The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner

I suspect Rachel Kushner has crashed a motorcycle. I'm reading her story about Reno, an artist conduit riding between New York, Italy and Bonneville Salt Flats.

The sweat wicks from unzipped leather as we start this mainly 1970's journey. We pause the new Italian motorcycle, somewhere near the casino lands in Nevada.

My small confession; at the start, I wasn't even sure if Reno's voice was male or female. It's a good thing.

Kushner writes with a coriandoli flourish of descriptions; whether it's glittering shards of Peroni bottle on via Corso or the scream, careen, rooster tail, float of fast boys in the American desert.

There's sparsely written incidental characters who could inhabit Tom Waits lyrics.

Reno comes from unsentimental people. Sibling Sandro, fourteen years older, photographed as an artist aloof with a shotgun slashing an X across the picture.

There's a richness from the characters that Reno meets. Quite often they get the best lines.

There's several themes dipped in seventies colour: alienation, politics, art, types of freedom.

And I'll pause right there.

I was fascinated enough to root around for back story. And there, in the Paris Review, was an issue curated by Kushner.

It's a useful read and more detailed than author puff-pieces from week-end magazines. It informs the writer's process and provides the fun of sometimes uncommented trails back to the novel like the Chia picture by Ginsberg illustrated above.

sunrise

I was up early enough to watch the sunrise this morning (04:42, since you wondered). That's a pretty early sunrise and its still getting earlier each day. Today, it has also been the sunniest time.

The sun also somehow managed to get into a gap between two houses at a very low angle, which I'll refer to as my local equivalent of a pre-solstice Stonehenge moment. I know jealous New Yorkers talk about Manhattanhenge when the sun sets at the right angle to shine along those blocky streets (July this year, I think).

Such regimented sun alignment doesn't work in London because of the non grid structure of the streets, but my local sunrise moment is still fun.

It's a good time to think of other entertaining sun rises and sunsets, hence my picture from Utah of a sunrise which allowed me to cast an extra long shadow. Yep, zoom in on the picture at the top of the post - that's my shadow with a camera.

But back here we now have the London rain, although it's still another few days until the proper solstice.

wallet

A few days ago, some of us were together in a restaurant in London. We were chatting away and probably because it was near 'bill time' the chatter briefly swayed to wallets. Or more particularly, how to keep them thin. Yep, it was that part of the evening.

People sometimes comment on my use of Oyster card holders as a substitute for a proper wallet. I see the objective to be to somehow reduce the number of cards I need to carry and therefore the Oyster card holder creates an interesting lower end design point. They are also (a) free and (b) frequently given away at places like train stations. My current groovy one is from the Tate Modern.

So I could claim that it's a proper work of art as well, although I confess that a previous version was in the colours of Sweden and advertised IKEA.

I decided to look at how professionals of wallet management would handle this and found the useful item below.

It's fair to say that I've discovered most of this myself, but it's useful as a summary.

Te tricky part is the bit about storing card info on the phone. I do that as well, using one of the keyring type applications which scans the card and makes a copy of the relevant information, optionally allowing the images of it to be stored too. There's a few of them around and it's quite a good idea.

The challenge, as we were discussing in the restaurant, is that these services also use 'The Cloud' which can create problems.

The first problem is that some of them don't keep a local copy of the image cached in the phone. That's not a lot of use if someone asks you to 'prove it' when you quote a (non payment) card number to them. The related problem is the one we've seen at plane check-in gates, when there's no phone signal and someone is trying to check in using a phone based bar code. It's a great idea but doesn't always quite work. I've also had the dedicated apps (ie Storecard apps) lose the information after being updated.

The second and topical problem is the thought that all these codes are now in the ether Cloud somewhere. The more paranoid might think it was all part of a Big Brother plan.

Norton One slows my Mac browser

Three Macs slowed down just after I installed Norton One.

An older Macbook (2009), a Macbook Air and an iMac. All were on latest OS X software.

After installing Norton One all three ran Safari noticeably slower. With one, I didn't even tell the regular user but received complaints.

The most powerful system was a 32Gb memory quad core i7-3.7.

I have now removed the whole Norton One suite from these Mac environments. They have all speeded up again.

Draw your own conclusions.

Here's a link to the uninstall page

Update: I called Norton.

They told me they had not heard of this slow running before.

They suggested maybe I should try removing the browser 'add-in' for Norton?

As a quick experiment, I reinstalled Norton on the fastest machine. I ensured the browser extension was removed. The browser ran faster, but of course it didn't then have the Norton capability.

Hmmm.

edging forward

I've had to upgrade the network security at rashbre central again. There's been someone attempting to tamper with one of the lesser known rashbre web-sites and trying to add some code into a directory. It didn't work and I think they will have burnt fingers. I've got a log record, IP address and bizarrely a phone number for this errant stranger so 'matters are in hand', as they say.

The web-site is actually hosted in Germany, although at least part of their internet journey passed through America. So like the recent reports about PRISM, it's probably fair game to provide a small notification about it to NCCIC or CERT.

It's annoying having to spend time on dealing with these negative activities. It's big business of course. There's one set of people selling pointless search engine optimisations by attempting to drop links of their client's products sneakily into other peoples' websites.

Then there's the other group (or parts of the same group?) selling the antidote products.

Facebook and twitter create another market. I'm sure I'm not the only one to get spammed by people offering packs of 'friends' to bump up the numbers. It all sounds quite saddo, were it not for the 'number of friends/followers' being used to create indices of social weighting. Of course, Google and similar systems are wise to it all and eliminate most of the spurious counts from their calculations.

It's all quite topical with the discussions of government-based spyware at the moment, but I can't help wondering how they'd have the horsepower to make it all work for more than a group of targeted individuals. There must be a lot of Chloe O'Brians around to save the day.

And of course, judging by the person attempting to fiddle with one of my web-sites, the perpetrators try to hide behind various masking technologies.

Annoyingly, it means we are all encouraged to spend time adding those defensive layers like complicated frequently changing passwords, Captcha codes, moderation for comments, firewalls, firetraps, sandboxes and so on.

So no wonder we need ever bigger computers to write our documents. It's all the edge activity.

approved for release

It looks as if I'll have a couple of weeks gap in my schedule ahead. This will be useful to help me round out a few partially completed projects.

I've also been on a couple of courses recently and it should give me a chance to put some of it into action. One was linked to side project screenplay activities, which I don't think have received much blogging coverage.

I met some excellent and experienced folk who gave great pointers about commercial storytelling.

We also picked through interesting modern material and it's given further avenues to explore. For example, changes based around modern audience sophistication and the storytelling shorthand used. Like text messages. I happen to think SMS based story progressions are overused. Check out any soap. Although, I suppose ideas travel fast and today's connectedness only accelerates that process.

As an example, yesterday there was that egg-throwing incident on a tacky television show. I idly looked at the perpetrator's twitter feed a few minutes after it occurred. She had about 350 followers. By the end of the show it was 10 times that number and by this morning it was around 10,000. She hadn't posted since Christmas Eve, so we may need to hold our breath for anything interesting.

Similar with the great spy interception PRISM expose. Guess what? Email is being monitored by government agencies. The charts (Victoria Nece redesign here) showed monitoring actions from around 2007 through to nowadays.

We've all watched some of the movies Enemy of the State, Bourne, Body of Lies, or episodes of Spooks or 24. That's where the screenplays exhibit a slickness around these technologies that I'm less convinced work so well in practice. All that on-demand repositioning of satellites in realtime and remote accessing of security pin numbers in a warehouse depot. Maybe it wouldn't work so well in practice. The wrong plug? the wrong software driver? System re-boot?

I'm not saying there isn't stuff out there. They've been launching surveillance satellites since the Gambit project in the 1960s. Back then the satellites had a short mission life, sometimes fuzzy corduroy striping cameras and a little better than 50% success rate.

The technology improved by the simple expedient of 'I think we'd better get a bigger dish' and then 'I think we'd better get a bigger rocket'.

A quick hint when trying to spot big stuff being fired into surveillance orbit is to look for the biggest rockets. Some of the next size down ones didn't quite make it.

The biggest currently seems to be the Delta IV-Heavy which is one rocket, with two more strapped onto it. There is a brilliant new design in discussion which is fundamentally the same, but with four extra rockets strapped on.

The biggest surveillance satellite on the biggest rocket so far is NROL-32 on the Delta IV-Heavy. It's still classified, so we can only guess that it's an astromesh construction, like a 100 metre wide TV satellite dish pointing back to earth. It was only obliquely referenced when it was launched back in November 2010.

I wonder how it is getting on? What it's looking at? And what else is planned?



Maybe after tidying up my current projects, there's an opportunity to practice some screenplay here? Spies and rockets instead of genre versions of folk tales? Hansel and Gretel's already been done. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, anyone?

rolling fog paint decisions

Now we've got the new sofa upstairs to go into the 'music room' we can start to work out the accompanying paint scheme.

Some might think that we'd have decorated the room before the sofa arrived, but it proved better to cross check the colour in-situ.

I didn't realise there were so many versions of a single paint colour, like "Rolling Fog", which has four variants.

That's before we add on the matt, silk, gloss and not forgetting the "Intelligent Matt", "Traditional Oil Gloss" and Floor Paint. Actually, there's 11 finishes for this colour in total, and 4 different shades.

Decision, decisions.

art everywhere

I like the idea of the Art Everywhere plans for Great Britain this summer.

It's along the lines of making the whole country into an art gallery by buying space on poster sites during August.

VVS vertical video syndrome

I saw this at Lady Banana's and it made me laugh.

blippar in the cupboards

A small post-twitter experiment for the weekend.

I decided to try that Blippar application by pointing it into a kitchen cupboard.

Blippar is one of those augmented reality applications that pings up extra information when it recognises the right content. You sometimes see Blippar enabled adverts for cars, on platform hoardings.

My casual iPhone scan of the cupboard struck Blippar gold straight away, when it's camera identified a bottle of barbecue sauce and pinged up a series of recipes. Okay, the recipes were along the lines of 'make something and squirt Heinz product into it', but it proved the point.

Then it spotted Marmite, which asked for a vote about Like or Hate (Like, obv). And a packet of crisps which seemed to offer a mini weather forecast. The iPhone knew where in the world the crisp packet was located and whether the conditions were suitable for outdoor consumption.

Companies are tentatively experimenting with this at the moment, but I suppose it won't be long before we start to see more; there's already AR bus stop advertisements for pizza and a certain charity.

derivative antifragility?

I've just been reading that newish AntiFragile book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's about how adaptive behaviour can strengthen systems, although ex-derivatives trader Taleb's pompous style requires a reader's mental machete to hack to the main points.

The book's core message takes a kind of Nietsche theme of 'what does not kill me makes me stronger' and expands it out to several hundred pages. When you think you've finished reading an idea, another whole section of the same theme appears, like the doubling regrowth of a severed Hydra's head.

I'll summarise it. We know if we shake a box marked 'Fragile' we break the contents. People don't mark boxes 'Robust' and if we were to shake them then nothing inside changes. A box marked 'Antifragile', when shaken, could reconfigure its components into something better. A bit like evolution. Yes, that's the main riff of the book. Things that gain from disorder.

The Mr Bombastic style insults as many people as possible on the way to this conclusion, whilst hinting that the self-aggrandising author dead lifts 330lbs, so we'd better not insult him. As a burly ranter fond of Malbec in Michelin restarants, his good lines are flashes spread across oft-times repetitive and self-justifying pages. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as Taleb would surely state it. Several times. Cross referenced. And maybe in Latin.

Taleb previously wrote the Black Swan book about 'one off' events that can't be predicted but have big effects. If that book identified the randomness of some key events, this one tries to turn the events and interconnectedness to advantage.

There's some good ideas in the book, which I found only started to lock in after 15% read and by treaing his asides as humorous. There's plenty of other people quoting Taleb's brilliance, although I wonder how they have suppressed their irritation of his style to get to the end of the book?

Instead I'll be reminded of Kanye West, whose oft-played stadium lyrics sampling Daft Punk and quoting Twilight of the False Gods, make a similar point to the book.

(Work it, make it, do it,
Makes us harder, better, faster, stronger!)

(Work it harder make it better,
do it faster makes us stronger,
more than ever, never over,
Our work here is never over)

N-now th-th-that that don't kill me
Can only make me stronger
I need you to hurry up now
'Cause I can't wait much longer
I know I got to be right now

rocking to the rhythm in the ice cream van

Two Polish guys with a big box arrived today.

I asked them to carry it upstairs, half expecting that it wouldn't go around the bend in the stairs.

It didn't.

That's not the first time this has happened and previously I've had to make a hole in the wall to get the offending item upstairs.

These guys were on a schedule and after the five minutes they'd budgeted for drop-off they were on their way to the next place. "Call customer services," they explained as they ran back to their truck.

Something like a reverse robbery really.

I then had a three dimensional geometry puzzle to get the large item upstairs. Unpack it from the cardboard, measure it and work out that I'd got about 2 cm of clearance if I jigged it at various tortuous angles.

It was also deceptively heavy and a very warm afternoon. I think it took about half an hour, at the end of which at least a replacement tee-shirt would be a good idea.

Maybe after a celebratory an ice-cream.