East Berlin to a foreign visitor was a bleak city devoid of
billboard advertisements and the consumer luxury goods in shops
one was accustomed to in Western Europe and North America. West
Berlin contrasted its other half with bright lights and
department stores on the Kudamm. Foreigners had to exchange 25
DMs (German Marks) for the same in East German currency upon
entry into East Berlin. There was really nothing to buy except
an overpriced lunch in the main hotel. In West Berlin,
residents were paid subsidy by the federal government to live
there.
Then to everyone's amazement, the wall opened.
TV coverage of the Berlin Wall's fall differed greatly between
German and the U.S. A German television crew set up a camera
and let it roll as events at the wall unfolded. American
television flew in network news anchors, stood them in front of
the wall and fresh from the flughafen they "explained" what was
taking place all around them.
It wasn't long after the dancing and celebration ended that
night clubs opened in abandoned buildings in the East and
American Express opened an office in a prominent location (as
if they had already chosen the spot.)
Eventually, the world would hear the stories of East German
secret police the Stasi and their
files.
Pieces of the Berlin Wall today in Leipziger Platz
across from the Canadian Embassy
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I don't think we're in the food chain anymore, Dorothy."
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
T-Mobile has stopped sales of its Sidekick phones listing all
models on its website as Temporarily
Out of Stock in wake of a massive and, so far, unexplained
server failure.
Sidekick phones, produced by a subsidiary of Microsoft, are
made to send e-mail and text messages quickly. The phones
link to a service operated by Microsoft that maintains a
backup of their owners’ data.
Microsoft’s servers failed on Oct. 2, cutting off
Sidekick users from e-mail, Web browsing and most other
services apart from voice calls and text messages.
Those services were restored over the next week. But in the
process, data on the Sidekick server and its backup server
became corrupted.
As
reported, someone else's data center may not always be the
best place to keep your calendar,
contacts, photographs and messages, if you do not have your own
back-up and your data is not in a
open format you can readily move.
Reuven Cohen
points out how such incidents such as this crash may
not be the end of cloud computing,
but point to the importance of being able to take your data
somewhere else:
This failure hits at the heart of why interoperability and
data portability is so important. It comes down to bad
things happen and I should have the ability to take the
data that is mine if I choose to do so, easily.
Microsoft bought the Sidekick maker Danger last year as a
defensive move against Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry.
Several of Danger's original developers had been recruited by
Apple and co-founder Andy Rubin
joined Google as director of mobile platforms.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
For me this is a season of hope - new hope for a
justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just
for the few - new hope.
And this is the cause of my life - new hope that we
will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every
American - north, south, east, west, young, old - will
have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right
and not a privilege.
- Ted Kennedy at the Democratic National
Convention on
August 25, 2008
An Inuit folk tale tells us when people die they go into the
sky and become bright shining stars.
John Hughes leaves here on earth a shining and comical
collection of his own tales, as some film clips of his teenage
movies, in particular, remind us.
For his fifty-nine years on the planet he had extensive
credits as shown on Baseline. Baseline's founder summed it
up well here:
In an unusually focused group of films in the mid-eighties
(Sixteen Candles, 1984; Weird Science, 1985;
Pretty in Pink, 1986; Ferris Bueller's Day
Off, 1986; Uncle Buck, 1989), all set in the
same Chicago suburb, writer-producer-director Hughes
examined the roots of Generation X before anyone realized
it existed. He did so with such understanding and style,
displaying a sensitivity to adolescent concerns and
middle-class family life that is as rare as it is precise.
- James Monaco, How to Read a Film
The Chicago Tribune shared some
local insight on his films and life in the Chicago area. A
number of blogs by those who grew up with his work, such as
this
fan, recalled Hughes' most memorable lines of dialogue such
as one from the 1985 film, The Breakfast Club:
Screws fall out all the time, it’s an imperfect world.
On Sunday night, Merce Cunningham passed away in his
New York home. He was 90 years old. Dancer, choreographer,
teacher. That evening, his dance company was performing at
Jacob's Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts.
Cunningham's RainForest with Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds
First performed 1968
“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you
nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to
show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be
printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment
when you feel alive.
Maybe you have seen images, like the one above, from
Cunningham's pieces or have seen the dances performed live. We
remember one viewing in which an aging Cunningham appeared on
stage crouching and pigeon toed captivating the audience with
his twitching and precise movement like an impish bird of
nature. Cunningham's work was full of such moments, however
abstract. For a lifetime of creating such moments, audiences
will forever be grateful.
Mary Emma Harris writes in her book The Arts at Black
Mountain College (MIT Press) how in the spring of 1948,
John Cage and Merce Cunningham visited the college in
North Carolina on a tour to the West Coast.
Cage gave the first performance of his recently completed
Sonatas and Interludes (February 1946-March 1948)
for prepared piano, and Cunningham danced. To demonstrate
their delight and appreciation, the faculty and students
loaded their car with gifts of food and paintings when they
left...
The Kansas Citian published its own
chronology of the first 99 days.
The Economist compared Obama's approval rating at 100 days
with other U.S. Presidents.
The Wall
Street Journal headlined Obama "engaged, yet elusive" while
acknowledging, of course, that these times defy easy
descriptions and old labels. The Journal put the first one
hundred in historical
perspective as did the New York Times which asked
five
historians for their view.
The Takeway
talked to Nobel economist Paul Krugman.
Mr. Manning (in the Mechanic's Dungarees) dances up a storm in
the 1941 movie Hellzapoppin.
Excelling in what quickly became first America’s and
then the world’s most popular participatory form of
jazz dancing in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Manning led
the way in giving the Lindy hop professional
expression. The dance, which enables both partners to
improvise rhythmically at the same time, has had
enduring appeal as both a social and a performance
dance, sweeping aside hierarchical, class, ethnic and
gender conventions. When questioned about the
apparently irresistible allure of the Lindy, Mr.
Manning invariably described it as “a series of
three-minute romances."
In those youthful days when life seemed boundless, one summer
in Connecticut we slept in a pup tent to the sound of chirping
crickets and badgers screeching in the middle of the night.
Daytime was quieter and spent in ballet and modern dance class:
diamond shaped plies contrasted Martha Graham exercises of
contract and release "Breathe in/breathe out." Most, if not
all, of the summer dance teachers and choreographers lived in
New York, the epicenter of the modern dance and theater world.
One day at lunch we said to our teacher Daniel
Nagrin, "It seems all arrows lead to New York."
"You can get stabbed on an arrow," he replied.
Nevertheless, some time later when an opportunity to live and
work in Manhattan arose, we packed our bags for New York
without hesitation.
Lee Nagrin and Daniel Nagrin
In New York we got to know Lee Nagrin who created her
own performance pieces in her studio on Bleecker Street and
performed in those of avant-garde artists like Meredith
Monk and Ping Chong.
Mr. Nagrin eventually moved to Arizona and retired. When a
journalist
asked him in 2007 if he missed New York, he exclaimed, "Ha!
I do, I do, I do."
We will miss Daniel Nagrin. Fortunately his work is preserved
for future generations of dancers to perform and audiences to
enjoy. He is survived by his wife, Phyllis Steele
Nagrin.
Time, Space and Dynamics
The only space that interests me
is the distance
between you and me.
The only time that interests me
is the little we have left
to make a decent gesture.
The only dynamic that interests me
is the tenderness of your embrace
and the memory of the fist
that broke my face.
I look to the time when
there will be sweet air
and room for all.
Then will I have the leisure
to arrange three soft lines
on a sheet of pebbly paper
and listen to them
sing to each other
- Daniel Nagrin, Choreography and the Specific
Image
Daniel Nagrin, Solo
