Written on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford:
via flickr
The Guardian reviews the new Star Wars: Clone Wars.
Drained of wit, charm or intelligence, (un)animated avatars of what were once, figuratively as well as literally, flesh-and-blood characters drag their way through an opaque and tedious farrago, uttering lines that would disgrace a speak-your-weight machine.
Written on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford:
via flickr
Friday we went to Blenheim Palace, which is one of the greatest of England's great country houses. Begun by the first Duke of Marlborough after his great victory commanding the British forces at the Battle of Blenheim, finished years after his death, and then updated, renovated, and expanded since, it's pretty amazing for a single-family home.
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There's a cool new exhibit about the history of the palace that reminds me somewhat of Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the movie) or other animatronic diorama-type things. You walk through a series of rooms with different scenes from Blenheim's history, with the ghost of a servant as your guide. Maybe the most interesting thing about it is how they solve the challenge of being distracted by the poor facial expression on animatronic or robotic figures. In a couple rooms, they have large displays that project full-body video; in others, they have animatronic figures facing away from the spectators (sitting at desks with their backs to us, for example), and their faces are visible in mirrors (displays). It's a pretty good solution.
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We also wandered around the gardens a bit (Capability Brown redid the grounds in the mid-1800s or thereabouts), and visited the maze and kids' area. Those were a big hit with the children.
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Something struck me when I was walking out of the gift shop: tourists are the new tenants. 200 years ago, a significant source of income for a place like Blenheim was rent: peasants lived on your land, grew stuff, and gave you a cut. Today, the peasants are gone, but tourists have replaced them. It costs about $100 for a family of four to visit Blenheim, and the place was crowded; add in the income generated from the cafes, gift shops, private tours, etc., and I'd guess that tens of thousands of tourist dollars must move through the place a day.
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We tourists don't live on the edge of the property: even better (to quote The SImpsons Mr. Burns after he starts a casino), we come in, empty our pockets, and leave. The fact that a servant-- albeit a relatively high-ranking one, the first Duchess of Marlborough's personal servant-- is your guide through the interactive exhibit is another clue to your status.
We're on the bus from Oxford to Heathrow, where we'll fly out for San Francisco this afternoon. We've got power but no wifi, so my son is listening to iTunes on my machine, rather than borrowing my iPod (he couldn't find his before we left).
Traveling with kids has been a challenge, but an interesting one.
My son is six, so he basically lives in his own universe. It intersects at certain points with the rest of the world, but those points are unpredictable: which means outside Westminster Abbey he might be fascinated by a dog, or see the Greenwich Observatory as cool because you could roll down the hill and break your leg. As a result, the questions he asked me had little to do with-- well, anything, from an adult's point of view. Here's a list of what he asked me on Wednesday, and where:
On the bus:
It turns out that my blog about my kids was sending notifications to my Twitter feed. Since the kids' blog is password protected, this was causing some consternation. I think I've got it fixed.
Tonight after dinner we realized that there was a second performance of the pyrotechnic performance art piece that I stumbled upon last night. The dads took several of the kids out, despite worries that they (the kids, not the dads) would be used as fireworks, drowned, or simply left outside a bar to be gang-pressed into some passing merchant marine vessel.
The kids quite enjoyed the show. On the way back home, one of them paid it the ultimate compliment: "That was even worth missing World of Warcraft for!"
As we got back from dinner tonight, we saw a container ship in the harbor, being turned around by tugboats. This is always interesting, even more so when it happens right outside a friend's apartment.
via flickr
While we were watching, we realized that there was something happening in Marco Polo park, just a few hundred yards away, so a couple of us went to check it out. Turns out it was performance art piece. I can't really describe it, so I'll just put up a few pictures to give a sense of the event.
now we're getting more serious, via flickr
wwitching to water a few minutes later via flickr
the crowd gets soaked, but has a sense of good humor about it, i think, via flickr
Here's a brief video of one portion of the show:
A friend of mine recently introduced me to Sagmeister's work. As a dedicated journal-writer, I agree entirely with the video.
I got up at 2:30 this morning, after not quite sleeping for a few hours-- more like drifting in and out of consciousness. Fortunately, the night porter opened the restaurant up for just me, brewed some coffee, and made sure I was taken care of until my ride to the airport arrived (five minutes early).
If there is a heaven, I suspect it bears more than a passing resemblance to a well-run English hotel.
The ride to the airport was interesting, as my driver lived in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Of course, at the end of the ride was Stansted, which was its usual multilingual, middle-of-the-night madhouse. With all the various languages, the slightly desperate yet all-too-often unhelpful signage, and people sleeping everywhere, the place feels like a refugee camp with duty-free shopping.
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My flight was delayed an hour, though, because the pilot forgot to fill out some critical piece of paper, so we had to turn around when we were on the tarmac, go back to the gate, and have him do it all over again. And since the cabin door had been opened, we had to listen to the safely video a second time.
However, we did eventually make it back to Hamburg. I'm here until Sunday, when we all fly back to England, and head for Oxford.
I came across this sign today.
via flickr
It reads:
Metropolitan Water Board
Motor Car Act 1896 and 1906
Notice.
This bridge is insufficient to carry a heavy motor car the registered axle-weight of any axle of which exceeds three tons, or the registered axle-weights of the several axles of which exceed in the aggregate five tons, or a heavy motor car drawing a trailer if the registered axle-weights of the several axles of the heavy motor car and the axle-weights of the several axles of the trailer exceed in the aggregate five tons.The great thing, the bridge doesn't really go anywhere. It crosses the stream, but opens into a tiny field.
By order.
My last night at Fanhams Hall; I'm tired, have to get up at 3 a.m. tomorrow to get a cab to Stansted, so I'm singing off soon.
I had an excellent day, which consisted of doing nothing-- or nothing by the standards of my usual life. Last night I ended the day with several pints of beer (or three of beer and one of cider), so I woke up pretty late this morning. I briefly entertained thoughts of going to Cambridge or London, but realized I rarely get out into the countryside, so why not take advantage of it?
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I walked around the village of Ware, which is pretty nice. After topping up my phone and buying some postcards and stamps, I stopped for lunch at the Old Punch House, and had Yorkshire beef and pudding, in convenient wrap form.
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I then wandered over to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, which was quite impressive, as it's been there (in one form or another) for almost a thousand years, and the oldest stones date from the 1380s.
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From there, I found the River Lee, and walked along it for a while.
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From there, then cut through town to a field that's being preserved as a piece of Real English Countryside. I felt a bit like a character from Jane Austen: they always seem to tramping through fields, when they're not in drawing rooms.
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Okay, enough vague complaining about the Lübeck Airport. Some examples of signage or other things that make no sense.
First, when you come into the airport, you're confronted with information about the airport lounge and other amenities in the 300 motif:
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Why is this appropriate? I looked at this and thought, "This is not madness. THIS... IS... LÜBECK AIRPORT!"
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Proceed next to the main departures hall (aka the tractor parts swap meet). There are two things that really caught my eye. The first was the signage above the bathrooms. Take a look at this and see if you can spot anything ambiguous:
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The symbols on top have the woman on the left and man on the right, but the doors are reversed: the men's room is actually on the left. You have to look at the yellow sign first to see that "bathrooms are over here," then double-check the doors-- and you stand a pretty good chance of going into the wrong bathroom, if you first pay any attention at all to the yellow sign. Needless to say, I nearly went in the wrong door. That's why I hate this sign.
Notice also that the wall is fabric. FABRIC. As in, like a tent.
Finally, notice anything missing from this map?
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The countries that Ryaniar doesn't fly to don't exist. This "dude where's my continent approach?" to cartography may not be noticed by people who haven't yet learned of the existence of places like Belgium or Switzerland or France, but I find it strangely disconcerting. Of course, it's possible that dark blue dye is more expensive than... lighter blue dye... so there was an economic reason for drawing the map this way. But I doubt it.
Late last night I got into Fanhams Hall, the hotel I'm staying in for the next couple nights.
fanhams hall at night, via flickr
I got checked in pretty quickly-- there weren't many people up, needless to say-- and got settled in my room. I did a little work on my talk, set a bunch of alarms, then went to sleep.
my chair is so squeaky, i think it might be haunted. via flickr
This morning I woke up to what sounded like half a dozen different kinds of birds-- I would guess partridges, something that sounded a lot like owls, and who knows what else. They were loud, though, whatever they were.
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The grounds looks pretty impressive-- there's a formal garden, a miniature Mount Fuji somewhere, and they've very smartly created some new rooms by filling in space between the older buildings, a la the great court in the British Museum.
the giant jello mold topiaries are famous throughout england. via flickr
I'm here for a couple more nights, thanks to the complexities of booking flights on Ryanair (which I now hate with a burning passion), but more on that later. I guess there are worse places to be stuck....
I'm in a taxi on my way to Fanhams Hall, which seems to be deep in the country. This should be interesting.
Flying Ryanair is the aesthetic equivalent of having an overdose on bad branding. Never before have I felt Cayce Pollard's allergy to logos and advertising. And I have two more flights on them in the next week. Gaaak.
Worked on my polishing my talk on the plane-- I was able to fall effortlessly into Airplane Thinking Mode (well, with the help of two cappucinos, served to me by a bemused Ukrainian barista), and work out the transitions and turns of phrase. For me, it often feels like 80 percent of the work of writing a talk is at one of two levels: the structural, where you focus on the big ideas and logical construction of your argument, and the fine details, the rhetorical joinery that make the pieces snap tight in the mind of the listener.
We're really out in the middle of nowhere: we've driven through two picturesque villages so far, and when the GPS sys "continue on this road for six miles," you know you're into some serious Country. I'll have to get enough sleep to get up early and explore before breakfast.
Third tiny village. We're getting into a Wicker Man level of remoteness.
Follow the course of the road for four miles. Oh my. Wait, we just turned onto a freeway, All is not lost.
I'm at Gate 5, waiting for my flight.
I'm in a shed.
Not exactly, since it's too big to really be a shed per se. But it's clearly a temporary structure. A tent with a wooden floor and fabric sides (all covered with huge Ryanair ads, by the way.) The kind of temporary architecture designed to be the cafeteria of a Boy Scout camp, or the main hall of a tractor parts swap meet... not international travel.
If you could take every bad design choice you could think of, put them all together, and scatter than randomly, I would have found them all between the Hamburg bus station and here.
From Changi Terminal 3 to this in two weeks. What a life.
Apparently there's a music festival called Wacken 2008. A lot of people are wearing t-shirts from that show, along with cargo shorts, dreads or long straight hair, goatees, or some combination of leather miniskirt, lace shorts, and boots. Fascinating.
I'm in the Lubeck airport for the next few hours, waiting for a flight to England. I'm giving a talk on technology, organizational learning, and the future to a group at World Vision International, a Christian organization that does a lot of work in development, disaster relief, and global change. It should be an interesting time, as it'll give me a chance to pull together some of my thinking about the end of cyberspace and the future of futures, but in a context that's novel.
I can't believe that of all the places in Europe, the Lübeck and Stansted airports are the ones I'm going to see the largest number of times. The Lübeck airport is tiny-- basically it's only Ryanair that flies in and out of here, though there may also be some Herczegovinian charters that stop here to refuel. But it's not just physically small. More perfectly than any other space I've encountered in my adult life, this airport reproduces the feeling of the Trenton, N.J. Amtrak station late on a winter's night: its mix of people who are waiting to go somewhere, yet have the vibe of people who have nowhere to go; downmarket retail; closed shops-- it's like a petting zoo of varieties of anomie.
There are a surprisingly large number of young people dressed in what I think in the U.S. one would call Goth-- lots of dyed ponytails, black clothing, aggressively ugly boots, and men who look like they're kicking their methadone addictions. Though since we're in a place that actually was Gothic, I'm not sure what you'd call it. Probably there was some music festival in the neighborhood, or maybe they're all flying out to Copenhagen to score some hash in Christiana. Maybe this is just the way kids dress here.
However, I found a reasonably comfortable chair and a working electrical outlet, and I have my Mac and some headphones. So unless they cut off the oxygen, fundamentally all is well. I've got to be in that space that's defined by what I'm thinking and writing rather than I am, anyway.
I may have gotten onto the free wifi network. On the other hand, it may be that a Chechen wireless company has used my insatiable thirst for mobile bandwidth against me, and is actually downloading all my personal information. All your passwords are belong to us.
And I'm certain that I'm breaking some rule by plugging into the electricity here.
Nonetheless, i consider it a minor victory that I got here, got settled, and haven't yet missed my flight (I've got another 5 hours before THAT happens).
Today we went to the Minatur Wunderland, a train museum in Hamburg.
via flickr
I was never really into miniature trains, but I found this place pretty amazing, in the surreal, hyper-real way that miniatures can be.
The museum is two large stories in an old warehouse in the Speicherstadt, and includes a dozen or so gigantic dioramas.
Vegas, and possibly Miami, via flickr
Every few minutes, the lights go down, and they simulate night. Then things get really cool.
For the right kind of person, working here has got to be absolute heaven.
After the kids got to sleep, I took the camera, and went out for a walk along the water. There's an artist who's been lighting up the Hafencity, putting massive sets of blue LEDs on things, and sucker that I am for lighting tricks, I wanted to see what it looked like.
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I see a lot of interesting lighting and signage, and some pretty good public art projects-- one of the benefits of spending time in London and Singapore (and Budapest, at least along the Danube). Hamburg is a very industrial city-- you don't eliminate 800 years of being one of Europe's major shipping centers overnight-- and it hasn't really made the dramatic jump that other major cities have of hollowing out their industrial base, and replacing it almost entirely with services and finance.
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So that made the installation really interesting. Because 99% of it is on cranes, docks, and other industrial infrastructure. Partly this reflect the fact that these things are really tall and dramatic parts of the skyline-- any good artist would think of using them.
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But I also think it turns the whole project into a meditation on the vibrancy and beauty of industrial things-- not just industrial design, but of objects that are made to do very hard, generally-ignored, but essential jobs. We take for granted that TVs and move from China to Switzerland or the US in a few days, but that everyday miracle happens because of places like this.
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Nobody notices these technologies; they're everyday, and if we don't edit them out of our reality, we think of them as ugly. But maybe this is how they should look.
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Last night during the Hafencity Festival, there were some pretty cool fireworks.
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We watched them from the patio of the apartment of the friends we're staying with. The cool thing, I thought, was that this brought us close enough to the fireworks to really get a feel for the materiality of the objects. Normally they're more like pixels in the sky-- just cool visuals-- but when you're this close, you can see the canisters explode, and pieces of paper and embers falling from the sky.
via flickr