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NYPL Info Desk
Kids at NYPL
Librarian and voter rights activist
Young adult librarian. See book in hand on left...
Map libraries. Cataloging them is an art.
These images are contributed by libraries to the flickr commons project: http://fwd4.me/73y
Librarians were collecting storing sharing and adding value to information long ago and still are....For more on libraries check out www.ala.org ...
It started with the little homonyms at the bottom of people's email signatures. This convention may be as old as email itself, and the creation of the signature footer for emails.
With the environmental culture fad, I am now seeing "Please consider the environment before printing this email" at the bottom. Usually these are printed in green text. Get it? I have been thinking before printing but I have no idea how this "conserves." The extra thought is actually a waste. Although the green might indicate this is about money? Am I wasting paper at the company? Am I being singled out by people? I am afraid to ask. After all if they send me this kind of imperative what else might they send me? Am I being paranoid? How do they know if they are customers that I am a waster of paper? If this is about the environment it should say: "Don't print this without considering the net environmental effect of increasing paper demand." The consideration may last hours or days and also may result in printing a copy or more. Then what?] Or "don't print unless you have to. It wastes paper and has a negative effect on the environment." But then again who defines what "have to" means? What if I print everything to cover my but on every little thing?
Or I have Georgia-Pacific stock? Sheesh. This is really too much for me to handle. Or should I purchase environmental offsets to cover (page) my printing? As you all know the company style guide forbids any messages like this at the bottoms of emails. But who cares when I am told I am wasting paper and the environment? Also will HP go out of business if there's no printing going on? Wouldn't that be bad? Or would staggering unemployment actually help the environment?
A friend writes:
What is funny about it is that by adding that message to the bottom of e-mails, they are making each e-mail just a few kilobytes larger. In doing so, they are requiring more disk storage space on their company servers for storing all the emails. More storage means more energy expanded to make disk drives, more energy to power and cool the data centers, which means more wasted energy and more carbon burned. Since that appears at the bottom of every e-mail and its incremental effect of making people not print is probably 1 out of every 1000 emails, it would be interesting to see whether the net effect of everyone emailing with that thing isn't just more waste vs. the cost of a few pieces of paper, which comes from a renewable resource.
Another friend suggests an alternative:
*Please print this message on a piece of your own flayed skin. Save a
precious tree's life instead.*
I keep seeing this sage advice at the bottom of emails. Do people honestly do this? Am I badly out of touch, or would other people also consider that even thinking about printing out email a mind-numbingly silly thing to do?
It got me wondering how much paper I’ve saved by not even thinking about printing my emails this year. Since I started using GMail (in September 2004), I have archived 9,687 emails, or about 12 per day. Those are the good ones. I actually ignored a further 1,994 unread spam just in the last 30 days, but let’s discount them. [More: http://rooreynolds.com/2007/03/09/please-consider-the-environment-before-printing-this-email/]
Can we go back to putting the Golden Rule at the bottom of emails? Did we?
A couplet from David Bowie's song Fashion came to mind when I was reading Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture. It's the last one here...
....There's a brand new dance
But I don't know it's name
That people from bad homes
Do again and again
It's big and it's bland
Full tension and fear
They do it over there
But we don't do it here....
If you see an orangutan in your neighborhood using a stick with the left hand and not the right to make a tree nest, for shame!! In fact these furry fellas do have different behaviors in different regions, Van Schaik (the author) discovered while following them for years as they bounce from tree to tree [watch out for pee and kid 'tangs throwing sticks, by the way]. She makes a pretty good case that these are more than learned behaviors but actual culture. In fact the same gesture, for example doing Frugg, may mean one thing in one group of people than in another. Or more pointedly, when Rick Steves gave a thumps up to folks in Tehran he was flipping them off.
This book is truly fascinating and also gives insight into human nature, both in the length of the child development necessary, and the characteristics which are both cause and result of both animal's sophistication.
The "flanged male" at left is called so because of the big pockets of flesh around the cheeks. These males will actually kill babies born to other fathers, and shockingly the females will take up with them. It is really a dark thing to realize. The other males also keep their distance from the dominants, and even prolong(!) going into full masculine form, with the flanges, if another is around. In a sense they don't grow fully until they know they can be the dominant and not killed. Lesser males do a lot of sneaking around behind the back of the gigantic males. When the lessers do a long call, not as loud because they lack the dominant's flanges, the girls come but so does the competition!
This is a truly elegant book, in terms of the writing, the photographs, and the precise arguments that establish that the 'tangs actually do have culture and not just learned or genetically transmitted behavior.
While Bowie's song turns a jaundiced eye to fashion, it seems that it is just one less thing that humans can truly call their own.
How do you keep from getting lost in the shuffle? Keep on going until you are the only ones left shuffling. That's part of the theme of Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band by Joe Bonomo. By any account the Fleshtones wrote a few amazing songs in the form of Shadow Line, American Beat, BYOB. and more. No less amazing is their 25 years of constant touring and willingness to break a sweat for the cause of having fun. I never thought having fun was a cause, but in a sense it its, even in the world of music where the removed, campy, contrived music is everywhere to be found in so called alternative or postpunk music. The Fleshtones cause is more than fun, but extracting the energy from pre-Beatles rock and soul, and spraying it (like sweat) over several continents in the form of energetic shows. But these shows are more than peppy but have the theatricality of the gay scene of disco, the connection with the audience more commonly seen in jazz, and this mysterious thing called "feel" that Keith Richards says truly animates rock.
The Fleshtones, although not considered, maybe until now, an important band in the story of rock, began in mythical fashion in a house in the New York region in which Peter and Keith, both from real deal working class backgrounds, discovered a disassembled guitar in the basement. Like the guitar, the Fleshtones re-assembled rock music as an extension of their Super Party lifestyle. The supercatchy BYOB from their first record, released among other places the delightfully strange ROIR records, which sold only cassettes through the mail.
As mythical as the beginning of their career, the book covers a lot of the required elements of the rock band. A sax player dies of drugs. Producers ruined albums. Guitar player has to get clean or die. And perhaps most painfully they didn't sell records.
Although self proclaimed Roman Gods, the Fleshtones got lost in the shuffle between megaselling groups that came just before them from CBGB and from queer places like Athens GA and Akron OH. The book seems most similar to the book about Wish the World Away, which describes the career-self-destructive American Music Club.
Both books were written by fans but Sweat is the better book. The proto-band days of Keith Streng and Peter Zaremba are wonderfully executed and actually are fun! Unlike the AMC book, the writer does not fall into cataloging every song at every gig, but he tries to say how amazing each gig was and that gets a little tiresome. Yes, many of the 2000 shows they played were "energetic" and "explosive" and, yes, sweaty. Luckily one of the band's Super Fans has written the book and he's a writerly academic in his spare time. Also I thought full profiles of people that joined the band in later years to be much too long for a general audience, with the exception of one bass player that was aghast at the realist, non politically correct stance of his bandmates. Is there a better metaphor for their music!! They are totally un politically correct.
Speaking of a modernism and things academic, it's hard to fit the Fleshtones into the academic story of rock which goes..First stooges and mc5, then ramones, then sex pistols, then CBGB art bands, then the far superior LA punk scene of X et al. Where are the Fleshtones in the narrative. With the dust settling, the Fleshtones do have a place, as the band that bridges two new york scenes...the world of CBGB and the world of the gay discos several blocks away. The guys, as the book calls them, would frequent both in a single evening. AHA. A story begins to emerge. They also shared a basement space with the Cramps, and both bands were channeling energies long forgotten and were seen as camp and they MEANT it. For me the Fleshtones are the Glittering Night to the Cramp's Permanent Midnight. The relative closeness of Lux's death and the last (?) tour of the Fleshtones seems a nice bookend. The final piece of the puzzle is that yes the Fleshtones were originals. Although they lacked the Moog squalks of Devo or the poetic angularity of Television, they had the American Sound. In their best songs like Shadow Line, it is a real resurrection. It's not them keeping rock alive but vice versa.
The same thing that seems to have gone wrong is the same thing that went right with the Fleshtones. They kept having fun, stayed true to their vision, and went with the best asset they had. Playing live. There are some awesome stories in the book. Peter going down a trap door in the stage and then emerging at the right moment, his mates understanding through ESP what would happen. (Actually the new guy didn't and got clocked by Peter for opening the door.) A song about a rescue was played on the beach and two 'Tones swam into the ocean while the rest of the band concluding the song and the set. They had to keep touring because they had to for financial and spiritual reasons but, if I can play the postmortem game, they didn't master three arts: playing ball with execs, learning how to record an album as well as play live, and perhaps writing songs. The pages of cover songs listed in the back of the book, and the many covers in their albums seems like a mistake. Maybe they should have stopped playing covers to stop being pigeonholed as purely retro; maybe they should have written more shitty songs to get a few gems, or hits?
But would one ask a Jazz musician never to play a standard again?
A couple of things did go right in the career, success in France (where a concert extended into a sing along happening in front of the theatre), being on trendy IRS record, and of course being in URGH: A Music War, which I think of as the Woodstook of the generation x crowd. Although licensing hell kept URGH out of DVDness forever, you tube has put up clips from the movie..
Thank god the book was written. Good things come to those who wait! The book ends with Peter's quote that being on stage is an act of expression, that nobody should be ashamed to cut loose and be who they are.
The Fleshtones have H-E-A-R-T and now they have R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
But what do I know. I have never seen them live.
Tools are tools but how we use them and what we think about them makes us human. This is true of the paintbrush as much as the computer. And the networked computer? Forget about it! What we know now as the internet has cultural and technological roots traceable to the post WWII era. The combination of the techies and the hippies goes way back, but this book is a lot deeper. It is a historical look at the 60s counterculture, or the slice of it that was into technology, and how the collaboration between people in our networked world may seem banal now, but was visionary back in the day. On the one hand it was the dry ARPANet and the Dead-fan-driven, elite-driven, Sonoma-based WELL. When the internet "turned on" when Netscape launched, or there about, there was a real head of steam going in terms of the elites who wanted the internet to be a free, libertarian, collaboration space that would flatten out hierarchy and bring about enormous grass roots change. Wired magazine is kind of an end point and not a beginning of the story, that has its roots in Stewart Brand's whole earth catalog and cybernetics. But back to the book. This is a true work of scholarship and really points out to me how much people may know about the internet but how little the cultural history of it they may not know. The vision of the cyberculture people reaches a point of hyperbole. Is the de-centralized, visionary, intellectual world of Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand truly visionary? Or is it at worst just another generation of elites charming each other and their establishment sponsors? Hard to say, but they seem to bring the goods, or at least have sold a property in the everglades rather than the Whole Earth. At any rate the book is an achievement and a must for anyone who wants to do try to get the first inkling of perspective on a very recent phenomenon, perhaps the most transformative one since the printing press--or maybe just TV.
Somebody actually made a good movie about a musician. After tragic snoozefests like Bird, a movie about loveable amateurs, The Germs, that turned into a snarling, existential, and just plain fun punk band (The first, in fact, hardcore band, according to many) comes through. This movie keeps its sense of humor and in doing so gives what feels like a portrayal of an archetypal Rock and Roll Suicide (as the song by Bowie that rolls on the final credits suggests) a sense of reality. The masque club owner is a commie ideologue whose words are slurred beyond recognition and come with subtitles! The nerdy girls that are part of the first germs rehearsal. Darby staring down glampunks the Dammed in a shitty theatre next to the masque on Hollywood blvd, and closing the set by shoving the mic into a jar of peanut butter. The hideous dragon lady that enabled Darby and became the manager for a spell. The good natured hippy from a record store that champions Darby. The silly yellow germs T-shirts Belinda Carlyle is wearing at a rehearsal. Yet the dark side of Darby's life, capped by life stunted by drugs and a romantic fantasy of self destruction, is tastefully handled here. In a mythical, creepy turn of events Darby dies the same day John Lennon does, the poet of the current generation overshadowed by another junkie, much more popular at that. (As a motive for the suicide, the movie touches on darby's gayness, not accepted by himself or by the orange county boneheads that embraced hardcore and killed the free-to-be-you-and-me aesthetic of LA punk bands like the Bags and so on.) And Darby was a poet and the tragedy is that his career did not continue. Like the shitty Cobain records with Stipe that will never be recorded, we never got to see Darby's album of Queen Covers with pat. (I can dream). Songs like "no god" and "forming" attest to that, and the totally astonishing lexicon devil, a perfect piece of pop music (nee hardcore) that lays out the power of language and its evil uses and its use as an instrument of his art. One thing the book does leave out, which the book Lexicon Devil talks about, is the cancerous presence of Scientology people in the Hollywood high school. The way Scientology (allegedly) uses ideas and language for the purpose of control was co-opted by Darby in his admonitions like "gimmie your mind" in his songs. In fact the book Lexicon Devil is probably THE BEST ROCK BOOK EVER WRITTEN. The level of detail, culled from interviews with the "Circle" around darby is really amazing and would put an academic historian to shame. It touches on Gerber, the it girl of the punk movement and a cast of other "weirdos." There's also a charming scene where the members of X tell Darby to accept his sexuality as the many great artists that came before him. The movie makers decided to stay with the history of the music in telling the story. There were so many funny and crazy things that happened at each of the shows they are more than shows but happenings. But like all movies about musicians, the need for exposition and explanation (through the use of doc style interviews wih pat) is horribly unavoidable. THANK GOD THOUGH WE DON"T HAVE TO LISTEN TO FLEA OR ROLLINS TALKING ABOUT THE GERMS! Are they in every fucking rock doc. Go away. Critics have bashed the movie for its documentary style a bit unfairly. You would probably need a much longer movie with a higher budget to really color this in. Of course the movie hinges on whether or not Shane West is any good, and he is. Don't worry. He takes on the roll like, the Germs music that was "like running head on into a wall from 25 feet away" (citation needed). What we do is secret has a heart as well as laughter. Lorna Doon, played by the candy faced Bijou Phillips, has a real love for darby and somehow the guy is loveable as a presence on record and in this movie
I can definitley recommend iCon, the Steve Jobs biography for various reasons, not all of which are flattering to the author and his subject. A couple of major weaknesses of the book
1) Devolves into story about Eisner, Ovitz, and Disney for at least an entire chapter. Loses focus and not impressive in its research and execution.
2) Some really really bad sentences. Worse than that one. Never has a ghost written book been so horribly written. There are some gem sentences in this one. You can only imagine what the first drafts were like.
3) Bizarre use of "Steve" instead of Jobs. Strangely affectionate considering what an iJerk "Steve" seems to be. Nobody else seems to get the first name treatment, until, strangely a "Brad" enters the narrative.
4) First part of the book seems to be a rehash of a first book by the same guy. Was I supposed to read this one?
As for Jobs he seems the epitome of the California Buddhist. He practices everything but the compassion part. Me me me.
Still a must read if you are interested in computer history, leadership, organizational psychology, marketing, or design. Yes iCan.
Ceruzzi's outstanding History of Modern Computing will blow your mind. If you ever wanted to know where your computer mouse comes from and were afraid to ask your parents, this book will clue you in.
A number of cool things you may not know if your memory of computers only goes back to the first PC, or something called ENIAC--or was it BRANIAC?--or maybe those code breaking machines. Were those things even computers.
This is a scholarly book but also toally readable. It's author was an early computer hobbiest and so you get some really great insight about how the first commerical computer, actually a kit sold in a store in the American Southwest, came into being in the 1970s. You also see glimpses of what goes beyond scholarly record keeping. You can feel Paul's bile against the lawsuit against MIcrosoft for stifling innovation. IBM as well was held back by government interference meanwhile the competitors are innovating away and the whole thing becomes a moot point. Oh the bile!
Here's just a few of the blow your mind moments of the book
1. The first computer found may have been a sewing loom where cards controled the pattern and the machine merely followed its instructions.
2. Hyperlinking, the mouse, and graphical interface technology were demonstrated in Palo Alto in the 1960s.
3. The word "computer" used to mean a person that did calculations by hand. Often these were females.
4. The first commercial computer (mentioned above). You could tell it worked when it flashed lights on the front. Not exaclty exciting.
What also makes this book more interesting than scholarship are the images. This scan (image) of an early ad is not exaclty "Think Different." There are also amazing images of a room full of human computers, promo shots for IBM's 360 business computer, and crazy shots of people using the first "personal computer."
Now if if someone asks me where the iPhone comes from I won't be ashamed to talk about it.
Hunt's Donuts was a hangout on Mission Street in San Francisco for punks like Erick Lyle, as well as local prostitutes and other people of the night. The shop's slogan. "open 25 hours" evokes going beyond conventional limits, or better yet, a kind of extra hour, an extra space for people that don't seem to fit so neatly into constraints or categories.
Lyle's book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, sets a number of scenes at Hunt's and other San Francisco spaces like the Tenderloin, UN Plaza, 24th street Bart station. The places are sites of protests, and "generator shows" where Lyle would play with punk bands in shop doorways, and conversations with the homeless. Lyle also comes up with some other spaces, 25th-hour places, like rooms in the Mission where he squatted, and a large Market street space that became an event space for free music and free food.
Despite his "not working", Lyle turned out a zine, Turd Filled Donut (pictured), and spent a time in bands, and giving a great deal of thought to the plight of San Francisco's working class and homeless (he was one of them), and at the same time trying to live out his own idea of freedom. The book weaves together TFD's interviews with folks like Zara Thustra and Matt Gonzales, and pieces under the hilarious title "Turd Kaen", playing on a venerable column from the SF Chronicle.
It's hard to belive some of this is already history, such as the dot-com era, the first gulf war, and a time before the internet when zines carried waves from the lower frequencies.
What makes this book very good rather than good is that there is a lot of meat here, things that you could only know by actually 'being there.' And Lyle was in some places nobody was looking. It also rises above a punk memoir because he's not limited by his punk persona in the way he presents himself. There are some sections which have an epic kind of romantic(!) voice and it is great too see how the voice shifts around. A rare book by a real-deal outsider that adds to the history of the city.
What ultimately is the value of something? Is it the price tag? Is it the fact that it is valuable to others? Or is value something the heart knows that cannot be quantify? And why do some folks put a value on some objects others would find valueless? And what exactly does money pay FOR?
These are the questions that come to mind when you sit down to read Hubert's Freaks. The author is a writer and antiquated book dealer and his subject is a friend and fellow dealer, Bob (whom he calls an :American Palindrome:). Bob is a restless young man in the early 70s who actually "lived like Keroac" while others just talked the talk. He developed an early fascination with collecting records and then moved to books. Book dealing is an odd business, where knowlege of how much something is worth is a guarded secret. In a sense, the person that parts with an old book may be screwed if she does not do her homework. Collecting also provides what the author calls a "down the rabbit hole" experience or two for Bob.
As Bob matured into the manager of a antiquated book shop in Philadelphia, he began collecting African American ephemera. His interests let him to a find of materials from a Times Square institution from the 30s to 60s, Hubert's. It was part museum, part freak show where an AfAm man, Charlie Lucas, and his wife, "Woogie," ran and put on shows for the visitors. Then a down the rabbit hole moment, he discovers what appears to be Diane Arbus photos, original prints.
From here the book reads like a good thriller. How much can they be worth? Are they authentic? How does one value photographs? Will Bob overcome this feeling that he always sells for too low? Will bob overcome depression, divorce, and more?
I won't ruin it but the piece also brings you to the word of outsiders that Diane Arbus took as her subject, and by association the outsider status of people like Bob.
The rabbit hole opens up further, Bob makes a strange outing to Florida to get more materials from Hubert's, finds an Arbus subject wheeling himself round the block near the bookshop, and gets grifted by relatives of Hubert's long-deceased manager.
The climax of the book links the low life outsider world with the snobby world of art museums, and Bob with his spirtual doppleganger from Hubert's.
All and all a singular story.
