John Menick

Morbid Victorian theatrical effects, phantasmagoria, television before television, and the women of the Moulin Rouge.

Amazing.

I can’t help thinking these two stories have something to do with one another. The first comes from Chris Anderson’s Longtail blog, and concerns his visit to the Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters. Actually, the entry is about random inventory storage: according to Anderson, it’s easier for companies like Zappos to randomly store inventory rather than in some hierarchical taxonomy.

[Zappos] made peace with messiness. The shoes are logged in by UPC when they arrive and assigned a spot wherever there is room available. When it comes time to pick-and-pack, the computers tell the warehouse staff where to go. No single trip is optimized, but the system as a whole works as a minimum-effort machine. Just as random access works best for bits in disk drives, it turns out to be great for atoms in warehouses, too.

The second archive-related story comes via “we make money not art.” The blog points to an article in Deutsche Welle on the work of Anke Heelemann, an artist from Weimar. She’s been purchasing entire boxes of discarded private photos and displaying them in her storefront in Weimar. Members of the public can come and “adopt” the photos. Unlike Zappos, Heelemann is not letting chaos reign, and instead she has “begun categorizing photos and filing them according to themes. “Beach,” “animals,” and “birthday” are among the more obvious ones while others are called “Handbags” or “linked arms.”

In one case, the inventory arrives in a very managed, pre-planned way, and is then stored randomly. In the second, it arrives randomly and is then placed into a somewhat subjective order. Perhaps Heelemann and Zappos should keep their techniques, but switch inventories…

Henry Jenkins — MIT director, professor and blogger — has a wild blog entry about his trip to Poland that documents, among other things, Polish Reggae, stadium markets, and a Fotoplastikon. Bruce Sterling points to the entry this week, and focuses on the Fotoplastikon, but what caught my eye was the amazing cultural collision that is Polish Reggae:

Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes… A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. [sic] Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there’s a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

For more on the Fotoplastikon (aka the Kaiserpanorama), see Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception, which also features praxinoscopes, stereoscopes, and tachistoscopes. The Kaiserpanorama is actually on its cover.

The Times has a favorable review of David Friend’s recent study of the photography of September 11th, Watching the World Change. Besides being a well-written and impressively researched study of the images surrounding the event, I was happy to see that Friend foregrounds Wolfgang Staehle’s work, which I wrote about several years ago for Parachute magazine. Friend’s book is probably the first important study of 9/11 photography, and is a must for anyone interested in a critical and historical look at that day.

(I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to the audio interview posted with the review.)