We Made a Blog

Once Google became a daily and unconscious part of the day, I started getting the feeling that somehow it would be possible for search results to show, well, results…of things that had not yet happened. Ridiculous, no? Maybe not so much. Google (and a little outfit called the CIA) have invested in Recorded Future (Orwellian by way of Disraeli motto: “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”).

Recorded Future is a search engine (it seems to prefer to call itself a “temporal analytics engine”) with three boxes: What, Who/Where and When. The “When” is where things get interesting. Instead of the usual search field date restriction of the present, the “When” goes boldly into the future to scan everything from Twitter feeds to government documents to map patterns and forecast an outcome.

As you may have already predicted, the future isn’t free (it’s $149 a month).

I noticed these started popping up by skates spots in Brooklyn about a week ago. This shots from under the BQE. Skate Something

There is simply no other group of three letters that has a bigger impact on the way we use technology. DRM is the bane of your existence and you may not even know it. It was created under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an attempt by legislators to protect copyright holders’ wealth, as digital copying became ubiquitous. The only problem is that it was outdated in a matter of months, possibly days and, in some people’s perceptions,  instantaneously. Suddenly, all that sharing we were doing ended. But then, we couldn’t even copy our own music for ourselves. I couldn’t share that which I legally purchased with friends like we used to with mix tapes.

Thankfully, change is a brew. Check out Gizmodo’s full-coverage of the recent revisions to the act, carried out by the Librarian himself.

While scanning the Whole Foods cold beverage display for some illy issimo, I came across a dark brew wrapped in a gold label with a Soviet-ish font and a pretty illustration of a field of wheat and a bird.  Krushka & Bochka Kvass – a fermented soda from the motherland.

Now we’ve all learned a lot about the Russians lately. That they’re still trying to gather secrets about how we live (even though there are no real travel restrictions and, you know, there’s the internet if they’re really lazy); that they have a town that’s an exact replica of Chevy Chase, Md., to train spies in (did they choose Chevy Chase because they’re fans of “Spies Like Us”?); and that no matter how much cleavage she shows, you shouldn’t trust a woman who dyes her hair red every week and sounds slightly foreign after a few glasses of vodka.

What hasn’t been very well publicized is that they seem to be very fond of a soda made of wort concentrate. Or that’s what the label of Kvass would have you believe. “Kvass has been a Russian staple of refreshment for centuries, enjoyed by czars and peasants alike. Pushkin describes how Russians believed they needed Kvass like the air for living.” When not composing thousand-page literary works or fomenting revolution, Pushkin kicked back and enjoyed a nice cold glass of fermented soda. You can’t buy an endorsement like that.

Back to the wort concentrate. It’s rye flour, fermented rye malt and barley flour. To that they add some sugar. And that’s pretty much it. Kvass is described as “[m]alty with a sweet finish and light sparkle, Kvass is truly a thirst quencher like no other.” The reality? A soda that tastes like the raisins that get stuck at the bottom of a box formed a collective that meant to work toward the common good but somehow they’ve just grown hardened and weary.

Na zdorovye!

When I was little I used to spend those last drowsy moments before sleep trying to consciously pixelate the darkness. When the effort to keep my eyes open got to be too much, I’d switch to marveling at the spidering bursts I’d see with them closed. That’s pretty much the point and effect of writer, artist and visionary Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine.

On display at the New Museum as part of a Gysin retrospective, the Dreamachine is a pierced rotating cylinder filled with light. In the Beat quest for any and all altering experiences, it’s designed to reproduce the alpha waves the brain emits immediately before sleep to achieve both relaxation and heightened awareness. Gysin developed the device with computer programmer, electronics technician and “systems adviser” to William S. Burroughs, Ian Sommerville.

Eager to recreate the spectacular flashes of my childhood game, I followed the instructions and sat six to eight inches away from the Dreamachine and closed my eyes. For a few minutes I saw the same spectacular and hypnotic flashes of color I remembered. But there’s no recreating a five-year-old’s marvel; ultimately all I saw were just flickers of the past.

Two turntables and a microphone is where it’s at, as Clemens Kogler demonstrates in “Stuck in a Groove.” Made using phonovideo – a setup involving two turntables, two cameras, a videomixer, an output or recording device, some cardboard discs with animation and no computer editing – it’s an analog revolution.