Ratchet Up

> I'd Love A Gmail Invite

Invitations to try out the new Google Email are spreading around among the technorati, and it's now clear that I'm not one, since none have come my way. Want to help repair my ego? Forward one to: John Schott. Many thanks.

[Back From Japan]

The two big bottles of Kirin in the foreground tell you just about everything you need to know about this meal. Apart from how nice it was to have an evening of conversation with my alter ego here, Hamed Karzai.

During my two weeks as a guest of Technos University, I met a host of wonderful people, and experiences ranged from getting hustled in Shinjuku to being charged by a wild monkey in the Japanese Alps. [Both were pretty tame.] I'm deeply indebted to Dr. Tanaka of Technos, and to Stephen Fleming, head of the Technos International Program and our indefatigable host and guide. I've started working on a website to assemble the best of our group's photos—I'll link to it in two or three weeks after they've reached me.

The last two days have gone to overhauling the Camera/Iraq site, which has gotten a lot of attention. I am totally reorganizing it so that individual items will feed as RSS, and so that visitors can navigate by category. It's pure grunt work, but it will make the site much more functional and easier to maintain into the future.

More to come.

[The Gendered Gait]

Prof. Nicholaus Troje's "Bio Motion Lab" in Germany has a demo that synthesizes the walking movements of 40 different individuals. Using a flash interface, you can alter not only parameters such as gender, but also things like emotional states—happy/sad and relaxed/tense, and so forth.

"The analysis reveals that the dynamic part of the motion contains more information about gender than motion-mediated structural cues. The proposed framework can not only be used for analysis of biological motion but also to synthesize new motion patterns."

[Bio-Motion Demo]

[Off to Japan For A Couple of Weeks]

I'm zooming off to Tokyo for a two-week cultural introduction to Japan courtesy of Technos International College. Plan is to go cold turkey from the keyboard, but who knows. I've been lucky recently, since I went on a similar trip to China a year ago last Christmas. The strategy in China was to listen my way around. I did extensive live audio recordings of ambient natural sound—the bird market in Beijing, a recording on the exact spot that for several centuries the Chinese considered center of the universe, and, thanks to an invitation, the sounds of woodworkers with traditional tools reconstructing a temple in the forbidden part of the Forbidden City.

For this trip, I've decided to sense Japan by palette. I'm taking Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. It's a cookbook, but with big helpings of cultural background and detail. Eating your way through Japan: how better to wave good-bye to your money?

[The Color Of Gravitas]

It wasn't until the early '70s, really, that serious photographers could make pictures in color. Until MOMA's John Szarkowski "broke the color barrier" by exhibiting chromed images by William Eggleston, Steven Shore and others, color for the most part had been barred entry to modernism's cool white exhibition spaces.

As Americans learned from looking at scores of FSA and WWII photos, social urgencies came in a scale of grays. Black-and-white was the color of photographic gravitas, while fledgling color, typically reserved for advertising, was shunned as so much fatuitas—as in fatuous, silly, empty. [Yes, I had to look that up; 30 seconds thanks to the web.]

So it's rather shocking to discover a new book [Abrams] and exhibition [Library of Congress] that features a selection from the 1,600 color images made by New Deal photographers, primarily Russell Lee and Jack Delano.

I'll no doubt get used to these, but for now they seem totally artificial, even weird. That's because the inter-texts against which we read these images aren't so much black-and-white FSA photographs, but rather the last decade of work by pomo art photographers—"I'm not a photographer, I'm an artist who uses photography"—who deliberately cultivated an ironic relationship with the past and its representational conventions.

Check out some of these images online at the "New York Times." Start here, with a girl who must surely be Cindy Sherman.

[Above: Russell Lee: "Winner at the Delta County Fair, Colorado, October, 1940"]