[PHOTO] Chrysler beyond Grand Central

Looking just east at a certain point on--I think--Madison Avenue, the Chrysler Building looms beautifully above Grand Central Station.

[LINK] More William Gibson on the future and popular culture

Friday, I linked to the first part of William Gibson's Wired interview. The second part, "William Gibson on Twitter, Antique Watches and Internet Obsessions", is now up.

Wired: You had an addiction to bidding on antique mechanical watches on eBay — an addiction you chronicled memorably in your 1999 Wired essay “My Obsession,” which was included in your recent non-fiction collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor. What’s your addiction now? Is it Twitter?

Gibson: The watch thing, fortunately, was kind of a self-limiting experiment…. I felt when I started doing that, that I’d never really been able to have a hobby in an adult sense, a hobby that was completely divorced from anything else I do in life, and a hobby that required an impossibly steep, insane learning curve. I actually did that.

I just learned stuff about old watches for maybe four or five years…. I got to the point where I could pass for semi-informed in the company of really world-class authorities, but by the time I got there, I realized that it had nothing to do with accumulating examples of one particular kind of thing — which I always found kind of creepy about collecting.

[. . .] In the old days, if you wanted to become insanely knowledgeable about something like that, you basically had to be insane — you had to travel around the world, finding other people who were sufficiently crazy to know everything there was to know about that. That would have been so hard to do, dependent on sheer luck, that it kept the numbers of those people down.

But now you can be a kid in a town in the backwoods of Brazil, and you can wake up one morning and say, “I want to know everything about stainless steel sports watches from the 1950s,” and if you really applied yourself, to the internet, at the end of the year you would have the equivalent of a master’s degree in this tiny pointless field. I’ve totally met lots of people who have the equivalent of that degree.

So is the third part, "William Gibson on Punk Rock, Internet Memes, and ‘Gangnam Style’".

Wired: In your essay in the new book Punk: An Aesthetic, you write that punk was the last pre-digital counterculture. That’s a really interesting thought. Can you expand on that?

Gibson: It was pre-digital in the sense that in 1977, there were no punk websites [laughs]. There was no web to put them on. It was 1977, pre-digital. None of that stuff was there. So you got your punk music on vinyl, or on cassettes. There were no mp3s. There was no way for this thing to propagate. The kind of verbal element of that counterculture spread on mostly photo-offset fanzines that people pasted up at home and picked up at a print shop. And then they mailed it to people or sold it in those little record shops that sold the vinyl records or the tapes. It was pre-digital; it had no internet to spread on, and consequently it spread quickly but relatively more slowly.


I suspect — and I don’t think this is nostalgia — but it may have been able to become kind of a richer sauce, initially. It wasn’t able to instantly go from London to Toronto at the speed of light. Somebody had to carry it back to Toronto or wherever, in their backpack and show it, physically show it to another human. Which is what happened. And compared to the way that news of something new spreads today, it was totally stone age. Totally stone age! There’s something remarkable about it that’s probably not going to be that evident to people looking at it in the future. That the 1977 experience was qualitatively different, in a way, than the 2007 experience, say.

Wired: What if punk emerged today, instead of in 1977? How do you think it would be different?

Gibson: You’d pull it up on YouTube, as soon as it was played. It would go up on YouTube among the kazillion other things that went up on YouTube that day. And then how would you find it? How would it become a thing, as we used to say? I think that’s one of the ways in which things are really different today. How can you distinguish your communal new thing — how can that happen? Bohemia used to be self-imposed backwaters of a sort. They were other countries within the landscape of Western industrial civilization. They were countries that most people would never see — mysterious places. You’d pay a price, potentially, for going there. That’s always cool and exciting. Now, where are they? Where can you do that? How are people transacting that today? I am pretty sure that they are, but I don’t have that much firsthand experience of it. But they have to do it in a different way.

[. . .]

Wired: Perhaps punk, if introduced now, would be a meme that goes viral, and the Sex Pistols would have millions of hits on YouTube.

Gibson: You know that “Gangnam Style” video from Korea? That’s kind of in the ballpark, you know? That’s something from a subculture we would have no way of knowing anything about, and suddenly it’s on YouTube and it’s got millions and millions of hits, and people all over the world are saying, “Wow, will you check this out?” That’s something. That’s something like that. But it doesn’t necessarily play out in the same way…. Our expectations and what it could become are different.

[URBAN NOTE] "Coach vs. Mayor: Rob Ford should stick to the job he’s good at"

Metro Toronto's Matt Elliott has it right: if Ford clearly gets more pleasure, and more results, out of coaching football than being mayor, why should he stay in Toronto's top position?

For a guy who knows way more about passing footballs than he does about passing items at city council, ditching politics for sports is an obvious choice.

On the field, Ford has a respectable record. His Don Bosco Eagles routinely post winning seasons and challenge for championships. Even more impressive is that Ford essentially built the school’s football program from nothing, giving kids from low-income neighbourhoods a new chance to get involved in something meaningful.

[. . .]

In committee rooms and council chamber at city hall, however, the mayor’s been an ineffective mess. His antics routinely distract the public from important issues like transit, housing or taxes. And there’s a mounting pile of evidence that says he just can’t be bothered to show up to work as often as he probably should.

Even supporters who consider themselves fans of Ford’s core principles — slashing budgets, ending the war on the car, complaining about socialists, etc. — have got to realize that the mayor has killed any chance he once had at turning those principles into policy. He hasn’t won a significant vote at city council in almost a year.

The mayor simply doesn’t know how to score points in the city hall game. Rob Ford’s political playbook is nothing but a single scrawled piece of paper that reads “YELL ABOUT STUFF.” And, even though it’s a proven loser, he keeps running that same play.

[URBAN NOTE] "Is this the death spiral of the Rob Ford legend?"

Over at the National Post, that magazine's Posted Toronto staffers Jonathan Goldsbie, Matt Gurney, and Chris Selley discuss Rob Ford's ongoing death spiral of popularity.

Goldsbie: Last week, we talked about Rob Ford’s conflict of interest case and debated whether the newly apparent depths of his ineptitude render him unfit for public office. But this week’s revelations were of an even more problematic nature: The mayor’s reported insistence on devoting City resources (namely his own staff) to his private football endeavours is much closer to actual corruption — and at the very least is definitive proof that he is a hypocrite of the worst kind. These stories have provoked a different reaction, one that questions the meaning and validity of the myth at the very centre of Ford’s leadership. If Rob Ford is not for the judicious use of office budgets, then what is he for? What is left of a man after he himself has undermined the supposed bedrock of all his principles and appeal? Once again, I put to you that Rob Ford does not have values, he has preferences. And he has let it be known that football is what he prefers. He will be coaching his team (presumably alongside his staff) every weekday afternoon for the next two months; meanwhile, the scrutiny will persist. Is this finally the death spiral of the Rob Ford legend?

Gurney: Hard to say. The Rob Ford legend, as you put it, is more like religious canon to some, and for them will not be shaken. For some others the man could never do any right, so this won’t change many minds there, either. But if the “football is gravy” narrative bites and holds — as an unnamed Rob Ford staffer was reported to have warned the Mayor it might — then, yes, this could potentially blow a hole in the S.S. Rob Ford. My own take is a bit more nuanced. The use of city cellphones or email accounts doesn’t much alarm me, since I’m sure I’m not the only Postie who’s used a work phone to call the wife or a work computer to check Facebook. Yeah, not taxpayer devices, I know. But I still think that making city staffers use different phones for different parts of their lives is unnecessary, so long as they don’t go overboard, of course. What did alarm me, though, was Ford slipping out of a meeting of his own executive council to go coach a game. Good Lord. If it wasn’t for that, the revelations about the phones might not have gone anywhere beyond the usual suspects.

[. . .]

Selley: What really intrigues me at this point is, does he even want to be mayor still? And if so, why? He has no staunch defenders left in the media. His biggest fans are now willing only to lament that his achievements are being undermined by this amateurish hypocrisy — but the achievements aren’t really that earth-shattering: Contracting out garbage pickup, scrapping the vehicle registration tax, reasonable settlements with the unions and no labour disruptions. I’m grateful for two of them, and indifferent to the other. But can he keep that agenda going, now that his reputation nears laughingstock status? And if he can’t, then what’s the point? Keep punching and kicking at his opponents and hope he gets another term? And then what? He could go back to being a councillor, which he was good at, or into the family business and coach football as much as he wants. I can’t help thinking that someone like John Tory could have accomplished all that he has and more, without the crazy sideshow. And if a reasonably conservative person enters the next mayoral race, then how does Ford appeal beyond his diehard base? This is certainly rock bottom, so far. He could win again. But I don’t see how he can do so with much of his self-respect intact.

[LINK] "Presidential Ambitions"

Wow. Open the Future's Jamais Cascio has realized that the recent remarks of Mitt Romney, captured at a private fundraiser, has resonances with fiction. What fiction? Warren Ellis' graphic novel Transmetropolitan.

"Look, my job isn't to make everything beautiful. My job isn't to make living life a good time. My job is to keep the majority of the people in this country alive. That's it. If fifty-one percent eat a meal tomorrow and forty-nine percent don't, I've done my job... My job is just to keep things the way they are. Everyone stays the same. I do the job, I keep the money coming."

-- The President, Transmetropolitan

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it... And they will vote for this president no matter what…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

-- Mitt Romney, not fictional

Yes, I'd prefer Obama. I think I'm justified in this; I think that the quote justifies this.