But this series lacked the crumbling architecture of blitzkrieged Paris, or even the beautiful grassy hilltops of Terrence Malick’s Guadalcanal. This was all mud and black sand, sopping trenches that held the piled and maggoty remains of corpses. It was nightmarish not only in the violence but also the aesthetic: suicidal banzai rushes, flamethrowers in mountain bunkers, meaninglessness death in a struggle for little desert isles in the middle of the ocean.

That same nihilism informs a reading of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Although much of the book focuses on the mundane non-adventures of our modern day narrator Toru, the crux of the book’s theme – and the best passages – are in the dark depths of Japan’s imperialistic conquests during the World War.

Wind Up is an odd book. Set in the mid 1980s, Toru has recently quit his job as a lowly salaryman to rethink his life. He sits at home and listens to music, reads books, counts the number of times the telephone rings, cooks spaghetti, while his wife goes off to work. Every day he wakes to the sound of a strange bird – dubbed the Wind Up bird – which greets the morning with a strange creaking call, like the winding of a spring.

Toru’s cat goes missing, and he has some squabbles with his wife, but in the first few hundred pages of the novel very little happens. It’s a study in passivity. Toru really doesn’t *do* anything. He’s pushed around by external forces and the people around him. This can be somewhat frustrating – an odd sensation, reading something with so little drive to *advance* the plot.

The mundane is broken up by exotic and visceral episodes that feel completely out of place in their stark contrast. Sex and Violence. The first in the form of obscene phone calls from strange women. The second in the retelling of horrific events from the war by an ancient veteran.

Toru’s wife disappears. He meets a number of other women who act as doppelgangers for his wife, engaging in conversations both spiritual and mundane, providing physical comfort and sexual release. But most of the plot points feel like filler around the excellent episodes from the 1940s.

By the end of the book (as it resolves a sort of half-boiled thriller regarding his wife’s disappearance), he gets letters from a young girl named May Kashara. She’s probably the most compelling of the book’s characters, with childlike curiosity and mischief underlain by a deep fascination with mortality and human evil. She writes:

“Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living…, they think that the world or life (or whatever) is this place where everything (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent. Talking with my neighbors here often makes me think that. Like, when something happens, whether it’s a big event that affects the whole society or something small and personal, people talk about it like, “Oh, well, of course, that happened because such and such,” and most of the time people with agree and say, like , “Oh, sure, I see,” but I just don’t get it. “A is like this, so that’s why B happened.” I mean, that doesn’t explain anything.”

Is the surface of the book nonsensical on purpose? Are these random characters and Toru’s passive reaction merely an illustration of that absurdist tenet?

There’s a lot to think about and digest in Wind Up. It’s easy to write the whole thing off as poorly organized, half-complete, or lost in translation. But it’s a book that requires multiple passes. On the surface, Toru is a passive robot, a blank everyman, a zombie of modern consumer culture. But he does possess a deeper spirituality, a hidden meaning, that’s only revealed when he climbs down and contemplates what lives in the darkness underground.

Corky. 1996-2010.

Like any good series finale, it was polarizing. A few writer’s I read even went so far as to say it ruined the entire series.

Most of the complaints stem from the finale itself – not that ends weren’t tied up, but they were fixed in a way inconsistent with the show as a whole. We were obsessed with the trinkets in the rabbit hole: how far did Dharma and Charles Widmore and Egyptian hieroglyphics really go? What were the numbers? Was the smoke monster some sort of nano-bot guardian of the island’s secrets?

And the show answered by saying: none of that’s important. What was important were Jack, Hurley, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Sun and Jin, and of course Locke (nevermind that he went rogue for the last two seasons…)

It’s taken me some time to digest. But I remembered back to what hooked me on the show in the first place. It was first in season one, when Locke went out in the rain with his knives and found freedom in the mystery of the island, only to become obsessed with the hatch. That first extended metaphor of the button was for us, the viewer. Did the button really matter, or was it just an illusion to draw us along, a psychological experiment? Those science vs. faith conversations between Locke and Jack were some of the best in the show.

And then in season two, conflicts with the Others – Lost perfectly captured and demonstrated the paranoia of conflict, terrorism, torture that were unavoidable in those early years post 9/11.

That’s what these island dramas are always about – a microcosm of human society. The sci-fi elements were window dressing to attract the modern obsessive fan with high def TVs, frame capture TIVOs and internet forums. The core was always that same story in Lord of the Flies or Robinson Crusoe – man vs nature; man vs man; man vs self.

The problem with any serial drama stretched over hundreds of hours is that it’s tough to show character growth without turned off the audience. We want to see Jack Shephard work through his demons, but we don’t want him to give up his guilty-savior complex, which can be at times obnoxious, but what makes Jack…Jack. It was obvious he’d be a sacrificial lamb in the finale. It was pretty bold to show his purgatorial redemption as well. That last conversation between Jack and Locke brings the entire thing full circle, when Jack realizes his purpose.

Faith won out. Science (represented by Dharma, Widmore, even the original Man in Black) got the proverbial (and literal) gunshot to the chest.

So now that it’s over, why be disappointed? It was an hour of entertainment on a weeknight filled with adventure, mystery, and deep questions, for six years. What more could you ask for? It’s time to let go. Now I just need to wait for the DVD box set. Apparently, there’s a secret revealed at 23:42 and 15:16 on episode 8 of the 4th disc!

From DIY Lenses

At the back of the lens is a pretty thick convex lens thats used to focus the light onto the sensor inside the camera.

From DIY Lenses

There’s also a circuit board that controls the autofocus of the lens. Take that off and below you can start to see the internal mechanisms that are used both for the telephoto zoom and the focus. The mechanical gizmos turn the focusing lens.

From DIY Lenses

There’s also 3 more pieces of glass in the center which are used to give the lens its zoom power.

So I decided to take the various lenses and try out some DIY photography. The basic starting point was the pinhole camera, which doesn’t use any of the glass. Pretty good explanation here on how to build it: http://digitalphotographyblogs.com/2006/04/09/diy-pinhole-lens/

I just used a piece of black paper taped to old lens mount. The results were pretty cool:

From DIY Lenses

From DIY Lenses

One effect of pinhole photography is that a perfect focus is impossible. So you get these sort of dreamy looking exposures.

From DIY Lenses

I had all the glass from the kit lens, so I tried some experiments. The most basic convex lens on top of the pinhole:

From DIY Lenses

The focus improved by a good bit.

Next, I fashioned just the small convex lens on onto a paper holster, at an angle. My intention was some sort of tilt-shift effect.

From DIY Lenses

At the basic angle, I’d get a wispy look on the edges of the image.

From DIY Lenses

From DIY Lenses

Since the paper holster was pretty loose, I could move the lens and increase and angle, resulting in some pretty cool images:

From DIY Lenses

From DIY Lenses

Fun stuff! I’ll see what I can rig up next after a trip to the hardware store.

I was also pretty surprised at the gameplay packed into the thing. There were dialog and symbolic puzzles, “go-fetch” quests, exploration of a beautifully designed world, multiple paths of advancement (magic user, warrior, thief), even a Street Fighter-ish battle system. These are all features that modern games tout as innovative, yet here they were in a genre blending game from the early 90s – still very playable (via Dosbox and Abandonia) 17 years later.

It made me think about the state of video games. Where they’ve come from and where they’re going. What’s really advanced? What’s stagnated?

Sure, there are amazing visuals. But better graphics and higher production values (writing, sound, art, plotting) are not the core of video games. The core is how the player interacts with the game world, the “tropes” that are used as basis of gameplay. Platform jumping, Role-Playing, first person shooting, driving, solving puzzles, and fighting are the standards – and many games combine one or more “modes”.

The golden age of truly new types of gameplay was 1995-2005 when 3D fully took over all the genres and we saw the perfection of the 3D platformer (Mario 64), the rise of internet multiplayer FPS (Halo, Counterstrike, etc) sandbox-city blockbusters (GTA III) MMOs (Everquest, WoW), even the instant gratification of browser games (Flash). The last five years we’ve only refined and barely evolved.

Wii was an interesting development. It led the way to interacting with the game world through “analog” control systems. So you control the avatar / car / whatever through fluid movements in real-space instead of tapping binary buttons or joysticks. This carries over to iPhone / iPad games that use the internal gyroscope for steering, etc.

Film went through its own golden age of innovation in the early 20th – from the silent Charlie Chaplin films all the way to masterpieces like Citizen Kane, Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Of course, technology was never divorced from the medium – the biggest films still come packaged with the latest cutting-edge technology (think Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron). But there’s an entire world of film that has nothing to do with technology. That’s the kind of thing we need in video games.

The independent era of film in the 60s and 70s would never have been possible without the big studios of the 40s and 50s that developed the technology and “tropes” of the medium, and built up the level of talent. Right now we’re in that big studio system, with EA and Activision the equivalent of Paramount and MGM.

Some of the Bad Trends:

-Expensive multimedia set-pieces (cut scenes, on-a-rail gameplay). This happens when you spend millions on impressive animations and graphics and you want to show it off to the player and not let them miss it, so you limit the range of motion and camera angles. Gameplay is reduced to tapping a few buttons in sequence in order to watch the “interactive” cut scene. (God of War is especially guilty). This leads to games that are spectacle, but with short gameplay times and little replayabity.

-The monetization of extras – having to buy extras characters / costumes / levels / feats / etc with real money. Instead of letting the player advance fully in the game world through the progression of their own skill, they have to increasingly chip in more real-world cash to get the full package. It’s one thing to buy add-on packs, another to pay for individual pieces of armor.

See: If Super Mario Bros was made today

What’s next for video games? Things I’d like to see:

-Procedurally generated 3D worlds for FPS and adventure games. Hell, even RPGs, just need to avoid the miles-of-nothing feel that plagued Oblivion.

-An Open-source MMO where avatars can be moved between public and private realms (with a strong gameplay rather than social basis (Second Life is out)).

-Control and power schemes in a fighting / action game that are purely based on physics, rather than pre-set and pre-rendered animations. That way you could get judo-like moves where you use the opponent’s momentum against himself, etc. Super Smash Brothers does this kind of thing to a degree.

-Adoption of HTML5 as a gaming platform for 3D browser based games. A strong community / toolset for building games/applications in the technology. Hell, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Apple should build and sell those tools. The technology is coming together.

-A mod community for console games – free downloadable levels and/or total conversions for console games. Use the apple App model for quality control. I know XBox Live does this to a degree but I feel that most game’s DLC is very limited and overpriced.

-The rise of truly independent game developers that distribute on the web (and through Xbox live) using low cost / open source tools and data sets (3D models, textures, engines). Just as the big studios gave way to independent film in the 60s and 70s I’d love to see the same thing happen with video games in the next decade.

DFW’s big claim to fame came before that, back in 1996, with his novel Infinite Jest. It was one of the last big postmodern novels of the 20th century. There were all the comparisons with Pynchon and Gaddis. Wallace actually didn’t like the “postmodern” attribute, instead hoping his writing possessed more of a humanist morality, more heartfelt than the clever intertextual nihilism of his peers.

Not to say the book isn’t daunting. Over a thousand pages, multiple spans without paragraph breaks, footnotes, words not found in common dictionaries, etc. The introduction does its best to dispel such qualms (by Dave Eggers, no less), but still, there is a sense of foreboding when taking the thing on, perhaps even dread. The title claims “infinite!”…but only in “jest”…?

That dread is appropriate – Hamlet being one of the primary allusions. There’s even a scene set in a graveyard, a skull held aloft, potentially holding secrets. Hal Incandenza is our protagonist, a tennis prodigy at the Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) in urban Boston. His late father, James, was the headmaster of the school before offing himself in a jury-rigged microwave. James Incandenza was a film auteur of some renown, but his final film (titled Infinite Jest) is the novel’s MacGuffin, a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it becomes instantly addicted, a mindless zombie.

The book meanders to this plot point, however, laboring over Hal’s family, his peers, the physics and philosophy of tennis, Hal’s chemical addiction to marijuana. The writing itself is what keeps the entire thing aloft. Like “This is water”, DFW sees things from an angle beneath and within.

First – he has verisimilitude and inner monologue so perfected that instead of “communicating” the thoughts/feelings/actions of a character in question, the reader has a running “download” of the event in question. Dialogue goes on for many pages without attributive pronouns and you can follow along because the characterization and verbal tics are so distinct and well-mapped. On top of that, the characters and conversations are laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Second – DFW has admitted the book takes its structure from a Serpenski Triangle, a rough sort of fractal. Both the narrative and the character threads start out simple enough at the top. But as the novel progresses, we revisit those same characters (and sometimes tertiary peers) with an increasing zoomed macrovision. This pattern shows up both at the highest level: the days that comprise the “chapters” of the book, and also the inner monologue of the characters – tiny little bits of flotsam (from J. Incandenza’s filmography, to a bizarre plot that involves a Québec terrorist group of wheelchair assassins trying to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest (called the samizdat) in order to threaten O.N.A.N. (organization of North American Nations), even the various chemical substances imbibed by characters) are expanded into lengthy anecdotes in the infamous footnotes.

The footnotes are an interesting aside. They make the act of reading the book a sort of performance art. The reader has to decide to interrupt the narrative, break concentration and flip to the back of the book to expand upon an obscure reference. In a way it’s similar to using hyperlinks on a webpage – perhaps DFW was alluding to this when the web was in its infancy. Even more fascinating is that the footnotes are probably less interruptive than DFW originally intended, because we have 10-15 years of training on the web under our belts.

Hal’s counterpart is a man named Don Gately, a hardcore synthetic opoid addict and burglar, now recovering in a halfway house down the hill from ETA. Don’s had a sorry life, rising out of the typical abusive family into an adolescence of experimentation and inevitable addiction. Burglary is only to support the habit. But when we encounter him he’s attending AA, attempting to be clean and sober. So in a way his arc is the inverse of Hal’s: Don attempts day by day to find lucidity free of Substance; Hal degenerates day by day into growing Substance addiction.

The core moral revolves around the interplay between happiness, entertainment and addiction. What is the threshold when anything we enjoy becomes addictive, be it tennis, pot, morphine, television shows, films, even Alcohol Anonymous groups? Do we have any hope when we’re bombarded with messages of infinite consumption, vehicles of addictive entertainment, on-demand pleasure? Since the book was published, there already have been instances of people dieing of dehydration, glued to some video game in a South Korean net cafe. Technology will only grow more insidious and addictive, and that same sad story will be repeated.

Infinite Jest is a brave book, because DFW gives so much of himself in writing it. There are passages about addiction and depression and suicide (half a dozen characters attempt/succeed in de-mapping themselves) so insightful and truthful they can’t be anything other than autobiography. Wallace’s suicide was tragic, but I will admit it was one of the reasons I started reading him (both IJ and his essays). He never could escape the demons he paints so well. If we think about his original intent – to create a sort of moral literature – IJ is a vital book. It’s wrong to call Wallace a martyr – that he felt the weight of his ideas so strongly he died because of them (ignoring all the biochemistry of depression). But if his death brings readers to his writing and ideas, and in turn makes them think and escape the traps of addiction/depression, is that a silver lining?

Ultimately we do come back to the samizdat, the failed entertainment. The book ends where it begins, questions of the climax hidden in the opening paragraphs, and we’re sucked into reading the whole thing again: an infinite loop, an infinite jest.

This was not the year 2000, but the decades leading up to 1900, a hundred years previous and many of the same problems we still face today.

All of American History contains valuable lessons – but probably no time is more relevant to our current crop of problems than the Gilded Age. In the years following the Civil War, industrialists from the northern states stretched their iron fists across the mountains and forests of the west to transform raw materials into hard currency. Waves of immigrants and newly freed slaves provided the man-power, and the growing corruption in all levels of politics allowed these robber barons to grow fat and wealthy.

Into this world of privilege – in fact, the capital of it all: Manhattan – was born a sickly boy named Theodore. His father was an influential businessman / politician, and the boy’s youth was filled with homeschooling, trips to Europe and the lands of antiquity, summers on the shores of Long Island. But Teddy was an inquisitive guy, fascinated with the workings of the natural world – especially birds, which he would first shoot and then stuff to practice his amateur taxidermy.

But he was plagued with debilitating asthma and other ailments and struggled to keep up with his athletic siblings and cousins. Instead of sinking into feeble nerdy despair, he took to heart his father’s stern prodding, and willed himself to physical health, climbing local mountains, lifting weights, boxing and swimming and playing tennis. His mission was not happiness, or leisure (which were his by birthright, and did in his brother), but to live the Strenuous Life.

By the time he enrolled in Harvard, he was fit and trim, and moved like a man of action, despite occasional setbacks and fits of ill health.

If anything can stand as a metaphor for his life – it’s that image of a sick boy denying reality and pushing through to build himself up.

He excelled in Harvard, socially and academically, becoming president of prestigious clubs, and he even wrote history books in his free time. He pursued and married his college crush, a beautiful and radiant girl named Alice Lee, and soon after graduation was elected as a state representative.

After two years of honorable (if raucous) service, his wife and mother died on the same day, throwing him into a black despair. It was from there he went west to seek his fortune in the cattle business and heal his soul.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is the account and exploration of TR’s life from birth to his ascension to the Presidency, following McKinley’s assassination. The book is written as narrative, utilizing private journals and primary accounts to paint a picture not only of Roosevelt’s actions, and the focal points of history, but his mind set, his strategic political thinking, the growth and evolution of his ideologies.

Roosevelt is fascinating because he is a study in contrasts. He was a son of the rich New England Upper Crust, yet he found himself at home among leathery cowboys of the Wild West – the Rough Riders. He was a sickly boy yet rose to great physical heights, climbing the Matterhorn in his early 20s. He was a thinker and writer, but also a man of action and physical drive – riding horseback for days through North Dakota snowstorms. He was a great lover of the beauty of the wild – yet he was a bloody and violent hunter, cataloguing his slaughter by the dozens, complete with gory descriptions of the carnage. He was an idealist and a promoter of moral values and absolutes, yet he was a shrewd player of the political game, accumulating favors and playing rivals off one another, even reaching outside his ‘legal authority’ when his superiors were off on Summer vacation.

At the turn of the century, American industry was churning – railroads and factories were producing the goods of the civilized world, and making fledgling corporations wealthy. But America as a country was still weak – with an aging fleet and an undisciplined army. Spain still controlled islands in the Caribbean – Cuba, Puerto Rico.

Roosevelt had the vision to see America as more than a collection of States united by a common constitution, but more so, a common dollar. He saw America as a first-world power, the hegemony of the western hemisphere, and Europe locked up on their side of the Atlantic. He even went so far as to provide racial reasoning for his imperialism, in his sprawling four-tome series The Winning of the West. He saw the Anglo-Saxon peoples as destined to conquer both the rugged land of the west and the natives that inhabited it, and that journey forged them into a unique and bold race called Americans.

Roosevelt adhered to the philosophy of “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” He applied his philosophy to civilizations as well as individuals. These ideas, which veer close to Social Darwinism, are certainly out of vogue today, but an interesting thought experiment is to follow these ideals to their logical conclusions.

Every other major world power was also engaged in nationalism and imperialism, and if America hadn’t started when it did (with the building of the Great White Fleet and the victory over the Spanish in Cuba) the United States potentially could have been overrun in the decade leading up to World War I.

Of course, this is all speculation, but if anything, Roosevelt kicked off the modern era of American history, the American Century. No longer the underdog, we became the masters of our geography, global-political events, culture, etc. One could say Roosevelt foresaw all that even as a young boy traveling by boat along the Nile, observing the colossal decay of the old empires, stuffing Ibises with formaldehyde.

Rise is a brilliant biography not because it accounts for the facts and accuracy. The footnotes can vouch for that. Morris’s gift is presenting Roosevelt as one of the most fascinating characters in American history, with tics and flaws, but also possessing greatness.

Roosevelt was a die-hard republican, and even in the 1890s the GOP was a party of big business. Yet he spearheaded the progressive movement, slicing through corruption, creating better accountability and transparency in government, and siding with the people (in most cases the generic idealized populace, or the natural health of the land, rather than a specific populist lobby). In his view, the role of the GOP was to set guidelines and principles not only to referee commerce, but also benefit the United States.

The modern GOP forgets the nationalist side of the equation (outside of the hollow warhawk rah-rahing), allowing big biz offshore tax havens and freewheeling outsourcing, even allowing foreign firms to own domestic infrastructure and manufacturing. Roosevelt would never have stood for that. He knew that unmoderated corporations were an amorphous, evil thing, and he hit them hard with intelligent and effective measures.

Perhaps the American century is over, globalization’s hold is too strong we’ll never again see a politician as dynamic and effective as TR. But both his life, words and deeds are part of our heritage, and maybe our hour has not yet come. Teddy would have reveled in the challenge.

“It is perfectly fair—and what’s more, manifestly accurate—to say that social and cultural conditions are presently antithetical in lots of ways to creating literature that resonates with the times. A familiar way of putting it is to evoke a nefarious alliance of massively multiplied information sources and stimuli with a clustered and distracting mass culture, and the corresponding shrinkage of the average person’s attention span and willingness to isolate himself with a book. The novelist is caught in a double bind: in order to properly capture the feel of a kinetic, overloaded modern world she must pack more, and more varied, material into her work, but does so for an audience that has less and less inclination to engage with it. Alternatively, the novelist simplifies and straightens her work in order to win readers, but at the expense of representing the world as she truly perceives it to be (i.e. “selling out”). There is a concern that the novel is simply unable, structurally, to harmonize with an era where the written word has been so heavily marginalized by sound and image. Or maybe the form is exhausted—there being only so many different ways to stick words together into a coherent whole, and only so many styles to adopt and tones to take, etc., might the last three hundred years of cultural activity not have burnt up our artistic resources? These worries are valid enough, but in fact there has never been a moment where the novel really was a pure and uncomplicatedly meaningful thing. It has always been a struggle against the elements.”