Arrival in NY, NYU, Brigham, Speer and the Virgin Mary

Revised 11/11/2013

Dearest Marie

I have arrived safely in New York City, a city I have heard so much about but not really visited since earlier in the century.   These notes will record some of my impressions and now that I have given into Satan and bought a digital camera, some pictures as well eventually.

Your idea of buying a cheap notebook worked great, mostly.   Windows 8 can be tamed it turns out, Microsoft is its own worst enemy.  The keyboard can be used but the mousepad is so big on the palm rest that if you indeed use it as a rest you mess with the touchpad and your mouse goes to hell and gone.

I checked into NYU and Perlin arranged for me to have a badge!  I did not have the heart to tell him that I still had my old one from 2000.   They want me to return it when done, fat chance.  The 12th floor looks very very similar to the way I remembered it.    I feel bad bothering people when I need something.   Ken has an interesting vision and we will see where it all goes.  I know from experience that in academia, things are complicated and may not be what they seem.   Danger everywhere!

I did notice that Chris Bregler when he did motion capture did not use the basic ballerina / stripper approach of so many of his peers, but went straight for an Olympic diving champion.  I applaud his taste in exploiting women and plan to complement him on this the next time I see him

I found Tom Brigham, and he is doing better than I expected.  His subterranean basement appears at first to be a junk room, but when you go further in you see there is order in the madness.  He thinks this is camoflage, but I think its just bad marketing.  He has to convince people he is not a flake, and presenting his office/workshop as a pile of junk to the casual observer is the wrong approach.

Speer took me around on Saturday and we got in Chelsea, the MET and some music.  The man is a dynamo of energy, the prototypical uber-new-yorker.   If I had stayed with him on Sunday instead of doing who knows what I would have seen the apparaitions of the virgin mary as photographed by the fabulous Veronica Leueken.  The Church does not believe these are true visions of the Virgin, then what are they?

These are her predictions as recorded in her ecstatic visions.  See link below.  Note that in 1977 under Revolutions she predicts the 3 W as a sign of the end times.   3W could mean 3 wars, or could it mean she predicted the WWW (world wide web) as a sign of the coming collapse of civilization?

http://www.roses.org/prophecy/seqevnt.htm

But now I must get out of Arlene's shelter for the poor here on Broome street and face the cold hard world and go to NYU and play with all the great stuff that Perlin has collected.

PS The MET was wonderful but the Rome exhibit was very underwhelming.

I miss you greatly and look forward to returning to our little Rancho in Siberia.


                                                     Your devoted Dimitri.

200 Motels (1971) on Youtube and Administrative Notes

[I just got back on the internet after 36 hours for failing to pay my 30.89 $US to the rich conglomerate that owns my access to the world.  Thanks to my many friends who are lending me money to get me through this insanely excruciating period.   I am for similar reasons going to be off my meds for the next few weeks, see if you can tell the difference!  I certainly can.  ]

[This post is being written in place, online, today and will become more detailed as the day goes by].

My friend Steve Speer has pointed out to me an immense and under recognized cultural resource, Frank Zappa's 200 Motels (1971).

It is very low quality youtube, which is what I would expect, and it has subtitles, whatever that means in this case.   Low quality Youtube is an abomination but we are lucky to have this work of genius in any form so we have to put up with it.

See it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL63MuKDyIg

Frank Zappa was the acknowledged genius of the generation before my own, the man we recognized as having the sense of humor and talent and accomplishment that we all wanted.   1971 was the year I went away to college and I remember listening to Zappa albums over and over again as a freshman in my dorm.

The IMDB page for 200 Motels is at:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066732/

1st Baron Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest

The Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest is a competition to write the worst possible opening sentence of a novel, in a homage to Bulwer-Lytton, one of whose novels began with the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night ...". (1) Any such sentence should be florid, dramatic, and disconnected.

This is not the novel that had the famous sentence, this is another novel of Bulwer-Lytton about the Rosicrucians.

My friend, Steve Speer, in NYC believes that Bulwer-Lytton has been swept under the rug of history, and does not get the recognition that he deserves.  And so, in his honor, I have written my first attempt at a Bulwer-Lytton-like opening sentence.

I can not tell you with what loathing I approach the disagreeable task of presenting to you, against my will, the events leading up to the disaster which you all know so well, which even now brings the taste of failure to my mouth as I write on this bitterly cold and windy morning on the desolate island of my exile, abandoned by all society and left to an undeserved and miserable fate.

[Modified per anonymous's suggestion on 1.23.2013]

Read about the Bulwer-Lytton Contest here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulwer-Lytton_Fiction_Contest

The contest itself is here:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

The Wikipedia page on 1st Baron Lytton is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bulwer-Lytton,_1st_Baron_Lytton

_________________________________________

1.  The sentence in its entirety, is "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." It is from the novel Paul Clifford by Bulwer-Lytton first published in 1830.

Online Panoramas, Streetviews of Ruined Cities, Archaic Panorama Technology

If travelling is a fools paradise, as Emerson said, then what is virtual travelling?  Here we have two examples of recent virtual travelling to exotic places, and one archaic travel photography technology, the ancient but still expensive roll-film panorama camera.   But first the online paradise(s).

1. Online Panoramas

www.airpano.com has collected a variety of photographic panoramas and given them a consistent user interface. We have some of the usual suspects, the Great Pyramid of Luxor for example, but some unusual ones as well. Here is a picture from the Sawminarayan Akshardham in Delhi.  (Thanks to Speer).  I have trouble controlling the interface with these things, so I find them frustrating.  But the photography is pretty good, but better yet, there are some unusual places here.  This first one is pretty amazing and I have never heard of it before, let alone have a clue how to pronounce it.

Link to this and other panoramas.

http://www.airpano.com/files/Akshardham-India/2-2

2. Street Views of Ruined Cities

On the one hand, I love this panoramic photography that has been enabled and inspired by digital photography. On the other hand, I find it annoying after a while that I can see these places virtually, but am so impoverished that I have no hope of visiting them myself. A virtual "street view" of Pompeii is fabulous as an educational technique and I am delighted with it, but it just reminds me how much wealth matters in this world and how stupid one is not to have it.

To get to the Pompeii street view, go to www.maps.google.com, type in "pompeii, italy", and zoom into the street on one of the gray areas to the north which are ruins. At some point it will enter street view mode, and tell you which ruin or building you are looking at.

3. Archaic Panorama Capture Technology

For those who have not seen or know of the non-digital way of creating panoramas, they are pretty amazing. The following all use so-called "roll film" which was one of the earliest film formats that were not individual "plates" of film, such as 4x5 or 8x10. Roll film comes in 120 and 220 format, or roughly 10 or 20 6x6 cm (e.g. Hasselblad) exposures.

In the following cameras, one may get only 1 or 2 exposures per roll of film and the frame will be very long and horizontal. They use large format photography lenses with very large image circles, and they have tremendous vignetting. One normally shoots such things with huge anti-vignetting filters and one shoots very long exposures, which makes them suitable for landscapes but not for anything that moves.

Fuji 617

Linhof 617