Author Archives: luke

Audium

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Went and saw the Audium in San Francisco (1616 Bush St, look up details at http://audium.org ) and had my mind thoroughly blown.

I probably take the title of my blog too seriously: I don’t post random stuff, I wait for deeper ideas to come along. Trouble being, I don’t have time to write them up as well as I’d like. The Audium was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had recently, so I’m just going to get this up and figure out what I think while I’m writing.

Stereo traps us in a lot of our audio experience. It’s good enough and cheap enough to do the job most of the time. I have been to amazing gigs — Alex Carpenter’s Music of Transparent Means, Merzbow in the Big Star basement — where the surround sound was unbelievable. I have been in noise bands, overwhelming the room and the performers with dense walls of sound. I have done listening meditations in interesting places, trying to immerse my self in the experience of the moment.

The Audium very rapidly reminded me of all these experiences and more.

176 speakers, multi-track location control, someone in charge who has experimented with this for 30 or 40 years. Even the architecture of the place communicates something important about the experience you are about to have.

The closest you have ever been to a sound system with this fidelity of location and presence is in a movie theater. There is no way you’ll see a film with a soundtrack that is this intense: multiple moving sound sources quickly pulls your full attention out of the visual realm. The performance rapidly overwhelms, becomes a raw and pure experience of attention. I was shocked when the lights came up at the end, having completely lost track of time.

I write about an experience that is, by definition, only capable of being summarized in text. I can tell you what happens around the experience, but the experience itself — the point of the experience — is beyond explanation. Once you have experienced the overwhelming presence of the sound, we can talk about it. Until we have these shared referents, I can only vaguely indicate what it is like.

In short, you should see this if you are in San Francisco. I am determined to experiment with multi-source / locational sound myself now. I have a whole bunch of ideas for a show in next year’s Adelaide Fringe Festival and a long list of people to contact about making it happen.

Twitter and your cyberspace lifestream.

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I recently read David Gelernter’s article on edge.org, “The Second Coming”. Later the same day, I read some reactionary screed against twitter in a newspaper. The contrast between the two was pretty extreme, and got me bubbling away with a few ideas on the interesting transitions our culture is going through.

I present these ideas in a semi-edited form, for your appreciation and re-use. Nothing here is necessarily true or final, in a cunning demonstration of my eventual conclusion…

Firstly, Gelernter describes something that underlies what is compelling about Twitter, in a very tangential way:

Your car, your school, your company and yourself are all one-track vehicles moving forward through time, and they will each leave a stream-shaped cyberbody (like an aircraft’s contrail) behind them as they go. These vapor-trails of crystallized experience will represent our first concrete answer to a hard question: what is a company, a university, any sort of ongoing organization or institution, if its staff and customers and owners can all change, its buildings be bulldozed, its site relocated — what’s left? What is it? The answer: a lifestream in cyberspace.

I’ve talked about twitter being like telepathy before, but this really catches another compelling aspect: twitter crystallizes conversations in a more accessible way than I have experienced before. Discover someone because a friend replied to something they said? You can uncover the entire conversation chain of replies, look at the branches in the discussion, find other new people of interest. When you find someone who is really interesting to you, you can look through their history and the conversation streams they have been a part of.

There’s a layer of people who have heard of twitter but who don’t have any experience deeper than following celebrities and their friends. This is the shallow part of the experience, and complaining about it is like listening in on two people who are getting together for lunch and gossiping about famous people. It isn’t interesting to an outsider, but is the lubricant for a lot of social interaction.

The fascinating thing about twitter is the easy emergence of groups and communities that dig deeper. Allow me to demonstrate.

Let’s say we have a group of people who find each other by some opt-in resource, say twittgroups.com . There are varying levels of quality of poster in there. The people who spam or waste time get unfollowed or ignored. The best posters turn up more often in useful conversations when people search or look at the history of interesting discussions. More followers within the community of interest means a greater ability to call on the resources of the community for their projects.

Twitter simplifies contributing to communities of shared interests. It makes it easier to find valuable people without the complications of facebook and myspace ‘friend’ relationships. It freezes the contrails of discussions without adding friction to the conversation itself. The way these build on the core mechanic of Gelernter’s lifestream — the ‘crystallised experience’ — is one of the elements that makes Twitter indispensable to me and many others.

Hakuba cheat sheet

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So. I’ve been on holiday in Hakuba with some friends for a devastatingly bad season. We’re getting springtime weather about a month early this year, with the usual snow dumps for this period arriving as rain.

Despite this, I really like the resort and I can see how much better this would be under regular conditions. There’s not much info provided in English by anyone other than tour operators, so I thought I’d write up what I have learned about staying here and getting the best out of the mountain.

The Area: Nagano is a large Japanese town near here, about an hour away by bus. A lot of the 1998 Nagano Olympics were held here in Hakuba.

Hakuba is the supporting town under a set of resorts that line the valley. Here’s a decent map of the resorts

Hakuba basically runs along the train tracks and up to the base of each resort. There aren’t pedestrian walkways, so if you go on foot then you have to share the road with the cars. The bus services on the mountain are ok, but aren’t loop shuttle services, they’re scheduled. This being Japan, they are on time as well. We have hopped on buses at exactly the time they were meant to be at the stop and they have moved on one minute later, so if you aren’t there early you could be waiting an hour for the next bus to come.

There’s a night bus service which costs 300 yen, and you have to buy tickets before you board. The bus services during the day and just after the resorts close are free, though.

Getting here: Train to Nagano/bus to Hakuba is the fastest route, but if your flight arrives too late (or is delayed) then you are in for a 5 hour bus ride from Narita airport. Check with your travel agent or the bus/train timetables.

Staying here: Each of the mountains has some accommodation at the base, and there’s lodges and hotels spread across the valley. We stayed at “Four Seasons Hotel”/Oharuka No-Yu, which is a hotel above Echo Land. Echo Land is an area with a bunch of tourist friendly shops/restaurants/snow gear shops. It is between Hakuba 47 and Happo One, so the buses go down to one of the main streets, across and then back up to the mountain.

General Notes: This is on the main island with easy train/bus access, so there are lots of daytrippers on the weekends. If you were going to take a day off for cultural activities, it should be a Saturday/Sunday. 

Japanese skiers/boarders are at a wide range of abilities. You’ll see people who have been engaged in snow sports all their lives go screaming past you at high speed. You’ll also see people who are obviously struggling with their first experience of snow. They usually have really good green runs for learners at the base of the mountain — No obstacles, really even gradients, but very well used and hard packed snow. If you have learners with you, get them used to their skis/board and then move to the intermediate runs as soon as possible, the ground will be much more forgiving when they fall.

The resorts were done with skiers in mind: wide open flat runs. The level 5 runs (dotted black lines on the maps) usually mean moguls. There aren’t very many areas where you can muck about in the trees without going out-of-bounds. Which brings me to an important point —

You will see areas that look awesome from the chair or the run. Some of these are genuinely awesome and quite safe if you are experienced. Others lead to avalanche danger, hidden obstacles and creeks. Case the area very thoroughly before you duck a rope, because you could easily end up dead if you screw up.

At Niseko, there are forbidden areas between the resorts, but you can do the trees between runs without risk of penalties. They will post that areas are beyond ski patrol and you’ll be personally liable for a rescue if you need it, but experienced groups can safely enjoy these areas up until the ropes are up for the forbidden zones. Hakuba doesn’t do this DMZ stuff: if you go outside the runs, ski patrol will take your pass if they catch you. This frustrates the experienced and adventurous snowboarders, because the most fun terrain is off-limits instead of restricted to people who know what they’re doing.

The Resorts:

Hakuba 47 / Goryu: These two link at the top, so you can travel back and forth between the resorts on the one pass. The higher up, the better the snow and the more expert the other people. If you hike the peak (doesn’t take very long, isn’t too steep) , you can do some excellent drops right over alongside the Alps 4th chair lift. We happily spent a day with 30-40cm fresh snow doing loops around the Alps 3rd chair lift, going in for lunch at the top of the Goryu gondola and then coming back out to the same area. Some nice jumps around the place, ungroomed areas alongside the main run and some moguls for the skiers. Didn’t spend much time lower down the mountain though — mainly busy beginner and intermediate runs from what I saw.

The cat trail for beginners down 47 is quite nice if you want to spend some time checking out the Japanese forest scenery, but is pretty dull so far as the actual boarding goes. Take some photos for your friends/family who don’t do snowsports, because they can respond to this kind of steep, alien landscape better than a flat white expanse of ski run.

Happo One: A few people working on mountain have season passes for just this one mountain: I’m not sure if that’s just random luck or expert opinion, but it’s a big, central resort that covers all the bases: park, long intermediate runs, some excellent ungroomed areas that aren’t out-of-bounds. A friend of a friend took us around here, and we struck out along a ridge to the right (as you look up the mountain) from the topmost lift: it was windswept when we did it, but had the potential for amazing powder runs during better times. There’s an amazing shrine at the base of this one too, which exerted some strange voodoo attraction on me: I have no idea whether it is a Shinto or Buddhist temple, but I’ve gone there twice to meditate briefly next to a massive tree that dominates the clearing below the temple. Weird. Compelling. Check it out if you have a chance.

Iwatake: I loved this mountain the first time I went there, even though the conditions weren’t that good. It isn’t as large as the others, has green runs near the top (better quality snow for any learners you have with you) and a few long challenging runs. I suspect that getting to know this mountain would pay off handsomely on powder days — it feels like the kind of place with some excellent opportunities for powder runs off the edge of the groomers. The reverse face of the mountain is in use as well, so you can respond to the wind/sun conditions over the day. The advanced runs on the reverse side were closed to us, but looked awesome — steep, narrow run. Reminds me of the Gun Barrel at Hotham, though waaaay more awesome 🙂

So yeah, my personal favourite mountain, based on some weird gut instinct from one day’s experience.

Tsugaike Kogen: Furthest big resort from the main part of Hakuba. You have to go to Iwatake and catch the loop bus over, if you aren’t staying at the base of it. Had the most snow of all the resorts in the area while we were there, but we went on a warm day and it was wet and slow. Under better conditions, you could happily spend the several days exploring the entire place. It seems a little less busy than the other resorts which are of similar size. We were told by a local to hike up from the lift above the Jib Park on the right hand side of the mountain and to do a tree run. Sadly, looked like being a really slow proposition under the conditions and we cased the entire mountain looking for an area where we could get some speed. There’s a place at the middle gondola station that you can rent two-person sleds from, and I wish we had done that for the afternoon because it looked like a ridiculous amount of fun.

Other stuff:

Bamboo Good coffee place at Hakuba Station — free wifi and lots of the Australians working on the mountain come in for their daily caffeine intake. Friendly Aussie barista as well, excellent place to get the goss about the mountain for snow conditions, places to eat and places to drink.

Zen Soba noodle restaurant diagonally opposite the 7-11. Awesome food, definitely order their soba dishes and the octopus/olive oil/garlic dish.

I’ll update this article as people comment or email me with their experiences.

The first rule of iPhone dev club is …

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Hanging out in Sydney with some friends has been awesome. Much love to Mike G/Kerenski for the handmade noodles and beers, and much love to Sam and Sally for the Crack Fox and, well, even more beers.

Also, thanks to the bookstores of Sydney for the new books by Warren Ellis and Clive Barker. Kinokuniya and Galaxy Books, you rule… Maybe next time I’ll make it to Gold’s on King St 😉

Why is twitter so compelling?

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Twitter is like telepathy. You get to know what people of interest to you are thinking in a continuous stream.

Twitter is like eavesdropping. You can listen in to conversations between smart/witty/angry people.

Twitter is like talkback radio. You can jump in with opinions and suggestions.

Now to convince more people in Adelaide to use it 🙂

This is what I’m talkin’ about!

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I’m writing this on the wordpress iPhone app. Local drafts, quick text entry… This is the kind of lightweight use that the platform is amazing for. There’s nowhere that I have any excuse for wasting time anymore. Waiting for the bus? Turned up early for an appointment? Here’s an opportunity to write down my thoughts for later.

Anyway. Back to studying for my supp exam. Talk more soon.

Caffe’ Trieste

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This one counts as an epiphany — I was in Las Vegas for a few days, and felt on the edge of some kind of deep insight into America, but it hasn’t cleared up yet — but I’m in a traditional Italian cafe, watching a performance by a Chinese singer and a black guitarist, while another patron watches youtube videos on his laptop. The multiple levels of meaning are true in fact and true in metaphor at the same time: this place is like some ultimate bricolage. Genetic heritage is subject to cultural and personal values: technology intertwines with emotional and social needs.

This is what San Francisco means on some level — to both its residents and outsiders. This is the freedom of cultural movement that makes this city compelling.

I feel like a big chunk of my understanding of this city has snapped into place. A long and winding chat with another customer here, Michele, also helped a lot. Many thanks, if you’re reading this 🙂

I’ll be putting up some notes on WWDC in the next few days, now that the dust has settled. I’ve been too busy doing things to write about them, but I feel like it’s a good time to pull the threads together at the moment. Maybe that’s the caffeine speaking. We shall see!

Does news.Ycombinator.com have a sense of humour?

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I had this idea the other day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153760

which I meant more as a kind of playful thought experiment. I thought people would catch on that it was a joke, but most replies seem way too serious.

sigh

Oh well, I’ll just have to work on my comedy writing skills. It is kinda cool to do a submit and to watch for comments and saves. This karma thing is an addictive game to play 🙂