Our contributors' incidental blog of technology, lifestyle, commerce, and design
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Monday, May 26, 2008
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...Now with briquet-ray technology
I inherited a hard-working Weber Grill upon moving to Studio City in 2001, left there by the previous tenant. I had never used a grill before, so the Weber was a great teaching tool, and I have never felt the need for anything else.
Well, over the past seven years of kids running through the yard, gardeners with other things on their minds, and the belief that a man's grill should never be coddled, the Weber - and who knows how long it provided faithful service to its previous owners? - has lost its legs, its replacement legs, and its winning spirit. Seven good years.
My Toshiba HD-DVD player, on the other hand, and for reasons not entirely its fault, lasted less than a month before it got shipped off to a virtual graveyard, namely a table in my office serving a 36", 105-lb. non-HD TV. I should have known what was in the air when, upon buying an HDTV around Christmas, I was given the HD-DVD player for free.
I want to get a Blu-ray player, and I want it to be a Playstation 3. I have neither Blu-ray discs nor Playstation games, but in that the PS3 is backwards-compatible with standard DVDs (as was the departed HD-DVD player), I'm more likely to scale up.
I bought a new Weber for $50 at Home Depot and feel a little ashamed and unworthy of cooking something on a device so clean and stable. But I'm hoping someone will buy me a Playstation.
For now, I am returning to my good old Sony 5-disc DVD changer with one bad tray. I'd relegated it to my office when the new HD-DVD player came home, and I regretted it; why go from four working trays to a single (very slow) one if the only HD-DVD title I had was "The Bourne Identity"?
"There's an evil force of vodka-sodden Mexicans thinking 'Reconquista'?" said Professor Michael Dear of the University of Southern California. "Doubtful."
Dear was referring to the clever Absolut Vodka ad that saw exposure south of the border but was taken, by people for whom the notion was convenient, as a sure sign of our nation's growing border problem with Mexico.
Dear was speaking at a recent Farmlab salon in downtown Los Angeles. Farmlab, an intellectually and botanically sprawling affair underneath the Spring Street bridge, hosts weekly lunchtime lectures for anyone who rolls in. Today, Dear discussed the state of the U.S./Mexico border at Tijuana and beyond.
First some numbers: The 2,000-mile border was cemented with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, and by 1898 there were 258 markers, bookmarked by two marble "puntas initiales" at either end. Now there are 700 markers, some obscured and made redundant by fences and some sunk into the Pacific Ocean, and 700 miles of fence, mostly in urban areas like Tijuana, Mexicali, and Brownsville, TX.
But despite fence complexes that in some case comprise three fences 30 feet apart from each other, one steel, one mesh, and one barbed wire, speaker Hector Lucero of Baja Caifornia's Cultural Affairs office said, "they don't deter border jumping."
North of Calexico there are graveyards of border crossers who didn't make it, collectively known as Juan Does.
But the border means somethig different the farther away one gets.
Indeed, trans-border citizens (people who daily cross the border for work), Dear said, view the border as a "two-hour Stop sign."
Dear said that border people, who live with the virtual or tangible border each day, view any proposed fencing with a shrug and see it as a logical next step, while the government in Mexico City is offended by the snub.
He also noted that the border is in itself a country. Mexicali was not connected by rail to Mexico City until 1948, and in many ways all border towns share more with the country they border than the country they belong to.
How does online technology shape community and identity, and do we have a chance to be more vital online than in real life?
Like the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 1950s, whose celebrities lived and worked in Brooklyn and were beloved of the neighborhood, the woman who voiced The Operator of the groundbreaking Alternative Reality Game/marketing phenomenon I Love Bees is allowed a more personal relationship with her fans.
"When I meet people at ARG events," said Kristen Rutherford, "I ask them what their gamer tag was before I ask them their name."
Rutherford is a hero to a small but intense community of Alternative Reality Gamers who grew to love and depend on her character when Microsoft launched I Love Bees as a marketing campaign for the game Halo 2 in the summer of 2004.
"To promote Halo 2, a narrative was created that would draw people down a rabbit hole," Rutherford said at today's Identity and Virtual Space: Are We Our Avatars? salon at Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles. "The reward is the story, and my character provided a lot of the exposition."
Rutherford spoke about the online gaming community as a dynamic hive, in which individual members, in the service of unfolding the I Love Bees story via telephone booths across the country, worked with unseen partners to complete the puzzle.
"And when people meet The Operator, after this experience they had, they still tell me personal things about themselves," Rutherford said. "The experience was that important to them."
Rutherford says the narrative, even though it was a months-long advertisement for a video game, didn't shortchange its audience.
"It says, 'We won't make you feel stupid for believing in us,'" Rutherford said. "It's the only form of entertainment I know where I don't get the feeling of being talked down to."
The salon was moderated by Stephen Johnson of G4TV, a tech and pop culture network owned by Comcast.
Sean Percival, author of “The Second Life Travel Guide," a handbook of virtual locations in the ARG Second Life, discussed avatars, digital representations of users in online forums and games, saying that a non-sophisticated avatar is every bit as ridiculous in the virtual world as highwater pants is in junior high.
"People can see you coming form a virtual mile away (with a "newbie" or "noob" avatar)," Percival said.
What was striking about the discussion was that it assumed a familiarity with fabricated identities and the need for keeping them. Second Life, in which one's avatar can buy and sell goods with virtual money that is paid for with an actual human being's credit card, and in which "islands" can be purchased by real-world corporations as advertising hubs, seems like a subscription-and-broadband-based do-over for a life less intriguing.
Percival is known as Sean Voss "inworld," as the Second Life community is known. He said that, unlike many gamers, his avatar looks similar to him.
"But I've talked to my share of men whose avatars are women, and vice versa," he said.
Toward the end of discussion, Percival admitted that participation in alternative reality communities might be compensatory.
"There are people here for romantic reasons," he said.
Google's "Meet the You Tube Filmmakers" a pat on the back
...but some people don't deserve an open bar by Marty Barrett
Google's Santa Monica office hired the art deco El Rey Theatre on L.A.'s Wilshire Blvd. for an informative but decidedly self-congratulatory event celebrating its You Tube user-generated video platform. Things were going just fine - and there was no reason for them not to be - when the critics showed up.
"Meet the You Tube Filmmakers," a catered networking affair culminating with a panel discussion with six directors, focused on You Tube's place as a marketing tool for professionals, even as their content sits a few clicks away from, in an oft-cited example, "Babies farting."
Located on the Miracle Mile, the 1936 El Rey was, like many preserved theatres of that era, a first-run movie house with chandeliers, brocade, and sweeping staircases. Now a trendy bar and live-music venue, the El Rey was an excellent location for this feeling-out session, in which guests opined on the constantly-refreshed dramas of old forms in new media, and how or if the old rules still applied.
Is audience-building a film on You Tube comparable to traditional methods?
"God, Inc."/director: Francis Stokes
Francis Stokes: I wanted an audience. At festivals there were 30 or 40 people in the room.
"my name is lisa"/director: Ben Shelton
"We_Are_The_Strange"/ director M Dot Strange
M Dot Strange: Half the people walked out and wanted their money back.
"In Loving Memory (Jesus Christ)"/director: Javier Prato
Is it a good thing that anyone can be a filmmaker?
Javier Prato: Yes.
Stokes: But the audience must be the determinant.
Each panelist's You Tube output has received hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views. Strange's "We_Are_The_Strange" has been translated into 17 languages - by You Tube fans. And Strange looks at You Tube as a direct road to his fans, where his work speaks for itself.
"There is no System trying to make you look great," he said.
The filmmakers ran a gamut of bookish to outlandish to South American. There were no women. Each embraced You Tube, and viral distribution systems in general, with varying degrees of hope.
Strange, dressed like Eminem, was the most Riot Grrl of the crowd.
"I am trying to raise the bar," he said. "They (Hollywood) are are getting richer and fatter. And they're getting lazy."
The filmmakers glanced on whether or not creating content (low res, free, generally shorter length) for distribution on You Tube altered the nature of the content, or affected the choices made in creating it, but "Four Eyed Monsters" director Arin Crumley said his project, no less narcissistic and touching for his time than a heyday Woody Allen's work was for his, worked well on the viral screen.
"Four Eyed Monsters"/director: Arin Crumley
Arin Crumley: From a creative perspective it makes most sense to make your stuff and send it to the web, and make it decentralized.
But do You Tube movies generate money? Crumley, who had to take the complete film down from You Tube when he got a deal with the Independent Film Channel, says Yes. But other directors seemed to say the exposure was enough.
Prato, whose "Jesus Christ" short was the only panelist's movie to arrive in the inboxes of everyone I know, espoused a consciousness-raising philosophy that seemed at odds with Christian dogma (as well as horticulture).
"It is a pyramid backwards," he said. "You plant a seed online and it grows into a worldwide sea of information."
But Stokes, who was the first to bring up monetization about 30 minutes into the panel, said he built a Google map of all the zip codes of "lisa"'s subscribers and prevailed on local movie theatres in those zip codes to screen the movie.
The panel was opened up to questions, and this is when it seemed that a few invited guests, all beneficiaries of an open bar and delicious snacks, inexplicably chose to pounce on Google.
The generation that recognizes You Tube's innovation and potential, but has doubts about its usefulness as a "film" platform, is of a different mindset from the generation that has grown up with You Tube and expects the world from a free service.
"Can you identify the commenters?" one angry young man said. "I get a thousand comments on one of my pieces (he said 'pieces') and real criticism is buried under 800 useless, useless comments. Can we ID them so we can bar them?"
A woman who identified herself as an actress seemed unclear on the purpose of the discussion.
"I'm not a techie," she said, wondering at the use of words like "upload" and "decentralize" by the filmmakers. "I am a human being."
"How do I get an audience?" another asked.
"Just say something interesting," Strange replied. He might have added a silent "Duh."
I inherited a hard-working Weber Grill upon moving to Studio City in 2001, left there by the previous tenant. I had never used a grill before, so the Weber was a great teaching tool, and I have never felt the need for anything else.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the Blu-ray and HD-DVD booths faced each other from a distance of just a few yards, much like Father Merrin and the statue of Pezuzu. I remember the HD-DVD guys being very optimistic as they showed me how good "300" and "The Fast And the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift" looked.
