cellar door

What NYC looks like in post-rock.

2012-01-27T14:43:00.000-05:00

I just saw this 3-minute homage to NYC on NYC Digital's Tumblr.

It's a beautiful video, but the thing that struck me in particular was the soundtrack – I've usually only heard very sweeping, epic, performed-by-an-orchestra songs backing videos like this (like Philip Glass in the Scorcese AmEx spot I linked to last week). This time, post-rock. I sifted through the comments and found out it's by a band on the West Coast called Dredg. Gives the swelling a slightly different, determined feeling. Very cool.

La mer de pianos

2012-01-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

This is a great little video I found on Kottke.org about the oldest piano parts shop in Paris.

This man is awesome – he's been working there for almost 30 years. When he gets his hands on an old piano, he holds onto it so that he can sell the parts to others who have that same piano and can't find replacement parts.

The sounds are my favorite bit – the music, of course, but also the wood rattling as he pulls a keyboard and action out of a piano, the metallic reverberation of assorted parts dancing around on the strings while someone plays. The attic of skeletons.

I felt a bunch of things while watching this – delight, longing, fondness, worry, regret – how about you?

Here is New York.

2012-01-20T15:24:00.009-05:00

A dear friend was in town visiting last weekend, and his eyes lit up as we walked by an independent bookstore in my neighborhood. While he spent the next hour poring over everything from philosophy to cookbooks and stationery, I found myself wandering into the New York section. Remembering a book that's been on my wish list for ages, I scoured the shelves until I found it.

While physically a book, Here is New York is more accurately an essay that E.B. White wrote one sweltering summer in 1949, as he strolled through this fair little city. It is seventy five hundred words of inspiration, longing, and majesty, and every one of those words made me swell in a frenzy of underlining. If you have ever gazed at this site in silence –

...or have felt something, anything upon watching this AmEx spot -

...then you should read it. I don't even know which bits to share with you since I've underlined half the book, but here's a shot at a few.

And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little diners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin.
-
By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.

One of my favorite things about Here is New York is that despite there being some things that date it, like elevated trains on 3rd Avenue or mentions of "in baskets" at work (heh!), it still feels like he is writing it today.

Police now ride in radio prowl cars instead of gumshoeing around the block swinging their sticks. A ride in the subway costs ten cents, and the seats are apt to be dark green instead of straw yellow. Men go to saloons to gaze at televised events instead of to think long thoughts. It is all very disconcerting.
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The glib barker on the sight-seeing bus tells his passengers that this is the "street of lost souls," but the Bowery does not think of itself as lost; it meets its peculiar problem in its own way – plenty of gin mills, plenty of flophouses, plenty of indifference, and always, at the end of the line, Bellevue.

But the best part – the very part that made me almost throw the book up into the air and do a dance as it made its way down, was this. I love it so much that I am putting it on the Internet again so that as many people as possible happen upon it.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

This post is for Nicole. ♥

On meetings and feeling like a fraud.

2012-01-09T10:10:00.001-05:00

I found both of these articles at least a year ago, but have been reading and re-reading both lately.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. This talks about two major ways people in business/entrepreneurship/the startup world allocate their time in order to best get things done. The maker's schedule allows for long stretches of productivity (or, "maker time"), while a typical manager's day is divided up into one-hour increments. Bringing the two together can be problematic, and it's something I've noticed in myself the more I've grown in my career and have had to move toward the latter. I haven't figured out how to reconcile the two yet, but I've tried to experiment with meeting clustering as much as possible, to allow for at least 2 to 3 hours of uninterrupted work time every day. It's a challenge, but a fun one to take on.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”). I've linked to this before (when I wrote about interdisciplinarity), and here it is again.

Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary?

This opening paragraph gets me every time. This post talks about these three types of knowledge: shit you know, shit you know you don't know, and shit you don't know you don't know. Steve Schwartz describes the last as the most dangerous, and poses that the goal should be to make that slice smaller – even if it's goes into the "shit you know you don't know bucket," rather than making the "shit you know" bucket bigger. He says that the more things there are that you know you don't know, the more stressed you can be or feel like you have no idea what you're doing. I frequently feel overwhelmed by all the stuff and expertise out there that I don't have a grasp on yet, but maybe that's better (or "less dangerous") than being blissfully ignorant of it all? Really interesting stuff, and easier to follow if you click through and look at his charts in comparison with one another and read his examples.

NY _____.

2012-01-02T12:49:00.001-05:00

Meet NY_____. (pronounced "NY Underscore"), Laura's latest. In her words, it's a magazine "about the things that make New York New York." She had been thinking about starting a new magazine (this is her third) for a while, and we tossed ideas around at my apartment one afternoon in September. We then brainstormed a miles-long list of themes for each issue (everything from nightlife to bodegas, transit, and sex) over ice cream, and the first issue launched last month with a fantastic party and reading. The theme of issue 1 is apartments.

The magazine features photography, art, creative nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry. I am so delighted and impressed by the design and layout of NY_____. and with all of the work within it. I stayed up well into the night reading it when I first got my hands on one.

One of my favorite parts is Laura's intro, which was printed in 5pt font, circling the back cover.

Everybody in New York has an apartment story. People who live in other places also have apartment stories, but like most other things, they aren't as good as the ones from New York. The great density of population that makes New York a place we want to live also makes our apartments, by necessity, bizarre. They are expensive little boxes of endearing idiosyncrasy, if we are lucky, and sorrow, if we are not. Our buildings are old; they have history and vermin. Our neighbors are weird and play the bass. We climb five flights of stairs without complaint. Our heaters scream like tea kettles; we lack a closet. People who are too fat can't fit in our bathrooms. We live next door to the ice cream truck dispatchery, or down the block from the sewage treatment plant. We live on parade routes. Our walls aren't real walls. Our walls have seventeen coats of paint of varying color and lead content. As we lay awake in our lofted beds, we hear rats running in the tin ceiling two feet overhead. It's awful but not nearly as awful as not living here. This is why I thought "apartments" would be a good first theme for NY_____. Sincerely, Laura.

You can buy a copy of NY_____. here. I urge you to do so! Something else you can do is submit for Issue 2; the theme is Jobs. As is the case with apartments, it's hard to find anyone in this fair little city without a strange or amusing story about making a living here.

Many excited congratulations to Laura for starting this. I love how it's turned out so far, and I can't wait for the next issue.

What I listened to in 2011.

2012-01-01T13:12:00.006-05:00

Happy New Year everyone!

I think this is my third year putting one of these together, but my first time doing anything with it beyond posting on Flickr. Here (from my last.fm charts) are the 10 bands/artists I listened to the most in 2011 --

1. Manu Chao. I think this has a lot to do with seeing Drama Mex last year, which put me in the mood to listen to energetic music in Spanish a lot.

2. The Hundred in the Hands. I discovered this band a few years ago, actually, but somehow failed to do anything about how amazing I thought they were until this video ran around the Internet.

3. Daft Punk. This is 100% because of the Tron:Legacy soundtrack and the remix album.

4. MGMT. I was never curious enough to listen to them until I heard their album Congratulations playing in a store. So strange and good.

5. Michael Jackson. I was actually surprised to see him on here!

6. Twin Shadow. I first heard his album on a train to a small town in Switzerland last March; the music matched what I gazed at from my window perfectly.

7. The Amplifetes. Per this post, do everyone a favor and listen to them. Phenomenal.

8. Mark Ronson and the Business Int'l. One of the only spillovers from 2010. It's just so good.

9. Crystal Castles. This was one of the only bands I had on my phone for most of last year, which explains why I listened to them so much. Also, more 2010 spillover - I love that 2nd album.

10. New Order. No explanation needed.

My top 10s for 2009 and 2010 are sort of similar, featuring my top artists of all time like Blonde Redhead, Metric, Morrissey and Mew. 2011 was markedly different, especially with the bands that were in heaviest rotation. I'm really terrible at seeking out new music most of the time, but I guess the stars just aligned. So happy that The Hundred in the Hands, Twin Shadow and The Amplifetes are in my music library.

What was your favorite music in 2011?

2011 in pictures.

2011-12-31T12:38:00.004-05:00

In fewer than twelve hours, 2011 will cease to exist. From long-distance travel (Los Angeles, Seattle three times and Switzerland twice) to best friends moving, death, illness, and professional growth, it's been a whirlwind of activity – both good and not so good. Time for my annual Year In Pictures...

As you can see, I ate macarons the size of my hand, traveled to faraway lands, saw (and heard) alphorns for the first time, had a proper English breakfast (...in Brooklyn), bought my first watch, and was surrounded by loved ones. Even though the second half of the year kind of unraveled a bit, so much happened to only make me excited for 2012. Bring it.

Happy New Year, everyone ^^

November in pictures.

2011-12-01T17:17:00.004-05:00

I hate it when it gets dark so early. It has little bearing on goings on, though. (At least for now, only 2 days into it being noticeably cold.)

Let's hope hibernation doesn't happen at all this winter. Even though my body is constantly exhausted, I love seing explosions of activity any time a dark, cold door swings open in the middle of the night in this city. That second photo is an example: Walking toward calling it a night brought me to an art opening somewhere in between a comic book, a skate deck, and a Purple Mag party. I had no choice but to go in, do a few laps, and grin.

Brussels.

2011-11-24T15:12:00.008-05:00

My friend Amber recently went to Brussels, and it got me a bit wistful and talking about Tintin with my parents. My mother had coincidentally torn out an article about Brussels from Elle Decor for me a few days prior.

At first it read like any semi-boring, glossy magazine article about a European city might - romanticizing the beautiful buildings and landmarks that every travelers' guidebook points out. But it pretty quickly took an interesting path, painting the city as a curious hodgepodge mixture of people and neighborhoods. I know very little about the inner workings of Brussels, which is a shame since I was born and lived there for two years. Here are some random facts (some probably more common knowledge than others):

Le Pain Quotidien's original location is there

In the '70s, "Brussels suffered from a flight of the middle classes to the suburbs. This offered an opening for artists, who found one of the few big cities in Europe where they could live downtown relatively cheaply."

It's full of expats

It has more Art Nouveau architecture than any other city (even Paris, apparently, whoah)

The curious hodgepodge I mentioned came out the most to me in the photos (shops and museums that look like people's residences, a restaurant that looks like a train station) and these couple of sentences -

You have to dig a little. People don't show off what they have. You find amazing apartments in completely unexpected places. And it's the same with people. [...] It's hard to get a grasp of the place, because in some ways there is no place to grasp.

It sounds like a larger-than-life-sized cabinet of curiosities; the type of city that you really do strike gold in when you go off the tourist attraction path. I haven't been back since the summer of 1996; fifteen and a half years puts me overdue for a revisit, no?

Dollar Note

2011-11-22T12:58:00.004-05:00

First it was the Barbican exhibit of zebra finches playing guitars, and then the antique pistols that mechanical birds come out of and dance around. I don't know why birds used in technology always make me happy, but they do. The latest is better to me than pistols or guitars –

It's called Dollar Note, by Robert Gligorov. Apparently there are two white uprights standing back-to-back, and the perches in the birdcage attached to the top touch random keys on the pianos. When the birds jump from perch to perch, the respective notes are played.

I'd love to see and hear the thing IRL, it's beautiful. (via today and tomorrow.)

Dance Friday.

2011-11-18T10:09:00.005-05:00

It is Friday morning, and I'm exhausted. If you are feeling similarly, here are two dance pop videos that will serve both as eye and ear candy.

Tiger Love: Gio Gio

I've been looping this all week at work. Not sure why the imagery of sliding around in raw egg makes me feel less bleary-eyed, but whatever works, right? It also reminds me of this milk-pillow-fight video by Para One.

The Amplifetes: Somebody New

How nobody I talk to knows about this band is beyond me. They have made me dance more than any other band has in the past 3 or 4 years, and are probably my favorite discovery of the year; I don't understand how they're not through-the-roof famous. If you heard the song first, you'd never think that the lead singer looks like this a well-dressed Brooklyn lumberjack. Brilliant.

October in pictures.

2011-10-26T17:04:00.004-04:00

Another month, another color palette, strangely enough. October was one of the busiest months ever, which was part of the reason I was so light on picture-taking for the first half of it. I have to hand it to the iPhone, though – since buying one, my Flickr stream went from having just two photos by the middle of the month, to having fourteen.

1Q84

2011-10-26T00:04:00.008-04:00

This came in the mail today:

I don't think I have been this excited about a book, ever. About a year ago, I read that Murakami's latest novel was to be translated to English, and that it was so long that it would be coming out in two volumes. I got so excited that I tried to quickly make myself forget about it, because I don't deal well with anticipation.

When murmurs started up about 1Q84 again a few months ago, I immediately put the pre-order in my Amazon cart, probably got distracted, and forgot to check out, leaving it sitting there. I have 10 other books of his (8 novels and 2 short story collections); just as I was sorting through them all tonight (a very strange coincidence), Mister Toky knocked on my door, holding the copy he had pre-ordered for me with a smile. I hugged it and hopped around the apartment for a bit, read a random sentence fragment toward the middle, and then set it aside. Things are way too nuts right now to even consider starting a book of this length that I know will consume me, but in about 2 or 3 weeks' time... let's just say my friends might be seeing a bit less of me for a while :)

F.lux and Ommwriter for your aesthetic productivity

2011-10-22T17:24:00.009-04:00

F.lux and Ommwriter are two desktop apps that have been around for a few years but I just downloaded a few days ago. Both have worked wonders to prevent longer-than-usual hours behind a monitor from giving me zombie eyes.

F.lux
I was working with Joanna this week, and all of a sudden I saw her screen turn this peculiar shade of yellow. I mildly freaked out, thinking that her computer was short-circuiting, and she introduced me to F.lux. From their website:

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun. F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

If you put in your zipcode, it will know when the sun sets in your neighborhood, and adjust the tinting of your screen to be less straining on the eyes – your usual bright, blueish white in the daytime, and more of a tungsten shade at night. Looking at the two shades together is pretty extreme, but I have mine set to change over the course of an hour and don't even notice the difference.

Ommwriter
Lauren wrote about this one almost exactly a year ago, and I remember her freaking out about how beautiful it was. Ommwriter is an experiential writing application that takes over your entire screen with soft colors and ambient music. It's a really pleasurable writing experience that allows for little distraction. My personal favorite are the typing tones you can choose from – it brings back fond memories of the ICQ typewriter sounds from the mid-90s. I burned the midnight oil and wrote three stories for Laura's upcoming zine, NY _____.* using Ommwriter this week, and it was so pleasantly different from using Word or Pages.

What are some of your favorite tools to help make endless nights more productive?

* Please help fund, there are only a few days left to help make this (awesome) idea a reality!

September in pictures.

2011-10-02T23:20:00.004-04:00

As I'm deep in making-things mode and my brain is hurting a little: Sometimes it's nice to look at stuff and not be so thinky all the time.

Looks like September had a definite color palette. Bring it, Fall.

Summerzine

2011-09-26T11:25:00.005-04:00

My friend Christine did something amazing recently. I remember seeing her at a party toward the beginning of the summer, and she said that she was feeling a bit of creative unrest; that she needed to make something. Well, she did. She and her friend Dwight made a magazine, and it launched last week.

It's called Seasonzine, which, as the name suggests, is all about seasons. Each quarter, the published issue celebrates the season that is coming to an end. The inaugural issue, Summerzine, launched on the last day of summer with a fantastic party in Williamsburg.

There is a ton of eye candy and wonderful writing in Summerzine. Oh and hey, I have a piece in it too! It's called 154-61, and here it is, on the right --

You can buy your very own copy here; the hard copy is $9.80 (which comes with a free digital version), and the PDF is only $0.99. I would love to see Fallzine become a reality, so I already bought a few.

So, here's the thing. I don't write about super emotional things very much anymore, because it's hard to put my thoughts into words (I have mentioned this recently). But I tried, and I submitted my best attempt at what summers in New York do to me. Reading the rest of the issue at home made me feel like someone had hit a gong right next to my ear – the ways that the other contributors wrote about their summer experiences mirrored exactly what I've been feeling all along. It was so moving to read others' tales of the unbearable heat pushing them to their limits that I didn't know what to do with myself.

Seriously, buy a copy. You won't regret it. Buy one while you can still grab on to the edges of the heat: it'll be that much more __________.

On Systems Thinking

2011-09-21T12:33:00.010-04:00

My friends and colleagues Joanna and Amy just published this deck on Systems Thinking.

SYSTEMS THINKING: Lessons From The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Senge, Kleiker, Roberts, Ross and Smith

View more presentations from Joanna Beltowska

This is part 2 in a 5-part series where Amy and Joanna deconstruct The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. The first one was on mental models and went out a couple of months ago (which happily blew up online and I also implore you to read). Both are fantastic at presenting incredibly complex information in an easy and fun to read way – you'll find stories, cats, charts, and even a cheat sheet for running your own systems workshop. Take a look; you'd be remiss if you didn't!

On muscle memory and piano playing

2011-09-14T16:59:00.011-04:00

I took a trip to visit my parents a few weeks ago, and they surprised me by having my upright piano tuned. Halfway through a 30-minute stretch of playing bits of assorted songs, I realized something: I was on autopilot. I was daydreaming, staring off into space, and playing Yann Tiersen.

Now, this isn't necessarily a strange thing, because I've been playing for a long time and don't always have to pay conscious attention to every single note. But usually when I play Tiersen's work, I at least have to be partially thinking about what bit of the song comes next. On my upright, I didn't at all.

The reason I had such a hard time with this was: I didn't learn his music on my upright. I learned it on my digital piano. Shouldn't any song come more easily to me on the piano on which it was learned? This seemed like some sort of bonkers anti-state-dependent memory at work. I mulled the topic of muscle memory around in my head for a while, and finally dug into Wikipedia a little today to help with some rough thinking:

I realize that there is a lot of research already done around fine motor memory, the psychology of music performance, etc. But this is where my thinking-out-loud-for-fun brain took me.

As I said, my mind went to muscle memory first. At the base level, once someone has played the piano enough, they can play any piano. Quite literally "Like riding a bike." But something I recently read in Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand – that all pianos have their own personalities, tones, and feels – had me thinking about particulars. There's a reason why, even though I know how to ride a bike, I've always nearly broken my neck when attempting to ride bikes with bullhorn handlebars, yet felt like I could ride the ones with riser handlebars in my sleep. More than just muscle memory for the act of piano-playing, it was THIS piano (my upright) that I spent the most time with; THOSE keys, with their particular width, spacing and weight; THAT bench's distance from the ground and piano itself.

The other circle in that chart, state-dependent memory, represents that piano's environment. It's in the same place in my parents' house that it's always been in – off of the kitchen and under the Verona painting. Also, I'm much more used to the feel of the house I grew up in than I am in an apartment I've been renting for just 2 years (on top of that: my digital piano is in its 5th environment, or apartment, by this point).

So, muscle memory is how pianos can be played interchangeably. And the particulars of muscle memory with a side of state-dependent memory – that piano in that position of that house – is what made my playing the most fluid. Here's another way of looking at it:

I can play almost any instrument with a basic piano keyboard setup – from an accordion to a Schroder-style toy piano. But I'm not very good. I'm better with a proper piano – either acoustic or digital. By "proper," I mean all 88 keys that are weighted. Next comes any acoustic piano. As awesome as brands like Casio and KORG have gotten at simulating acoustic pianos with their digital versions (I have a Casio, and I love it), there is just no substitution for the feeling of hitting a key that subsequently makes a tiny hammer hit a string. And finally, my most familiar piano. This is why I think it doesn't matter at this point which piano I actually learned a song on: I'll always be better at it on that one upright.

For your supplementary fun:
Muscle memory (Wikipedia)
State-dependent learning (Wikipedia)
A page on sight-reading and memory (from The science & psychology of music performance)
My favorite Yann Tiersen-related video ever: Dave Thomas playing La Noyee on accordion

Five Years.

2011-08-30T22:52:00.002-04:00

Yesterday marked five years since I drove one-way to New York.

I don't talk about New York much – whenever I start to, I lose all of my words. Enjoy the song – for various reasons, Bizarre Love Triangle is the one that reminds me of the city the most.

Dropbox as carrier pigeon

2011-08-17T09:37:00.004-04:00

Several months ago, I shared a song with my friend Mike via Dropbox.

Days later, I was doing some hard drive housecleaning, and noticed a new file in my Dropbox folder called hi hi.txt. Inside was a line of text:

hello toky toky! -MLE, 1/17/2010

So, I responded.

oh my goodness, hello! -Johanna, 1/26/2011

Over time, another text file appeared.

And another.

We never talked about this, but kept adding to hi hi.txt little by little over time. This is what it looks like now (please excuse my too many exclamation points):

I love how we got used to and felt the medium out by mirroring each other's writing styles – first with writing our name and date after each message, and later evolving to just including the date.

To me it feels a little like long-distance, long-term message exchanges, like playing a game of chess with someone else via mailed letters.* Mike brought up how crazy it was that we were communicating by physically making changes to each other's hard drives over time. So sci-fi (especially since we live across the country from each other). Usually people who opt for slower communication do it in a way that purposefully ignores new technologies – the thought of slower communication existing within the very channels that its participants strive to distance themselves from had never occurred to me.

* How much would you scream if chess-by-mailed-letter became the next "thing?" I would never stop laughing.

Visual Cues of a Collective Experience

2011-08-12T21:07:00.005-04:00

A month or two ago, Laura and I walked down the High Line in a heat wave. As the sun was setting and it was still 100°F out, we literally ran to a frozen fruit bar vendor we saw near the 30th Street staircase. As we walked away with our spoils, we noticed them melting a lot more rapidly than we had expected – it was like someone had turned a faucet on in our hands. So after fumbling around for a few steps, we stopped at one of the benches that line the park to finish our popsicles before they disappeared completely. We were only half successful:

Woops.

And then I noticed something pretty awesome when we got up and kept walking – visual evidence of all New Yorkers getting outside in this heat, having the same idea, and getting through it in the same way that we did.

The popsicle puddles continued for several steps and several benches. I bet there's some cool calculation you could run here – involving the temperature, size of popsicle, rate of melting, steps taken, average walking speed per person and opportunity cost – that would predict or dictate when the puddles would stop.

Decoding The Shining

2011-07-25T15:31:00.004-04:00

Last week, Flavorpill posted a ~20 video on their blog (in two parts) on the psychology behind the impossible set design of The Shining, created by a guy named Rob Ager.

I was fascinated, watched the whole way through, and found myself then reading the text version of the analysis, which is really, really long (currently at 21 chapters). It attempts to parse all of the subliminal messages, themes and symbolism that he thinks run rampant in the movie. Covered are child molestation, alcoholism, secret societies, duality, genocide, animals, cartoons, and a bunch of others. Everything is tied together in a pretty engrossing package. There were definitely times when I thought the author was reaching for straws (he even says, "Before we move on to the next chapter, if you’re not familiar with a lot of the conspiracy theories discussed here then you may well be jumping to a 'Rob’s a bit of a nutter' conclusion" at one point, which made me laugh). At other times, though, the analysis was pretty hard to argue with, which led to a new respect and interest in Stanley Kubrick that I've not had before (I admittedly don't really pay attention to directors). There are ties drawn to Kubrick's other movies, to the making-of documentary of The Shining and its role in the movie's symbolism, and even the dynamics between him and the actors on set.

I guess it's no surprise that I liked reading this thing: what got me into Art History many years ago was a museum tour that took me through some of the hidden meanings and imagery in Salvador Dalí's paintings. I really like the stories behind things – especially the ones that reveal stuff that is right in front of you and you don't consciously realize are there.

[source]

Global English

2011-07-24T17:09:00.003-04:00

This beautiful piece of art showed up at our office this week:

It is called Global English, by James Clar. In his words:

This piece is a reaction to countries such as the UAE where younger generations are exposed more to English language though work, school, and pop culture, and now favour English over their native Arabic.

Every language has rules that allow us to formulate thought and transfer that thought to other people. However, the structure and rules of each language makes certain ideas easier to express in one language as opposed to another. While a global communication medium is necessary, we need to explore what we gain from the use of English and what we lose from it. In this piece, the words 'global english' are phonetically spelled out in Arabic, forcing an Arabic speaker to speak in English.

I didn't know that James himself was the one installing it in our office until Josh sent an email around about the piece. I instantly hit the ceiling, starstruck; I've been a fan of his for a while. Most notably: The Rat Race and the New York Times 'T' Style Magazine logo. I ran over a second time and acted like a silly fan girl. Woops.

Starkey - Lost In Space

2011-07-19T11:14:00.003-04:00

I sadly don't usually read my GBH emails all the way through and click on every single link - it's usually more of a skimming for parties. But when I do click on every video and MP3, I'm rarely disappointed. GBH emails led me to this priceless gem a little while ago, and today was no different. When I started listening, I got into a very nostalgic, summer 2005 mood because it sounds a lot like Hide & Seek. Then the pace picks up a little and the visuals get more dreamy (space aesthetics are oddly present these days).

About halfway through, the thing explodes into a mass of heat and pressure and not being able to breathe. Picture post-rock meets electro. It's like getting rear ended by a car made of fire.

I'll stop typing now. Watch!

Morvern Callar

2011-07-17T22:38:00.007-04:00

A few months ago, Mike recommended a movie called Morvern Callar, based on my post on Drama/Mex. I finally got around to watching it last night, and he was right – excellent.

I won't give anything away, even though all of the synopses do. But I hadn't read a thing before watching it, and I like it much better that way. I was confused for a lot of the time, mostly in the "Now who is this new person/is there context I missed?" way, and also because my television set has lousy sound and the accents in the movie were quite heavy. But again, movies I could watch on mute. The movie brings out a bunch of feelings throughout, from a sense of urgency to a cold snap, carefree breeze and quiet dark.

The soundtrack is great, too. The theme song seemed to be The Mamas & The Papas' This is Dedicated to the One I Love (is that what it's called?), and it closed with this awesome Aphex Twin song --

So good. Watch it alone, if you decide to give it a shot.

Yann Tiersen: Ashes

2011-06-11T21:54:00.003-04:00

I just got home from a couple of days in Switzerland, and I feel like I'm floating across the floor still - from the time travel, the time difference, and the time spent with a wonky internal clock. This song fits it perfectly, and I've been listening to it all night.

The explosion and swelling at 0:55 makes me short of breath, and the shift at 1:49 makes me want to cry. I was privileged enough to see Yann Tiersen do this one live back in February with Lauren; she wrote about it afterward too. We're nearly halfway through the year, and it's still the best concert I've been to of 2011. Anyway, enjoy :]

Some music about rhubarb.

2011-06-09T06:00:00.005-04:00

I've been making mixes for a few years now, but this is the first one I put together with the intent of sharing with a bigger set of people. Also, usually I make one to immortalize a big-deal-something – there is one for the trip I took to Japan in 2008, for example. This one had a much more desultory inspiration: rhubarb.

I went to Seattle twice over the past month. Each time, I could not pick up a single menu without seeing rhubarb featured as an ingredient somewhere. I ate rhubarb preserves on steel cut oats, rhubarb compote on doughnuts, rhubarb juice/extract in a cocktail... you get the idea. It was so strange to me that I asked a server if it was in season, or if Seattle was just particularly nuts about rhubarb. It was mostly the former, coupled with the fact that rhubarb is grown locally in that area.

Tokyohanna - Rhubarb XXVIII1 by tokyohanna

So there you have it. I got a very strong set of audio associations to mirror the different forms all of this rhubarb took, and it turned into 32 minutes of music that matches the taste perfectly in my head. There's a bit of a tart kick, a drowning syrupy layer, and something else that I can only describe as feeling like the end of a very long dress train. Enjoy!

Zachary

2011-06-08T09:58:00.010-04:00

It has been exactly a year since I last saw my friend Zachary. I've actually been meaning to write this post for a year, but whenever I try to summarize anything from around 2005, my brain turns into a jumbly mess since it was my first real time in New York and there were stimuli everywhere (this happened when I tried writing about Don Hill's death a few weeks ago too). So here we are, at an anniversary of sorts.

I met Zachary at a dance party at Rififi in the summer of 2005, and we became instant friends. He is the closest thing to a Renaissance Man that I know – always (and I mean always) writing, drawing, making music, doing little projects, and daydreaming about things. He kind of reminds me of Ray Johnson in a way I can't quite place. The last night I saw him was at his solo art show, 1 to 61 - a few days later, he moved to Ohio.

One thing Zachary has done in life (among stuff like being Nightlife Editor of The L Magazine, singing briefly in a super metal band, and popping up on The Sartorialist) is work coat check at Don Hill's. If you never saw it, it was located in a drippy, dark, freezing basement, its leaks covered by a makeshift ceiling made of the cardboard sides of beer boxes. One of the things Zachary did to pass the time over the years was draw on the cardboard with a Sharpie; his art show was the entire collection of these sketches (as a supplement, he kept a blog called Coats from the Underground, documenting everything from Brooklyn Industries and J.Crew to Chloe and Oak). The Culture of Me wrote a nice little thing about Zachary after the show (plus photos better than mine).

I could say a million more things – that he knows everything there is to know about both Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen; that he owns a Hot Lixx guitar in impressively good quality; that reading pages of his writing while walking a different way home one day in 2007 was what gave me the idea for this; or that he is pretty hilarious...

... but then this would just turn into another jumbled mess since there's so much I want to talk about! So I'll leave it with that, and with the hope that Zachary comes back to New York soon. The city misses your light.

Sing For Hope's Pop-Up Pianos 2011: A Preview

2011-06-05T20:26:00.010-04:00

I got a text message from my friend Marc yesterday morning, saying he was painting an upright piano downtown and that I should visit him. He was working in a huge corporate building, so I was prepared to see him painting a piano all by himself in a cavernous lobby. When he led me through the door to his work space, I was standing in a room filled with pianos – uprights, baby grands, and grands – all hand painted.

If you live in New York, you might remember that there were 60 pianos placed all over the city for a couple of weeks last summer. Well, it's happening again this year, brought to us by Sing for Hope – an organization that brings artists together to volunteer their time for the benefit of the local community (schools, hospitals, etc.). This particular initiative is called Pop-Up Pianos, and will run from June 18th until July 2nd. Their vision is "that all New Yorkers – from Rockaway to Riverdale, Stapleton to Sunset Park – have access to the arts." Watch this trailer of sorts --

Here are shots of Marc's --

Fucking beautiful, no? Also stunning: Here are two of Chris's (one of Marc's best friends, and a friend of mine as well) --

(See the rest here.)

First of all, I've never been in the midst of so many pianos before (there are 88 this year).* This – along with (1) Knowing exactly what these pianos in various stages of transformation were planned for; and (2) That I've been playing for 24 years/pianos have great significance to me – made yesterday afternoon the most overwhelming thing that has happened to me all year.

Be on the lookout come June 18th; on that day you'll be able to see which artist's piano is where on the map on the site (Marc is hoping his goes to Coney Island). You can also follow them on Twitter for news. Man, I haven't felt this strongly about a local nonprofit in ages. Sing For Hope, this is going to be awesome.

-

For more (all over the place) perusing:
A piano-related video I made a while ago
A crazy discussion on major & minor key on AskMeFi
Antiquated Giant, a mural Chris painted a couple of years ago
Beyoncé's new Run The World (Girls) video – Marc painted a bunch of the posters in the background

* Coincidence that there are 88 keys on a piano, and 88 pianos this year? I don't think so ;)

The Craft

2011-05-22T18:29:00.005-04:00

A series of events last week* reminded me of The Craft, and this weekend I re-watched it for the first time in over 10 years. I've been in the throes of middle and high school regression lately (with things like My So-Called Life and the Lost Highway soundtrack), so I was already in the mood for the clothing and music in the movie. The soundtrack is fantastic; I remember going on vacation with my parents that summer and only listening to that CD, over and over.

If you haven't seen it, The Craft is a pretty campy movie about four high schoolers who form a coven and cast spells on other people. The girls are played by Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Rachel True. What ever happened to all of them? Somehow I remember exactly what I wore to the movie theatre for this one - a Hole t-shirt (borrowed from my friend Krys) with a black skirt and Dr. Marten boots. Holy 90s.

See? Campy.

I remember trying to balance my pencil on my desk for days afterward. Never worked, surprise.

*Upon seeing the album cover of Lady Gaga's new album, I thought of Wheelers from Return to Oz. They were these (creepy as hell) steampunk looking guys with wheels for hands and feet. That made me think of the one and only Fairuza Balk, who starred as Dorothy in the movie, and has a lead role in The Craft.

Soviet Era Antarctica Watch

2011-05-16T11:28:00.007-04:00

I started writing this post twice yesterday, and couldn't figure out where to start because my thought process on this topic for the past 2.5 months has been very labyrinthine. The short version is that I got this watch in the mail on Saturday:

It took me a long time to figure out what kind of mechanical watch I wanted; when I figured out I wanted a Russian 24-hour (a Raketa in particular), it was easy to narrow down but hard to get my hands on. This is because (from what I understand) fakes in Russian watches tend to run rampant, and it's hard to know unless you're holding one whether or not it's real.

I fell down one of my rabbit holes with Raketa a few weeks ago; I found out that it means "rocket" in Russian, and that it was founded to commemorate Yuri Gagarin's "first flight in the history of mankind" into space. The factory that produces Raketa is the oldest factory in Russia (founded by Peter the Great! in 1721); it was destroyed by Nazis during the Siege of Leningrad, and rebuilt in 1944.

Googling "Raketa 24-hour" yielded many awesome watches, and the above is the one that caught my eye the most. But I couldn't pull the trigger. Both eCommerce sites that had them in stock were very shady, and I had read things about them on forums confirming my suspicions. I felt a bit paralyzed, until I mentioned the conundrum to a watch journalist and collector in Singapore, SJX. He and his friend helped point me into a trustworthy eBay seller's direction about a week ago. After talking to him and reading the seller's description, I don't think this watch is actually a Raketa, but rather a brandless Russian watch designed some time between the 1970s and late 1990s. I was deflated for about 5 seconds, but then realized that I didn't even care; I love this thing, and this was the one that I had already formed a relationship with online over the past several weeks.

If you click through and zoom in, you'll see a few stars sprinkled onto Antarctica – they mark Soviet research stations. I could go on for pages about the stuff I dove into afterward – about the Soviet Antarctic Expedition, the global research that happens on the continent, and that there are places called the Pole of Cold and Pole of inaccessibility (whoah) – but I'm still trying to unravel my brain from it all. All the while I kept thinking about this Herzog movie I saw years ago, Encounters at the End of the World –

I'm still trying to figure out what to name the penguins. Fabian and Mikhail? All suggestions welcome.

If you're curious:
Raketa's new designs from BaselWorld 2011
Russians Relaunch Soviet-Era Space Watches on WSJ's Emerging Europe blog
Antarctica on Wikipedia (the entire article is fascinating)
Soviet Antarctic Expedition on Wikipedia
Pole of inaccessibility on Wikipedia
Pole of Cold on Wikipedia
Antarctica The Coldest Place on Earth group on Flickr (awesome photos)

(Also, I know about 2% of what I'd like to know about both mechanical watches and Soviet-era watches; apologies if I got anything wrong here. Please let me know if this is the case.)

Kiss Me Forever

2011-05-04T08:25:00.007-04:00

Alexandre shared this music video with me last week, and I've been thinking about it since then. It's called Kiss Me Forever, by Julien Doré. He was raving about the song and video, and when I watched it I understood why. It's pretty catchy, and makes you want to do a silly dance or pump your bike tires and zoom down the street. The video though is the best part - it's a kind of loony mix of spring colors, cold, and said silly dancing. And a bichon frise. The slight silliness, slight Frenchness, and particular style of catchiness all reminded me of M's video for Qui de nous Deux.

JULIEN DORE : KISS ME FOREVER (2011) by artemis181

Most of all, it reminded me of the fact that it's May, and bright pops of color are showing up in store windows, yet New York didn't seem to get the memo – it's been cold and rainy since March. Watching Kiss Me Forever makes me not care as much.

The Puck Building

2011-04-19T14:14:00.006-04:00

Over a year ago, I read American Psycho for the first time. A hundred or so pages in, I caught a mention of The Puck Building.

I am usually heads down when I'm going somewhere with purpose in New York, but the Puck Building isn't just an ordinary-looking building. It's huge, details of its striking architecture aren't just reserved for its top several feet (as is the case with many buildings in SoHo), and it's a rich, rich red.

Over the next several months, I found myself staring at the building every time I walked by it. I became incredibly curious about what it was built for, and what had happened in it over the years. I turned to where any history-curious person would - Wikipedia.* And here it is:

The Puck Building was built in the late 1800's. It housed the offices of Puck Magazine, which seems to have been one of the first humorous, political-satire-ridden publications. At some point more printers had offices in there, and for years one could smell ink up and down the hallways. Now it is mostly used by NYU. You can have events in its ballrooms.

Somehow, I was disappointed. I was half hoping for something creepy or strange to have happened in the building. I can with 80% certainty say that this was influenced by the book that referenced it. American Psycho is one of the best books I've read, but it was also the most horrifying and disturbing.

The remaining 20% lies in the defining characteristic of the building – there is a gold figure of Shakespeare's Puck (from A Midsummer Night's Dream) above its doorways, and one on the back corner. Now, I know Puck isn't supposed to look cute, and is a pretty mischievous fellow, but in these statues he looks downright creepy. Like he knows something you don't.

One interesting thing I read was about this guy Alger Hiss, who was a salesman in one of the stationery companies housed in the Puck Building. Prior to this, he actually helped establish the United Nations, and was later accused of being a Soviet spy. The case was never 100% solved, and a historian mentioned that until all documents surrounding the trial are recovered (they are sealed up and won't be available until 2026), we will never know the whole story.

[source]

What's my point? Not sure. I still, still give the Puck Building my suspicious sideways glance whenever I pass by, and I felt compelled to share this, 15 months later. This is most definitely my imagination filling in blanks that don't exist and running away with me. Oh well, see you guys in 15 years ;)

* Here's a fun fact: Before writing this post, I edited my first Wikipedia article, ever. I added the bullet point about the building's appearance in American Psycho under In Popular Culture. Hooray!

Drama/Mex

2011-04-13T23:57:00.010-04:00

Los Telez - Mi Obsesión by tokyohanna

I noticed a movie playing at a restaurant a few months ago, and liked the camera shots so much that I wrote down the name of it. I finally watched Drama/Mex this week, and still can't stop thinking of it. It's a short movie that takes place over the course of one day and one night. It is set in Acapulco; lots of the shots reminded me of growing up in Puerto Rico, mostly in an urban design/terrain kind of way. Anyway, I loved it. There is very little about it online, and most of the reviews are cool, at best. I loved, loved, loved it. And after some digging I found out that it's executive produced by (among others) Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. Perfect.

Drama/Mex is about a handful of people who are semi-intertwined and either start the movie being in a crisis, or end the movie being in a crisis. I found myself becoming invested in every one of the characters. They are strange, sexy, imperfect and intense. Also: Similar to when I watched Diva, I didn't notice how grainy the film quality was until loaded it onto my computer to take screenshots.

So, there you go. I'd like to buy a copy. I wouldn't recommend Drama/Mex to you unless I knew what kind of you movies you were typically into (similar to how I feel about Somewhere, which I'll also write about soon). Just maybe don't watch it with your parents if you do decide to give it a shot - there are a couple of pretty intense bits. The song above is the main theme song of the movie; I can already tell it's going to be my favorite song this summer...

Bikes in New York

2011-04-04T13:08:00.005-04:00

I don't think I've ever written about my bike blog on here before.

I moved to New York at the end of August 2006, and Laura and I walked all over the place every spare moment we had during the weekends. I noticed myself taking lots of pictures of the bikes I saw, so I started a Flickr set for them all. (My initial interest in bikes was prompted by a dream I had had that summer, in which I owned a shiny yellow three speed.)

The posts, predictably, are much more frequent when the weather is nice. This explains why I got excited this past Saturday when I noticed my first bike since New York started to give us a hint of the spring and summer ahead.

It made me think of all the things I'm excited about in the upcoming few months, and it made me remember the time I had searching for a new bike this time last year. I knew very little, and only had an idea of what I thought I wanted. Alex talked about single speeds, Clay sketched a history of frames out, I went to stores and read everything I could. Eventually, I found the perfect, perfect bike, and didn't care if everybody and their best friend in my neighborhood had the exact same one. After months of test riding bikes that felt like I was going to break my neck, this one felt like walking. The rest of the summer was magic.

The bikes I like the most typically give me a craving for a specific food; I don't know if that's a weird manifestation of my mild synaesthesia, or if I just like eating. Here are 2 examples:

This one made me want Hot Tamales -

This one made me want birthday cake -

Anyway. If you like looking at nice bikes, maybe you'll like the blog. If you're a serious bike nerd who takes bikes apart for fun and knows what kind of frame makes what degree turns, maybe you'll be bored ;)

Tumblr enables (temporary) digital wildfire.

2011-03-31T17:26:00.008-04:00

That post I put up yesterday about the burning crater in Derweze sent my stats completely through the roof.

This is how it happened: I tweeted it. Faris RTed it. Zeb saw this and put it on his Tumblr, crediting Faris. At some point ABC World News reblogged it. Some combination of these things is what brought me from an average of 100 unique visitors a day to 4,693 in 24 hours.

There are a couple of observations here, one of them being very obvious.

1. This would not have happened a few years ago, to this scale.

Yeah, I know, duh. But it's so interesting to me because: Prior to the Derweze crater post, the thing that got me the most hits was the photography project where I ate monochromatically for a week. Mental Floss wrote about it, which gave me 700 visits in one day. Then CNN featured the link to the story in a side bar, and I got 500 more. This was before Tumblr was widespread - before it was so easy to pass a story along by reblogging it (or even Liking it on Tumblr). Mental Floss and CNN are usually the types of platforms that have the most reach online, but by putting this sharing behavior into anybody's hands and making it easy, you can really get strength in numbers. I wrote about something equally insane as the burning crater - The Boston Molasses Disaster - nearly 3 years ago, and the web didn't even notice. I wonder if Tumblr is eventually going to tip the proportions of The 1% rule at all?

2. This is not necessarily an indicator of "success."

Yes, this is huge scale for me - eight times as many unique visitors as I, on average, usually get (this is awesome). But it doesn't indicate depth of engagement (which I care about a lot). You know how many comments I got on the Derweze post (as of now)? Four. How many of these 4,700 visitors are going to be back this time, next week? Who knows. If you're reading this, you're either a regular reader, or maybe you got curious about what else I talk about here and clicked on my masthead via the Door To Hell post. Either is great, but going the extra step to comment, come back, even subscribe (!) is what I really love.

So, hi! And if you're new, do stay. I write about the weird and fascinating things I find sometimes, just like the burning crater. Like this:

There's a $9 million vault in Norway that holds 250 million of the world's seeds

An engineer at GE studied butterfly wings to make better security sensors

A fifteen-foot wave of molasses tore through Boston in 1919, killing 41 and injuring 150

My point: This is exciting. And has the potential to be even more so. I guess that second part is up to me ;)

The Door To Hell

2011-03-30T15:10:00.005-04:00

Mike sent me an IM one morning a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking of this thing ever since.

[source]

That's a crater in the middle of Derweze, which is a village in Turkmenistan. And it's on fire. It's been on fire for 40 years.

Here is the Wikipedia page; there's not a ton of information, but I guess enough to give context. In 1971, this crater formed while some people were drilling, and they realized that methane was emanating from it. Geologists decided that burning the gas would be less dangerous than letting it permeate the atmosphere, and figured that it would burn out in a matter of hours. It's still burning.

Isn't that nuts? The crater (which is 230 feet across, by the way, ~~that little dot on the right of the crater is an SUV~~ (I must have either seen another picture when I first learned about Derweze with an SUV in it, or I'm hallucinating, thank you Anon; it is actually a hunk of metal)) has come to be affectionately (maybe not affectionately) referred to as the Door To Hell.

I immediately put the town's name into Metafilter, because this is exactly the sort of thing that would be posted in there. And, you know what, not really. Why don't more people talk about this thing?

Check out some more pictures on Flickr.

An Education

2011-03-21T10:00:00.002-04:00

I watched An Education yesterday, which had been on my Instant Queue for quite a while. It was pretty great, and every time something like this happens, I marvel at the fact that I had been sitting on such a delight for so long without knowing it.

As you can probably tell, the movie is about a school girl in the 1960s who is cynical about what a traditional education all means - she'd rather learn about life by living than by reading textbooks. I won't get into details on the rest; just see it. The story is heartfelt, exciting, and shot beautifully – I took a million screenshots and couldn't prioritize or stop, really. They triggered all kinds of different memories and associations in my head. How I imagine English, 1960s style, Marisa (who writes the fantastic The Significant Other), and current Swedish girl blogger culture (see this, this, and this for examples), mostly. This might crash your browser (unless... does that happen anymore?).

How I Imagine English -

1960s style with a dash of The Significant Other thrown in -

Current Swedish Girl Blogger Culture -

These two are hilarious for different reasons, and both make me giggle -

And this one is just pretty -

See what I mean? Just watch it.

View-Master Model E

2011-03-20T15:19:00.007-04:00

While fidgeting my way through work today, I decided to take a break to play with this piece of magic -

It was a gift from my friend Joe; he told me that he had bought a bunch of them while he was living in Portland and at WK12. The first View-Master factory was in Oregon, so it makes sense that one might happen upon more of these than usual over there. He bought a few reel collections from eBay and wrapped them all up together. I hadn't looked through one of these in decades, and it blew me away. Super 3D! So cool. And they're all printed on Kodachrome.

I really felt like I was 5 years-old again when I was looking through all of them. The different layers of depth are so cool. And if I moved my head, the colors would get richer with the sunlight coming through my window. The pictures in the Boston collection I have feature tons of noise and stuff that must have been on the camera lens. My favorite ones are the Las Vegas and New York collections, though, since there are so many examples of neon signs, cars and architecture from the 60s (the ~~MetLife~~ PanAm building was the best). Very Catch Me If You Can. I kept wondering who in their right mind would put these things on eBay in the first place. Well, good for me I guess ;)

I kind of like that the images can't be photographed. Maybe you can tell this is from the NY reel.

So, this is how it works.

While a View-Master disk holds 14 film slides, these really are only seven pairs, making up the seven stereoscopic images; two film slides are viewed simultaneously, one for each eye, thus simulating binocular depth perception.

I just assumed View-Masters were always a children's toy, since I had a Fisher Price-looking, red version with yellow handle when I was a kid (I'm sure a lot of you did too*). But apparently the View-Master was invented by a guy in the photo postcard business, and a photographer. It was unveiled at the World's Fair in NY in 1939**, after which you could buy them at "photography shops, stationery stores, and scenic-attraction gift shops."

The Wikipedia page talks about the View-Master's evolution - having a popular phase in the U.S. military ("In the 1940s, the United States military recognized the potential for using View-Master products for personnel training, purchasing 100,000 viewers and nearly six million disks from 1942 to the end of World War II, in 1945"), and later morphing into a children's toy. Eventually, the scenic tourist attraction discs were phased out and everything moved into entertainment themes (movies, cartoons, toys, etc.). Look at the thing now. Jeez.

Check out this visual timeline/evolution of View-Master viewers; look at the Mickey Mouse shaped one! Amazing. Thanks for the inspiration, Joe ^^

* Ha, turns out they were Fisher-Price at one point (and still are now). The one I had as a kid is the Model L.
** Wow! I was lamenting the end of the World's Fairs to myself, figuring that communication technology made them unnecessary; but apparently there might be a version of the World's Fair in a few years!

Shark Ridden Waters

2011-02-14T09:38:00.001-05:00

Neal is on an aesthetics roll lately; he recently sent me this video for Shark Ridden Waters by Gruff Rhys* --

It sounds like a boppy version of Iron and Wine, with a hint of 70s. Similar to Joanna, I'm mostly taken by the video itself - it's shot beautifully and features this French actress Roxane Mesquida, whom I embarrassingly know nothing about. She is pretty captivating, and reminds me a little of Parker Posey (at least in this video). The whole thing blends the absurd, pretty and wistful seamlessly, which doesn't seem like an easy thing to do. Well done.

The inspiration for this album (Hotel Shampoo) is really interesting; in this bit he talks about it while setting up a domino-style layout of hotel products he'd collected from 15 years of touring. Cool stuff.

* Gruff Rhys was once the frontman of Super Furry Animals, which Neal also introduced me to years ago.

The Teenagers - Made Of

2011-02-09T11:18:00.006-05:00

Here's another touch from the recent music past; a Teenagers track that came out a few (to several, woops) months ago, but I only heard it yesterday. It's fantastic, and you can totally hear how they've grown over the past couple of years.

The Teenagers - Made Of by tokyohanna

The sound is fuller than I've heard from them, and it makes me feel simultaneously like I'm flying a plane through a laser-filled tunnel, and feeling like I'm the only person smiling in the middle of a packed dance party. And just because it is very cute, here is a preview video of the track I found on their MySpace page, which makes me smile even more:

I can't wait to hear the rest of this album they're working on and catch them on their next tour. Enjoy!

American Trash

2011-02-08T19:07:00.002-05:00

I've lately been very music- and lifestyle-nostalgic for 2007. A visit to GBH.tv did the trick - check out this video for American Trash by Innerpartysystem --

As GBH put it, this is what it would look like if Adbusters made a music video. Pretty spot on, with the rough cut-out and overlayed mostly-pessimistic, sometimes-political text. The aesthetics also mildly reminded me of some other stuff I saw at MoMA last week - a bunch of hilarious posters from Guerrilla Girls, who are these gorilla-masked (I see what they did there) feminist artists who formed in the 80s and appear to be going strong today. Anyway, enjoy. It made me want to go back to the Dafterparty in the middle of the day.

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen

2011-02-04T19:20:00.002-05:00

I took the day off today, and set out for the MoMA bright and early for some much-needed inspiration. I didn't know what I would find, really, as I haven't been great at reading my member emails. The most delightful surprise was an exhibit that's been around for around 4 months, called Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen.

In their words:

Over the course of the past century no other room has been the focus of such intensive aesthetic and technological innovation, or as loaded with cultural significance. Kitchen design has been both a central concern of modernism and fundamental to our concept of modern life. Drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, this exhibition explores the twentieth-century transformation of the kitchen as a barometer of changing technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies.

I read this description after walking around for a bit, and found that I'm definitely not alone in my fascination with kitchens. I don't do a ton of cooking, though I love the idea of it and always plan to do more. I always love kitchen-related gifts the most (you should have seen me when I opened a wine foil cutter at Christmas), love kitchen-related photography, and always daydream when I apartment-hunt that I'll find one with a window to filter Saturday morning sunlight in as I make tea. Not sure why, the way I frame kitchens in my head... it's almost like peering into a dollhouse.

Anyway, the exhibit. What a delight. There were rotating models of 70s modular kitchens, movie stills from the 50s, a plastic food collection from Japan, old appliances, historical photographs and ads (I noticed one on loan from DDB's archive, how cool is that), kitchen efficiency books, and a ton of stuff about the "Frankfurt Kitchen," which was part of a movement in 20s Germany relating to egalitarianism. Here are some pictures I took with my phone (why I didn't bring my camera today, I have no idea) --

This is an Irving Penn photo. I recently found out that he shot the first Clinique print ads, in the 1960s. Cool, no?

I have worked with GE for quite some time, so this was far out and awesome to see.

This was the first thing I saw when I walked in. Looking closely revealed old egg shells in the egg cups and cigarettes in the ashtray.

I also saw this thing – and I'm really annoyed that I didn't take a picture of it – that looked like a small bicycle wheel. I knew was it was before I even read the plaque: it was a cake slicer. My head blew up a little, because I've throughout my life always remembered this Betty Boop cartoon that features her inventor-friend, Grampy, opening an umbrella skeleton and pushing it down onto a cake to slice it instantly. I always thought that was so cool, and I can't believe it's actually a thing that existed once. Why don't I ever see those now? It seems like the most efficient way to do things, ever.

Anyway. I recommend paying this exhibit a visit if you're in the area and this sounds remotely interesting to you. Here is the exhibit site (there is a blog, too!). Also a few more pictures with commentary in this Flickr set.

Little Comets - Joanna

2011-01-20T11:01:00.005-05:00

I am going to show you a music video that my friend Neal sent over. It's the debut single of a new band called Little Comets, and it's called Joanna. Already off to a good start, right? ^_^

Isn't that one of the most magical things you've ever seen? The colors and lights and scenarios remind me of what I see in my head when I read The Elephant Vanishes or After Dark. It reminds me a lot of how I used to feel in 2007, which is interesting because the album was mixed by the same dude who worked with MGMT.

There's not a lot out there about Little Comets yet, but I loved this line from their Wikipedia page: They are described to play 'kitchen sink indie' music, citing Debussy, Roald Dahl, Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Simon as influences. That might make some people's eyes roll out of their heads and out the door, but I was in a good mood.

Kinda Vampire Weekendish, no? Which also makes sense given the Paul Simon influence, I guess. Take a listen; what do you think?

2010 in Pictures.

2011-01-03T07:30:00.000-05:00

Taking a cue from last year, I decided to make another Year In Pictures mosaic to give some visual highlights of how I recorded 2010. I left out some favorites, but wanted to keep it to 25 x 25 to be even.

[captions and individual links here]

Some highlights:

Happy 2011 again everyone!

JetBlue and Twitter Save New Years

2011-01-02T13:33:00.004-05:00

Unless you have been hibernating (I wouldn't blame you), you know about the mess that resulted from blizzards in the Northeast a few days ago – on city budgets, on the cities' residents, and – most "loudly" – on the airline industry.

Lee tweeted a NYTimes article a few days ago called For Some Travelers Stranded in Airports, Relief Is in 140 Characters. It was perfect timing, because at that exact moment, I was writing this blog post.

I kept hearing about thousands of flights being canceled and people sleeping at airports. I figured my 12/29 JetBlue flight from Florida to New York would be okay, since it was a full four days after the storms, and every flight from 2 days prior to mine between the two airports seemed fine - at worst, a few delays here and there.

Wrong. At 2.30 am my phone rang – a JetBlue robot telling me that my flight was canceled.

I was on hold for two hours and fifteen minutes, trying to re-book. Finally I was told that the earliest possible flight for me was on the 3rd of January, 5 days later. I went back to sleep at 5.30 am, delirious.

The following morning, I was furious. I laughed at the irony that after boycotting JetBlue (I was directly affected by their 2007 crisis) and taking a few cautious maybe-we-can-be-friends-again flights 4 years later, this happened. I considered a lot - paying close to $500 for an earlier flight on another airline, renting a car and driving two and a half days, taking a train. I heard about another guy on my flight that had put himself on a standby list and flown to New York an hour later. I tweeted.

I combed Bing Travel. I was hung up on by JetBlue's support call center. I searched CheapTickets. I planned around the day of work (and four days of sanity) I would be missing. My phone rang.

"Hello, is this Johanna? This is Jeff with JetBlue, and I might have some good news for you."

Jeff told me that he would be able to get me on a flight at 9am the next morning. I was utterly confused and asked him why he called me, of all people on that canceled flight. Turns out Jeff Hofmann manages their Twitter account. He saw my tweet of desperation, looked me up in JetBlue's system, found that one seat, looked up my phone number, and called me personally. He said that he would have DM'ed me but was too worried the seat would go before we could speak. I was so stunned I almost cried on the phone to him.

And there you have it, folks. Jeff single-handedly restored my faith in the airline, saving them from another 4-year boycott. I knew JetBlue had a social media strategy and knew what they were doing, but I honestly never thought someone handling a Twitter account could have the power to do something as big as changing a flight reservation for someone. This level of personalized service went above and beyond what I ever thought a Fortune 1000 company could be capable of. Well done, guys. My doubt for you has gone out the window.

And: Happy New Year, everyone!

The Sea and Cake: Weekend

2010-12-29T04:42:00.001-05:00

Late this year I got a recommendation for The Sea and Cake's most recent album (which is actually 2 years old). I hadn't really thought about them since I was in graduate school, so I was excited to have a listen. I'm not through hearing the whole thing yet, but so far it's a bit more poppy than their usual chilled-out sound. It's pretty fantastic. I came across this video a few weeks ago and wanted to share. I'm not the type to miss the season I'm not in, but it's one of the most perfect music videos about summer and that carefree, young feeling that I've ever seen.

I started reflecting on this past summer in New York, which was filled with bike rides, barbecues, record stores, balconies, brunches, Brooklyn, bloody marys, and World Cup games (lots of good things seem to start with the letter B). It made me smile and want to listen to Mark Ronson and The Beach Boys as well, which I listened to a lot. Enjoy! And give the rest of Car Alarm a listen.

EFIT in Montana

2010-12-26T00:38:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago, I went to a completely foreign place: Montana. I had never seen snow or mountains like that up close before; it was a completely surreal and dreamlike weekend for me. The inverted-V rooftops of the ski lodges and pine trees strung with silver lights and caked with snow made everything feel like a gingerbread neighborhood.

One of the days I was there, I did an EFIT for Julie. Those of you who have been around for a while know I do these every now and then. A combination of no-Internet (none) and a shoddy memory made my email to her about doing a joint EFIT float into the ether rather than getting to her. So here are my photos. I was worried about them all being only of snow, but I managed to get a little variety in there.

10.30am - I was convinced me to go snowmobiling. The moment we got out of the car at the rental place, 3 dogs walked over to us, curious. This one had the most piercing blue eyes I had ever seen. Like water in the Blue Grotto.

11.33am - On my snowmobile. I tried to pretend I was Beatrix Kiddo the entire time so I wouldn't be paralyzed by terror. The narrow trail up the mountain through forests had a probably 60° drop on one side.

12.23pm - In a meadow thing on a mountain - our first destination. Completely silencing.

1.09pm - In a rented snowsuit and helmet. Those guys know how to dress for the weather, yeesh. I wasn't cold the entire afternoon, and it was about 6°F that day (colder than I've ever exprienced).

2.04pm - Taking a break.

3.30pm - Back at square one, 50 miles later. A note about snowmobiling - I had no idea what a snowmobile even was until I looked it up on Wikipedia (most of my life was spent in tropical places). If you've never been before and you want to try it, there is a section of the article called "Accidents and Safety" - don't read it. I made that mistake and was petrified for the first half of the trip. But then by the end I was having a blast. So much so that I almost flew off the thing from going too fast over a hill on the way back. Another note: You will not be able to move the next day. From my triceps all the way to my sides and quads, this thing used just about every muscle to steer.

4.07pm - Another tip for anyone who may go snowmobiling for the first time: Eat beforehand. We were all so starving by this point that we had dinner at 4 o'clock on the afternoon. This was at one of the half dozen restaurants in the area - a motorcycle-themed place called Choppers. I had a burger, onion rings and Guinness. Perfect.

5.24pm - This huge thing was on our way out.

6.03pm - Just before the hottest shower ever. Mister Toky's midi keyboard, Nooka, and loose change.

7.40pm - Writing a letter to Julie about Montana.

9.00pm - Here is where I was one minute too late to get an 8pm photo. Rats. This is Mister Toky's computer; he was playing this amazing computer game that was like Doom but took place in an underwater city with zombie-like guys walking everywhere.

9.32pm - On our way to have a snack (still hungry) and drink. Most of the little trees in the resort were lit up and covered with snow like this.

10.50pm - If anybody has any idea what this is, let me know. I looked up at my table and was met with this dude; pretty disarming.

The first half of those pictures were taken with my phone, since taking a camera on a snowmobile is pretty useless. The second half were with the Nikon. Quite a different EFIT than the ones I'm used to doing. This was a pretty amazing trip; I'd go back. And maybe do the same thing again ^^

Art Historians, German Translators, Frankish Kings, and Scrooge McDuck

2010-11-20T14:05:00.012-05:00

A text message conversation with Brandi this morning about Disney characters led me down my second rabbit hole of the week. This one is about Frankish kings in the 7th century. The question that prompted this:

"Who is your favorite Disney character?"

The immediate answer of "Dagobert" came from my father.

?

He said that Dagobert was the rich uncle of Donald Duck – the one who would dive into a pile of gold coins while being a very stingy guy on the side. I am admittedly a bit ignorant about the side stories of Disney characters, but I knew who he was talking about.

[source]

Dagobert is what Scrooge McDuck was called in Germany.

I started Googling. The first result on my phone was for Dagobert I - the king of Austrasia (623–634), king of all the Franks (629–634), and king of Neustria and Burgundy (629–639).

??

Okay, too weird. Was there a connection? Unsure. Digging into this one took a really long time. Two hours. I read about Dagoberts I, II, and III, and none of them really gave any hints as to why this name was given to Scrooge in Germany. Well, Dagobert I took me down a side-rabbit-hole that ended up being a clue, but more on this later.

I also read about Dagobert of Pisa and Erich Dagobert von Drygalski.* I read about a famous German extortionist named Arno Funke.** I read the near-eleven-page Scrooge McDuck Wikipedia article.***

Still nothing. I searched on Metafilter, more Wikipedia, and then just started Googling all over the place. My father told me that his brother might know the answer. It was dinnertime in Germany at that moment, so I waited on that one. He also said that perhaps he was just called Dagobert Duck because it sounded good, and because it allowed for him to have an alliterative DD emblem all over the place. I supposed that was possible.

THEN, my final resort – which I was just turning to so I wouldn't feel like I had abandoned an unsolved mystery – got me close enough to feeling I had the answer. I went to the German Wikipedia page for Dagobert Duck and winced as I hit the Translate button (I'm still used to the horrors of Babelfish days). It introduced me to the person who gave Scrooge his German name – German Walt Disney translator Erika Fuchs.

[source]

Fuchs was a prolific Disney translator in Germany, and stuck all kinds of wordplay and hidden meaning into the stories. She seemed to have a ton of fun with it, and once said, "You can't be educated enough to translate comic books." Apparently some phrases have stayed in pop culture throughout time and there is even a term - Erikativ - for popular phrases she coined (no Scrooge pun intended). In 2001, she got a prestigious literature prize "for her work on Duckburg." I am SO DELIGHTED that someone became successful and famous for translating Duckburg stories for most of her career. She was an honorary member of – ready? - D.O.N.A.L.D. This stands for "Deutsche Organisation nichtkommerzieller Anhänger des lauteren Donaldismus" or the "German Organization of Non-commercial Devotees of the true Donaldism". HA! This is the best thing I've heard in weeks.

Anyway. It was Erika Fuchs who gave Scrooge the name Dagobert in her Duckburg translations, named after those Frankish Kings Dagobert I, II, and III. So my initial impulse WAS the right one, but I needed that Translator button (ha, das ironie).

And you know why this makes sense? I will tell you. First, let's go back to the Dagobert I clue I mentioned earlier.

[source]

That is a cathedral close to Paris called Saint Denis. Dagobert I founded this cathedral in Saint Denis's name, and is now buried there. Who is Saint Denis? A patron Saint of France. How was he martyred? By beheading.

[source]

That is a statue of Saint Denis. Apparently after he was beheaded, he walked six miles, preaching the word of God while holding his own head (yes). And apparently saints were beheaded happened enough that there is a term for statues depicting saints holding their own heads – cephalophores. Good grief. Anyway, at Saint Denis's burial place was erected a shrine, and this is where Dagobert I founded the Abbey of Saint Denis (a Benedictine monastery). This is now the cathedral of Saint Denis. The shrine was made by a goldsmith named Eligius.

Above all, Eligius fabricated a mausoleum for the holy martyr Denis in the city of Paris with a wonderful marble ciborium over it marvelously decorated with gold and gems. He composed a crest [at the top of a tomb] and a magnificent frontal and surrounded the throne of the altar with golden axes in a circle. He placed golden apples there, round and jeweled. He made a pulpit and a gate of silver and a roof for the throne of the altar on silver axes. He made a covering in the place before the tomb and fabricated an outside altar at the feet of the holy martyr. So much industry did he lavish there, at the king's request, and poured out so much that scarcely a single ornament was left in Gaul and it is the greatest wonder of all to this very day. [source]

So. A very lavish shrine, with gold and jewels everywhere. And these, unrelated to Saint Denis but very related to Dagobert I: gold Dagobert coins.

[source]

[source] and [source]

Know why this is interesting to me? Because I am an Art History nut.

Know who else was an Art History nut? Erika Fuchs. In the 1930s (about 10-15 years before Scrooge was invented and entered into German pop culture), Erika Fuchs studied Art History in university. And I'm fairly certain that this stuff is why she named this character after Dagobert I.

So cool. And now I'm exhausted. Hooray! I guess it's still a theory, but hopefully pretty close. And as I tweeted earlier:

* Erich Dagobert von Drygalski was a really cool geographer and took the first Antarctic aerial photo from a balloon, ever.
** Arno Funke used to place bombs all over Germany to get ransom money. He always strategically placed the bombs to minimize people getting hurt – he was mostly seen as a prankster who kept trying to get rich. He gave himself the pseudonym Dagobert after Scrooge McDuck, because he had visions of himself one day swimming in gold coins.
*** You have to read this thing. It is more thorough an historical account than some articles I have read about real people. It contains a personal history; educational history; professional history; psychological analysis; code of values and moral conduct; log of traveled countries and languages spoken; analyses on his relationship with Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie; and short list of wealthy duck rivals in Duckburg. I can't believe how extensive this article is. It blew my mind.

Thanks to Brandi and my father for making this afternoon amusingly strange ^^

From The Turtles to 1800s Organs

2010-11-16T01:08:00.009-05:00

Tonight I had the intense urge to listen to You Showed Me by The Turtles:

I was compelled to Google "circus organ" after thinking that one never sounded so nice as it does in the opening notes of this song. And I found some really cool pictures:

[source]

[source]

[source]

This type of organ – called a calliope – was wheeled around by traveling circuses in the late 1800s. They work via steam (what?) passing through pipes (what??). Here is an old ad for one from 1874:

[source]

The calliope is kind of distant cousins with the train whistle (which makes sense now, steam and all).

Calliope mechanics evolved a bit over time: First they were played via a series of pins on a metal cylinder (like in a music box). Then there were organ keys, and a person played them (like in that ad, above). Then things went back to rotation-based systems with rolls of paper, and resembled player pianos.

I suppose I've only heard "good" versions of what a calliope sounds like, because apparently it's impossible to keep in tune, can be heard from a mile away (no volume control), and the notes' sound depends on how hot the steam is.

Here's a video of a riverboat calliope; you can see the steam flying out of the pipes:

EDIT: I just received an email from Zachary saying that he played this very calliope on the Delta Queen in the 1980s, "When I was about 5 while traveling down the Mississippi River on a riverboat trip that included a visit to the real setting of Mark Twain's work." Amazing.

And here's a video that came up when I searched "circus organ" on YouTube. The sound is different from a calliope, but I wonder if the vast world of 1800s organs gets mixed up easily since it still came up in search results. A quick Wikipedia search helped me figure out that this is a fairground organ, which is (it turns out) different. These were found around fairs and amusement parks, and if you play this video with your eyes closed, it will make perfect sense. Though, don't listen to this if you're not in a good mood, because you will want to throw your shoe out a window.

Randomly falling into a rabbit hole like this one at 1am makes me realize how many other insane things I don't know about yet. Jeez. I could easily spend another 2 hours researching different types of organs from the mid- to late-1800s (there are dance organs and street organs too; which of these sounds the most like a baseball game?).

Yelle La Musique

2010-10-16T20:07:00.005-04:00

I was just perusing the video section on GBH.tv and found this new Yelle video for La Musique:

This thing mesmerized me. Not only is Yelle's sound a lot more mature since I last heard her material, but the video seems to match it perfectly. I knew it was going to be a pretty interesting video from the beginning – it starts out with cut-outs of sumo wrestlers moving around on planets in a galaxy. Then you spot the heads of Kanye and Michael Jordan in a corner, and the entire thing explodes into cut-outs of pop culture icons moving around and dancing in a watercolored fade all over the place. Everything from the Brazil Jesus statue hula-hooping to Clint Eastwood, the Taj Mahal, and Justin Bieber have cameos. At one point a flaming car flies from the sky into a camper, which then explodes into a mountain of kittens. Paris Hilton sits on a huge version of her chihuahua. Popsicles fly through the air as cats play guitars on icebergs. Finally at 1:20 I realized that the whole thing was strikingly similar to the feel in one of my favorite videos of all time, Leave Me Alone by Michael Jackson:

Usually I question interpretations that are this close, but then I saw the Yelle video close with this little nod:

Awesome. Especially since Bubbles is heavily featured in his video. Thumbs up to Yelle, can't wait to hear the whole album. She's playing Highline Ballroom on 4th November; buy tickets! If her performance was incredible 3 years ago, think of how it will be this time around with this new material.

Levi's Photo Workshop

2010-10-08T22:41:00.006-04:00

Last night I went to the launch of the Levi's Photo Workshop. If you haven't heard of the Levi's Workshops yet, they aim to encourage and foster the creative spirit as part of their current Go Forth campaign. The first one was in San Francisco in July, and it was a printmaking workshop. Very happy that the one to hit New York was about photography! The whole thing was put on by friends of Undercurrent Sub Rosa, and was held where Deitch Projects used to be at 18 Wooster.

Now, this party was a fantastic madhouse. It was one of the best vibes I've gotten from an event in a long time - probably all year. The music was great, the crowd was great, the drinks were great (thank you Skyy), and there was photography stuff EVERYWHERE. Light tables, vintage cameras for renting, tons of film and other goodies, photo booths, a machine that puts any photo you want onto a t-shirt, huge Macs with editing software, this place was hooked up. And lining the walls was a really great curation of photographs hand-picked by Tim Barber of tinyvices.com. You can buy supplies, take classes, go to panels, see rotating exhibits and just mess around with all of the goodies for almost the entire ~~month~~ year. I highly, highly recommend this thing if you live here and have even the slightest interest in photography. Seriously, there's something for everyone.

Out of the entire space and event, I don't think I saw a single piece of Levi's branding, which is just insane. Over the years I've seen the worst of the positive correlation between size of brand and how much control they want to have re: "make the logo bigger" syndrome. The most I saw were three little racks of jackets and shirts on the upper level. Very well done, guys.

Speaking of brands, the collaborators' list is nuts. Everything from Aperture Foundation to Leica and Kodak, Taschen and Vice. And there's a community partnership component, which supplies the warm fuzzies. A+ to Levi's, Sub Rosa and everyone else involved.

[More of my pictures here; see the Levi's Workshops pool here.]

EDIT 12 Oct | Marisa blogged about the workshop and event as well; if you're in the mood for more polished editorial (and some other shots courtesy of The Selvedge Yard), it's worth a read!

Three songs

2010-10-07T16:06:00.006-04:00

Music is a huge part of my life, as it probably is for a lot of people. I'm thrilled about how often I hear something that I instantly love because I'm the type to play that song exclusively, over and over for 2 weeks straight. But it isn't very often at all that I am blown away enough to stop what I'm doing and listen to the whole thing with my jaw on my desk. This usually happens about once every year and a half, but I guess I've been lucky lately because we just hit time number three for 2010. Just want to share these three very different songs with you. Maybe you'll like them too, if you haven't heard them yet.

Hot Chip: I Feel Better
I first heard the Bonnie Prince Billy remix of I Feel Better on RCRD LBL, and loved it. My friend Lucy sent me the original, and I wanted to jump out the window. I went home that night and transcribed the entire thing because I wasn't satisfied simply listening to it. Yes, people are sick of autotune by now, but I don't know if I ever will be. It can be used in a ton of different ways, and this way is spectacular. I kind of hate the video because it violates the image that the song put in my head originally, and it's a slightly edited version. And all I need is the magenta of the audio (but click on that link if you're curious and in the mood to be creeped out by an endearing bald man).

France Gall: Poupée De Cire Poupé De Son
I heard this one off of Niotillfem's French Spotify playlist. I stopped working and listened to it 3 times in a row; I couldn't tell at first whether it was a girl or a very young mischievous boy. Then I looked up France Gall and it turns out she was part of a huge musical movement in the 60s called yé-yé. I had heard of it before, but didn't know how influential of an explosion it was. It mostly involved young girls singing about boy stuff in an intentionally innocent way. I don't know what the song is about, but I do know that Serge Gainsbourg wrote it and that it's been covered all over the place (Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene are just 2 of the bands who have).

Mark Ronson x Ghostface Killah: Lose It (In The End)
Some of this album gives me a slight golden oldies feel, but I may be the only one. The song has a good intro, a great beat, and an extremely catchy verse. Almost reminds me of the Four Seasons (it's less than two and a half minutes long, too). He throws in that effect that sounds like you're singing into a fan, and Ghostface swoops in nearly a minute in (similar to how he does in his version of You Know I'm No Good with Amy Winehouse). I smiled the whole time I heard this song for the first time, and it's my favorite on this album (Record Collection; I bought the whole thing after previewing on Spotify and I suggest you do the same. Also check out the final track).

Hope you enjoyed. I might stitch together a playlist that features songs that have affected me similarly in the past; I wonder if it will have a good flow or just sound like a complicated mess. Anyway, has this happened to you this year? What song(s)?

VAMPS

2010-10-05T16:32:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan from New York-Tokyo sent me a press release for a Japanese rock band that is playing this weekend. They are called VAMPS, and I'm kind of upset that I already have tickets to a different show that night because from the looks of them, they are pretty much the epitome of my idea of what Japanese rockstars are like.

The guys' names are Hyde and K.A.Z, and from what I understand they each had years of being in other bands under their belts before deciding to form VAMPS together. It's hard to find much else about them other than the other bands they were in before, but apparently they are a big deal and sell out all over the place. One look at their MySpace page shows that they have 17,579 friends and six pages of just fansign photos, which is really endearing. And watching this album teaser really makes me sorry that I can't make it:

I know, right?

This is their first world tour, and if you live in NYC you can catch them at Roseland Ballroom this Saturday the 9th. Get your tickets here and let me know how it is!

Takashi Murakami x Versailles

2010-09-16T18:47:00.003-04:00

When I see something covered over and over on different platforms and Twitter feeds, my typical reaction is to ignore it forever. This is why I didn't see the Arcade Fire video until a week after it launched; I guess the buzz just annoys me and I don't even want to bother. But this instance was too weird, and well, it appealed to two loves of mine: fine art and contemporary art.

Within 3 minutes, I saw this tweet:

This blog post:

And received this email:

It's almost like my noticeably fast adoration of the new Blonde Redhead album, except it's the Internet with Takashi Murakami having 22 pieces displayed all over Versailles.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI// Exposition Versailles from OFIVE.TV on Vimeo.

This is kind of AWESOME. I can't even imagine how this could have happened; I don't know a lot about the recent history of art being on display at Versailles (or even who is in charge of something like that), but over time I've noticed a sometimes-prickly divide between lovers of fine art and lovers of contemporary art. Especially since even though Takashi Murakami is most widely known for his happy, psychedelically-colored flowers (did you know he also created six little mascots for the Tokyo district Roppongi?), he has also made some pretty controversial stuff (maybe don't click on that link if your entire office has full view of your monitor, just saying. It's art, but it's definitely leaning more toward NSFW).

[from Flavorwire]

It's very disarming and delightful to see the imagery of bubbly creatures juxtaposed in front of Rigaud and Bernini works. If in the past you could only imagine these two guys hanging out…

…now you can see it for real. If you get over there by 12 December (or before the angry French protesters kill it, whichever comes first), that is.

Penny Sparkle

2010-09-14T23:19:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago, I opened my email to find this:

If the text is too small, it was basically tickets to see Blonde Redhead kick off Fashion Week at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. And for those who don't know, Blonde Redhead is my most favorite band. How good Gilt City is at curating special packages like this should be a separate post entirely, but to give an idea, $80 would get you:

• A ticket to the (very small) show
• An advance copy of their new album, Penny Sparkle (scheduled for release a week later (today))
• An hour of open bar prior to the show (sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery and Tequila Avion)
• A reserved area at the after party
• Two immediate digital downloads of tracks from their new album

This is pretty much insane. Plus, the entire thing was to happen on the eve of my birthday, so I hesitated very little on getting two tickets.

All in all, I loved it. They have this kind of synced magic between the three of them that just kind of works. At one point all they could hear was fuzziness on their ends, and they weren't wearing ear pieces, yet they were still all exactly on beat with each other throughout.

Forgetfulness left my camera at home, but I did get two kinda neat shots with my phone that actually fit the sound of Penny Sparkle really well:

It wasn't until the next day that I got to take a good look at the CD. It's the nicest packaging I may have ever seen from something that doesn't get a lot of attention at all anymore; I can't wait to see what the vinyl looks like.

As far as the album itself, I got to sneak a listen a few days before the show, and it's beautiful. It's very different from the previous two or three releases, and at first I wasn't really sure at all what to think. But you know how sometimes you give a new album a couple dozen spins, you warm to it over time, and in the end you grow to adore it? The process was expedited with Penny Sparkle in a strange way that's never really happened before with any other album. The very next time I heard it, I was really into it. By the third time, elated. By the fourth, inseparable. I actually noticed the spikes with each listen. If 23 was like drowning in a goldish shimmery haze, Penny Sparkle is like drowning in a silvery brushed vapor (which I realize doesn't sound VERY DIFFERENT AT ALL, but trust me). I am not sure how else to describe it except please give it a listen. Here's a link to one of my favorite tracks off the album on The FADER, Not Getting There.

Pre-digital music playback and rotation

2010-09-06T02:15:00.009-04:00

Part of my being unimpressed with iWork.com so far is that it seems I can't work on anything else while one file is being uploaded (which so far has taken about an hour and is not finished yet). So you get to look at some pictures. There is not too much deep thought to this post; I just was sitting on my couch last week, staring at an album playing on my record player. I thought, "So, this massive circle spins, and a whole song takes up very little space in this format. How did they ever think of doing it this way?"

And then I realized that over time (and up until digital files), everything that played music has been based on rotation. Duh. I know, so obvious. But it was fun to keep thinking of examples.

Phonograph

Organ grinder

Nickelodeon

Music box

Casette tape

CD

Any more that I'm missing? I wonder if Steve Jobs got the click wheel idea from this.

Motivational credit: Photojojo linked to this picture of a pinhole camera sitting on a record while the turn table was spinning:

It inspired me to get this thought down before I forgot about it again. Cool, no?

EDIT 7 Sept | Zachary gave me two that I missed! Reel to reel and 8 track.

The 1980s NYC Subway

2010-09-02T18:58:00.003-04:00

Lisa emailed me a link last week while I was traveling to America's Dairyland, and it made me miss home so much that I felt a tug in my chest. Subway, lifeblood. features photos taken in and around the NY subway system in the 1980s. I frequently daydream about what NYC must have been like in the 80s, mostly because it sounds like it was a completely different, dark, scary, underground world. Also because of my now four-year fascination with Basquiat. I can't believe I didn't blog about watching Downtown 81 after I saw it, because it blew my mind and sent me on a daydreaming spiral for another few months. It's a movie about underground art and music in 1980s NY in the 80s, and stars Jean-Michel himself (I should watch it again and do the whole screenshot/blog post thing). ANYWAY. Here are some of the shots that made me swoon the most:

Bruce Davidson

Bruce Davidson

John F. Conn

Jamel Shabazz

Here is the closing scene from Downtown 81; I regularly drift off thinking about this. Driving up what seems like the FDR as the sun is considering coming out, the fuzzy notes from Suicide's Cheree perfectly matching the light, mood, everything. I have felt similarly in the past when walking to breakfast with my dear friend Zachary* at 7am after a night of dancing, watching the East Village slowly wake up and open its doors.

Again, here is the link to Subway, lifeblood. on 24 Flinching; check out the rest of the pictures. Heartbreaking.

*Look for a post about Zachary soon!

Pick One

2010-04-27T09:47:00.007-04:00

When it comes to little Internet thingies that get tweeted or blogged like crazy, I usually get bored in about 10 seconds. Here's one that held me for quite a while though: Pick One. There is nothing to explain, really: Two words show up on your screen, and you click on one of them. And repeat. As much as you want.

This is probably not unique to me at all, but when faced with either-or choices, my initial gut reflex is to frame the two options as being on opposite ends of a continuum. So you can imagine how amusing these were:

Here were the toughest ones for me:

(I'm not a socialist creep, I just have issues in the mornings)

And the easiest:

The more I clicked on choices, the more I started framing my decisions in different ways. If it was a tough decision, I framed the two as, "Which one would I miss the most if it went away?" and "What would be a comforting alternative if I lost X?" Images of flying to Tokyo to save music and switching to the Wall Street Journal to keep eating cheeseburgers came to mind. Then I started thinking about what an interesting personality test this website would make. What do you think?

EDIT | Prominent blogger Eric Tabone just informed me that this site is something like 3 years old. Good, I was starting to think that I was actually up on things for once!

Make A Chart Day IV

2010-04-23T07:00:00.011-04:00

Some of you may have heard of Make A Chart Day by now, but if not: It's Friday. Charts are nice. Let's make some. Make A Chart Day was started one Friday a few weeks ago by Bud, and was taken over the following Friday by Clay. The torch then got passed to Rachel, and now I have been granted the great honor of hosting this week. Here's how it works:

• Make a chart
• Tweet it (you can @ me @tokyohanna if you want)
• Include the hashtag #makeachartday
• I'll post them all here

Get to it! I'll be tweeting reminders throughout the day and updating this post every few hours, including a link to your Twitter profile. I'll start it off:

Here is our first round of submissions at 10.00am. The bar has been set high, folks.

A hilarious truth courtesy of @lilmissjen (she blogged about it too):

One from @laurent_fintoni on something we know all too well:

Here are two from @IanSohn: "Proof that my child is a supercreature" and a segmentation of singers:

@Timbotown's Personal Sweat Factors:

I think this might be a Make A Chart Day first: a video! From @LenKendall:

All right, round two of submissions, post lunch edition. More brilliance, more hilarity -

A currently-relevant one from @ tylertravitz:

If you grew up in the 80s you'll appreciate this one from @ryeclifton:

Here's one from @scheinerinc that I can also relate to (relevant inclusion of an object in to make up this one):

And a 2nd submission from @Timbotown:

The first sports-related content to ever appear on Cellar Door, from @jsamps:

Here's our 2nd Apple-themed chart of the day from @brandexpression:

Another of the elusive, staged + photographed variety from @rachelcoady:

Here's one from @MatthewElijah, which he assures is not autobiographical:

My 2nd submission of the day, made around 6 months ago:

Another staged + photographed one from @pragerd! Am I lucky or what.

And another. I love these so much. This one from @Digitalinfant is meta as well:

This one from @christinewhuang does seem autobiographical:

These next two are from UC-ers! May I present @tabone's joke about charts:

And @matthewcarlin's creation, which could either be taken very literally, as a jargon joke, or both:

Still going strong in round 3. I posted this one earlier than intended because certain office mates were getting impatient, Clay.

Way to go @davidzaza on meta x iPad:

Another relatable one: @brandexpression's coffee clock:

Something tells me @clpreg doesn't live in NY. WTF indeed :[

More UC-sponsored charts! Here are two from our esteemed Make A Chart Day founder, @bud_caddell (one of them is an internal joke, womp womp everyone else):

Two from @clayparkerjones:

And one from @jondstern, which I actually get since I've been on my "watch all culturally-significant 80s movies you missed the first time" kick:

Here's a hilarious truism on just one segment of the vast world hipsterdom by @marisazupan:

This one comes from @adamcl, along with my wishes for a lazy weekend:

And this one from @ishquez will be directly influencing my dinner plans:

All right, here is the final frontier, guys.

Here's one from @InnrChildAtPlay with a humorously circuitous title:

And the second ever Cellar Door-hosted sports-related chart from @paigecalvert (And potentially a reference to the other sports chart? Don't look at me, I have no idea.):

@chucky987 sent over a very impressively-complicated analysis of the word "believe" in song lyrics:

Especially on Fridays, via @anavisan:

@brandexpression's keep getting more and more clever with time. Or beer?

And our official last chart of Make A Chart Day IV comes from Undercurrent's newest member, @joe_liebman:

We ended up JUST shy of 40 charts this week with 38, which is bonkers, insane and awesome. You guys rock. Thanks again to Bud for the torch, and best of luck to whomever gets to host next week. Thanks everyone! Have a great weekend.

JK LOL EDIT: We had a last-minute entry from @TheRobHayes, and it's pretty cute/amusing/good:

TEEN ANGST : Julian C. Duron @ YES Gallery

2010-04-22T17:20:00.005-04:00

A few weeks ago, I went to my friend Julian's art opening. It's a good-sized show at YES GALLERY in Brooklyn called TEEN ANGST, and is up until next Tuesday, 26th April.

The reception was pretty great; there was a good crowd, a tangle of bikes outside, and it was my first time seeing Julian since he was involved in producing last year's JellyNYC pool parties (PS, I heard this summer's lineup is shaping out to be hot fire).

Here's an explanation of the collection, in his words:

This new collection of work reflects my passion for painting together with an experimental video titled International Instructional Video Series, which in my mind acts as the sour cherry on top of TEEN ANGST. The exhibition title seemed like the best way to describe my feelings toward the compositions as a whole, boasting a hyper-color palette, fluorescent pigments, and permanent marker. Each painting is a thorough exploration in hasty mark making, meaning, investigational or instantly gratifying marks with radical variations in surface quality and finish. The addition of inscriptions into the work references themes or brands popular among the youth demographic such as Google, scum, Coke, Four Loko, Apple, etc., which I attempted to render in adolescent style graffiti within the backgrounds of each cluttered abstract still life.

Most of the lumber used to build each painting surface comes from discarded or found materials, which I hand crafted into gallery style panels, and applied synthetic materials such as acrylic paint, aerosol, marker etc. This aesthetic, along with exposing raw elements of the construction on the surfaces calls attention to the materials in a Modernist sense reflecting the faux Earth conscious, here today–gone tomorrow, shabby- chic, bipolar, lazy, medicated, aloof, spastic and utter lackadaisical TEEN ANGST I have observed in art/design school and popular culture over the last few years.

I sadly got there too late to buy the piece I had my eye on (the girl who did get her hands on it was really cute and nice, so I couldn't even be mad), but had a blast ducking in to check it all out and say hi. The show is mostly paintings, with two installations (one of them video). Trippy and visually-stunning stuff; I've always been a fan of his blend of surrealism and still life. Get thee to Yes Gallery (147 India Street in Brooklyn) for some TEEN ANGST while you still can ^^

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

2010-04-06T07:35:00.001-04:00

One of the good things about getting a new phone is transferring all of your notes from your old one and rediscovering a world of cool things that you wanted to read about some day. Here's one my father told me about a year ago: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Think of it as an analog external hard drive of sorts: one that stores seeds. The idea was to consolidate all of the world's seeds into one place (more on this later), and two years ago a vault was built in Norway not too far from the North Pole. It cost $9 million, and was largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a handful of other countries.

[img from Wikimedia]

The chosen location for this vault was quite strategic; from Wikipedia:

Spitsbergen was considered ideal due to its lack of tectonic activity and its permafrost, which will aid preservation. The location 130 metres (430 ft) above sea level will ensure that the site remains dry even if the icecaps melt. Locally mined coal provides power for refrigeration units that further cool the seeds to the internationally-recommended standard – 18 °C (0 °F). Even if the equipment fails, at least several weeks will elapse before the temperature rises to the -3 °C (27 °F) of the surrounding sandstone bedrock.

Let's say that even though this thing is in a low-tectonic-activity area, a freak earthquake still happens. No problem: I read in a NYTimes article that the entrance to the vault "is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes." Also: "No one person has all the codes for entrance." Kinda like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, except Scandinavian. And no gold. Okay, nevermind.

Most of the reasons I have heard for this thing existing always threw images from the end of Cat's Cradle into my mind... that is, if something were to wipe out everything on Earth, we would have enough seed samples to "start over" all thanks to the Global Seed Vault. Apparently though, its current biggest reason for being is to help prevent the extinction of seed genes, since gene banks all over the world seem to run into issues with management, funding, natural disasters, and equipment failures. "Now these scattershot efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on world food production."

The Global Seed Vault has its own site, which includes a comprehensive list of all of the seed samples it holds. Right now there are half a million seed samples in there, and each sample has about 500 seeds in it... which brings it to about 250 million seeds. Wowzers.

There are a ton more interesting things about the Global Seed Vault; too much to write here. Like how it operates on a safety deposit box system re: the countries that submit seeds to it; or how recently Ireland sent over seeds for 32+ varieties of potatoes. Read more on the Wikipedia page!

EFIT for April 2nd

2010-04-05T07:52:00.005-04:00

I was overjoyed to get a message from my friend Julie on Thursday afternoon with the subject "Last minute EFIT?" We did our 5th long-distance one the next day (Friday, April 2nd).

For those who don't know – and there's surprisingly little on the Internet about it – EFIT stands for Ett foto i timmen, which is Swedish for (loosely) one photo an hour. I think typically it's a one-person project, but we like to do them together and share how we each see the world on an average day. I've never done one during a work day because I always feared the pictures would end up boring, but it was actually really fun.

10.23

11.53

12.45p

1.10p

2.42p

3.22p

4.35p

5.25p

6.32p

7.38p

8.09p

9.56p

10.26p

In the past, I've posted some of Julie's photos as well, but I always feel weird about uploading pictures other people have taken onto any web space of my own. Like I'm not supposed to or something. Trust me: they were great.

The Ecstasy of Gold

2010-03-31T17:47:00.003-04:00

I saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the first time last month. There are a lot of classic movies I haven't seen, and I always fear that unless I saw them early on and had years of context to build around the story, characters, and situational references, I "just won't get it" or appreciate as much as if I saw them from the beginning (never mind that I was far from being born when that movie was released).

I mostly watched it because I felt some kind of cultural duty to do so. Well, I loved it more than I ever thought I could. And I had completely forgotten that these movies were filmed with a bunch of Italian actors acting in Italian and some American actors acting in English. So I was totally confused until about halfway through the movie about the fact that some of the actors' lips just weren't syncing up. I know, I know.

Here is probably the most classic scene from the entire thing, and the one that made my jaw drop the most. If you've seen it, you'll know that the part that starts at 40s is a super huge deal that builds throughout the previous couple of hours.

Tuco (the Ugly – I also had no idea that the movie title referred to 3 different people) running through the cemetery paired with Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold" made me almost tear up. So good.

That's all. Please rent it.

Interdisciplinarity

2010-03-30T16:41:00.021-04:00

About a month ago, James asked if I might be interested in guest lecturing a class that he teaches at Parsons. Well, the class was last week (Information Design, made up of Sophomores and Juniors I believe) and went really well (I think, at least)!

I talked about interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems, which I fortunately get to do a fair bit of day to day. The basic premise of my chat was that the more complex a problem gets, the more thinking from various points of view /backgrounds /disciplines needs to come into the picture to solve it. It's a bit more jumbled than trying to draw a clean, linear path from problem to solution.

I gave a bunch of examples to illustrate this a bit more: I talked about how my Social Psychology background helps me do my job better by giving me a knowledge of group decision making, motivations, and behavior. I talked about how the more Laura sends me articles and papers about Urban Planning, the more I realize that it has a ton in common with digital strategy.

And then I gave some examples to illustrate that standing on the fringe of one's field yields a lot more disruptive & interesting ideas than standing in the middle of it and recycling the same thoughts over and over again. (This is why I only read one or two advertising-related blogs and everything else is about, well, everything else). My two favorite examples are about insects; those who know me IRL are probably sick of hearing about them by now.

That's a Morpho butterfly. When they are around different types of atmospheric vapors, the scales on their wings change color. An engineer at GE – Radislav Potyrailo – studied this and figured out how to apply this to sensor technology. Long story short: enhanced security sensors will soon be available in public places – the subway system, a concert venue, an airport. Radislav was able to connect the dots enough to see a relationship between butterfly wings and our safety.

Honeybees. In this SEED Magazine article from last summer (I recommend it to every single one of you), I read about Thomas Seeley, a Biologist at Cornell who has been studying honeybees for 30 years. He noticed over time that "there are intriguing similarities between how the bees in a swarm and the neurons in a brain are organized." Seeley is publishing a book later this year (Honeybee Democracy) that talks about what we can learn from the complex decision making processes in honeybees ("swarm intelligence"), and how we can apply these learnings to decision making in large groups.

Amazing, right? Neither Radislav and his team nor Thomas Seeley could have ended up here had they not been thinking beyond their own disciplines. People like this don't have to read volumes on transportation modeling or neuroscience to be able to solve complex problems, but having a basic knowledge of what's going on in other places at least helps them know where to start, or who to talk to next. And most exciting: how to adapt this high-ish level knowledge to their own areas of expertise to turn it into something completely different.

When I was leaving the office to go to Parsons that day, I told Alex I was nervous that the students would say, "What does this have to do with me?" He left me with a very comforting, "That's exactly the point!" Oh, right.

Prepping for talking about all of this was so fun, mostly because of the very nature of my chat – my inspiration came from all over the place. Here are some sources (almost in the exact order of my coming across them); please to enjoy:

Information Design on Wikipedia

Interdisciplinarity on Wikipedia

Biomimicry Institute

Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese – BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind

Reflections on Interdisciplinarianism

Mike Arauz: What Behavioral Psychology Can Teach Us About Engagement

Lateral thinking on Wikipedia

Negative capability on Wikipedia

Agile software development on Wikipedia

BBC – Nick Bryant's Australia: Visionary architect

Metaphor on Wikipedia

No One Knows What the F*** They're Doing (or "The 3 Types of Knowledge")

Finally: If you were in that class, hi! It was a pleasure to chat with you all last week. I learned some good stuff ^^ And a HUGE thank-you to James for thinking of me talking to an Information Design class (via interdisciplinary thought) in the first place!

Lady Gaga feat. Beyoncé and whole bunch of other brands

2010-03-12T11:11:00.010-05:00

Mike was kind enough to notify our office that the video for Telephone, by Lady Gaga feat. Beyoncé was released. It's nine minutes of flashy, entertaining stimuli:

Something that's hard to miss while the video rolls are all of the brands. Some look like blatant product placement, most notably Beats by Dre (susprise, they collaborated late last year); Virgin Mobile; and Polaroid (double surprise, she became a Creative Director @ Polaroid back in January). Others seem to be there for fun (the Pussy Wagon, Wonder Bread, and Miracle Whip). Here are a few I was able to catch:

Beats by Dre

Virgin Mobile

Diet Coke & Chanel

Plentyoffish.com and HP

I don't know how to classify this one, but it made me really, really happy. The Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill Vol. 1:

Polaroid:

Wonder Bread:

Miracle Whip:

I'm sure there were more that I didn't catch; feel free to leave your own in comments!

EDIT | Looks like Buzzfeed had the same idea 3 hours later with nearly identical screen shots. At least they caught one I had missed (Little Debbie).

Mr. Brainwash presents ICONS

2010-03-10T09:22:00.007-05:00

Last night Ana and I checked out the Mr. Brainwash ICONS show in the Meatpacking District. I remember being drawn to it because of the huge can of pink paint (I've been wanting to paint my closets this color for months); noticing a few other blogs cynically and aggressively hating it made me want to go more. It opened a month ago to lines around the block, but last night at 8pm it was practically ours.

As the name suggests, the show is about cultural icons. The style is similar to Banksy's, and some people even think that Banksy is Mr. Brainwash. Banksy made a movie called Exit Through The Gift Shop that screened at Sundance and apparently features him. The trailer reminds me of A Cross The Universe in a way, and I want to get my hands on it.

Anyway, about the show. There were lots of screen prints of people's faces - an art wall featuring guys like Basquiat, Damien Hirst, and Roy Lichtenstein; two fashion walls facing each other, one with models and the other featuring designers; lots of Madonna. There were also musician portraits made from pieces of broken up LPs, replicas of famous paintings with bits of contemporary culture snuck in, and installations of familiar brands & symbols. Two of my favorites were the Michelin man constructed out of tires, and a full-sized NYC taxi in Matchbox Car packaging. Brand names ranging from Campbell's Soup to Louis Vuitton were displayed on big spray paint cans. And there was a HUGE boom box downstairs.

ICONS is open until 31st March and has super convenient hours; free signed posters too. See some more pictures in this Flickr set.

Mr. Brainwash presents ICONS
415 W. 13th Street
www.mrbrainwash.com

EnHANTs

2010-02-24T16:16:00.003-05:00

I was poking around a few days ago for stories on RFID; I've been interested in the technology for about a year, and am really into the ways that so many different industries have experimented with it in making operations & the exchange of information more efficient. (If you haven't heard of Songdo yet, your mind will shatter to pieces. Mine is still recovering, 14 months later).

What I found was pretty awesome: this new technology called Energy-Harvesting Active Networked Tags (or, EnHANTs) that does just that: harvests energy and communicates information. A team at Columbia University is working on this flexible chip that harvests energy from things like the sun and movement, and communicates with other wireless devices using this power. We've all been hearing about harvesting energy to power small electronics for a couple of years; this is the same kind of thing, but in very tiny form, and with communications capabilities. It's getting a lot of attention right now because it won a Vodafone contest that was searching for new ways wireless technology could be used in times of global crisis. The EnHANTs team's project for the contest is called Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications, and deals with using these flexible, energy-harvesting chips in places where buildings are prone to fire or collapse. If something terrible happens and a building collapses, the chips could assess the area and communicate with rescue workers on their wireless devices. From an interview:

The system will be designed to enable the rescue forces to get a good understanding of the situation within a disaster site. In particular, the tags will be carried by people within the building and embedded in the infrastructure. In case of emergency, the tags will construct a network. This network will be used in order to transmit information (e.g., last known location of a survivor) from the survivors to receivers that will be deployed by the rescue forces around the disaster site. The multi-hop nature of the network will enable rescuers to obtain information from survivors that are relatively far from the receivers without depleting their energy resources.

Now that is pretty wonderful! And it gave me an idea. Remember the thing I mentioned in my butterfly article about sensors that can detect harmful vapors in the air? Radislav and the gang over at GE are working on these sensors; wouldn't it be great if they could combine this wearable RFID technology with the EnHANTs to add atmospheric monitoring capabilities? If there are harmful gases in the air, for example, this added functionality could help rescue workers mobilize accordingly (and even help keep them safe as well). I'm no engineer, but couldn't this be possible?

Anyway. Once this technology is ready to go, it will only be a matter of (several) months or (a few) years until a bunch of other industries begin using it to solve all sorts of problems. Let's just say I don't think the pronunciation of the acronym EnHANTs was an accident ;)

Social Behavior is not new

2010-02-17T15:39:00.002-05:00

My friend Marisa recently wrote a post over on her Tumblr called Our digital stone age and why we need to trust our intuition. It might seem a little strange at first to liken digital communications – a discipline that is so new that we laugh at head hunters who tell us they're looking for someone with 10 years of experience in it – to the stone age. In her post, she is referring to the fact that motivations and behaviors across digital channels are examined and pontificated on as if they are completely new sets of behaviors that we have never seen before. In some ways, they are new, since new platforms are popping up every day that serve different purposes for different types of information and relationships between people.

But the fundamentals of social behavior online shouldn't be that surprising to us, because they are rooted in a long heritage (as in, centuries old) of group behaviors.

…Passing down social rules of thumb from generation to generation is again NOT rocket science. It is social wisdom, it is the intuitive force that creates culture. “Digital” or “Online” or “Media” are no excuse for us to completely lose what millions of years have taught us about how to interact, create, live. We are humans, we already have culture; the digital world is not separate from this culture, and so this new digital chapter should be informed by the previous “real life” chapter, treating it as the foundation that it is.

In order to achieve this we need to look backwards and internally before we look forwards and externally. We need to trust our pre-existing social intuition to inform our digital tools. We need to innovate based upon what we already know about human interactions, community structure, relationships. We need to rely on this intuitive social knowledge to be smarter and more innovative about our “digital” selves. As brands, civilizations, humans.

This is one of those things that is so true that I don't know why more people haven't called out the "social media experts" sooner, Emperor's New Clothes style.

It's turning out that this subset of communications I've found myself in is helping me pull from my Social Cognition background a lot more than when I started my career as a Strategic Planner. It kind of intuitively makes sense to me, since a lot of Strategic Planning (the work I did in it, at least) had more to do with individual behaviors and motivations, while observing people across digital channels is more about group behavior. It's one of those common sense things, but not one that I might have necessarily thought about before. In either case, I love that I'm seeing more and more people pull from these principles and apply them to this business. It only makes sense, right?

Zebra finches playing guitars

2010-01-27T23:08:00.007-05:00

As you may know by now, sometimes wildly awesome things that have been around for a long time fly completely over my head for months (sometimes years) before I discover them. Barbican Centre might be one of those things. It's an arts complex in London that features visual art, music, dance, theatre, film, and education events. One part of the complex is called The Curve, for very apparent reasons:

The Curve is home to Curve Art, which is "A series of new site-specific commissions created for The Curve by contemporary artists." The one up right now looks awesome. It's by a French artist named Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, and features a bunch of musical instruments arranged throughout the space (mostly electric guitars, it seems). Also in the space: a bunch of little zebra finches!

Boursier-Mougenot’s installation for The Curve, his first solo exhibition in the UK, takes the form of a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a random and captivating soundscape.

If that sounds a little confusing, this video should help:

I love that! I like the concept alone, but the way that bright green and flecks of orange are brought together amongst muted grays and butter creams – with distortion and tiny tweets as a background – makes me smile throughout the entire thing.

[img via the exhibition page]
If you're in London before the 23rd of May and end up catching it, let me know! Special thanks to Roxy for sharing this with me.

Happy Birthday, Cellar Door!

2010-01-26T00:04:00.004-05:00

It's 12.05 AM, and Cellar Door is now FOUR! Lots has happened since January 2006, but I'll spare the details since I've – as you can see – written about it along the way.

I've been documenting my life since I was six; my first diary was a gradient of neons featuring Minnie and Mickey Mouse. I wrote about Cinderella and a blonde boy I had a crush on. Since then, I've kept with it and added about five thousand layers to it all.

In my two years at the VCU Adcenter, I filled seven 8.5 x 11 black, linen-bound sketchbooks with thoughts, ideas, and things I gathered along the way (everything from postcards to Polaroids and candy wrappers). I stopped writing on paper as much when I started this blog, and filled post upon post with the stuff.

I got a little down on my self at the end of 2009 when I looked at my archives and noticed that my frequency of blogging had steadily declined over the years:

2006: 168 posts
2007: 124 posts
2008: 83 posts
2009: 57 posts

I also got a little sad that I was no longer filling books as quickly as I had in school. Had I run out of thoughts? Had my brain stopped racing?

Then I realized that the amount of thinking and documenting hadn't changed, but had been spread across many more platforms over the years. I started taking pictures with everything that could take a picture (even my RAZR for a brief moment in 2006, yikes); I flew onto Twitter in 2007 (I have tiny thoughts all the time and this was finally the perfect place for them); I flew onto Tumblr in late 2008 for my medium thoughts (which were once thrown onto my blog with the rest of them). So really, all of this stuff used to be poured into one place: paper. Then two places: paper and a blog. Now: well, you know where I'm going with this...

4,454 pictures on Flickr
3,899 tweets
676 Tumblr posts

I guess the point I'm getting at is that whatever the platform, the thoughts are flying out as much as they ever were. Thanks for sticking around, guys :] you're inspiring as hell, and only get more so.

The Butterfly Effect

2010-01-17T23:05:00.009-05:00

Sometimes life will give you signs, and it is good if you can see them, because they can show you the way and prepare you for what is to come. The most important signs are usually not labeled, so they are like secret signs. They occur in the physical world, but they map your inner landscape, and they are made just for you. Since they are secrets, you cannot read them directly — instead you must use feeling and intuition to uncover their meaning.

– Jonathan Harris, Jan 16, 2010*

A few months ago, Kevin from Given Collective contacted me about another project he was cooking up (he was behind both One City Left and DOCUMENT Magazine). His next idea was for an online, thematic version of DOCUMENT called Weeklies, and asked if I would consider contributing. At the time something pretty strange was happening around me, and I decided to write about it and call it The Butterfly Effect. Kevin graciously commissioned a Toronto-based illustrator to create a visual to go along with my piece. Awesome!

At the end of September, I read a crazy article in an in-flight magazine, of all places, about the migration paths of monarch butterflies. Every year they fly from Canada and the Northern US all the way down to the volcanic belt of Mexico and back, and for thousands of years this path was a mystery. Then in the 1970s, an American engineer and a kid who had never met each other figured it all out together. The engineer was traveling in Mexico, and had known about a Canadian entomologist who had been trying to figure out the monarchs’ paths by tagging butterflies before they left region each year. The engineer spoke to some locals, scaled some volcanoes, and after a long time of searching happened upon a tagged butterfly. He called the number on the tag, and was shocked when it wasn’t the entomologist on the other end, but a 12 year-old boy in Texas. The boy had been tagging butterflies as a hobby for some time, but had no idea he would one day play a huge part in figuring out one of the biggest mysteries ever.

Two or three weeks later, some research at work led me to the coolest example of biomimicry I have ever come across. Nano-engineers have been using butterfly wings as inspiration to build better security systems. The wings are made up of thousands of little scales, and there is one type of butterfly whose wings change color when they sense certain atmospheric changes. These engineers are trying to recreate the basic structures of the wing scales to improve the technology in public security sensors (potentially making us safer at concert venues, in the subway, at airports, etc.). I couldn’t stop talking about it for days.

Not soon after that, I turned around at work to see Clay putting a presentation together. The slide he was making was a single monarch butterfly on a dark background. When I asked him about it (having forgotten about both the migration and biomimicry cases), all he said was, “Butterflies are actually kind of awesome.” All of a sudden something clicked in my head, and we spent the next few minutes talking about it. He brought up the butterfly effect, which had slipped my mind until then: that something as slight as the flap of a butterfly wing can alter the atmosphere enough to drastically affect weather patterns in the future.

By the time I read a blog post that weekend announcing the opening of a massive butterfly exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, I started feeling like there must be something going on here. I told Jack about it, and over the course of the next couple of weeks, butterfly imagery started popping up everywhere for him as well, the photographic evidence of which would turn up in my Inbox every day. I saw a blue morpho perched among piles of bones and shells in a window display on a cold and gray afternoon; I looked up from a pounding headache in the coffee shop to see a paper kite on a poster; I walked to the subway in the freezing rain to see the silhouette of wings on a hanging store sign; they were in a short story about nuclear holocaust; in the song title of a band I had never heard of who reached out to me online. Sure, this could be partially a case of perceptual vigilance, a type of selective perception that makes one more attuned to (and notice) the things they are looking for.

Refusing to believe that cognitive bias explained this entire thing, I read everything I could about butterflies. Spending some time on Wikipedia, I learned that throughout history butterflies have stood for both good and bad things, depending on the culture. Sometimes seeing one means a loved one is going to visit you, and other times it means that somebody is about to die. Sometimes you can expect good fortune if one lands on you, and other times you will have bad luck if you don’t kill the first one you see each year.

Reading a dream dictionary told me that butterflies often symbolize some kind of major transition. Remembering the fact that I had been through three major life changes in the second half of 2009 got me thinking about the subconscious. If the cryptic things that pop up in our dreams are actually manifestations of our conscious thoughts or stories that our lives are writing, why can’t these symbols be present in our waking life as well? Perhaps they are for everyone, but are so subtle that we don’t notice them at all or even know to look for them.

It’s clear that I haven’t figured this out yet or come to any sort of conclusion. In the meantime, butterflies have become a type of cognitive security blanket for me, every time I see one now, my mood soars. Maybe it’s my own way of telling myself that Things Are Pretty Great.

---

While I was thinking about all of this, I kept a small Flickr set documenting some of my (and a couple of Jack's) butterfly sightings. Check it out if you're so inclined. Otherwise: Thank you Kevin, thank you Devin for the illustration, and thank you *Jack for keeping the serendipity coming always! })i({

Audrey Kawasaki @ Jonathan LeVine

2010-01-10T00:02:00.005-05:00

I was fortunate enough to catch the final day of Audrey Kawasaki's NY exhibit today with The Retrospective's Gitamba, who was in NY for a few wonderful days. It's called Hajimari–a prelude, and was at Jonathan LeVine Gallery on W 20th Street.

For those who are unfamiliar with her work, Kawasaki does illustration and painting on wood. They are nearly all of beautiful girls with pouts and flowy hair, oftentimes featuring underwater themes, skeletons, and creepy little creatures.

The show title Hajimari means beginning in Japanese, and is a word often used in the introduction of a story. Although it is a theme she does not typically explore artistically, Audrey has always felt strongly rooted in two distinct cultures. Born and raised in America, with parents from Japan, she has been immersed in Japanese culture her entire life. Deeply connected to each of the two, she feels both cultures are very much a part of her personal identity.

I haven't gone through my mental list yet, but I can say with a huge degree of confidence that she is my favorite living artist (and has been for a number of years). And there were so many pieces at the show, much to my delight! Here are a few:

You can see a few more in my Flickr set, and the exhibit's page has images of all pieces + a description of the show. Hopefully it stays up for a while. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

H&R Block: too many shiny objects?

2010-01-04T10:40:00.011-05:00

This morning, I read about H&R Block's aggressive social media push to supplement their "H&R Block At Home" software that lets you do your taxes by yourself. Apparently they have screened and selected 1,000 of their current employees to lead (and presumably run) the campaign.

The tax pro force's main domain is the home website, where there are both community pages as well as direct "Ask a Tax Advisor" buttons (staffed beginning Jan. 5). The tax team will answer questions directly, of course, but will also "listen" in to concerns or problems being discussed within communities and forums and respond accordingly.

The article also brings up the fact that H&R Block were hesitant to get into "digital" at first out of fear that this service would cannibalize business from their retail locations. They have ultimately figured out how to combine the two services, by allowing people who do their own taxes to bring their files in and double check with tax preparers at the retail level. Pretty interesting, and I wonder how successful it will be. I won't be experiencing it first-hand.

In 2008, I did my taxes at H&R Block. I don't remember the details of my experience, which probably means that it was a painless one (considering what tax season can do to people). And everything afterward – the debits to my bank account, the refund check I got later on – went pretty much like clockwork.

Fast forward to last year. In early January, I got a big, empty envelope from them. The insert said something like, "We know you aren't thinking about taxes yet, but we are." And they really seemed to be: the empty envelope had a long check list on the back of it, outlining every document I needed to bring with me to have my return done this year. Before I had even received my W-2, I'd already been set up with a comprehensive list of everything I needed, and an envelope to put it all in.

A few weeks later, the woman who prepared my taxes in 2008 in Florida left me a friendly voice message asking that I call her to make my next appointment. Since I had decided to do my taxes in NY last year, I called a downtown Manhattan location instead. "Yes, I see your information all right here," I was told on the phone. So far so good.

Well, almost. During my appointment was when things got complicated. Really complicated. For starters, their database was being temperamental, which meant my 2007 return was impossible to access. The internal call center couldn't access it either, unless I told them the i.d. number of the Florida store (no, I didn't know it). There is apparently no way to find out a store's i.d. number in their system, even if you have its street address (which they also didn't seem to have; I had to pull it up on my BlackBerry); they eventually had to call Florida directly and ask an employee working in the store. I'd been thinking about internal communications and operations a lot by that point because of then-projects, and it was pretty mind blowing to think that some company databases are not equipped to find (or sort by) seemingly-important, basic information.

Other assorted things that happened during this experience include (but are not limited to):

– Charging me $30 for an extended service plan without asking me
– Not being able to refund the above charge directly (it requires an internal request that takes at least 1 month to process)
– Marking me down for nearly $500 of savings account interest income that was not mine
– Refusing my request to itemize my charitable donations
– Receiving "insufficient paperwork /information" notices from the IRS, leading to 3 more visits to the tax preparer and 2 appointments with a certified H&R Block CPA
– Being told "Oh, don't listen to [your tax preparer], she messes up sometimes," by an H&R Block employee upon one of my return visits in which my tax preparer had stepped out

[Click for bigger, sorry so teeny]
In consumer behavior, there is an adoption process stage called Confirmation. It's pretty much when post-purchase doubt is removed (and maybe evangelism starts, if things are awesome). H&R Block did a stellar job in many ways of making this process as painless as possible to bring me back in. The automatic debits; the checklist envelope; the followup call; and the ease at which I made my 2009 appointment all went above and beyond Confirmation – and the loop was nearly closed (this cycle would have repeated each year, ideally). And I'm sure there are parts of their new digital strategy that work great along with their At-Home kit as well.

But the thing is: companies have to be on the ball at every stage of the journey. What if my 2009 experience mirrors what many first-time-customers and "H&R Block At Home" walk-ins will only ever come in contact with? Because taxes are something we have to do every year, closing this feedback loop is so important! Otherwise people can end up feeling cheated and potentially go somewhere else the next time around. Like me (this year I'll be with an independent CPA that specializes in my industry). Maybe some of their communications budget should have been reallocated into streamlining database infrastructure or more robust employee training, rather than throwing a Twitter account, widgets, blogs, a YouTube channel, a Facebook fan page, AND apps (?!?!) into this strategy.

Looking back on 2009

2009-12-31T12:11:00.006-05:00

Usually in the last days of December I read old journal entries to relive some of the highlights of the year – and I did this year, and that was great. But then I realized that flipping through the pictures I've taken would be a lot more colorful (literally) and fun to look at. I went through some huge changes in 2009, and as it turns out, I filled up 50 pages documenting parts of it on Flickr. Here's the year in pictures:

[captions & indiv links here]

And some highlights...

Have a safe and happy 2010 everyone. See you next year!

Nothingness in space

2009-12-17T09:58:00.006-05:00

This one is for the space and science geeks. My friend David (we met on an AOL message board in the mid-90s, he was Musictopia and I was Angelynx, oh god I just admitted that) sent me a series of text messages this morning that made my head hurt. See if you guys can help:

So, it's impossible for actual nothingness to exist, right? Everything is something? Question: In the vacuum of space where large areas contain only a handful of particles far apart from each other, what is in between them? We can't say nothing, right? "Nothing" can't take up space. Right? So in a vast area of space you may only have a few particles and a lot of "???" Is it really completely empty? Nothing?

[img src]

I'm sure Wolfram Alpha can help somewhat, but I'm curious to hear people's explanations.

From daydreaming to Avatar

2009-12-12T19:25:00.008-05:00

I just read an article in Wired called Second Coming, which tells the story of how James Cameron's new movie Avatar came to be. It covers daydreaming about it in 1977 all the way to today (the movie comes out next Friday 18th). The article explains why Cameron seemed to disappear completely after Titanic came out (we haven't seen anything from him in 12 years): he wanted the alien world and its characters to be so realistic that he actually waited for technology to catch up with his visions. Hardware was also behind – a camera that excelled in shooting in both 2D and 3D filming didn't exist yet. He flew all the way to Tokyo with a partner to pitch a new camera technology of this caliber to Sony, and they agreed to produce it. Then he had to convince the movie theatre industry to upgrade theatres all over the country to support screening this new filming technology. It goes on and on, and ends with Fox giving Cameron $250 million for the project. My favorite parts were on the last page, and talked about the excruciating detail that went into dreaming up this fantasy planet called Pandora:

He started by hiring USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora. Frommer came on board in August 2005 and began by asking Cameron what he wanted the language to sound like? Did he want clicks and guttural sounds or something involving varying tones? To narrow the options, Frommer turned on a microphone and recorded a handful of samples for Cameron.

The director liked ejective consonants, a popping utterance that vaguely resembles choking. Frommer locked down a “sound palette” and started developing the language’s basic grammatical structure. Cameron had opinions on whether the modifier in a compound word should come first or last (first) and helped establish a rule regarding the nature of nouns. It took months to create the grammar alone. “He’s a very intense guy,” Frommer says. “He didn’t just tell me to build a language from scratch. He actually wanted to discuss points of grammar.”

Amazing. Check out this mini "making-of" clip:

Here's some stuff about the planet's plant ecosystem:

[...] Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.

WOW. I would love to hang out with someone with such an insane imagination and tenacious attention to detail. This is just the tip of the iceberg, too – Cameron even had Pandora's atmospheric density calculated. Are you going to see this movie? I'm not that big on this type of science fiction, but I might have to be now.

Nightingale x healthcare x visualizing data

2009-12-06T18:30:00.009-05:00

Some of you have seen this already:

It's a dynamic visualization that GE put together with Ben Fry and Seed Media to show the costs associated with different chronic illnesses. It's a Processing file, so I recommend heading over to The cost of getting sick to play around with it a little.

When I brought this partnership up with my friend Mike this week, he pointed me toward this:

Here's where stuff gets amazing: that was hand-drawn in 1858 by Florence Nightingale. Eighteen fifty-eight. EIGHTEEN. fifty-eight. Mike went on to tell me that in addition to being a nurse, Nightingale was a pretty brilliant statistician. She actually invented this kind of chart (it's called a polar area diagram). Wow!! Here is part of it in a little more detail:

It shows the causes of death in military hospitals during this time:

The area of each coloured wedge, measured from the centre as a common point, is in proportion to the statistic it represents. The blue outer wedges represent the deaths from: preventable or mitigable zymotic diseases, or in other words contagious diseases such as cholera and typhus. The central red wedges show the deaths from wounds. The black wedges in between represent deaths from all other causes. Deaths in the British field hospitals reached a peak during January 1855, when 2,761 soldiers died of contagious diseases, 83 from wounds and 324 from other causes making a total of 3,168. The army's average manpower for that month was 32,393. Using this information, Nightingale computed a mortality rate of 1,174 per 10,000 with 1,023 per 10,000 being from zymotic diseases. If this rate had continued, and troops had not been replaced frequently, then disease alone would have killed the entire British army in the Crimea.

The way this chart came about began with how Nightingale saw hospitals being run. Conditions were unsanitary (to put it lightly), and she wanted to see reform in the entire hospital system. Being a woman during this time made it pretty hard to get heard, so she decided to observe and write down the causes of death she was exposed to over a period of time through her own record-keeping system to see if she could make a convincing case for reform. Eventually she had amounted so much data that she was seeing patterns in (too many deaths that could have been prevented, essentially (the blue wedges)) that she did some calculations and finally did have a solid case. In brief, that mortality rates could decrease if some changes were made within city and military hospitals.

Nightingale needed a concise way to present this data and clearly make her point, so she told its story visually through the polar area chart to ensure that non-statisticians (public officials, in this case) could understand it. The rest of the story is pretty storybook: Her wishes for a formal investigation were granted in May 1857 and led to the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army. Nightingale hid herself from public attention, and became concerned for the army stationed in India. In 1858, for her contributions to army and hospital statistics Nightingale became the first woman to be elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. [src]

Everyone around me has been nerding out on telling compelling stories from heaps of numbers for a while now, and it was pretty great to find this (eighteen. fifty. eight.) and learn about one of the earliest processes and motivations behind graphical representations of statistics. Neat, huh?

Thanks Mike :]

Laura Strangelove on buses

2009-12-02T00:26:00.013-05:00

Laura is in the process of getting a Masters in City Planning with a focus on Transit. She's been into it for years, and has a soft spot for buses in particular. We recently realized that Urban Planning and Digital Strategy have so much in common that we're able to send each other articles, stories and links all the time that sit at the intersection of our respective interests.

Speaking of, Laura recently forwarded me a paper she wrote, and I found it so fascinating that I got her permission to post huge chunks of it here. It's called

Positive Public Perception of Bus Rapid Transit
as Dependent on How Unlike Conventional Bus Riding it Is
Or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bus
and talks about just that – a fairly new type of bus transit that could elevate people's general opinions of bus transit.

The bus is generally considered to be the most loathed form of public transportation. People, as a whole, do not like to ride the bus. A google search for “I love buses” turns up 217,000 results. A google search for “I hate buses” turns up 2,890,000 results. (...) Our culture’s hatred of buses even sneaks its way into our idioms—of late, to “throw [someone] under the bus” is a phrase that means to sacrifice another person for personal gain, even though throwing someone under a train or into the whirling propellers of a helicopter would almost surely result in more gruesome consequences.

To be fair, the bus has rightly earned some of its criticism. There is a plethora of reasons people do not like buses, and while all of them are not present all of the time, some of them are present most of the time. Buses can be unreliable and late, and when they do show up, they sometimes show up in pairs, or more insultingly, in groups of five. Waiting for a bus at a conventional pole-and-sign stop can be a cold, wet, and even dangerous adventure. A bus ride on a heavily-trafficked corridor with many stops is slow and lurching. Hardly any transit mode in the world can be considered more unpleasant than a standing-up ride on an overcrowded bus while carrying six shopping bags or an infant.

Enter Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). It's still a bus, but it's operationally different in a lot of ways. For one, dedicated rights-of-way: buses get their own lanes. One result of this is that they are seen as a unique form of transportation, rather than another vehicle sharing the road with everyone else. Dedicated bus lanes are also a lot more efficient (more on this soon).

images of current & proposed BRT systems in St. Petersburg, Florida; Changzhou, China; and Hamilton, Ontario

Another popular feature of BRT is pre-boarding fare collection: everybody pays (or swipes their card) ahead of time, like in the subway. When the bus arrives, everyone is "ready" and can board at once. Also results in more efficiency. Dedicated rights-of-way and pre-boarding fare collection reduce the likelihood of bus bunching, which is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.

Bus bunching occurs when one bus, due to traffic, a late start, or any other reason, is a little behind schedule, and as a result, arrives at each stop to see more people than usual waiting to board. Because it takes longer to board more people, the bus arrives at each subsequent stop more and more behind schedule. Meanwhile, the bus behind it—the next bus running the route—does not have a large number of passengers to pick up because any of those passengers who were early enough to be there when the earlier bus came by in all its lateness boarded it instead. By the end of the route, the second (or, when it’s really bad, third, fourth, or fifth[!]) bus will have caught up with the first bus, and the bus arrives very late and in multiple.

There are other factors that can set BRT apart from regular bus transit as well, to get commuters over the psychological barrier against them. The buses themselves look different, the stations are more sleekly designed (sometimes with modern logos and bright color schemes) and are built to accommodate pre-boarding fare collection. Here's an example from the RIT in Curitiba, Brazil, one of the most successful BRT systems in the world:

image from Wikimedia

A tubular station! That beats standing by a pole in the rain any day.

Does New York need this? Well, the MTA has dabbled in it with their Select Bus Service (SBS), which has a very limited run (bet you don't know where it is). Since the NYC subway system is so advanced & gets you almost anywhere you need to go, Laura sees the SBS as "an example of BRT used in the context of merely making bus service vastly superior" rather than its own, unique form of transportation.

In short, BRT is good for pulling buses out of their perceptual dead zones: the more they resemble – and are seen on par with – rail systems, the more psychologically accepted they will be, and the more passengers the system will attract. Of course it's not all shiny wonderfulness; Laura plays devil's advocate and raises some great questions (including cases of induced demand, which isn't always necessarily a "good" thing). She also writes about how BRT is so characteristically (and operationally) different from buses that people have even talked about removing the "B" from the system:

It is as though people are known to hate buses so deeply and thoroughly that the only way to trick them into riding one—even if it’s a bus with none of the problems of a conventional bus—is to disguise it with an Orwellian name change, a la 1984: But the Ministry of Love is still where people get tortured, and “Commuter Rapid Transit” is still, technically, a bus.

I recently spotted a PSFK article about the MTA investing further in more efficient bus transit, but the link seems to be dead (see? a sad, dead link). I did find This MTA page on their SBS Project that explains BRT really well, and explains how they envision BRT fitting into New York's transit system in the future. Exciting! Maybe it'll turn bus riding reluctance in NY around?

tweet by James

There is a chance that I may have butchered some of Laura's reasoning, as I just tried condensing 18 pages into a single post in just an evening. Stay tuned for edits, as (and if) she corrects me. Thanks, Laura!

Spiral Jetty and Time

2009-11-23T12:30:00.000-05:00

Almost all of the photography projects I'm ever involved with deal with time in some way. This, paired with my desire to visit Spiral Jetty in Utah by myself one day, made How to Conserve Art That Lives in a Lake? a pretty great find last week.

I had a dream about a year ago in which I found Spiral Jetty leading off of a beach on a tropical island, and walked to the end of it in a vast silence. It took me a few hours of creative Googling the next day to figure out whether or not this place actually existed, or if I had quite literally dreamed it up. It turns out that I learned about it in my AP Art History class in 2000, and it chose eight years later to show up in my subconscious. Ever since, I've wanted to buy a plane ticket to Utah and walk out to the middle of it by myself. Bud almost gave me a heart attack when I half told him this story a couple of months ago and he responded with, "I don't think that actually exists anymore."

Well, he was half right, it turns out. Apparently it was submerged for decades, and droughts caused it to resurface recently. Robert Smithson (the artist) was always into what the passage of time did to his works, and it's too bad he didn't live to see it come back out of the water. It looks a lot different now; salt and silt have whitened it considerably, and over the years people have also taken pieces of it with them as souvenirs.

The photography part of it comes in with Dia, the art foundation that owns the piece. They wanted to find a way to photograph Spiral Jetty longitudinally to see how the passage of time's effect on it could influence conservation efforts in the future. Because it's so huge, it was hard to figure out a way to do this without blowing through thousands (millions?) of dollars. They finally got there with a latex weather balloon, helium, fishing line, assorted tools, and a point-and-shoot. Pretty awesome, no? Anyway, I was happy that the article brought it back into my consciousness. I still want to go, too. Does anybody know if people are even allowed to walk to the end of it?

Fall 2009 Art in Chelsea

2009-11-22T00:21:00.004-05:00

I went to Chelsea today intending to visit one gallery, and ended up going to more than ten. It's a really, really good time to make the trip there, and I stumbled upon a few things that delighted me so much I was hopping in place.

Luke Smalley @ Clampart

It started with Luke Smalley. He passed away this past May, and Clampart is hosting a memorial exhibit of his Sunday Drive series. I haven't been this impressed with photography since I discovered Jeff Wall's light boxes by accident. The pictures are pretty big, and the colors and lighting are beautiful. The story is that three girls are taking a road trip to a prison where their boyfriends are incarcerated, and the boys are killing time until they arrive.

[images from clampart.com]

Chiharu Shiota @ Goff + Rosenthal

I think I was in disbelief when my friend Joe and I walked by Goff + Rosenthal and I saw the tangle of black threading through the door. I just found out about Chiharu Shiota two or three months ago, and have thought about her every few days since then. Her work has a lot of thread tangles (black and red), windows, pianos, and long dresses in it. This exhibit featured some sprawling black corners and boxed-in tangled objects (my favorite was a hardcover pocket book) suspended in black tangles. This was the most pleasant surprise of the day.

[images from chiharu-shiota.com]

Dan Flavin @ David Zwirner

I visited this one a couple of weeks ago with my friend Dan because I love light installations and I love Dan Flavin. I loved it so much that I had to go back today. I might make a fake one of these for my apartment one of these days. There's a huge room with pink and gold lights, and another part of David Zwirner with multiple rooms (each for a different color or color combination). My favorite might be the white room, even though the blue one is probably the most striking.

[white and pink & gold from davidzwirner.com]

Basquiat @ Stellan Holm Gallery

Wow! Walking by Stellan Holm and seeing this made me gasp like a complete creep. It's a small exhibit of some large Basquiat drawings. Made me smile and want to pour syrup all over a tabletop.

[image screen capped from stellanholm.com]

Andy Warhol @ Danzinger Projects

Double wow! This one at Danzinger Projects is called Greatness, and is a collection of Polaroids Warhol shot of famous athletes in the 1970s and 1980s. Think Muhammad Ali, Dorothy Hamill, and (yikes) OJ Simpson. Here's a good slideshow on The Moment.

Other highlights of the day included Kim Cogan @ Gallery Henoch (really pretty oil paintings of NYC scenes); Hockney @ PaceWildenstein; and John Wesley @ Fredericks & Freiser (Googling John Wesley only to find that there was an Anglican cleric by the same name is the most hilariously ironic thing in the universe. Click through only if you dare. NSFW.)

What do you know everything about?

2009-10-05T16:27:00.001-04:00

Last week Alex asked me the coolest question I had heard in a long time. And now I'm going to ask it of all of you:

I definitely wasn't prepared for Alex's answer: tennis courts. The best part is that when I asked why, he said, "I used to make them." WHAT! I don't know if I ever would have known that about him if this topic had not come up. That's fascinating.

So now I'm into asking everybody I know; I have a feeling that different people's answers could be surprising or not necessarily expected. For example, this is mine:

Please leave a comment and let me know yours; I'm sure this will start a bunch of interesting conversations ^^

Death Note & A Cross The Universe

2009-10-04T09:47:00.010-04:00

Two DVDs I ordered last week arrived –

The first one is called Death Note, which screened 2 years ago at the NY Asian Film Festival and is adapted from an animated series of the same name. I heard someone call Death Note a "gothic thriller" once, which I think is pretty accurate. And as you can imagine, this equals throngs of teenaged girls and otaku kids going nuts for it. I recently watched both live action movies and the sequel via Netflix and am minorly obsessed with one of the main characters, a detective named L with lots of eyeliner, a massive sweet tooth and aspergian tendencies. I fear that if I start watching the series, I'll never leave my house and spend a small fortune upping my Netflix plan.

The other one is a Justice tour documentary called A Cross the Universe that came out almost a year ago. It came with a bonus CD featuring a live show they did in San Francisco. The booklet features a ton of pictures from their 2008 tour, which fans got to submit when they were putting together the DVD/CD set. (Just a note: the trailer is a little NSFW)

I listened to the set at work last week and loved it, especially Phantom pt 1.5 (click to listen). The best part was that they closed with Master of Puppets with some Uffie mixed in, which they didn't do when I saw them @ Terminal 5 in 2007.

As for the DVD, I watched it on Friday night and it was thoroughly entertaining; never a boring moment. It definitely made me feel like my life was suddenly very boring. Let me know what you think if you've seen either or end up checking them out...

Bleach re-released

2009-10-02T09:54:00.009-04:00

It all started with this, yesterday afternoon:

Seeing a Nirvana song posted on a site that only features current releases was a treat. It ended up being a previously-unreleased, live version of a track from my favorite album, Bleach. Take a listen:

Reading further gave me the best news of the day (which was a tough feat; yesterday was pretty great!): For the 20th anniversary of its release (wow), SubPop is re-releasing Bleach as a double disc. The second disc contains the entire Pine Street session (remixed by Bleach's original producer), a booklet with a ton of previously unreleased pictures, and my favorite part: the vinyl is white. Apparently the original copy of Bleach was on white vinyl as well.

You can probably imagine by now that I pre-ordered it. I should be getting it by the end of the first week in November. That said, anybody want to buy my current vinyl copy? ^_~

Untitled, Anonymous 2009 – revealed

2009-10-01T17:50:00.005-04:00

The anonymous video project I wrote about almost a month ago (wtf, it's October?) had its official screening a couple of nights ago in London. Again, it's called UNTITLED, ANONYMOUS; clicking on that will take you to everyone's submissions, including mine! The theme of Paul's was around this Buddha quote that I hadn't heard before and now adore:

Great, isn't it? Check out a few of the videos; they range from beautiful and introspective all the way to bizarre, strange and completely bonkers.

From :) to :\ in 30 seconds

2009-09-15T13:27:00.007-04:00

This is going to be a quick one because I have approximately 30579 things on my plate, so sadly it's not as blown out as I would like it.

Anyway. I have my last.fm radio playing in the background when I work sometimes, and just now really liked what I was hearing (Miike Snow - Song for No One). I quickly flipped to the page to "♥" the track, and all of a sudden a little message appeared above the video.

Then I realized that it was the entire background that changed.

Twice!

I thought this was pretty cool, since I (and I'm assuming many others too) get really excited when I find a song I like, and even more excited to be able to mark it down so I can listen to it in the future. AT&T seemed to no only recognize this happiness, but also do it with explosive hearts to make me even more giddy. Plus, hearting something on last.fm is a neat little feature, and I liked that out of the entire site, AT&T chose that as the focus point of their communication with us on the site.

Then I noticed this:

Perfect! I clicked on the Twitter icon so I could share the track with my friends. But guess where it took me.

oh. slanty face. How quickly I was reminded of AT&T Wireless's bottom line, and yanked out of my song elation. Never mind that it took me to a completely different site, but are those phones even music phones? In short, they did a complete 180. This could have been so much more! Like, what if I had then been able to create a play list of my ♥'ed tracks from this current radio session within last.fm, and then share it with my friends? I would like that. And the :) would have remained.

A little video

2009-09-04T12:20:00.007-04:00

Hopefully Kyle from the London office doesn't get mad, but I've kept this to myself for a while and just can't anymore. Remember when I wrote about Untitled, Anonymous a while ago (oh, great, broken images)? Well, it was organized again by the UK office this year, and was taken up a notch – video. The submissions were to be:

a) autobiographical
b) under 3 minutes
c) anonymous

So here's my little one...

One of the many things I learned: Not to use iMovie if you're a perfectionist who wants to sync stop-motion with music ;) Sorry for the reveal ahead of time, Kyle!

(The song is Gimme Sympathy by Metric)

Google Street View documenting humanity

2009-08-21T11:28:00.004-04:00

I just read the most fascinating and beautiful post on Art Fag City about how Google Street View is an objective, impartial snapshot of humanity today. I had no idea such gems could be found there! It reminded me of this post about digital serendipity; you never know what you'll find as you're poking around the world from your desk.

Jon Rafman – the artist & guest blogger of the post – brings up about a million good points, but some of my favorites were about how Street View records the world: as it exists, at that very moment, in whatever state it is.

The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.

It definitely different from photographers who spend hours taking 500 shots, only to pick one that is perfect, no?

The last part of that quote – about the vastness of the project – is brought up again later: If Google chooses, their systematic storing of panoramic views serves photography’s historic role of cultural preservation. This could be a different version or perspective on things like the LIFE archives, maybe?

Rafman also brings up how technological phenomena like Street View are ongoing symbols of our world & how we interact with it evolves all the time. This very way of recording our world, this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience. Beautiful, a little wistfully sad, and squeakily delightful all in one.

Delightful error pages

2009-08-04T10:32:00.008-04:00

I know clever error pages aren't anything new, but I have seen 3 recently that I liked enough to take screen shots of.

This one was four or so months ago on Daytum:

Here's the swissmiss one I got a few nights ago:

And this morning: Firefox.

[click all for bigger if you can't read the text]

One would think error pages would = annoyed, I-just-want-to-use-the-site /find-what-I'm-looking-for thoughts, and they usually do... but these were disarmingly on-personality with each of the respective sites. Taking the time to put some effort into the little details and assuaging (hopefully infrequent) frustrations when things go wrong can go a long way, I guess*. I kind of want someone to do a psychological study on the effects of a disappointment framed in a charming way. Each of these times I smiled and forgot what I was even looking for or trying to do, and I was left with a positive feeling toward the site. An error page delighting someone? Pretty neat.

What are some of your favorites? Please share a screen shot or two if you can.

* One factor that matters though is obviously frequency: I have only seen each of these error pages only once. They can be as cute or clever as they want, but if they happen all the time (I'm looking at you, Fail Whale), they can somehow end up more maddening than a default error page. Over time, I began associating that whale with the Microsoft Office paper clip.

EDIT | The wonderful Amber just showed me this one she got at Sephora.com once:

Thanks Amber!

More Japanese phones and Galapagos Syndrome

2009-07-21T14:26:00.008-04:00

Well, this came at an opportune time. Remember when I was gushing over those Japanese phones last week? Today someone tweeted a link to this NYTimes article, which explains why they haven't been able to expand to other markets.

One of the reasons is that the phones themselves are too advanced for anyone else's infrastructures and capabilities. I knew they were years ahead of the rest of the world, but didn't realize just how much:

[Japan's] cellphones set the pace in almost every industry innovation: e-mail capabilities in 1999, camera phones in 2000, third-generation networks in 2001, full music downloads in 2002, electronic payments in 2004 and digital TV in 2005.

E-mail in 1999? That is bonkers. Apparently this conundrum has a name – Galápagos syndrome. Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University. The only Japanese handset manufacturer that's been able to significantly move into other markets is Sony, largely because of its partnership with Swedish manufacturer Ericsson.

Another big reason for this stunted global growth is that Japanese handset hardware is what seems to get the most resources and attention – bar code readers, credit card chips, electronic built-in car keys, facial recognition, etc. This seem to put the focus on the entire experience within the handset itself, rather than how it can be used as a tool to receive information from other places.

For instance, connecting a phone to a computer is a foreign concept to them, which is one of the reasons the iPhone did so poorly in its launch there. Coincidentally, this Wall Street Journal article from today talks about Apple's and RIM's successes over other brands because of services, software and data packages. "The two accounted for only 3% of all cellphones sold in the world last year but 35% of operating profits." Guess they were onto something all along.

I wonder if Japanese manufacturers could find a way to merge their innovations and vision in hardware with other company's software advancements. Can you imagine a Japanese phone with Apple's software/services, or something like that (one can dream)? It would be even more bonkers than mobile e-mail in 1999. The NYTimes quotes Natsuno's recommendation: "Japan’s handset makers must focus more on software and must be more aggressive in hiring foreign talent, and the country’s cellphone carriers must also set their sights overseas." What do you think?

Brutus Casa

2009-07-20T18:54:00.006-04:00

This is kind of a part II about the package I recently got from my friend Fumio. Here's the first thing I saw when I opened it: an issue of Brutus Magazine.

I first heard about Brutus when they profiled Naked a little while ago. This issue seems to be a special one, centering around interior design. Maybe it's the Hiragana, but Japanese magazines seem to be laid out so much nicer than ours. This is one of my favorite pages:

Don't you just want to live there? I think it's a bakery. It reminds me of the bookstore in... I think it's Norwegian Wood... that the girl inherits from her family. The one where she cooks a big feast for the main character in the kitchen upstairs, and there is a fire somewhere in the distance. This page made me daydream for several minutes.

Speaking of Murakami (but a different one), here is the most endearing picture of Takashi Murakami I've ever seen, wearing a big ball of his own work, and a flower crown hat:

(are you in a good mood yet?)

This is the best part. The cover of this magazine was very big. It wasn't a page at all, actually: it was a page-sized, flat box attached to the front and serving as the cover. There was a little window cut out of the inside, revealing...

Sometimes the most delightful things come out of putting two completely different ideas together. In this case, a plate and a magazine. Would you ever have dreamed of opening a strangely-big magazine cover and having a little dish slide out?