Colin's Corner: A Sumerian-tablet invitation for multimedia-enhanced "books"

Colin's Corner: Apple's slate a "Sumerian" publishing eco-system for mobile mass media

If Apple manages to pull this off, it will be both potentially devastating and liberating for legacy publishing industries. Bright creative entrepreneurs will change the moribund textbook industry, children's books with be brought to life via multimedia, the travel guide industry and special interest publishing will be revolutionized, comic books anime and manga will reach massive new audiences. Where it makes sense text can be enhanced by audio and video, readers can be connected to discuss and share content, and new business models can be developed that take account of how readers want to access and consume content. The whole of the publishing industry could be revitalized. The journey is the reward.

Apple media release photo of iPad showing NY Times App

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Apple's Cutting-Edge Way with Computing and Digital Media

What amazes me is how the Internet has made breaking news just minutes away for someone thousands of miles away from the event. Following the endgadget liveblog, unwashed, unshaven, still dressed in night clothes, I read what Steve Jobs had said just a minute or so before on my computer screen at home.

I had the New York Times Bit correspondent on liveblog as well but his reports were not as frequent blow-by-blow like Joshua Topolsky's  at Endgadget. I also had Twitterific on so read tweets as people commented on what was unveiling at the San Francisco Yerba Buena (Good Herb) Center.

Apple did it again, despite naysayers. The way they built up their campaign of controlled leaks so anticipation grows like a giant propaganda machine is perhaps without peer. This reminds me of the much-hyped release of the iPhone. Most comments were slightly negative-"underwhelmed." The most frequently written criticism was lack of multitasking which one could do with a "real" computer like the iMac or MacBook. Jobs left for the very last his announcement of 3G phone connectivity. Without that I think the product would have floundered.

AT&T served an unexpected surprise. It undercut its competitors in offering unlimited data/call monthly charge for $29.99 and this without contract in an unlocked GSM-microSIM device. For me this was one highlight of Apple's new release. It heralds a new era in phone/Internet mobile pricing, perhaps appreciated only in the context of what has been happening on Wall Street and the global financial market. Pull back, retrench, cut prices back to something closer to affordability.

The most momentous element of the release to me is Apple's iBooks. At a time when the publishing industry has been struggling with sales for paper products, Apple's iBooks Store could very well revolutionize not only books but magazine distributions. With its capacity for Apps, one can fantasize about the possibilities.

Pundits mourned how the iPad lacked hardware revolutionary emendations. Someone pointed out the obscured significance. Apple provides the hardware and a few initial software offerings (as it has always done) created by Apple itself and a few typical software creators) and provides with the hardware release the software development package that allows other entrepreneurs to create the content that makes the device so powerful and useful.

I think Apple was right in not changing the UI significantly. Why change something that works? Now people used to the iPhone and iPod can use the same skills to use a new device with more content possibilities. Jobs spoke of standing on the shoulders of Amazon's Kindle. What he didn't say but which is obvious, the iPad stands on the shoulders of the iPhone and iPod, and really on the whole Apple product line: the online store, the intuitive graphical interface, touchscreen that allows fingers to directly manipulate content.

Jobs said something at the outset that struck me because I had not thought of his company in this way. Apple, he said, was the world's largest producer of "mobile" devices. Of course! With included WiFi, Apple MacBooks, iPhones and iPod Touch are what else but mobile devices? These are the very devices I first heard about at NAB in Las Vegas four years ago, devices that were going to be the new distribution outlets for creative people.

Sometimes I am appalled at how slow I am on the uptake. It has taken me two years to feel I am understanding digital media enough to be creating intelligent products. I am so very far away from creating the cutting-edge, edgy products I wanted to make but over all I am happy with the little I have accomplished. The future is opening, slowly, but it is opening to a new page, and I am excited.

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Loving words, living

Verbal sensitivity, wrote John Gardner, was one quality a writer could use. I like this phrase better than "love for words." It's a closer approximation of what I enjoy when writing.
I do feel a caffeine jolt when I find a new word that captures what I mean. I love the sound of it, the cadence it adds to my sentence, the harmony or disharmony it contributes to the paragraph, or even to the whole work but what I enjoy is bigger than this. Gardner's term includes more than the delight I feel with individual words or group of words. It is curiosity about the structure of language and the mimetic function of thought in putting flesh to experience. I might hazard to say that what I enjoy in writing is intrinsic to living life itself. Living by itself seems inadequate when I cannot put down what I am living into what I see. Seeing is at the core of writing, seeing in the sense like dipping a teaspoon into the surging river that I have a bit of it in my possession, something I can gloat over and dissect and make something else out of because what I have is not the river surely. It's mine now; hence I I can, maybe even must do something with it. It is delight and obligation; it is response and responsibility.

I lost this sensitivity to language and to words for years but it only went underground and took on another form. I wanted to cultivate and understand images. Now I understand why. Language is more than words. It is a tool I was not interested in passing on information or facts. Language rises to its potential when it recreates experience. (Life is, after all, only what we experience, not some absolute thing, certainly not "reality" or "truth." The art of the writer or graphic artist derives from his or her experience of this confounding, frustratingly ungraspable entity that created mystics in the first place. An artist is one who senses in some dark corner of her psyche that there is more to life than just living it. She must imitate what experience hints is it's essence, that animating force that some call God. By imitating it she tries to identify with it and sometimes by God accomplishes this. Or appears to, anyway. Artists aspire to this goal, a goal no one can verify. Publishing what a writer writes might give verity to his success. Selling a movie concept or a video or a painting might make the artist feel he's gotten it. The recognition by another person encourages the artist to try again, and try and try. But I think he tries because he must. Life otherwise would just not be enough. It has to be transported by his imagination and desire into something filtered through his being, through what he represents in the incalculably immense scheme of things.

To descend from hyperbole, I think I am on the right track. Better late than never, they say. Not being a fatalist I still think we do what we do. To feel remorse or dwell on what might have been is senseless. Desire is, like imagination, just a page in the eternally mysterious that changes and moves relentlessly on (or back or sideways). We don't become eternal by cultivating art or achieving financial or business or personal success. It's just life, this short span of time of awareness, of sensitivity.

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The Changing Chinese Presence in the U.S.

House of Cheung Cantonese Shrimp Vegetable Stir-fry

At Sichuan last Friday, my Chinese friends Allan and Helen urged me to check out the Sunday buffet at Mandarin House, Carmel. They'd been urging me to try the food there on Sunday as they had also urged the Thai Taste buffet on Thursday night and The Journey, Carmel, buffet Saturday noon. Today I decided to see for myself what the brother-and-sister Chinese gourmets were so excited about.

Mandarin House is just across the street from Sichuan, both of them on South Rangeline Road.  When I got there at 1:45 this afternoon, there were two cars in front of Sichuan. The parking lot in front of Mandarin House was packed with more than twenty. Groups of Chinese diners were oozing out the door, many in a hurry to get back home to watch the Colts game scheduled at 3. While waiting for a table, Allan and Helen come out. Allan insisted on showing me the buffet. He walked me past the maître d’ and pointed out the day's highlights. He told me the restaurant periodically changed their spread. He introduced me to the "boss lady," Lilly, who later told me the regional provenance of my favorite dishes. The noodle dish was from Shanghai, the bean cured Sichuan, the ribs Cantonese, etc

Last week I took photos of the food at the House of Cheung on Keystone Avenue. Peter's restaurant opened 20 years ago. Back then he told me there were seven Chinese restaurants in the city. They all more or less had the same menu, mostly Cantonese specialties the owners had modified to American tastes, what came to be called "Chinese American." Unfortunately I shot the food at the steam table with just the existing light. The pictures did not have good contrast.

I want to make a video about Chinese-American restaurants. These are cultural dinosaurs. I would also love to make a small documentary about Peter and his family and the story of how they came to America in tandem with the story of Cantonese American restaurants. More Chinese now are coming directly from what used to be called "Mainland China." Chinese restaurants in the U.S. are changing because the Chinese who are creating them are different, and the American diners, too, are savvier. Many are now open to food traditions their parents could not stomach before.

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Believing in an afterlife

I acquired Merrill's A Different Person: A Memoir last August, began to read it then tucked it away on my shelf for future reference. Yesterday, determined to stay in bed and rest away an incipient cold, I plucked the book for something to keep my mind from going crazy. What a crazy inspiration!

I resumed reading the book today. It inspired me to rethink what I had recently concluded was a false love for words. How could I ever have thought I loved words? If I ever did, where the hell did it go? Merrill resurrected that sweet inebriation. How I've missed it. A gift sometimes becomes a slave's collar that keeps getting heavier until we tear it off our flesh that we can walk off the slave boat a free man again. But then sometimes we miss what we had so violently discarded. We'd extirpated a vital something in us; we'd reduced ourselves to becoming a stranger even to ourselves, treading water in an even more alien sea.

I found Merrill on Facebook. Nothing written there on the wall but I joined the 117 fans. I learned from Wikipedia that the poet had died in 1995. His memoirs were published a year earlier. They comprised the main text he must have written closer to the trip to Europe he undertook in 1950, and updates in italic from the "different person" he felt he'd become. The memoir may be the last thing he published while alive, a final statement on his sixty-nine years.

Among the fans of his faux Facebook account was a young man who blogged about the 142 books he'd read in 2009. Erudite, sensitive, intelligent, possessed of a way with words I used to think I too had, he added to the feeling that took over this otherwise dismal, drizzly day in Indiana. It's a day to ignite belief in resurrection and the afterlife. I have been bemoaning my sad estate while being obnoxiously ungrateful for my advantages. I can turn this ship around. I am not Merrill nor the unnamed prodigious young reader but I can do a bit more than what I thought I could.

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Cantonese Diaspora Life & the House of Cheung

Cantonese food is what came to mind when growing up in the Philippines we went out for Chinese with my father. Cantonese was also what Americans had until the last ten to fifteen years when more mainland Chinese have been liberated to come to America and offer us the wider variety of Chinese viands.

Peter Cheung started the House of Cheung in 1989. His grandfather came to America in 1907 and worked at various jobs until he came to the Midwest in the late 1940s and started working in various restaurants. Peter followed in the 1970s, his father arriving later on with his mother. Peter told me that when he first arrived in Indianapolis there were seven Chinese restaurants. Now there are over a hundred. But his Cantonese-American style of Chinese restaurant is quickly disappearing. Sprouting like shiitake mushrooms after the rain, the newer restaurants are smaller with minimal decor to tell customers they sold Chinese food. Peter's restaurant, on the other hand, is a museum of artwork overseas Chinese and Chinese who fled the mainland were homesick for. Reverse glass paintings, scrolls, ornate imperial-style dragons, and the golden lanterns with Mandarin-red faux silk tassels.

My rather confused take - his machine-gun speech left me in the dust - on Peter's family history in America gave me the impression that the seven Chinese restaurants in the city were incestuous enterprises. Owners and chefs came from a small group of Chinese who knew each other and who traded places as necessity occasioned. They maintained a consistent blueprint for what constitutes a Chinese restaurant and its menu. Peter's House of Cheung is one of the last examples.
The story of Peter's family and their associates starting from the late 1800s fascinates me. So much has been written about the Jewish diaspora, largely in the Europe and the Americas, but the Chinese too dispersed from mainland China and their story has been told only in a few books. They came to California in the 1800s and built the railroads that spanned the West. Many ended up finding new ways of making money by starting Chinese laundries and restaurants. These were the equivalents of European explorers fanning out into America and Asia. The Chinese began to leave Manchu China after Europe and the U.S. made contact with the deteriorating Middle Kingdom to seek their own fortune. Theirs is a story begging to be told.

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Field Greens with Feta

Wal Mart has been offering a large tub full of organic field greens for under two dollars. The organic revolution may be said to have arrived mainstream when Wal Mart offers organic veggies on its shelves. The greens include baby red-leaf lettuce and arugula, which by itself is often prohibitively priced. I should have used plain cider vinegar instead of balsamic that darkened the salad. A Greek salad to me is mixed greens, cucumber slices, a few tomatoes slices and feta cheese dressed simply with vinegar and olive oil. I didn't quite achieve this but the mix was tasty nonetheless.

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