RSS Feed
  1. A Frame Around Art

    May 5, 2012 by gkurra

    Frank Zappa puts a neat little frame around art:

    “The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively — because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a ‘box’ around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall? If John Cage, for instance, says, “I’m putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I’m going to drink carrot juice, and that’s my composition,” then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. “Take it or leave it, I now will this to be music.” After that it’s a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it’s a guy swallowing carrot juice.”

    After that it’s a matter of taste. Well, now as for the matter of taste, for those who can empathize with or perhaps even share in Cage’s context, the gurgling will evoke something of value to them, completing the process that Cage began.  For others it’s still just a guy swallowing carrot juice.

    (quote from the Real Frank Zappa book)


  2. Your Taste is Why

    March 18, 2012 by gkurra

    Your taste is why your own work disappoints you, says Ira Glass of This American Life in a fascinating interview about Creativity:

    Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

    But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

    It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

     

    The quote is pulled from an interview from Fresh Air, the relevant part of which can be seen here:

     

    Filmmaker David Shiyang riffs on the concept with a neat typographic animation. Here:

    Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.


  3. Monoculture

    March 3, 2012 by gkurra

    In her new book, Monoculture – How One Story is Changing Everything , the 2011 George Orwell award winning author FS Michaels quotes Vaclav Havel on the pressures to conform in the monoculture of communist ideology in Czechoslovakia:

    In a society grown rigid with ideology, Havel said, you come to accept that you live according to that society’s values and assumptions. If you were to refuse to conform, there could be trouble. You could be isolated, alienated, reproached for being idealistic, or scorned for not being a team player. You know what it is you are supposed to do, and you do it, not least to show that you are doing it. You go along to get along, he said, and so you confirm to others that certain things in fact must be done if you are to get along in life. If you fail to act as you are expected to, others will view your behavior as abnormal, think you arrogant for believing you’re above the rules, or assume you’ve dropped out of society. The society grown rigid with ideology gives you and everyone else the illusion that the way things are is the way things are meant to be; the story you hear is natural. It has been told and retold for years. Everyone tells it.

    In truth, Havel said, that story is not natural; there is an enormous gap between its aims and the aims of life. Whereas life moves toward plurality and diversity and the fulfillment of its own freedom, the system demands conformity, uniformity and discipline. The system, Havel said, “is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.” That world of appearances operates on a kind of automatic pilot, permeating and shaping the whole society. Though the world of appearances is partly stable, it’s also unstable because it’s built on appearances. Living within the world, you don’t have to believe in it, but you have to act as if you do to get along in life.

    Sometimes the whole thing seems innocuous enough for you to shrug and say, What’s wrong with going along with the world of appearances anyway? You then accept the rules of the game, Havel said, become a player in the game, and so make the game possible in the first place.

    Now, it turns out (surprise, surprise) all of the above can be applied to the dominant monoculture of today, which, as FS Michaels defines it, is the economic story that we have come to believe is the story of life itself. The story that being rational, efficient, productive, and profitable are the ultimate expressions of being in the world. This economic monoculture is changing (directly and indirectly) the way we think and act in terms of our work, our relationships with others and with the natural world, our community, our physical and spiritual health, our education, and our creativity. It is becoming the sole fabric with which we weave meaning into our lives, to the exclusion of any other possible meaning. But of course the problem is, as with the monocultures of the past, the story of economic values and assumptions isn’t the whole story of what it means to be human. It may be one story, but it isn’t the only story. It may be one part of one story, but it isn’t the whole story. By closing ourselves to everything else that makes life vibrant and diverse and worth living, by choosing only one meaning for human existence, we end up paying a heavy existential price. Just like you’ve always suspected.

     


  4. War against cliché

    December 23, 2011 by gkurra

    “To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart” – Martin Amis


  5. I Say Play Your Own Way

    September 29, 2011 by gkurra

    “I say play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – Even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years” – Thelonious Monk


  6. Digital Advertising: An Information Scientist’s Perspective

    September 18, 2011 by gkurra

    Jimi Shanahan and I co-authored a chapter for the book, Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval, published last month by Springer. Titled ‘Digital Advertising: An Information Scientist’s Perspective’, the chapter surveys some of the current science behind the fast evolving landscape of internet advertising. The chapter focuses primarily on sponsored search and contextual ads with an ultra-light sprinkling of other types of online advertising, such as Display. Here’s a link to the chapter from Springer Online: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j0247817r2388824/ The book itself should be available from Amazon, et al. Since it’s part of an Information Retrieval book/series, the multi-faceted topics of display advertising, real-time-bidding, mobile, video, social, IP-TV, etc – fast growing areas that I’ve been focused on for the last several years are barely explored. The really cool thing about computational advertising, or the computational aspect of digital advertising, is that it is multi-disciplinary field, mixing it up with all kinds of interesting areas – machine learning, statistics, behavioral economics, information retrieval, macro-economics, auction theory, game theory, privacy, large-scale distributed systems, very very big data, predictive modeling, risk management, graph theory, and a number of other sub-fields.


  7. Felicity and Depravity

    July 23, 2009 by gkurra

    From a terrific English translation of the Zhuangzi, we have this gem:

    “This Mighty Mudball of a world spews out breath, and that breath is called wind. Everything is fine so long as it’s still.  But when it blows, the ten thousand things cry and moan.  Haven’t you heard them wailing on and on?  In the awesome beauty of mountain forests, it’s all huge trees a hundred feet around, and they’re full of wailing hollows and holes – like noses, like mouths, like ears, like posts and beams, like cups and bowls, like empty ditches and puddles: water-splashers, arrow-whistlers, howlers, gaspers, callers, screamers, laughers, warblers – leaders singing out yuuu! and followers answering yeee!   When the wind’s light, the harmony’s gentle; but when the storm wails, it’s a mighty chorus.  And then, once the fierce wind has passed through, the holes are empty again.  Haven’t you seen felicity and depravity thrashing and failing together?”


  8. Specialization is for…

    March 10, 2009 by admin

    “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

    - Robert Heinlein


  9. 3000 feet of perspective

    August 11, 2005 by gkurra

    Last weekend I went flying with my friend Rob who is earning his pilot’s license one choppy flight at a time. We flew a 4-seater Piper Archer, a single propeller aircraft from the 70s. The plane was painted a dull shade of metallic blue over white and had hard plastic seats. We took off west-bound from the Palo Alto airfield and soared over the Pacific ocean at an altitude of about 3000 feet, just under SFO airspace. Then, turning due east near the Marin headlands, we headed towards the little airfield in the town of Concord, where we landed for lunch. On the way back we circled past tall Mt.Diablo and across the blue-gray waters of the bay.

    So, yes, the Bay Area is simply beautiful from up in the air. I’d probably have to try very hard to dream up something more picturesque, more appealing as a whole. Imagine: the deep blue hues of the Pacific ocean shimmering in striking contrast to the wispy, fleece-white clouds hovering above it. Imagine the soaring, majestic California coastline dotted with dozens of little sandy beaches and rocky coves. Lush verdant mountains, redwoods and forests, little colorful waterways with white sailboats and their creamy wakes – the bays, the inlets, and the lakes. The surreal gleaming glass city at the tip of the peninsula. The Golden Gate. Mount Tamalpais.

    I guess it often takes a change of perspective, 3000 feet in my case, to appreciate the charms of something you once treasured but now have come to take for granted.

    Floyd Salas used to say that everything that is beautiful is sad, because it will be gone soon. But there’s the other side to it – that even if things stay as they are, unchanged for eternity, our perceptions of them don’t remain the same. Sooner or later, what used to be beautiful becomes boring, ordinary, unattractive. When I first moved to the Bay Area, driving up 280 was a feast everyday the way the setting sun painted the sky like a playful child would splash colors on an empty canvas. Now, I don’t pay as much attention to most sunsets because spectacular sunsets are so common here that they’re ordinary. I almost wish they weren’t.


  10. Demise of the Renaissance Man

    July 6, 2005 by gkurra

    As I perused the bookshelves of the local library last Sunday, I was reminded again of the ironic post-modern tragedy that we humans have wrought upon ourselves. I looked at all those books, juicy fat tomes arranged in long neat lines, and realized (yet again) that I’ll never be able to read them all. And neither will you.

    We humans have produced and unraveled a cornucopia of knowledge and thought, a spectacular growing mountain of information about everything: from the ruminations of wise-old-men about the human condition to models of nano-particles that can’t be seen with the naked eye. We have created a staggering, gigantic, leviathan universe fueled by thought and imagination over the ages and crystallized into little words dancing around conceptual paragraphs to Helvetican rhythms, sans serif.

    Why is this a tragedy? Because no single man can experience the fullness, the entirety, the breathtaking enormity of our legacy. We can nibble on the mountain, little chunks at a time, we can stand back and use devices such as synopses and summaries, optic aids to give us the macro view of a ledge, a peak, a forest on the never-ending slopes. Perhaps. But we simply can’t partake of the whole.

    So this is where the individual ends and Man begins. For only the human race as a whole can imbibe of this metaphorical mountain – only a billion people can scale it and consume it together. While a surgeon who specializes in taking apart the left-pinky may not know a coccyx from a cockatoo, “the surgeon” as a collective figure can repair everything from despondent bone marrow to that peculiar bigger breasts fixation of ours.

    The Individual Man, proud, self-sufficient island of yesteryear, is revealed in all his nakedness to be neither. It may seem obvious, even laughable, this inevitable predicament of ours, but I lament the loss of innocence, the demise of the Renaissance Man.

    You cannot be an astronaut and write a Walden too.