November 2009
50 posts
1 tag
A people pattern
At the kitchen table, where ideas started, I founded The Greenridge Gazette. I didn’t read other newspapers at the time; I was eight years old. Yet I liked the simplicity of gathering stories from people to print on a page — for a profit. It seemed a step beyond lemonade. So it began.
And so did the paradox of a journalist: I needed content, but the spatial configuration and social...
Inevitable versus optional →
Haruki Murakami on the difference between inevitable versus optional:
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important part of marathon running.
I often...
The rhetoric of enumeration →
Umberto Eco on the importance of curating lists:
[T]he list maker often is compelled to acknowledge that each accounting predicates an uncountable number of shadow lists, alternative choices abounding. Such recording seeks order even as the process implies the chaos of ever-lengthening inventories — thus the “infinity” of lists.
On the job of the list maker:
If the list maker’s...
On being specific →
Glenn Gould was renowned for the control he had over every aspect of his playing environment:
He invariably insisted that it be extremely warm. [T]he air conditioning engineer had to work just as hard as the recording engineers. The piano had to be set at a certain height and would be raised on wooden blocks if necessary. A small rug would sometimes be required for his feet underneath the piano....
1 tag
“The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it...”
– Adam Gopnik, staff writer, The New Yorker (See him respond in the present.)
More slowly slowly →
Maira Kalman:
The United States of America could be less fastly fastly and more slowly slowly. We could think small and shift to a new (old) way of growing food and eating and being.
See also: Alice Water’s The Edible Schoolyard, F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook, Edible Schoolyard at PS 216 Brooklyn
A network of function over geometry →
Daniel Nairn on Brasilia, specifically on a network of paths showing where human activity was very different from the plan:
This is the network of function over geometry. The paths are trodden out of convenience, but they also gently meander.
In 1961, Lewis Mumford recognized this same tendency when Brasilia was under construction:
[T]he slow curve is the natural line of the footwalker, as anyone...
Thanksgiving 1980 →
Ethan Hawke narrating the story of The High Line in New York City:
Rail traffic declined on the High Line, and part of it was torn down in the 1960s. The last train ran down the High Line before Thanksgiving in 1980 carrying three boxcarsful of frozen turkeys.
The short film chronicling its history, birds and all, here.
Caring about places →
A sense of place is beyond control of a single person:
It is not the designer who creates the sense of place. It is the user or observer. The designer merely sets out opportunities for others to use — to make distinctions, to perceive connections and to take advantage (or not) or the structure or thought that is there.
Donlyn Lyndon goes on to issue a cautionary note, “Places that harbor no...
1 tag
“The art world has historically been a black box for most people, and I really...”
– Jen Bekman of Jen Bekman Projects on 20x200
The paradox of the paradox of choice →
Ten years ago, conventional wisdom suggested that more choice was bad. Now, it seems that the opposite is true:
[A] more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink...
The possibilities of an aphorism →
On the nausea of the novel versus the confines of the essay:
Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing — especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or — even better! — an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing...
Paramodernism →
[It] requires actual action by actual people in actual space — not the repackaged neomodernism that seems to be cropping up everywhere, a literally redesigned utopia that ignores the social, the political and the very notion of a just city or the right to the city — but one which is capable of taking on the profound and intertwined crises of poverty, injustice and the environment. This requires...
1 tag
Here comes a regular
I tell stories about people. Sitting on subways, in airports, or in cafes in new cities, I make up stories about people. I tell stories in part because I imagine others’ lives, but mostly because it helps give context to my own. At times, I take this a bit further, and imagine what it’s like, when I visit a new town, to leave behind where I am and, for a moment, suspend belief about the...
The point of points →
the practice comma art comma method comma or system of inserting points or open single quote periods closed single quote to aide the sense comma in writing or printing semicolon division into sentences comma clauses comma etc period by means of points or periods period other punctuation marks comma e period g period exclamation marks comma question marks comma refer to the tone or structure of...
A test for relationships →
Milton Glaser:
There is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you...
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“Music is everywhere. It’s one of the currencies of being human.”
– Yo-Yo Ma
The science of shoelaces →
Most people think there are one or two methods for tying shoelaces. However:
Many are surprised to learn that there’s more than one method, let alone seventeen! This sheer variety is testament to the ingenuity of people throughout the ages in their quest to prevent shoelaces from coming undone.
Admittedly, I am sort of taken with all the methods, and the feature comparisons. Perhaps...
Symphonies of everyday sound →
Luke Fowler is charting a grammar for listening:
Luke Fowler creates field recordings to posit questions on how to develop new dialogues between looking and listening. The artist responds to pivotal moments in the history of Western culture’s aim to classify noise, music and everyday sounds: John Cage’s 1953 composition 4’33’’, silence used in experimental films of the 1960s, and Peter Schaeffer’s...
Subway psychology, and the "no justification"... →
Researchers set out to unpack rituals on the subway, and examined a common societal pattern: Why don’t people give up their seats to others they “should” give them up for?
It seems all they needed to do was ask, simply.
Students in [an] experimental social psychology class took to the underground to ask for seats, under a number of conditions (either with no justification, or...
The park prescription →
Taking walks in parks and getting outside as a doctor’s prescription:
I have started to make formal “park prescriptions.” The prescribing instructions are considerably more detailed than ones you might get with a medication; they include the location of a local green space, the name of a specific trail and, when possible, exact mileage. It turns out I am not alone. I’ve...
Design anticipates →
Ramp-shaped railroad cars, invented by Henry Latimer Simmons:
One train may passover another train which it meets or overtakes upon the same track.
“Crashproof,” as Greg Ross points out. The 1895 patent.
[Image: Futility Closet]
New York City startups, and designing for people →
Anil Dash on New York City startups:
New York City startups are as likely to be focused on the arts and crafts as on the bits and bites, to be influenced by our unparalleled culture as by the latest browser features, and informed by the dynamic interaction of different social groups and classes that’s unavoidable in our city, but uncommon in Silicon Valley. Best of all, the support for these...
Stick with people who give you bad advice →
Penelope Trunk:
If you’re getting advice from someone who has never steered you wrong, then you’re not asking this person enough questions. After a while, someone who has given you a lot of advice will falter. Because no one is perfect, and no one can do as well at running your life as you can. So if you find someone who is giving good advice, push harder, until you get to their...
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The swingset manifesto
At age five, Melissa Foley and I became friends because she violated my personal manifesto. I spotted her on the swingset in my yard without permission. I, the oldest child in the family, had already arranged a rigorous permission system for swingset use. And this strange four-year-old, with all the courage I didn’t have, unflappably swung. I approached her, furious, reciting the Manifesto...
The value of voids →
On the presence of absence:
Perception is at least a twofold process: the first stage is an awareness; the second attends more directly to the particular stimulus. In staking out our place in the world, we begin by reforming the relevant order as a means of overlaying significance onto that terrain. Disturbance, whether by adding or subtracting from the landscape, is the first realization of...
The foster-mother of books →
On an editor at work:
Miss Julie Eidesheim, of Alsatian extraction, and consequently a linguist, is a foster-mother of books. She delivers them, pins up their didies without comment on sex, numbers and picks out the solecisms from their sheets. Frequently and usually she proceeds further. She teaches her charges how to spell, she corrects their pronunciation with diacritical marks, she gives them...
1 tag
“A classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has...”
– John Dewey, 1859-1952 [cf.]
Taming the alarm clock →
A nine-point proposal for crafting a more humane alarm clock (or, how to play an aria):
First, replace the ferocious bell with a discreet dry sponge, then sharpen the hour hand (1) like the blade of a pocket knife so that when it comes into contact with the thread (2) you have extended to correspond with the hour at which you want to be woken, it will sever it. A sturdy firebrick (3) painted dull...
What You See Is What You Mean →
On Donald Knuth and when WYSIWYG transforms to WYSIWYM:
As opposed to industry-standard page layout programs that implement a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) paradigm, TeX produces “What You See Is What You Mean” (WYSIWYM) by using plain text files and a semantic mark-up language compiled on-the-fly to produce final pages.
Then:
This is where the moral objection comes in. Once the...
Composition in performance, the future →
Robin Sloan asks, what if the magazine article of the future, the album of the future, and the novel of the future are all the same thing, live events:
It’s an amazing live event that happens… every night! But I don’t really like the associa tion, because it implies so much about format, tone, scale — lots of things. There’s a reason I’m building my perfect weapon out of TED and Phoot Camp, not...
Spontaneously, against your better judgment →
Often, I return to Seamus Heaney, in his Crediting Poetry Nobel lecture, where he explores the properties of poetry:
I credit [poetry] immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently encourage myself (and whoever else might be listening) to “walk on air against your better judgment.” But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality …...
Algorithmic expressionism →
Mark Wilson in an interview on the intuitive nature of writing software:
Writing software can be very intuitive. Even with a very formally defined programming goal, there are usually many different ways to achieve that goal. Choosing a good path to achieve the goal is a question of intuition, judgment, intelligence, and probably a thousand other things. In my case, I don’t have a formally...
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“Fifty years ago the notion of releasing a product unfinished — with the...”
– Kevin Kelly
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A ban on busy
Over lunch, over the phone, over email, and some simple eavesdropping, I’ve noticed a pattern. Because the social constructs of a greeting includes a banal how-are-you salutation, people tend to answer abruptly. And recently, I’ve heard people answer most often using a single word: “busy.”
The conversation, which might have otherwise had potential, immediately takes a dive into...
Defying the limits of paper →
Inspired by a 1967 paper airplane contest at the Great Hall in New York, Klara Hobza developed a contest, the New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest.
This weekend, Studio 360 interviewed Hobza on the book which chronicles the entries:
Depending on what you try to achieve with your paper airplane, you’ll choose a different design. If it’s supposed to stay in the air for a long time,...
Bauhaus women →
Ninety years after Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, its female students sound as contemporary as they would today.
But The Guardian poses a question: if the world’s most famous modern art school accepted women, then why have we never heard of them?
The school’s fleeting existence (just 14 years), the rise of the anti-modern National Socialist movement and six years of world war may have been...
The honey maker of the United States →
The White House carpenter is making honey:
A White House carpenter for the past 25 years, Mr. Brandts started beekeeping in the backyard of his Maryland home three years ago.
Now it’s been organized into something quite impressive:
Numbering more than 65,000 at one point, the bees produced a bumper crop of honey this year, the first time honey has ever been made on White House grounds....
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Cybernetics →
Brian Eno, cybernetics, and systems thinking:
Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots — the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words...
RIP: the clothes peg →
Wooden clothes pegs, an invention of the American sect, the Shakers, have been mothballed and are no longer manufactured in the United States. Why? A sharp decline in the use of clothes lines:
Some 80 per cent of US households own and operate a tumble dryer, with millions more of us going down the street to a laundromat. The average American household dries eight loads of washing a week; over 2...
The writing of Sesame Street as arranged marriage →
On the writing process for Sesame Street:
The show’s research team developed an annotated document, or “Writer’s Notebook”, which provided extended and developed definitions of the researchers’ curriculum goals. The notebook assisted the writers and producers in translating their educational goals into televised material. Suggestions in the notebook were free of...
554 years and counting →
On why Gutenberg is the first typographer and its relationship to music:
[Letters] have a shape and life of their own outside of legibility. This is the birth of typography as a profession, which is akin to the birth of recorded music. Before music could be captured and reproduced, musical performances were heard once by whoever was present, just as typographic works could only be performed once...
The stoop →
I’m a stoop dweller. No matter the season, this marginal space functions as a break between inside and outside, between familiar and unfamiliar, between recognized and anonymity, between private and public, between lost and found. Or perhaps it’s just a place to watch from.
Josh Owen moves the essence of the stoop off of the typical urban grid, so the stoop can be translated to a park...
An imperfect list of obsolete →
Privacy may be in danger of becoming obsolete if one lets it. Getting lost is not. Obsolete, an encyclopedia of once-common things passing us by. [See also]
World builders →
Jonathan Harris shares a series of powerful vignettes about both the current state of the digital world, as he sees it, and his vision for its future:
You could argue that people will do what people will do, and that trying to change people’s behavior is arrogant and foolish. There is truth to that, but people’s behavior is largely influenced by the context in which they live. People who live...
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“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. (Happy the person who could learn the...”
– Lucretius [via]
The making of the modern museum →
Abbott Miller has designed The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum, a book chronicling the museum’s 50th anniversary. [Image: “The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum” designed by Abbott Miller. via.]
The motifs of the book are inspired from the museum’s architecture and Wright’s iconic style:
The...