Field Notes

Working to restore the layout after WordPress installed a new high-level path that bypassed my templates. This is the reference for how it should look.

Signs of the apocalypse, stateside trip edition:

Leslie Harpold, one of the early Internet colonists I encountered on alt.society.generation-x and its spinoffs, died this past weekend of natural but sudden causes. Most of you kids probably don’t remember what life was like back in the early Clinton Administration, when Al Gore and that guy at CERN were personally dragging the Web out of the Pleistocene of the Arpanet and Gopher. The standard webpage was stone grey with faux-incised division lines and a yellow “Under Construction” sign. Netscape was the browser of choice and Alta Vista was the search engine of choice. People were still arguing about whether it would be right to use the Internet for commerce, and if so how. Spam was a highly uncool food product, often mentioned in the same breath with marshmallow Jell-O molds.

At some point in those years John Scalzi said he was going to start an online diary, and people scoffed. How could anyone come up with stuff of general interest to write about every day? Around the same time Leslie started her first webzine, Smug, and some of us were skeptical about that too. I think it’s fair to say that Leslie (and John) had the last laugh, and kept on innovating.

I never met her, and I wasn’t in the center of the target market (a favorite eyeroll phrase at asg-x) for Smug, but I dearly loved Leslie’s posts and her Compulsion column. Almost ten years later, I am still looking for Ren Dan just because of the way she wrote about it. Many people have posted tributes to her and I hope a lot of that love reached her while she was alive.

One Grundig 37-730 text TV, personal model. The picture tube blew right before the broadcast of the first round of the presidential elections in January. Edicron said they didn’t know if they could fix it so I bought another secondhand Grundig TV from them, which turned out to be better than this one. That is, the screen on the current TV is bigger than a laptop display, nearly flat, and has good color balance. There’s an occasional tracing problem which I can live with.

One Brother HL-730 laser printer in an uncommonly space-wasting design. The gears have been wonky since soon after I got it in 1998, and almost entirely stripped since maybe 2001. The paper tray never sat properly. I never did get to make use of the second ink cartridge.

Both of these were acquired from A&A upon their departure; they’d bought them new less than two years before. I made several attempts to give them to repair and resale shops or otherwise recycle them greenly, but was turned down everywhere and ended up just taking them to the Sortti station in a cab. You no longer have to pay to dispose of small amounts of electronica at the Sortti station, so I treated myself to taking the cab onwards to Malmi railway station. Last time, I dismissed the cab and tried to walk to a bus line, but ended up getting lost in the forest for about an hour. The Sortti station is really in the most inaccessible place in the city. Now if only YTV would institute curbside recycling for glass, paper, etc., or restore the Arabia recycling point which they took away when the tram line shifted, we’d be in business.

At the Steve Reich concert on Saturday night I had that rare feeling of being at an important event. The program began with Piano Phase in which two pianists start with an eight-note figure in unison, move out of phase and then back together, and then one drops out and the other reduces the figure to four notes and then nothing. It is amazing how much Paavali Jumppanen can communicate with four notes and I suppose that’s why he’s a star. The applause lasted longer than any I have ever heard in that hall, and there were three bows. As the clapping died away, two clappers emerged from the audience performing Clapping Music, which brought the house down. This was followed immediately with Music for Pieces of Wood, and after the intermission with Music for Eighteen Musicians, which was about three times as long as my concentrated attention span but interesting nonetheless.

“The thing about these concerts is that people are coming that we’ve never seen before,” said H. Not just the usual music students, music student familiars and concert groupies but a whole underground of minimalism fans who now have the chance to hear live music. I suspect many of them are geeks who’ve discovered that minimalism is good trance music for software coding and problem solving; I remember when Glassworks replaced Dark Side of the Moon for a term as the favorite stereo-blasting album in Senior House.

The Sibelius Academy minimalism festival, clapping music, continues with conferts today and tomorrow. The piece Clapping Music was performed as an audience participation piece in London the same day, and is available as a recording on emusic among other places.

Above, Reich’s Pendulum Music for microphones, amplifiers and speakers is performed in the lobby of the Academy before the second Steve Reich concert the following Tuesday. This latter concert featured Tehillim and a marimba duo by the same two clapping guys from the first concert, who make their entrances with an affectless Blue Man Group demeanor that gets me wondering if they’re going to throw paintballs, or play music. They are grad students in the percussion department and they are incredible percussion players. And clappers.

1. Tarharyhmä, ca. 1995. That was Maija Vilkkuna’s old band, an all-girl punk outfit that played everything double fast (if you have eMusic, look up Jenny Choi and the Third Shift, “My First Time” - that’s what they sounded like). My neighbor Paulina T. was in a Finnish class with Maija and we hung out with her in the lobby of Tavastia before the show. It was before anyone knew who she was; five years later she couldn’t walk into a classroom without everyone feeling the silent frisson of rockstar.

Between 1996 and 2003 I was doing the hardest part of my graduate work and didn’t really get out much.

2. Steel Wheels and J.M.K.E., ca. 2004. Two Soviet-era punk bands from Estonia, come to Senate Square to play at a celebration welcoming Estonia to the EU. J.M.K.E. is more famous but I mainly heard Steel Wheels, who I was told at the time were J.M.K.E., and who played an Estonian version of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” with the lead singer prancing around wrapped in a Union Jack in the Estonian colors.

3. The Lucksmiths, this evening. “… One for Steve … yes, Steve the Crocodile Hunter Irwin, dead today from a stingray barb through the heart … yeah, big fucking surprise… the guy wrestled snakes … only a matter of time, really … he went the way he wanted to go … actually, his first choice was an adder bite in the balls, stingray was only number two … we’d like to thank you all for coming out on a Monday night … Monday, what is this, don’t you guys have school tomorrow?”

No, I’m all done, thanks. But yes, I kind of do, in the sense of having things of no direct utility that I need to get up and do in order to have a better life later.

At some point this entry will have links and also a picture of the Lucksmiths fridge magnet which was as Anth said a bargain at 1€. The fuel to fly it here probably cost more than that.

1. As a celebration of an exploitative imperial autocracy, rationalized through the familiar rhetoric of showing that the Romanovs were a family just like ours - only prettier, more popular, and, crucially, at some point in the past stronger and more violent. And thus in a position to give really cool Easter presents.

2. As a tribute to a visionary designer and craftsman. Aesthetic elitism is integrated with power worship through the establishment of hierarchies of taste, with unique and labor-intensive products at the top: by admiring the treasures we have the illusion of raising ourselves to a position of distinction, and of virtually taking possession of our favorites.

3. As an exercise in Finnish nationalism. The overriding message of the exhibition is that many of the Fabergé workmasters and workers were Finns, and Finns made significant contributions to the industrial rise of the Russian empire. Their work is described as the contribution of mobile elites and largely ghettoized guest workers, not as the work of enthusiastic members of the empire or a colonized people. Great play is given to an official of the Finnish Diet of Estates who risked his position by taking a stance on something (what and how, we are not told), and was later given an exquisite Fabergé cigarette case by a boxmaker’s widow in thanks for his service to the Finns.

4. As a rewriting of art history into labor history, foregrounding the role of middle managers and hands-on workers over that of Peter Carl Fabergé who is reduced to a company founder and figurehead. The Fabergé workmasters, particularly Holmström and Wäkewä, have been credited in past books and exhibitions about the firm, but here it is made insistently clear that they (Finns! don’t be misled by the Swedish names!) actually designed the objects and commissioned lower-level craftsmen, and some women, to execute them. The non-Finnish workmasters and workers are still written out.

5. As a showcase of ordinary Fabergé production. The Fabergé firm did not just make the exquisite picture frames, cigarette paraphernalia and egg fantasies collected by Malcolm Forbes and the Queen of England. It also made quite a bit of kitsch, notably some animal sculptures that are only slightly more attractive than the frightful china miniatures that were given away for years in boxes of Red Rose Tea. (When an animal image gets that neotenic, top-heavy look, it’s always kitsch.)

6. As a marketing opportunity for a firm apparently owned by Fabergé descendants that makes ornaments bearing no relation to the best of the real thing. For example: a set of crown-shaped napkin holders in different colors that look like props from a children’s play. I’ve seen things more in the spirit of Fabergé at H&M.

7. As an imperfectly executed translation project. Perhaps I should be grateful that, like the toiling gemsmiths at Fabergé, my contribution was uncredited, since errors like “chrystal” and “jetton” were introduced after I clocked out.

August 26, 1996 - August 26, 2006

Don’t worry, Pluto. You will always be a planet to me.