Stephen Miller on CBS

Bumpspark* advisor and author of Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller, was on CBS Sunday Morning this past weekend discussing our favorite topic. Check it out on CBSNews.com.

Kindling

Newsweek’s recent cover story on the Kindle, Jeff Bezos’ version of an iBook clearly not designed by Apple, is a real hoot. Towards the end of the article all kinds of experts wax philosophical about the death of the manuscript. In the future, it seems, books will no longer end, they will just get footnotes, forever. They will become “more of a process than a product.” It works so well for Hollywood screenplays.

So instead of one person going off by him or herself and actually accomplishing something, narratives will become something akin to boardroom meetings. Well since producers are now “auteurs,” I don’t see why entire book clubs can’t become “authors.” As long as they can make a few decisions without Oprah.

My favorite line – “Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium.”

Yeah, right after he dusts off his Pulitzer.

Tactile

I posted draft one of my writing page, dotkalm. It will work as the storage space for dotkalm blog. Any pieces I get published or refer to here will be linked to there. It’s also where I can send someone who simply wants to read my stuff.

The design is my effort to bring back the analog desktop. Right now it is just a background image, but one I can easily subtract to and from. Eventually you’ll be able to click on the various items I leave on my desk. Maybe flip through it with Flash. Maybe I’ll start a timeline. What was on my desk back in October of ’09?

I like that it feels tactile. I can jot on a post-it with a crayon and stick it up there or truly cut and paste a clipping. I can scribble. I also like that it’s chaotic. Just like I might find something hidden on my desk that I forgot and get inspired, so might the random surfer bumpspark against something they didn’t expect.

It’s messy. That’s the idea.

Bumpspark* Heart

Jarvik puts it much better than I could in his ubiquitous Lipitor ads. He was pursuing a career in architecture until his father died of a heart attack. He went into medicine with the mind of an architect.

Medicine + architecture = artificial heart.

Bumpspark.

Return To Source

Where better to locate the pilot bumpspark than the first American escape, the archetype for the artist’s retreat? Where better for poetry and science to meet than in the footsteps of Thoreau and Emerson? The Walden Woods Project will host part of the conversation between Alan Lightman and Robert Pinsky at their Thoreau Institute.

This is getting really good.

Pinstripe Nation Waves White Flag

Or were they throwing in the towel? I couldn’t tell. How sweep!

(AP Photo/Eric Gay)

PBS Airtime

I met with Jerry Franklin, President & CEO of Connecticut Public Broadcasting last week. He thinks Bumpspark* will make a great national PBS series. He has committed to airing the pilot episode and guiding the larger series through the proper national PBS and NPR channels. I just sent out a press release.

Ghosts

I went to see Dr. John Leinhard speak. The NPR commentator on ingenuity talked about ghosts in books, how the spirits of individuals remain in the volumes they’ve written or have read. He spoke about the ahead-of-her-time Jane Marcet, who’s Conversations on Chemistry was one of a number of educational books she wrote around 1806. Even more unexpected, she wrote them in the form of a conversation between two girls and herself.

Leinhard owns a copy with an Ex Libris entry by the great scientist Michael Faraday. Conversations fell into Faraday’s hands when he was a fifteen-year old bookbinder in London. This was certainly one of the books that started him on his destiny with electricity. Leinhard takes great pleasure in the fact that Marcet’s book would eventually be updated, in the 1800s, with an experiment by Faraday.

I gave Leinhard my Bumpspark* proposal and he enjoyed it. He said great conversations usually entail the counterparts’ willingness to be wrong and he wondered how many would be so willing, while on camera. My hope is that there are more than we would think. Speaking with both Robert Pinsky and Alan Lightman recently, I brought up Leinhard’s question and they both felt, or hoped, they would be that open.

Preparing for my meeting with Professor Lightman, I read my old copy of his Einstein’s Dreams again, full of jottings and highlights. I realized he is a part of my project because I learned from him and my ideas and projects come from his. Lightman confessed he remembers all the drafts of his books, not only the sentences he finally gives the printer, but all the versions of each sentence that came before. When reading them in public, he sometimes gets confused.

When our talk was over he signed my old copy of his most famous book and I thought of Leinhard’s ghosts. I am anxious to make my show.

Whaditelya?

Sure, the Yankees always come back in the ninth, but who always comes back three games down in the ALCS? It’s a whole new century folks.

Been Here Before

To my fellow Red Sox fans who are down tonight, might I remind you of the Full Eclipse.

Beyond Mashups

There are gimmicks like The Grey Album and then there are real musical efforts of collaboration between the unlikely.

Hear what happens when two Mexico City artists move to Dublin on the self-titled album of Rodrigo Y Gabriela.

Then stand in line with me a week from tomorrow when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss release the T-Bone Burnett produced Raising Sand. One review I read said this is no he said, she said duet album, but two great artists struggling to create a third distinct thing. Exactly what I hope.

Bumpspark* Business

The Chicago-based innovation company Inventables searches around the globe for new technologies, gathers them in a kind of swatch book, and delivers them to R&D departments at P&G, Nike and Mattel so they can bumpspark them against their products and services.

Genius!

Disco Bumpspark*

Isaac Newton as played by John Travolta. Who walks down the street eating out of a jar?

Fresh Ideas

Working minds are new minds. As we discuss dates and locations and possibilities for the first bumpspark, Robert Pinsky and Alan Lightman are also busy adding their latest thoughts to the world dialogue.

Gulf Music comes out on 10/16. Ghost arrives the following week on 10/23, just in time for Halloween.

Schmelling

My old roommate and good friend Mike Schmelling is featured in the latest issue (Issue 35) of Blind Spot, a magazine of fine arts photography.

It is ten years ago now that Mike was working on a series of photos in El Paso. He mailed a postcard of one shot to my family home in Connecticut. It was of a woman folding a shirt on a bed, a man in the background. My mom took one look at it in the pile of envelopes and said, “They just had an argument.” She was right, I found out later from Mike.

God knows how short a time Mike knew this couple before he was in a corner of their bedroom getting that kind of moment, but it was a short time. I always wanted to go with him when he worked, but I knew I couldn’t, that it would completely change the situation. It is there in some of his best work though; somehow he becomes invisible.

Congrats Mike.

The Camden 28

My good friend Andy Firda’s good friend Anthony Giacchino has been working on a documentary about the activists arrested in New Jersey during the Vietnam War for quite a while. It is finished. It is timely. It is getting great reviews.

I’m going to watch it tonight at 10PM on PBS. You should too.

Way to go Anthony.

Remember

What do I remember?

I remember the day before.

I was supposed to shoot a television commercial all week, so the same adrenaline that burned every detail of Tuesday into my brain was working in a different way on Monday. I was shooting a promo spot for a new channel called New Americans. It was going to provide foreign news broadcasts, English as a Second Language and job skills programming for the latest huddled masses.

I love shooting. I storyboarded thirty seconds of New York City diversity, Harlem to Hasidim, and set up locations in all five boroughs. I can see Carlos rolling his eyes with the camera slung over his shoulder. In the morning we took pictures of a tiny Indian girl in her tiny Queens home sitting in front of her family's gigantic widescreen television. At noon I had an Arab man meet us on Thirty-fourth Street and Park Ave wearing his native garments and carrying a rug so he could pray towards Mecca. It was one of the first images I thought up; something I had seen all over the city.

On September 10, 2001, at around one o’clock, I was superimposing the Muslim religion with the Empire State Building because I wanted to show their accord.

It poured at dusk. I was going to shoot in the back of a Chinatown kitchen first thing the next morning and I confirmed everything with the owner. I didn’t get two blocks when it just started to come down. I was caught in an old painted-over doorway on Mosco Street between Mulberry and Mott for forty-five minutes. The sloping alley filled with a raging flash flood, a river.

Just as quickly, it was over. All the way home, as I walked back to my office on the 29th floor of One Centre, as I glanced out our tower windows and packed up my things, as I went down into the subway and came back out in Brooklyn, and as I walked to my apartment on Hicks Street overlooking the BQE and lower Manhattan, I was looking up. There was the most spectacular sunset over the Towers. I saw many others before this one. This was a bonfire. The storm clouds broke apart into all the peaks and valleys of a fingerprint and caught every color in the spectrum.

I try to remember to be thankful every day.

Bumpspark.org

The new site is up.

Here's a press release for that.

And author Stephen Miller has joined our board of advisors.

Here is his book on conversation.
Here is something he wrote for the project.
And here is the press release.

More soon.

New Work

Here’s a nice way to start this thing off. Newsweek published an article of mine.

Fall Eve

Change can be so subtle.

I still realize it is back-to-school time like animals know a tsunami is coming. It still sits in my gut like a fast food burger.

Yet autumn in New England is my favorite time of the year. It is for most creative people I know. The crispness of the weather focuses the mind. Ideas fall as numerous as the leaves. People dwell on masks and costumes.

I now love school so much that I’m back in it. I’m getting my master’s. I’m preoccupied with deadlines from now until Christmas. I’m writing syllabi, emailing professors, culling friendships and tackling assignments with zeal.

I learned to accept the queasiness that comes with anticipation. I look for risky ideas. I want to make mistakes and learn and innovate. Lepidoptera in my gut are no longer a thing to fear, they are an energy I can use, a chrysalis with promise.

So what exactly has changed?

I guess my perspective.

Update

First accident.

Notice

The show will begin in about five minutes, barring accidents.

Eeeeeeeeeeeee

This is a test. This is only a test. If this were the actual blog you would already be riveted. Repeat. This is only a test.