…opening for Ameilia White’s CD relase party at the Stone Fox Saturday, Jan 11, 2014
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Author - Paul Schatzkin
Olympus OM-D EM1, ISO 200, Olympus 12-40 f/2.8 lens @28mm; 1.5sec @f/22
I joined my friends Ken Gray and Kim Sherman at Radnor Lake for the sunrise on Sunday, January 12. Waiting for the sun to appear… this is probably as good a shot as I got…
Of course, as is usually the case, I saw what the other guys came up with and think they got the best of the situation.
Ken really nailed the actual sunrise, and got some great shots of the wildlife as well.
AndI love what Kim did with the sunburst through the trees. Now why didn’t I think of that??
I wonder if that’s the way it goes with this business… does it always seem like the other guy got the better shot? I’ll have to take that up with my therapist…
My friend Ken Gray (yes, the same Ken, the bartender at McCabe’s who has been feeding me a blackened cheeseburger once a week for the last… oh, please, don’t make me count the years!) and I went out to the Narrows of the Harpeth, a few miles from my house, to see what the deep freeze earlier this week had done to the river. Seems it formed some ice:
click to embiggen
This is strictly for the benefit of the few dozen people who actual subscribe to this blog/site.
You may have noticed starting last month that you now receive notifications from an email service called MailChimp whenever I’ve posted something new to this site. That was a conversion from the Feedburner RSS feed I’d been using previously. I probably committed some kind of ethical transgression by subscribing you all to a mailing list without your explicit permission, but I figured you were subscribed already; I was just changing the means of distribution so didn’t think that would require another opt-in.
I hope that’s OK, and if not, the “unsubscribe” link should be pretty easy to find at the bottom of the emails. Conversely, if you’ve serendipitously found your way here by some other means and might want to follow along, use the signup form on the home page.
Since I made the switch to MailChimp, I have been making a fairly concerted effort to gather some thoughts and post some observations to this space about once a week. I hope to continue doing that for the foreseeable future.
I have been keeping a fairly consistent journal for the past year or so. To the extent that it’s a habit now, it started when Ann and I were in Scotland together in October 2012. It might have had something to do with the time difference between Tennessee and Scotland, or maybe it was the changes in latitude… Whatever it was, I started waking up before the sun rose and typing notes and observations – and the occasional complete sentence – into my laptop.
Before that, prior efforts at keeping a journal were done mostly longhand. I thought I was doing something pure and simple writing with pen on paper. When I started doing it on a computer instead, I discovered that I could much more readily keep up with my own thoughts.
And every once in a while whole thoughts emerge, as they started to do with some regularity over the past couple of months, starting with Dystopia Now back in mid-November. I’ve adopted a model of sorts – about 800-1200 words, or 2-3 pages of typed text in a Pages document. That’s about how many words you’ll find in your typical newspaper op-ed column. It’s also – hopefully – a quantity that doesn’t unnecessarily tax our digitally-fragmented attention spans.
So I sit down several times a week and just start to type, and after I’ve been at it for a while, I start to get a grip on the lightning flashes that light up my brain during a typical day. If I stay with it a little longer I will often arrive at what a writing coach I studied with back in the 90s called “the transformation line” — when suddenly out of all the errant thoughts and jibberish an actual point begins to emerge.
That’s when what Flannery O’Connor says in the quotation above becomes operative. I write to figure out what I’m thinking.
I’d like to think that somewhere amid all these snapping synapses there is the occasional unique and original observation. I am quite certain that we are at a pivotal point in human evolution. We are in the midst of a massive transition that is dictated by new technologies, and I don’t think we’ve really got a firm grasp on what these new technologies portend. And I think about that a lot.
This new environment does not come with an operating manual – and even if it did, I doubt very many people would actually RTFM. In the absence of a comprehensible overview, we tend to think of new things in old ways, wrap new technologies in old terminology, and try to do old things with new tools. Until suddenly the lights go on – and we find ourselves in a cage of our own making.
It is probably a stretch to think that I have anything useful to add to the copious – and at times quite strident – dialog that is emblematic of this new environment. I don’t really know if I’m adding any meaningful signal that might rise above the noise – but I’m going to try.
I’m doing it anyway, so I may as try to be coherent about it, right?
That’s why I’ve been posting these occasional missives, and why I hope to continue doing so with some degree of regularity in the new year ahead.
I seem to be thinking something, and by writing, I have a better chance of figuring out what exactly that is.
And with some degree of diligence and consistency, maybe I can shed some actual light – and unlock the cage before we lose the key.
– – – – – –
I posted the Flannery O’Connor quote to my Facebook page last night, I’m getting more comments and “Like”s there than I am here – but apparently the notion does resonate with others.
Also, a nod to Jeff Goins, who first posted the Flannery O’Connor quote on his blog.
I woke up this morning thinking about Morton’s. Yes, the steakhouse chain.
No, I was not lying in bed like some condemned prisoner dreaming of his last meal.
This was more like an object lesson in “be careful what you read before going to bed.” Because what I read just before the lights went out last night was this item about an incident last week at the Morton’s in Nashville:
How quickly can the insensitive actions of an employee destroy a restaurant’s reputation in the social media era? In the case of the Nashville outpost of Morton’s Steakhouse, it took about 48 hours.
I’d seen at least one reference to this incident earlier in the day; Morton’s was in the news — i.e. my “news feed” – which is decidedly not the same thing. I pretty much sloughed it off as more of the usual daily noise/distraction until it showed up again in, literally, the eleventh hour.
When I woke up, with the light of the full moon pouring through my bedroom window, this ridiculous business kept running around in my addled semi-consciousness: Something is not quite right here…
Now, I really don’t have any skin in this game. I’ve been to a Morton’s maybe twice in my life. In the almost 20 years I have lived here, I’ve been to the Morton’s in Nashville once, though I’ve probably driven by it hundreds of times. I guess it’s part of my landscape, but as much as I am a healthy red-blooded American beefeater, I don’t tend to frequent high-end steak joints. I”m more a “weekly cheeseburger” kind of guy.
The facts – to the extent they are readily discernible – are these: a large-ish party (16 people) availed themselves to Morton’s for a seasonal feast, running up a tab in the neighborhood of $2,000. Near the end of the evening one of the guests, a cancer patient whose chemotherapy treatments cause some body temperature regulation issues (he gets cold), put some kind of wool cap on his chemo-induced, hairless head.
And then all hell broke loose.
If Zac Brown can appear in public all the fucking time wearing a wool beanie, what’s the harm in one patron with a medical condition wearing one in a restaurant? There’s a dress code? Oh, please.
Well, once the story hit the Internets, you’d think that John Lennon had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, or that poor Natalie Maines had questioned George Bush’s senseless march to an unjustifiable war.
Suddenly Morton’s, a company that has quietly gone about its business for 35 years – has become the pariah of the social media universe.
Hundreds of angry posts to Yelp. A deluge on the company’s Facebook page. A firestorm on Twitter.
Most, obviously, from people who had no direct connection to the actual event.
Which leads me to conclude that this particular uproar has little to do with the unfortunate, zealous, and dispassionate conduct of one corporate employee whose governing principal was probably something along the lines of “I don’t want to lose my job.”
It is, rather, a disturbing illustration of the pernicious, unforgiving, mob-rule quality of “social” media.
This wasn’t just “that was a bad call.”
This was “Hey, somebody fucked up. Let’s pile on!”
In a culture where the robber barons who 86’d the global economy all live free, we demand the head of a restaurant manager who thought she was doing her job.
It now appears that Morton’s corporate establishment has swept in and offered amends: they have made a contribution in the amount of the party’s check (~$2,000) to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital (Marlo Thomas, feel free to weigh in…) and are revisiting their policies with regard to suitable attire and appropriate local management response to transgressions therefrom.
More to the point: The patron whose haberdashery selection caused the furor in the first place has accepted the company’s apology and, in the spirit of the season, has expressed his sincere desire that nobody lose their job over the incident. I hope the company accedes to the man’s request as a condition of their rehabilitation.
Yes, the manager who objected to the patron wearing a beanie in her establishment should probably reconsider her priorities. Some kind of sensitivity training is probably in order.
But the people who have gone ballistic over a subject about which they have no actual connection… they should be ashamed of themselves.
For whatever it’s worth, this is precisely the kind of environment that David Eggers forewarns us about in The Circle. It’s not in the future. It’s now.
Apparently, in the age of “social media,” the expression “it’s none of your business” is no longer operative.
And I’m going back to sleep now.
And now, a bit of shameless self promotion:
You do know that there’s a new year starting in a few weeks, right?
But… how will you know for sure unless you have a colorful calendar on your wall that reminds you of the fact every 30 days or so?
Oh, sure, that digital thing in your pocket will keep you up to date well enough. But where’s the fun in that. It’s so… one dimensional!
Consider, on the other hand, the three-dimensional, time-warping qualities of these images:
First, they will help you identify the present date. Sure, any calendar can do that, but these calendars also…
…Transport your imagination into a time in the not so distant past (i.e. centuries, not millennia) when great edifices were carved from stone, by hand, and constructed over several decades. Many of which lie in ruin today…
…and through which you are transported into the cosmos and offered a glimpse of the vastness of space and time – in the form of starlight that left its source millions of years ago…as captured by a giant camera/telescope suspended in orbit around the earth.
The images are “Portals of Stone” – rendered in ink, on card stock… a new “portal” every month through the new year.
Just follow the link to see more at…
or follow this easy PayPal button to order yours today:
Nice token, but it’s a “coin” in name only.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, the word “bitcoin” has probably shown up on your radar.
With bitcoin, the Internet is now attempting to redefine the very concept of money. And why not? The Internet has redefined just about everything else in the past 15+ years. Why shouldn’t the greatest technological innovation of the past millennium aim its Howitzers of disruption at one of the fundamental pillars of the human experience?
What exactly is “bitcoin?” Well, it’s really several things. Its advocates like to call bitcoin a “crypto-currency” – which is to say, it’s a medium of exchange based on a highly sophisticated block of computer code that can be used to buy and sell things over the Internet. At last measure, just getting set-up to acquire or hold bitcoins starts with downloading a block of code in excess of six gigabytes. That’s a lotta code. It’s like an operating system for the future of Internet commerce.
Much of the appeal of bitcoin stems from its inherent nature as an open-source ‘currency without a country.’ Unlike dollars or yen or pounds or marks or francs (or whatever the Chinese call their currency), bitcoin lives outside of the authority of national governments and central banks. It is the ultimate form of ‘crowd funding’ – the collective creation of the funds themselves. This stateless existence makes bitcoin a high ideal among the digital libertarian and anarchists in our midst.
It also makes bitcoin the currency of choice among liars and thieves, but that’s a different story altogether.
Bitcoin has been flipping on and off my own radar for well over a year now, though I hadn’t really paid it much heed until earlier this fall when I caught the tail end of Luke Stokes’ presentation at Barcamp, “Could Bitcoin Be More Disruptive than the Internet?’ That’s the sort of title that gets my attention. After his presentation, talking to people in the hallway, I heard Luke use a phrase that in nearly 20 years I have never heard uttered by a single soul in this city: “Fiat money.”
Finally, somebody in this town is thinking about the underpinnings. At that point my radar became more fully engaged.
In the investment world, a chart like this is what’s known as “going parabolic.” It usually doesn’t end well.
Bitcoin gets a fair amount of attention in the mainstream media when its price as measured against conventional dollars goes through one of its periodic, parabolic run-ups to stratospheric new all-time highs. It got some attention last spring when the price ran up to about $500. More recently it has been in the news as the price has exceeded $1,000, and several of the earliest adopters who acquired their stash of bitcoins for single digits have cashed out to become millionaires – in good, old-fashioned, red-blooded American greenbacks.
Unfortunately, this speculative fervor for bitcoins is probably its least savory feature.
I have seen a couple of instances this week where those earliest adopters are now telling the next round of adopters that they, too, can be “early adopters.” After, there’s still like 7-billion people on the planet, and most of them are not even on the Internet yet, right?
In conventional investing circles, this is sometimes known as the “greater fool” theory – in which any price paid for an investment is rationalized with the expectation that there will always be another buyer at a still higher price. Hallelujah, it’s not too late to “get in at the bottom!”
Unfortunately, the final destination of the “greater fool” theory is usually the “bag holder” theory – in which some poor shlub finally pays the highest-ever price for the investment, and is thus left “holding the bag” once the price has peaked and regresses to the mean.
The likelihood of future fools and bag holders aside, these recent, spectacular fluctuations in the market value of bitcoin illustrate the challenge in understanding its potential. Is it a digital currency, a virtual commodity (oxymoron alert), or a security? Is it a medium of exchange — or an outright speculation? It is all of these things. And, I suspect… none of them.
Here I must confess that I have no personal experience with bitcoin (yet?). I’m not in any particular hurry, either. I may not be Warren Buffett, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is that you do not “chase” a rising price. Besides, I don’t really need a new “virtual currency” it at this point. I can still buy all the crap I need/want from Amazon and B&H with the conventional virtual currency – aka “dollars” – currently at my disposal.
What interests me about bitcoin is what might be lurking within the actual technology. I suspect that there is really much more to bitcoin than meets the virtual eye, and that our preoccupation with its surface utility – and its speculative windfalls – is concealing much more disruptive possibilities.
Here is where we have to put on our ‘Marshall’s X-Ray Specs’ – the goggles that let you see through the windshield instead of the rear-view mirror – and try to see: what’s really going on here?
Amid all the reading I’ve done on the keyword ‘bitcoin’ in the past couple of months, I think the first clue showed up in this blog post by Naval Ravikant, who writes under the nom-de-plume of “Startupboy:
Most people are only familiar with (b)itcoin the electronic currency, but more important is (B)itcoin, with a capital B, the underlying protocol, which encapsulates and distributes the functions of contract law.
“…distributes the functions of contract law??” Whoa, Nelly. Forget about central banks and sovereign governments… have the lawyers heard about this yet??
If you, too, are intrigued by the prospect of an “open source currency,” there are several ways to get on the bitcoin bandwagon. The simplest is to set up an account (better start downloading that 6GB now…) and just buy the ‘things’ at whatever price they’re going for today.
This 500-GHz/sec dedicated “Bitcoin Miner” can be yours for a mere $22k. I’m thinking the brand label should say “Levi Strauss.”
But what really intrigues me is this notion that you can get a dedicated (and expensive) computer that can crunch the code in order to “mine” for bitcoins. WTF?
What is most curious to me though is not the technology, but the vocabulary that is being used to describe it. With this notion of “mining” – which invokes visions of picks and shovels and holes in the ground – we see old terminology being used to grasp an understanding of new technology. And that’s while the new technology itself (digital ‘currency’) is being used to do the work of the old (facilitate commerce). A classic McLuhan moebius.
For the past 15+ years, the Internet has proven massively disruptive to the world of commerce. Now the beast has turned its attention to money itself. The ultimate disruption is at hand. And yet, here we are, putting this powerful new tool to use to do the same old things.
Is there any truly trans-formative, cultural potential for a ‘crypto currency’? Or is just another way to buy more stuff?
As mentioned at the outset, part of the appeal of bitcoin lies in its potential to circumvent the power and authority of central banks and the governments that sponsor them.
What central banking has given us over the past century amounts to a new Gilded Age, with most of the wealth of the world concentrated in a tiny sliver of its population.
What I want to know is: By virtue of its decentralized, stateless foundations, is bitcoin – or any virtual, open-source ‘currency’ – sufficiently disruptive to equalize the distortions in the global economy? Can it alter the 99% -v- 1% equation that has become the world’s dominant economic/cultural reality over the past 40 years?
My hunch is that this bitcoin revolution is real, but it is not what we presently think it is. And there will be a lot of wreckage strewn along its path as we stumble into the realization of its real potential.
As with the Internet itself after the crash of 2000, I suspect that it will not be until after the initial bubble of speculation has burst that we will begin to see the true potential of bitcoin.
Point of reference: the NASDAQ Composite – after 13 years, almost back to it’s all time high just before the Internet bubble burst.
I’m trying to sync this WordPress blog with the RSS feed capability of my Mailchimp account. This is harder than it looks and there are few clues along the way.
…or the dumbest idea for a camera, ever?
Ming Thein offers some insights on the just announced Nkon Df – a camera that seems to blend all the disadvantages of digital photography with all the disadvantages of film photography.
I think Ming is mincing his words here.
To be honest, I really don’t quite know what to make of this camera… I’m confused. On one hand, there are very sensible engineering choices – the sensor, for instance; but on the other hand, marketing said that you have to have AF and a full digital set of controls and a retro look, so we land up having too many buttons and knobs and a bit of an F3-collided-with-a-D600 appearance to it.
I’m not mincing mine: I think this is the dumbest thing in camera design/engineering Nikon could possibly have offered.
Starting with the same dysfunctional AF array that soured me on the D600 right out of the box.
Ming talks a lot about the viewfinder. He’s talking about an optical viewfinder. But based on my experience with the Olympus EM-1 so far, I think the whole idea of the optical viewfinder is obsolete. I spent a lot of time while shooting the Barcamp on Saturday experimenting with flash settings – flash on, flash off, flash exposure plus/minus – and never had to take the camera away from my eye to make those adjustments because all the info is right in the viewfinder. I don’t think there is any optical viewfinder that puts that much info in front of your eye.
But better than that, each time I made an exposure, it would appear before my eye in the viewfinder. I could tell without ever looking at the back of the camera that I’d gotten the shot and move on to the next one. You can’t do that with an optical viewfinder, either.
It seems to me that some evil twin of Marshal McLuhan is now running Nikon. McLuhan wrote about seeing the future through a rear-view mirror – using new technology to do the work of the old. He wasn’t suggesting that that is necessarily a good thing – but this camera is a classic example of doing just that. It’s taking digital technology and trying to replicate the film camera experience. Jeezus, if you want a “film experience,” just get an F3 or an F100 off eBay.
And the price… almost $2,800?? That’s the same as a D800… which is possibly the finest DSLR on the market.
I’m with Ming. Totally confused.
Tomorrow’s Seventh Annual BarCamp Nashville is going to be one of those “coming around full circle” events for me.
The very first Barcamp in August 2007 was something of a “coming out” event for me. After selling songs.com – my early-stage, “Internet one-point-oh” business – to Gaylord Entertainment in the fall of 1999 (and spending a year watching them run it into the ground), I sorta went into seclusion for several years, during which I wrote two biographies of obscure 20th Century Scientists.
Then in the summer of 2007, I started reading about this event that was going to gather all the disparate elements of Nashville’s emerging digital arts and business communities for an “unconference” that covered a vast array of topics – the only unifying factor being some interface with “new media” and their underlying technologies.
Here, see for yourself:
I have not made it to every Barcamp since, though I have made it to several and made lasting friendships at each one.
This year, for the first time, I’ll be making an actual contribution other than my usual wandering around between sessions and heckling the presenters. I have signed on as an “in-kind” sponsor which means that in exchange for hanging the “Cohesion Arts” logo in strategic places around the (undisclosed) location (a designation that puts me in some most-esteemed company), , I’ll be providing still photography coverage for the event.
More than just taking photos, though, I hope to engage everybody in attendance who has a cell phone / camera (who am I kidding, that’s everybody...) in the day’s photo coverage. There will be a video screen in the front of the venue offering a continuous Instagram feed that will include not just my photos, but any photo that bears the hashtag ” #bcn13 .”
Barcamp is a hard event to describe to somebody who is not familiar with the concept. Yes, it’s an assembly of the region’s digerati, but there is no single theme for the day. It’s really just an excuse to get a lot of similarly minded people in a room and start bouncing ideas around.
For me, Barcamp has always been first and foremost about the people I get to meet. It’s a welcome departure from the virtual, online experience that tends to dominate our lives these days. Which brings me to the acronym in the title of this post, which came to mind while trying to describe BarCamp to a friend today:
You’ve heard of “mooc“s, right? That’s a “massively open online course,” those classes that universities offer for free to thousands of students around the world over the Internets.
And then there is the concept of “meatspace” – what was once – before we all started living our lives through screens and keyboards – known as “the real world.”
So BarCamp is a
Massively Open Meatspace Opportunity
or
MOMOP
At least, that’s what I’M calling it.
Now y’all get those cell phones out and start tagging your photos w/ ” #bcn13 “
And if you see a guy with a rumpled photographers vest and a couple of cameras round his neck, stop and say hello, and I’ll make sure we get an “official” photo into the stream…
P.S. A special shout out to Kerry Woo for suggesting I volunteer for this assignment. I’m glad they accepted the offer, and I hope I can live up the exceptional standard that Kerry has brought these events in the past.