No Boundaries

It’s been a while.  A few small projects have jumped up here and there and I’ve been busy redoing my own site. Please excuse the mess. I’m at a stage now where I like having it both up and under construction at the same time. It may be a while before I get around to finishing things up completely (separate style sheet for the iPad). I have a lot of galleries to tend to and will be in fairly substantial trouble if I get busy with other things — having put stuff up while only partially complete.

Much has happened in the  feud, war, imbroglio or whatever between Apple and Adobe since my last post.  I hesitate to use the word amazing, but it does seem appropriate. This morning NPR mentioned that the Feds are getting involved. It would be good, I think, for a few enlightening rays of sunshine to find some way into the story. That may be what the Federal government can provide. On the other hand I hate to see things come down to Federal investigations and the lawsuits that often ensue thereafter.

Since my last post, the Wall Street Journal has reported that modifications to the Apple OS, made by Apple, are likely responsible for many of the problems that Apple users are encountering with Flash; Apple, in an out-of-nowhere unilateral swipe has excluded Flash developers from the iPhone/iPad platform via language in the developer’s agreement; Google has responded by jumping right into bed with all of the spurned Flash developers (May 20th should be an exciting day as the Flash – Android marriage is formally announced); Apple has patented pretty much every conceivable hand gesture; Steve Jobs penned a really long letter about Flash; Microsoft has canned the Courier; HP has dropped the Slate and picked up Palm; Adobe’s top Flash evangelist has used the “screw” word in formal reference to Apple; Adobe has released CS5; and now rumors of the Federal inquiry into Apple. Wow. These are exciting times. I’m thinking that Adobe  has the upper hand at present, but it all is starting to look like a lengthy prize fight where the lead changes every other round and both combatants leave in worse shape than they began.

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Here we go. The calendar has rolled around again to the beginning of yet another baseball season. It is the all-too-often-way-too-brief period when those of us, who are faithful to the mighty Chicago Cubs, can truly believe that all will go well and that this year is, indeed, the year of Cubby Blue and not the Cubby blues. Those who can’t comprehend should contemplate Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”. He understood what it is to be a Cub’s fan: that there is an absurd pleasure in the act of rolling of the rock to the top of the hill, only to somehow find it at the bottom again, and begin the process anew. As a child of sunny summer places, he knew that: if you are under the open afternoon sky and it is summer and you are alive, things can’t really be all that bad.

This new year finds us in heady and important days for the late-middle parts of a rather nasty recession. Apple has, perhaps, forced an enormous change in the way we consume our, well, everything; a new iteration of Adobe’s Creative Suite is about to appear as if from nowhere; and, at least where I live, Spring has suffered an enormous setback. A whole passel of nasty storms, over a five-day period, has dumped 30 to 50 inches of fresh whiteness all over the Wasatch Mountains at the close of what had been a snow-depleted Winter. This results in a temporary suspension of belief in the concept of Spring which can only be relieved with the onset of televised baseball from distant lands.

The assault on Flash by Apple and the belief that this will result in a resurgence of an economically-viable old media in modified form is the really big story: a thing that may make a difference in the way people go about their lives five-years hence.  Whether this will all pan out remains to be seen. The success of the “magical device” and pending tablets of similar functionality is undeniable. That this will resuscitate old media is a much dicier question. The answer is probably no and this last hopeful emergence is a bit of a sad ghost-dance. It would be a very good thing if everyone who watches kittens-flushing-toilets on YouTube suddenly switched to reading lengthy articles, full of thought, complicated sentence structure and good design, on their portable devices. Unfortunately this great hope for a new world order relies on a certain sensibility on the part of the public which has, long ago, left the building. Free is difficult to beat as well. If the accumulators of others work could just disappear before those who actually do the work which is accumulated, that would be a small step in the right direction.

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A flawed film that changes everything.

OOh OOh I am so excited.  I’ve lost some of my love for the concept of winter. We all fall prey to this moment at some point in life and my time came a while back.  So I could gladly toss my last shovel-full of driveway fluff  (although for some reason or another fluff is in extremely short supply in Park City this year). I’ve also never been much for the holidays. So the one thing that makes winter for me these days is the Sundance film festival and it is just around the corner.  I’ve lucked out again and landed a very high spot in the local’s ticket lottery, allowing me my choice of flicks.  And, there is to be a nice digital presence (seminars on the making of movie marketing with social networks and the new internet) which I intend to check out.  Fourteen films and as many seminars as I can get into should keep my mind whirling.  Which, of course, is my favorite condition of the human condition.

I’m especially interested in Howl (Ginsberg deserves more credit for his influence on everything that came after), Freedom Riders (my journalist parents were part of that whole scene), and films covering John Lennon as a pup and Jean-Michel Basquiat as … (well, you know).  My eldest daughter is forcing me to attend a 3D flick about toads that take over Australia.  Her taste in films is of notorious ill repute.

Since my last post I’ve seen Avatar in 3D and think that everyone who enjoys cinema owes James Cameron a good deal of thanks.  I’m not a Cameron fan per se, having seen only one of the Terminator movies and not having seen Titanic.  On many levels Avatar is bad film.  The plot is tired and clearly directed at reconsideration of American involvement in Iraq.  I have been against that particular war from the get-go, but think the standard progressive take on it (that we did it for the oil)  is almost as lame as the standard conservative take (that we did it because Sadam was a bad bad man and we are a moral country). The answer can be found in a quick gander at the French conflict in Algeria in the early sixties I suspect.  But that is a bit off topic.  Also the aliens are aesthetically lacking.  Many have compared them to smurfs, I think gumby is a better match.

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I’ve run into the same post on a half-dozen blogs recently.  It varies a little from place to place, but this is the gist of it:  ” I just wanted to let you know.  FLASH IS BAD.  IT KILLS LOTS OF PUPPIES.  That’s why we don’t do it anymore.  Ever.  Talk to us and we will save you.”  Please insert any derogatory and relatively baseless comment you wish for that above.  Self-serving Flash-bashing is afoot upon the land.  Flash now rivals Elvis Presley’s hips as something that should never be seen by the children.

My favorite so far was a post on Smashing Magazine which reported the results of a survey of designer portfolio sites and concluded that only a small fraction use Flash.  Way way down at the bottom it went on to say that the sites of designers who use motion (aka Flash) were excluded from the survey.  Something of a head-scratcher.

The hyperbole appears to be inversely correlative with the economy.

The thing most often cited in the “Flash is dangerous” posts is search engine optimization.  This is not a problem without many solutions.  It reminds me of a realtor telling a home-owner to mow over the three-acre rose garden because it can’t be seen from the front of the house.  Curb appeal and search engine optimization run in the same circles.

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For a variety of reasons, listed below, I’m rebuilding  pieces of my site.  The core page will be about the same with a few random artistic flourishes tossed in.  The peripheral bits are to change quite a bit.  I’m about half way through.  It’s a matter of tackling things here and there that have bothered me a little but not enough to jump in and fix.  It remains a work in continual progress. So, if you are ever on it, and things go weird, it is because I’m working on that particular piece and it’s undergoing experimentation (empirical evaluation of the new), or I’ve put it up without testing it and it indeed requires some testing.

I remember an excerpt from a biography of the composer Charles Mingus wherein one of his first important influences, in the how of building art, is described as being a fellow, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, who spent much of his life experimenting, building, demolishing, and rebuilding a tower made of glass bottle-fragments embedded in concrete.   All for the mere pleasure of seeing how things looked throughout the process.  I apparently have a similar affliction.  My apologies if you find yourself in a corner where things aren’t quite working as one would expect.

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