Writing
Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition has a unique ability to judge how the market will respond to logos and brands. At the root of this rare talent, for which Bigend employs her, is a “phobic reaction” to trademarks she’s had since age 6 when she threw up after seeing The Michelin Man in a French catalog. Otherwise known as “Bibendum,” the 114-year-old, anthropomorphic stack of tires remains her biggest weakness.
Read MoreOriginally published in the East Bay Express, 2012 Roman Mars' radio show and podcast is changing the way we look at design — and maybe the nature of public radio.
By Tate Williams
When people think of design, they usually conjure images of prominent, beautiful objects, like a sleek modern building or a stylish piece of furniture. But there's another world of design, one we rarely notice, that quietly orchestrates our lives — the paths we walk, our moods, our interactions.
That secret world is the terrain of 99% Invisible, a four-and-a-half-minute-long KALW radio show and podcast that local producer Roman Mars creates at night from his home in the East Bay, and has become something of a national hit. In its sixty-plus episodes, the show has uncovered the hidden world of design, revealing such stories as the murderous history of dentures, the faults and virtues of the cul de sac, and the free-jazz of deteriorating escalators.
Read MoreZero History operative Milgrim is kept on a tight leash by his handler Ollie Sleight. He supplies Milgrim with nothing but an unusual phone and what he calls a “Faraday pouch” for carrying his passport.
Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport…You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.
The pouch plays a role in Milgrim’s evolution as his involvement in corporate espionage deepens.
Read MoreBuzz Rickson’s Black MA-1 Bomber Jacket Cayce Pollard, brand-phobic coolhunter at the center of Pattern Recognition, adores her Japanese-made replica of a standard issue U.S. Air Force flying jacket.
The Rickson’s is a fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket, as purely functional and iconic a garment as the previous century produced…Cayce’s MA-1 trumps any attempt at minimalism, the Rickson’s having been created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion…It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates.
The Rickson’s is a quite real jacket, emblematic for Gibson of the almost religious craftsmanship of Japanese garment makers. Buzz Rickson’s is, in fact, a Japanese clothing company founded in 1993 that specializes in replica vintage flight jackets, one of which is the MA-1.
Read MoreHollis Henry stays at Bigend’s Vancouver apartment toward the end of Spook Country, and gets a mysterious warning call on the way there:
Read More“Do you have any piercings?” he asked.
They took a right.
“Excuse me?”
“Piercings. If you do I must warn you about the bed in the master bedroom. The top floor.”
“The bed.”
“Yes. Apparently you don’t want to crawl under it if you have any magnetic bits. Steel, iron. Or a pacemaker. Or a mechanical watch. the designers never mentioned that, when they showed me the plans. It’s entirely about the space underneath, visually. Magnetic levitation. But now I have to warn each guest in turn. Sorry.”
I've been wanting to start a Tumblr about a particular topic as a hobby because I have such an overabundance of free time. Nothing was really striking me, but I've been reading "Zero History" by William Gibson, and I remembered, particularly in his newer novels, how dense they are with references. Some are real, some are not real, some of them are right on the brink of being real. I remember when I saw Gibson do a reading for the release of the new book, and during the Q&A, he was asked about the potential of hyperlinks in ebooks. He sort of shrugged at the idea, but answered that, since the Internet became widespread, when he writes, he doesn't feel the need to explain everything he mentions. It's as though novels are now are somewhat suspended in a cloud of information readily at the fingertips of almost every reader.
Fifty pages in and I found myself on the subway, googling references on my phone to see if he made it up or if it's a real thing that's out there. Also in his newer novels, he writes in present day. Gibson is noted as saying "The future is here — it's just not evenly distributed." His books are filled with existing items that are on the very fringe of awareness, or on the brink of becoming mainstream. It makes for a participatory reading experience, and it's a reason he's one of my favorite authors.
And so, the Tumblr. The very geeky Tumblr. For now known as Blue Ant after the corporate identity of eccentric, wealthy puppet-master Hubertus Bigend, whose curiosity drives the events of Gibson's most recent three novels. In it, I'll pick some little item mentioned in the book and explore the story behind it. It will be fun. And it will let me write little pieces about cool things. The general topics will be fashion, marketing, computing, design, corporate espionage, all great stuff even if you have no clue who William Gibson is.
I'll repost stuff on the website. Here's the inaugural post:
Read MoreEven something as tuneless as reading a psychology research paper can get a song stuck in your head. In my case, it was “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National, which has a quirky drumbeat that is particularly sticky. It’s like, bum BUM bumbum badabum, bum BUM bumbum badabum. And so on, you get the idea.
Ok, this particular paper is about getting songs stuck in your head, so while it may be ironic, it wasn’t completely counterintuitive that it would happen to me while reading it (the song is mentioned in the study).
But the research in question, which sought to classify the circumstances that lodge little tunes in our brains — Involuntary Musical Imagery, INMI, or just “earworms” — found that the set of contributing factors are more varied and complex than you might think. Earworms are ubiquitous, and the circumstances associated with them run the gamut from banal to mathematic to profound.
Read MoreThere’s a growing body of evidence that the Internet can be an empowering tool for marginalized populations, and a recent study tells some striking stories of how it’s been used by one uniquely isolated community.
In the early 1990s, when Gorbachev reopened the borders of the declining Soviet Union, many thousands of Russian Jews fled to Israel, where there were no restrictions against Jewish immigration.
Read MoreThe story of Scott and Amundsen racing to the South Pole at the dawn of the 20th century only gains dimension as time passes. The mythical (you could say tabloid) aspects are as captivating as ever, but it’s the humanity that bleeds out from the details over time that has us returning to the story 100 years later. I recently read “Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole,” an illustrated account of the competing expeditions, and the one that didn’t make it back. It was a compelling and emotional retelling of the events that left Robert Falcon Scott and four of his fellow British explorers dead in their tent, not long after being beaten to the Pole by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team.
Read MoreOne weekend a year, the steampunks come out in the streets of Waltham, and it feels like home. In the much-preserved 19th century factory town just outside Boston — with displays of linotype machines the size of refrigerators, reanimated steam engines, and clocks, lots and lots of antique clocks —you can feel like you’ve sort of fallen out of time.
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