OMG, par-T in NYC w/LG

I’m using a pen and paper to write about the National Texting Championship in New York City on July 9, 2008, at the Roseland Ballroom, a few doors down from the theater where the musical “Hairspray” is performed. The contestants, mostly teens and young twenty-somethings are standing behind a tape pounding thunder sticks with LG logos. They whoop and holler as a movie camera captures entering contestants on the red carpet. As they are filed and photographed, they hold up their phones, they wave, they mouth something incoherent. LG is busy creating an atmosphere of adulation, doling out the shiny thundersticks and red spongy hands making the hitchhiker/thumbs-up gesture. These giant red hands are meant to applaud extra loudly. They are meant to provide thunderous applause.
A real thunderstorm starts up outside, but no one at the Roseland Ballroom notices.
T-shirts behind a bar at the event: “just txt it”
GET UR QWERTY ON (with thumbs-up hands in the O and N)
“txt if UR : )”
The Ramones “I Want to be Sedated” plays on the sound system, then Dee-Lites “Groove is in the heart”
At check-in, signs read “Minors must have a signed consent form and an LG enV2, Voyager, enV, or V phone in order to participate.”
I think I’ve been in this theater before for a ’90s alt rock music festival, the same music festival where I saw Sonic Youth at CBGB, which no longer exists. Lots of things have gone the way of CBGB*, like pen and paper, which I am using now.

I ask the LG contestants:
How is texting like a sport?
Does it help you do other things well with your thumbs?
How do you train?
Do you ever text so much that your thumbs hurt? What do you do then?
 
Flat plasma screens loop the footage from last year’s “first annual National Texting Championship”
15,000 participated one way or another to get to this point. A couple hundered are here tonight.
Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle”
The Who “Baba O-Reilly”
Some short, bald stand-up comic rallies the crowd of competitors seated in bleechers. He wants to see which side can make the most noise.
Contestants are given a number to which to send their completed messages. Once they program it into their phones, they must put their phones down and hold their hands behind their backs.
After a countdown from 10, the competitors must send the text message displayed on the flat screens in less than 90 seconds. The first person to send the message 100 percent correctly wins the round.
“I am sooo ready 4 this down n dirt battle on the QWERTY!”
“They gave a monkey a typewriter, and he typed only 2 words: Chuck Norris”
Stage moms and dads hover.
Among the New York finals are Kyle Jacques, 20; and William Less, 14.
Hands behind their backs … 10, 9, 8, 7 …
 
I sit next (not too close) to a guy on the pleather settee surrounding the stage. He is giggling at his LG enV2. It is a stolen giggle, as if giggling by himself at a handheld electronic device were not completely acceptable in today’s society. It is the same giggle I let slip out when reading greeting cards at the car wash. It is the same giggle that ekes out of me when I’m listening to something funny on my IPod. Someone has connected with me. Someone invisible. Someone that the people around you may not believe exists. Crazy people laugh at things they see, hear, and feel, things that are not really there. We all fear our imaginations. They might trick us. Mirth is not something that should come so easily. We must be crazy. And when we’re crazy, “they”, the men in white suits, remove us even further from a society that is already so difficult to negotiate, to fit into, to belong to, to be in unison with. What a relief to find that we’re just like someone else. Even better, just like lots of someones.
 
Ehtisham Rabbani, LG Mobile’s vice president of product strategy and marketing:
The two-thumb prevalent use of electronic devices has only been in the last year. When we designed phones, we assumed they’d be keyed by the fingertips. The two-thumb motion has become so ingrained so quickly. The space bar has been on the side of the phone in the past. New keyboards are more like computer keyboards, where the spacing reflects how the thumbs work.
Products coming out within the next year are influenced by the 2-thumb ergonomics. Sixty percent of their customers polled said that texting is very important to them. First QWERTY was a 3-line board, but consumers prefer 4 lines because it’s like their computers. We want to make them as comfortable as possible, with appropriate spacing and keys raised. We’re even working on methods that don’t require thumbs. We’re already seeing a convergence, where everything – phone, email, appointment and address books, photos, music, TV, movies, books – is in one device. Mode of data entry will be absolutely critical.
 
“No, that’s cool, I’m into it,” says Kyle Jacques, 20, when I ask him for an interview and explain what I’m doing. Jacques is from Massachusetts but lives in New York, was here at the competition last year, winning $2,000 in consolation prizes. He works as a personal assistant, a job he thinks his sonic-speed texting helped him land. At the moment, he’s carrying an orange LG enV model. His thumbs arc in. It may be an advantage.  He sends 100 texts a day. He texts out of convenience. He says he’s developed a rhythm for both phones and has memorized interface motions the day before to practice for the contest. Riding his bike is the most athletic things he does. His strategy, he says in a mocking tone, as if my questions are boring him, is to simultaneously check yourself while being in the moment. He texts so he doesn’t have to talk to people. He asks if I’m going to any leather bars while I’m here, wondering if there’s a any sexual thing a leather bar goer might be “into” with thumbs. I tell him I didn’t bring any of my leather, so probably not. I do appreciate the idea.
 
Megan Rach, 14, from Naperville, Illinois: I entered on a whim. Her mom said, text as much as you want. Leading up to the competition, she said she texted “a decent amount more” than normal, which is still less than Jacques’s norm of 100 a day. She says when her thumbs hurt her, she stops texting for a little, then keeps doing it. When we’re done with the interview, she and her mother, their matching LG phones in hand, stand shoulder to shoulder, neither looking at the other. They don’t realize it, but they stand in the exact same stance, as if mid-stride. They hunch their shoulders forward as they look down at their thumbs flying furiously across the tiny keyboards. The thumbs move as if they have a life separate from their humans, like double-time meth-head caterpillars on a manic aphid binge. They hit the send button almost simultaneously. I wonder to whom they’re sending the messages. I wonder how similar their messages are. I imagine: “we R thru w txt thingy. Meet us @ Hairspray.”
 
Morgan Pozgar, 14, from Claysburg, Pennsylvania, is last year’s champion. She says she texted a lot before the event to practice. She is captain of her cheerleading squad, plays softball and basketball. When competing at text contests, she feels as nervous as for a sports event, “but there’s nothing athletic about it.”
I ask if her speedy texting helps her do anything else well with her thumbs. “We’ve never given it any thought before,” says Mrs. Pozgar, who looks at me as if I’ve spilled something that might be sticky on her daughter’s hands. I ask Morgan if she ever texts so much her thumbs hurt. “My thumbs don’t hurt yet,” she says. “But sometimes they cramp, so I have to stretch them out.”  With each question, they jut their heads forward, as if confirming that they’ve heard me correctly, as if to say, “What else is the kook going to ask me?” and “Why would we ever have spent time thinking about our thumbs?” 
“Why, indeed,” I think, as I thank them, put away my notebook and pen, and wander onto Broadway. It’s still light outside, despite overhead thunder clouds, which have dampened the city and lent its hard, gray pavement a sweet, moist scent. I walk past theater after theater with their confetti-bright marquees. As it begins to drizzle again, I step up to a sidewalk cart with a saffron-colored umbrella. “Halal” is written on each of the umbrella’s panels, and the cart has photos of chicken and lamb dishes over rice and served with green salad. But it’s the smell of grilled meat and Middle Eastern spices that sells me. I buy a lamb plate and take it back to my hotel. I’m looking forward to street food in my room with a chick flick on the plasma screen. But first, I want to tell my husband all about the texting championship, how ridiculous it was. With one hand I lift my properly prepared dinner from its plastic bag. With the other, I flip out my cell phone and thumb-punch the speed-dial.
 
Nathan Schwartz, 20, won $50,000 at the second annual LG National Texting Championship. He wrestles at Cleveland State University in Ohio. Texting is like sports in that “I got a big trophy, and I was really nervous while I was competing.” What did he do to train for this? “I have a book, ‘Good to Great,’ and I’d text whatever I read. Plus, he texts a lot to his girlfriend, who sits next to him on the bleacher seat where we chat. He’s also a good thumb wrestler.

 

*CBGB & OMFUG stood for country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers.

Welcome to the human race: thumbs optional

Meet Ralph Dunbebin. His close friends call him Stubbs. Born without thumbs, as well as a few fingers on each hand, he has dedicated his own blog to thumb-free people worldwide:  http://www.thumbs-suck.com/

Impressions of Keji

“Harlooloo loo loo loo. I’m here. I’m here. Are you? Are you?”

Out there, somewhere, a loon calls across the swells of a lake dark as a cup of high-test tea even in broad daylight. Frozen Ocean Lake.

Its dark waters pool within Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site. Keji, as the locals call it, rolls across 147 square miles of the Nova Scotia peninsula, in Canada’s second-smallest province, an Atlantic maritime province of which no part is more than 50 miles from the sea.

Resembling a colossal thumbprint, Keji isn’t so much flat as lumpy and furrowed, a plain undulating with surface features of the last glacial stage: boulders; boulder fields; long, winding ridges of glacial sediment; and drumlins, the smooth, oval hills which have a steeper, blunt end facing the oncoming glacier, and a gentle slope nodding in the direction of glacial retreat. After the last glaciation, which began 100,000 to 80,000 years ago, and after glacial retreat, shallow lakes formed. Like the ridges of a thumbprint, glacial furrows channel the region’s moisture into these shallow lakes and connect them with slow, meandering rivers, making Keji the best canoe country in a wet and water-bound province.

Prehistoric hand-, finger- and thumbprint art carved into rocks within Keji makes up a portion of the largest collection of petroglyphs in eastern North America. More than 500 petroglyphs detail Kejimkujik National Historic Site, a place sacred to the Mi’kmaq people, and accessible only with a native guide.

The earliest traces of the ancestors of today’s Mi’kmaq date back more than 10,000 years. Following retreating glaciers at the end of the last great ice age, these Maritime Archaic people arrived from Asia via Siberia and moved into the southwestern area of Nova Scotia about 5,000 years ago. Thirteen of the 30+ modern-day Mi’kmaq First Nations still reside within Nova Scotia, while others inhabit the surrounding provinces and Maine.

The nomadic Mi’kmaq spent summers at the seacoast and the rest of the year camped inland. With abundant caribou, moose, freshwater fish and other staples, Keji made an ideal living site for part of the year. Because of its central location within the complex system of rivers and lakes between southwestern Nova Scotia’s north and south coasts, Keji beats at the heart of Mi’kmaw culture.

To get there, you roll west from Halifax through second-growth pine forest, then north toward small communities surrounding Keji, their white clapboard houses offset by rainbows of colored Adirondack chairs, farm fields, and orchards. Near the park entrance, again forest dominates: Acadian Forest – red spruce, eastern hemlock, sugar and red maple, white and red pine, yellow birch, American beech, white ash, white spruce, balsam fir. The maps show water nearby, but the trees hide all channels. Somewhere out there, a transcendental yodel echoes across water still as a frozen ocean.

“Harlooloo loo loo loo.”

icanhascheezburger cat can has thumz

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Building the mbira buzz

On the bottom edge of the instrument, they write their names in colored marker. Or they carve their names on the back, names like Newtan Chihota or Gift Rushambwa. With hands and thumbs dark as bordeaux, a Zimbabwean mbira craftsman like Gift Rushambwa might first cut and chisel a soundboard, or gwariva. This book-sized gwariva is made of a hardwood whose name translates as “you came from blood.” Also known as bloodwood, the tree gets its name from nothing more sinister than the red sap that flows from its bark when it has been cut.

Into the bloodwood soundboard, the mbira craftsman mounts 22 to 28 tuned metal strips on three manuals, or rows, of keys – two rows on the left, one on the right. “The keys are often slightly curved, resting over a bridge, so that they are raised from the soundboard in the direction of the performer,” says Berliner in The Soul of Mbira. “A crossbar holds the keys in place tightly enough so that they can be moved forward and backward over the bridge for tuning.” In addition, the rows of metal tongues line up across the tray-shaped soundboard with a sanded finger hole in the lower right corner. 

At the very bottom of the gwariva, below the tongue-like keys, below the finger hole, the mbira maker attaches shells, metal beads, or bottle caps to a metal plate.  These produce the buzzing vibration that is an essential part of the music. The buzzing clears the mind of thoughts and worries so that the music can fill the consciousness of performers and listeners. “This quality is appreciated by African musicians in the same way that Westerners appreciate the sounds of the snares on a snare drum or the fuzz-tone on an electric guitar,” says Berliner. “It may be seen as analogous to the mist that partly obscures the mountains and small figures of certain Chinese silk-screen paintings … establishing mood and feeling, and the figures are not supposed to be seen more clearly.”

Mbira lesson No. 3: The Shona believe the buzz attracts the ancestral spirits.

Nothing soft about it

The Washington Stars shoot out onto field No. 4 at the Kino Sports Complex, home to the 2008 Roy Hobbs Women’s National Championships. A 90-degree breeze exhales earthy scents of mown turf, watered dirt, creosote bush, and Cleveland sage. Ferny guajillo, sweet acacia trees, and desert willow perfume the air, and spidery ocotillo shrubs wag their red-tongued tips. In the distance, violet mountains jag into wide, thirsty blue sky.

 

It is the seventh and final inning of the tournament’s semifinal. Team captain Stephanie Derouin’s Stars are pitted against the California Sabers, a team that defeated them in earlier tournament play. Derouin will not be thumbing curveballs in this game. Instead, she’s covering second.

 

There are nine Stars at this tournament. Nine players – no more, no fewer. There is no leeway, no room for injury or illness. If someone tears a muscle, sprains an ankle, or so much as sneezes hard enough to be pulled out of play, the whole team is done – with a big, fat FORFEIT next to Washington Stars on the roster.  Yet the Stars can’t afford to play like powder puffs either. They don’t want to hold back. These women love baseball too much, but not just the game, playing the game, this game, nothing soft about it. They want to feel the solid plap of a 9-inch-diameter ball meeting their gloves every time. When they’re at bat, they imagine their swings taking toothy chomps out of the ball. They want to lead off when they’re on base, each of them envisioning, I’m gonna steal this base without getting tagged. I’m gonna sashay one base closer to a scoring run. No tags, no tags, no tags. Moo-ah-ha-haa!  

And they sure as hell want to prevent the other team from doing the same.

 

Fragment XI

Ancient Sufi parable: He who tastes, knows. He who tastes not, knows not.

Fragment X

When you were little, art museum visits taught you new manners. You learned that while it’s OK to stare at Degas’s “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot,” it’s not OK to stare at woman boxing at the ear of her screaming child. You must not stare. You should not point. You do not touch.

 

It was easier not to touch the paintings than the sculptures. The sculptures begged your thumbs to feel the apples of their cheeks, the ruffles at their collars, the delicacy of their noses. And an outstretched hand beckoned you to mirror the gesture, touching each corresponding marble finger to your own. But you didn’t. You kept still. Polite.

Fragment IX

Synergy

• A mutually advantageous conjunction where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
• A dynamic state in which combined action is favored over the sum of individual component actions.
• Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. More accurately known as emergent behavior.

Fragment VIII

Auguste Rodin replicated, recombined, and refinished fragments of the human body, creating whole new pieces on their own. As an author relies on a limited alphabet of letters to write epics, Rodin used an assembly of partial figures – drawers full of hands, shelves heavy with legs – to create dynamic compositions. This practice of assemblage, using “figures he had previously created as a sort of image bank from which he drew forms to create new works,” reveals “how he liked to surround himself with a certain number of casts of the same subject, which constituted a form of vocabulary, which he would dip into as he searched for inspiration, truncating, adding new elements, simply modifying the original presentation, or integrating it into a new composition.”  In The Burghers of Calais, brothers Pierre and Jacques de Wissant share the same hand, the same strong thumb opened up and away from the fingers. In contrast to his brother’s upturned gesture, Jacques’s left hand extends from an arm dangling at the man’s side, thumb and fingers open downward, as if letting something precious fall to the ground. Later, this same hand transformed into a symbol of creative power in The Hand of God. 

Rodin to his English biographer, Frederick Lawton: “[The artist] thinks … of the whole, even in the part, and his study of the part is for him a way towards more nearly grasping the whole.”