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Maker Faire in the NYT
In today's New York Times, a piece by John Schwartz on the cultural movement embodied in Maker Faire -- and its ties to Burning Man, and other tech/counterculture threads.... At first blush, then, this festival, sponsored by Make magazine, is a gathering place of pyromaniacs and noise junkies, the multiply pierced and the extensively tattooed. But wander awhile, and the showy surface gives way to a wondrous thing: the gathering of folks from all walks of life who blend science, technology, craft and art to make things both goofy and grand. “We are grabbing technology, ripping the back off of it and reaching our hands in where we are not supposed to be,” says Shannon O’Hare, who has brought his three-story Victorian mansion on wheels, one of the most prominent examples of the anachronistic style known as steampunk, to the Faire. He is holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale. “We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,” says Mr. O’Hare, who goes by Major Catastrophe and works as a fabricator for the stage and businesses. “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.” Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s,” Mr. O’Hare says. “ Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.” Link to the article (disclaimer: in which Pesco and I are quoted), and some cool multimedia stuff. Image above (Peter Da Silva, NYT) -- "At the Maker Faire, center. Justin Gray and his turbine robots, right, and a physics show participant fighting arcs from a Tesla coil, left."...
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Did Gnarls Barkley's video producers "swipe" a photographer's style?
Clayton Cubitt, whose photography I've blogged about a bunch of times here on BoingBoing, writes... “Lagos Calling”, (above right) mixing African tribal style with working class British skinhead punk style. My good friend and constant collaborator, René Garza, and I had this idea about five years ago, and just finally got around to doing it last year. It felt good to get it out of our heads. I don’t know when the idea for the Gnarls Barkley video “Going On” (above left) was hatched, or shot, but it’s just coming out now and bears a striking resemblance to our inspiration. I think this is a lovely happenstance, and it’s happened to me before. I’m a firm believer in artistic “multiples”, as Malcolm Gladwell writes about scientific discovery in The New Yorker... But then, later, Clayton updates his post: It looks like I spoke too soon. Turns out the production people for the Gnarls Barkley video were taking their inspiration from our shoot after all, and even contacted my stylist Rene’ in April to ask him where he had sourced the beaded African accessories. They didn’t bother hiring him for the job though, or crediting either of us for the advance “art direction.” You’re welcome anyway, Gnarls! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. Link....
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Flickr photoset of last days of Tucson minature golf course
Dianne Stevens says: "When I heard the Magic Carpet miniature golf course here in Tucson was closing, I thought about that big Tiki Head and wondered what would become of it. It looks like it's destined for the landfill, but I thought you'd enjoy the photos." Link (Here's some backstory)...
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US-born journalist threatened by Yakuza
Jake Adelstein was the first US citizen to work as a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, but he quit after getting death threats from the Yakuza. He has a book coming out called Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. This is an article about his experiences reporting on the Yakuza for The Washington Post. I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, and covered a roster of characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders, child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John Gotti of Japan. I came to Japan in 1988 at age 19, spent most of college living in a Zen Buddhist temple, and then became the first U.S. citizen hired as a regular staff writer for a Japanese newspaper in Japanese. If you know anything about Japan, you'll realize how bizarre this is -- a gaijin, or foreigner, covering Japanese cops. When I started the beat in the early 1990s, I knew nothing about the yakuza, a.k.a. the Japanese mafia. But following their prostitution rings and extortion rackets became my life. ... On May 18, 2001, the FBI arranged for Tadamasa Goto -- a notorious Japanese gang boss, the one that some federal agents call the "John Gotti of Japan" -- to be flown to the United States for a liver transplant. ... Three years ago, Goto got word that I was reporting an article about his liver transplant. A few days later, his underlings obliquely threatened me. Then came a formal meeting. The offer was straightforward. "Erase the story or be erased," one of them said. "Your family too." I knew enough to take the threat seriously. So I took some advice from a senior Japanese detective, abandoned the scoop and resigned from the Yomiuri Shimbun two months later. But I never forgot the story. I planned to write about it in a book, figuring that, with Goto's poor health, he'd be dead by the time it came out. Otherwise, I planned to clip out the business of his operation at the last minute. I didn't bargain on the contents leaking out before my book was released, which is what happened last November. Now the FBI and local law enforcement are watching over my family in the States, while the Tokyo police and the NPA look out for me in Japan. I would like to go home, but Goto has a reputation for taking out his target and anyone else in the vicinity. Link...
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John Shirley and Daniel Marcus free talk in San Francisco, May 17
This Saturday, May 17, the SF in SF reading series will host authors John Shirley and Daniel Marcus in conversation with Terry Bisson. These free readings in San Francisco are some of the best science fiction events going anywhere in the world, and these are two great authors. JOHN SHIRLEY "known for astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work, addresses the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering... And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained, the prose attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. His fiction, however, is only sometimes recognizably horror, as Shirley was also one of the primary cyberpunk writers, in company with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker." His "lost cyberpunk novel" Black Glass, is due out in August from ESP books, with the urban fantasy novel Bleak History from Simon & Schuster to follow. John Shirley also wrote several suspense novels including Spider Moon and The Brigade, and won a Bram Stoker Award for his collection Black Butterflies. His best-known science fiction novels are City Come A-Walkin', the Eclipse trilogy, and A Splendid Chaos. DANIEL MARCUS has published around twenty short stories in literary and genre venues, including Witness, Asimovs, Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, ZYZZYVA, and F&SF. Most of these stories will be collected in Binding Energy, appearing soon from Elastic Press. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, his short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and placed in the Asimov's Readers' Poll Top 10. His nonfiction has appeared in Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, on Boing-Boing, and he is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. After a spectacularly unsuccessful career attempt as a saxophonist, Daniel earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley. Currently a technology executive for a digital multimedia firm, Daniel lives in Berkeley, California, and he has authored more than twenty articles in the applied mathematics and computational physics literature, although the three are not mutually exclusive. Binding Energy is already garnering high praise, such as this from Mike Driscoll at The Fix: "If he deploys the mechanics of SF and fantasy, it is as a mean to explore worlds and mental landscapes defined by disconnectedness and isolation, by degradation and deceit, by love and its absence. This is not to say that these stories are filled with gloom and despair. Quite the contrary, most of them, despite their degraded physical or spiritual terrain, are marked by a sense of hope and possibility." Lounge and cash bar open at 6:00 PM 7:00 PM readings The Variety Preview Room The Hobart Building, 1st Floor 582 Market St. @ Montgomery & 2nd, by Montgomery St. MUNI/BART Entrance to the Hobart Bldg. is between Citibank and Quiznos Link (Thanks, Rina!)...
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