stevengharms.com

Yesterday Lauren and I went to Semantic Web Austin’s event with Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research.

Peter delivered an excellent presentation on getting started with RDFa.

I feel like one of the biggest challenges with getting started with Semantic Web is that it’s so hard to get up and running quickly. Being a W3C specification, the documentation doesn’t immediately lend itself to easy practical implementation. It seems that most of the time introductions for beginners dance around specifications, semantics, IETF councils, and theoretical specifications.

I think it probably turns off a lot of people actively working to advance the cause. And the cause is worthy! Making the data on the web informative to non-human agents will make for a far better internet experience, but the first step has to be making it possible for Perl/Python/Ruby hackers, CMS tool authors, PHP people etc. to actually think “Oh, I’ll embed these SemWeb” features.

The last programmer-friendly product that integrated web of data concepts at the user-programmer level was years ago when Matt at WordPress put in FOAF ontology references in the WordPress code. I could be wrong here, but I’ve not seen massive adoption as yet. Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up and saying “Can anybody give me a coherent story on how to do this, you know like a ‘Hello, World’?”

Peter’s presentation was very accessible and “hands-on.” This was a welcome change.

Helpful resources are:

• And RDFa primer
• The FOAF ontology specification
• RDFa Validator

In the early evening we headed down south and met up with our friends Ryan and Jamie. After a bit of visit discussing semantic technology (Ryan works for the University’s library system and they’re certainly in the business of considering how to expose relationships between data stores), we headed to Trudy’s south. I had a great gulf shrimp chimichanga and a fine margarita.

We headed back to their home and Ryan cracked open a Glenfiddich 15-year single malt which was smooth and oaky with richness. We had made substantial progress into it, and conversing with our lovely ladies when we were joined by Matt and Nicole. We hadn’t all been together just hanging out in many months, so I really enjoyed it.

Most of the time when we see one another it’s during a dinner or a party, so it was nice to have a quiet evening just catching up.

Right about 1:50 I felt extremely old when I said: “Oh great, I always liked The Cure’s ‘Disintegration,’ I’m glad it’s back.”

And then..

“Oh, I like the Cocteau Twins like vocals”

She’s doing a good job in respecting her sources though.

I’m used to Republican governors and congressmen getting caught in “grave errors in judgment” or “seeking God’s favor in this time of difficulty” or “experiencing moral fault.” Of late, these have been in the homosexual sector.

{ Incidentally, having spent time in Holland it’s funny that in that country there is nothing that proscribes being both far-right and gay, as the late Pim Fortuyn exemplified }

When I heard that Governor Mark Sanford (R) of South Carolina had returned after an emotionally-tormented powder spent visiting his South American mistress, I took it merely as another opportunity to gloat about not being a member of the party that thinks it should dictate the moral terms of the nation’s life — least of all the while its members act to the contrary. In short, schadenfreude.

Yet I read the actual harvested emails and I was, quite honestly, moved. It’s clear this man is quite over the moon with this woman and their letters, particularly hers, are warm, tender, full of that Brazilian triesteza that makes slow samba with sangria so nice on Sunday evenings’ sunset.

Said “Maria:”

You have not brought complication or are not bringing complication to my life, on the contrary you’ve fullfiled (sic) me with happiness and made me aware how you can feel when you love somebody. I can think with my head but only feel with my heart so I can’t avoid it even knowing is hopelessly impossible

Honestly, could you not put a slow samba beat under that, read it, and bill it as a something from the João Gilberto back-catalog?

and…

Send you millions of kisses that will last till we get in touch again. best wishes from the deepest of my heart.

Said Sanford, steamily:

…you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light

Source: The State

My goodness. These are clearly people in love. In some ways, I was surpised to see this level of attraction and infatuation in middle age. Our media-enabled view seems to say that this kind of smoldering infatuation is the sole realm of teenagers. Maybe the Boomer generation is coming to peace with the idea that you may not have to look and act like your 20-year old version but can still have a rich emotional life ( cf. Diane Lane in “Unfaithful”).

And what of the the erstwhile Mrs. Sanford: the poor humiliated wife. To be on the “I prefer thee less” in this story must be excruciating and she is suffering an indignity that I do severely doubt and marriage could recover from. This interaction is a grand emotional infidelity. But I must give her credit in not showing up to the press conference. The tableaux of the by-the-man-standing wife in the boardroom suit is ridiculously dated. It would have been tantamount to carrying a sign saying “I’ve been grievously humiliated, and am here for your viewing pleasure.” Good for her, it’s a tiny beach-head of dignity that she may still hold.

So I moved from callow gloating, to a more considered view of the emotional torment of the parties involved. This is where I should have been first, I now realize, but 8 years of Bush rule were hard on heartstrings all around.

I was very much kind of feeling sorry for the guy until I read the following:

wish I could wish it away, but this soul-mate feel I alluded too is real and in that regard I sure don’t want to be the person complicating your life. I looked to where I often look for advice and counsel, and in I Corinthians 13 it simply says that, “ Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude, Love does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice in the wrong, but rejoices in the right, Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things”.

Boy, it takes real brass balls, you over-entitled megalomaniac, to quote I Corinthians 13 at your mistress and to portray yourself as her educator or tutor.

I don’t celebrate the shattering of any home, but where are those W. Somerset Maugham men who bolt out on the family and say “I love this woman and for once I’m going to live my life like I need to — I am an unfaithful man, a lousy father, but I must be with this woman, she is my life!” Or, failing that couldn’t they adopt the steely silence of the patricians because That’s What Our Type of People Do?

O tempora, in our world we don’t even have men making bad, harsh decisions who take the blame and live with it. No instead it’s simpering, it’s “I disappointed X, I let people down.” That’s not contrition (Mrs. Sanford is insulted by this), nor is it passionate depth of true love (“Maria” is ill served by this) it’s hoping to not loose too much station in the exchange for having had your cake and having eaten it too. Consider Edward VIII, who gave up his crown to be with Wallis Simpson, does the governor of South Carolina have so much more to loose?

It’s weasly cowardice then. I’m sick of the lack of responsibility the Baby Boomers have shown in handling public lives. He says to her: “…helping you live a better — not more complicated life.” Such pomposity!

But in the end, this is the eternal story of our condition, uncertainty and unhappiness, stability and family set against an unruly cerebro-chemical mush-pot animating us. I hope all these people moving through darkness come into peaceful world.

Curiosity is a funny thing, and sometimes breaking the taboo verbally, by merely suggesting it, leaves us all astounded, uncomfortable, and immobilized for a short amount of time. In that daze, nothing changes, but the opportunists and innovators find ways to profit by the new zeitgeist. At just about the time the public thinks that the verbally-broken taboo has gone away, the work of these opportunists and innovators surfaces and gives us a tangible artifact that the way we knew, whose existence had effectively been banished by the mere thought of the world with this change, will not be coming back.

Doubtless someone said this when the MP3 compression produced a small music file: “Hey, we could move songs over the internet in an acceptable time length over consumer-grade broadboand” I don’t doubt that those who were paying attention to this algorithm then faltered: “You mean, we could write software to move music about for free?” And then, a breath later: “we could destroy (or save the recording industry as we know it.”

Other examples are innovation, radio, television, the destruction of the newspaper, etc.

With these models in mind, it’s with some trepidation that I consider the case of [WARNING: GRUESOME FOOTAGE] Neda, the brave Iranian woman who, during a protest, appears to have been killed…on film. The legend of the snuff film is nothing new, but there’s something about the immediacy and the ubiquity of a this woman’s cruel fate that scares and awes me.

Here we are in the breathless moment I mentioned above: “Are we going to live in a world where we, and thanks to the Internet I do me all of us, see death – live?” Will this serve as that first drop of blood to our inner Audrey IIs that teaches spectator bloodlust to our culture as once belonged to the Romans and Aztecs of yore?

Don’t feed the plant

How would our world change. Perhaps with such spectator-grade gore there would be learning experiences from showing the charred bodies of those killed in combat. We would understand the horror of battle more clearly. And perhaps, too, seeing the bodies of the fallen we would better understand the incredible practice made pro patriam.

But the world we live in is not one of gravitas, a BBC world. We live in a world of fluffier stuff, and I can see a world, the ravenous chasm of which we now stand before, in which spectator bloodlust becomes blood entertainment.

If you have the stomach for the clip, you can feel it there, that adrenal cortex response as the danger grows great to the woman. As she crumples. Your animal circuits rage to run, or to fight but your cerebrum calms you down and understands it’s “just footage.” Nevertheless, the jolt was there, was real, and was vaguely stimulating in your life of Jon and Kate, of Paris Hilton, of church and taxes. It was a pituitary hypodermic straight to your “stay alive” center. Suddenly that pagan eros shoots up, the world is brighter, you feel sexier, and all those secondary adrenal responses fire reminding you to live and spread gametes.

And just like the porn genie that the internet let loose, I wonder what happens when they (probably some of those self-same entrepreneurs as they already have a taste for “extreme” entertainment) start collating blood-footage and giving it away in 30-second teaser doses for $30/month fees. Will they turn to a generation raised on mixed martial arts, war, and social dissociation to provide the willing fodder for the burgeoning market?

Mortituri nos delectabunt

If you think blood spectatorship, ask yourself is it so terribly far from martial implosion spectatorship?

I heard via Slicing Up Eyeballs on Facebook that David Byrne has a book coming out: Bicycle Diaries.

David Byrne writing an engaging and interesting book about bicycling is a bit like what I make of Carlos D[engler] of Interpol’s DJ career: “What you aren’t adored by quite enough people?”

Just imagine, the impeccably silver-coiffed Byrne, apparently, chooses to rent, hire, or acquire a bicycle when he reaches the various towns and locales he visits on the occasion of performing as one of the most revered and creative musicians ever.

Yes, not one to rest on being at the forefront of the punk and new wave musical genres — gracing CBGB’s with Blondie, Television and the NY Dolls — or to bask in being one of the original White Guys Who Do World Music (ago gratias tibi Alfredi Garcia), or to simply enjoy being a buddy of the entire country of Brazil, Byrne grabs a velo or a fiets, eschewing those quotidian concerns of drugs and ribaldry, and bikes around, thinking Byrne-y thoughts — thoughts that in lesser (talking?) heads would be the kind of thing they build a musical career on, but which he tosses aside disinterestedly as he pedals on noting that the cantaloupes are ripe.

I’m completely going to read it.

A very nice young man from Israel took this of us.

I recently got a new computer and decided to set up Mutt locally on it. Here’s how to get to reading mail with Mutt in a way that supports HTML and multi-byte character sets. This is not a perfect HOWTO (especially in the mutt ./configure section), but should get you most of the way there.

Use Darwin Ports

• sudo port install rxvt-unicode
• sudo port install tokyocabinet (if you’re going to talk to an IMAP host and want to cache the data, you need a db to cache into)
• sudo port install w3m (for displaying HTML mail)

Set up your shell to help mutt with multibyte

• See MuttFaq/Charset

export LC_CTYPE="en_US.ISO-8859-1"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/local/lib  

Build the source, don’t use port here

• Download mutt source (developer branch to get SMTP support, header caching, i.e. the good stuff)
*

./configure --prefix=/opt/local 
--enable-imap --enable-smtp --enable-hcache 
--with-tokyocabinet=/opt/local/ 
--with-curses=/opt/local/include/ncursesw/ --with-regex

• That means: target to install in /opt/local/bin, enable IMAP and SMTP support, enable IMAP header caching using the tokyocabinet libraries, use the wide Ncurses library so that we can show fancy characters in the terminal, and add regex support
• make && sudo make install

Make mutt take advantage of your configuration

set folder= {mailserver}INBOX # where i keep my mailboxes
set spoolfile={mailserver}INBOX # where my new mail is located
set imap_user=me # your user id
header_cache=$HOME/.muttconfig/.cache
set smtp_url="smtp://smtp.server"
auto_view text/html

Configure your .mailcap so that you automatically view HTML mail properly

# HTML
text/html;      w3m -I %{charset} -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

## Images
image/jpeg;     open %s; nametemplate=%s.jpg; copiousoutput
image/png;      open %s; nametemplate=%s.png; copiousoutput
image/gif;      open %s; nametemplate=%s.gif; copiousoutput
image/bmp;      open %s; nametemplate=%s.bmp; copiousoutput

# PDF
application/pdf; open %s pdf

Recently I rented Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film based off of Stanislaw Lem’s story of the same title. I was very much moved by the movie and consider it to be one of the finest science fiction movies I have ever seen. I esteem it so because in this science fiction future, humans, and our essential need for emotional contact and connection are so thoroughly explored without being directly mentioned. Further, the movie has some of the best visual tableaux and spatial constructions that I have ever seen.

The movie may not be easy for a Western audience. It has an extremely slow pace, sometimes glacial, sometimes brooding, crosses the 2-hour mark and suffers under the strictures of USSR film budgets. Humorously, the “city of the future” sequence is footage of driving through Japan with “future vehicle” sounds foleyed in. But the patient viewer will find visual richness, narrative complexity, long-take shots, and shall know Tarkovsky to be a true lover of the medium of his creation.

Beautiful and confused, Natalya Bandarchuk plays “Hari.” Here she realizes she is not who she is told she is, but is becoming who she wants to be, almost like a human.

The story opens on Earth — beautiful Earth! — where her greens, her water, her rain, her beautiful animals, her sensuous humanity is set up in long sequences to create a full character, a foil to space, and the sentient planet, Solaris. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, Kris Kelvin, a man burdened by his past, his widowerhood, his cold relationship with his parents, who is to be sent to the Solaris observation station to evaluate whether it ought be decommissioned. Having arrived, Kris finds a disheveled Solaris observation station populated by a bitter scientist, a frightened scientist, a recent suicide, and an inexplicable collection of apparitions: projections from the planet. Understanding the broken men, understanding the alien projections, and trying to understand himself urge Kelvin on a psychological and philosophical journey that attempts to limn the boundaries of what “human” means.

Animating the plot is Lem’s question, “What” if the aliens were fundamentally unlike us, non-anthropomorphic, could not speak, could not relate to us. What if we had only a dark, warped mirror in their consciousness in which to see ourselves? How would we interact with such an intelligence, and what if that intelligence were an ocean? What exactly would we do then? Given the difficulties or flat-out inability to relate to such an Other, Kris’ considerations implode into himself — saving when he discourses with the two other members of the skeleton crew, and the Solaris-produced simulacrum of his late wife — and provide the context for his psychological journey.

The gravitas of the movie is formidable, and the colors, the construction, and its love story — about loss being the only thing that truly makes us appreciate the now — are so rewarding that potential viewers should not be scared away. I recommend you view The Criterion Collection version.

Both Lauren and I were deeply affected by the film for several days and have tried to puzzle out Tarkovsky’s message to us. I hope you take the opportunity to do the same soon.

PS. Soderbergh: Pure folly to think you could remake this one, although Natasha McElhone as the visitor was a great casting call. No one could have gotten this right but a metaphysical post-Dostoyevskyist.

Quoth Stuff White People Like:

White people love Wes Anderson movies more than they love their kids. If a white guy takes a white girl to a Wes Anderson movie on their first date, and neither of them have seen it, they will immediately commence a relationship that is reflected in songs by Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.

— On: “Wes Anderson Movies”

If you read my review on “The Darjeeling Limited” (“The Darjeeling Mumbledy”), I make no bones about my dislike of the cult of Anderson that has so thoroughly given him carte blanche to make vapid etchings into celluloid with pretensions of grandiosity-cum-naïvité.

It’s one thing to criticize an artist with words, but to criticize bad art with good art, now that takes a special breed of determination. I give you Alex Cornell’s vision: “A Hypothetical Wes Anderson Film Festival.” Thanks @meghatron.

[— Alex Cornell]

But what is it that irks me so about Anderson hipster juggernaut that the beautiful work of Cornell so successfully indicts him on? It’s the “tweed becostumed ingenue beneath a façade of gentle meekness” schtick that is absolutely calculated and drapes heavily on all Andersonia. It’s the “Anderson movies are the most insightful thing under the sun” that his fawning public holds as credo.

Dig that Howard Kosell Wide-World-of-Sports jacket in the photo in the mock-up above? Designed by a custom designer (Thom Browne) in Brooklyn, not some vintage off-the-rack find. And what’s with the Futura obsession? Ah, I get it, it’s an hômage to the Italian futurist movie-makers. Aren’t we clever. Oh, wait, I get it, you’re too naïve to be that hip, how quaint.

These ideas are effectively lampooned by Cornell, in a beautiful art design project it’s hard to believe he put so much work into a parody. That through simple design and typography he is able to communicate this is truly a commendation to his talent.

I might be asked, am I projecting this? An interview with Anjelica Huston documented this amore of affect. She described how she, playing an archaeologist, asked the esteemed auteur if she were playing his mother, also an archaeologist. She then related thaht he shook with a start of absolute surprise that this could have been latent in his script. Really, you didn’t realize your major matriarchal protagonist was based essentially on your mom. How darling! I don’t see that one could be caught unawares.

“But what about Rushmore?”

Yes, well what about it. Yes, it was a very good movie, and I would quite nearly forgive him the many sins that came after this movie for the lovely tale of Max Fischer and company. It’s the sort of achievement that gets used to justify all sorts of terrible movies post facto.

Let’s say on on old time balance scale that you have “Rushmore” and “Bottle Rocket” on one side. Now heap in “Life Aquatic”, “Darjeeling”, and maybe split “Tenenbaums” 50-50. I can almost see those scales balanced out.

But for me what makes the bad-Anderson pan weightier than the mass of the two good movies in the good-Anderson pan were the absolute howlers of “The Darjeeling Express”

“I guess we’re going to have to let go of Dad’s baggage”

…this is the quite-literal line delivered as the characters let go of their, uh, late father’s baggage and the inherited (emotional) baggage and run to the future. This could have been done with pictures (we are making a movie here). How about tight-framed gunfighter-style shots on the brothers, sweating, angry that they’re about to miss the train. A slow-mo of Owen Wilsons eyes pan left to a tight shot on Brody, Brody the same to Schwarzmann, a look of desperation, tight shot of their feet with India’s dust swirling on the colorful planks as one bag falls behind, close-framed shot, surprise dawns on each of them…etc.

And what about the conceit of Schwartzman’s character contending “All his characters are fictional” when they are so clearly à clef. I honestly thought I might bust an iris rolling my eyes.

I would love to see Wes Anderson take on M. Night Shamalyan in a pretension-off, Summer Slam-style. Both ride the coat-tails of their early work to make woefully bad movies in the present that are given far too much leniency.

[— Alex Cornell]

Yes, Alex Cornell, you say it so, very, very well.