M.C. Escher’s “Relativity” litho as a Star Wars LEGO diorama


I’m not just posting this because geeks and LEGO and Star Wars and nostalgia-singularity and *neat!* {*squeeee*} FREAKOUT! Yes, all that’s in the mix (plus, like most of you, I’m a depressingly unselfconscious Escher fanboy from small times), but I’m posting this because, simply as art in and of itself, this sculpture is lovely and worth meditating on. It is here to tell us something interesting about ourselves and our myths. For example, the artist’s blithely stated intention to *dismantle* this.
Take a second to click through and look at the detailed images. Please. Trust me:
Star Wars Relativity V2: A LEGO– creation by Paul Vermeesch : MOCpages.com

Shameless Self-Promotion: Are You Prepared for Father’s Day?

A gentle nudge: If you’re looking for a Dad’s Day gift for a fella with school-age children, you can do worse than my book SNIP, BURN, SOLDER, SHRED: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids. Fully certified dads have said stuff like:

This is the stuff that magic and dreams are made of in childhood, at least for those kids who have the idea that magic can be handmade. Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred is a seriously cool book.

and

This book is full of great innovative ideas to engage you and your kids for quite some time. What I loved most was that this book provided step-by-step directions that left nothing to chance. Instead it spelled everything out making it simple, even though your kids will simply think that you are cool! I mean how many dads can say that they built their own electric guitar? I don’t know many that is for sure!

and

Seriously: order this soon.

(That last one’s from Rob Malda, founder of Slashdot.org, and really nice cat.)

If you really want to stick it to The Man, you can always order directly from the publisher. You’ll get the ebooks (including a Kindle version) *FREE*, and if you use the coupon code SHRED you’ll save 35 percent.
Order soonishly from whoever and the book is sure to arrive in time for Father’s Day.
Alternately, if your dad or hubby is into clockwork sex robots, maybe try this steampunk novella on Kindle–or the supercool, handmade print chapbook.
So, that’s my pitch. Thank you, and goodnight!

Bilal Ghalib Rocks Veggies in his Wok using MakeyMakey

I’ve worked with Bilal Ghalib in the past (we hosted one of his “Pocket Factory” 3-D printing crash-course workshops at Workantile), so it was a delight to see him pop up out of the blue with something new and rad:

Yup: He’s using the MakeyMakey USB keyboard interface (a Kickstarter project I geeked about a few weeks back; it’s now funded at 1,700% [!!!] with 6 days to go!) to play with his food. Nice!
This is precisely the reason I jumped on the MakeyMakey funding bandwagon: Obtuse interfaces for musical instruments inspire all sorts of crazy new ways to rock out, and I *love* that. Here’s another great MakeyMakey ad hoc instrument:

FYI, I’m just now starting in on my second DIY book with No Starch Press. This time around it’s going to be all musical instruments, mostly electronic; expect lots of janky little synths with nary an equal-tempered keyboard in sight, and inappropriate uses of conventional technologies. Also at least one ukulele.

Steampunk and DIY

I came to steampunk writing fiction, so when I started occasionally going to cons and speaking on panels, I was caught flat-footed by the whole dress-up end of the movement–which actually seems to be the genre’s dominant facet (which was news to me, which is why it’s sorta shocking that people invite me to speak on panels). I’m not a huge dress-up guy myself (although I’ve got a childhood soft-spot for Ren Festivals, and am as impressed by bodiced/corseted decolletage as the next human that’s into ladies), but the handy-craftsmanship folks bring to their steampunk garb is eye-catching. Beyond sewing (little of which is simple), there’s a whole universe of leather-working, woodworking, metalworking, soldering, tinkering, and scavenging necessary to make these costumes. And, man, then there’s the *hats and goggles!*

I’m sort of inclined to write off the dress-up end of any artistic movement as foppish preening, but it’s been interesting to see elements that start out just being costume-ball frippery filter back into the literature. For example, you see that breather mask? As near as I can tell, these came into steampunk fashion from some backwater tribal-industrial post-Burning Man rave-scene affectation. I find them creepy, and kind of assume they have Mad Max sexual overtones. Whatever your opinion, they aren’t abundant–or even notable–in canonical steampunk lit. But I’m now seeing breathers like these show up in *stories*, the rationale being that *if* you had the Industrial Revolution lead directly into high-level computation, then you’d have exponentially increased the consumption of fuel–which was all wood and coal–and thus brought on the complete blighting of London, for example, much, much more quickly.
I spent a lot of time kicking around the merchant hall at the World Steam Expo last week, pawing fancy hats and generally making a pest of myself. Now, maybe I’m jaded, but when I’m looking at a huge display of hundreds of funky leather hats, my inclination is to say “Man, there’s some crazy Upton Sinclair nightmare of a factory in Shenzhen where 10-year-olds crank these out for nickels!” But then I ended up talking with the sales folk–who it turned out were *actual* milliners–and I was just gobsmacked: They crank these out from scratch in Fremont, OH. The company that made the pith helmets in those pics is Blonde Swan, and their janky website doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the variety of their hats, or the craftsmanship of those lids. The Universe where I’d pay $150 for a hat that *can’t* save my life or grant wishes is far, far away from here, but I’m gonna level with you: These hats are *cheap* at that price. The gal I was talking to (not pictured, sadly) was a cutter–whole days spent cutting leather to make top hats, twenty at a time. And they’ve got seamstresses there that can crank out those hats as fast as she can cut the leather. This is an all above-board, all-American operation. That there is this kind of demand for leather top-hats with brass gewgaws stitched to them, in this economy, simply boggles the mind.
Likewise, I spent a goodly amount of time talking to Abbey Manalli of Altered History, from whom I bought these patches:

(my boy claimed the monocled lion, but I get to keep the Navy squid)
First glance: they’re nice designs competently wrought; a solid buy. But then you pick them up, and discover that they’re not your standard-issue glue-backed embroidered patches (which are sort of a post-WWII technique), but rather an embroidered design on wool felt. Why’d Manalli bother? Because that’s how insignia were made in the late 19th and early 20th Century. She wanted to be period to a period that doesn’t exist, so she tracked down the only wool felt producer in the US (located in rural Massachusetts) to source the material, and then hooked up with a crazy embroiderer in Milwaukee who was into the aesthetic, and thus willing to futz around with a material no one had used in mass producing patches since my *grandfather* (now of blessed memory) was born.
So, there’s no big point here, except for to say that there isn’t a Hot Topic for steampunk fashion yet; even if someone’s togs are strictly store-bought, there’s still a helluva lot of good ole American elbow grease[*] in the making.

Continue reading “Steampunk and DIY”

Artist? Freelancer? Neil Gaiman Has Some Advice for You

Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012 on Vimeo

Gaiman offers *excellent* advice for *any* sort of freelancer at the 14-minute mark. The rest is good if you like Gaiman, or writing, or fiction, or comix, or art, or English accents, but the minute starting around 14:00 is *vital* of you roll freelance. The bit at around 18:40 hits me in the right place as well, because I’ve been pretending like I am what I am for a solid 20 years, and it’s more-or-less working.

A Lil Bit More On Voice, Sauce, and Gravy

A few weeks ago I guest blogged about “voice in writing” for Shimmer. That essay starts something like this:

I want to talk about voice–about your capital-V Voice as a writer, and the little voice of each specific piece you write–but first I want to tell you about how this guy I know makes steaks.
He goes to the butcher and buys a few good cuts of beef. Back home, while these steaks drain on the cutting board, he makes his “sauce.” This sauce consists of Worcestershire sauce, malt vinegar, salt, pepper, brown sugar, ketchup, maybe barbecue sauce, whiskey (or whatever he finds in the cupboard), beer (maybe), wine (why not?), soy sauce, and season salt. He marinates the steaks in this sauce for an indeterminate period, then sears them briefly on a high-BTU gas grill.
If you’ve spent any quality time in the kitchen, then you see how absurd this “sauce” is . . .

and ends like this:

Voice is the economical result of not throwing anything away, but instead boiling and scrapping until what you have left is as concentrated as possible, a half-once of liquid with more flavor than the chops you started with. Every good story will make its own gravy.
And your Voice emerges from the process of cooking up story after story after story in the same iron skillet, until that skillet is so seasoned that you don’t need oil to fry an egg, and any steak seared on it comes off tasting like it put you back $50 at a necktie establishment, even though you didn’t even bother to sprinkle salt on the pan prior to sizzling.

In the middle I specifically cite David Foster Wallace and Stephen King as examples of how a Voice–even a very ornate one–arises from a process of reduction. So, I was interested to come across this note DFW sent Harper’s magazine regarding this nifty lil piece he wrote about Kafka for that magazine in 1998. The note reads, in part:

The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax (“stuff,” “lightbulb” as one word, “i.e.”/”e.g.” without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.)

I share this, because DFW was fundamentally wrong. I was a UofM comp lit student with a subscription to Harper’s when that essay was first published, not to mention an embarrassingly enthusiastic fan of DFW’s, and I remember reading that piece–feeling how breezy and conversational it was–and I’ve gotta say that this sense of the piece’s voice wouldn’t have been at all affected if DFW had elected to use Chicago Manual of Style-compliant punctuation after his abbreviated Latin introductory clauses, instead of being a royal prick.
The takeaway: Don’t do this; don’t squander even a few minutes from your limited store of earthly hours fussing over pinches of pepper on what is already a really damn good steak.

Me & Mitt, Mitt & I: Pranksters, Bullies, Mormons, Jews, Education–AMERICA!

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This latest installment is about the school Mitt Romney and I attended, bullying, pranks, progress, identity politics, and how institutions seek to change over time. It starts like this:

Mitt Romney and I went to the same high school – three decades apart. This would be immaterial, except the Washington Post just published a fascinating 5,500-word remembrance of Mitt Romney’s hijinks at Cranbrook, a high-pressure prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
I attended this same school in the 1990s; it’s an architectural gem, the staff is excellent, the program an academic crucible. Later, as a University of Michigan student, I shared a broken-down house with three fellow Cranbrook alums. One was in a sociology class, and we were delighted when he revealed that his textbook listed Cranbrook as “one of the last vestiges of American aristocracy.”
Because Mitt and I attended Cranbrook exactly 30 years apart, we ended up standing back-to-back on a balmy June evening in 2005 – the same year Mitt received the school’s 2005 Distinguished Alumni Award. The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and I stood together at the lip of a deep, inset fountain, which gurgled contentedly, almost as though it was whispering ♪♫Daaaaave, I would be an excellent place for a GOP splaaashdown!♫

The rest is here: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Mitt and Me

Recommended Buy: “Stop Motion Studio” for iPhone–Make Animated Films in Minutes with Your iThing!

Still hyped by a late coffee and this earlier post on iPhone stop-motion animation, I dropped 99-cents on Stop Motion Studio after dinner tonight. Elapsed time between downloading the app and uploading our finished video: *Literally* five minutes (including having to muck around with the App Store’s new “security questions” BS)–and that included poking around to figure out the controls, composing and shooting the frames, doing a little light editing to remove a totally botched shot, rendering, and adding the soundtrack (with foley work by my kid). The video and sound editing make this a total *steal*; it’s easily worth 10 times the current price, as it allows for a full end-to-end production all in one app (which is *great* if you need to work within a kindergarten attention span).
PRO TIP: Turn on both the “Grid” and “Overlay” options; they make lining up shots and maintaining frame continuity (i.e., the two most frustrating things about shooting stop-motion) a total breeze.
Seriously, *Buy This NOW*. You’ll make the investment back before bedtime.