Month: January 2002

Wordplay and Cornell’s prince

I guess five hours is my limit in museums these days. Boy, I’m not even 30 and my stamina is shot to hell. 🙂 However, I found a couple of really cool things in the short time I wandered around.


Cornell's Medici prince, on display in the East Gallery of Washington's National Gallery.

First, Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Boy) is in fact on display in the National Gallery’s East Wing; it wasn’t there two years ago. They’ve moved it with the two works that were previously displayed to the second level—while I didn’t get as much of a cool feeling of exclusivity as I did in the days when you had to climb up to the tower to find them, the works are placed much more prominently.

Second, Xu Bing. Contemporary Chinese artist whose medium is calligraphy—but what calligraphy! A permanently installed three story mobile chains together the word for “monkey” in eighteen languages, each fragment shaped like a monkey. A flat plane containing three dimensional Chinese characters describing birds takes flight, as characters for “bird” become shaped into a flock of birds. A room is filled with scrolls, newspapers, and books printed with “Chinese” characters that in fact have no meaning. Walls are filled with a hand calligraphed speech from Mao — but the characters are English words written as though they were Chinese calligraphy. (This was a favorite—there were two indigo iMacs in the room running a Mac OS X program that took a typed English sentence and rendered it in this style of calligraphy in near real time. Okay, after 30 seconds. But the first few words of “The Waste Land” look really cool as neo-Chinese calligraphy.)

Not that I would know

Okay, so my arms have mostly recovered from yesterday’s marathon blog. I’m still thinking about the new iMac, and my conclusion is that they’ve done a fine job of hitting their target market. Not power users, not Linux guys, but the many more people who need a computer to help them get things done. Regarding appearance, it is, as Seal said, very 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also like what “Doc” wrote yesterday from the convention floor: “What seemed to have everyone most fascinated afterwards at the press ‘viewing’ was the shiny metal arm that connects the base to the monitor. It looks like a chrome dildo…”

Dave, we hardly knew amiable entrepreneur ye

(I asked Tim at our family reunion on Saturday if he intended to do any blogging while on the road. “Maybe a little,” he said. I’d like to draw derisive attention to the “little” that takes up the rest of this page. Geeze Louise.)

Sad news today, folks: Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, has died. Hats off and a moment of silence for the creator of the Spicy Chicken Sandwich.
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In Store Updates

Sorry–I lost something when my machine went down and that news item got corrupted. Anyway: 14″ iBooks are here today. New iMac will be here on Thursday for display and for sale in two weeks. Firesale pricing on old iMacs and on the DVD-only iBook. And iPhoto is available for download.

Pushback

By the way, Dave and John Robb, have to push back about content management software and Apple. My mother in law needs to be able to manage her photos. That will help Apple sell computers. They’re leaving you a space in the ecosystem to capture the mindshare of all of us bloggers.

Prognostication?

Steve’s getting hoarse, I think. Now I’d like to end by talking for a few seconds about our strategy. One word: to innovate. We have been busy in the last 12 months and innovating while most of our competitors have been retrenching and laying off. Why? Because I think we can see the future…. Hey, there’s no “one more thing!” Good. My fingers hurt.

First reactions

An email from a reader about the new iMac. Frank Himsl thinks “It looks like a small, expensive flat screen perched on top of a $15 electric tea kettle.” Here’s another question, how easy is it to keep clean?