Month: May 2006

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Way to rule the 21st century

It’s stories like this one that keep me from taking China seriously. A U.S.-educated Chinese researcher returns to his homeland to develop innovative DSP chips for China’s internal market, in hopes of breaking China’s stereotype of a being a great at manufacturing and crap at innovating. He ‘develops’ a line of DSP chips called Hanxin, and gets regarded as a national hero.

What happens?

But late last year, according to these reports, the whistle-blowers came forward. Some colleagues who had a dispute with Mr. Chen began contacting the government. They claimed, according to the news reports, that migrant workers had simply scratched away the name Motorola from a chip and replaced it with Hanxin. Presumably, that early version of Hanxin was a foreign company’s chip, the specifications of which Mr. Chen or an associate could give to manufacturers to mass-produce under the Hanxin name.

Repeat: He hired migrants to scratch out “Motorola” and write in “Hanxin”.

Update: Looks like BusinessWeek is with me on this one.

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Indy 000?

When I tried my hand at literary publishing — I’m in recovery — I received almost zero support from any of the major chains. Amazon, on the other hand, had a program in place for me to sell books through them and have the same potential for exposure as just about every other book (notwithstanding co-op payment to get on the front page of the site). It’s one of the reasons that I still use Amazon for most of my new book purchases.

I’ll go to the Borders around the corner from my office, but it’s quite rare that I spend any money there; it’s more for general browsing. There’s a Barnes & Noble with a massive used book section a few miles away that I’ll trawl every few weeks or months, but that’s the extent of my chain-shopping, unless there’s some sort of immediate priority (like forgetting to get a Mother’s Day present).

The closest worthwhile independent bookstore is the Montclair Book Center, but I don’t think I’ve been there for at least eight months. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that there are 1,200 books downstairs, most of which I haven’t read. I’ve been on a book-a-week pace for few months now, which means it’ll only take me around 40 years to finish reading everything, provided nothing new comes out.

Anyway, over at Slate, Tyler Cowen has an article about the superfluousness of independent bookstores:

But with the advent of the Internet, the literary world has more room for independence — if not always in its old forms — than ever before. Amazon reader reviews, blogs such as Bookslut, and eBay — the world’s largest book auction market — all are flourishing and are doing so outside the reach of the major corporate booksellers. Print-on-demand technologies and self-publishing are booming. Along with Google and other search engines, they will allow niche titles to persist in our memories for a long time to come. This is the flip side of the same computerization that elevated Wal-Mart and Borders: Information technology brings more voices into book evaluation and supply.

Unfortunately, many virtues of the new order are relatively invisible. Consider the used-book market. It was much easier to find a good used bookstore 20 years ago. Yet it has never been easier to buy a good used book, with the aid of, among others, Abebooks, a superb central depot for used booksellers.

Enjoy.

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Simeon

I was cleaning my basement last weekend when I found the program from Simeon’s memorial service. It was in a pile of ephemera: friends’ wedding invitations, tickets to Nets games from 2001-2002, photos of my driveway after the 1996 blizzard, a Volkswagen postcard, the brochures for a Lorenzo Mattotti exhibition in Milan and a religious painting exhibition in Bergamo. Virtual memories.

The program isn’t much: an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet, folded into four pages, a color photo of Simeon printed a little blurrily on the front. It reads:

Memorial Service for Simeon Georgiev Popov

May 5, 1974 – January 20, 2002

“I someday hope to be part of the largest orchestra so that I can share my love and compassion for music with others.”

Simeon came from Bulgaria to study music (trombone) as a graduate student at Syracuse University. Bill Harris, the uncle of my girlfriend at the time, took him under his wing. I met Simeon at a Thanksgiving dinner, since “the kid” (three years younger than me) had become part of the family. He was a little shy, very pleasant, had wonderful manners, and his English was a lot better than that of the last Bulgarian I’d met. He was good company.

In January 2002, Simeon walked in on an armed robbery in an off-campus apartment. He was delivering an order of chicken wings for his night-job. He thought the robbery was a joke, and tried to leave the room to make his next delivery. The robber tried to shoot him, but the gun jammed. They scuffled, and the robber fired again, shooting Simeon in the face and killing him.

So much in life hinges upon accidents, and who we are depends on what we make of them. We walk into each other’s worlds without a clue, sometimes walking right out again, “the moment” lost. Sometimes those accidents are cataclysmic. We could build a chronology of how and why Simeon walked into that room, and lament all the choices that could have been made, all the decisions and accidents, little and big, that could have kept him from being murdered. None of them would bring him or his music back.

The murderer’s name is Dominic Dennard, Jr. He liked to go by the nickname “D Murder.” For his crimes, he’s been sentenced to 75-to-life in state prison. At his sentencing, the judge said, “None of us now will ever know what beauty Simeon Popov might have created in this world. We will never know whether he might have been the next Bach or the next Beethoven. You snuffed out his talents and creativity, and you left this world a darker place as a result of it. My only regret this morning, Mr. Dennard, is that I cannot sentence you to life without the possibility of parole.” According to the NY prison system’s site, “D Murder” won’t be eligible for parole until 2067.

The lawyer for “D Murder” said, “Dominic Dennard is one of the most courteous, gracious, pleasant people I ever represented. It is irreconcilable with the person you’re about to sentence.”

Simeon’s parents left a letter for Bill to read after the sentencing and, even though it’s the saddest possible sentiment I could post on Mother’s Day, I’m going to share it with you:

“We remain on this earth, parents, who are neither alive nor dead, who have nothing left. Our home is now turned to dust, and the most sacred place in the world that we can call our home is our child’s grave. We live in pain and die little by little every day.”

* * *

SU started a scholarship fund in Simeon’s memory. The fund’s original purpose was threefold: to purchase basic equipment (like instrument stands) for the Music Academy Pancho Vladigerov in Sofia, Bulgaria; to provide a new instrument as an award to a promising young trombonist at a competition at the Music Academy; and to sponsor an annual prize to a graduating student at Setnor School.

Bill Harris and his wife Karen headed back to Bulgaria about a year ago for the music competition. Their first trip was to bring Simeon’s body back to his parents. I haven’t found out if the competition was a one-time event; a school rep wrote to tell me that the fund is devoted to providing assistance to music students at SU, but I’m not sure if that’s the sole use now.

If you’d like to donate to the scholarship fund, you can send a check to Angela LaFrance, 820 Comstock Ave., Womens Bldg., Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244. Make sure you note on the memo portion of your check: “Simeon Popov’s Memorial Scholarship Fund.”

Thanks.

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Who took the money away?

Ever wonder how Michael Jackson could’ve gone through so much cash? The NYTimes tries to explain, while slyly running Deke Richards’ comment on MJ’s early talent: “Nobody had seen anything like that since Frankie [Lyman], a kid with chops like that who could sing like that. It was like a 30-year-old man was inside this little boy.”

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Bagel day!

Today’s my ninth anniversary at my job. I almost got myself fired several times in my first year here, so I consider it an achievement that I managed to work my way up to a position of responsibility over the years. The company has around 50 people, and I just figured out that only 10 of them have been here longer than I have.

I’ve always goofed on my lack of commitment and my general flightiness, but I have to admit that I’m pretty stable and devoted about work.

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25 years, huh?

A few months ago, I wrote an insanely rambling piece about the crappy state of contemporary literature.

In that post, I mentioned a conversation I had with an NYU prof (Elayne Tobin) and an author/critic (David Gates) about what novels since 1980 will become “canonical.” We had slim pickings, supporting my thesis that we live in a crap-era for fiction.

Well, now the NYTimes has asked a “several hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” to name “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

I don’t think my claim is contradicted at all.

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More posts about buildings and food

I came across BLDG BLOG yesterday, thanks to a link in the NY Observer. The most recent post, on the shortcomings of architectural criticism, is awfully read-worthy. It explores how an art form (and again, I’m using architecture as a stand-in for other art forms) can become too esoteric for its own good:

[S]trong and interesting architectural criticism is defined by the way you talk about architecture, not the buildings you choose to talk about.

In other words, fine: you can talk about Fumihiko Maki instead of, say, Half-Life, or Doom, or super-garages, but if you start citing Le Corbusier, or arguing about whether something is truly “parametric,” then you shouldn’t be surprised if anyone who’s not a grad student, studying with one of your friends at Columbia, puts the article down, gets in a car — and drives to the mall, riding that knotwork of self-intersecting crosstown flyovers and neo-Roman car parks that most architecture critics are too busy to consider analyzing.

All along, your non-Adorno-reading former subscriber will be interacting with, experiencing, and probably complaining about architecture — but you’ve missed a perfect chance to join in.

The mention of Adorno puts me in mind of the great essay, “Is Bad Writing Necessary?” which appeared in the late, lamented Lingua Franca a few years ago. (It took me a long time to find that article online after LF folded, but I dug it up on a Chinese site, cleaned up the typography, and saved it as a Word doc, which I present here.)

That essay explored the attraction of ‘esoteric writing’ of sorts, that use of academic jargon and deliberate obfuscation that (in my opinion) creates a closed, insulated circuit of theory that has little involvement in the real world. The writer contrasts this style of writing (as exemplified by Theodor Adorno) with the ‘windowpane’ style of George Orwell, which strove to be as unjargonistic as possible.

Even though I went to a theory-heavy undergrad institution, I ended up championing Orwell’s prose over the self-privileging of academic jargon (okay, maybe that should read, ‘Because I went to a . . .’). I understand that some concepts are awfully tricky and need plenty of work to explain, but if you can’t convey them to a reasonably intelligent person without resorting to a glossary of strange terminology, you’re probably just spinning your wheels.

(I’m not sure if the example of explaining the pick-and-roll to my wife this weekend applies, but that was an instance where, rather than resorting to basketball terminology, I used our salt and pepper shakers, a salad dressing bottle and a bottle-cap to demonstrate exactly what the p&r is. Then I explained to her how the Lakers’ terrible defensive rotation on the wing led to Tim Thomas rolling 20 feet for an unimpeded dunk.)

BLDG BLOG writer Geoff Manaugh also explores this idea of theory essentially having its head stuck up its ass:

First, early on, one of the panelists stated: “It’s not our job to say: ‘Gee, the new Home Depot sucks. . .'”

But of course it is!

That’s exactly your role; that’s exactly the built environment as it’s now experienced by the majority of the American public. “Architecture,” for most Americans, means Home Depot — not Mies Van Der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you’d have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan — or San Francisco, or Boston’s Back Bay.

You’d also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique — or celebrate — these buildings now popping up on every corner. If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey — citing Le Corbusier — then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night’s panelists.

Put simply, if everyday users of everyday architecture don’t realize that Home Depot, Best Buy, WalMart, even Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, can be criticized — if people don’t realize that even suburbs and shopping malls and parking garages can be criticized — then you end up with the architectural situation we have today: low-quality, badly situated housing stock, illogically designed and full of uncomfortable amounts of excess closet space.

And no one says a thing.

I’m not sure why I’ve grown so interested in architecture and buildings in the last few years. Maybe it’s because of the sorta intersection of art, commerce, and real-world-ness (it’s a building). I should probably ruminate on that for a while.

Anyway, enjoy the article.