his own “Hunter story”. (Zane has since removed the story, but it's preserved here though you'll have to scroll a tad. -Ed.)
I went on to read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and immediately followed it up with “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, 1972”. Within a year, half my friends had read “Las Vegas” at my suggestion. We called it “the work” and would read aloud from it at parties. We quoted from it in strange, tense and indefinable social situations, referring to “rude murmurs of dissent” and after a few too many drinks would mockingingly claim to see giant flying bats. Upon a sudden realization one might exclaim "God Hell, I'm beginning to see the pattern!" One friend I hung out with all the time became “My Attorney” – even though he wasn’t in on the joke and didn’t like those times I insisted that he wasn’t really Hawaiian but was in fact Samoan. Occasionally I’d even demand that local bar bands play “White Rabbit” at top volume. Like those stoner kids in high school, I thought I was in on the joke too.

Still I knew there had to be more to Thompson than this. “Campaign Trail” proved it. Where Las Vegas was a strange farce more fiction than fact, “Campaign Trail” delivered some brutally honest truths about our political system that are proven over and over every time this republic elects another chief executive. Nobody dumb or shallow could write these truths. That book I rarely recommended to others. I kept it to myself.

My second Hunter story takes place in New York in 1999 on Halloween. Having just published “The Rum Diary” — the novel he wrote in his 20s, but which remained unpublished until his early 60s — Thompson appeared at the Union Squarer Barnes and Noble. Thompson was to read, but because he was so hard to understand when he spoke, he tapped Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes” to do the reading for him. I remember that Ed, who appears every bit the smart and educated guy on the screen, had a problem with the pronunciation of the word “chancres” as he read.

Other notables I met that night were Steven Levy of Newsweek and Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans who is also editor of Thompson’s collections of letters. Volume I of that collection “The Proud Highway” had been out for about a year and I got after Brinkley to get on with it already and publish Volume II. He finally did: “Fear and Loathing In America” Volume III is still as yet forthcoming, but given Brinkley’s opportunistic bent toward the deaths of notable Americans – whenever a President dies you can find him commenting on numerous cable gabfests – it won’t be long. He’s even been named an executor of Thompson’s estate. However I digress.

The weirdness quotient was much lower that night. But the crowd was just as eager. Bradley did his readings, Thompson, wearing an orange boa and accompanied by Benicio Del Toro, who had played “My Attorney” aka “Dr. Gonzo” in the film adaptation of “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” (Trailers here, Courtesy The New York Times) did what Thompson did best. He showed up and basked in the strange bubble of admiration that followed him everywhere he went.

I stood in line for more than an hour, shook his hand, told him the story about swiping his cup of Chivas in Eugene eight years before, and got a polite refusal when I asked him to sign my copy of “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” — the rare Modern Library Edition without the movie tie-in cover. It would take too much time if he were to sign everyone's book, someone said. Still he admired the book and said he didn't have his own copy of that particular edition.

So I went around the line again, told him I had gone around twice, and that given that he should sign it. At this he acquiesced, and signed the title page. He then asked "Were you lying?" About what? "Were you lying about going around twice?" I assured him I hadn't lied told him again the story about how I had helped steal his cup of Chivas. He laughed and said “I remember you, you prick.”

Being “Hunter S. Thompson” must have been terribly difficult at some level for Hunter S. Thompson. His fame created what looks to me like a strange cocktail of veneration and vexation, which made it difficult for him to ever give a straight answer about anything personal or intimate.

The most telling moment I think about this comes in “Hunter,” a biography of the writer by E. Jean Carroll, excerpted here. In an interview she asks Thompson about his father:

— Tell me about your father.

— (Silence)

— You never talk about him.

— Well, read what I've written!

— I've read everything you've written. You never mention him.

— (Silence)

— Tell me about him.

— He had a great outlook on life.

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?

The legend Hunter Thompson had so deftly crafted about himself was one in which the alter ego clearly overwrote the identity of the original person. Or did it? The legend of Thompson’s strange rise to prominence is well known. The 60-day jail sentence. The time in the Air Force. The firings from newspapers. The kicked in candy machine, the freelance magazine assignments, notably “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”, all leading up to “Hells Angels” in 1966, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in 1971, and the “Campaign Trail” in 1973, which is my personal favorite. Chaos, madness, rage against convention, a reckless disregard for rules and societal structures and even human endurance are erupt and swirl into an intense and colorful tornado emanating from a window built into his skull. These are the hallmarks of his early work.

From there, the trajectory spirals steadily downward. Later works feel as though they came from the hand of a writer trapped within the expectation of what editors and the public thought a Hunter Thompson book should be like. There’s the collection of magazine pieces “The Great Shark Hunt” much of it containing pre-“Las Vegas” work is exceptional. Aside from the “Kentucky Derby” piece it contains the strangely prescient “What Drew Hemingway To Ketchum?” in which Thompson, for the National Obsever in 1964 explores Ernest Hemingway’s final home and resting place, Ketchum, Idaho, scene of a similarly spectacular literary exit:

“It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying...So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”

Later collections “Generation of Swine” (1988) and “Songs of the Doomed” (1990) are notable for how forgettable they are. They are Thompson at his most formulaic, seemingly living on the inertia of being Hunter Thompson.

I wish in these later years that Thompson had found a way to speak through the strange madness that gripped his machine-gun mind and to give his admirers like myself a clearer picture of not necessarily who and what he was — that much I got — but why he was, straight from his own gut.

It seems to me incongruous that so self-involved a writer as Thompson never truly engaged in any serious self-examination, never revealed the moments rare as they may have been when the legend necessarily gave way to the man, when the applause, and the drinking and the shooting paused. There were great regions of unexplored territory in the psyche of Hunter Thompson which remained utterly untouched: The self-doubt that grips all good writers with terrors unknown to mere mortals; The pain of the personal losses he experienced in his life, and which he seemed determined to deny; the creative struggle to remain original when so little actually is original in a world that values the mediocre and the banal and shrugs at the extraordinary.

These are sectors of the inner cranium of Hunter Thompson to which only the writer himself held the keys. Now that he’s pulled the trigger and literally destroyed it, he has locked us all out forever. I fear we’ll never know what really drove the madness that forced the world to notice him.

The Doctor Speaks

Some more Thompson links:

An NPR Audio Remembrance from Poet Andrei Codrescu
A Collection of "Hunter Stories" from Charles Kuralt, Sally Quinn and Rosalynn Carter among others
Christopher Hitchens weighs in
Audio Samples of a 12-hour interview pitting Thompson with the late George Plimpton
Part 1
Part 2
Thompson's widow Anita gives first-hand account of the scene at Woody Creek to The Rocky Mountain News
Ben Fong-Torres, a Rolling Stone editor remembers Thompson on NPR's "Talk of The Nation"
Thompson discusses "The Proud Highway" on NPR's "All Things Considered" in 1997

Why I Went to Dallas

2005-02-15T08:37:00.000-05:00

So I really didn't say much about why I went to Dallas two weeks ago. This should explain it all: "Diary of a Demo".

Signed in from Scottsdale

2005-02-13T14:49:00.000-05:00

Got to Scottsdale despite the unseasonable rain Friday night. The weather is better today and Maggie got some time by the pool, but I have a nasty head cold and so can't quite enjoy being outside. The in-room Internet isn't working, so I'm typing from a the lobby bar where the Wi-Fi is working. Otherwise all is well. I'm at the Westin Kierland to cover the Demo Conference and all indications are that it will be as interesting as it was last year, which was my first time attending. Went to a party last night honoring Demo's Executive producer Chris Shipley hosted by Jan Ziff and Alan Davidson which was enjoyable. I especially enjoyed their two dogs. Hoping to find some excellent Mexican food tonight, and to get an early start before Demo starts in earnest tomorrow morning.

A Musical Mystery Solved, But Not Really

2005-02-07T22:26:00.000-05:00

Tonight marks the end of a mystery that has bugged me for about a year. For it was about this time last year that I happened to hear an intriguing jazz piece on the radio. It was played during a Sunday afternoon broadcast of the show "Jazz Profiles" on WKCR radio, up at Columbia University. The show is generally an in-depth look at the work of a particular artist, and on this particular day it focused on the work of pianist McCoy Tyner. The show was playing in the background during a birthday party, but what I heard was nothing less than tantalizing. It was one of those long jazz epics that ususally grab me when I hear them mid-way. This once happened at the HMV record store on 86th St. and Lexington Ave. (now sadly gone) when I walked into the lower-level jazz section about six or seven minutes into the 11-minute saga "The Gigolo". It was an auspicious introduction. I bought it and one other of Lee Morgan record that day "The Sidewinder" for which Morgan was actually better known, and became a Morgan admirer for life.

And so back to this curious McCoy Tyner piece. As always happens when you really want to hear the name of the song, the radio announcer is less than completely helpful. She rattled off a long list of tunes she had played in the set, and from the best I could determine, the piece that got my interested was one in which Tyner was playing with none other than John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. The title wasn't apparent, just the fact that the set was Tyner, Coltrane live at the Vanguard in 1961.

I wrote to WKCR by email, asking what it was, and naturally got no response. At this I let the mystery lie figuring it was another of those jazz tunes I would never track down for lack of information.

Fast forward to July, when I heard what I think was the same tune once again, and again as a fragment on a radio program. This time it was "Sounds Eclectic" on KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif. which I happen to record occasionally online. If you listen to the July 25, 2004 show and fast-forward to about the 55th minute, you'll hear what I think was my elusive Coltrane-Tyner tune, but only briefly, as a background while Nic Harcourt is talking between segments. He did not ID the tune.

Again I write the radio station, but get no info.

I let the mystery lie again, but then intermittenly search through iTunes for hints as to what the tune may be. I finally remember the Village Vanguard connection, and come to arrive at the conclusion that the elusive tune was indeed "India" as it sounds like the kind of long, complicated epic, with a bit of a Middle-Eastern or south Asian flair worked into it.

So the puzzle is this: Which is the original mystery tune from February? Is it "India" or is it the unnamed tune from "Sounds Eclectic"? The unnamed tune sounds closer to what I remember hearing in passing, but "India" more closely resembles the notes I took from the radio announcer that day.

More searching takes place over the months that follow. At this writing I don't quite remember how I came to discover that the unnamed tune was actually "Olé" a powerful 18-minute slugfest from "Olé Coltrane," which was Coltrane's final album for Atlantic Records in 1961. But now the unnamed tune has a name. And yes, it turns out that McCoy Tyner is indeed the pianist on "Olé." So now both "India" and "Olé" are candidates.

Well my copy of "Olé" arrived today, and I recently bought a live version of "India" from the 1961 Coltrane album "Impressions" from iTunes, and I'm still convinced that either one could be the original mystery tune. Both are brilliant, long, complex and fascinating, and as it happens, were recorded during the same year: 1961. Yet I may never know which it was I that so intrigued me that Sunday afternoon a year ago.

Below is an audio sample of "Olé"

Here's a sample of "India"

Now how could I possibly mistake one for the other or vice versa? Listen to them both in their entirety, and I think you'll hear subtle similarities that underlie their obvious differences. In Ole we have two chords underneath everything else. In India only one. From a certain detached and distracted distance, I think the mistake isn't hard to make.

One side of me says "India," the other "Olé". Maybe both were strung together in the playlist and formed what I remember as a cohesive whole, where one bled into the other. The mystery is at once both solved, because I now know it had to be one, and yet not, because I know not which.

Fly to Dallas, Buy A Computer

2005-02-01T22:18:00.000-05:00

POSTING FROM DALLAS -- So I get to Dallas and my PowerBook conks out. Bad. I start combing the Yellow Pages for someone to help.

This has happened before. During my Jan. 2004 trip to San Francisco, the original hard drive on this same PowerBook decided it was only going to show up for work when it wanted to, not when I wanted it to. So I scrambled around and ultimately used my connections at Apple Computer to score a loaner machine for the duration of the trip, which was all of a few days.

Not so lucky this time. I get into the hotel room around 4:45 p.m. and realize that the machine is acting up again. When it does start up it freezes after a few minutes. Upon restart it might emit a few strange and frightening electronic tones, but not start up. This was not what I needed on a trip during which I need to write. So I call the only Mac repair shop with a display ad in the Yellow Pages. I get its proprietor on the phone,and she says she has already closed up the shop for the day. But she suggests that I take the machine to the Dallas Apple Store on Knox Street.

Of course when I get it there none of the problems I experienced take place. Adding to the embarassment, all checks by the tech's diagnostic tools show that the machine is in good health. Well even after all this, I decided that I can't risk having an unreliable laptop any long. It gave me problems in San Francisco, which I thought I had fixed by replacing the hard drive. Its battery had aged to a point where it was holding only an hour's worth of charge at a time, so I replaced that. And during the Vegas trip earlier this year it started to act up by freezing up while I was working, which is rare for a Mac running OS X.

As it happens, Apple announced new upgrades to its PowerBook lines just this week. I had already resolved to get a new one, but hadn't really decided when to do it. Today's problems forced me into action. I am now the proud owner of a brand-spanking new 15-inch PowerBook G4, with a 1.67 GHz PowerPC processor, a SuperDrive, 80-gigabyte hard drive, 512-megabytes of DDR SDRAM. And get this, when the ambient light starts to darken, the keyboard lights up.

Maggie's Place

2004-12-28T21:02:00.000-05:00

Maggie has a new blog. Do visit.

What I ate

2004-11-25T20:12:00.000-05:00

Every Thanksgiving people ask me what I ate and how it was and so on. I get tired of talking about it. (Uh....turkey?) Tonight we went to Stonehenge Inn in Ridgefield, Conn. for an early dinner, and it was excellent. But rather than describe the food ad naseum on Monday morning, I figured I'd save myself the trouble, and follow the old "picture is worth a thousand words" rule. I used my phone to snap a few images of the food as it arrived. (Shrimp, Turkey and Chocolate Mousse). I'll no doubt have many better things to do come Monday than relive repeatedly what I had to eat four days previously. There's a few thousands words worth of breath saved.

Quote Of The Day

2004-11-22T17:40:00.000-05:00

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."
--Winston Churchill

A Rare Find

2004-11-20T22:42:00.000-05:00

It's really amazing what you can find on the Internet when you least expect it. This morning I was just glancing over my collection of Cowboy Junkies that I've poured into my iTunes library. And I remembered an old bootleg tape I have probably stashed in storage somewhere that was called "Stolen Flowers." I Googled something or other and scored a hit at The Internet Archive. I hadn't heard of this before, but it includes a Live Music Archive and included among the detrius is a huge collection of bootlegged Cowboy Junkies performances. Among them, oddly enough, was "Stolen Flowers." Here's a cut from the session -- it's a live performance in Boston from 1989 that was broadcast by a local radio station -- from which it gets its name:

'Cause Cheap Is How I Feel

Here's a second cut from the same session: Sweet Jane

One other cool thing about this is that the group has given their permission for the non-commercial trading of tapes of their live performances. That means that it's not only okay to download them, but to share them.

Central Park Today

2004-11-14T23:05:00.000-05:00

I spent the afternoon walking around Central Park, mainly around the reservoir and near The Obelisk. For once I remembered to bring a camera.

Good Gravy

2004-11-12T16:19:00.000-05:00

If it weren't already bad enough that I waste what time that I do on the Homestarrunner Web site, apparently there is also a Homestar Wiki which contains more information about the Homestarverse and Strongbadia than most mortal minds can comfortably comprehend. This however is to me, the best Homestar page ever.

Phone pic of the day

2004-11-11T23:57:00.000-05:00

my ride home

More phone pictures

2004-11-10T22:39:00.000-05:00

times square tonight

First Audio Post

2004-11-09T20:05:00.000-05:00

Just playing around with AudBlog for the first time.

So what was that anyway?

2004-11-09T19:54:00.000-05:00

That last post was done entirely from my mobile phone. I used it to take the picture, type the caption, and from there I sent it to a service called Flickr.com which then automatically published it here. The only thing I did on the computer was go back into Blogger to change the title of the posting, because at first it was just the filename of the photo. But give me enough time and I'll figure out how to post that automatically as well. More on this subject to come in the days ahead.

Look what my mobile phone can do

2004-11-09T19:11:00.000-05:00

wolrich is a good volunteer.

Pictures from Sagamore Hill

2004-11-08T23:09:00.000-05:00

Shot by Maggie

A Memorable Birthday

2004-11-08T13:35:00.000-05:00

For my birthday this weekend, Maggie and I headed out to Sagamore Hill. If you're not familiar, it's the summer home of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. It was a simply gorgeous day in a wonderful setting. Maggie got some pictures and I hope to post a few here later. I was already a TR fan, but became a bigger one after reading Edmund Morris's two excellent biographical volumes "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" and "Theodore Rex". I am eagerly awaiting volume three in the series. Here's more on the second book, including an interview with the author, from National Public Radio.

After that we drove to Brooklyn for a couple of double-dipped beef sandwiches at Brennan and Carr's. The first time I was there was for Maggie's birthday earlier this year. They serve a hot beef sandwich au jus, and the first time I had one I had one of those moments where you say "where has this been all my life?" It's apparently a local institution in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and has been serving up the same food continuously since 1938, and it doesn't look like its changed much inside or out, which is a good thing. See item #49 on this "You know you're from Brooklyn when" list.

I was off, but still right

2004-11-03T13:35:00.000-05:00

Okay. So my numbers were off. I still called it, against the advice and counsel of many friends who thought I was nuts.

Bush 273, Kerry 265

2004-11-02T23:56:00.000-05:00

That is my prediction for the final result tonight, even if we don't know the final result tonight. I predicted it earlier this week in an email to my grad school classmates. As the results read 237-188, I stand by it. Ohio will fall next. Get ready for four more years, like it or not.

More thoughts on the election

2004-11-02T06:06:00.000-05:00

A few commentators have been suggesting that its possible we could find ourselves with a split electoral college -- 269 votes each -- tonight. I heard one organization say that there are no less than 33 distinct scenarios under which this could happen. Should that happen, the decision would would under the 12th Amendment to the Constition Fall to the U.S. House Of Representatives. And if the House can't make up their mind, by Jan. 20 of 2005, then the 20th Amendment comes into play. Under this scenario, the vice president -elect becomes the acting president . But get this. If they're still undecided, the 20th Amendment reads as follows: "the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified."

Most elections aren't terribly close. It appears this one will be. But the election of 1800 was as well, and resulted in an evenly split electoral college. Here's a fascinating look -- in audio -- on that election from National Public Radio.

Garrison Keillor also has some fine words to take some comfort from with today's installment of
The Writer's Almanac. (Scroll down to Nov. 2). I often get frustrated about low voter turnout, like in 1996, when less than half of those voters eligible -- 49% -- showed up to the polls. Yet I learned today -- thanks to Keillor -- that the lowest turnout was in 1788 for the very first election held under the authority of the Constitution: It was 11%.

Keillor goes on:

To be eligible to vote at the time, you had to be a white male property owner. But different states had trouble defining what a property owner was. ...In Pennsylvania, you just had to prove that you paid taxes. In New York, you had to prove that your estate was worth a certain amount of money. If your estate was greater than 20 pounds, you could vote for state assembly, but your estate had to be worth more than 100 pounds to vote for senator or governor. In Connecticut, you had to be a white male property owner "of a quiet and peaceable behavior and civil conversation. ... In order to vote in that first election, voters had to travel many miles to the nearest polling place, which was often a tavern. There they met the candidates for their district's seat on the state assembly. In many precincts, there were no ballots. Voters announced their votes to the sheriff in loud, clear voices, and then stood by the candidate they had voted for, who usually offered them something to drink.

Here's the audio.

Election Day, 2004

2004-11-02T04:41:00.000-05:00

Devo's "Freedom Of Choice" seems as good as any as the theme of the day.

Or if you prefer, some verse:

Election Day, November, 1884
--From Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless prairies--nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes--nor
Mississippi's stream:
--This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name--the still
small voice vibrating--America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen--the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd--sea-board and inland--
Texas to Maine--the Prairie States--Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West--the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling--(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the
peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity--welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
--Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify--while the heart
pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

Hosting switch completed

2004-11-01T11:55:00.000-05:00

Looks like the hosting switch went off without a hitch. This site is now hosted entirely on websitesource.com. I can publish normally just like before. Yay.

A Break from politics, and other things

2004-10-31T13:04:00.000-05:00

We're out at the house in Bridgehampton today, taking in an unusually warm day for this late in the fall -- 66 degrees and sunny as I type. But the foliage on the trees out front is gorgeous.

Here's how those same trees looked on 2 Oct.

Thought for the day

2004-10-28T21:07:00.000-04:00

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
--François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)

86 Years Is Long Enough

2004-10-28T01:26:00.000-04:00

This one goes out to the city of Boston.

Expect a move soon

2004-10-24T10:32:00.000-04:00

I found a new hosting provider that works properly with Blogger.com. I put up a test blog at hesseldahl.org to check. Overall I haven't been terribly impressed with 1and1.com and expect to move this domain over to websitesource.com, which seems to have an interface that I can understand as its a little more conventional. 1and1.com has been, well, weird from the get-go. Mail accounts, for instance, are created not based on the name of the account itself, but rather as a convulted serial number naming convention. I'll be glad to move over to a hosting provider that makes sense to me. That may mean some downtime again, though the Websitesource people insist that won't be the case. Stay tuned.

Yeah, okay so I haven't updated in awhile

2004-10-02T11:35:00.000-04:00

Blogging is a funny thing. One day you're obsessed with it, and the next you're on to other things and neglecting your blogging duties. Of course Blogger's seeming inability to ftp to my new hosting provider -- or maybe its my hosting provider's fault for not running ftp or sftp properly -- kinda took the wind out of my sails. After all the trouble I went through to move over to 1and1.com, I'm actively looking for another host that offers a similarly inexpensive deal for multiple domains. But then I'd have to move everything over again, which is, as we all learned a few months ago, a very big pain in the neck. Exactly why I feel the need to belly-ache about this publicly is beyond me, and to be fair no one has asked about the lack updates. Leave me alone and go watch Strong Bad Email or something.

Oregon, My Oregon

2004-05-27T10:49:00.000-04:00

Attorney General John Aschroft is in town today, to do a little business on the terrorism front. Here's the lead courtesy of the AP:

NEW YORK - A radical Muslim cleric was arrested Thursday in London, accused in a U.S. indictment of trying to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon while providing aid to both al-Qaida and the Taliban, officials said. ...

Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, also known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, also is charged in the 11-count indictment with hostage-taking and conspiracy in connection with a December 1998 incident that left four tourists dead in Yemen. ...

According to the indictment, Mustafa tried to establish the terrorist camp in Bly, Ore., between October 1999 and early 2000. He was also charged with specifically providing material support to al-Qaida and the Taliban to foment jihad, or holy war, in Afghanistan

Bly, Oregon is nowhere terribly interesting. But it is remote. The actual town is one of those places where at most you'll stop for gas. It has a k-8 school, three stores, a post office, three churches and a gas station...that's about it. Turns out this isn't the first time it has figured in an American military conflict.

Its last moment of notoriety came when it was bombed by the Japanese -- yes the Japanese -- during World War II. Seems Japan had this idea for causing huge forest fires in the American West and floated hydrogen ballons with bombs attached to them. On May 5th, 1945, one of those ballons landed outside Bly. A group of kids found it, and started to mess around with it. The bomb went off and six people, five of them children, died. Here's a first-hand account by a Forest Service Ranger who arrived on the scene after the explosion. From what he says, these six deaths were the only fatalities in the war caused by enemy action within the borders of the 48 contiguous states. Here's more on that incident with more info on the wider Japanese effort to bomb America with balloons.

So back to the current war. Consider this phrase:

Blest by the blood of martyrs, Land of the setting sun

Where would you imagine something like that would appear? Perhaps something written to attract Al-Qaeda recruits, or a new diatribe by some Muslim crackpot with nothing better to do that dream up new and creative ways to kill people he's never met. No. In fact that phrase, irony of ironies, appears in the second verse of the Oregon State Song.

We're back.

2004-05-20T18:43:00.000-04:00

The change finally came through. Arik.org is back on the grid as of now.

Now into day 6, or 10 or something

2004-05-19T17:47:00.000-04:00

This is very upsetting. I still don't use of my arik.org domain. It is now something like 10 days since I started the transfer process. This to me smacks of some stupid bureacracy getting in my way. Somehow I just know its ICANN's fault.

A quick explanation of what's going on

2004-05-08T21:09:00.000-04:00

The domain arik.org is on ice. After hosting it for several years with Earthlink, I'm now centralizing all the domains I own with a single hosting provider, 1and1.com. The transition is complete for all the domains except arik.org. This means until the various bits of the Internet bureacracy get my domain registration and hosting transfer complete, which could take as long as ten days, everything about my Internet existence is going to be in a weird state of flux. I myself am rather flummoxed by the whole affair. The further complicating fact is that Blogger.com doesn't seem to like sending data to the new host via ftp. I'm either going to have to perform some kind of sacrifies to the Gods of Blogger to get them to help me out, or really stand on my ear with my ISP to get them to investigate further. The new hosting provider's level of support as yet is not encouraging. Meanwhile my digital identity is floating in peices.

2004-05-08T17:10:00.000-04:00

Testing.

This site is moving

2004-05-06T22:17:00.000-04:00

If you happen to notice any disruption in availability here, it's probably because's switching hosts. It should only last a few days. I'll be reachable on arik - at - arik.net in the interim.

2004-05-04T23:03:00.000-04:00

On my very first job, I said 'thank you' and 'please.' They made me scrub a parking lot down on my knees. Then I got fired for being scared of bees, and they only gave me 50 cents an hour....

2004-04-12T17:42:00.000-04:00

No. I really don't know this person so stop asking.

Readings

2004-03-31T19:26:00.000-05:00

The New York Press is out with its annual "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" list. I made the list, sort of, at #42, lumped into the "i-Snobs" category. But my favorite selection was #13, whose name I will not mention here. See if you can figure it out based on the clues in this excerpt from a well-executed polemic smackdown:

"The actress speaks like an 11-year-old girl and has less to say; lacking utterly in charm, she compensates with screamy clothes and pointy shoes. Now that she is at long last gone, we're hoping new icons will spring up to replace her, and we're hoping they'll be wearing no-name jeans, going light on the eyeliner and reading a newspaper every once in a while."

The Song In My Head, II

2004-03-08T16:39:00.000-05:00

Help me. I can't stop. I can't stop, I say. I can't seem to stop listening to John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things." Yes, yes, I know it's like, all accessible and easy and stuff. Yes, yes I know. But I still can't stop listening to it over and over. That's why I'm saying "HELP!"

Now Hear This: Outsourcing is good for the economy

2004-02-23T17:27:00.000-05:00

With all the griping out information technology jobs migrating to India and elsewhere around the world, I've been thinking about basic economics lately. It to me seemed pretty clear that when a company saves money by redeploying work to a less-costly venue it frees up the money saved for reinvestment in new projects likely to require more intensive supervision in domestic job markets. Well it seems I had ignored the political dustup about comments made by Gregory Mankiw, President Bush's chief economic advisor. It appears he had the audacity to explain to members of Congress that when goods are produced more cheaply abroad it makes sense to import them. The same applies to services. The Washington Post put it elquently in a Feb. 13 editorial:

"Just as it makes sense to buy cell phones from Finland if they are cheap and excellent, it makes sense to buy call-center services or software programming from India if these are the best on the market. Not only is Mr. Mankiw right, but to argue otherwise is elitist and offensive. It would suggest that it's okay for blue-collar workers to lose jobs to foreign competition but not okay for white-collar folk to face the same competitive pressure."

Well now The Economist has weighed in with a more complete treatise on the issue. In "The great hollowing out myth" it points out that outsourcing labor to less costly markets is a very old idea known as the law of competitive advantage.

Remember all those lost jobs -- about 2.3 million of them -- for which critics blame the Bush Adminstration? Well it seems a good portion of them were simply "bubble" jobs created during the late 90s tech boom which drove the unemployment rate below the 5% "natural" unemployment rate considered healthy for keeping inflation under control.

Another interesting point: "Between 1980 and 2002, the U.S. population grew by 23.9%. The number of employed Americans, on the other hand, grew by 37.4%. Today in 138.6 million Americans are in work, a near-record, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the population."

For American companies handling the politically delicate question of whether or not to send certain kinds of jobs overseas it comes down to this: Send the easy jobs overseas where you can pay someone less to do it. Then you can reallocate that money to pay someone a higher salary to take on more difficult and demanding domestically sourced jobs that require more skills and more direct supervision. The net effect over time is more domestic jobs, not fewer.

Remember companies want to grow and expand. They want to make more money. That means saving money where it makes sense and then reinvesting that money in building new products or services or expanding their geographic reach, and so on. This is what businesses do. And as painful as it may be in the short term for people losing jobs, its a basic force of economics that no presidential candidate of any party can hold back.

Hello to Sree's class

2004-02-05T12:32:00.000-05:00

If I know Sree then this site is required reading in anticipation of tonight's New Media Workshop class. So to those of you surfing in from the Class of 2004, greetings.

During my visit last year I had wanted to show off the work of the Class of 1997, only to find it had long gone missing from Columbia's Web servers. Disappointed by the performance of a server that was named "Dragon" if I remember correctly, and horrified that that result of several months of hard work had disappeared into the ether, I set out with a new mission to reconstruct as much of the work of the 1997 New Media Workshop as I could.

As luck would have it I found a signifnicant treasure trove of information on The Internet Wayback Machine. From there I started copying files like a madman. I guess you can consider it a form of digital archaelogy. The results, such as they are, are still under heavy construction, and it is, as you might imagine, a rather time-consuming and labor-intensive project for one person. For openers, you can go have a look at the entry page. I've even recovered Sree's summaries from the first six classes here.

Rebuilding the actual projects however, hasn't been as easy, particularly when it comes to the original NYC24 project. When the time comes, I'm going to need a little Javascript help from those who did the work on it, and hopefully John McGrath will be up for it. I apparently still have to correct some broken links and get my directory structures worked out just right. The project link above apparently doens't work right, but here's Project 1, and Project 2. However Project 3 was primarily done with Apple Media Tool, and only one was produced for the Web. Then for Project 4 most of us went back to the Web. In addition there was Global New York and finally NYC24, the original.

A note about the links to the projects themselves. Many -- if not most links to the projects themselves go to the versions saved at archive.org, and so your experience with download speed and depth of links may vary. Most of the projects were preserved on several different dates, and in different states with each date, so your experiece may vary. A few have been completely lost, as none of the files associated with them have not been preserved at all, which happened with one of my projects, and a few others.

Also remember what kind of tools we were using in 1997: We did most of our production on Macs, and hand-coded our HTML using BBedit. That was pretty advanced for those days. The Web was still largely an experimental medium seven years ago, and when you look back you see how far its come.

Finally, here's the page that Sree and his pal Andrew Lih used to advertise the class. Sadly, the Quickime movie they recorded for it has been lost.

Lesson: The Web is not a permanent medium. If it's important now, BACK IT UP for the future.

Dean-ied

2004-01-27T21:33:00.000-05:00

From the AP: "With 52 percent of the precincts reporting, Kerry had 39 percent, Dean had 25 percent, Edwards 13 percent, Clark 12 percent, and Lieberman 9 percent."
CNN reports that Dean will spend Wednesday in Vermont giving satellite TV interviews and talking strategy with all the senior campaign aides. Could it be he's catching on to the fact that the man who was the presumptive nominee two weeks ago has yet to carry a single state in the primary process? The wheels are off the Dean campaign, and those who are still backing him are simply in Dean-ial.

Howard who?

2004-01-19T22:35:00.000-05:00

"Dean Disappoints Dopes." Seems so-called insurgent candidate Howard Dean managed to get his ass soundly kicked by two Johns ... John Kerry and John Edwards. Now we know why Jimmy Carter stopped short of outrightly endorsing Dean over the weekend. He knew what many political pragmatists have been saying for a long time: Dean peaked too soon. His supporters have been acting like he was the presumptive nominee while he has been staking out one extremist position after another. Dean will be yesterday's news by March. The race is now officially on, and Dean isn't in nearly as strong a position as all his obnoxious supporters would have you believe.

The song in my head

2004-01-15T00:39:00.000-05:00

If you happen to hear me humming its probably "The Plum Blossom" by Yusef Lateef, which is the first track of the 1961 album "Eastern Sounds." I heard a cut of it while at Amoeba Music in San Francisco. As I like to say, I "went mad" for it, but they had no more copies for sale. Thank Jobs for iTunes. I bought it online after I got back to New York. Can't seem to stop listening to it.
So what's it sound like? Here's Plum Blossom in Real Format and Windows Media, and link directly into iTunes:

And Here's "Love Theme From Spartacus" in Real and Windows Media, and iTunes:
That's the music in my head this week.

Holiday cheer

2003-12-24T18:19:00.000-05:00

Dateline, Washington and Paris: Air France canceled several flights to the United States after U.S. officials, on heightened alert for terror attacks over the holiday, passed on "credible" security threats involving passengers scheduled to fly to Los Angeles on flights from Paris, U.S. and European officials said Wednesday. That from the Associated Press.
Dateline New York: With the nation on high alert and the city at orange plus, LaGuardia Airport has placed all departing flights on hold due to concerns about a passenger. Aiport officials say all passengers will be re-screened before flights are resumed. At about 5:30 p.m., security officials began clearing portions of the airport so passengers could be sent back through security checkpoints. That from New York One.
Meanwhile as I sit here blogging overlooking Manhattan, I can hear the sounds of jets. They do not sound like the disctinctively meanacing Air National Guard or Air Force F-15s flying combat air patrol that were ever present in the hours and days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They sound like typical commercial airliners. I wonder if any of them are carrying any special presents.
Have a Merry, and a Bright, and all that.

2003-12-21T22:13:00.000-05:00

So what the heck is this suppossed to mean anyway? Here's a few things that happen here in New York. Tomorrow will be a bad day for fare-jumping at the subway gates. It'll be a bad day for subway commutes period. Head to work early.

Ah, office party season

2003-12-19T10:44:00.000-05:00

Reuters has a dispatch on a record-setting drunkard.

RIGA, Latvia (Reuters) - Latvian police said a drunk picked up with around twice the blood-alcohol level considered deadly had probably set a world record but would wake with a hangover to match.
The unidentified middle-aged man was unconscious but stable after a blood test showed 7.22 parts per million of alcohol, police spokeswoman Ieva Zvidre said.

He must have been heading home from an office party. I wonder who it was?

Trilogy Tuesday follow-up

2003-12-19T08:57:00.000-05:00

I never did fully explain what happened on Tuesday night so I'll just sum it up. Just before "Return of the King" was to begin, Elijah Wood (Frodo), Sean Astin (Samwise), Dominic Monaghan (Merry) and Andy Serkis (Gollum/Smeagol) showed up to say hello to the troops sitting through 10 hours and 35 minutes of film. I'm not usually all that impressed with being in the presence of celebrities, but it was awfully nice of them to come and show their appreciation to the Rings fans. The New York Times has the rundown. (Free registration required.)

A quote from the Times peice:

"Oh, my God," Mr. Wood said. "You people just sat through one and two?" ("YAYY!!!") "The extended versions?" ("YAYY!!!") Then he uttered a warmly enthusiastic but entirely un-hobbitlike obscenity. As he went on excitedly, I was torn: delighted to seem relaxed and expansive, dismayed to see this radiantly smooth-skinned cherub with the curly tresses talking like a sailor.

So what do I think of the film "Return of the King"? Everyone who knows I saw it has been asking. All I can say prepare yourself for three hours of carnage, puncuated by what has to be one of the longest and most drawn-out conclusion sequences ever put to film. Don't get me wrong -- I loved this film and will see it again. But after 10 hours and change, the end of ROTK reminded me an old sketch from "Space Ghost Coast To Coast" -- the one about the song that never ends. After 10 hours, ROTK was the film that wouldn't end.

Actors here

2003-12-16T21:47:00.000-05:00

Elija woods, samwise andey serkis and dominc monahan are in the house!
=============

Update

2003-12-16T21:40:00.000-05:00

Big boxes bearing WETA logos just appeared at the front of the cinema. Its probably t-shirts or something.
=============

Trilogy Tuesday field report

2003-12-16T21:37:00.000-05:00

Return of the King is about to start. Theater management has promised a "special surprise" promptly at 9:45. More later if its cool.
=============

2003-12-14T14:15:00.000-05:00

They got him.
So now, where's all that money?

2003-12-12T10:26:00.000-05:00

You may notice changes underway, that have a little something to do with the little badge at the lower left of the page. With luck this once-static page may actually see some regular updates starting now. You might say this is arik.org version 2.0.

2003-12-06T22:56:00.000-05:00

This is a test post.

2003-10-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

So I've been playing around with Handspring's Treo 600 for the last few days. It's a PDA/wireless phone with an integrated camera. The pictures are surprisingly good when moved to a PC screen. Here's an impromptu snap of me and Maggie, the love of my life.

2003-07-02T09:33:00.000-04:00

Those guys at NASA just keep getting better and better. Always snapping pictures of outer space and the heavens above. Seems they caught a fleeting glimpse of the hand of God Himself recently. His message for mankind isn't a kind one.

Did I Sleep Through The Coup?

2002-06-29T16:39:00.000-04:00

I'm troubled by what I read in today's Washington Post which you can read here. Apparently the Bush Administration thinks it can arbitrarily suspend The Constitution, and in particular the Sixth Amendment, which requires that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

I'm also bothered by the argument that in these cases concerning people accussed of having links to terror organizations are not subject to civilian authority. Last I checked, the military was subject to civilian authority, which is why it is an elected civilian, The President of the United States, who is designated as the Commander-in-Chief of the military, and why generals and admirals answer to that office, and not to their own authority.

But then again, I have seen nothing to indicate that the country is in fact, at war. Congress has not declared as such, though President Bush insists we are. I'm rather inclinded to agree, but the authority to declare a formal state of war rests solely with Congress. Don't believe me? Look it up.

You don't have to tell me about the nature of the national emergency we find ourselves in. What most people in America saw transpire on television on Sept. 11, 2001, I saw with my own eyes. I've shocked old friends with my hawkish opinions about the course of the war, and when it comes to captured members of enemy forces, I have precious little sympathy as to their fate. But we have rules that we live by that were set down in a building on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. And we can't just throw them away because they're getting in the way.

From the "It Couldn't Happen To Nicer People" Department:

2002-06-27T16:12:00.000-04:00

Word comes from Slashdot that that terrible, horrible excuse for a software firm Gator is on the business end of a lawsuit filed by several publishing companies that describes Gator's advertising disease-ware as "a parasite that free rides on the hard work and investment" of the publishers" according to this Washington Post story.

I for one won't be sad to see Gator fade into the historical footnote it deserves to be. I once was fooled into installing it and was creeped out by the little eyes that would occasionally pop up in the lower right corner of my screen. Even after deleting all the elements of the Gator software I could find, it wouldn't let go, and remained somewhere in some secret Windows NT start-up menu where I couldn't reach, reminding me that it was there every time I started up. I finally deleted everything on the machine and installed Windows 2000. So far I have managed to remain blessedly Gator-free, and intend to stay that way.

A Close Shave

2002-06-20T17:15:00.000-04:00

It helps to keep things in perspective. On June 14, the Earth apparently came within only 75,000 miles of a catastrophic collision with a peice of space rock the size of a soccer field. The BBC has the details. If 75,000 miles seems like a long way consider this: The Moon is more than three times that far away: 240,000 miles. Had this bit of rock actually hit the planet, the result would have been something like what happened in Siberia in 1908, when an asteroid of similar size flattened 2,000 square miles of forest land. Scarier yet is the fact that astronmers only detected in three days after it had passed us by.