Scott Haefner Shows his Stuff This semester I taught an Integrated Learning studio for Otis College of Art and Design. I co-taught the class with Sandra de la Loza, an excellent Chicana artist working here in Los Angeles. We brought a small group of students to Laton, a tiny rural town in the heart of […]
Archive for the ‘Technology’ category
Gear
A White Bear wrote a few months ago about getting into a bizarre conversation with a random guy at the Russian Baths about why guys are into “gear.” AWB recounts discussing this question with me at the baths, where I “was helpfully explaining something about a masculine desire for control and mastery, possibly out of […]
Pure magnetic fun
On the continued theme of wholesome fun from the past, I’m postponing murderous fun to focus on the power of magnetism, before I have to pack these games away for several weeks. Long ago, there were people who could have come up with a Nintendo Wii or a Sony X Box, if only the technology […]
Multimedia: More short reviews
What we’re watching, reading/looking at, watching, and, uh, rejecting: The American Experience, “Walt Whitman” (PBS) Last Thursday night we serendipitously stumbled upon the broadcast of The American Experience episode on Walt Whitman. One commentator noted that “it was as if Whitman had read a want ad’s notice for ‘National Poet’ and signed up.” For me, […]
My new toy
The first toy I can remember wanting really badly is, of course, one that I never got. This was back in the late ’70s, when the original Battlestar Galactica was my favorite show, Star Wars my favorite movie, and fighting in space with guns was by far the greatest joy imaginable. And so one evening […]
Firsts
Every once in a while I think — usually while calling 5 minutes before I get home to say I’m 5 minutes away from home — how odd it is that in the last century I didn’t own a cell phone. Aside from email, which I didn’t have until the fall of 1994, it’s probably […]
The Apple of My Eye
After I moved to Los Angeles last spring, I soon learned that people don’t communicate here quite like they do in Washington D.C. I’m not talking about think-tank dissertations, multi-footnote policy papers or the monotone dronings of C-Span speeches. I’m talking about text messages. In D.C., people picked up the phone and called each other. […]
An idle pixel is the devil’s playground
Ogged was complaining about the overabundance of “twee, oversaturated photoshopped” photos. Coincidentally, I had just installed the newest version of iPhoto and wanted to try out its enhanced tweeification techniques. I found this photo from one of this summer’s weddings: the groom making a toast to the bride on a dock in Lake Tahoe. You […]
After a long hiatus: The return of the short reviews
Linda Thompson, Versatile Heart (Rounder, 2007) The death knell of the “album” is ringing out all over the land. With sales drastically plummeting, the long player (digital or analog) is going the way of the 78 rpm. Occasionally, though, a dying form will cough up a gem as it heads to extinction. Thompson’s first release […]
Eye in the sky
In NYC, I don’t see them all that often. Or I don’t notice them. I’m sure they are there. But in LA, they come upon you at all hours of the day or night. Night is the scariest – and most exciting – as they chase a speeding car or speeding suspect hot-stepping through the […]
