Ionosphere

After I posted the link to BLDGBLOG last night, Geoff Manaugh came right back today with a long article about shipping container architecture, which also fascinates me. I can very easily imagine a subgenre of architecture-obsessed science fiction, though I pray it will not have a "-punk" label.

Some twenty-five or thirty years ago, I went to my first estate sale. My mother took me to a big house, and we wandered around, looking at the possessions some deceased man's family no longer wished to keep. I had a small amount of cash from my lunch money savings (I went without eating or drinking every single day until I got home, and pocketed the quarters) and a sawbuck my grandmother gave me for my birthday. The kind old widow who was parting with her late husband's worldly goods half-heartedly bargained with me until the arithmetic would allow me to purchase both a banjo and a shortwave radio. She said the old man had only used the radio tune in WWV and reset all the clocks in the house when daylight savings time began or ended. While she explained that, she and my mother rolled their eyes, agreeing that men have strange obsessions when kept in the house for too long.

Later, a drummer I went to high school with also turned out to own a shortwave set. We compared ideas about the best use for such a thing. I mostly tried to find amusing programs or decipher numbers stations. He monkeyed with the controls to make odd noises, and said it was better than the cheap synthesizers available at the time. As the radio I had featured a quarter-inch earphone plug (the same size as an electric guitar) I incorporated it into my musical career.

Every few months, until I moved out of my house suddenly a couple of years ago, I would drag that radio out and try to find proper antenna and ground connections, but there was less and less to be found by way of signals. Mostly religious broadcasts and the BBC was all I found at the last. Anyway, the other justification I came up with for keeping the thing was as a source for samples I could incorporate into musical compositions. There are a lot of web sites where such samples can be found now, so that notion is quashed to the point where I don't even try to look at the handheld radios on display over at Hymall.

Today, someone mentioned The Radio Kitchen on Metafilter. It's run by a man known only as "The Professor" and is a vast treasure of recordings of long-distance radio broadcasts. I also love the pictures of vintage receivers that surround the page.

Bear with me a moment now, because I'm going to try and connect all this stuff into the big concept I see it as fitting into, like a big puzzle. As we, humanity, progress into the future, things change. Technology advances, and radio is forgotten. Notions of living space change, and dwellings evolve from four-bedroom standalone ranch-styles in the suburbs to repurposed shipping containers hanging on the backs of billboards or the rafters of shopping mall parking garages. Notions of personal space and privacy change. Maybe more and more of our belongings will exist only virtually, and "real life" homes will only be places to sleep and have sex, all other activities being open to public scrutiny. We might move away from George Carlin's view of having a place to keep the stuff we accumulate, and toward an existence where the online and offline merge, the division blurring, until we come to view chat sessions and web pages as places in the same sense as the diner on the corner or the mall are places.

It's starting already. Customer service is an automated voice at a toll-free number, advising you to go to the company web site to seek assistance. Large corporations find the need to set policy for employees doing work inside Second Life. We're already in the future William Gibson predicted (and many pooh-pooh'ed in the early 1980's), or well on the way to it. The only questions that remain is how we will all react, and who will successfully adapt.

Satisfaction

This is how this song really should sound.

Are we there yet?

One of my recurring obsessions is with the division between public and private space and the mindset shift as one moves from one to the other. Sitting at home in your bedroom reading a book is different from sitting in a laundromat reading a book, or even sitting in the lobby of a hotel reading a book. Even if you have a comfortable chair and the temperature is just proper, you're visible. You aren't alone, even if you're the only one there.

Another idea I can't seem to divest myself of is the perceptions of retail space installations. I've worked in retail, and seen the shitty plywood/cheapest-ass carpet assemblies that serve as platforms for mannequins to stand on, and yet, they look a little magical when I'm wandering through the aisles, contemplating how to get the mannequin out to my car without being caught (there was one in particular that I would've paid big money for, just because it had a facial expression that messed with my brain every time I passed by on my way to the stationery aisle).

So, I read all the related links to this story of a group of artists that covertly built an apartment in a shopping mall in Providence. Actually, I read a bit of the original article last night, then left it when I was called to the other room. I woke three times during the night, convinced that I had some deep memory of a similar meme. Then, I recalled that William Gibson had a bit in one of his novels about people building makeshift homes in Tokyo train stations, or something similar. Every notion I've had for a science-fiction plot line turns out to have already been covered in one of his stories already. I would suggest that explaining the mechanism by which this coincidence occurred might be a suitable concept to base a story on, but I'm sure his next manuscript already has it penciled in the margins (he writes on an old manual typewriter, you know).

4 October 2007 9:43 AM
UPDATE:
I almost forgot this bit. BLDGBLOG had a mention of the A.I.R. unit, which is a lightweight "deployable condo unit." I could easily see something like this being covertly stuck to the back corner of a strip mall, or a few of them being placed together to form a community on some interstitial bit of land, the kind of place where exact ownership of that spot is not easily determined, and maybe not interesting to anyone else. The diagrams look a bit luxurious for my ideas, but something along these lines, discretely attached to the back of a bus station, Shoney's, or interstate rest area, would be as cool as the club house in the mall garage loft.

"I" is for "I don't know if it counts as irony or not."

It took the better part of two weeks, but bittorrent finally coughed up the second half of "No Maps for these Territories" this afternoon. I saw the first half, which was not marked as "part one of two" in the listing, and then waited not-so-patiently for the rest to download (after I googled the torrent out of another site entirely). Anyway, I watched the rest of it as soon as it finished downloading, and at the very end, after all the credits finished rolling (and I watched them to try and discern who did the music that played over said ending credits) there were two URLs displayed for a few moments before the video ended. One was the site for the film itself, and the other was www.atomcandy.com. The latter gave me the message: "The server at landing.domainsponsor.com is taking too long to respond." Since the title of the page is "Search the web" I'm just as glad nothing showed up, because I know the idea is for a blinking, flash-polluted advertisement asking too much money for the domain. In fact, whoever purchases the name is likely to get sued by some real candy manufacturer who has been selling "Atom Candies" since early 1946. You know the things, red dye #2 color and artificial cinnamon flavoring. Maybe you recall getting sick from eating too many of them while you absent-mindedly skimmed a yellowing copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Or maybe that was just me. I still feel queasy when I smell those candies.

Ha.

Now I'm glad I dropped out and subsequently studied elsewhere. [link]

When I was at Cornell, I discovered Throbbing Gristle, but only some of their material appealed to me. The rest was annoying. After they broke up, I tried to figure out who did which bits. Coil had some good songs, and some bad ones. I never figured out what Chris & Cosey/CTI did, because I only heard their songs in the middle of long sets on the radio, and didn't match the name to the sound. I saw a bit about Genesis P. Orridge today, and can't for the life of me recall what I thought about Psychic TV, except that I kind of avoided their recordings.

Cutters

OK, here's the second attempt. A link loading in another tab took down the entire browser (some web pages do that, though I can't figure out why because when I try to look at the pages in question for clues, the fucking browser crashes).

The image above is a photograph of a design carved on someone's leg. Tattoos were too easily removed with lasers, and piercings would heal closed if the jewelry was removed, and maybe cosmetic surgery could eradicate branding or "scarification" so this chick let someone whittle a cartoon character on her thigh. I like how the design incorporates a knife and slab of raw meat, both dripping blood, as well as a girl wearing only fishnets and an apron. Raw meat carved to look like raw meat.

Don't get me wrong; I have been obsessed with more than one anime series. But I never, ever for a millisecond considered gouging Lain's likeness into my abs. I will admit, however, that I watched FLCL again last night, and I would purchase an orange Vespa without hesitation if the price was in my range.

The Grim Stripper

A death-worshiping cult in Mexico City has replaced the icon (or is it an idol?) at the front of their church with a statuette of a woman in a long golden robe.

For the record, none of the following is mocking the beliefs of the people who attend said church. So long as they don't harm others, what they believe is fine by me (and I'm sure they're relieved as all hell to know that a semi-anonymous blogger conditionally approves of their creed). But a few questions linger in my mind:

• Did they leave the Vampirella costume on under that robe? The value of memorabilia like that goes WAY down if you lose the original accessories.
  
• Did they change the bibles and hymnals to reflect that Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is now their one true savior?
• Fuck, you don't think that's maybe supposed to be Cher, do you? That would be over the line.

Now that I think of it, there used to be a comic book store in the same mini-mall where I bought all the Amiga software and peripherals I used to own. In the back, next to the indie and import section, they had assorted knick-knacks (or "collectibles" if you let them dictate the terminology) to separate the comic books from the RPG stuff. One of the objects they sold was a model of Elvira. The parts that were supposed to represent flesh were glow-in-the-dark plastic. I wanted to buy it, but it was (as I recall) out of my discretionary budget range.

Now that I mentioned glow-in-the-dark plastic, I will mention another recent discovery: The Virtual Absinthe Museum. One of the things they display is Uranium Glass. Now I have two vague nostalgic feelings (you think Dearest is letting Absinthe into the house?). I notice a lot less stuff made from glow-in-the-dark plastic these days. Is that just fashions changing, or is there a practical reason?