A Merry Yeti Christmas

Wandering the streets with two of my teenaged cousins this afternoon, I ducked into Narwhal Art Projects on Queen and picked up this little guy for my tiny prized objects collection.

I was tempted by Sonja Ahlers' new batch of sweater bunnies (I've got a sweet little lilac one, thanks to an old roommate) and her new book, The Selves, but instead found myself drawn to this heartwarming scene. It's a small Yeti family celebrating the season with a snowball fight, courtesy of Jennie Suddick. The image does it no justice, but you get the idea. In addition to her solo work, Suddick is one third of the group responsible for "Cry School Yearbook" (one of Nuit Blanche's greatest participatory successes thus far, IMHO). Check out her website to see more enclosed treasures.

Everything will blink

This week InterAccess held an introductory course on the LilyPad Arduino, easily the cutest item in the Arduino series of products. Made specifically with artists and crafters in mind, the LilyPad makes it easy to incorporate physical computing into clothing and fabric projects.

My demo project.​

My demo project.​

Our instructors designed our in-class project to demonstrate the basics of Arduino programming and get the creative juices flowing. My LilyPad is sewn with conductive thread to a soft switch (top left) that we made with regular and conductive fabric. Upon contact with another piece of conductive fabric, the two pieces create a connection -- it works like pushing a button. The soft switch is connected to the negative side of a tiny LED (my apologies, this is the cutest Arduino product). Its positive end is connected back to the LilyPad at pin no. 6.

We programmed our LilyPads and the directions for pin no. 6 using Arduino's open source software, learning to make the LED obey simple commands -- fading up and down, blinking with various delays, et cetera. We also learned how to make the switch work. You can see developer/artist Leah Buechley's slightly more complicated application of these ideas here.

Our instructors, Dave McCallum and Angella Mackey, showed us examples of what they'd done with Arduinos in their own work, as well as more mainstream examples in fashion and art -- more than enough to start a million fires in this head!

To be continued..

On the lower freek

Hey! Check it out: I wrote a review of Erick Lyle's collection On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, and the famed (and lately much-lauded) NGM of Broken Pencil saw fit to publish it. Thanks, BP!

Here's the text:

In the introduction of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs recounts meeting with her city planner friend who, despite thinking Boston’s North End of­fered “wonderful, cheerful street life,” still believed it to be “the worst slum in the city.”

Erick Lyle’s beloved “slum”–the streets of San Francisco’s Mission neighbourhood–is the setting for the majority of Frequencies, a collection of articles from Lyle’s Turd-Filled Donut street newspaper, Scam magazine and other free publica­tions. The stories weave intricate tales of the neighbourhood and its “untouch­ables” (to borrow from India’s antiquated caste system), which include immigrants, punks, drug dealers, prostitutes and others that City Hall deems unsavory.

Despite this stigma, Lyle and his impassioned (and sometimes tragic) friends struggle against the cops and local government to work for a better life: building hope out of temporary art and community centres such as the previously abandoned 949 Market, advocating on behalf of the Mission’s homeless population, fighting mid-’90s gentrification and the dot-com explosion, and making good things hap­pen for free.

Both hindering and bolstering these dispatches is the book’s choppy organi­zation. The chronology is iffy and sometimes repetitive. However, the flow is also a literary embodiment of the way Lyle and his gang lives–from the security of their own homes, readers will have a simple un­derstanding of the chaos and uncertainty of idealism and street life.

More from Jacobs, angered by her friend’s comments: “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy out­er impression they give.” Fortunately for neighbourhoods, Lyle’s challenging love affair with (and fight for) the Mis­sion proves that some of us aren’t will­ing to give up hope for our communities.

It's worth the few naked dudes

ChatRoulette isn’t playing fair.

Last Saturday I conceded to the buzz. The verdict? Horrifying and fascinating all at once.

In the traditional rules of Russian roulette, the deadly game of chance, there's one active round (er, bullet) in a revolver with six rounds. You sit in a circle and pretend you're brave, taking turns holding the barrel to your head and pressing the trigger. Stupid? Yes. With Chatroulette, on the other hand, the chances that "nexting" (yes, people are using it as a verb) is going to land you looking at some exhibitionist naked dude are WAY higher than one in six. Not cool, unless you're into the hairy and old combo.

Happily, my experience did put me in touch with some genuinely nice and funny people who were willing to not show me their family jewels. Stranger #1 (location: Italy) and I spoke in broken English and Italian respectively, and found common ground with music videos. We spent the better part of an hour sending YouTube links back and forth and decided after an hour or two to become Facebook friends. Quick-witted Stranger #2 (location: Massachusetts) and I shared some jokes about the Olympics and the man-voiced lady commentator on NBC. Good times. We too decided to keep in contact, so I gave him my dusty old Hotmail address. (I knew I was keeping it for some reason.)

As I sank further into the ChatRoulette spiral (it's addictive), some old memories bubbled to the surface. The concept reminded me of my early internet days on BBSes (if you have to ask, n00b, go read the Wiki). We'd link our modems to some bozo's system and chat (or play MajorMUD) with people we didn't know, mostly other kids from nearby high schools -- people we'd probably never meet in real-life Oshawa. There were forums and flame wars and emoticons and detailed ASCII graphics -- all the stuff that's commonplace these days, though now in a truncated, more organized format (Twitter, Facebook, et cetera).

ChatRoulette, I thought, is reinventing the wheel, making it waaay bigger and adding the element of randomization. It's a simple concept, but it retains and reintroduces the best parts of BBSes or old-school ICQ -- meeting new people and starting fresh. Those were my favourite things about those old days, and, for me, Couchsurfing's the only concept that's come close since 1996.

Check out this great New York article. My sentiments exactly, but more eloquently conveyed.