The Bipeds’ Monitor

OK. There are days when the items in the news look like a conspiracy. Today was one of those days. There’s a thread of the threat of extinction about it all. The headless and heartless U.S. Senate attached a rider to a budget bill to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, using as a justification the fact that gas prices for America’s SUVs are at an all time high ($2.05 a gallon nationally), and crude oil stands at $57 a barrel. OPEC agrees to raise production levels twice by 500,000 barrels per day, but “the market” still thinks that world petroleum demand will continue to outstrip supply (now at about 87 million bpd). Stay tuned to see how open the oil taps will go this summer, and whether Al-Zarqawi can destroy Iraq’s flow. I want to keep track of these numbers from now on. Time to buy gold?

Meantime, what is the alternative, nuclear energy? Great idea, except that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports today that scientists trying to find a way to make the proposed Yucca Mountain long term plutonium waste repository safe for the next 100,000 years couldn’t even use uncooked data. Apparently, they fudged their computer models to show that the effects of underground water would not cause our hot waste to leak out into the environment–anything to get this horrible project built.

OK. Nuclear is on hold, then, so how about coal? Well, it turns out that two studie released today show that even if we were to stop burning all fossil fuels today, we could expect air temperatures to rise over a degree in the next few centuries, and sea level should rise at least a meter. I will never get to see the snows of Kilimanjaro even in a photo (see above). Guess what? We’re not going to stop burning fossil fuels.

And what else do we do with oil, gas and coal? Make poisonous chemicals like pesticides and steroids. So it’s either goodbye Bangladesh (experts say we have plenty of time to “adapt”–build dikes, move cities–all fun) or hello, Jose (Canseco). I’m going to remember this day.

Unfortunately for the world, we are losing visionaries at an unacceptable rate. This month marked the passing of Jef Raskin, who believed (against all odds) that computer systems can be built that don’t break and are understandable to users. At his death, he was working on putting into use a way for users to work quickly and efficiently with computers. To quote from Raskin’s proposal (nicknamed “Archie” for RCHI or the Raskin Center Humane Interface):

*CLEANLINESS

A user should never be responsible for cleaning up the system, whether it is leftover debris from internal operations, fragmentation of the file structure, garbage collection, or whatever.

Computer resources belong to users, not to developers.

*RESTORATION OF SYSTEM STATE

The state of the system, when it has been turned off or slept and then turned on again, is whatever state it was in when it was turned off or entered into the sleep state. The saved appearance, which reflects the saved state, includes cursor position, selection markings, and all other indications of state. In other words, the way it looked and worked when you left is exactly the way it looks and will work when you return.

Even though these are old ideas of Jef’s (from the dawn of the Macintosh era), the juggernaut of commercial computing ignored them, leading to our wonderful world of “AutoSave”, “AutoBackup”, and “Save As”; programs that crash leaving unworkable documents, the delete and backspace keys, and other oddities that we all work with everyday.

Like the Dvorak keyboard, Archie could help us get to the point that I blithely tell the teaching staff will come “in the next generation,” when using computers is an uncomplex as answering a telephone (an old-style telephone with the “pick up equals answer” syntax).

We may have to wait for the demise of the “computer” for this to happen.

Everyone knows how Marty Scorsese should have won at least one Oscar by now. He will probably be in that small group of old timers hung out to wait for a lifetime achievement award.

In 2001, he made an extraordinary introduction to postwar Italian cinema titled My Voyage to Italy. In four hours, he excerpts and comments on over 30 films by Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni, and leaves the viewer breathless to see them all. Beginning with Paisa’, the breakthrough film that created neorealism, he explains the impact of such totally conceived pieces as Stromboli, Viaggio In Italia, and L’Eclisse. The film is edited as expected by Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, who did win an Aviator Oscar while Marty watched and waited, and relies on footage and scripts provided by some of the original creators of these groundbreaking works, like Visconti’s screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amato. On Scorsese’s tour from Sicily to Rome (Rosellini) to Venice (Visconti) and back (Antonioni) there are side trips to early Italian epics of the teens and twenties. And a link to the next generation of directors who would stand on the shoulders of these giants: Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Resnais and Oshima.

By the time you start Disc 2, you will have to get a membership to GreenCine, Le Video, or the Criterion Collection, the last of which is about to reissue L’Eclisse on DVD in April.

I spent two nights in ps at the Caliente tropics, lair of the tiki gods and half-price mai tais. The second night, I walked the boulevards under starlight past huge adventist churches and the high school, the mega Ralphs and the frog-filled Tahquitz wash, fresh from Southern California’s wettest winter in recent history, to see Bruno Ganz play out Hitler’s last days.

After my required attendance at two days of lectures given by futurists and kindergarten teachers, I was able to hire a cab driver who had his life apparently ruined by the U.S. government and its mercenary contractors, to drive me around some of the north end of Palm Springs. With Palm Springs Weekend and the Palm Springs Modern Committee’s tour map in hand, we made our way around Donald Wexler’s steel houses, Frey’s collaboration for Raymond Loewy’s house, Craig Ellwood’s Palevsky house, Elvis’ honeymoon hideout (otherwise known as the House of Tomorrow) and the too-impeccably restored Kaufmann house by Neutra. (For those who don’t know, Kaufmann’s other house was a small one built a few years earlier back east out of concrete and stone in a wooded place in western Pennsylvania called Fallingwater). All as the sun went behind Mt. San Jacinto, the dust storms started to kick up and it was time to make stops for ATM cash and a date shake and head to the airport.

What the world needs less of is another blog. Nonetheless, I am going ahead just as other bloggers are showing the white flag. I want to try to address some of the things that have stricken me for better or for worse in our decadent, technological, capitalist society.

Maybe every noun in this blog should have three adjectives, since it seems as though for each positive, exciting possibility of urban (and even suburban) 21st century American life, one can find at least two negatives.

Or maybe it’s just springtime in 2005 and I feel like writing. It’s the negative ions I picked up by spending two days in the Coachella Valley. Anyway, I hope to cover my hopes and dreams for Nature, Architecture, Science and Technology, and Community in these pages. Or else like Calvino’s baron in the trees, or the student of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, I just don’t feel like there’s any other way to live but this one.