Che Guevara and Debussy to a Disco Beat

With yesterday’s Pet Shop Boy’s show at the Warfield, I have finally completed my high school “favorite bands live” quest.

The First World Checklist

_x_ Bathroom has sitdown toilets

_x_ You can flush toilet paper down the toilet

_x_ Water is drinkable after boiling

_x_ The street stalls all post sanitation grades, so you can have reduced fear of foodborne illnesses

_x_ The streets do not smell of urine

_x_ Public spaces have designated smoking / non-smoking sections

_x_ People do not spit in public

_x_ 3G network signals are prevalent

Congratulations, Singapore, you made the cut.  San Francisco, with your lovely pee-scented downtown and spotty network service, you do not.

Pieces for the Museum of the Near Future

I’m trying to recall correctly whether the following art exhibit that a friend described to me was real or imagined.  Perhaps you can help me out.  A few years ago, my friend, who happens to work for a company that measures cellphone traffic, described an installation at a museum, where a light cloud was formed in direct proportion to cell phone emissions in and around the installation.  In essence, calls and texts were visualized (that same interference you hear on your car radio, when you get a call on your iPhone, transformed into light).

If you asked me 5 years ago, to visualize cell phone art, I think projects of this sort, are what most people would have imagined.  Thus, I am somewhat surprised, but not blown away with what, David Hockney is painting on his iPhone (story via Stribs). Or to put it properly, I am amazed that David Hockney is painting on his iPhone.  This is not the first instance, of someone using his/her phone to create art; Jorge Colombo painted a New Yorker cover this May, but as these little stories add up, I’m excited for the day when I walk into SF MoMA and see an iPhone mounted on the wall, running through a slideshow of such works, and see the descriptive tile on the wall: “David Hockney / “Untitled” / 2009,” etc.

But perhaps the physical SF MoMA is the wrong way to think of the Museum of the Future.*  From my Googling, I see that Hockney’s works are already on display in SecondLife homes. Perhaps the globally accessible Internet museum is it?

*”Museum of the Near Future” is more accurate, since this isn’t something that I expect to see in 10 years, but since the speed of information surpasses the speed of light these days, I completely expect this near the SF MoMA roofdeck sometime in November.

**

On separate thought involving iPhones this week.  Based on the stat that 20% of all iPhone customers are in SF and NY, I was rather surprised by how common iPhones were in Singapore, but they were area.  The iPhone is truly a global phone, at least in urban centers.