Entries tagged with “cities” from active social plastic

Greetings from lovely San Jose and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference! I'm here for the first time since 2004. The talks have been terrific. I had the opportunity to give an Ignite talk (5 minutes! 20 slides!) on pneumatic tubes.

I'm giving a talk today called "Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: India's Mobile Phone"-- it's the result of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in 2006. If you're interested in the topic, there are two chapters that I've published about it. I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). And with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary.

At South by Southwest, Francesca Birks and I organized a panel called Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces, where we'll be joined by Ben Cerveny and Mouna Andraos. We're on deck on Sunday at 10 a.m. (early! but very cool!).

Do come to see us -- and if any of these subjects interest you, please follow up with me. I have more material to offer.

It is 11:56 p.m. and Haruki Murakami begins his novel, After Dark, as follows.

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature--or more like a collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

The tendrils of night furl and unfurl in his novel about surveillance, forboding, theft and violence in the haunts of late night Tokyo: Denny's, convenience stores, love hotels, basement rehearsal spaces for jazz bands, empty playgrounds. In Murakami's worlds, things are always sad but all is not lost.

After Dark, everything is a jazz motif. Its title comes from a Curtis Fuller song called "Five Spot After Dark," a synchronous encounter that takes four minutes before midnight between a boy named Takahashi and a girl named Mari. James Sanders recently said that without characters in films about cities, the city is nothing. In After Dark, without Tokyo, the characters in Murakami's novel are nothing. With their author and their city, they are motifs and riffs. The novel situates people against each other who can't speak, can't give away the secrets, can't quite bring themselves to take the next step that would bring them one-half step further, save for one moment.

These moves are those of a jazz piece. Indeed, Murakami came to novel-writing from an obsession with jazz and from running a jazz cafe, he wrote in a recent New York Times piece. "When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel -- that I could do it," he wrote. He didn't know where to start. "My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument." He's now approaching 60 and still takes inspiration from music, from "Charlie Parker's repeated freewheeling riffs," and the "quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis's music."

Murakami never fails me with a mix of simplicity and depth, a jazz piece you know well, a style with which you're acquainted. Like McCoy Tyner's hands, it starts familiar and then you find yourself in a darker place you'd not imagined, wondering how the quiet thunder started and then where it went once it dissipates. "Unimpeded by other schemes, this hint of things to come takes time to expand in the new morning light," Murakami writes in After Dark. The city holds the characters. The notes of the trombone fade. The thunder settles.