Por que me obliga a ver con atención lo que me rodea.

Sony’s Cybershot series and a bunch of other cameras promise to

Automatically capture smiles with Smile Shutter™ technology and focus easily with Steady Shot mode.

I imagine a commercial for these cameras soundtracked by an REM mashup: Bad Day vs. Shiny Happy People.

After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

The quote and picture are taken from the Smithsonian Institution’s flickr stream. I wonder when we’ll be able to send children through email.

via Kottke

These new Sony Cybershot cameras have smile detection. This means that, if you turn on the “happy face” function, the shutter will automatically go only when it senses that the subject is smiling.

So, from now on it is against the rules to be sad or grumpy. Just as you are expected to say “fine” whenever someone asks you how you are doing, now you won’t show up in pictures unless you smile.

It reminds me of an R.E.M. song that says: “it’s been a bad day, please don’t take a picture”. There you go Michael Stipe, you’re clear.

My last post got me thinking about non-places. By non-places I mean either places that once were and now cease to exist or places that only exist in the imagination but are somehow very real.

Of the real places that ceased to exist, I think of the last scene in the amazing film Underground. There is a family gathering and the ground underneath the table suddenly begins to crack and drift apart, separating the family members into difrent islets. It is, of course, a pretty straightforward metaphor for the divided Yugoslavia. It is also magical and unforgetable. Eastern Europe has several other cases. The most interesting one is the Republic of Naaru, which I first heard of on this episode of This American Life. Naaru has a wonderful story which deserves a post just to itself. The intersting thing about it, as a non-place, is that it’s a tiny island-state that, on top of being exploited to near-extinction by its own inhabitants, is soon to be swallowed by the rising sea-levels. In short, it is a place on the verge of becoming a non-place.

Of the fantastic non-places, the obvious would be Alice’s Wonderland, Peter’s Neverland, Narnia, Middle Earth, and so on. My favorite, by far, would have to be be Gabriel García Marquez’s Macondo. I’ll leave this gem to the Spanish speakers in the room:

José Arcadio Buendía, que era el hombre más emprendedor que se vería jamás en la aldea, había dispuesto de tal modo la posición de las casas, que desde todas podía llegarse al río y abastecerse de agua con igual esfuerzo, y trazó las calles con tan buen sentido que ninguna casa recibía más sol que otra a la hora del calor. En pocos años, Macondo fue una aldea más ordenada y laboriosa que cualquiera de las conocidas hasta entonces por sus 300 habitantes. Era en verdad una aldea feliz, donde nadie era maor de treinta años y donde nadie había muerto.

I can’t imagine a better description of paradise.

UPDATE: Cuba is also non-place, for the way it is remembered by those who left.

Even though the Soviet Union is extinct, you can still use the .su domain.

Para quien no entiende el mexicano, el título de este post, en venezolano, sería algo así como “¿Lo guarro es fino?”. Hoy, por desgracia, me volví a tropezar en YouTube con un video que vi hace tiempo y me puse a pensar en una posible corriente estética, muy latinoamericana, que tiene que ver con el mal gusto llevado al extremo.

Para hacer un contraste absoluto con el post anterior, les dejo con tres ejemplos dignos de esta tendencia imposible de ignorar (perdón Enrique, pero confío en que tu, incluso aquí, podrías encontrar algo que valga la pena… si lo haces, dime qué es):

Primer Lugar: La Tigresa del Oriente

Segundo Lugar: Francisco y Fernando

Tercer Lugar: Yasuri Yamileth

 

¿Qué opinas? ¿Está chido o no tanto?

I am fortunate to have many very talented friends. Some of these I consider my foils (read this post to know what I mean). Enrique Gonzalez Muller is certainly on of these friends. If I had to choose one single person responsible for getting me into music, it would have to be Enrique, with his toy Casio keyboard when we were 9.

Enrique took music seriously and has made it his way of life. He works in San Francisco and Italy and has been producing amazing albums for an amazing array of artist. I probably shouldn’t say this, but he even smuggled out of a studio the original lyrics sheet, printed out and handwritten, of Dave Matthew’s “Grey Street” from the album “Busted Stuff”, in which Enrique recorded the voices.

I have never seen Enrique work professionally, but we made a lot of music together throughout high-school and I think I know him well enough to imagine him in action. Enrique is disciplined, schooled, a perfectionist, and a lot of all the other things one needs to be successful in anything. But above all, I would saw Enrique is entusiastic. You can see this in everything he does, from the way he greets to the way he writes emails with caps and !!! and eeeeven very expressive, even EXPLOSSSSIVE acsi art. In music listening this enthusiasm translates to a very eclectic taste. Enrique has the wisdom to find something worthwhile in everything he listens to. He picks up on it and gets inspired. I am sure that when he is producing records, working closely with artists and bands, he finds a way to GET not only their music, but their groove and their vibe. I can see Enrique getting excited not only by what he hears them do, but by what he imagines they can do. This entusiasm, of course, is contagious. So his “clients” end up trusting Enrique, absorbing some of that enthusiasm back and drilling it into their music.

Enrique has had the luck to meet and work with many of his heroes: Metallica, Les Claypool, Joe Satriani, Desorden Público, Tina Turner, and the list goes on. Recently, Enrique worked with Kronos Quartet on this album. Later on, when Kronos got a commission from Trent Reznor to remix a NIN track from Year Zero, they turned to Enrique. It turns out that Kronos don’t compose their own music, so they asked Enrique not only to produce, but to write, arrange, and produce the song they would record. The song, Another Version of the Truth, eventually came out in the album Year Zero Remixed, with Enrique’s credit in the track list!

Here is the original NIN song:

Here is the Kronos + Enrique González Muller version (in my opinion, the best part starts at 1:46):

Aren’t you proud of my friend? I am.

An aside, here is a very interesting post on enthusiasm.