ASUS 1000HE Netbook as Kindle Clone

Thanks to Paul Biba at Tele-read for the tip that you can press ctrl-alt-arrow to rotate the screen on a 1000he and use the netbook as a Kindle-like device. The navigation is hitting the pagedown and pageup buttons. Here I am checking out Susan Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Unreason over at Google Books. Google Books is great, but you don't get all the pages. E-books have this book for 15.95. My friend, Michael Twittered to me that there is always Project Gutenberg, but that is great if you want to read an old classic like The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Clearly, if I want to read something a bit more recent it is cheaper to just buy a used book over at Thrift Books, Biblio, or Amazon and pay $4-$5 bucks.

Don't get me wrong. My preference for books are used paperbooks. Recently, I bought used paperbooks and there is nothing more nostalgic for me. One of my fondest memories when I moved to Menlo Park back in the late 1970s is finding this great used book store that would by back your books and gave you store credit to get more. Nothing motivates a young person to read more than being able to pay for books with one's meager allowance and be able to earn more books by bring fully read books back. Of course, they went out of business.

There is something tactile and social about physical books. You can feel and smell the pages and underline passages and make notes. You can share your book with friends and they make great gifts. If somehow an electronic pulse knocks out all of electronica in the world ala Dark Angel, you still have physical books to keep you company and entertained.

That being said, I think it is cool that my netbook can be repurposed to become an ebook reader. The awesome thing about ebooks is that like used books, you are not killing new trees for entertainment. Making paper and inks does have an effect on the environment. One issue is storage of books. Books take up a lot of room and ebooks could help unclutter our homes.

A Daybreak Stroll in Dithyrambia

From time to time I will search the webs for anything dithyrambunctious or more properly dithyrambic in style or spirit. One item of dithyrambic curiosity is a screen print of mixed media called, Dithyrambic Aspirations by Bret Pfeifer. This work is housed on the Office of Urban Air conditioning. There are on-going essays by Aaron Jones about what defines success, terra impenetrabilis or surfaces of our paved planet, our relationship with fossils and their fuels, urbanity's siren sell to affluent suburbanites, and predatory neglect in the inner city. His art echoes the themes of his essays although my favorite of his work is "Berber Woman." Speaking of Berber... I just bought a used copy of The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity (Paperback).

My first question to Bret Pfeifer was about his use of Dithyrambic for the title, and how he defines dithyrambic.

The title 'Dithyrambic Aspirations' comes directly from my own creative process. I seem to have a never ending flow of creative aspirations that remain stagnant due to new more exciting thoughts, ideas, projects. It is as if the creativity feeds on itself in a cyclical process never producing any real product. Once I understood this I began to revel in the process of creativity rather than the final product.

Life is dithyrambic, it is a continuos flow of the unexpected, never ceasing. In this case creativity is dithyrambic, flowing without regard for anything else but the creative process.

When my eyes sank into the piece, Dithyrambic Aspirations, my first impressions that it works visually and feels like a comment about business or urbanity with what looks like high-rises, date stamps of 2008, and what could chemical reactions. I wondered what Bret was trying to accomplish with this piece.

"I am an architect by trade so the building-like forms refer to my 'creative profession'. Architecture is seemingly very creative....but to me, it is one of the creative endeavors that holds back the development of one of my ideas, thoughts or projects. Architecture is one of the only creative processes in which a real tangible product is delivered, although, throughout the 'process' of architecture the original idea is so tainted by the real-world constraints that the creative process removed.

The date stamp refers to the idea actually setting a date and developing one of these ideas into its mature potential. This of course diminishes the importance of the 'process' and places that importance on the product, which kills the creativity.

This piece is partly me as an artist making piece with the fact that creativity and commerce are directly in conflict, to pursue one depreciates the other. I would much rather retain the creative process.

I would like to thank Bret for graciously answering my questions. We will be sure to let you know when his website goes up. I wish him well.

My Lunch in Dresden

In the Summer of 1984, one of the places I stopped was Dresden, Germany for lunch after a tour of the city. The tour was punctuated with the tour guides judgmental snarl, "This was BOMBED by the AMERICANS!" We were a bus of 60 American kids that were in the late teens, born in the mid or late 1960s. It was a real temptation to take it personally, but excuse me for saying at the time, "We were not even born yet, give us a friggin break!" We would get similar sentiments from another East German tour guide on our tour of East Berlin. She would claim that they left the ruined buildings up as a monument to the Allied bombings. Right.

What I remember of lunch was that they had this liqueur, digestif of sorts that smelled like it could run a car. Don't get me wrong, I love liqueur, especially lithuanian honey liqueur, or rasberry liqueur. A tiny sip confirmed that I had no business with the stuff and I handed it over to one of the guys on the tour that seemed less discriminating. Passing on the digestif would happen in Prague. It just seemed to be the right thing to do.

The East German guides did have a point. Our country did firebomb the hell out of Dresden. In fact I was reading Vonnegut on the trip and he actually spent time in a bunker while it happened. It was horrific. In 1984, we had Reagan as President who was certainly hawkish and calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. The thing is, despite the verbal digs, they needed our cash and so they let us in.

My story of my short time in Dresden came up when I thought of artist Otto Dix, an expressionist from Dresden. I bring up Otto Dix, because he is a great example of how art was affected by World War I. Dix was also a part of was called by the facists as degenerate art, which I prefer. Otto Dix comes up because there is a show I want to go to, but can't, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called, Shell Shocked: Expressionism After the Great War, Today.

Extraordinarily resilient, German Expressionism was profoundly changed by World War I (1914-1918), which first enthralled and then devastated the “generation of 1914” throughout Europe. The young German artists initially welcomed the “Great War” as a grand adventure. But this euphoria soon yielded to pacifism and outright political protest in opposition to a war that was taking a heavy toll in such unprecedented battles of attrition as the Somme and Verdun. Departing from the arcadian landscapes and anguished probing of the individual psyche of early Expressionism, artists now conveyed political protest and communal utopia visions of a new humanity.

These artists lived through WWI and were surrounded by maimed vets, war widows, economic decline, and the whole world punishing them for the war itself. Dismemberment, distortion, death, and destruction were familiar to these artists and they faced it head on in their work. The work is often described as grotesque, but it is really is a time where all you had left was to portray the world how it felt to many. There is a German proverb, "“A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves”

Unlocking The Heart of Adoption

It has been a wonderful experience being friends with Sheila Ganz, who is a birth mother and filmmaker extraordinaire. I had the pleasure of working on the website of her first film, Unlocking the Heart of Adoption, for about 7-8 years. Unlocking the Heart of Adoption is essential viewing for anyone who is adopted, adopting, planning to adopt, or has relinquished or plans to relinquish a child to adoption. This film unflinchingly deals with experiences in adoption that do exist, but are not found in most adoption films.

You must go to her website and for as little as $39.95 buy the DVD for yourself or for friends you know that are touched or want to be touched by adoption.

The Bastard Fairies: We Are All Going to Hell

Warning this song does contain profanity. Pause if this offends you. These folk are called Bastard Fairies, an indy band. I am liking their version of "Brand New Key" with the ukelele band.

Don't Trust Anyone Making $250,000 or more...

Think Progress found this little gem on CNBC. It seems to this particular anchor that this AIG problem cannot be solved by those making less than $250,000. I know a lot of smart, experienced people who have been laid off who would love to be making $100-150k a year right now. Many are settling for jobs that make 12 bucks an hour, so I am sure AIG and these ruined companies can get help. It seems to me and a lot of folks that it was people making more than $250,000 that got us into this mess in the first place. It is clear from the past year, we cannot trust these people who make more than $250,000 with our public dollars. They have to earn back our trust.

We, taxpayers, sacrificed and gave them bailout money to fix the problem they created and they turned around and gave 218 Million dollars in bonuses (and gave Paulson's ex-employer Goldman Sachs $12.6 billion). The money can go to salaries for people to work through the problem, but times of high salaries and bonuses are over. The time for slipping billions to your friends are over. When the government owns 80% of you, it is time to get paid like a government worker. To say no one would take these jobs is false.

It is time to make an ultimatum to those who still work at these corporate welfare queens that they work for the taxpayer now. If they do not want their jobs, then there are plenty of people who will take their places. We can hire a lot of smart people for the price of one, overpriced and over hyped executive with entitlement issues. Maybe it is time for them to stand in the unemployment line and feel the pain that their choices inflicted upon the world, and let the rest of us take their places.

People have been accusing Obama as wanting to redistribute wealth while we have been witnessing the greatest redistribution of wealth to financial, energy, and military contractors in the past 8 years. It is time to redistribute it the other way for the best interest of our country.

Dithyrambicology: Historical Dithyrambic

"In Paris appeared The Black Book, a novel by Lawrence Durrell, who gave promise of outdoing Henry Miller in the form that admirers call the dithyrambic novel and that others call plain old-fashioned pornography." - Time Magazine, Dithyrambic Sex, Monday, Nov. 21, 1938