Gone Astray: Russell Johnson

Qik: Yikes, Is That A Reality Show in Your Pocket?

Russell Johnson — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:00:47 +0000

I used to dread it when my wealthy aunt dragged out the magic lantern, put up the screen and proceeded to torture us youngsters (and I am sure our less-traveled parents) with fuzzy slides and stilted stories about her encounters with the pigeon pocked monuments of Europe. Now, thanks to the internet, we have tedium on demand…or as it is on demand and we might not choose to demand it, we can choose spontaneity and entertainment instead. And that fun, these days, could just come from the little device that has become our love it/hate it sidekick, our mobile phones.

Qik is a game changer in video. It is a free software program that works on almost any video-capable phone, that enables you to broadcast live video on the internet for the world to see: to your own free video page, to YouTube, to MySpace, to almost any place your cyber pals lurk. It also stores your video on line, so those who are asleep while you are mugging your way through the Montmartre can watch it later. But Qik’s possibilities are endless, like catching an evil-doer in the act and storing the evidence online before he can wrench the phone from your hands. I spent some time with Rishi Malik of Qik.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Most Qik video is not ready for prime time…yet. It is not the fault of Qik, but of mobile phone manufacturers who use poor quality cameras and codecs (the software schemes that process video). My wife’s Samsung Blackjack delivers passable video while my Blackberry Bold is virtually worthless. Rishi’s Nokia produced a good picture. But Rishi says the future is HDTV. Samsung has a phone (the Omnia HD) that shoots 720p high definition television, which, if your carrier can handle the bandwidth, should look just fine on that big Plasma TV you went into hock for.

The Hello Kitty Gate

Russell Johnson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:08:18 +0000

Gate C3 at Taipei International Airport with a play area and piped in music that is not to everybody’s taste…unless of course you are a nine year old girl…or my daughter, who is 32.

Charles Darwin Meets Gilbert and Sullivan

Russell Johnson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:49:23 +0000

If it ever comes to your neighborhood, as it did ours last night at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center, see Richard Milner’s “Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert.” Milner combines his love of musical theater, especially Gilbert and Sullivan, with his scholarship as an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History to do Darwin in song. He wrote the lyrics himself and manages to pull them off in a number of vocal styles: Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Jimmy Durante’s “Inka Dinka Doo” and Maurice Chevalier crooning the love song “If You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish,” even something vaguely resembling a Blues Brother. It is 80 minutes of rollicking edutainment.

Milner wouldn’t play well communities that still believe that “Father Knows Best” and that man walked with tyrannosauruses or probably even with some free marketers who foster the principles of Social Darwinism, the notion that anything unproductive should be allowed to wither…or worse. That doesn’t jive with the complex ecological and social dependencies Darwin and his successors studied and proved.

Darwin probably never sang about his studies of finches and barnacles. Unlike Milner, he was said not to be a very funny guy.

Here is a video story about Milner produced by the New York Times:

What Would Hopper Paint?

Russell Johnson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:25:56 +0000

I wondered what American Realist painter Edward Hopper would paint if he were alive today. One possibility I came up with after horsing around with Photoshop:

Edward Hopper and Company: The American Landscape

Russell Johnson — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:49:24 +0000

Too often we look at cultural and physical landscapes of places we visit as tourist brochures: America as the massive architecture of New York City and Chicago, quaint New England villages, the Bridge and Bay in San Francisco and pinkish western landscapes. One of the best examples of clichÃ© America is a propaganda film called Portraits of America produced by Disney for the US State Department and Homeland Security in an effort to boost our damaged image post-9/11. It depicts America as a Magic Kingdom, cleansed of all of the quirks and nasty bits that make us interesting:Â (you need only watch a minute of it to get the point). A slick video brochure, for sure, but when I previewed it with a group of tourism executives it received a unanimous thumbs down as being ingenuous.

Edward Hopper and Company at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco until May 2, 2009, offers a different sort of travelogue.

Hopper was known as an American Realist and his stark, often lonely views of urban and rural landscapes had an enormous influence on photography. Not that there weren’t other other forces, like the Industrial Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and the German Expressionists who influenced everything from Hitchcock to Tim Burton who dreamed up Batman’s dark landscapes of Gotham City.

Along with ten paintings and drawings by Hopper, the show features works from eight photographers spanning the years 1936 to 1974: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Although most of these photographers were a bit before my time, what they depict was not. In fact, I still see these scenes in rural and urban areas of America: the old railroad workers’ road houses in Northern California, there long after the lumber mills and railroads folded, the neighborhoods of New York City that have yet to become Times Square-ized, the pastures of tract homes across suburbia. Most of these are not marginalized areas inhabited by marginalized people. They are often just slightly off the tourist track, on the side streets and back roads of travelogue America.

I often look to local writers in a place I plan to visit to gain a sense of place.Â I should be paying more attention to its artists.

Fraenkel Gallery: 49 Geary Street, 4th floor, San Francisco.Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10:30 am - 5:30 pm, & Saturday 11:00 am - 5:00 pm.