Interview from pookitty, yay!

Interview from pookitty, yay!

1. You have the choice of getting a job you know will pay all the bills, but don't love...or having the job that you love, that doesn't pay as well. Which do you choose?

   It's all about loving what you do. Why enslave yourself to a horrible quality of life? That would imply that I believe money is the answer to all life's problems. Not having to worry about money is nice but being miserable at work would leave me well, miserable.

2. What is your preferred footwear?

   Well, the climate here in Canada can be pretty extreme in the winter so I tend to stick to big treaded boots. In the summer I wear my trendy bowling shoes or big clunky Cat® sandals. Oh yeah, and my crystal slippers. You know, for those special occasions.

3. Which makes you happier, spending time with yourself or in a big group of people?

   I get a lot of time to myself, it's just the nature of what I do with my life presently (READ: sit at a desk or on a bus). So I really enjoy groups of people whenever I can hang out with them. There are of course different types of groups of people. I really enjoy being amongst friends I know well but I can also get off on meeting new groups of people infrequently. Making small talk all the time invariably drives me nuts though. I couldn't go to the Eagle or Toolbox every weekend and talk to new people all night. I'd drown in the shallow end of the pool.

4. Do you believe in old souls? Reincarnation? God? What's your spirituality, if any?

   I don't think I believe in God with a capital "G" but I know there are aspects of life that cannot presently be explained scientifically either. It's totally against your best interest to be faithless or without principles but conversely I keep my faith malleable and therefore adaptable to whatever situations in life that arise.
   
   Now more specifically do I believe in old souls or reincarnation? Well, to put it simply: yes. But not necessarily in an inexplicable way. Who we are and how we live is passed down generation to generation. Perhaps that inheritance of principle is the rebirth of the old in another? Again with the malleable and adaptable faith, but it's not as if I'm unable to believe at all. That's the common downfall of the atheist.

5. Someone cuts in front of you in line, how do you react?

   Nine times out of ten I'd just grind my teeth and deal with it. But that one time out of ten look out, you've got a big problem to deal with. I have my Dad's patented Scottish Temper™ that is indicated by burning coal embers in my eyes that later shoot lazers and nuclear fire.

Interview with Adam

Wow, this one was a toughie. Thanks goes to Adam (ultrabithorax) for some very challenging and insightful questions!

1. Do you have a favorite musical period or periods? Include the last 1000 years but restrict yourself to Europe and Asia Minor. Are there periods in that interval where you just don't give a fig?

   Well, as a viola player I don't really have an specific period that I like the best although Baroque and Romantic period classical music tends to be the nicest. In fact that's the primary question a viola player asks: how nice is the part? Will I just be playing a harmony to the Violin II? Maybe there'll be a two bar solo?! Ok, some people would question the choice of Baroque as 'nice' but I enjoy being a rhythm robot.

   Now in a modern context it's so hard to define periods because history is fairly well documented. Well, I guess that's outside off the European and Asia Minor restrictions.

2. I posed this to Henry Mensch first: you wake up tomorrow and it's 1975: you work at Xerox PARC. You're at a development meeting where they're announcing the operating system interface for the ALTO: it will involve bitmapped displays exclusively and documents, terminal emulators, controls, everything will appear in independently-placeable objects called windows. You, being intimately familiar with the next twenty-five years of GUI-OS development, immediately leap to your feet and cry . . . what?

   Evangelistic marketing!!

   Actually I'm not particularly sure how I'd go about it but definitely as potential problems arise I'd be more savvy to the destiny of an object oriented GUI OS. I don't think the ALTO was really at all positioned as a consumer product so taking it into that realm would indeed change history. I guess having a knowledge of at least basic usability concepts would be very helpful.

3. I posed this to Henry as well: how should medical care be distributed? Is the best possible medical care a right or a privilege? Basic care? Essential medical intervention? Preventative care? At what point does "medical care" become "social infrastructure"?

   That pretty much is the role of health care, in my opinion and I'm sure most Canadians would be likely to agree as health care is major point of national identity. I believe that the best possible care is a human right and a nation's ability to care for it's sick and disabled is a gauge of it's overall socio-economic prosperity. The problem is that socialized health care implies, well, socialization which is some sort of dirty nasty word in North America. In the wake of an international conflict as the extreme right takes political control both domestically and abroad the likelihood of any sort of social programs of course become minute.

4. Is there an artistic avant-garde in any sense anymore? Or, after 1942 (Pollack, whitewashed canvases, aleatory music, serialism, relativity, the atomic bomb) did we hit a conceptual wall, swerve around and start plummeting back toward the Pre-Renaissance? If so, what happens when we hit?

   Pre-Renaissance is a very dignified way of putting things! I think it's nearly impossible to put the state of contemporary art in context of the past. I say this because due to advancements both in the egalitarian nature of society since the 14th century and the speed of communication. The net difference of these two factors is, ideally, a much more chaotic and diverse artistic universe. There are enclaves and eddies of groups both connected and disconnected by varying dynamic degrees in a complex social disaggregate. So is there a pre-renaissance going on? Probably somewhere and most likely in more than one place. But there's also the avant-garde and the downright derivative present in what is an increasingly complex social universe.

   I see this as a predominantly positive thing.