blues (and reds and greens...)

If you're paying attention, you're at attention.

Taj Mahal, 26 November 2004 - Live at Jazz Alley


To be in a room with Taj is to be carried away on laid-back Hawaiian waves of laughter; to hear the swelling longing-respect-emotions of chortles and squeals; to smell the tide of life and love; to touch the energy of melodies and lyrics; to see an optimistic horizon - colorful and vibrant.

Translating Bucky

During only the last few decades of the three and a half million years within which humans now are known to have been living aboard our planet Earth have the behavioral clues been increasingly sufficient to suggest that all humans, including the assumed-to-be "illiterates" and "spastics," are born with a comprehensive and superb inventory of subjectively apprehending and synergetically comprehending faculties -- as well as objectively articulating capabilities.

Buckminster Fuller, "Critical Path"

I've read this paragraph several times this weekend and I can't figure out exactly what Bucky means. The first two faculties seem straightforward: we are born with a large assortment of good quality faculties that include 1. the ability to derive understanding through reasoning and 2. the ability of the various aspects of the mind to work together to create understanding that could not be derived from an indivudal part. Does the third ("objectively articulating") mean "the ability to describe in words what we observe" Or does it encapsulate the first two to mean "the understanding that we have derived through our senses and thinking?"

The year 2026 through a 1927's lens

There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.

This weekend I watched Metropolis and enjoyed Fritz Lang's 1927's vision of the technologies available in the year 2026.

Despite Rotwang's ability to create a "machine man" (robot) that is indistinguishable from a human, humans power the machines of the city. My favorite machine has a person-sized clock face with two "hands" and a lightbulb at each number, reminding me of a carnival game and likely inspired by Luna Park. When a bulb lights, the worker moves one of the two hands to point at the bulb. By the end of his 10 hour shift, Freder is so tired he is barely able to move the hands. What does this machine do? If it knew which lights to light, why couldn't it move the hands to those positions? I hate to think that all of Freder's sweat was in vain.

Metropolis was made the same year that the television was invented and twenty years before the Eniac - so it is not surprising that Fritz anticipated computing machines but he wasn't quite sure how to put them to use. In one scene, Joh Fredersen, the ruler of Metropolis, and his computers (in the original sense of the word - "mathematicians performing computations") watch symbols scroll up a twenty foot tall wall (a stock ticker?). The computers are writing so furiously on pads of paper, that they are mopping sweat off of their foreheads. Joh paces the room working equations in the air with his finger ("air math?" ha). In the background, blinking lights indicate that there are machines present, even though all they appear to do is move the symbols up the wall. If only each of the computers had a machine to perform the computations for them...

As with "The Fifth Element" and "Futurama," traffic bisects the city at various heights. Unlike these films, the traffic doesn't hover: cars, trains, and pedestrians travel on elevated tracks and roads while biplanes glide through as slowly and aimlessly as butterflies. Biplanes! tee hee.

What will people in 2103 think of The Matrix: the Merovingian's train station, The Architect's multi-screen chamber, and the Nebakanezer's dentist chairs?