Meaure R, AVC, and 1,000 Magic Hours

In cinematography, to shoot just before and after sunset --- a time of day when the light turns the sky golden with ethereal beauty, and, with it, the faces of the actors --- is called shooting during the magic hour.  AVC yesterday held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Performing Arts Theatre that happened to have been scheduled for the magic hour, and that coincidence prompts these brief comments on the event and about what's yet to come.

The time?  Magic hour.  The place?  Measure-R's gift from the community back to the community: the new Theatre.  Thanks to the generosity and foresight of the District's voters, we are now seeing completion of one major project after another on campus.  The event?  First the ribbon-cutting, followed by a performance by the Antelope Valley Symphony Orchestra and Master Chorale.

While the term "ribbon-cutting" is a common one in civic events, I for one remain excited by the magical transformation of an under-construction project to one finally (at last!) "now open to the public."  Here we see the members of advisory committees and the Board of Trustees, not about to cut the ribbon, but actually doing it.  With a special nod to Scholar in Residence Matthew Jaffe, here is the exact moment in time that history happened.

For many on campus, the twenty-odd years that this project has been in process has made it seem as if the first foundation would never get poured, let alone the final ribbon be cut.  Babies have been born, have grown up, have started at AVC and graduated, all in the space of time it took to get this dream realized.  Even once started, it seemed to take forever.  Here is AVC Journalism student Vanessa Hines documenting process on the Theatre as it was being built.

One of the Klassen foremen, a lovely gentleman named James Williamson, was kind enough to pose a bit for my own shots.  I asked him if building something this hard and this complex was a particular challenge.  "Shucks, no," he said. "We don't even need to check the instruction manual.  Now trying to figure out why your office roof always leaks in the LS1 building --- now THAT'S a real challenge!"

Maybe the complexity and the magic of building it mislead me: it turns out, trying to get the building funded and built was only part of the equation.  Next?  Now we have to find ways to staff it, clean it, light it, and maintain it.  As somebody who had a small part in the inaugural event, I was inside the theatre during rehearsals.  Without an audience, the room looked grand yet forlorn, as if it sensed the fiscal crisis that is keeping it unstaffed and empty.

Yet the emptiness was illusory, or at least I might say temporary.  Ribbons cuts and drinks poured, cars parked and violins tuned, at 8:04 pm on 15 October 2011, the Grand Opening Season of the Antelope Valley Symphony began.  The program was an ambitious one.  Titled "Symphonic Cinema," it would survey and celebrate the scores from 16 different movies and television shows, plus feature another nine briefer pieces played as traveling music while guest speakers left their seats and mounted the podium.  The room was alive with excitement.

One of the things I have always admired about Dr. David Newby is the breadth of his musical knowledge.  It seems as if he knows everything, and, certainly, his tastes are wide and varied.  Here are just three things we were able to consider on that night's program: Tara, from Gone With the Wind; the entry music from The Dick van Dyke Show; and, of course, my favorite --- Star Wars.

Williams's music for Star Wars is ranked number 1 of all movie scores by the American Film Institute, and he also wrote scores for ET, Jaws, Schindler's List, Indian Jones, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and many others.  In introducing his piece, I made some fancy-pants remarks about neo-German Romanticism, trying to see a connection between Beethoven's Eroica symphony, Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the "2001" music), and the struggle of individuals striving to master their fates. 

What everybody remembered though was not my ersatz musical theory, but my impression of the studio moguls mocking George Lucas for trading his director's fee for the merchandizing rights.  Oh that yokel, they said.  Some dumb kid from a community college.  Get him: he's such a rube, he wants the TOYS!  As I said then and still feel now, they laughed all the way to cocktail hour.  George Lucas laughed all the way to the bank.

An ambitious program, excellent musicianship, crisp directing, near flawlessly-arranged video clips, and insightful, passionate introductions to the movie scores made this event a real triumph for the AV Symphony, for the college, and for the AV as a whole: by gumption, we've arrived!  Not the "magic hour" singular, but magic hours, plural.

Here is the audience, leaping up for a standing ovation at the final piece's conclusion.  Sorry for the blur: my camera was leaping to its feet at the same time.

So what's next?  For the AV Symphony itself, 19 November will be a "Fate and Fortune" evening.  Before then we have the Concert Band with Berkeley Price, we have dance performances, and we may even have the campus rock band Test Flight --- though where the mosh pit will go in the new space, I am less sure.  I was thinking though of a larger question.  That came from watching the Dean of Math, Science, and Engineering, the wise and affable Dr. Les Uhazy, rehearse for his introduction to the Twilight Zone and other classic 1960s-era television programs.

 

After all, Measure R is not yet finished.  (Education: give the gift that keeps on giving.)  "I spy with my little eye"... well, I spy re-bar and insulation, coils of electrical conduit and palace-tall support beams.  We are now perhaps just a year away from another ribbon cutting, this time for the 107,000 square foot Health and Sciences Building.  That too has been rising slowly but inexorably.

Soon enough, another magic hour will be at hand.  Will it be windy?  Probably.  But no matter how bad the budget stays, I am sure that sooner or later we'll find a way to get this building finished and wired and carpeted and lit and staffed and filled with students.  In fact, for the opening, it has come to me in a dream, what the ribbon-cutting event should look like:

Maybe I can even convince Dr. Newby to play the theme from Thus Spoke Zarathustra at the opening.  After all, I still have about two hours of remarks left over about the expressive traditions of  German Romanticism....

A Trip to the Idea Factory

gluesticks and coffee cups: where and how art happens

Sometimes when doing in-class lessons the students and I write papers together, and as we talk it through, I type the paragraphs up on a classroom computer and project the results.  In doing this we might bang out several assignment versions in a row --- pro, con, and anywhere in between.  If things are really cooking, I might write three or four papers in front of them, lickity split, maybe four fairly complete essays in fifteen minutes.

This usually gets at least one anxious comment --- "But where do you get your ideas from?  How can you come up with so many new topics so fast?"  That's usually part of a larger anxiety, along the lines of "Ideas might run out soon, and I don't have mine yet.  Where do ideas COME from?"  I almost am accused of cheating, as if I have illegally broken into the Gringotts bank of goblin ideas.

Well hmm, to be honest, the answer is that (drum roll, please) ideas come coffee.  Oops, no, sorry.  Starbucks ain't bad for working on ideas once you have some, but if you want to go the premium source of all, the best of the best of the best, then I have to confess that ideas come from Reno.  There's a building there, and they keep ideas in a box, and, for a very modest amount of money, you can go inside the building and help yourself.  Sure, go on, be a pig --- use all your pockets and both hands, too.  Shove some under your shirt.  There's plenty more where that came from.

The magic idea place goes by the rather unassuming name of the Nevada Museum of Art.  Here's the sign, out front.

I was there recently for a conference, my second visit in six months, and I must say, they really know how to do things right.  Before we can get into how they generate, steward, and disseminate ideas, we do have one small point of business.  I did say they are in Reno, and just as many people think that all we do in the Antelope Valley is cook meth and drive around looking for the best dirt road to leave our sofas on, so too does Reno too often get a bad rap.

Are there casinos?  Yes.  I don't gamble (unless you count my marriages), so for me, these buildings are just interesting ways to squander electricity.  Yes, there are casinos in Reno; yes, they are gorgeous at night; no, they do not define the city.  Here is the view from my 15th floor hotel window, looking north.  (You can see my casino reflected in the windows of this blue one, outlined by the dotted pink lights.  I am the one waving, fourth pink reflection from the left.)

One of the surprises about Reno is that it inhabits an ecological reality in ways many other cities do not, and so, for example, right in downtown Reno one can fly-fish or doodlebug in a kayak.  (Denver has something like this too.  Perhaps the Mayor of Lancaster should take a fact-finding trip to Reno, get ideas for how to continue his revival of Lancaster Blvd.  We could use some kayaking there, and maybe a skate park, too.  How about a climbing wall?)

There also is a commitment to public art in Reno, including sculptures on loan from the famous (notorious?) Burning Man Festival  -- well, who knows what Turner might have painted if he had been turned on by some E and surrounded by topless women.  I do think Turner might have enjoyed this red and blue bench below, tiled to resemble a koi pond.  This was just the right size to rest on, and is on the main street in downtown.

Back though to the Nevada Museum of Art, aka the Idea Factory.

While I had come to attend a conference and to see the adroitly curated "Altered Landscapes" exhibition --- about which more in a moment --- a lovely bonus  was the chance to fall in love with a newly-restored and utterly-fabulous Titian, and while I am not sure if the banner ads are her talking to me, or we in the audience talking to her, it did not matter since she was transcendentally splendid.  Hello, beautiful indeed.

I am afraid no photography was allowed in her gallery, so all I can show you is the wall wrap, above.  A few things though from the museum did manage to sneak themselves into my camera, such as these two interesting (and in some ways, very parallel) sculptural pieces.

The primary occasion of my visit was the 2011 Art + Environment Conference.  Here's the interesting part: they really wanted people to walk out smarter than when they had walked in.  From the program brochure (called a "Field Guide," and designed as sharply as anything I have seen recently), comes this introductory statement:

"Art museums can be temples to culture or cultural catalysts.  They can be passive and predictable or unpredictably idea-driven.  Museums can watch the world pass them by, or they can shaped the trajectory of its course.  Art and ideas matter here.  We see art that challenges minds, melds environments and cultures, and responds to the uncertainties of the future."

This continues, with one of the most refreshing claims of all: "Art has a point of view and it deserves a voice at the table."

Right on.

These ideals were manifested in the opening night's main act, musician and thought-provocateur DJ Spooky.  Backed by live performers from the Reno Symphony, he used video, scratching, narration, and layers of electronica to build up a whole new art form, sort of what I guess we have to call Hip-Hop Mozart or maybe Moon Landing Jazz Fusion.

I was very excited to meet him, since he and I overlap in two curious ways.  We both have been recently to Antarctica, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and we both have been almost all the way to the North Pole, sailing north of Svalbard aboard the schooner Noorderlicht.  (The only way to have gotten the rest of the way to the North Pole would have been to have enlisted in the US Navy and to have gone there aboard a nuclear submarine.  I liked our way better.) Here is the ship he and I both sailed on, in my photo from mid-summer in the high arctic.

Not only did our trajectories follow one another's, but I think we even took pictures of the same slabs of pack ice.

In their commitment to dialogue and cross-pollination, the Nevada Museum of Art has designed this event to be small, verging on intimate.  The program guide had QR codes (those square barcode maze squiggles that allow smart phones to link directly to website conversations), while at the breaks you could talk to just about everybody, from the curatorial staff to the tech support guys to world-famous artists.  In this kind of social design the content thus flows not just from main speaker to audience, but person to person, coffee cup to coffee cup.

The main auditorium couldn't quite fit everybody who needed to be present, though, so in the Founder's Room on an upper level, an overflow lounge let the graduate students and late arrivals participate as well.  I ended up here because I just wanted more leg room.  This was where the laptop users hung out too (and as is typical at art events, there were a lot of Macs on hand, mine included).

Talks included issues of intelligent design, how do we define wilderness, ways of including indigenous cultures in discussions of land use, what is the relationship between "ecological" photography and social justice, and, in Antarctica, what is a pee flag and why does one need one.

One shared assumption was that even waste areas and conventionally "un-scenic" landscapes (including Llano, which appears in one of the show's photographs) have a tremendous potential for visual and intellectual content; broadly speaking, I don't think there was an artist present who doesn't find deserts thrilling.  I think several artists present could proudly say that they had never met a pile of used tires they didn't like.  Of course, if so, these are my peeps.  Once at the USGS lab in Denver I shot some core samples (geological specimens, being housed like library reference books in a stable, well-managed archive).  I liked the history and science of them, but also just the aesthetic pleasures they offered, as minimalist sculpture.

So where do ideas come from, to return to the original question.  Answer, everywhere and nowhere.  In the field of large-scale works usually called (reluctantly so, by curators and artists equally) "land art," one famous piece is Lighting Field.

It is installed in New Mexico and consists of a one mile x one kilometer grid of steel rods.  Right time of year, they attract lightning.  The precision of the man-made objects contrasts with the stark beauty of the environmental setting, but the main thrill (even an imagined one, as few people have been here) is the lightning itself.  Here's a less-than-perfect scan, from a special issue of Time magazine edited by art historian Robert Hughes.

Where did the idea for this come from?  Thanks to the archives housed with the Museum's Center for Art and Environment, we can follow the idea's progress.  It started out as a sketch on a napkin in a Las Vegas coffee shop.

From there the proposal needed a budget.  How old-school this all is --- look, ma, real typewritten pages.

George Lucas's classic coming of age story American Graffiti supposedly offers history's best return on an investment in a Hollywood movie.  Produced for $100,000, it has gone on to make 100 million dollars.  Well, hang on to your Wookie, George, because the de la Maria Lightning Field is a close runner-up.  Proposed budget according to these archived notes is a just a few thousand dollars.  I'm no expert at appraisal but as a wild guess, what's this idea and its site worth, combined?  I don't know, $20,000,000?  Half that?  Three times that?  And unlike a Blu-Ray player, doomed to be obsolete in five or ten years, thunderstorms won't be going out of fashion any time soon.  "Lightning --- give the gift that keeps on giving."

The conference coincided with a major exhibit, which in turn has been documented in a gorgeous and informative book, Altered Landscape, the cover of which appears below:

One of the artists featured in the exhibit and the book is San Francisco aerialist Michael Light.  He was generous enough once to let me use one of his images on the cover of my third book, the Enola Gay survey titled Half-Life of Salt.  (The Enola Gay of course was the B-29 that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima; many people do not know it, but the plane's name came from the pilot's mother.  Her thoughts on being included in this process went unrecorded.)

Michael Light received international attention for a project that salvaged NASA lunar archives (a body of art collected as Full Moon), but more recent work involves deliciously complex "takes" on the American landscape.  Consider this image, in both the Nevada show and the exhibit catalogue:

The blog cannot do it justice, since it is a very large negative and so makes a very large print: scale, here, is part of the conversation, both the scale of the image (you can fall into it) and the scale of the subject matter being shot.  What looks like a cross-section of the Grand Canyon or perhaps terraced Inca farmland in the Andes is in fact a copper mine outside of Salt Lake City, shot from a helicopter.  We have reached a stage of so-called advancement in our culture where we now can not only fly to the moon (as his earlier work documented), but we now can make the Earth look like the moon.  (Another of Michael Light's projects --- and also included in the show --- involves archival photographs of hydrogen bomb testing in the Nevada deserts.)  In this case, the photo above has formal qualities that Ansel Adams would admire, a political message about man and our relationship to nature, a comment on god-like points of view (helicopter as the ultimate vista point), a nod to the monumental wet-plate photographs from 19th c surveys, and a sly comment on land art too, since after all, isn't this mine pit now an even bigger art piece than Robert Smithson ever dreamed up?

My reference here is to a piece from 1970, Spiral Jetty.

(Just a note on photo credits.  Most images in this blog are Hood's or else clearly can be sourced to the book under discussion, but this image above comes from a Tate publication, Land Art: a 2011 Calendar. The image is copyrighted by the Estate of Robert Smithson.)

Extending out from the margins of the Great Salt Lake, one idea behind Smithson's artwork was scale, of course, but another was color: the water trapped in the inner parts of the coil turned progressively redder as algae and silt became more concentrated.  That is, it did so until some El Nino winters flooded Utah with extravagant runoff, and so rising lake levels hid the art work from view for many years.  Later, droughts revealed it again, the embankment intact and yet salted and transformed by its time off-exhibit.  (In the time it was below surface level, could scuba divers claim to have "seen it" if they had gropingly carried out underwater tours?)  This is a lovely, iconic piece, and many artists pay homage to it.  One of my favorite riffs is Mark Tansey's, in his 1982 painting, Purity Test.

Tansey was the son of art historians, and even the title of his piece alludes to 1950s art criticism.  What I like about a museum such as the Nevada Museum of Art is that they are not snobs: anybody can join into these conversations.  I happened to be talking to Matt Coolidge, the Director for the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and I was saying that I was a bit troubled, a bit puzzled.  In my own recent aerial work, I felt as if I had both achieved a goal and yet missed something.  Here is my image that I was trying to talk about:

Printed three feet wide by two feet tall, this photo recently was on display in the campus art gallery in our faculty show.  In the print (though not here) small white snowflake-sized specks are visible, California Gulls in flight.  (Footnote: the California Gull is the state bird of Utah, due to their help in predating anti-Mormon crickets.)  Left to right we have black lava, white sand, and shallow water, in my Frank Stella protractor homage.  I was leaning out of Michael Light's plane (a plane whose doors had been taken off), shooting straight down.  This is exactly the kind of photograph I have been trying for years to get, and yet, in Nevada, at the museum, seeing other artists' aerial work, there still felt like there was something missing.

We were talking between sessions, and Matt Coolidge said some things about an image's context and presentation, and his insights made the proverbial light bulb go ding, ding, ding.  For me, one of the things any landscape does is manifest itself not just visually, but through language: what explorers wrote in their journals, or even what I myself have written and published.  For my own future practice, it seems I should be finding a way to integrate visual presentations with textual ones, but in denser ways (more linguistically saturated) than the one-word slogans of, say, Ed Ruscha.  How this will work, exactly, I am not sure, but it will be great fun to find out.

One difference between Christine Mugnolo in the AVC art department (or me, on my side of campus) and our students is that Christine or I give ourselves permission to be ready to capture ideas any time they zing past.  I keep journals with me almost all the time, and even in a meeting or while driving, if an idea is kind enough to offer itself to me, like an Inuit hunter I try to bow and immediately thank the Great Spirit.  Recently in Reno, I think I added about twenty pages to my journals.  In a small shoulder bag, I most often have a soft-sided sketchbook, with pages that look like this:

Let's ignore for now the benefits that OCD medication might have for me and just notice the watercolored pink rectangle on top of the MOPA handout.  My note to myself says, "Next thing, Kevin will be scrumping apples."  I love this British phrase (to collect, often illicitly, windfall fruit), and want to do something with it, perhaps as a character study for a profile of eccentric people I have met.  The phrase though had been lost to me (no wonder, with pages like that!) until when at the conference a speaker was talking about responsible ways to think, to draw, to be alive on the planet, at the same time that I looked over at a floral arrangement inside the Founder's Room.
 

Those sparks helped me to remember not just the journal pages, but some other notes I had, back home, about portrayals of gleaning in 19th century art.  I can't wait to get started working with these.

Another connection that came for me has to do with a book project.  Roughly speaking, I am working on six books right now; one of those is a collaboration being organized by poet Nicelle Davis, called just "Bodie."  As many of us remember, Bodie was the 1880s boom town that was later abandoned in the 1920s, and which is now a time-capsule California State Park.  Two recent pictures:

Yes, that's an outhouse (as expected), but yes, below that, that's a child's coffin, propped up inside the parlor of the undertaker's house.  You can't go in: I took this picture through the window.  Note though the vintage wallpaper, the hat rack, the still-in-place art on the wall.  It's creepy and exciting, all at once, like finding a rare coin in the dirt of an abandoned homestead.

The book though struggles to find direction and voice, and bully that I am, I keep trying to lobby the head editor for changes that I think need to be made.  My case might be easier to make if I could articulate my thoughts better; coming back from Reno on the scenic but long trip back down 395, some of the stray ideas came together, and I transcribed my notes into a prose-poem slash essay that now is in another journal, one that I keep in a spiral-bound artist's book of 9 x 12 inch pages.

We have in this two-page spread a painting by Dutch artist Koen van den Broek, an aerial photo of the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, an explorer in the snow whose goggles reveal that he is (apparently) on Mars, a man walking on the top of a wall in Venice, a napkin holder wrapper from Carl's Jr that has had a word swapped out, and my Bodie poem, top right.  These images are my way of making shorthand notes for ideas or projects I want to come back to later, or, in the case of the Dutch painter, just work that I like and want to see more of.  Will all of these little visual memo notes end up in produced, finished work?  Of course not.  I can't speak for others, but I know that for me, interesting ideas are too rare, too ephemeral for me to treat casually, and by golly, if something crosses my path, I will do my best to honor it by remembering it any way I can, from a ballpoint pen note on my left hand to inclusion in a 13 x 18 inch journal page.

I have "written" about Mono Lake before, at least in terms of visual notes, and this page (below) did end up resulting in an essay, a nicely received piece in an anthology by Red Hen Press titled Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural & Geographic Map of California Today.  The Mono Lake landscape in the background is not one of my shots --- as I recall, it came from a Patagonia clothing catalog.

Thank you Frieda Kahlo, for helping me with my essay for Red Hen Press.  (And thank you to Red Hen Press, for creating a venue for work like that to appear.)  Where do ideas come from?  From journal pages and long drives, from the left half of our brains getting into a barroom fight with the right half, from random flower arrangements and chance conversations in the restroom, from tufa spires and the Nevada Museum of Art.  I am not sure when their next conference will be held, but I do plan to make sure that I stay at the top of their mailing list.

Is it Easier to be Half a Christian, or Half a Comedian?

Uses and Misuses of the English Language

In a recent newsletter from my pastor, I see that he quotes a book by Steven Furtlick titled Sun Stand Still.  Pastor Furtlick apparently dislikes a phrase from contemporary Christian practice: "full-time ministry."  He says, "I know what it's supposed to mean, but I vehemently disagree with its implications.  To say that someone is called to 'full-time ministry' suggests that others are permitted to do 'part-time' ministry."  He disagrees, and goes on to say that Jesus "didn't die on a part-time cross."  He says, "There's no such thing as a part-time Christian, and [ so therefore ] there's no such thing as a part-time ministry."

This passion (which I do admire, separate from any theological discussion) reminds me of the late, great George Carlin.  He said about the instructions to cook a turkey, how can one "pre-heat" an oven?  After all, there are only two possible states for an oven to be in, ON or OFF.  If it is on, even a little bit, it is a heating (or heated) oven.  If it is not, it is not.  After all (I will say, agreeing with his outrage), if in one's pre-heated oven, while inserting the turkey, one's hand touches the rack, then you're injured.  You're not pre-injured, you're just injured, and go ouch and reach for an ice pack.  Ovens are either on or off, either hot or cold.  If you turn the switch to off, are you pre-cooling it?

I suppose my kids might disagree with my analysis.  As a cook, I was (and am) notoriously casual about such things as measuring cups, cooking times, and, in fact, directions in general.  Next time somebody asks me what I am doing in the kitchen, perhaps I can answer, "pre-burning tonight's dinner."

George Carlin also objected to the phrase when in an airport that a given flight was about to begin pre-boarding.  As with an oven, either people are getting on (they are boarding) or they are not.  Who gets on first or second doesn't change that: the first folks to exit the terminal and walk down the jetway are not pre-boarding, they are completely and utterly boarding, plan and simple.  I do agree with him on this: to my mind, the only way any of us could preboard would be if they had some kind of module with all of the seats attached to it.  If in some kind of a holding area all the passengers took their seats in the module, and then, only later, if the module were lifted up by a skip loader and slid into the side of the plane sideways, THEN I would agree, we had pre-boarded.

Recently I heard a German banker talking about the Euro debt crisis.  He said (in very good English) that it is not just premature to talk about further loans and rescue attempts, but that it is MORE than premature.  This makes no sense to me.  How can something come before the fact that it has not yet come yet?  It is either a premature plan or else it is a timely plan, but it can't be a pre-premature plan yet.  That sounds like a biological impossibility: mom and dad haven't even met at Schooners yet for their first date, so the baby isn't premature because it does not even exist yet.

Of course we are used to living with contradictions and redundant phrases.  I am at a conference in Reno, whose central street has this sign:

Apparently, as little cities go, Reno used to be a littler little city, because I remember this same slogan from the mid-1960s, and the sign was definitely smaller then.  (If I can find that image, I will add it to this post once I get back to campus.)

Isn't this Reno phrase a sort of demographic impossibility?  If it's a little city, it can't also be a big city.  Only in particle physics can light be a particle and a wave at the same time.  In Newtonian physics, big is big and small is small.  If it keeps growing, will Reno some day be the littlest big city in the world?  And, eventually, with a few more malls and casinos, then the middle-littlest big city in the world?  The expression makes no sense.

We use the term at AVC that so and so is a "part-time student."  I feel about this the way that Pastor Furtlick feels about Christians.  One either is a student or one isn't, and if one is, then learning and growth and discovery are constant goals, constant companions.  I would hope that whether one is taking six units or twenty-six, the openness to ideas and new ways of being would be equally present.  (As Furtlick might say, one does not go to just a part-time Heaven.  And for us, there are no half-credit degrees.  Either you have the credits for a degree or you do not: Dr. Fisher at commencement this coming June won't be handing out 3/4 diplomas or 5/8th ones.  All or nothing, in learning as it is in life.)

Of course maybe for some of my students, the ones, say, texting during the lectures, we might say that they have already started to pre-fail the final exam....

T.S. Eliot's iPad

More Developments with Digital Books

I had lunch with one of my editors last week and he was joking yet a little bit serious when he said, "How long until you have your first iPad book, Hood?"

"Five years," was my answer, surprising even me, as it came out of my mouth.  That it is coming is certain; that for poetry it may not be immediate is also true.  The start-up costs are too high, at least initially.

Of course if I wanted to be serious about photography, that "five years" answer might be smaller: most professional photographers now use an iPad as their portfolio when meeting with clients and art directors, and many of the publishers of high-end "art" photography books (what are sometimes called monographs or coffee table books, as opposed to "how to shoot a wedding" kind of photo book) will either be dual platform (hard copy and e-version) or e-version alone.

This series before has talked about Kindle versus conventional books.  Now the Kindle seems like old news in the million-miles-a-minute way that computer technologies evolve; it is the Nook and the iPad and other digital platforms that seem to be the newest stars in the sky.  Amazon supposedly has its own iPad kind of super reader in the works too --- the only surprising thing is that it took them so long.

Exciting book formats can be found on an iPad, to be sure.  A Kindle is fun and useful and may be the future of textbooks.  Cal State Bakersfield, for example, allows students to take literature courses uses the Kindle as their platform of choice, if they do not want to use a "real" book.  But a Kindle is no iPad, and not be able to catch up.  As an example of this, Santi Tafarella, our Antelope Valley blog king (featured here recently and also in the campus paper), showed me over the summer a T.S. Eliot application on his iPad.

Eliot is the best-known, most academically-certified poet in English language arts and letters since the Romantics; his 1922 book-length poem, The Wasteland, represents Modernism in literature the way that Picasso does in art or the Beatles do for rock.  Brilliant, dense, complicated, allusive, elusive, and poly-lingual, with references in six languages and sudden jump cuts in mood and scene, this poem repays serious study.  But it's not the sort of thing that one might expect to be a best seller.

On the iPad though, the presentation of this text is so rich and engaging, with so many "valued added products" to borrow from marketing, that we even had a discussion about just that one app at our department's summer comp retreat.

Now it is Jack Kerouac's On the Road that has come up as profoundly better and different in its iPad version.  According to an article in the current issue of Poets & Writers, it even briefly outsold electronic versions of the Bible.  From that same article, here is this heads-up: "For the time being, plain text still rules the e-book roost, but it's clear that the industry is concerned that the ascendancy of the tablet may signal the obsolescence of dedicated e-readers."  The article further reminds readers that there are over 200 million iPad-driven tablets already in use, and since it's Apple's number one money maker right now, they don't plan to limit production any time soon.

Maybe when my editor asked me about poetry for the iPad, my answer should have been, "Well, how soon I get one out depends on you.  How soon do you plan to hirer a coder and get me released as an app?"  Development costs for Apple are just the price of doing business, and given that they bring in billions of dollars a month (NOT a typo), they have the capital to re-invest.  Most small presses that I know, the companies releasing poetry and indy rock and oddball theatrical pieces and hybrid art-novel-performances, which is to say, the companies doing now what T.S. Eliot was doing in 1922, can't afford big bucks for iPad development.  After editor A asked me my lunch question, I went to editor B, at another firm, a publisher with whom I also release books. I asked them the same question.  How long until you're doing iPad editions?

Press B just said flat out, "We can't get into that right now --- we don't have the staff, we don't have the marketing department, we don't even have the demo iPads laying around the office for people to fiddle with."  I appreciate this.  Reality is reality.  I would like to get into larger format photography, but a top-end large-negative digital camera, like the ones that they use to shoot the cover of Cosmo magazine, would cost $40,000.  Thanks but no thanks.  For now I will stick with my Nikons.

So the i-Book route may not be feasible . . . yet.  It may well be that do-it-yourself versions (conversion kits for amateurs) will come along eventually --- something that for $100 I can buy, plug my Word manuscript into, and bingo, a small press can use a few simple templates and have the iPad version. 

So what do you think.  Five years?

Maybe ten.  But then again, maybe not, maybe just two.  Maybe one.

Maybe tomorrow.

Until then, there's always the old fashioned delivery methods.  Not hand-made Bibles from monks, not printed books, not Kindles --- I am talking about license plates.  And on that note, good night.

Electric Cars, Wind Turbines, and Logical Fallacies

contrarian thoughts on alternative energy

Among the faculty at AVC there are a fair number of shop-at-Trader-Joe's, voted-for-Obama, left-of-center types, and among those (many of whom are dear friends and fabulous teachers) there's a vague sense that wind turbines are a good thing, as are electric cars.

Indeed, in the newly redone parking lots, shaded now with the ubiquitous solar panels, there are electric car charging stations.

I've not seen anybody at them, but I assumed it was all vaguely for the public good.

A photography expert, Ken Rockwell, writes a very respected independent photo blog, and while his Libertarian politics do manifest themselves, on average, he stays clear of general politics or cultural commentary.  He did break that rule recently, to talk about electric cars.  While I encourage you to see the site itself (kenrockwell.com), some of his points are so provocative, they merit discussion here.

Among the points he raises are these.

---Electric cars consume huge amounts of electrical power.  Rockwell: "One electric car consumes as much power in typical operation as four homes."

---If electric cars become widespread, we will need to increase energy output.  That means not just more power plants (up to four times as many as now exist, if the USA went all electric) but four times as many transmission lines and sub-stations.  The skyline would be nothing but utility towers, from horizon to horizon.

While some phone poles have a kind of quaint, "out West" feel along a deserted road, we hardly need more things to create even more visual static. 

---Rockwell again: "It is ironic that the same people who worry about replacing real bulbs with carcinogenic CFL bulbs loaded with mercury, lead, EMI and EMF just to save five watts are the same ones mislead into thinking that an electric car that charges at 10,000 watts overnight on 440V three-phase [ equipment ] is saving energy."

---One problem is the inherent waste in the system.  No car is 100% efficient, nor are the transmission systems efficient, nor the production methods, even with nuclear power (which has its own very problematic ancillary issues).  "When you ignore all the free subsidies handed out like cocaine to get people hooked," he says, then you have to admit that "electric cars need to burn about four times as much [ oil ] to fuel the [ average ] power plant compared to just burning it in your car."  He does the math: "75% of the heat energy of combustion is wasted converting heat to spinning motion in a power plant, [ then ] converting that motion to electricity, transmission to your home, storage in a battery, and conversion back into motion in your car, all with more heat lossses over simply burning the same fuel in your car to make that motion directly."

---A final point of concern is a bit dystopian, but may make some of us pause: "Repressive governments love electric cars, because as soon as power is cut during an uprising, no one can recharge their cars until the civil unrest subsides and the government chooses to restore power."  This assumes that we could buy and pump gasoline without electricity (which, on average, we can't), and assumes too, the refineries and distribution infrastructure would be intact (which it might not be), but I do love the point itself.  Be careful what you give up, as you may want it back one day.

But what about the wind?  That's clean, right?  Couldn't a wind-powered sailboat car park here?

I am in the minority who don't find miles of windmills on the ridges attractive, but that's no reason not to go full-ahead with wind farms, so long as they do what are promised.

But do they?  If we ignore who builds the ball-bearings and which countries sell us the rare metals for the innards and where the money comes from to install them, once up, are wind turbines an answer to everything?

Not for the wildlife.  Ever see those Star Wars kinds of sci-fi films where the hero has to cross a narrow catwalk then dodge between the spinning blades of a turbine fan?  It is like trying to make your way through a garbage grinder.

That is what wind farms are to things that fly, namely hawks, eagles, songbirds, and bats.

Bat Conservation International has a page about bats versus wind turbines on their website.  They claim to have the documentation that shows how "Wind-energy sites, especially those on ridge tops in the eastern United States, are causing unexpectedly high bat fatalities."  Don't think that this won't effect us.  Among the insect-eating species, one bat can eat 600 mosquitoes in an hour, while other types prey on the moths whose larval forms destroy crops.  Other bats pollinate saguaro cactus and the plants that tequila comes from.

At Altamont Pass near San Francisco, 2000 eagles and hawks a year are killed, some chopped right in two, following their annual migration routes from Alaska down over the ridges towards wintering grounds in Mexico, the Antelope Valley, and other wide open spaces.  Just as a hang glider needs to use thermal winds to provide lift, so too for raptors, and where the wind flows through a series of turbines (over 6000 on those ridges as one leaves I-5 before Stockton for the swing west to San Francisco), it is murder alley.

Not all news is bad, though, and after many years of debate, the relevant utility companies are going to start dismantling the old style "lethal" windmills and replace them which much taller units that not only can generate a lot more juice per pole, but also will be placed to cause much less harm to the residents of that airspace.

(A note on photo sources: while almost all of the photos in this blog are by Charles Hood or else are clearly credited to their source, this osprey, above, is better than any of my reference pictures, and came pre-loaded on my Aperture photo software.  I don't know who took it, but it's a great shot!)

The world always seems to be a contradictory and unyielding place.  If electric cars soak up too much just and wind turbines place slice-n-dice with birds of prey, what's left?  Gas is expensive and running out (and probably causes global warming), solar power has yet to become significant, nuclear power is expensive and dangerous (especially in earthquake areas), and so-called "cold fusion" turned out to be a hoax.

I was talking about this once with somebody in Brazil, where they supplement a lot of their petrol with ethanol.  One man told me he had the perfect solution .... and patted his horse's head.

I guess the Lone Ranger never had to wait in line at Arco on a Friday night.  Hi ho Silver, awaaaay!