Posts tagged ‘life’
Alternate Reality: The Weather Network
Posted on | October 21, 2009 | No Comments
The Weather Network is a portal to another reality. It’s a 24-hour cable news channel where everything revolves around the weather, all the time. Every bulletin and every story segment is about the weather, climate change, or about the weather’s impact on traffic or other aspects of people’s lives (cars spinning out in deep snow, homes destroyed by falling trees or floods).
There is no irony in the Weather Network’s flow: it’s as if the anchors and journalists aren’t even aware that there’s another world out there, one where the weather is merely a small part of people’s lives. Presenters are professionally dressed in business attire and have all the mannerisms of CNN or BBC World: they say things like, “Up next!” or “What an interesting story there.”
During the frequent “news bulletins,” there are even ‘chatty’ parts where two anchors (!) share some informal banter with the viewers, like this:
Anchor 1: We thought we’d start this newscast by showing you some pictures of warm, sunny Toronto yesterday.
Anchor 2: Let’s do it!
Since nothing actually happens during the news bulletins, they are filled with B-roll images from around the country, showing iconic scenes from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, St. John’s, Toronto… catalogued (in a very large media library, one presumes) by season and weather condition, so that the appropriate clip is shown. For example, one of today’s stories was “Vancouver has Winter Woes of Its Own,” where we learned that winters are hard even in Vancouver because it always rains there:
One of my favourite parts is how the Weather Network has its own weather report. Just after the news, the actual weather report comes on, with a country-wide review of meteorological conditions, followed by an exhaustive local forecast. Of course, there’s also a traveler’s forecast that talks about a number of US cities.
The Weather Network also runs house promos where it tells us why it’s the best Weather Network out there (there are no others). It claims to have “40 meteorologists” on staff who anticipate and report on storms and other extreme weather conditions, and the promo is filled with dramatic images of floods, hurricanes and cars sliding on highways during blizzards.
The high production values of The Weather Network make it eerily similar to the Onion News Network, the Internet’s most brilliant video news satire, where everything is just like real television, only much, much funnier.
Now, you can sort of work out why the Weather Network is the way it is. This is a channel most reasonable people will only flip to for a quick weather check before leaving the house in the morning. Its ‘bounce rate’ must be very high. So the idea of creating ‘sticky’ viewers by offering interesting stories, opinions and banter to hang on to that viewer just a little bit longer must have made sense to someone.
But I like to imagine that there are home-bound people somewhere for whom the Weather Network is a main source of information about the world. Who are continually amazed at the astounding goings-on in Canada’s weather, who are delighted with the “international news” items about tropical storms and Canadian travelers stuck at airports due to white-outs.
In popular culture, the weatherman is typically the newsroom underdog: an aspiring journalist who doesn’t quite measure up to his news anchor brethren and who wears flashy jackets (it’s a waist-up sort of world) or does wacky things to catch our attention.
The Weather Network is the revenge of the weatherman: it’s all weather all the time. Because if you can’t join them, just create your own.
The Magic of the Ordinary (DNTO Podcast)
Posted on | September 29, 2009 | 1 Comment
Definintely Not The Opera (DNTO) is a magazine show on CBC Radio 1 that comes out every Saturday. It’s one of my most treasured Canadian cultural institutions. Originally named Brand X, it was first broadcast in 1994 and later renamed to Definitely Not The Opera to signify that it ran opposite Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio 2.
Host Sook-Yin Lee is a former MuchMusic VJ who took over DNTO in 2002. She’s also an accomplished actor, musician and filmmaker. Known for pushing her own limits (and, as a result, ours), Lee was involved in a controvery in 2003 when she acted in the film Shortbus which showed her having unsimulated sex. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation threatened to fire her in response, but a number of international media personalities supported her strongly and the CBC backed down.
DNTO is unusual in the current media landscape. A salon-style magazine program resolutely aimed at Generation X, it entertains and informs not by commenting on current affairs or the entertainment industry, nor by decorating itself with celebrity interviews. Instead, DNTO picks a topic (for example, “What do you believe in?” or “What didn’t you learn in school today?”) and provides 2 hours of thoughtful and intelligent analysis, narrative, humour and commentary.
The ‘talking heads’ are an eclectic mix of (mostly local, Canadian) artists, writers, scientists and other cultural producers. The style is a Sook-Yin Lee-led conversation, interspersed with incidental music. Quite unlike a more traditionally oriented interviewer, Lee asserts her opinions strongly in most segments – each episode has a story to tell and a point to make, and ‘getting out of the way’ doesn’t really support that objective.
Stories, in fact, are what DNTO is all about. Stories from when we were kids, stories about love and sex, stories about memorable embarassing moments, about accomplishments and failures, about the intrigue of the world. Stories about life.
Lee, in a way, is the show: many of DNTO’s most memorable stories are from her own life. She has a strong sense of wonder, an awareness of the magic of ordinary events, and is entirely fearless of disclosing too much (or at least that’s what we allow ourselves to believe). She professes that she’s “private” and a “prude” (her Chinese background, perhaps), yet we have weekly evidence of her need to share her most private experiences on air.
DNTO is very Canadian. The spirit of Trudeau’s children permeates every moment of programming. Cultural differences are acknowledged and respected, shared school experiences celebrated. The Canadian melting pot is discovered and surfaced in the ordinary events of everyday life. Somehow, DNTO manages to be wildly entertaining in its ordinariness; more so than, say, many of NPR‘s magazine shows which are oriented around cultural events (books, films, music releases) and their associated producers.
DNTO is available as a weekly podcast from the DNTO website.
Blue Ikea bags
Posted on | April 26, 2009 | No Comments
How would you move house without these? This is the ideal moving bag. From humble beginnings as a $1 useful item available in large boxes at the Ikea checkout, these are now officially one of the most useful things I have in my household. While they’re obviously too large to take them grocery shopping, they’re ideal for moving soft things (pillows, blankets, clothes) and assorted lighter ‘stuff’ that doesn’t mind being jumbled together, like shoes.
They also have a satisfying crumple sound – a bit like a sail maybe, or tarp. While you certainly can’t use them to sneak stuff around in, their crunchy nature signifies that they don’t mess around. Apparently, you can carry up to 60kg (130 pounds) in them.
Read: Karim Rashid, Design Your Self
Posted on | April 19, 2009 | No Comments
A review of Karim Rashid’s Design Your Self (2006)
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. (‘Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young,’ by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, 1997)
If you lived in the Western world and had access to a radio circa 1999, you know these words. Baz Luhrmann, an Australian screenwriter, director and producer, took a ‘theoretical’ commencement address from a Chicago Tribune columnist and made it into a ‘song’ of sorts: read in an authoritative male voice, the track dispenses a broad range of advice over a version of the song “Everbody’s Free (To Feel Good)” by Rozalla. Definitely a ‘novelty’ single, it reached #1 in the UK and Ireland and a respectable #45 in the US.
Industrial designer Karim Rashid‘s Design Your Self, whether intentional or not, has the same thrust throughout its roughly 325 high-gloss pages of advice. Clearly not content with a single role or type of work, Rashid-as-author dispenses advice on the four key areas of life. The sub-title is, “Rethinking the way you live, love, work, and play.”
The book’s tone is a benign imperative: “Create large white spaces,” “impose order,” “drink plenty of water and use a humidifier,” “sex toys are great,” “simplify where you can.” It took me a lot of conscious effort to move beyond the imperatives, handsomely summarized on colourful pages with designer-ish fonts.
When I did manage to set aside my indignation at page after page of being told what to do and how to live, I initially learned that Karim Rashid is quite a good writer. While it’s definitely not particularly artistic prose, it is head-and-shoulders above almost every self-help book I’ve ever read. Most explanatory passages are crisp and economical, with perfectly serviceable (and sometimes slightly quirky) anecdotes from the famed designer’s hobnobbing life.
About 100 pages in, another realization: the reason I didn’t set it aside (and I set books aside readily when they irritate me) was that Rashid actually made sense in large stretches. It’s a strangely all-encompassing work, this; as wide (or wider) in scope as Emily Post‘s famous instructions about manners, he sets out a comprehensive guide to living in this 21st century, urban, technology-savvy, media-saturated multi-culti world of ours. Design Your Self‘s surprisingly broad range of topics also ensures that it never runs out of subject matter and, therefore, doesn’t become boring. (It’s quite possible to read it in the same way one might watch a horrible accident being narrowly averted: “Can he do it? Will he be able to turn the wheel before he hits the guard rail…?”)
Design Your Self is the ultimate reference to a kind of celebratory cultural relativism and as such will be deeply irritating to anyone with a more conservative outlook. Searching for its roots is, of course, not particularly hard – at least not if we speculate a little. Rashid was born in Cairo and grew up in Canada during the crucial Trudeau decades. There’s a generation of Canadians who came of age in the 70s and 80s who, naturally and quite fervently, believe in a tolerant, let’s-all-get-along, economically productive, inclusive society. This book is one such person’s attempt at imparting that world view to the next generation.
Rashid’s father was a non-practicing muslim (as he recounts in a passage about accepting yourself and others), and one gets the impression that his world is a deeply materialistic place, a place where spirituality of any kind has little place (key quote from the section about managing your own death: “Why can’t someone order a casket from Gucci or Prada?”). This seems fitting for a pontificating industrial designer, on one hand: this is a man who makes things, after all. Famous, iconic things. Things we might admire in a catalogue or exclusive storefront window.
On the other hand, it’s clear that Rashid is driven to communicate more than just advice and instructions. His is a thoroughly materialistic ethics, presented in perhaps the only way that such a project can be presented in the 2000s. Rashid’s desire is, I think, to intervene in the increasing occurrence of young people who simply don’t appear to have any idea how to do things, how to live. He does this in a way that is reasonably dignified – not preachy, not against a millennial backdrop of impending doom, not as the wise words of an old man (Design Your Self was published when he was 46). He offers advice based on reason alone, strange as that may seem.
If you can suspend your disbelief long enough – and, perhaps, skip over the portions where he tells you that black is out and that you should wear white and pink – there’s actually a lot to learn here. A little is about design and how one might structure one’s surroundings and activities; a lot is (old-fashioned) common sense, brought into the 21st century by a smart, accomplished and charismatic man.
It’s the sort of book you might find in a second hand bookstore on a Saturday afternoon, and before you know it, it’s Sunday night and you’re lounging on an orange couch with rounded edges in your newly remodeled loft apartment wearing white jeans and silver sneakers, wondering whether you should really have ordered that Gucci casket after all.
Inaugural Ball – Beyoncé
Posted on | January 21, 2009 | No Comments
While her last album was unfortunately not very good (a case where reach exceeded grasp), Beyoncé has a lovely voice – and, evidently, genuine admiration for her new president. Singing Etta James’ “At Last,” she opened the first of many inaugural balls in Washington D.C. last night.
Obamavaganza!
Posted on | January 20, 2009 | No Comments
(Barack Obama by Obama-Biden Transition Project, Creative Commons License)
It’s a big day in the US today. Even if it’s in the midst of an economic recession, Obama’s inauguration feels like a moment of hope becoming real. I’m not sure it’s any more specific than that for me: everyone (including myself) projects their aspirations, desires and expectations on the new Democratic President.
Most thinking people know that the United States (and the world) has suffered immeasurably under the Bush administration – in public life (the economy, the environment); in terms of personal freedoms and rights; and in foreign policy.
Obama’s presidency signifies the possibility of practical renewal. And while it’s reasonable to assume that many things will change quickly, some legacies will take much longer to sort out. And some may never be addressed by the Obama administration. But ultimately, today says that things we’ve known for years should be possible, are actually possible.
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
As I write this, I have the inauguration ceremony on in the background, streamed over the Web. Those who are present in Washington D.C. are chanting, “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” I don’t imagine that’s happened at a presidential inauguration in a few decades…
Lego Chinese Buddhist Temple
Posted on | August 5, 2008 | No Comments
I built a Chinese Buddhist temple out of Lego yesterday. It’s not based on an actual temple and it’s pretty free-form. It’s fun to see what you can make out of a limited assortment of bricks… I’m particularly fond of the praying minifig in front of it. I turned his legs around so that he could ‘kneel.’
Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
- HelTweetica for iPad July 20, 2010
- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
