Mountains of Moleskines

With the demise of many Borders outlets, printed magazines and newspapers, there seem to be a lot of books being written about the topic. Sort of like a Dodo bird support and discussion group on extinction.

I've been reading one of them, Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powers. Like others he makes a case for taking time for being unplugged or at least having a balance. The fact that he has a website for the book shows he's not for complete removal of the wired life.

Midway through he makes a case for the Moleskine. I have my fair share of Moleskines as well as other variants. I am also an obsessive journal keeper. I have a basic daily journal that I do on my laptop but also yoga journals, gardening journals, travel journals, house journals, health journals, dog health journals...I tend to call my Moleskines "flash journals" in which I paste photos, make collages, line art, fleeting thoughts. I'm also fond of my Flip Notes which come with a built in pen and are about a third the width of an iPhone.

The German film maker Heinz Emigholz even did a series of films called The Basis of Make-Up which are nothing but clips from his Moleskines or whatever brand he uses. Double spread pages flash on the screen for a fraction of a second interspersed with flash clips of unedited field video.
So I was thrilled to discover the page Moleskines: One Page at a Time and The Sketchbook Project 2011 at the Brooklyn Art Library which features 10,000 of them. Indeed, there is talent out there!

Gasp (This Is Not a Tech Nerd Blog)

Besides having a shoe collection in the triple digits, Junk Thief has an obscenely high count of MP3s (over 50,000) and multiple times that in source materials. Sadly, more of those are on CD than the far superior vinyl, but at least he has held onto at least 3,000 or more of the original vinyl 33.3s and 45s. And then there are the heirloom and vintage store 78s.

Junk Thief has thought himself pretty clever over the past eight years or so for being able to convert these to MP3s with varying and never completely satisfactory results. It's rare that Junk Thief will gush over 21st technology, but this time he is going to make an exception with today's purchase of the above Ion USB turntable. Forget plasma screen TV and Blue Ray, this baby is eargasmic. He'd held out on a USB turntable, still being partial to his still fully operational 1977 original issue direct drive Technics turntable (one driver, high mileage, in mint condition) and a back up standard Ion turntable purchased about a year ago.

He recorded his first track on the new USB model with mild optimism, but when he hit "next" for to begin the save process and it started connecting to Gracenote, found the appropriate track into and within a fraction of seconds was booming through Airtunes to the mixture of 20th and 21st centuries speakers, he let out an audible gasp and shed a tear. The quality is impeccable and require so little work compared to past rigging and mixing of old/new technologies. The thought of being able to have his original issue Abbey Road (age 13 birthday gift from Grandma Polley) streaming through his iPod as he walks the mean streets of the Mission is bone chilling.

I'm A Steampunk, How About You?

Junk Thief has slowly become aware that he's part of a subculture without intentionally joining it. There've been clues and mention of the Steampunk movement popping up lately, but he wasn't that clear on what it is. He remembered seeing this video on the Wall Street Journal site last summer and he certainly saw examples a couple of weeks ago at the Edwardian World's Faire which was referenced in an NPR piece this afternoon that put the whole thing in perspective. Surely that's what those mysterious but glorious inventions in the storefront near the 24/Mission BART -- such as the one on the right -- are. There are even Steampunk iPod skins out there. How typical of Junk Thief to be clueless as to what the kiddos are up to while being totally in sync with it. Maybe Junk Thief TV with its many references to the past qualifies as a Steampunk channel. That sure sounds a lot cooler than "retro".

This whole idea of turning backwards to go forwards is really central to the Junk Thief aesthetic that celebrates everything of the Beaux Arts/Modernisme/Edwardian area evidenced in his recent homages of the George Melies, Antoni Gaudi and Claude Debussy. And, honestly, isn't that computer at the top of this post a hell of a lot more attractive than those white laptops with glowing apples? Junk Thief just can't wait to see the reaction of the Geek Squad guy the next time he comes out and sees the laptop with wrought iron bear claw feet.

On the Same Page

Okay, apparently I am not a complete crank or freak on these two issues. Watching Charlie Rose over lunch, the tech reviewers are saying the same thing I have about the iPhone -- worth getting but wait six to 12 months. Okay, sometime in 2008.

And while Michael Moore's Sicko is getting some positive reviews, New York magazine did go so far as to call him a blow hard in their otherwise affirmative review, but the assessment in The New Yorker was to ultimately dismiss it as being "superfluous."

Last night, I was watching the Al Franken documentary called God Spoke that featured his encounters with the Fox News idiots and was reminded how much Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly have in common with Moore -- biased blowhards who consider facts and journalistic accuracy to be mere pesky details for their "greater truth." True progressives need someone with more integrity and less ego than Moore. I'm sure that qualifies me as a card-carrying member of the liberal elite, but so be it. Integrity may not be chic these days, but it feels like the right fit to me.

iWon't Buy One Yet

I was in Union Square this afternoon as the line to the Apple store wove up Stockton...
...and further up O'Farrell...
...as news crews took shots....

...of people camped out, some selling their spots for $500 a spot. I, like many, took photos with my Treo (so early 21st century!) while listening to my iPod mini and then checked email. Now, could I do all those things at once with just once device? Perhaps, but I still am in no rush to buy one.
And then there was this guy being pulled in front of Neiman Marcus around the corner. Somebody must have had some great bait, an iPhone perhaps.

The World in My Head

While this shot might suggest that I’m standing by to respond to QVC viewer calls, this has actually been my communication web this morning as I’ve swapped between calling card and Skype calls. After more than a decade of working from home (and being the first in my organization to do so), I’m now part of one of four North American time zones featuring home-based staff. We’ve been increasingly urged to adjust to a Skype-based reality (which, being with an organization that employs people with at least 23 languages I’ve heard pronounced Sky-pay, Skipee, Skeepie…)

Though I could still romanticize about a Princess phone I am still not one to embrace Skype conference calls. The dual headset thing is a bit spooky, since it feels that my co-workers are literally in my head. And, yes, I often walk around with the Skype and cordless headsets on at once.

Yesterday, I was on a conference call with domestic staff and people in Ouaga, Quito and Port-au-Prince. At one point, the main thing you could hear were the sounds of Haitian tuk tuks honking their horns, kids playing soccer in Cleveland Heights and birds chirping in DC’s Adams Morgan district. My neighborhood contributed the clinging of a Honduran ice cream vendor’s bell that could have convinced people I was in Tegucigalpa until a crack head started screaming to his gal-pal, “I gonna cut you up you filthy ho. I mean it. I mean it. I know you don’t think so, but I’m gonna.” It was finally drowned out by the sound of the MUNI 48 bus passing by as we heard about the release of the new HR manual.

And, no, I still refuse to become a Vulcan with a RAZR phone.