The Incredible Machine

Jan 232012
 

I keep thinking about this Kieslowski fragment. I admit I don’t remember much of the rest of the movie. This fragment is more or less all I carried away. The puppet master and the dying ballerina. They are joined, related, married into something altogether different. In the artistry of an artist. Speaking of which, the artistry of a bookseller was always a bit fuzzy, complicated. Are we just the guys that push coins over the front desk? Or is there still some magic in little bookshops, those few remaining ones?

My friend Natasha sent me a link to this Rube Goldberg video. I watched it once. A couple of days later I decided to take another look.

It is his face that is so beautiful. He is from another planet, no? The way I understand it is that the whole construction of the incredible machine relates to the rational side of personality. Yours, mine, doesn’t matter. Rationality makes all these incredible bridges and not always the easiest and the most logical connections. It doesn’t always get you where you want and the way you want it. But it does protect the creative inner being. That is important. As long as I can manage to protect my inner being and keep it as innocent, as curious and as alive as this guy’s beautiful face – Book Depository and Amazon can both go to hell. I’ll keep constructing my incredible machine. Whatever the twist, turn or shape it may take.

On Wednesday we went dark together with thousands of web sites all across the universe. It might look a bit funny or pretentious. Such a small and insignificant bookshop joins the protest. After all, we make our living by selling intellectual property and yet we seemingly disagree with the act that is supposed to stop piracy. Well, I tend to agree with Cory Doctorow that no level of piracy justifies the proposed measures.

I’ve read this nice piece about how independent booksellers should stop trying to compete with online retailers. A day or two later I ran into this email from a disillusioned publisher employee. Very interesting. One of the problems I see is that the complete book industry pricing system has been turned obsolete. It was originally designed to appreciate each and every single creative input in the bookselling network. Now the list price mutated into a mere concept, useful psychological tool in the hands of big players and a heavy burden around the necks of independents.

I followed links to articles pro and contra independent bookshops. I’ve learned that Ann Patchett, American novelist has recently opened a bookshop. She could not stand living in a city without a single bookshop.

On my hyper-walks I stumbled upon this lovely independent bookshop that opened in 2011 in Rockland, Maine, USA, town of less than eight thousand inhabitants.

In real life, I happened to walk past Smetumet window on Celovška and liked it a lot. And I continued to read 1Q84. Slowly.

The Year of the Dragon

Jan 032012
 

Have you seen Love Actually? There’s this little scene I like there.. I know, I know.. It’s yet another classic western corporate cliché, well packed and skillfully sold. But, you know what? It’s hoildays time, so let me get away with it, just this one time. The scene I am telling you about is, I guess, a quote or perhaps a loving appreciation for the famous Bob Dylan video with Allen Ginsberg in the background.
Well.. in the movie the guy says something like: “..because it’s Christmas (and at Christmas you tell the truth)”. I like this “tell the truth” part.. So.. let me pretend that you are that gorgeous blonde girl and I’ll be the guy with the tape recorder and a little confession to make. Here I go:

It was a nice Spring day when a person walked into the bookshop and asked for a book that we didn’t have. The classic situation: if we don’t have it in stock, we can order it for you. We check the price and availabilty and ask our potentional customer for order confirmation. Instead of confirmation, I was confronted with honestly innocent question: “Is this the cheapest I can get it for?” Now.. there’s so much to explain, there are so many details that should be added here in order to put all of this into the right perspective.. I’ll try to choose only the few.. it was obviously a non-bookish person, you could see there were all these other priorities in life that make reading books hardly even enter the top hundred necessities. The title of the book suggested it was an obligatory reading for school, university or work. It was far from desired reading or what I lovingly call predestined meeting of people and books. So here I was, looking into those eyes, trying to figure out what to do. Needless to say, it has been a slightly difficult year for us. Some of our customers switched to electronic books. Some decided it is cheaper and more convenient to order books online. And even the most beautiful and the most faithful customers experienced cuts in their budgets due to overall financial meltdown. The question hang in the air. I am not fond of lying. I simply stood there and contemplated the ethical values and practical consequences of an old fashioned bookseller advising an innocent, non-bookish person of the cheapest ways to obtain an undesired book.

Contemplating my technologically enhanced near-suicide has been pretty much what I’ve been doing in those seldom free moments of a dedicated parent and a small business owner during the past year. Once confronted with a proximate possibility of loosing it, I tried to think the true nature of my book-selling.

Financial meltdown set aside, my principal enemies are technologically driven online retailers. Technology in itself is neither good nor bad. It takes the same knowledge to create a nuclear weapon and a nuclear reactor. Technology is closely linked to a certain type of knowledge that is created by beautiful minds of scientists and fucked up by evil moguls of corporate capital. It is false to think that Book Depository and Amazon are involved in an activity even remotely similar to what we are engaged in. As far as I am concerned, the true nature of what they do is making money and the true nature of what we do is lighthouse keeping.

One of the questions that repeatedly came to our mailbox this year was a variation of “Why is this cheaper on Book Depository?” Here is a bit of copy-paste from my recent email trying to answer one such question:

Zanimivo je, da gostincu nihče ne ugovarja, da je kava pri njem deset ali dvajset krat dražja kot doma. Pivo je tudi dva do trikrat dražje kot v trgovini, pa vseeno radi naročimo še eno in še eno in na koncu celo razneženo in dobrovoljno pustimo še kaj natakarici. Gostincem zavidam, da ljudje preprosto in po občutku, skozi podzavestno, enostavno jasno sprejmejo in vedo (brez da racionalizirajo), kaj je dodana vrednost, kaj je gostinec naredil, vložil in kako si je zaslužil to razliko v ceni.

Pri knjigarnah je to bistveno težje, med drugim tudi zato, ker konec koncev sploh nismo vajeni teh knjigarn. Ni tako, kot z gostilnami, da je na vsakem vogalu vsaj ena. Knjigarne so tukaj redke in ni vse, kar se imenuje knjigarna, tukaj zares knjigarna..

A ja, pa še to: 11. julija 2011 je Amazon kupil Book Depository.. A ste Orwella že brali? Danes je to zelo aktualno.. Orwella je spet potrebno brati..

It is hard to see all that is at stake when someone is waving with a five euro banknote in front of your eyes with a flashy neon-lit “You Save:” inscription on it. The truth behind is ethically very questionable. It is killing healthy bio-diversity of thousands of small and not so small independent bookshops, each and every single one with a unique story to tell, books to curate, readers to hide from a winter chill. In words of John Updike: “Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk.”

It is difficult for me to define, explain and defend the lighthouse aspect of our book-selling. It is hidden somewhere in the nature of a real space. If all is well maintained and properly orchestrated – this real space may occasionally transform into a magical place. The true meaning of independent is interdependent. We depend on you. Not only in the sense of “your money is your vote”. Your personalities are embedded into our shelves. We dance, spilling light onto the sidewalk. It is difficult to define and explain. I just know the magic is there. And I am thankful that you know it.
Happy New Year!

One Percenters vs. the OWS Library

Dec 032011
 

holy bible

The wonderful Michael Lieberman at Book Patrol talks about the birth, death and hopeful rebirth of the OWS Library. In this moment one of the most interesting and promising libraries.
It seems that 1% is getting afraid. To me, only fear explains such brutality.

Satyagraha

Dec 022011
 

batman

In the case you might be wondering what brought Philip Glass, Alex Ross, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and many more beautiful, inspired, hardworking people together last night, check the video below (gets very beautiful after mark 3:00).

When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.

(via Kottke)

Blu on Greece and Argentina

Nov 222011
 

Blu has miles to say.

blu_greece

He couldn’t have put it better.

blu_argentina

Via Arrested Motion.

Montag, silently.

Nov 202011
 

damaged library

I would hand copies of Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm to NYPD. I would like to hear Obama says something.

OWS Library
Boing Boing

At least they didn’t throw them away

Nov 152011
 

Update, 20th November: Unfortunately, they do destroy books. And they do hurt people.

library

This short Boing Boing post got me madly furious in less than a second.

Luckily, here is Huffington Post update on what really happened.

And here is a picture of books stored in dry and safe place.

Let’s hope tents for people will be allowed. It’s getting cold out there.

New beginnings

Nov 022011
 

zizek

Slavoj Žižek summarized his Zuccotti park address. The essay is different from the original speech. His attention focused on what is to be done. (via Dangerous Minds)

“But what do they want?” After all, this is the archetypal question addressed by a male master to a hysterical woman: “You whine and you complain, but do you know at all what you really want?” In the psychoanalytic sense, the protests effectively are a hysterical act, provoking the master, undermining his authority. And the question “But what do you want?” aims precisely to preclude the true answer — its real purpose is: “Tell it in my terms or shut up!”

The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn’t know what they are answers to, and it is up to the analyst to formulate the appropriate questions. We should treat the demands of the Wall Street protests in a similar way: Instead of wondering “What are they asking for? What are their demands and what are their proposed programs?”, intellectuals should see the Occupy protests as the answers for which we are not yet asking the right questions.

A walk around Zuccotti Park with Dangerous Minds

Oct 272011
 

An honest, first person account of a visit to New York’s Zuccotti Park. Via very interesting and outlandishly great Dangerous Minds.

Slavoj Žižek speaks to Occupy Wall Street

Oct 112011
 

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom.

New York Observer

occupywallst.org

transcript one

transcript two

Library

Oct 052011
 

I am very enthusiastic about this unique library.

The People’s Library is the collective, public, open library of the Occupy Wall Street leaderless resistance movement.

Located in the northeast corner of Liberty Plaza, the library provides free, open and unrestricted access to our collection of books, magazines, newspapers, ‘zines, pamphlets and other materials that have been donated, collected, gathered and discovered during the occupation.

Balance by Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein

Sep 302011
 

In support to occupywallst.org. My eyes are filled with hope.

The Wall

Sep 232011
 

I love this graffiti. There’s more to it than just an opinion about Facebook. There’s Pink Floyd and there’s The Wall. The idea of a wall is confronted in a form of a written word and it’s immediate physical presence. It calls to mind all the walls ever encountered, with emphasis on those right above our keyboards. One thing they have in common is that they remain impenetrable.

Matrix or Marx?

Sep 222011
 

“Something went wrong around the start of the 21st century.” It sounds like something Morpheus might have said to Neo, no? It’s actually from the back cover of the book I am reading right now.

Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century. The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, is more for machines than people.

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

All that free stuff on the net is making it really difficult for us to concentrate on what might be missing. Yet, it is no longer enough to be a happy user. The soft stream of novelty and convenience is turning us into living batteries. We think we are users, yet we are already products. It’s happening fast and it’s not easy to notice. Revolution might be overlooked.

I warmly recommend Jaron Lanier’s book. If you would like an appetizer, here is an one hour video of Jaron Lanier explaining some of the things he’s been thinking about lately.

Networks and neighborhoods

Sep 022011
 

I keep thinking about this picture ever since I first saw it.

It was taken at a closing-down Borders store in Chicago. I believe the true subject of the sign, which may well have been unintended, reaches far beyond this short and humorous comment.

It really depends on how you read it. It might be the work of a young, devoted, innocent anger. Like my own, only a bit younger. It might be pointing their last customers towards the closest functional restroom facilities. According to one Boing Boing comment, Google Street View shows that a thematic restaurant, named Amazon, is just around the corner.

Sadly, those comments can no longer be seen, and a Google search for “closing+borders+sign” doesn’t return many interesting reads. One mostly learns about convenience and price advantages on the one side, and bad management on the other. And toilets, of course. But somehow, I really doubt this is about toilets.

To me there’s something in this picture. Some kind of logical error. Something that, like an arrow, points into a direction yet unknown to me. Into a direction I might not be skilled enough to think about.

It asks. It poses a question. Like all good art (and that is how I understand the above sign), it poses a valid question. It relates our reality to the realm of the unreal yet possible.

It reminds me of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs:

Kosuth

In my view, they both explore different levels of reality.

Maybe it points towards a future in which styrofoam eventually replaces stone.

Maybe it is about the difference between neighborhood and network.

Maybe it points toward Singularity in which digital restrooms replace the real ones, and we never ever have to worry about our real neighbors, our real needs, our real relationships. Red or blue pill?

Of course, maybe it is all just my imagination. You see, I find it hard to think about possible futures and not to think of George Orwell – one retailer, one publisher, one customer database.

I prefer diversity. I like to be able to choose where to get my cup of coffee. I prefer diversity buying croissants, zucchinis, books or shoes.

I believe we should continue to develop, cultivate and think about our networks. But we must not ignore the danger of them smoothing the way towards an overwhelming power to but a few strongholds.

I think our networks should not endanger our neighborhoods. They are here to enhance and improve our lives. To widen the realm of possible, not to narrow it.