The Maker Faire: Burning Man Meets Martha Stewart
Posted on May 6, 2008
My father was a do-it-yourselfer, a master carpenter probably better than Jesus as the Son-of-God’s carpentry skills were never well documented (but I’m sure the SOG had more important things to do than building bird houses). I didn’t take after either one. My woodworking was plagued by bent over nails and my middle school shop teacher, a large ruddy man bursting with blood pressure, said I did rivits like “a girl.â€
But the Maker Faire, sort of a Burning Man meets Martha Stewart affair, grabbed what was left of the little boy in my soul, the urge to build a Go Cart or blow up the neighbor’s garbage can. This was not a hangout for the tough-as-nails guys who hang out in the tool department of Home Depot. Here the muse was as important as the monkey wrench.
The Maker Faire: Burning Man Meets Martha Stewart [2:58m]: » Filed Under Video, Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
An Interview with Arthur C. Clarke
Posted on March 19, 2008
I am headed to Sri Lanka next week and asked a mutual friend of mine and the late Arthur C. Clarke if it would be possible to see him. “I’ll try, but he is very weak”, was the reply. Clarke, of course, passed away yesterday. I spent a day in 1994 exploring the sandbox that is his mind while working on a documentary on the future of travel. I brought a copy of the first 3d Studio, a then-primitive 3d design program, on an ancient laptop. After muddling through a thousand page manual, I proudly created a ball rolling down a ramp. A job at ILM was not in my future. Like a couple of little kids, I showed him mine and he showed me his, a digital re-landscaping of Mars, of the way it would look in thousands of years once Smith and Hawken established its first branch there.
I have met few people like Clarke, with an ability to dance from subject to subject, making sense — common sense — of subjects ranging from space elevators to sumo wrestling, often with childlike excitement and tearful emotion. He also loved animals. His back yard has a pet cemetery with gravestones marking his beloved companions. He introduced me to Pepsi, a chihuahua he named Pepi, but his staff called Pepsi, so he changed the name.
I exchanged messages with Clarke a few times, but never got back to Colombo. I had always longed to return to recharge my brain batteries…not to mention share a few hearty laughs.
We sat down in his garden one morning and talked about subjects ranging from virtual reality, to tourism’s effects on environments and cultures to Gandhi’s views on capitalism. I left a camera running an pulled a few clips.
» Filed Under Video, Sri Lanka, Sustainable Tourism, Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
The Danube in the Rain: Bureau of Forgotten Footage
Posted on March 3, 2008
I was doing a search in our video footage files and came up a clip I shot several years ago and proceeded to forget. It was a rainy day aboard Peter Deilmann Cruises Mozart, a luxe riverboat the plies the Danube…which is really blue at times and quite beautiful. I fixed my camera on my cabin window and watched scenes along the riverbank dissolve before me. The vocal of Strauss’ Blue Danube was recorded by Frieda Hempel in 1907.
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12 Million Pixels: Review Panasonic FX100
Posted on February 8, 2008
R.Johnson Veterans Day Shrine – London (Inset enlarged from frame)
I have never been very much for boxy things: Humvees, large suitcases, Wagnerian contraltos. I own two boxy cameras, both antiques: a 1950s Brownie movie camera and a vintage Crown Graphic, a bulky machine with bellows once favored by cigar chomping, flashbulb-popping guys who sat at the edges of boxing rings and Eisenhower-era CSI agents. In fact, the Graphic was given to me as a teenager by a friend of my father, an ex-boxer turned photographer named Ed, deaf from too many blows to the head and always reeking of stogie. My mother hated him, thought he was a bad influence. Ed taught me photography and a couple of punches with which I wasted the neighborhood bully. I hung up my gloves at age twelve but stuck with photography. I have always favored precious little Leicas with squinty viewfinders handmade by the Moss People of the Schwartzwald, cameras with smooth, precision gears, burnished surfaces and shutters that click with the uninvasive self-confidence of European maitre d’s.
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Feed the Tiger: The Future of Las Vegas
Posted on January 21, 2008
Traffic at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (c) Russell Johnson Feed the Tiger: The Future of Las Vegas
When will it end? Why as our salaries shrink, our expectations dwindle, our house values plummet, our IRAs squeal like piggies being led to slaughter, does that supersize-me oasis of bare buns, aged sirloin and greedy motives called Las Vegas keep on getting bigger. Last week the strip got its latest boob job called the Palazzo, a 1.9 billion hotel implant that would dwarf the crumbling palaces on the Grand Canal and make a Doge weep. Outside of Las Vegas, what else could 1.3 billion get you? According to the UN, you could immunize every child in the world against deadly disease for 1.3 billion a year. But then, what happens in Bangladesh
stays in Bangladesh…Las Vegas is a different reality.
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