Second Thoughts

Your Eyes On My Phone Song

I was cleaning up a lot after a departing tenant in SL when I happened to hear his stream -- I almost never turn the sound on in Second Life. Try to imagine riding riding Highway 66 with the radio stations changing every 60 miles -- but imagine that you are travelling 6,000 miles an hour -- and you get something of the experience of flying around Second Life.

Not only did he have a good stream (rare, that), but it had a good song on it (even more rare!). I listened in fascination, because it seems I never find any "favourite" songs anymore. How many times can you listen to the "Hey Ya" video on YouTube (yes, it's back up!) and notice little things about the band? (the Love Haters are a parody of those little caddy ornaments Americans used to put out on their lawns).

So this song "Hljomalind", by a band called Sigur Ros in Iceland, sung by Jón Þór Birgisson, was named after a record store that became a coffee house and I guess a cool place to be. It has a video of awesome scenes of Iceland, not sure if that's the YouTubers' tribute, or the band's own video.

It's not long before listening to the song about the 6th time -- I loved it to pieces -- that I began to think, but what is that guy singing? At first it sounded like he was saying in English, "Your eyes on my phone." I began to think I was hallucinating that because it just so happened that when I was listening to this song for the first time, I was also browsing and listening to Robert Scoble's video chat in a bar in California somewhere with vloggers, which he was making with his Nokia 95 and I explained earlier. "Your Eyes On My Phone" came to be my theme song for Scoble. I pictured it coming up at the start of his show, with the credits rolling...

I then pictured this indie sort of band deciding to sell out, what with the popularity of this song, to some telecom company, and I imagined a commercial on TV -- in black and white except when the glaciers come on, then they're faintly blue -- with a languid Icelandic girl with long hair and some kind of Nordic sweater skating, with a guy in a long scarf walking along by the edge of the pond (yes, I was reading Auden, too, see) but with no skates, and the girl was ignoring him, chatting on her cell phone, and the singer was heaving 'Your eyes on my phone..." Then it shows him climbing to the top of a mountain, putting on skis, and then calling the girl and vlogging his descent down a mountain, and she's staring at the video, holding it away from her...then comes the closing bars.

Now what *was* the guy singing toward the end?

Graves

Forget about all that fake Japanese stuff that we round-eyes have been making in SL up until now -- the real people are here now and they are making a great deal more interesting stuff than those little tea houses that we've replicated to kingdom come.

I've never been to Japan, but my father served there during the Korean War and my favourite memento from him is the little white ivory elephant he brought back from Tokyo in the 1950s. I had heard from him and read over the years the practice the Japanese have of making memorial sites even in cities, not graveyards as such but memorial plaques even for unborn babies. I had heard they made such areas for pets, too, and of course for people.

Now we can experience this in Second Life. One Japanese resident artist and builder, Memoris Jan, made a vast cemetary sort of place on a Japanese sim where you can rent a 64 m2 for $400/4 weeks to put out a memorial for your loved one.

We've all seen Goth roleplay and spooky cemetaries all over SL -- this is very different. When you arrive in Memoris, you realize you aren't in Second Life anymore.

The Wind in Their Prims

When I was first tipped off by Almathea Blanc at the Blingsider to this cool new sim , I thought to myself, "Now, there's what many people will say, that's what Second Life is for! That's what they should do!". Well, not "many people," but you, know, a certain kind of math-genius type who likes this sort of geeky stuff. Still, ever ready to cleanse the jaded SL pallet from its steady diet of beach bungalows, Goth castles, and LockableTintableLloydWright, I headed on over to Harmonia sim to see this installation by Edo Autopoiesis (I think that's how to see it: an installation of conceptual art, not a build on a sim, and indeed it is called "Sound Art: A Sound Installation Resonating With Second Life Wind). The island is owned by DDB, "owned by Carre Bleu Marine (DDB Group). The french events, live, e-live and v-live communication agency of DDB France."

When you land, you hear a kind of sound symphony of children's voices and some kind of instrument knocking on a water pipe (the video you watch feels as if it suitably Free Traded or Certified Organic or something) -- it's oddly appealing (when I came a second time, it seemed to be replaced by some gonging and people coughing). Then you climb into a flying saucer and go whooshing around up in the sky to see these tinker toys knocking chimes in response to the SL wind. Yes, there is real wind in SL, well, synthetic wind that behaves randomly like RL weather wind. After a tour myself, what better person to invite on such a little SL adventure than Anya Ixchel, who was the first person to turn me on to Robbie Dingo's Whisper device, which takes avatar speech chops it up Derrida-style, blends it and serves it back up in a reverberating echo chamber (cool, but many people are made nervous about having their speech recorded, and rightly so).