Dan – Page 34

The old apartment rule

This evening I had dinner with a friend who just bought a new car and consequently sold his former car, a dilapidated old second-hand BWM that had become totally unreliable. He described poignantly how sad it was to part with the old car, despite how much he’s enjoying having a new one. The sense of finality, of parting with an old friend, etc. I compared it to the dislocating feeling when you move out of a flat you’ve lived in for a few years, hand over the keys and just walk away.

I think it would be nice if there was an agreed-upon social convention whereupon you could show up at an apartment you had lived in before, explain that you were a previous resident and reasonably expect to be shown around for a few quick minutes. Not as some strange favor, but simply as a quirk of agreed-upon social convention.

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Clarion Alley, San Francisco. This was the back exit of my old apartment on Sycamore Alley.

4 recent favorite quotes

1. “My poems may offend the dead, but the dead belong to me.” (Unknown)

2. “Everything ends badly, or it wouldn’t end at all” – Tom Cruise movie Cocktail

3. “In the war between the grasses and the trees, humans have greatly helped out on the side of the grasses.” (Unknown)

4. “There’s no I in ‘team’… but there is one in ‘win’.” – Michael Jordan

Edit: reader SP points out that quote 3 is Michael Pollan. And she should know, as I nicked the quote from her.

Robot Doubles

radio_shack1 Spring is always the most listless semester in my teaching gig. Energy is low, weather is good, and class attendance basically collapses once the beer gardens open in mid-April. One weeknight not long ago, I was feeling uninspired to teach one of my more droopy classes, and remembered my robot doubles concept from many years ago:

Let’s say that everyone had (or could easily purchase, at least) a robot double that looks almost exactly like you and has about 70% of your mental capabilities. You could send your Robo off to take care of minor errands for you (say, picking up a package from the post office) and be pretty confident that he/she would be up for the task. There would probably be legalese written into many social transactions that forbid people from sending their Robos on their behalf and maybe even ‘No Robos’ stickers on certain storefronts (the DMV, for instance), but for the most part you could be confident that nobody would notice the switch.

But the question would be whether you would dare to send your Robo off to deal with more complex and critical tasks. I imagine people getting busted periodically for sending their Robo to work for them while they stayed home and slept in. In extreme cases, faltering marriages would collapse when one already-jaded partner detected that their husband or wife had sent their Robo home to deal with them so they could sit in a bar or have an affair. The Robo problem would crop up especially in school– I can almost imagine certain students of mine trying to pass off deficient robotic doubles of themselves if they had the chance. But then again, they also might notice that the person teaching them was, in fact, a Robo. The real question would be whether our Robos would be capable of detecting other Robos, and if so whether they would inform their Humans, or whether they would instead form a tacit alliance to keep it a secret among themselves.

The New Moscow Philosophy

Here’s the other book cover I’ve made for Twisted Spoon in the past year (first one is here): Vyachelsav Pyetsukh’s The New Moscow Philosophy. This one should be going to print some time over the summer.

New Moscow Philosophy

A bunch of Moscovites live crammed together in a flat originally intended for a single family during more prosperous times. When one elderly tenant mysteriously disappears, the residents start jockeying over her living space. The apartment itself is presented as the the dominant character of the story in a sense (the author introduces you to it before any of the characters, and its crowded conditions define the experience of most of the characters), so it seemed to make sense to feature it on the cover as the ‘protagonist’. The disappearance of the elderly tenant, moreover, is turned into a kind of meta-absurdist whodunnit, with conscious literary references to Crime and Punishment. So, hence, the ‘Colonel Mustard did it in the study with the revolver’ aspect of the design.

I’ve always had a fetish of sorts for floorplans, so it was fun to do a design around one. I only hope that I got the layout of the flat more or less correct– it was difficult to figure out on paper, nonwithstanding the author’s meticulous descriptions of which room is where.

William Eggleston and Big Star

Speaking of flying lounges, here’s William Eggleston’s beautiful ode to in-flight beverage service:

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Eggleston’s red ceiling photograph was used by Big Star for the cover of their Radio City album.

Given that Eggleston and Big Star were both from Memphis and both broke through around ’73/’74, it’s little wonder that Big Star basically sounds just like how Eggleston’s photos look. Still, I can’t think of another example of musician and visual artist who remind me so clearly of one another.

More Eggleston here.

More on flying lounges

Compare this photo with the swinging social atmosphere shown in Purephazed’s Pan Am post directly below.

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I’ll take the Pan Am party, thank you very much. The above photo is, of course, the grueling Amtrak lounge, a sort of airborne version of the bar scene in Star Wars.

What’s interesting nowadays about Amtrak from a self-parodic perspective is that their spokesman and key lobbyist is none other than Michael Dukakis.

There’s something poetic about two failed, lefty, Northeast institutions that are held in wide contempt by most of the country coming together like this.

Steiff bear diagram

This graphic was introduced to me by a student, who did a really good presentation of the visual evolution of the teddy bear for an assignment called the Artefact Assignment. It’s a great sort of Rorschach test, in the sense that any given interpretation probably reveals more about the viewer than the object itself:

steiff

In fact, what this graphic diagrams is the change in design over time of the Steiff bear. The Steiff bear was introduced in 1903 by the German company Steiff, who became involved in a decades-long arms race (furry arms, to be sure) with the Mitchom company, who had released a ‘Teddy’ Bear in the United States around the same time (named after TDR, who allegedly refused to shoot a defenseless bear).

Please feel free to submit any alternate possible interpretations (psychosexual or otherwise) via the comments box.

Good times

Thompson&Thomson It always warms my heart to read about Eng and Chang Bunker, aka the original Siamese Twins. Despite being conjoined, they managed to lead dignified, productive lives, ride horses, marry two sisters (?) and sire loads of children (!). However, things were not always rosy. Eng and Chang’s fondness for gambling and drinking, respectively, caused several heated arguments and even a few fist-fights, the logistics of which boggle the mind.

Another case of brotherly pull-though-it-ness: a few months ago, the news channels here showed footage of the Prague Marathon and of the Karanjan brothers, Francis and James, from Kenya. Francis is blind and runs marathons holding the hand of James, who I guess sort of guides him along, describes the sights they’re passing and concentrates on running the 26.2 miles himself all at the same time. I like this.

Nerd Time: The Leopard Seal

Untitled A few years ago, I got really into reading accounts of extreme adventures and explorations. There’s something comforting about sitting in the warmth of your living room while other people haplessly freeze to death, fall of cliffs, catch on fire, have their still-beating hearts removed by Mayan priests, or get half-digested in a the stomach of a whale and emerge bleached and peevish.

During this time, I read two accounts of the Shacktelton expedition. Basically, Shackleton and his mates head off from the south pole, but their boat gets frozen in ice in the Weddell Sea, effectively trapping them for 6 months of dark Antarctic winter. Adorably, they actually stage puppet shows and stuff like that in order to maintain their sanity. Eventually, the ship is crushed by ice and the crew is forced to float around on giant ice bergs for months trying to sail their way out of the sea to land.

All sorts of terrible stuff happens, but one thing that was really a head-scratcher for me was the frequent account of attacks by Leopard Seals. Leopard Seals? Apparently, this is a species of carnivorous seal specific to the Antarctic. Shackleton and his crew are constantly trying to drift off to sleep on their flying ice floe when this leopard seal thing clambers out of the sea and starts attacking them. Apparently, it’s a worst-of-both-words proposition, in the sense that the Leopard Seal is dangerous (like a non-seal) but totally fatty and non-nutritious (like a seal). So, once they kill it, there’s still nothing in it for the beleaguered crew

All this makes for a good scenario to re-enact with guests as an after-dinner game. Just commandeer a few sofa cushions to use as ice floes.

(Above: real Leopard Seal cranium. Eek.)

Taqueria Dolores

I’ve added Mission Mission to the blog roll, and was pleased to see that they covered the jarring Taqueria Dolores in one of their posts.

It’s a ‘Mission-style’ taqueria in Berlin (in Alexanderplatz, no less- a really sterile, touristy square) with maps of the Mission on the walls and bottles of Anchor Steam to be had. Behold:

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Basically, you can have fun locating on the walls three or four places you’ve lived while eating a really, really non-greasy burrito. All they’re missing is the unbelievably loud juke box that bursts into mariachi at unexpected intervals.

Man, I miss Berlin. Even though I’ve never lived there. The ‘Czech-Mex’ here in Prague is comparatively unimaginative and second-rate.