I Heart Movies in Seattle

Right now I’m in a really, really fun gallery show in Seattle called I Heart Movies, featuring art by Timo Meyer.  My friends and I are having a ball trying to guess the movie titles, and the titles of the prints are nothing but a line from the film and its year. 

If you’re in Seattle on Capitol Hill, check out the Ltd. Gallery, 307 East Pike St.

1984- The Battle Continues

1973- It's the year 2022...People are still the same.

1984- They didn't obey the rules

1984- The thing that won't die, the nightmare that won't end.

OMG a tiny 3D printed TARDIS!

Someone made it at Seattle’s Metrix Createspace.  Cho Kawaiiiii!  It’s about 1.5″ high.

Ammonia as a food product?

why ammonia in food?

Bill Beaty brought this to the Weird Science Salon in Seattle this Friday.  It smells like you would expect it to, like a rodent cage not cleaned out in weeks.  The big question: Why would you need ammonia in food? 

Apparently it was expired when he bought it. Oops.

First World Problems

Yet this is about how I feel right now.  Breaking the laws of relativity would have felt soooooo good.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/02/22/superluminal-neutrino-result-caused-by-faulty-connection/

Planking, by Takashi Shibuya

Takashi Shibuya was born in New York City, raised in Tokyo, and went to college in Portland, Oregon.  He continued with this tradition of globetrotting by heading to Hawaii, and most recently, to Panama, Ecuador, Chile, and Peru.  Not content to take standard photos of the scenery, he gathered up his friends to take the possibly the most hilarious and imaginative planking series since the meme debuted earlier this century.

Sometimes requiring a closer look, sometimes involving a good many animals, and occasionally requiring the assistance of traveling companions, Takashi Shibuya’s planking photos are anything but orthodox to the meme!

Beautiful Steampunk Altar Pieces and Jewelry by Portland Metalsmith Couple

Amy Buettner and Tucker Glasow of Portland, Oregon have taken the art of steampunk to a whole new level.  Not content to simply assemble period components together, they photoetch eldritch symbols into their surfaces.  Their pieces are primarily original metallurgy, not just “upcycled” gear.   They create elvish-looking latches and doors to house objects that would look at home next to an orrery or bonzai tree.   Best of all, their objects fuse the ancient geological with the modern industrial, creating that ephemeral bridge between nature and tech.

What is described here is their “Celestial Navigator – Steampunk Stargazing Kit”.

Highly ornate latch to the altar door

Ritual piece within the altar door.

Contents of the altar box

With the steampunk meme so abundant that even Justin Bieber’s producers have adopted it, it can be hard to find practitioners who do more than merely imitate the look and feel of one of the most beloved genres and fashions.  Amy Buettner and Tucker Glasow inject the art with more mystery and redefine the mastery of metallurgy.

Free Geek Portland’s Computing Nostalgia

All things scuzzy...

Free Geek Portland, located on 1731 SE 10th Avenue, is a great place to get computer parts that would otherwise be very expensive.  Recently we needed a parallel port cable and found one there for only $2.  Best Buy would probably have charged closer to $20, if it carried such a thing at all.  But lest this blog post become a Yelp review, it must be revealed that stepping into the Portland Free Geek was like walking into a 16th century curiosity cabinet that happened to be about computing.

Take for instance, these hard drives (that tiny thing in the middle is a present-day, internal, 100 GB IDE drive for a desktop).  The dude behind the counter said that the one on the right was a 100 MB drive from the early 1980s.

You could store a lot on 100 MB back in those days...

Or the Osborne 1, the first portable computer ever created – back in 1981.  Can anyone complain about the size of their screens today?  I imagine the early computer enthusiasts were akin to the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, plowing forward despite adverse conditions and lack of tasty foodstuffs.

Ancient Days of Computing

The next display had a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, from the same era as the Osborne (1981).  It didn’t even come with a floppy drive, yet it supported Pascal and even was capable of text-to-speech synthesis (if you’d get the right cartridge.  It was also the first 16 bit personal computer, with a processor running at blazing speeds of 3 mHz and 256 bytes of RAM.  Despite what we see as heavy limitations today, its users could play games such as TI Invaders (a nearly perfect clone of Space Invaders).

Also you can see the Teddy Ruxpin doll, a surprisingly complex toy for its age.  It used special stereo cassettes on which one track would play the bear’s voice, and the other would contain the data for its movements, using a kind of signal known as pulse-position modulation.  Luckily, Teddy could recognize his proprietary cassettes from regular ones (because of a hole), otherwise his body would probably go berserk if he’d try to interpret the other channel of that Michael Jackson tape…

TI-99/4A, the first 16 bit PC.

I didn’t photograph the more familiar computers – there was of course a Commodore 64 that made my heart cry out for the days of a blue command prompt screen, an Apple IIE and the first cute little Macintosh.  However, there was a lot of creativity taking place on the walls that caught my fancy, and I felt that it needed to be published for posterity.

I bet you didn't think to do this with your AOL disks...

Finally, they had this weird little diorama, “The Land of the Dinosaurs”.  I suppose that somebody had to keep up the tradition of Keeping Portland Weird.

Along with the parallel port cable, I also found a Fallout 3 collectible lunch box and the periscope-lens component of an overhead projector (you never know what you’ll end up building with such things).  It was a great thing, to be in a store that reeked of a very exclusive kind of nostalgia.  Free Geek Portland is a place like no other.

Occupy Seattle Results in Resolution 31337

I had the opportunity to visit the Occupy Seattle protest earlier this November, set up on the front lawn of Seattle Central Community College.  I expected there to be a lot of angry, aggressive people with holier-than-thou (or harder-working-than-thou) attitudes, but was surprised to find a much more peaceful vibe.  A fellow played a guitar decorated with visionary style art while a troupe of teenagers sang along.  Some people carried signs, others clipboards with petitions.  It was actually very quiet, and, despite rumors of homeless people appropriating the camp, not at all smelly.  The neat arrangement of tents and canopies were reminiscent of the Burning Man tent city, particularly when you include the kitchens and public meditation tents.  Seminars and yoga classes were held in beneath other canopies, and the kitchen was in the process of phasing out disposable silverware, enforcing a rule about bringing your own bowl and spoon.  Everything was amazingly well-organized, and all the more surprising as the protesters maintain their stance into the late fall in chilly Seattle.

Much of the conservative media is making the Occupy movement look like a lot of shabbily clad, disorganized, bored slackers.  The truth is that a physical presence is often the only way to get heard.  There’s nothing quite like a real, live person – or a whole lot of people occupying a space – to get your attention.  There’s a lot of debate as to whether or not the Occupy movement even means anything, leading some pundits to refer to themselves as the “98%” – neither the super-rich, nor the “lunatics out there in the streets”.  It’s so much easier to discount- even attack-  protesters aren’t blending in to what counts as “proper behavior” than to address the serious economic injustices done in recent years from which we all are suffering.  Why don’t they just go home?  They look like such idiots.  However, it’s important to remember that the most momentous advances in civil rights have been accomplished exactly by such civil disobedience.  Whenever we feel uncomfortable that relatively minor laws are being broken about camping out in a space, perhaps they should recall how trillions of tax dollars were swindled out of our collective pockets without anybody going to jail for it.  It certainly sounds trite to put it that way, but we’ve all got better things to do than to put down the Occupy movement.

There is tension now between the college – who wants the Occupy tenants out, claiming costs of $20,000 a day to the school in extra security guards and cleanup fees (it seems an absurdly high number) and the Farmers’ Market, located less than 200 feet down the block.  The Farmers’ Market is concerned with revenue loss, caused by people, oh, I don’t know, frightened away by the protests.

Yet even with these issues, the City of Seattle has shown solidarity to the Occupy movement, today passing Resolution 31337 (http://clerk.seattle.gov/~scripts/nph-brs.exe?d=RESF&s1=31337.resn.&Sect6=HITOFF&l=20&p=1&u=/~public/resny.htm&r=1&f=G) , containing passages such as:

“Section 2. The structural causes of the economic crisis facing our society require decisive and sustained action at the national and state levels. Cities are harmed by the crisis and must play an important role in the development of public policy to address it. By adoption of this resolution, the City Council commits to the following steps to minimize economic insecurity and destructive disparities:

1. The City will review its banking and investment practices to ensure that public funds are invested in responsible financial institutions that support our community. The Council may also consider future legislation to promote responsible banking and provide an incentive for banking institutions to invest more in our City, particularly with regard to stabilizing the housing market and supporting the creation of new businesses. This review should include evaluating City policies on responsible depositing and management of City funds.”

Though a dance party planned by the protesters was not able to acquire a permit, official recognition in Resolution 31337 is far more than the peaceful protesters in Oakland, Portland, or New York received.  It is a symbolic victory, and though we don’t know what the resolution will accomplish in the coming months, there is at least a modicum of comfort that in one city, the mayor was listening.

Improv by Nature

Florida physicist, engineer, and jazz musician Johnnie Tips made a recording of himself playing a positively sublime improvisation that defies genres.  On his Tumblr, he dedicates it to the 99% and writes,

“A personal improv composition while contemplating on the solidarity of natural systems, and the responsibility of people as super-organisms to regenerate and prosper in our quantum, unpredictable universe, where change is constant.”

Listening to this piece one can envision vast landscapes and narrow city canyons.  The rolling waves of the collective human experience and its discoveries.  The constant drive to create something new yet coexist with our nurturing environment so that others can continue to do just that.

John and I went to New College of Florida together, and I had the privilege of listening to him play at one of the school’s many public pianos on a number of occasions.  The fellow could roll out entire compositions like a master storyteller spinning a yarn – and would hold your attention the same way.  His other friends and I would then lie on our backs, listening and watching our minds expand under the influence of this musical soma.  This video is but a taste of those delicious times, and a glimpse of an undiluted musical genius.

How Medieval people used to save their information, or a Medieval PDA!

I was at Faerie Worlds 2011 in Mt. Pisgah, OR, when I met a fellow with an interesting leather case.  Inside, he revealed what he called a Medieval PDA – or a booklet of waxed pages.  The outer bindings were usually carved from ivory, though this one was cast using modern techniques.  Simply marvelous!