In recent years, the moustache has gone from cheesy to ironic to strangely hip. Phil McAndrew demonstrates some of its undiscovered properties in a new web comic.
Via Ectomo for Boose.
Beautiful Greenpeace Ads
The new Greenpeace ads are lovely. Check them out.
via Copyranter.
The Machine Stops
The Machine Stops was written in 1909 by E.M. Forster, who you may recognize from A Room with a View, Howard’s End, and suchlike.
It’s a short story about a future society in which space has been abolished. People live in small, hive-like cells and have everything brought to them through the function of a world-spanning device called the machine. They spend their days communicating with friends, consuming culture, and rehashing ideas without ever leaving their rooms. There is no physical contact and no direct experience of the world.
It’s a bit terrifying to see how, a century later, much of the story’s predictions are increasingly true in spirit.
Pretty Words
Erin McKean recently wrote an article for the Boston Globe about the new Pictorial Webster’s, which features over 12,000 engravings set and printed by hand from the 1859 edition of the Merriam-Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Its a lovely book. If the cheapest edition weren’t $2600, I’d want one for myself.
Incidentally, Ms. McKean gave a delightfully geeky TED lecture about lexicography last year.
I’m tossing this entry into the Vickies and Eddies filter, since it may be of interest to steampunk enthusiasts.
The Cost
One of the saddest things about the Iraq war is that the destruction of an ancient culture isn’t even tabulated in the cost. An article in today’s New York Times, A Fabled Iraqi Instrument Thrives in Exile, discusses the suppression of secular oud music in Baghdad. There are other places where Arabic music continues to survive, but Baghdad was once the center of a particular sound that may now fade into obscurity.
This is the long term cost of political instability. There are millenia-old pieces from the National Museum of Iraq that may never resurface, and an intellectual tradition as old as the Abbasid Caliphate is slowly being rubbed away.
The same thing has happened in Afghanistan in the instability following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhas at Bamyan, and things didn’t get much better after allied forces took over. In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart documented the 2002 looting of the lost city of Turquoise Mountain, former capital of the Ghorid empire. The empire was utterly destroyed by the Mongols, so an organized excavation of the site may have been our last opportunity to learn about this vanished culture.
This is worse than killing a group of people; it’s erasing any sign that they ever existed.
On a more positive note, if you’re not familiar with the oud, check out this video on YouTube or visit the website of Issa Boulos, a Palestinian player in Chicago, for some free recordings. If you want to listen to the Baghdad style, search YouTube with the phrase “Iraqi maqam.”
As an interesting tangent, check out the middle of this video from the Turkish film Crossing the Bridge to hear the oud’s influence on flamenco. The entire film is well worth watching and is narrated by Alexander Hacke of Einstuerzende Neubauten.
Confidential to Jonathan Coulton fans: mark the date.
Take off the Steam Skis. Step Away from the Clockwork Shark.
We’re currently witnessing the peak of steampunk’s cultural relevance. From here, it will be a long, downhill slide.
On the surface, things seem to be booming for the young subculture, with artisans like Jake von Slatt, Datamancer, and Kinetic Steam Works; web comics like Girl Genius and Freak Angels; online zine Steampunk Magazine; podcast Steampunk Spectacular; and a number of blogs and Etsy shops.
The trouble is, steampunk used to be a genre, and it’s becoming a subculture. Genre denotes a similar form, style, or purpose. Subculture denotes a group of people with shared beliefs, interests, or values. In the nineties, the word steampunk described books like The Diamond Age and The Difference Engine. Now, it describes a type of person, and that’s bad news for fans of creative media.
Genre works are similar works produced with individual vision. Subculture works are created to enforce a group identity.
If you don’t think this is an important distinction, consider the plight of the cyberpunks. As a genre, cyberpunk included classics like Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Blade Runner. As a subculture, cyberpunks were loveable goofballs with functionless plastic gewgaws strapped to their faces.
The more the word steampunk refers to a steampunk lifestyle or a steampunk scene, the more rigidly it will be defined and the less room there will be for anything innovative or interesting. It will become a derivative and dull rehashing of the same tired ideas. The creators will not be garage tinkerers, anarchist punks, and period costumers. They’ll be steampunks generating steampunkery for other steampunks. It will be boring.
If you want to see the hideous endgame of a stale subculture, take a look at what’s happened to the gothic subculture.
Actually, one of the worst signs for steampunk is that the goths are taking an interest in it, as the Steampunk Librarian noted last week. Let’s face it; Abney Park is basically just the Cruxshadows with an airship. Vernian Process is Clan of Xymox in spats. I don’t think we need Abraham Van Helsing to warn us about these undead intruders.
Steampunk has to keep things fresh, or it will die. I’m already tired of airships and ray guns. Steampunk’s energy does not come from props or any individual aspect of the steampunk genre or style. The best steampunk comes from the bolting together of mismatched parts to see what twisted machines can be invented. The key ingredient is an individual creative vision, not a pair of brass goggles.
If you love steampunk and want to contribute to the genre, don’t emulate other steampunk work. Find the things you love best about the real and imagined past, take them to the house of pain, and vivisect them onto your reality in the most violent manner possible.
Be bolder. Work harder. Do your homework. Emulate the process, not the products.
The Red Mage
The trouble with trying to practice too many things at once is that some projects suffer from neglect. This blog has been one of those projects.
Ironically, I actually got down to the business of writing two new entries on the train last weekend but returned home to find that my neighbors have gotten wise to my piratical ways and secured their wireless networks.
Soon, though, I’ll be posting a series on the construction of our Ouled Nail tent, complete with photographs, tips, and references. There may be some food entries after that, but we’ll have to see how things go.
In any case, your patience will be rewarded.
What This Is
This won’t be a personal journal, because we both ought to do something better with our time than gratify my vanity. Instead, it will be a journal of the many things I’d like to learn.
Like many of you, I’d like to be a more articulate speaker, better in the kitchen/bar, more culturally informed, and imbued with more social grace. If you’d like the same things for yourself, then keep watching this space. Though I can’t claim to have the answers you’re looking for, I can at least claim to have similar questions.
Regular updates will begin after I’ve replaced the computer that died in the fire.
I’d like to thank my benefactor, Mr. Steelbuddha, for hosting this journal. He is a scholar, a man of principles, and a gentleman deserving of any free drinks given to him.