[PHOTO] The Gladstone Hotel

The Gladstone Hotel
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street) is just a couple of blocks west of the Drake on Queen Street West, located on Gladstone Avenue just where it jogs to the east under the railroad tracks to connect the southern and northern portions of Dufferin Street. Like the Drake, the Gladstone is a boutique hotel that hosts numerous art events, but I've always found it to be less pretentious than its neighbour.

[URBAN NOTE] Not a cruel summer, I hope

It's another summer-like spring day here in Toronto: temperature in the range of 25 degrees, slight and not overpowering humidity, and a cloudless blue sky. If this says anything about the upcoming summer, I'm certain that it'll be a glorious season.

[BRIEF NOTE] Netbook vs. Mobile

John Paczkowski, writing in Digital Daily, reports that neither Apple nor RIM expects the netbook to last.

Apple and Research in Motion may disagree on many things, but they are of the same mind when it comes to the netbook phenomenon: It will be short-lived. Asked about Apple’s interest in the category during a late-April earnings call, COO Tim Cook said the company has none.

“When I look at netbooks, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens,” he explained, noting that it’s “a stretch” to call a netbook a personal computer. “It’s just not a good consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on….it’s not a space as it exists today that we are interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in. It’s a segment we would choose not to play in. That said, we do look at the space and are interested to see our customers’ respond to it. People that want a small computer so to speak that does browsing and e-mail, might want to buy an iPod Touch or they might want to buy an iPhone. And so, we have other products to accomplish some of what people are buying netbooks for and so, in that particular way we play in an indirect basis.”

Turns out, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie feels pretty much the same way. In a recent interview with Reuters, he said the company has no interest in adding a netbook to RIM’s product line. The only netbook Balsillie is interested in is one “you can hold up to your ear and clip onto your belt.” In other words, a BlackBerry. Anything larger just won’t cut it, as a parade of discontinued nonphone portable hardware has already shown us. “These devices don’t work,” Balsillie said. “At the end of the day what we’ve really found is that if [customers] can do it on a BlackBerry that’s what they’ll want.”

What's coming? Balsillie, who's on the front page of The Globe and Mail with his plan to buy the Phoenix Coyots, is also on page 3 explaining where he thinks the computer market will go.

"If you want to see the next 10 years, just look at the next 10 months," RIM's co-chief executive officer, Jim Balsillie, said in an interview. "You can only see so far ahead, but you're just seeing a revolution happening right now and it's just so fast, you almost don't notice, if that doesn't sound like a paradox."

The Internet will remain an increasingly important distribution medium for digital media, but the range of faster mobile devices with larger screens and greater storage capacity that consumers can use to access the Web is enabling a host of new ways to get music, movies and other information on the go.

However, smart phones don't simply offer a new medium to experience content. Software applications are giving users more control over what they can do with their mobile phones than ever before. Apple's App Store, an online marketplace for games and other software, reached a billion downloads in less than a year.

By combining various functions - linking social networking with GPS or marrying music services with the ability to buy concert tickets, for example - these devices and applications are changing the way people communicate and interact with media.

"The best parallel that I use is when they first came out with motion picture projectors, the whole thought of those was, 'Hey, now I can do a stage play and play it at a different location at a different time,' " Mr. Balsillie said. "The concept of a 'movie' wasn't in anybody's mind at the time because they couldn't see how the media could change the nature of the entertainment.

"In the case of smart phones, we're just time- and place-shifting some of the applications. Will it actually change the nature of the application? Absolutely. Do we know exactly how it's going to change it? I don't think so."

[MUSIC] Bowie's Major Tom

I've been thinking about writing about Major Tom for three years--talktooloose can testify to this.

David Bowie's character of Major Tom is one of the longest-running characters in popular music, featuring in three songs--1969's "Space Oddity," 1980's "Ashes to Ashes," and 1995's "Hallo Spaceboy"--that are all frankly iconic songs covering a timespan of more than twenty-six years. The "Major Tom" character, as the Wikipedia article indicates, is one that has entered into broad use in popular culture--Peter Schilling's 1983 "Major Tom (Coming Home)" comes most readily to mind, but there are other pieces of pop culture out there that reference him. For parsimony's sake, here, when I take a look at Major Tom I'll only consider the official trilogy of songs touching upon him and not any deuterocanonical literature. Although Bowie characteristically complicates things by referencing the lonely Mars-bound astronaut in Elton John's "Rocket Man". Eh, I'll cope.

Major Tom appeared first in "Space Oddity", the 1969 single that started off his career, capturing the zeitgeist thanks to its closeness in time to the Apollo moon landing. The official video, the one that starts with the oscilloscope, is here; an alternate version is below.

"The Reagan Administration's Chilling Response to the AIDS Crisis" (Watch on YouTube)

This song, unlike the others, is devoted entirely to the character. It begins with Ground Control reminding him to "Take your protein pills and put your helmet on," that they're "Commencing countdown, engines on/Check ignition and may gods love be with you," and that he has "really made the grade," with the papers wanting to "know whose shirts you wear" and reminding him that "it's time to leave the capsule if you dare." But then, after he floats, something goes irretrievably wrong.

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell me wife I love her very much she knows

The song ends with Ground Control trying to reach him though his circuits are dead.

Major Tom's next appearance is in 1980's "Ashes to Ashes", a #1 UK hit taken off of the fantastic album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). The trend-setting official video is here, another video is below.

"Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

This song certainly deconstructs the Major Tom mythos. Once a heroic astronaut venturing worth into infinite space, taking a fatal risk to see what else lies beyond, perhaps on the pattern of 2001's Dave Bowman, it turns out that Tom's story has ended on on a much more depressing note than anyone would have feared.

Do you remember a guy that's been
In such an early song
I]ve heard a rumour from ground control
Oh no, don't say its true

They got a message from the action man
I'm happy, hope you're happy too
I've loved all I've needed love
Sordid details following

[. . .]

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heavens high
Hitting an all-time low

Time and again I tell myself
I'll stay clean tonight
But the little green wheels are following me
Oh no, not again
I'm stuck with a valuable friend
I'm happy, hope you're happy too
One flash of light but no smoking pistol

I never done good things
I never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue, who-o-oh
Want an axe to break the ice
Wanna come down right now

It's common knowledge that this references the existential despair that characterized the depth of Bowie's frankly terrifying period of drug addiction in the mid-1970s, with Bowie presumably using Major Tom as a voice for this sort of thing. It resonated, though--how else could it be a #1?

Bowie's final reference to Major Tom--so far--came in the 1995 song "Hallo Spaceboy", one of the many songs off of the concept album Outside that marked his continued recovery from his horrible nadir around 1990 with Tin Machine and everything. The Pet Shop Boys remix that featured in the single release is below.

Originally, the song didn't include any direct references to Major Tom at all, but when the Pet Shop Boys remixed the single they added a line. After due consideration, Bowie agreed to leave in the new lyric in so long as Neil Tennant sang it.

NT: Ground to Major, bye bye Tom
DB: This chaos is killing me
NT: Dead the circuit, countdown's wrong
DB: This chaos is killing me
NT: Planet Earth, is control on?
DB: So sleepy now
NT: Do you wanna be free?
Don't you wanna be free?
D+N: Do you like girls or boys?
It's confusing these days
DB: But moondust will cover you
Cover you
D+N: So bye bye love
Yeah, bye bye love
Hallo spaceboy

Major Tom began his career as a brave astronaut venturing forth into the beyond, was later revealed to have a sordid secret life, and finally assigned an ambiguous sexual orientation. Major Tom's evolution has reflected the changing zeitgeist, from the era of easily ambitious and optimistic space travel that characterized the summer of '69 to the drug-fueled dissolution of so many of those easy optimists by the end of the 1970s to the conventional and entirely public voicing of sexual difference of the 1990s. (That last song is excessively binary, mind. "Or"?)

There's something funny about "Hallo Spaceboy," though. Bowie sings about Tom being covered by moondust, but on the selenologically dead Moon that would take hundreds of millions if not billions of years, while another line about how his "silhouette is stationary" suggests either Tom's extreme stillness or extreme distance. Maybe he hasn't come back, after all?

[LINK] Three Inter Press Service Articles

The Inter Press Service has recently posted three articles that struck me as particularly interesting.

• First came Marcela Valente's "Blogs – a Shortcut to Fame?", an article examining how some Argentine writers have been gaining national and international fame thanks to their blogging, winning awards and spinoffs and the like. The writers interviewed don't expect blogs to displace more conventional forms of literature, but rather to supplement and enrichen the media universe.
  
• Servaas van den Bosch's "China in Africa – South-South Exploitation?" wonders, after observing the situation in Namibia, whether the ongoing influx of Chinese investment in Africa is actually helping the continent as a whole, with the frequent use of imported Chinese workers, the very low wages paid to African workers, and the undermining of local industry with cheap Chinese imports, additionally gaining a back door into European markets through the various Europe-ACP trade agreements.


• Finally, Mario de Queiroz interviews East Timorese president José Ramos-Horta on the subject of East Timor. Ramos-Horta hopes that oil exploitation and good agriculture will help East Timor grow out of its structural poverty, the products of more than four centuries of Portuguese colonialism on top of the devastating Indonesian occupation and continuing political instability.

[LINK] But for four months, Berlin might have glowed

james_nicoll links to an article from The Telegraph revealing that, because of the German's use of the devastating V-2 rocket, the British government considered responding using nuclear weapons. Germany, unlike Japan, was lucky in that it surrendered to the United States before that country test-detonated its first atomic weapons. Surprise.