New Interview

Here’s a new one, from the C-Realm.

The C-Realm Podcast – my first interview on the notion of being “Corporatized.”

Sorry Rochester, Hello Austin

I missed my first talk last night. Equipment trouble led the pilot on my already-delayed flight to Rochester to abort take-off (quite exciting) return to gate, and then order some repairs. Seven hours waiting at the airport, and no flight materialized to Rochester. Yes, I could have driven or trained in that amount of time.

But it meant canceling a 400-person event at Nazareth College, and for that I’m really sorry. I’ll get there in the fall, I promise.

Today I’m flying alternate planes to Austin, for my KRLU talk.

(FYI: I’m always glad to buy people tickets for my gigs, or to get them on guest lists when I can. But it’s a whole lot easier to do this if you let me know ahead of time! Email requests for tickets on the morning of the event – especially when I’ll be flying all day – are really hard to make happen. I’m buying seats (I”m assuming it’s not sold out) for everyone who emailed by 9:30am EST today. But I’m not going to have time to check email between now and the event, so that’s about as good as I can do. I am sorry this particular event costs so much – I’ve done a bunch of talks in the past in Austin for free – but it’s a fundraiser for PBS, and that is a worthy cause.)

I’ll try to make tonight worth it, though. Here’s an interview I did with the Austiner about it. I’m thinking of bagging my prepared speech, and instead inviting the audience to come up with five topics they’d like addressed. I wouldn’t want it to come off as a cop-out – it’s actually a lot harder to think on one’s feet like that. But it’d be an opportunity for people to witness me actually process live, rather than just downloading something I’ve thought of.

Plus, it would guarantee the stuff I talk about is relevant to at least someone there.

I’ll decide on the plane.

Taking Testament Seriously

So you wanna know what a comic book like Testament looks like through the eyes of a genuine Torah scholar? Check out this paper by Boston University PhD candidate and author A. David Lewis.

This guy not only gets pretty much everything I was thinking about when making the choices I did for how to adapt the Torah – but he helps justify some of those choices with Midrash I hadn’t considered. Lewis also went as far back as my Nothing Sacred and even earlier books and interviews to cobble together some of my rationale and intentions. Reading his essay, I began to remember some of what got me interested in this line of inquiry to begin with.

From Lewis’s essay:

Tellingly, Rushkoff’s original storyarc for Testament, “Abraham of Ur,” was retitled for the collected trade paperback as Akedah, the Hebrew word for being bound, specifically the Binding of Isaac. It works as a cute pun on the repackaging of the original six issues, but that should not be the only meaning we take from it.

With this subtle shift of nomenclature, Rushkoff hints both at his agenda and at the power of comic books: to break boundaries. As he says in Media Virus:

With surprising and almost frightening consistency, comic-book writers fill their stories with a unilaterally progressive countercultural agenda. Like most alternative and underground media, these comics promote psychedelic consciousness, environmental awareness, sexual permissiveness, racial equality, feminist values, distrust of authority, and conspiratorial paranoia. (188)

We can see, when viewed this way, the allure that writing a comic book series would have for this media critic. If we have a holy text Biblical that, as New York Times reviewer Lore Dickstein says, is “full of lacunae and empty spaces” which, over time, have been filled in Iserian or Auerbachian fashion, then comics may be the best medium by which to reopen it. “[C]omic books exploit those gaps in order to communicate (Rushkoff Playing 57), perfect for when your purpose is specifically to reopen them – to de-delineate the boundaries.

…the whole essay is here.

Vista Sucks; Linux Wins

I purchased a computer just a few weeks ago – a travel laptop with a whole lot of power in a two-pound package (Sony Vaio G1 – available only as a Japanese import from places like Dynamism). There was an option to get the computer with the new Windows Vista installed, so i figured I should get with the times and step up to the new operating system.

Yes, it was a mistake on my part. Nothing really works, anything I need to access is embedded in flashy but useless and counter-intuitive menus, and the things I install to get around all of Windows roadblocks end up being *removed* by Windows when it does its automatic upgrades.

Why is Vista so bad even after six years of development and a myriad of promises? Because instead of seeing computer users as its customers, Microsoft has apparently chosen to put the needs of its fellow corporations first. This shouldn’t be surprising, particularly when we stop to remember that Windows primary customers are the giant companies who install Windows on each and every one of their workers’ machines.

But the way Microsoft chose to show its loyalty through Vista was through an elaborate set of – Digital Rights Management – limitations. Microsoft wants to help corporations prevent the illegal use of their content, such as music and videos. The easiest way to do that is to limit the use of non-secure file formats. And the easiest way to do that is to not supply the codecs required to view them in one of the installed media players.

But Microsoft has taken this a step further: not only do they not supply the necessary codecs, but – at least in my experience so far – they overwrite the alien codecs if the user installs them himself. During certain updates, Vista removes files and utilities it suspects of being able to permit illegal movie watching.

If a user chooses to stop an update, there might even be repercussions. One report indicates that Windows “Genuine Advantage” notification calls Microsoft automatically, telling the company who has aborted the installation.

The utter uselessness of my new Vista machine, combined with the week I was going to have to wait for an XP disk and the current barriers to installing the Mac OS on a non-Mac machine, convinced me to download and install Ubuntu, one of the more user-friendly versions of Linux out there.

Yes, I’m working on it right now, and it makes even the Mac OS seem like a forest of unnecessary gizmos. Linux is blazingly fast compared with Microsoft’s OS, utterly simple, complete with any application you can imagine and – more amazingly – based on an entirely different philosophy than Windows. There’s a spirit of abundance and transparency in this Linux universe. Need something, and you just grab it. Pay, if you like, what you like, when you’ve determined its of value to you.

Working in Linux reminds you that your computer is just one drive in a network. That getting your machine to do something new really just means grabbing a few lines of code from someone who has tried it before. It means working in a collaborative space where productivity and creativity are more important than protecting a movie studio’s futile efforts at maintaining control-by-force over the digital media it releases.

But the fact that I’m now using it as my principle operating system means something else: that soon a whole lot of people will be, too. Linux has finally arrived. Maybe not this year, but 2008 will almost certainly be the year of Ubuntu in the same way 2005 or 6 was the year of Bittorrent. It will reach critical mass, penetrate the general market, or do whatever it is that means coming of age.

And it will herald the beginning of a new era in computing – one characterized less by limitation than by possibility, less by “security” (for Linux uses a shell) than by open systems, and less by consumerism than by collaboration and do-it-yourself. In a sense, the age of computing will finally begin. Again.