03-22-11:Lucy Jane Bledsoe Reads at SF in SF on February 12, 2011
"Everyone lives out in front of everyone and it is very, very intense."
—Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe has been places most of us have will only ever be able to see on film. As the two-time recipierctica and lived everywhere that humans live in that isolating world — in small, confined places, with lots of other people. She lived not just in the big bases, like McMurdo Station, but in field camps scattered across the terrain. She has been to placed beyond remote.
At SF in SF on February 12, 2011, she read from her latest novel, 'The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica.' In case you’re wondering how the beginning of the universe got in the title of the novel, it is one of the many things that scientists living in Antarctica find themselves studying. As an artist-in-residence, Bledsoe found herself studying the scientists and other people there.
When you put people in what she calls "fishbowl communities," it's more than science. This is the perfect place for the artist to study humanity at its purest. There is nothing more than what we bring, both to keep us alive physically and to support our ever-questionable sanity. Bledsoe is an acute and powerful prose stylist, whose observational abilities match the complexities of the people and interactions she lived among. Cooks and scientists are members of the same species. You can feel the frozen wind of a world that is beyond human by following this link to the MP3 audio file of the reading by Lucy Jane Bledsoe.
03-21-11:A 2011 Interview with Kevin Poulsen
"Max was pretty good at sussing out snitches...He wasn't perfect, if he'd been perfect, he wouldn't be in jail now."
—Kevin Poulsen
I arranged to speak with Kevin Poulsen at the downtown San Francisco headquarters for Wired magazine. Anticipating parking problems, I left early but hit traffic on the way up, with the result that I arrived just a few minutes before I was supposed to speak with Poulsen. The reason I'd left so early in the first place was that parking in downtown San Francisco can be challenging, to say the least. In a worst-case scenario, you become a shrieking Lost Dutchman, circling through packed intersections, forced down one-way streets and ultimately into $12 per-hour parking a mile away from your destination. So imagine my surprise when I pulled up to the Wired offices and found a parking space outside the front door. $3.50 per hour, and they took my ATM card. It was TV parking and I was suspicious.
Since I only had one hour, I waited until I'd got in touch with Kevin, then armed the meter and hurried upstairs to what looks like a giant rec room, with scattered desks and cubicles. I suppose this is what I might have expected Wired to look like, but frankly, I didn't want to spend time oohing and aahing the scenery. Kevin met me at the door, and we hustled back to an office where we talked about his remarkable book.
When he speaks, Poulsen is, like his book, concise. It was a kick talking to someone who knew about the old free-phone-call-with-a-paper-clip hack — and that said shortcut had been featured in Wargames. I have to admit, I'd forgotten about that movie, but it was the perfect way to immerse myself back in the mindset of that time.
Poulsen, Max Butler, and I all started our journey to the point where I'd end up talking to Poulsen in a not-so-futuristic 21st-century San Francisco at a time when the terms "geek" and "nerd" were insults, not badges of pride. What is now mainstream online culture was then very much an outsider mentality. And Poulsen's understanding of this is what makes this conversation so interesting. You can hear our small-room reverb chat by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
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