I recently read that Sawhorsemedia was giving out an award for the best Tweets. Venturebeat describes it as the Oscars for Twitter!
Got me thinking about the rise of short-from content and also about a book I read in college called The Economy of the Unlost. In this book, Anne Carson compares Paul Celan ( 20th century Romanian Jew who lived in Paris and wrote notoriously short poems in German) with Simonides of Keos (ancient Greek poet — first poet to write poems for money and charge by the word!)
The book is about the economy of language, exactitude in communication and brevity. Carson poses questions like: What is lost when words are wasted? Who profits when words are saved?
If Paul Celan and Simonides were born in this age, they would definitely smoke any modern day counterpart and bag the Twitter Awards. They would also be pretty good at Pecha Kucha!
Tangential: The phone number has 7 digits because memory of numbers drops off significantly after 7. Twitter only allows 140 characters. 140 is the sum of the squares of the first 7 integers.
Today, the New York Times has a story about Tangier’s new image. The Times notes:
“But while the gritty authenticity of Tangier is still there, a new generation of artists and expats is giving this fabulously shabby port a new shine.”
I thought it would be interesting to go back to my travel journals when I was in Morocco and compare this article with some of my thoughts and observations from Tangier. At the time, I definitely saw more of the grit than the glamor!
This is what I had penned: From Casablanca I decided to make by way to Tangier. I had extremely romantic images of this place. As the bus trudged its way forward, I thought about how every other marauding European kingdom had left its indelible mark on the city. The Phoenicians arrived in the 5 th century BC, the Romans followed suit 400 years later. The mad Vandals swept across North Africa through Tangier; the town was later subsumed into the Byzantine Empire and then changed hands between the Arabs, Portuguese, British and Spanish! This was a place that had become enslaved by the lure of its own strategic location between the southern tip of Spain and the northern tip of Africa.
Tangier has also been safe haven and sybaritic capital to many aesthetes and artists including Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Pawl Bowles, Henry Matisse and the Rolling Stones. Ruminating on the idyllic beat spirit of the place I heard my dad’s croaking Dylan impression. “If you see her say hello she might be in Tangier.”
I did find her. She was not the women who had left Dylan “last spring,” the one who makes him invoke the “yellow moon.” She had in fact become a hideous moroccon prostitute on a bar stool offering up her body and cheap romance to a middle-age Spanish huckster who thought he was a libertine. Tangier was a rude awakening for me. My tendency to romanticize places by weaving together a tapestry of “exotic” facts and fanciful impressions that wildly departed from the truth, had to stop. I spent a night walking around the city and saw its dark underbelly. Little boys tried to sell me hash, aggressive hookers followed me around (“I give you full love for 1000 dirham”) and the only English speaking person I met was a dodgy looking British guy who had just finished serving a prison sentence for trying to smuggle hookers AND hash across the border. I asked him how he thought he could get away with such an egregious crime. He looked back at him with cadaverous eyes and said “that’s why the Morrocon’s say Tangier Dangier man….but sometime dangier can lead to big reward..you got to take your chances man.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into his Moroccan “friend” who giggled flirtatiously at me and licked her lips seductively. Feeling that I was in the tenth circle of hell, I beat a hasty retreat to my hotel room, ate a cold sandwich and buried myself in Tom Robin’s Jitterbug Perfume. I drifted in and out of sleep thinking about Alobar’s quest for immortality, the Bandaloops and vice-ridden Tangier.
After a fitful night of sleep, I awoke to the sound of loud Moroccan music from the streets. The day proved to be much better. I walked to the Grand Socco (socco = Spanish for souk = market) soaking in the sun, the smells from fruit stalls and the cacophony of sounds from street vendors and hustlers. I made my way to the medina and passed the Church of Immaculate Conception (which was built by the Spanish in the late 19th century) and eventually to the Kasbah which is perched at the highest point of the city.
I spent two hours under a tree in the Sultan’s gardens and the remainder of the afternoon contemplating and admiring Moroccan zellij (tile work). Every door of every house I passed had a distinctly different style of abstract tile work. I took out my camera and clicked away indiscriminately. The evening was spent drinking mint tea, learning how to play backgammon with two locals and gazing into the Straight of Gibraltar from the terraced gardens of Café Hafa – a favorite joint of the Rolling Stones. Spain looked tantalizing close and I wondered if I should jump into the next ferry and explore southern spain. But Fez beckoned and my realism got the better of me
There is a Sanskrit word called “Darshan” which means seeing the divine. I like to think of it as a “way of seeing,” a philosophical viewpoint. Tangier was dirty and ugly in many ways but if you looked close enough, and if you saw through the right lens, it had its moments of beauty.
A week ago, my roommate and I (over late night libations) decided to make a short film for the Sundance Short Film Competition. I had a strange idea for a story, he had directed many films and so by the end of the night, we had come up with an idea and a plan for making a film. In less than a week, we found two professional actors, a bunch of cast members, a bar that was willing to let us shoot twice, music to go with the film (courtesy of SubSwara), a producer, a “set designer” and some other unsuspecting friends who had unwittingly volunteered their time and sanity!
Today, a week later, we have a film entered into the competition and plane tickets to Sundance!
This is the short:
A brief synopses I wrote (excuse the dramatic flair!):
Acomia is a short film about a balding man living on the margins of society. His day job is Sisyphean; day after day, he inspects an endless stream of bald eggs arriving on a conveyor belt with mechanistic certainty. At night, he watches his imagined paramour from across the street as she reads and strokes her beautiful red hair. As time goes by, his obsession with her grows – as his hairline recedes. Overcome by unrealized infatuation and loneliness he descends into madness and phantasmagoria – she flashes past him like an apparition in the night and he decides to follow her to what seems like a subterranean speakeasy. In this surreal underground space, shrouded in mystery and strangeness, he learns that they occupy the same world.
Yesterday evening I got the chance to check out MAD (The Museum of Architecture and Design). I highly recommend checking out their new exhibit: Second Lives.
Over 50 international artists transform household items into transcendental works of art. Butterflies are made from old vinyl records, dresses from latex gloves, a giant flower made from spoons and a military jacket from dog tags!
Sometimes the sight of a broken umbrella makes me a little verklempt. There is something inherently woeful about a broken umbrella abandoned on a New York street corner. However, one’s mild anthropomorphization of the poor umbrella quickly turns into annoyance when your own umbrella breaks and you are forced to leave it on the street amongst other broken umbrellas.
This is an interesting problem because cheap umbrellas always break and some people don’t want to buy expensive umbrellas because they think they will lose them. So instead of owning one expensive umbrella that withstands the rain, some people will buy many small cheap umbrellas that break or “get lost.”
I would argue that over time, the cost per cheap umbrella X nos. of cheap umbrellas bought per person > cost of expensive umbrella X (lower) nos. of expensive umbrellas bought per person assuming similar umbrella usage and propensity to lose an umbrella.
This is my cracked-out theory of the day. I am going to call it the Broken Umbrella Theory. I am also going to wager that people who exhibit this particular brand of cognitive dissonance (short-term thinking as it relates to umbrellas) exhibit similar tendencies in other aspects of their lives. I bet all day traders have cheap umbrellas!
I can give you litany of reasons why I disliked Quantum of Solice. It was short on gadgetry, beautiful women and exotic locations (the trifecta that makes up any good Bond Flick in my opinion). However, what I found most intriguing was that the plot is the bastard child of two real events in history:
1. The CIA backed coup in Guatemala
2. The Bolivian Water Crisis
What irks me about this is that the Bond universe is supposed to be about suspending ones disbelief and entering a world where Bond, the Bon Vivant seduces and globe-trots and does crazy shit that does not happen in real life. We like Bond because of his un-reality.
I give Quantum of Solace 1 star. It should have been called A Modicum of Mediocrity.
The Times recently wrote about the revival of the White Russian. We all remember the “dude” from Big Lebowski and the way he nurses this drink.
The movie definitely popularized the drink. Got me thinking about all other objects that are now part of our collective consciousness from the movies/TV. I can think of a few:
I just finished reading The Outliers, Malcom Gladwell’s new book about success.
If you read this book as a collection of colorful anecdotes that make for “intelligent” cocktail conversation, then you will be satisfied. If however, you expect real scholarship, you will be disappointed. I am sure most serious sociologists will cringe at Gladwell’s sweeping generalizations, sloppy logic and unfounded hypotheses. Gladwell belongs to a new crop of “public intellectuals” that make MBA students and non-academics feel smart.
That said, I enjoyed the book as he tells a good story. You “learn” why most Canadian ice hockey players are born between Jan – March, why asians are good at math and why most successful New York Lawyers are of Jewish descent with parents working in the garment industry! You get introduced to a range of characters including Chris Langan — who reportedly has a genius-level IQ of 195 but lives a mediocre existence on the margins of society.
On a side note, Gladwell dedicates a significant portion of the book developing his “10,000 hours” theory which basically says that very successful people (like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, The Beatles, the Canadian hockey team) spend 10,000 hours practicing and perfecting their specific disciplines. Do you think Allen Iverson might disagree?
On the Chinatown bus from Philly to NYC, I struck up a conversation with a man who said he worked for the International Maritime Bureau. We talked about pirates.
When I hear the word “pirate,” I think of a swashbuckling Jack Sparrow or a Blackbeard. Hollywood has done a great job of romanticizing the ‘fabled’ world of pirates. The history of pirates dates back to the 14th century when Egyptian records mention pirates raiding Cyprus and the “golden age of piracy” is supposed to be from 1660-1730.
Hence, I was shocked to learn that pirates still exist and that the modern day buccaneer is brutal, definitely not cute and capable of causing significant damage to property and human life.
So what parts of the world remain plagued by the the threat of the modern pirate?
Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq, Eastern Coast of South America, Bangladesh, the Straits of Malacca, Indonesia and the South China Sea are all hotbeds. However when you realize that a staggering 95% of world trade travels by water, you would think that there would be more modern day pirates?
On the Chinatown bus from Philly to NYC, I struck up a conversation with a man who said he worked for the 