Shortly after the Wachowski Brothers released a film called The Matrix in 1999, I got a job on a film shooting in Hendersonville, North Carolina about summer camp and spent a beautiful month and a half in a small cottage reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. It was a potent combination – the movie and the book; what the Matrix was doing for me spiritually, Kurzweil’s book seemed to be prepared to manifest on Earth.

Cut to a decade later, where I will be attending my fifth consecutive NAB Show – the largest tech and entertainment media show of its kind in the world – and have the opportunity to see Kurzweil actually speak in person for a power session entitled “The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Media, Communications, and Society.”

Kurzweil will begin the session with a presentation on how information technology is transforming traditional industries, including media and entertainment, into infotech businesses. He will explore how the exponential growth of technology and the influx of new chip-driven tools is upending free enterprise as we know it and paving the way for an unparalleled change in human history. After his presentation, Kurzweil will be joined on the stage by Professor Donald Marinelli for a special discussion highlighting topics that directly impact Hollywood and the entertainment technology arena.

This is precisely what I have been asked to speak about throughout most of my career – the confluence of technology and the arts – so you can imagine how excited I am to hear these two go on about it.

To give you a better idea about Kurzweil’s relevance (besides the fact that he invented speech recognition technology) he has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes and ranked 8th among entrepreneurs in the United States by Inc. magazine. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is a six-time national bestselling author whose works include “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “The Singularity is Near.” Which reminds me, Kurzweil also recently spearheaded the opening of The Singularity University where he invites the world’s foremost thinkers, doctors and technicians to figure out how to live forever, in harmony, probably with robots. And he is totally serious. And he might even pull it off.

Donald Marinelli is a tenured professor of drama and arts management at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the executive producer of that institution’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). The ETC is recognized internationally as Carnegie Mellon’s “Dream Fulfillment Factory.” Its emphasis is on bringing artists and technologists together to work on substantive, real-world projects combining the latest digital media technologies with myriad artistic, educational, and entertainment efforts. Marinelli’s book “The Comet & the Tornado” will be released on April 6th.

This event joins an impressive line-up of previously announced keynote conversations, including Dana Walden and Gary Newman, Chairmen of Twentieth Century Fox Television (TCFTV); and Stan Lee, the iconic comic book visionary who co-created Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Fantastic Four.

“A key theme of this year’s NAB Show is transmedia: developing, integrating and monetizing content for multiplatform distribution,” said Chris Brown, executive vice president, conventions & business operations for NAB Show. “Stan Lee has epitomized the concept of transmedia with his amazing creations, which have been turned into smash hit feature films, television series and innovative digital content.”

Did I already mention how excited I am?   This is like Christmas for prognosticators like me, never mind robotics fans. And manifesting dreams.  And wanting to live forever.  And SEO types.  And comic books.

The NAB Show will take place 10-15 April, 2010 in Las Vegas (exhibits open 12 April). It is the world’s largest electronic media show covering filmed entertainment and the development, management and delivery of content across all mediums. Complete details are available at www.nabshow.com.

The post Inventor Ray Kurzweil and Comic Book Icon Stan Lee To Speak at 2010 NAB Show In Vegas appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Crumb

This is the film that first made me hyper-conscious of self-imposed, voluntary corporate branding as illustrator Robert Crumb observes that “these days” everyone is walking around wearing t-shirts and clothing advertising one company or another.  But the effects of this film cast a far wider net than mere corporate aversion.

Crumb is a complex man from a complex family; his two elder brothers are geniuses in their own right but each is also more mentally disturbed than the next which leads me to wonder, in this case with much greater emphasis than normal, whether it is the the anomalies and deviations from what is considered a “healthy, normal” mind that give rise to great art or whether it is the life of an artist that give rise to mental instability.  Of course there is no definitive answer but this film’s utterly deviant subjects underline that the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Required viewing.

In the Realms of the Unreal – The Mystery of Henry Darger – Dir: Jessica Yu

Continuing on this theme of mental instability and visionary creativity, here we have as our subject an ascetic, anti-social man about whom even his lifelong neighbors knew very little.

A janitor and avid church-goer, no one knew, until he was moved to a convalescent home in his final weeks on Earth, that in his single apartment he had written a fifteen-thousand page fantasy novel with profoundly complex and beautiful illustrations wherein all the young girls who were the subjects of his very innocent-spirited magnum opus (and even that is understatement) had penises – more than likely because he didn’t know better.  The study of his work is a study of how the mind attempts to heal it wounds – Darger was sent to boarding schools and even a sanitarium in his childhood – all of which he works out in the course of his book.

Rivers and Tides – Dir: Thomas Riedelsheimer

This documentary about nature-artist Andy Goldsworthy will, unequivocally change your life. using only things found in the natural world, he synchronizes himself with the patterns found in the world and ultimately finds a way to render found objects in a manner that pursues and underlines their energy.

Not only is it a fitting introduction to this extraordinary soul, but Fred Frith’s score perfectly punctuates this delicate process throughout.

Highly recommended. Beautiful beyond belief.

Surfwise: The Amazing True Odyssey of the Paskowitz Family – Dir: Doug Pray

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz is another man who turned his back on the conventions of society and decided to raise his nine children in a dilapidated RV, teaching them what he felt were the true values and virtues of life.  An expert surfer, and Stanford-educated physician who was head of the medical association in Hawaii, Paskowitz’ extraordinarily liberal views manifested different results in each of his children.  Living on a strict organic food regimen and making do with as little money as possible, this is a study in what it might mean to live virtually off the grid, for better or worse, and whether or not that is any longer possible.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill – Dir: Judy Irving

Concerning the life of homeless musician Mark Bittner who befriends a wild flock of stray parrots that live in San Francisco city proper.  What begins with a seemingly innocuous birdseed hobby becomes a life unto itself and he transforms into a kind of Francis of Assissi to this displaced, growing flock.  He conjectures the flock began as a group of runaway pets that found each other and eventually began breeding in the wild.  Mark champions them when public outcries by environmentalists to exterminate them so as to ensure the stability of the local ecosystem take on City Hall.  This film teaches a lot more than birdkeeping, however, as it observes what dynamics may unfold when we open our arms and our hearts to realities of the present and the abundance that exists in our ever changing world.

Man on Wire – Dir: James Marsh

I get vertigo even thinking about this film, let alone looking at the cover photo.  But yes, it is real – Phillipe Petit, a French tighrope walker, conspired, coordinated and ultimately manifested his ultimate dream – to walk a tightrope between the very top of the World Trade Center Twin Towers.  He pulled this off without any sanctions from the city of New York or permits whatsoever.  This document of the event is made even more amazing by the fact that the Twin Towers are no longer there.  Likely to be nominated for an Oscar in 2009, this is easily a film that will irrevocably change your expectations of what can be done while here on Earth.

Sharkwater – Dir: Rob Stewart

Speeding along on the inspirational humans train, we come to Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater that I had the great fortune of seeing when it had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival several years back.  Rob Stewart was, of course, in attendance, and confided that he simply set out to make a film about the ocean, and his love for sharks.  What he ended up with, however, is a precursor to Al Gore’s much more ballyhooed Inconvenient Truth; Stewart discovers that his beloved predators are being siphoned out of existence by the hundreds of thousands as the illegal shark-finning trade (that is, hunting the sharks for their prized fins and then dropping them, alive, back into the ocean) becomes ever more voracious.

Stewart gets arrested, deported, threatened by global blackmarket gangs and even goes undercover in some very dangerous locales after all of this, to bring us a critical warning: if we wipe out the top of the food chain, we wipe ourselves and everything below it out as well.  Suddenly Jaws seems like the worst kind of demonizer.  Much like Fatal Attraction did for empowering women back in the 80’s.  Shark Week will never be the same.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston – Dir: Jeff Feuerzeig

My favorite short story of all time is not The Lottery, but rather “Light Verse” by Issac Asimov wherein an irreplaceable broken robot is discovered to be the secret source of an artists unrepeatable holographic light sculptures.  When it is repaired, as a favor, by a visiting robotics specialist, she murders the man for having tinkered with her glitchy android worker.

Daniel Johnston sees devils, fears more things than you can count on your hands and contends with all manner of mental illness ranging from manic depression, schizophrenia, narcissism and bipolar disorder, and he is also considered to be one of the musical geniuses of our time by such luninaries as Curt Cobain and Thurston Moore.   Utterly self-obsessed to the point of exasperation, this doc provides an exahustive insight into Johnston’s world.

Dark Days – Dir: Marc Singer

Whoa.  Just – whoa.  I am not sure which is the real documentary I am referring to here: the film about secret underground village of homeless people living in an abandoned train tunnel in New York City, or the making-of documentary about director Marc Singer who gave up everything to make this film and ultimately find these people something better.  Perhaps because I was playing Bethesda’s Fallout 3, a first-person-shooter about the world after a massive nuclear holocaust, that tempered my response to this film.  Even then, I was still picking my jaw up off the floor.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara – Dir: Errol Morris

A composite interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a former president of Ford Motors, and a chief manager of the Vietnam war, reveals the complex decisions that must be made concerning war, career and the bottom line.  Regardless of your political leaning, exposure to McNamara’s perspective on all of these will expand and diversify, and perhaps even muddle your own arguments and considerations when opining on what is best and what is acheiveable in the fog of war.

The film won Morris the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

The post Ten Documentaries About Men That Will Change Your Life appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Then the my mother’s Ecuadorian traditions took over. We would return from Mass to open presents until two or three in the morning. Often the most bearded member of the family would play the surrogate Santa Clause and everyone would take turns accepting gifts from him and take pictures and so on.

Our house was the central HQ for the holiday season and so all the uncles and aunts and their growing legions of offspring would descend upon it. We could numbers in the dozens and the piles of wrapping paper could become quite formidable.

These traditions often came with some bemoaning as we opined about the gluttony and greed and consumerism, but also they maintained something else that was very important – the spirit of togetherness in a time of year that becomes quite cold and quiet and dark. It was a reminder that we all came from somewhere and that the things we believe, our perception of the world has direct roots to our upbringing. They also provided some sense of constancy in such a volatile reality and thus afforded us an anchor in the storm.

Years ago I studied Kaballah under the tutelage of a mystic named Gahl Sasson. One year, when I couldn’t make it home for Christmas, Gahl talked about a pattern that existed among all the great religions and traditions at this time of year – that is – that they all celebrated the Light in one form or another. I never forgot this teaching and was never quite so jaded about the holidays again. I Googled Gahl and sure enough he had a recent blog entry recapitulating what he had taught us in that ashram years ago. Rather than paraphrase I include a quote from his blog at CosmicNavigator here:

“The winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, is the day we encounter the least amount of light. The winter solstice has proven to be rather traumatic for many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere. As we progress toward the winter solstice, the days are stripped of their light. Everything becomes dark and gloomy. Early stargazers and shamans recognized this phenomenon and its deleterious effect on human mood and behavior…Bears have found a practical solution to winter depression. They just go to sleep. Psychologists devised a different remedy. They expose the patient to light. They call it light therapy.

[snip]

All over the world, wise elders, storytellers, religious teachers, and astrologers lit upon another solution. I am sure that you and your family have already practiced this same preventive medicine many times before. It’s called the holiday season, or to be more specific, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Saturnalia, and Yule, just to name a few. Our astute ancestors, like modern day psychologists, could not help but notice that people’s moods sour as the days grow shorter. Versed in the practical applications of the ancient alchemical axiom of “as above, so below,” they figured that as the light slowly disappeared above, people’s energy levels declined correspondingly below. In order to enliven their communities, these ancients decided to concoct holiday festivities to crown the winter solstice with special significance. During the darkest time of the year, they created the holidays of light.”

Indeed as I walk through my neighborhood in Hollywood, California, I reflect upon the strings of white Christmas lights adorning the hedgerows in front of people’s homes and recognize that they are reminding us of the little lights in the darkness.

This was a fascinating and challenging year. The economy faced a shakedown the likes of which we haven’t experience in half a century.  Dozens, if not hundreds of major corporations, banks, and even industries went under. The game changed in so many ways that we were simply forced to surrender expectation to be able to maintain any semblance of sanity as we were tossed around the storm of change and entropy.

We also saw America elect the most unlikely of candidates into the Presidency. Barack Obama was an essentially untried politician whose message of hope and desire for change captured the imagination of not only the country but of the world.

I began the year by releasing a humble solo music album. I had fifteen years experience launching albums and thought that my knowledge and wisdom in the music market would serve me well. What I found was quite different. Gone was the interest of print media, even handmade indie Zines, as was the process of submitting a music video for television broadcast or even college radio. In its place were music micro blogs, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, free music streams, linkback directories, and handing out CDs for free in the hundreds of units. Before I was a prophet of guerilla marketing. Now I was a podcaster, a blogger, a new media consultant. All because I recorded a small intimate collection of acoustic songs that I wrote in the windy forests of Northern Ontario, Canada.

I proclaimed the death of Web2.0 – that world of social linking and networking. I decried the glut of intentionally made viral videos and begged for the next phase, one that had already become comfortable with the ubiquity and reach of the new broadcasting power afforded to anyone with a webcam, and created something of substance, art and depth.

I may have been radically premature in these proclamations, however the bell tolls.

I am a different person at the end of 2008 than I was at its outset. I have been exposed to very powerful tools that track how people shop, think and behave, though I look at their thought processes in terms of keywords and statistics.

When I removed myself from Facebook, I felt a strange void, as though a giant lead wall had been erected between me and social network. As though I was the last man on Earth. And yet my hope and desire was that my self-imposed exile would restore the warmth and intimacy of those relationships.

I started reading more books, more of the time as a result. I took more walks out in the world. I recommenced drawing, exploring various hobbies like Lomo photography, model-making, cooking.

And now as we face the shortest days of light in the year, I can see the little beacons of humanity set out on those front lawns, reminding us that someone is still home. They are displaying those strings of little hopes that say, its alright, the world may be at its darkest, but we have been here a long time, as substantiated by our traditions, and we have returned after the darkness to explore new ground time and time again.

Have a happy and safe holiday and thanks for reading The Culturepin this year.

Keram

The post The Celebration of Light and 2008 in Review appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Would most of the people on your Facebook friend list really go out of their way to come help decorate your birthday party?  Probably not.

More than likely, they will prolly proffer elaborate excuses as to why they can’t: their cat has the flu, their back is out, they drank too much last night, they have work in the morning.

Granted, but perhaps they are on your friend list to share ideas, to discuss ways to transform your negative feelings and thoughts into productive happy ones? Again, probably not.

Facebook preys on your need to be important – to be relevant. To be desired. To not be alone. To “figure.”  It preys on your Status Anxiety.

One might argue that it’s a good way to keep in touch with people you haven’t seen in a long time. Isn’t there a reason you haven’t maintained contact with those people from long ago?

One might argue that it’s a good way to manage your contacts – business and otherwise.  Nothing more.

Consider using LinkedIn for that. Or your Blackberry. Or a daytimer.  Or your memory.

If you argue that it’s the new phone, a way to communicate with family who you can’t see as often as you’d like – phone’s didn’t track what you purchased today, what age group you were talking to ten minutes ago and whether or not you like broccoli.  And no Nielsen polls aren’t the same thing.

One might argue that I am a Luddite, Amish, purist, fundamentalist.  I prefer, as grass-farmer Joel Salatin would like to call it – “post-Big Organic.”

MySpace has become the 80’s roadside billboard: Blast the message and hope to grab some of the collateral damage.  Facebook, on the other hand is an insidious, micro-targeted “resource;” every personal detail, choice, preference you submit leaves you open to highly-focused targeting.  It’s quite brilliant and something that any small or large company would be naive to overlook as a tool for hawking their wares. 

But what does it do for you?  Does it enlighten you?  Does it advise you?  Does it challenge you?  One might consider that exposure to these many personalities and their interests would, but in fact I find the results utterly homogenizing.  Recall that you are being targetted and thus your choices thus far are merely being reinforced as they are pandered to.

If it’s 140 character Haiku you are into, consider Twitter.  No – I don’t have it out for Facebook, but let’s call it like it is – an obsessive compulsion to have people whom you keep at arms’ length know about your neuroses.  Come back to life.  There is a lot of room and it’s yours to discover.

The post Soma: What Facebook Really Means Now appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

I held off joining FB for a long time because I can still vaguely remember the sense of awe and dread I felt when observing my 12 years younger brother and his prissy The Hills reject girlfriend perambulate through the voyeuristic obsession of checking out what their homies were up to.  Eventually, a desperately close friend of mine who is a “New Media” consultant talked me out of and into acquiescing, arguing that I should at least be savvy to what they were doing with Ajax and how Facebook trumped MySpace which at one point I recall trumping this Napster spin-off called Friendster.

So — good.  I put out an indie album (a real from-the-heart effort) at the beginning of 2008, my first release in 12 years on a CD no less and spent the remainder of my year getting schooled about the way things work now, which is to say – forget print, its all about the music blogs.  I now know about SEO, affiliate ads, linkbacks, watering holes, Linkshare, Clickbank, Kontera, Amazon Associates, Adsense, licensing content, ezinepublisher, bloggers paying their rent with promo CDs at Amoeba, Sonicbids, mirpod, odeo, Ning, viral videos, ROFLcon, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Furl, Mixx, Reverbnation, Trig, Twitter, Fanpop, trackbacks, NoFollow, DoFollow, LinkedIn, Wayn, Spock, Plaxo, Sharethis, and every other goddamned way of clamoring for anyone who I ever met or whomever I met has met that might exist.

And it’s done.  The US has its first ever dark-skin colored president, the Dems control the house and senate, the DOW goes up and down faster than the mechanical bull at the Saddle Ranch and its time to move forward.

Web 2.0 is over.

In my last post I announced the death of viral videos.  Now I am speaking with some certainty that Web 2.0 has to lay its head in the loam and expire its last breath.  No it’s not because I “want real, meaningful relationships back.”  It’s because it’s just, in toto, a glorified SPAM button that leads to nothing more (I promise you) than Google analytic and Adsense report mashing and at best the world’s biggest flash-mob-cum-grassroots-electoral-campaign.  That does not discourse make.  Mobilize?  Perhaps.  All good, but now what.  You got 80 years ’til you give up the ghost – what else?

Joel Salatin is a farmer that produces beef, poultry and pork.  He will not ship his non-USDA, totally natural product to you via any means because it defeats the purpose of his obsessively local-grown ethic.  When pressed he will confide that he is not a beef-manufacturer or a Luddite, traditionalist, purist, or grassroots, return-to-the-way-things-were thinker, but rather a post-industrialist.  He is looking at what’s here and how to expand it into new ways of approaching our well-being, continuity and enjoyment of things,  dealing in complexities not often ascribed to the “humble farmer.”  He will tell you that he is a grass-farmer.  And that the cheeseburgers we eat are the product of what the animals over which he lords, ate.

That’s where I am headed; not a return to some puritanical  time before Facebook, but rather to the next iteration.  A better-sustained dialogue into the experiences possible and the evolution of what this mass-consciousness means.  The Tweets are nifty, but let’s form a paragraph.  Let’s not dally.  Things move faster now, but that is not a strong enough argument to settle for ADDled brevity.  There is something beyond that thought, and if you have the courage, you may find unclaimed territory.  I want to meet you there.  Press me, challenge me, let’s climb the next summit together, because we sure can’t do it flashing postcards at each other from the digested murmurs of our fragmented IDs, Twittering and FB updating away, grasping for attention, lost in the sea of unformulated meditations on the boundless ecstasy in which life itself revels.

I import the indelible experience of Web 2.0 into this uncharted space, honoring its potency, and expect something that builds upon its Mind-Meldish, Chrysalid potentiality.  But enough is enough.  I have no idea where that leaves me, us, yet.  Isn’t that, again, exciting?

psst go go get your life back…

Opine, damn you.

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