Scottunder

Today's ephemera: Collabolate!

The small print says 

Collabolation--through the complex creativity, we found a possibility of reaching to the new scope that no one has ever known. 

That's a pretty big burden for a notebook.

A visual Feldman

The other day I listened to all six hours of Morton Feldman's String Quartet #2 (streamed courtesy WXQR), which reminded me I hadn't posted this much more accessible visualization of Feldman's Projection 1, a 3:20 piece for solo string bass.

By accessible, I mean this might help you understand, if not actually enjoy, Feldman's music, as it shows how the Feldman's unusual "notation" gets turned into music. Plus it has a kind of Godard/new wave look for that certain je ne sais quoi. (That's French for WTF?)



(I've posted before about music visualization.)

Pink animation

I recommend reading all of Dan Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, but this 10-minute video is a condensed and effective way to get the elevator version (tall building edition).

In addition to liking the ideas in Drive, I liked this video. Ever since my long-ago days as a draftsman and technical illustrator, I've felt there's something about outline illustration that enhances clarity. Simply animating the process of drawing it makes it visually compelling without getting in the way of the ideas.

Pink's Drive 18:40 talk at TED is also worth watching.

Love & Theft

Love this short film by Andreas Hykade called Love & Theft. I particularly like the music by Heiko Maile, who is unknown to me. Watch it full screen.

Hummy!

Spent part of yesterday watching a nesting hummingbird from a few feet away. I had to shoot through a window, so it's not as sharp as it could be. We loved seeing how the nest is almost indistinguishable from the rest of the tree. 

I'll return soon to catch the hummylings.

My first jury

I served on my first jury ever this week. 

Selection took all day Monday, trial was most of Tuesday and Wednesday, and this morning was closing arguments and deliberation. It was a criminal case. I live about a mile from Richmond, CA, which has a pretty bad reputation in some neighborhoods, as you may know. We sat for a minor case, a misdemeanor charge of "delaying, obstructing, or resisting" a peace officer. 

The defendant was a young woman who lives across the street from a house that the Richmond police raided for drugs and weapons. She's friends with the young man because they both have a pair of pit bulls. It's that kind of a neighborhood.

The prosecutor called his first and only witness, the arresting detective. His story was that they had a search warrant to raid the house where the young man deals drugs from the porch. They went in force: two police cars, a raid van, and animal control, maybe 12 men total. The woman saw them coming and yelled "Rollers!", which alerted the man, who ran into his house, giving him a 30-second head start, "delaying" their raid. They used "the key" to get in (it's a battering ram), and the defendant was returning from the bathroom.

Then, while four cops dragged the man (big: 6-3, 275) and three others outside to the front yard, she was a constant yelling and physical presence to be dealt with, "obstructing" their mission. Finally, after he'd had enough and she was told to "come here" (because he intended to arrest her), she "fled" to her yard and taunted the cop with her dogs, "resisting" the peace officer.

He reached over the fence, and one pit bull bit his sleeve. He drew his gun at the dogs, and with the other hand pulled her over the fence and arrested her. When they retrieved her camera (back at the station), they took out the memory card and watched the video, but it had "nothing of evidentiary value" on it. He gave her the camera back, but he left its memory card on his desk, and later mailed or handed it back to her.

Her story is that she never yelled "Rollers!" because the young man across the street wasn't outside. She watched the event unfold and she had seen the police being excessively rough. She came out to her sidewalk to videotape the event, which the cops didn't like. They tried to block her visually, and when she went back to her front yard (where her two pit bulls were going berserk), the cops decided to arrest her.

In the end, we believed her story, which is pretty sad. It really looks like the RPD screwed up during the arrest, didn't want the video to get out, and arrested her so they could confiscate it. Not coincidentally, she filed a suit against RPD about minor injuries and the card. The chronology didn't make Richmond look good, either: arrest in April; she filed suit in October; RPD pressed charges in December.

I was fascinated by the process. The judge had a light touch, but let her annoyance be known when necessary. The two attorneys were cordial with each other, but I enjoyed the sparring and pas de deux of the questioning. We deliberated for only about an hour, starting with 9-3 not guilty, but quickly got everyone to agree that most of the charge we didn't believe, and the small portion that was possible did not rise to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt. I played foreman and made, like, $45 plus gas.

Today's ephemera: Father and Son

Next up on the ephemera list is another sex manual, The Manual of Hygiene for "Father and Son" from Hygienic Productions in 1947. It's edited by M. A. Horn, about whom I have learned nothing.

This 90-some-odd-page manual boasts an excellent Table of Contents, with chapters ranging from "Your Boy and His Sex Problems" and "How to Help Your Boy Curb Masturbation" to "Aid for Over-sexed Males" and "Aiding the Sexually Abnormal." I'll be sure to read both "Do You Understand Your Wife?" and "Woman's True Sexual Responsibility."

I'll share one small excerpt, from the chapter on women's reproductive organs:

While the chief function of the female breasts is to provide milk to a nursing child, they are definitely one of the lesser sex organs. The nipples contain erectile tissue, just as do the (... I'll skip ahead ... ) when they are kissed or otherwise handled. As a rule, cold, frigid women have small, undeveloped breasts, while those who are warm and well-sexed have well-developed ones. 

       

The telephone will rise again

I predict the return of the old-fashioned corded telephone. 

Reading Nathaniel Rich's For Whom the Cell Tolls: Why Your Phone May (Or May Not) Be Killing You in the May issue of Harper's made me think about the inevitable transformation of the cellphone from status symbol to commodity, and what that might mean for the phones they replaced. 

The first mobile phone I remember seeing was in Bill Bixby's Corvette in a '70s TV show called The Magician, but that must have been something like a ship's radio telephone. The first cellphone was the enormous Motorola DynaTAC -- launched in 1983, it cost $4000 and weighed a pound and a half. Now, Rich reports, there are 276 million subscribers in the US, which has a total population of 309 million. Around the world, he reports a 4.1 billion-person market for cell phones. Certain cellphones may be status symbols, but cellphones now are as commonplace around the world as televisions -- more common, actually.

As a new technology supplants an old one, it can cause them both to perform a status flip: first, everyone desires the shiny new thing, then the dull old thing gets admired in a new way. The old tech becomes romantic or rugged or otherwise special; used sparingly, but beloved.

In one well-known example, travel by horse was common before people had automobile. If you didn't own a horse, you probably used one's services regularly enough that it was unremarkable. Automobiles were playthings of the wealthy, the shiny new thing that few could afford, but when Henry Ford made Model Ts affordable for nearly everyone, the rich had to maintain their distinction by buying ever more opulent and expensive cars than the hoi polloi could afford.

Somewhere in that transition, horses experienced the status flip. Not being necessary for everyday use, they became possessions that fewer and fewer could justify, and that rarity transformed them into playthings of the wealthy or romantic reminders of times past. Riding a horse has becomes for most people a special occasion event -- a carriage meander through the park, or an afternoon's ride along a scenic trail.

A similar thing happened to airline travel, which turned travel by ship into an indulgence (for direct travel) or a destination in itself (for cruises). Electric lights similarly transformed candles and oil lamps into mood lighting, and kitchen stoves made cooking by fire an excuse for a party. 

More recently, a handwritten letter has become a little-used but highly personal form of nonelectronic communication, saved for travel postcards, thank-you replies, and irate rants to elected officials. Another imminent status flip may happen to printed books as iPads and Kindles become the norm.

So what might this mean for the telephone? 

There was something slow and deliberate about telephone use. Generally, telephones were tethered to either a public part of the house, like the kitchen, or in more private offices and bedrooms. If you intended a long call, you might pour a cup of coffee and find a seat at the kitchen table. A private call might require a trip to a back room with the door closed. This also helped focus the event: "I decided to sit down and give you a call, my friend. Tell me how you fare?" (People used to talk like that, you know.) And the old telephones were substantial, well-made objects, especially the heavy phenolic phones of the '30s and '40s. 

There's a specialness to phone conversations that we've lost with our always-on, always-reachable cellphones. How might the corded telephone regain its luster? Could the modern corded telephone offer a better experience than a cellphone, whether through voice quality or setting or something else?

Maybe my prediction in the opening overreaches a bit, but there might be an idea there. 

Today's ephemera: The Male Motor

 Next up, a 1927 sex manual, The Male Motor: Its Uses and Abuses, by M. Sayle Taylor, Sc.D, Ph.D, sexologist. Dr. Taylor was known as The Voice of Experience on 1930s radio shows, and appeared under his own name on the Eddie Cantor show and in public lectures. His name appears in books of radio history and public quackery, there being few barriers beyond shame to setting yourself up as a public sex therapist even if you had no idea what you were talking about.

For instance, here's my favorite excerpt, taken from the chapter "Sex Compatibility in the Home," which contains a list describing the "vital parts of the sex-anatomy of the wife, complete with function." After going over the usual suspects from Labia Major to the Glands of Bartholin, we come to the entry on Hair:

The Hair which surrounds the pubic parts of the woman has a specific function to perform in that it is an insulator for the conservation of the electro-mechanical current generated in the pelvic region of the wife. Any woman who denudes herself of this pubic hair by shaving the pubic parts is endangering herself to to nervous disorders, such is the importance of this hirstute adornment.

There are some other interesting tidbits -- for instance, alternating hot and cold sitz baths are recommended for impotence and "loss of manhood" -- but nothing to match the information above. 

In truth, "Doctor" Taylor only studied premed, and an auto accident cut short his medical career at 19. But he became a public speaker on the Chautauqua circuit debating fundamentalism with Williams Jenning Bryan, which led him into radio, where he dispensed advice for many years, receiving tens of thousands of mailed questions. He died at 58 in 1942 of a heart attack in a Hollywood street. The NY Times obituary felt the need to lead with news that the famous marriage expert was on his third wife.

Scans of the table of contents and an author photo, smirking just a little. 

    

 

Today's ephemera: TMBG Postcard

I first discovered They Might Be Giants in 1989. I heard "Shoehorn with Teeth" on an NPR show and I bought the first CD but it didn't have a lyric sheet. (Did I hear "Yellow Roosevelt avenue leaf overturned" correctly?). I was apparently smitten enough to write a fan letter and ask for one, and John Flansburgh replied with this nice postcard.

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Admin note: I'm starting a new Ephemera category as a way to share some printed weirdness that has followed me home over the years.