Ok, link to Felix day. The only econo blog I read. Comments to his post – Did wifi cause a rise in bus ridership? Correct about the most there. Since I am intimately familiar with the products let me add few points.
- Yes Wifi is trash but you can pretty much send an email and browse any page, albeit slow. Especially when people fall asleep an hour into the ride and free-up the router.
- The price is definitely the factor but so is the general upscale ridership, unlike the Chinese bus.
- There is no advertising for this products, people know about it through the word of mouth.
- The bus leaves every hour and you can pretty much get on any scheduled ride for the same day, no matter the ticket or you can pay $20 before boarding (often less that the online price).
- With the rising gas prices the cost of the ticket is 1/3 of the gas.
- Amtrack also has Wifi and the ride is more comfortable than the bus. The bus is often too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer. It’s a virus trap.
Siting here with my regular post drip, post trip cold.
I want to comment on Felix’s post – A tale of two retailers.
- There is a mystery in timing. Sears used to be synonymous with the American retail, arguably at it’s most prolific moment. The iconic Sears catalog defined tastes for generations. There is an afterglow on the paradigm defining companies. They are sort of like a religion whose time has passed but people around it still warm themselves around the bonfire of memories. Apple is almost at this stage now, it’s a religion that will last longer than the creative convergence.
- People in the media deal exclusively with the past. They are not only blind to the future but also to the present. Especially the financial media, the parasite describing other parasite living off the creativity of other people. Twice removed parasites.
- The Apple and Jobs are the artist and every artist deals with the present that puts him at odds with culture that feeds off the past.
- And then the indescribable mystery of luck and timing, you need it to hit the present at the right moment.
- Shout out to Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the architects of the Apple stores. Steve Jobs didn’t design the stores (or his gadgets), these architects did.
- Let’s freaking compare Apples to Apples, there are less than 20 (!?) Apple stores worldwide and just the proposed closure of Sears stores is 120.
P.S. Apple was ungrateful to Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and instead selected a terrible architect for its headquarters. During the presentation the late Steve Jobs said “we know how to design a curved glass”.
by Ben Atlas on 12.27.2011.10:49am · 1 comment
There is currently an impressive Renaissance Portraits exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. There are two featured portraits of Simonetta Vespucci by Sandro Botticelli from the Museums in Germany. It’s indescribable how much better they look compared to the illustrations.
Sandro Boticelli, Simonetta Vespucci AKA Portrait of a Young Woman, 1480-85. Tempera on wood, 82 x 54 cm Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
Sandro Botticelli, Simonetta Vespucci AKA Portrait of a Young Woman after 1480 Oil on panel, 47,5 x 35 cm Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Simonetta Vespucci was a girl from Genoa who married a nobleman from Florence Marco Vespucci. Marco was a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci who gave his name to this continent. Simonetta Vespucci died in 1476 when she was just 22, but not before all Florence fell in love with her including the Medicis. There is some debate if the portraits are really of Simonetta Vespucci. But whats the debate? Just look at the paintings, Sandro Boticelli seemed to paint the same woman in all of his significant paintings. He also asked to be buried at her feet in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence. Thirty four years after the death of La Bella Simonetta, Boticelli’s final wish was carried out. Here are some of the painting where Simonetta Vespucci makes an appearance, the same dreamy and distinct redhead. ►click to continue
As a follow up of my previous post. There are at least two other frescoes with the traditional depiction of the menorah.
Dura Europas Synagogue. Moses striking water i n the desert.
►click to continue
On the Christmas Eve I went to see an interesting little two-room exhibition at the NYU Institute for the Study of Ancient World. It’s on 84th St, just off the Met. The exhibition is dedicated to the archaeological finds in Dura-Europos, a town that stood on the Euphrates bank and was founded in 303 BC by the Seleucids (of Chanukkah fame). Dura was captured by Parthians in the 2nd century BC, when the Seleucid Empire was weakened on the periphery. The Maccabaean Taliban kicked the Seleucids from Jerusalem in 167-160 BC. But the Seleucid king Antiochus actually died simultaneously in 164 BC during the war on the Eastern front with the Parthians, when the Parthians took over the Dura-Europos. Alas, you are not likely to celebrate the triumph of the Parthian light over the Hellenistic darkness at your local supermarket.
Eventually the Romans conquered Dura-Europos from Parthians in the year 165 after the birth of the Savior. But the “Romans” here must be understood as the Greek speaking Byzantines. Greek remained the spoken language in Dura-Europos.
The town of Dura-Europos stood as important cosmopolitan commercial hub for a century under the control of the Roman garrison and fell for good and abandoned to the Sassanian siege in the years 256-257. During the siege the Romans concerned with the Sassanian ability to dig under the town walls filled the perimeter structures with stones. The entombed artifacts in the perimeter buildings remained intact till discovered by the Yale archaeologists in the 1930s (hence the other name of Dura-Europos – “The Pompeii of the Syrian Desert”). This includes the synagogue with remarkably preserve frescoes.
Dura Europos Synagogue Plan
Note how the plan above is a maze of organically connected structures between the outside wall (top) and the interior st. (below), with the open courtyards inside the building strip.
There are several ceiling panels from the Synagogue at the NY exhibition but the entire reconstructed Synagogue is at a museum in Damascus. It’s much bigger than it looks on the plan. ►click to continue
Eric Blair who became famous as George Orwell wrote a single article under a different pen name John Freeman. The artcile is sort of about Chrismass and titled “Can Socialists be Happy?” Here is the key paragraph for me:
“It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast. That is why the conception of Heaven or Utopia varies from age to age. In pre-industrial society Heaven was described as a place of endless rest, and as being paved with gold, because the experience of the average human being was overwork and poverty. The houris of the Moslem Paradise reflected a polygamous society where most of the women disappeared into the harems of the rich. But these pictures of “eternal bliss” always failed because as soon as the bliss became eternal (eternity being thought of as endless time), the contrast ceased to operate. Some of the conventions which have become embedded in our literature first arose from physical conditions which have now ceased to exist. The cult of spring is an example. In the Middle Ages spring did not primarily mean swallows and wild flowers. It meant green vegetables, milk and fresh meat after several months of living on salt pork in smoky windowless huts. The spring songs were gay … because there was something to be gay about. The winter was over, that was the great thing. Christmas itself, a pre-Christian festival, probably started because there had to be an occasional outburst of overeating and drinking to make a break in the unbearable northern winter.”
It’s just happens that people are not very good with positive definitions. People are unsure of who they are but rather certain who they are not. I think this hard-wired as trial and error is the only mode of knowledge, so we are constantly involved in selective elimination. And no one, not even Lenin would admit how rooted they are in the negation.
The rest of the article is confused and unstructured. Although the idea of Socialism as brotherhood is interesting. I also believe Orwell is saying that the incomplete English Christmas is the source of the delight in the holiday and this incomplete happy picture is what Lenin couldn’t grasp.
It’s worth listening to Zizek’s riffs about film. In the interview for Radio Praha he says:
Radio Praha: Do you like any Czech or Czechoslovak film directors?
Zizek: “Are you kidding? Although I admire Hollywood, they are a great example of how the West can destroy you. I’m talking of course about Miloš Forman. My absolutely favourite movies are still his three films A Blonde in Love, Peter and Pavla, and Firemen’s Ball. This is the work of a genius. I also like his first American film, Taking Off, because he tried to read the American middle class through Czech glasses. It’s the same universe and it works wonderfully.”
Radio Praha: But it didn’t work in the US; I think it did very poorly commercially there…
Zizek: “Yes. I don’t like Amadeus, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it’s not just Forman, it was the same with Krzysztof Kieślowski. Even though they were made under horrible oppression of Jaruzelski, his films from the 1980s like The Decalogue, Blind Chance, and so on, are better than those soft pornographic films which he basically made, and I’ll be very cynical here, to seduce some of the beautiful actresses like Juliet Binoche. Even with no nostalgia for the communist regime, this is maybe the greatest tragedy of the fall of communism. In those oppressive regimes, there were was nonetheless something that solicited true art. People then wrongly thought, ‘now we have freedom and all the oppressed spirituality will explode’. But it didn’t.”
And here I was pointed to this page on the hideous Russian Facebook clone Vkontakte. Its the curricula of the new Glazunova Art Academy in Moscow, the new school established in 1987 by Ilya Glazunov whom I describe as the commercial, soviet, russophile, kitch artist. There is plenty of skill there and some talent. Here are my selections (in the typical internet fashion non of them have attributions):
►click to continue
My neighbor Judy Tsafrir writes:
“It is a great relief to let go, and allow your mother, father, sister, brother, daughter or son, to be who they are, without feeling devastated by their emotional, physical and spiritual limitations; their own history of trauma or misery, their selfishness, insensitivity, depression, self-sabotogue or addiction. “Whatever” is different than denial, which is a distortion of reality. “Whatever” acknowledges what the situation is, but responds with eyes wide open and acceptance. Denial runs the risk of being blindsided by reality. Acceptance, by contrast, takes reality into account and adapts. This often is only possible after a period of grieving, which is the single most powerful catalyst for the capacity to move on and let go.”
This guilt and pain about the relatives is because they are part of what you are. You might be able to accept their limitations though. But then comes the impossible part, going “whatever” about your own failing and failures. I haven’t seen anyone who can cleanly pull this off. Unless you go through a grieving about yourself…
In his last interview Christopher Hitchens points to the theocratic origins of totalitarianism. Yet the business of mind control remained the same. Alas when religions faltered Eddie Bernays discovered that the word ‘propaganda’ was already taken by the Nazis, so he reluctantly came up with the name “Public Relations”. And yet the method is not much different from the religious opiates. Connect the primal fears and desires to a lard with the ultimate goal of fusing lard to emotions, having the lard become a part of what you are, your identity. And now this little screenshot on reddit under the ‘WTF’.
No need to evoke the Big Brother, it’s the advertisement driven capitalism, not the socialism, that is finalizing Orwell’s prophecy.
by Ben Atlas on 12.20.2011.5:40pm · 1 comment
The New Statesman, the magazine where Hitches started as a journalist has a teaser of his final interview with Richard Dawkins. The full interview will ironically appear in the print Christmas edition.
RD I’ve always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
CH Yes; it’s broken down with me.
RD It’s astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule.
CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.
Curbside Bus Boom
by Ben Atlas on 12.29.2011.6:56pm · 0 comments
Ok, link to Felix day. The only econo blog I read. Comments to his post – Did wifi cause a rise in bus ridership? Correct about the most there. Since I am intimately familiar with the products let me add few points.
Siting here with my regular post drip, post trip cold.