bookofjoe

Jimmy Wales and Edwin Heathcote — 'Good enough, making do and getting by'

Financial Times arts critic Edwin Heathcote and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wouldn't seem to have all that much in common — but appearances can be deceiving.

In an August 13, 2006 New York Times story by David Colman, Wales discussed his Wikipedia ideal of information that is "good enough."

The very next day, August 14, Heathcote's interview with British sculptor Richard Wentworth noted the title of Wentworth's recent series of photographs, "Making Do and Getting By."

Wrote Heathcote, "Since the 1970s Wentworth has been documenting... ingenious and creative use, reuse, misuse and abuse of everyday things."

Here's that article.

An alchemist of everyday trifles

As I strolled up to the Kings Cross café where I was to meet the British sculptor Richard Wentworth I noticed that the rubber doormat was being used to hold open the front door on a day which was already sweltering first thing in the morning. That, I thought, is exactly the kind of thing Wentworth would like. Sure enough, he rolls up a few minutes later, greets me and excuses himself while he takes a quick photo of the surrogate door wedge.

Since the 1970s Wentworth has been documenting precisely this kind of ingenious and creative use, re-use, misuse and abuse of everyday things. His photographic series entitled “Making Do and Getting By” is an open-ended poem to improvisation – a coat hanger propping open a broken sash-window, brooms used as barriers to close off a doorway, a cigarette stubbed out in a bottle-top and, he is keen to show me the latest one on his camera, a paintbrush wedged between a pair of cupboard handles as a makeshift lock.

But the series is also a heartfelt poem for the Kings Cross he lives in (an exhibition at an old builders’ supplies store was entitled An area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty), a world in which things take on an almost human pathos and charisma – a glove impaled on iron railings, creative littering in the form of styrofoam cups wedged behind drainpipes or railings, broken office chairs and TVs piled on the pavement.

It is a world where discarding becomes a creative act, where things are placed deliberately and produce new meanings and possibilities. Once you look at the work it is hard not to see the world in those terms, to see objects as things with parallel lives of their own.

In his sculpture too, Wentworth creates curious and beautiful paradoxes, everyday things somehow made strange: ladders, buckets, junk-books, lightbulbs, punctured and penetrated by other things, leaning and balancing, given character through juxtaposition, by being displayed on shelves, suspended on wires, by being massed together. These things bring with them the ghosts of Laurel and Hardy and Jacques Tati as much as that of Marcel Duchamp.

“I’ve got some kind of filter,” he tells me, “so I always see that [he points to an odd, undersized manhole cover next to our table] before I see the pavement, the crack before the glass. I see figure before ground. To me that’s a kind of syntax of assemblage, which is actually what culture is.”

Wentworth’s world really is a world of things. By the end of our conversation virtually every object on our table has been used to demonstrate a point. Even the table itself, which wobbles (he gently admonishes the designer). “I’ve never been able to let go,” he says, picking up a knife. “I know this is a one-piece knife and how odd it is that the blade and handle are made in one and that once the handle would have been made of something else. These things are all forged and formed and they all have meaning.”

Then he gets out his new digital camera and points out a scratch. “This must have happened in my pocket, keys or something – at what point does use become misuse or abuse?” He points to the battered surface of the table – “look at this, this is good isn’t it? So why am I upset about my camera? These things we have now, they all look like they were made in heaven, look at that bottle of water, where did that come from? These things are like us, they have skin, they can be damaged and wounded. Like this.”

He points to a small circular scar on his palm.

“I drilled into this accidentally. It’s very useful when you need to buy a new drill bit” – he holds out his stigmata – “this size please.”

So does he think this world he’s been so assiduously documenting is disappearing under all these shiny, brand new goods?

“No, it’s not disappearing. Look, I don’t seek this stuff out but it just seems to find me” – and at that he scrolls through some pictures on the camera alighting on one of a “closed” sign crowned with a handwritten “We are now”.

“What other kind of closed is there?” he asks me, then (“look at this”) he shows me the paintbrush/cabinet lock (“and this”); he scrolls on. “This 1930s building in Baker Street is being rebuilt and there’s a hoarding wrapped around the site. At the top is a flagpole, the whole building seems to be building up to this flagpole, which is all about empire and saying ‘we are here’. Someone has gone to the trouble of getting some stickers and made a flag of St George on the rendering.”

And there it is, a stiff sticker flag on this virtual future. Funny, poignant and ingenious, it’s all about the lengths people will go to, to do eccentric, often extremely funny, occasionally touching little gestures.

Although Wentworth’s work is so tied up in the ingenious strangeness of the London streetscape, there seems to be something vaguely Parisian about it. In fact his photos appeared together with those of Eugène Atget, the French photographer who died in 1927, in an exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery five years ago. Atget’s images of a disappearing old Paris inspired the Surrealists and the surreal is ever-present in Wentworth’s images. But also present is that very French idea of the flâneur looking at what happens on the city’s streets, and the Situationist idea of the dèrive, the urban walk that exposes the hidden patterns of the streets and the life that seeps up from the beach below the paving stones.

But one figure in particular comes to mind: Duchamp. In fact one of Wentworth’s sculptures was based around a very familiar looking bottle rack.

“I bought that rack in France, as an antique. Incredibly the French name for it is an ‘if’, which I just love. I’m a kind of inserter. I don’t mean to do it, things just stack. I’m sure there’s some kind of psycho-sexual thing there. It was like waving at Duchamp – and I think I got away with it.

“I once spoke to someone who photographed Duchamp and he told me how vain he was. There are artists who wilfully self-mythologise.”

Born in 1947, Wentworth studied first at Hornsey College of Art and then the Royal College. While still a student he worked for Henry Moore, and then became a key member of the highly influential New British Sculpture generation of the late 1970s, which included Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Richard Deacon and Anish Kapoorl. Since 2004 he has been Master of the prestigious Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. So he is profoundly qualified to talk about what he describes as “a small tribe producing luxury goods”. Overall, in fact, Wentworth is alternately politely withering and gently forgiving about the art world. For him it is “a bit of an ingrowing toenail – you have to decide if you can live with that discomfort”. Later he says, “we can’t really tell what’s good art. There’s a longer story there and some of this stuff will become part of our culture. The good stuff sticks and the other stuff floats off, like not very good transfers.”

As we start to wrap up, he looks at all the bits and pieces that have accumulated around our table.

“It’s all about stuff,” he says, “all these things, here at our service. Everything is always performing. Your bag is sitting there open, waiting for you to put stuff back into it, my glass is waiting for me to finish off the water. These guys’ laptops [he gestures towards our neighbours] are acting as fortifications, their screens as modesty boards in the same way we might use these books as barriers.

“We’re negotiators, not controllers. All this stuff surrounds us and hits us and, in order not to go mad we have to throw some of it out but it’s the pieces we keep inside us which make us us, which make you Eddie and me Richard. In the end it’s all stuff in the plughole.”

As we leave, the doormat has been moved slightly, to a different, more deliberate angle. He gets his camera out and takes another snap.

....................

Here's Colman's piece on Wales.

Possessed: Industrial Art Illuminates Life

Jimmy Wales does not come across as the great philosopher king of the technical age. He does not utter sweeping statements about the disconnect of modern society and the salvation that the Internet offers. He does not have a catchy book on the best-seller list; he does not lay down heady projections of where society will be in 20 years.
If anything, Mr. Wales, the founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, who has become an unlikely lightning rod for the quality-versus-quantity debate over information on the Internet, is a figure out of a 1930's Frank Capra film, a likable guy with a Southern twang whose simple social experiment has run away with him.

So Mr. Wales works at keeping it simple and staying dedicated to the Wikipedia ideal of information that is helpful, more or less accurate and ''good enough,'' to borrow a term from Barry Schwartz, the author of ''The Paradox of Choice.''

This applies not just to Wikipedia's content but also to Mr. Wales's own style. His home is not an Italianate villa on a grape-ridden hillside in Napa but a four-bedroom ranch house in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he moved for the simple reason that it was sunny and cheaper than San Diego, his former home.

At home, Mr. Wales has honed the good-enough style so well -- or rather, not honed it -- that the place will not even remotely be featured in House & Garden. He dresses casually, Florida-style, goes by the nickname Jimbo, and although he does drive a foreign car, it's a Hyundai Accent.

''It's sort of like an appliance as a car,'' he said. He bought his DVD player at Wal-Mart, and his television set has something inside it called a cathode ray tube. Heard of it, kids?

About the only thing he has that aspires to a higher ideal is, of all things, a flashlight. The SureFire M6 blasts the competition, which averages 60 lumens, with a 250-lumen light beam. The company bills it as a ''searchlight disguised as a flashlight'' and boasts that ''SWAT teams use the lights to temporarily blind suspects at night.''

''Who needs a baseball bat?'' said Mr. Wales, who keeps his M6 on his bedside table not as a weapon but in case he, you know, needs a flashlight. ''You have to love the kitsch of that, that there's an assault flashlight now.''

The $400 M6, which is eight inches long, holds six lithium batteries and is housed in aerospace-grade aluminum, is the product of a design school that might be called Modern Militant, the most familiar example of which is the Hummer. ''It's really, really, really, really bright,'' Mr. Wales said. ''Anyone who tries to one-up me with their fancy car or whatever, I've got 'em. I say, 'Well, I have a brighter flashlight.' ''

Not that the flashlight was bought with one-upmanship in mind. As Mr. Wales explained: ''We were living in California, there had been earthquakes and terrorist attacks, and we had these crappy $2 flashlights. I started reading flashlight-geek Web sites and just went crazy and got very into this. The M6 was like 10 times brighter than any normal flashlight.''

Still, the flashlight sees very little active duty. He likes that it is there next to his bed, just in case. Even at rest, it functions as a little totem of safety and quality. ''It's almost like an object of art for me,'' he said.

It may not be the best piece of art in the world, but hey, it's good enough.

....................

"Use, reuse, abuse and misuse."

That sums it up pretty well.

What does it sum up, joe?

Hey, come on — you might recall Picasso's observation, to wit: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

I take a backseat to no computer.

Polar Ice Glass

Say what?

From websites:
....................

Polar Ice Glass

This Polar Ice Glass keeps liquids up to 23°(F) cooler in hot weather without diluting your drink with melted ice.

Insert ice and cold water into chamber inside the glass and seal.

The ice never touches your drink!

24 oz. glass is dishwasher-safe and made of super-durable polycarbonate.
....................

Perfect for traveling to places where the ice ain't so nice.

I wonder which travel catalog will twig first and feature this item.

Get your ice tube mojo working, combine it with this nifty glass and you've got yourself one icy-kewl mashup.

A set of two glasses is $12.

Far Out — The year 2019

That's as far out an expiration date as I've seen.

I espied it on a set of Energizer AA lithium batteries (above and below) I bought yesterday.

"Use by 2019."

Will do.

Anyone got something in, say, the 2020s?

Sounds cool, doesn't it?

"That was popular back in the 20s."

That's what they'll be saying in 2080.

Well, OK — that's what I'll be saying.

I can't speak for you.

Business Card Mouse Pad

Kind of cool.

Business Card Mouse Pad

You're in business — tell the world!

Just send us your business card — we'll enlarge it for the mouse pad.

9" x 7".

$9.99.

'117 books to be read immediately' – by Francine Prose

It's a list

appended to her

new book,

"Reading Like A Writer,"

and appears below

and above.

Mini Christmas Snowglobe Key Chain

Not recommended for carrying in your back pocket.

From the website:

Snowglobe Key Chain

Carry this little snowglobe with you and "shake up" the magic of a white Christmas — anytime!

Mini snowglobe measures 1-7/8" high and makes a great stocking stuffer.

$3.49.

Sorry about that, Guy.

[Killer] Tax Collector [Klowns] From Outer Space

Fred A. Bernstein's August 20 New York Times story unroofed the new new thing in revenooing: using aircraft to fly around over cities and take pictures of buildings, which are then downloaded into computers equipped with software that detects changes in properties, resulting in a nice increase in the subsequent tax bill.

Ka-ching.

Here's the article.

Why Some Homeowners May Not Be Smiling for These Cameras

There are about 300,000 row houses in Philadelphia, which means there are about 300,000 row house owners in Philadelphia who would like to see their tax assessments lowered.

Some of them get in touch with the city’s Board of Revision of Taxes. A caller may say, “Our house is in the worst condition of any on the block,” said Barry Mescolotto [below], the board’s assistant administrator.



These days, Mr. Mescolotto has a good answer: “I’ll say, ‘I’m looking at a photo of your house, and it looks to be about the same as all the others.’ ”

“That usually ends the conversation,” Mr. Mescolotto said.

Until recently, assessors had to accept homeowners’ claims or visit the properties themselves. But in 2003, the city hired the Pictometry International Corporation, a company in Rochester, N.Y., to provide images of every building in the city.

Once a year, Pictometry flies a Cessna 172 over Philadelphia, taking thousands of black-and-white photographs. The low-altitude shots, unlike satellite images, show buildings at about a 40-degree angle. Pictometry’s computers organize the photos so they can be searched by address. Nearly 200 employees in Mr. Mescolotto’s office have the software on their computers.

Pictometry isn’t the only company offering aerial photos to assessors, but it has won adherents in more than 200 cities and counties, according to Dante Pennacchia, Pictometry’s chief marketing officer. Its competitors include an Israeli company, Ofek International, working with Aerial Cartographics of America, based in Orlando, Fla.

Mr. Mescolotto said that the Pictometry system, which costs Philadelphia about $100,000 a year, “probably paid for itself within about two weeks.”

“If you have a dog, or a locked fence, we may not be able to get into your backyard to see something you’ve built,” Mr. Mescolotto said. But Pictometry flies over dogs and fences.

In addition to home improvements, the software has also helped his office pick up more than 100 cellphone antennas that have been erected on existing structures. Each tower, he said, “adds so much value that, taxwise, it’s the equivalent of finding a new house.”

Pictometry’s software makes it possible for assessors not only to see buildings, but also to measure them, down to the hundredth of a foot. But trying to zoom in on people’s faces causes the photos to dissolve into pixels. “It’s not at the resolution where you can look in windows, or read license plates,” said Kenneth M. Wilkinson, the property assessor of Lee County in Florida. “The system preserves privacy.”

Mr. Wilkinson has made the Pictometry images available to the public over the Internet. (To see images of properties in Lee County, visit the property assessor’s site, leepa.org, and then click on Pictometry. Registration is free.) The site has received millions of hits, according to Mr. Wilkinson.

And that makes a few people unhappy. One of his employees, he said, received a telephone call from a retired New York City policeman, who didn’t want people to see that he had two Cadillacs in his driveway.

Another time, he said, a woman complained that her garage door was open, and people could see a mess inside. “You can’t make an appointment to have your picture taken,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

Mr. Wilkinson says that Lee County’s tax base has grown rapidly — to about $180 billion today from about $4.5 billion in assessed valuation when he took office 25 years ago.

He said the county is dependent on Pictometry. The contract with the company, signed in 2001, came in particularly handy after Hurricane Charley made landfall in Lee County in August 2004.

By law, the county had until Jan. 1, 2005, to adjust the assessed valuation of every property affected by the hurricane. Without Pictometry, “there is no way we could have had it done in time,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

In addition, Mr. Wilkinson said, petitions to lower assessments have declined since 2001, to about 500 a year from an average of 2,000 a year. “People are surprised how well we know their property,” he said.

Recently, Mr. Wilkinson’s office has been using Pictometry’s “change detection” feature: After flying over the county, the company prepares a list of properties that appear to have been altered since the last fly-over.

“The software takes us right to those properties,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “We can look, and see that you’ve added a pool.”

Scott Yamamoto, the property appraiser for Geauga County, Ohio, which is east of Cleveland, also uses the change-detection feature. The computer, he said, is programmed to look for “something that wasn’t there before, or something that was there before but isn’t there now.”

“We get a list, in spreadsheet form, of all the parcels where there was some type of change,” he said.

Unfortunately, he said, there are a lot of false positives. A pile of sand, or snow on the ground, can trigger the change detector. “Or a boat parked close to a garage can look to the computer like the garage has been expanded,” he said.

But Mr. Yamamoto is not complaining. The first time his office used the change-detection feature, he said, his office “picked up about $1.8 million in property value that we could not see from the ground.”

That translated into $35,000 in tax revenue last year for his rural county.

He said many taxpayers like the software, “because when they call you to talk about their property, you know right away what they’re talking about.”



“But,” he said, “a property owner isn’t going to call us and say, ‘I built a riding arena back in the woods, and you can’t see it — ha, ha, ha.’ ”

What do 20,000 flies look like?

According to the catalog copy for the device pictured above, you can find out in the privacy of your own yard or home.

From the website:

Flies-Be-Gone Fly Trap

Easy to use, economical, and effective for up to 4 weeks, over an area half the size of a football field!

Just hang it up, indoors or out, wherever flies are a problem, and watch it go to work!

Attracts and traps up to 20,000 flies with totally non-toxic bait (included).

Works on house and yard flies, even fruit flies.

Maintenance-free and biodegradable.

Simply throw it out when full.

8" diam. x 10" high.

Plastic.

$14.99.