Monthly Archives: November 2008

Fordlandia

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Johann Johannsson:

The album has a theme, although it’s more loose and open to interpretation than on my last album, IBM 1401, a User’s Manual.

One of the two main threads running through it is this idea of failed utopia, as represented by the “Fordlândia” title – the story of the rubber plantation Henry Ford established in the Amazon in the 1920’s, and his dreams of creating an idealized American town in the middle of the jungle complete with white picket fences, hamburgers and alcohol prohibition. The project – started because of the high price Ford had to pay for the rubber necessary for his cars’ tyres – failed, of course, as the indigenous workers soon rioted against the alien conditions. It reminded me of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, this doomed attempt at taming the heart of darkness. The remains of the town are still there today. The image of the Amazon forest slowly and surely reclaiming the ruins of Fordlândia is the one that gave spark to this album. For the structure and themes of the album I was influenced by the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Herzog and Kenneth Anger. I was interested in a kind of poetic juxtaposition and an alchemical fusion of themes and ideas, which I feel is similar to the way Anger uses montage as an alchemical technique – as a way of casting a spell. During the making of the album, I also had in mind the Andre Breton quote about convulsive beauty, which he saw in the image of “an abandoned locomotive overgrown by luxurious vegetation”. There is a strong connection to the IBM 1401 album in terms of both thematic and musical ideas and I see the two albums as belonging to a series of works.

Fascinating and quite pleasant. Clusty Search: Fordlandia.

The Manufacturing Spectrum: Ariens & BMW

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Two interesting articles today reflect polar opposites in the manufacturing world, first up – Wisconsin’s Ariens: Timothy Aeppel:

Daniel Ariens’s biggest concern right now isn’t the financial crisis. It’s getting his hands on snowblower engines.

The chief executive of Ariens Co., a maker of mowers and snowblowers, got a curt email last month from the company that for decades supplied engines for his line of snow machines, telling him they’re halting production in 60 days — essentially cutting off motors at the peak of his season. A host of problems hobbled that supplier, including the loss of a huge customer and problems obtaining crucial parts, such as starters, from the engine maker’s own supply base.

“I’m quite sure we have other suppliers that won’t make it through this cycle,” says the 50-year-old Mr. Ariens.

This highlights a grim reality now dawning across the U.S. economy. Deep problems existed long before the meltdown on Wall Street and won’t be fixed by the government’s injection of taxpayer money into the nation’s banks. Even if the credit crunch eases, as now appears to be happening, companies such as Ariens are bracing for a painful recession and taking steps to survive it.

Car sales and industrial production have plunged, consumer confidence has wilted, and companies have accelerated layoffs. Manufacturing, particularly autos and machinery, is leading the way down. Exports can’t be expected to cushion the impact because the slowdown is global.

Dan Neil channels Karl Marx & Leon Trotsky while tooling around in the latest BMW 750Li near Chemnitz:

My driving partner and I were in the vicinity of Chemnitz, a somewhat dire little city in the former East Germany known for its alcoholism and an enormous monument to Karl Marx. Naturally, we had to see it.

“Bitte, kennen Sie, wo ist der grossen Kopf vom Karl Marx?” we asked passersby.

The former East Germans, standing in chilly drizzle, were delighted to help the capitalist running dogs in their gigantic limousine, a 2009 BMW 750Li. They pointed us down one of the main streets — Lumpenprolitariatstrasse, maybe? — and there it was: A huge, glowering stone bust of the German political philosopher, about the size of a FEMA trailer. Now there, there’s a redistributionist.

I have an Ariens snowblower.

Destroying Oil as a Strategic Commodity

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Joe Francica:

A Summary of Remarks by Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey at the GEOINT Symposium

At the GEOINT Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Jim Woolsey gave a chilling account of the implications for national security related to the United States’ dependence on foreign oil. He described the vulnerabilities of a resource located far from our shores, highlighting how consumer habits could have dramatic geopolitical consequences. He then offered a solution to the crisis by suggesting a way to remove oil as a strategic commodity.

Woolsey’s assessment of the problem is similar to what we have heard from T. Boone Pickens, the oil businessman-turned wind power advocate. We spend in the range of $350 – $700 billion per year for oil, depending on the price per barrel. The reality is that the U.S. and other oil importers like China and India are engaging in the biggest transfer of wealth in history. The result is that the U.S. is either directly or indirectly providing funds to support countries that may not have our best interests at heart. “Oil tends to be produced by countries that are either run by autocrats or dictators. (One exception: Norway). So, one of the things we are doing with this money is contributing to the support of dictators. Putin [Russia] and Chavez [Venezuela] are a bit quieter with oil at $65 per barrel,” said Woolsey. “[However], a national energy policy that depends on oil is probably one of the stupider policies ever done. Even at $65 per barrel, we still have one of the biggest transfers of wealth the world has ever seen.”

Mainstream Media: The Morning After

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Listening to NPR this morning, I was somewhat amazed to hear this assertion during the top of the hour news: “stock futures opened lower today, not due to the election, but rather the weak economy“. How in the world do they have any idea? Personally, it must be the warmer than usual November Midwest weather 🙂

The market was up on election day.

Does Google Know Too Much?

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Julia Bonstein:

Google gathers so much detailed information about its users that one critic says some state intelligence bureaus look “like child protection services” in comparison. A few German government bodies have mounted a resistance.


The little town of Molfsee, near Kiel in northern Germany, has three lakes, an idyllic open-air museum and a population just under 5,000. It’s not the likeliest place to declare war against a global power. Yet Molfsee has won the first round of a battle against a powerful digital age opponent.

Flughafen Tempelhof Closes: VR Scene

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Tempelhof Central Airport (52.482088 13.389716), home of the Cold War era Berlin Airlift closed recently. I had an opportunity to visit in August, 2007 and shot this VR scene.


Flight Global posted a useful link roundup.




A few more photos: Tempelhof entrance, nearby Berlin Airlift Memorial and a closer look (photo from the Memorial’s 1951 unveiling).

Berlin Airports: Tempelhof – from the beginning till today. “An important chapter in the history of German aviation draws to a close“:

Tempelhof is justifiably regarded as the cradle of aviation. The name Tempelhof is closely connected to the beginning of engine-powered aviation. On 4 September 1909, an engine-powered flight took off for a few minutes for the first time in Germany. With his plane, American Orville Wright ushered in the age of engine-powered aviation in Germany on the Tempelhof airfield. Aeronautical engineering continued to develop at a rapid pace: on 8 October 1923, Tempelhof was granted the status of “Berlin Airport”. The central airport Tempelhof developed into the biggest hub in Europe. Tempelhof became the home of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, which was founded on 6 January 1926 in Berlin. 1936 saw the start of construction of a completely new airport of epic proportions. The construction of the largest airport building in the world catered for both Hitler’s penchant for monumental constructions and the expected 6 million passengers. During World War II, civilian air traffic increasingly dwindled. After a brief occupation by the Soviet army, the Americans took over the airport in July 1945.

Obama’s Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology

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Sarah Lai Stirland:

During a sweltering Friday evening rush hour in early October, Jeanette Scanlon spent two-and-a-half hours with 20 other people waving a homemade Barack Obama sign at the cars flowing through a busy intersection in Plant City, Florida.


“I got shot the bird one time,” laughs the easy-natured Scanlon, a 43-year-old single mother of three and a Tampa psychiatrist’s billing manager. “That wasn’t the thumbs up I was looking for.”


Scanlon is one of an estimated 230,000 volunteers who are powering Obama’s get-out-the-vote campaign in the swing state of Florida. And while sign-waving is a decidedly low-tech appeal to voters’ hearts and minds, make no mistake: The Obama campaign’s technology is represented here. Scanlon organized the gathering — and 24 others since September — through Obama’s social networking site, my.BarackObama.com. Similarly, she used the site’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool in September to find registered voters in her own neighborhood, so she could canvass them for Obama. And this weekend, Scanlon and another 75 or so Plant City volunteers will be phoning thousands of Floridians to urge them to vote, using a sophisticated database provided by the Obama campaign to ensure they don’t call McCain supporters by mistake.


The Obama campaign has been building, tweaking and tinkering with its technology and organizational infrastructure since it kicked off in February 2007, and today has most sophisticated organizing apparatus of any presidential campaign in history. Previous political campaigns have tapped the internet in innovative ways — Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, and Ron Paul’s bid for this year’s Republican nomination, to name two. But Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday’s election.

A friend recently mentioned that one of the canvasers asked if they could leave an orange dot on their mailbox, notifying other workers that they have already voted! I wonder how long it will be until citizens push back on the extensive personal data mining.