Obama, recently, revealed part of his framework for simplifying his decision making process,“ namely: same suit, different day. Brian Eno nicely outlines the same as cowboys versus farmers:
Describing his philosophy of studio work, Mr. Eno tries out another big metaphor: cowboys versus farmers. Most of what happens in a recording studio is repetitive monotony, tilling the same soil over and over to make slight improvements — insufferably boring, in his view. Mr. Eno prefers to see himself as a cowboy — or, even better, a prospector — constantly seeking out new territory, never staying in the same place for long.
“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. “I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”
We can’t make any life in New York without composing a private map of it in our minds.
An actual map of New York recalls our inner map of the city.
Simultaneously [New York is] a map to be learned and a place to aspire to.
A city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here.
Even when we are established here, New York somehow still seems a place we aspire to.
We go on being inspired even when we’re most exasperated.
If the energy of New York is the energy of aspiration, the spirit of New York is really the spirit of accommodation.
And yet both shape the city’s maps, for what aspirations and accommodations share is the quality of becoming, of not being fixed in place of being in every way unfinished.
In New York, the space between what you want and what you’ve got creates a civic itchiness.
I don’t know a single content New Yorker.
To make a home in New York, we first have to find a place on the map of the city to make it in.
The map alone teaches us lessons about the kind of home you can make.
Each summer, she visited New York. “What’s your diary like?” preceded overlapping calendars to find where we might place the visit. And each summer, I drew a map for my guest. Shopping places, seeing places, eating places, finding places, sitting places, secret places. The neighborhood diagrams charted my moves through the city — East Village, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens — and were as unknowable as they were temporary. Each summer, places dissipated into places they used to be. Drawn maps, a history of a moment. The ritual of the map became the truth that persisted.
We experiment; we assume; we fail; we experiment some more. Finally, tentatively, we succeed.
Megan Garber on the City of Tomorrow and the dead dream of the dirigible. She continues, “[They are] a timely reminder not just of the short, happy life of airship hegemony, but also of the crazy contingency of history. …. Like the hot-air balloons that preceded it and the wing-thrusted planes that would render it all but obsolete, the Zeppelin represented a hope for a future that might have been, but, finally, was not — an accident of history whose demise was as inevitable as humans seeking the sky.”
The lessons from Internet school are life lessons. If I can sum them up I would say they are: 1. The Internet and the emergence of networks have disrupted and will continue to disrupt structures that are hierarchical. 2. Learn technologies and use them to build. We are no longer designers or writers or technologists, we’re creators. 3. Know yourself, have an opinion and share it. You’ll find others like you. Networks aren’t lonely, they’re empowering. 4. There is very little reason to work for others. If you have the skills that make you hirable, you have the skills to create something for yourself, and in turn, for others. 5. Don’t spend all your time refining, get your ideas out there and see if people like them.
[Y]ou don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.
That’s Annie Dillard in her 1989 book, The Writing Life. In it, she tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student:
“Do you think I could be a writer?” “ ‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?’ ” The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sentences he could begin,” and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.’ ”
But:
[W]ouldn’t the equivalent of paint be words rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while you can brush or even drip paint on a canvas and make something interesting happen, just piling up words, one after the other, won’t do much of anything until something else has been added.
Frank Chimero and I came together over a shared commitment to jazz. But not only exchanges of music. We emulated the form. He would write a blog post. I would respond. I would improvise one of his hunches. He would iterate one of my posts. A call-and-response approach to a developing friendship.
We wrote like this alongside one another without ever meeting or speaking directly – much like many of us: we never meet the people we admire from afar. We read their stories. We watch their videos. We inspect their work. We make up the in-between parts. We improvise. Frank’s stories became my stories, our stories. This book is, partly, about making things out of stories, and using them to help us live well.
Without warning one day, a mail from Frank appeared in my inbox, introducing himself:
You know what I love about jazz and improvisation? It’s all process. 100%. The essence of it is the process, every time is different, and to truly partake in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun. And in a world riddled with a feeling of inertia, I want to !nd a verb and hold on to it for dear life.
My conversations with Frank began to draw a line between the adjacent systems in the world and our own design process. Jazz. Tools. Art. Pizza. Announce a noun, and Frank helps trace its mutable shape to something more active. A verb! The adjacent process.
Deciphering and designing these systems is hard work. Done well, and one gets there “the long, hard, stupid way,” as Frank frames it in the pages to come, nodding to the gap between efficiency and the effort that compels us to make things with pride and compassion. Our process will vary, but steeling ourselves to persist is what Frank gives us the tools to do.
In that way, this book is not unlike a more ubiquitous tool and platform, the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Today, we take it for granted, mostly, but its numbering system at one point had to be designed. At a time when telephone poles lined dirt trails, Bureau of Public Roads employee Edwin W. James and committee were asked to come up with a more expandable system as roads were growing in the 1920s. They designed what we know today as the Interstate Numbering System. Prior to that, people relied on color codes for direction. Telephone poles ringed with color bands lined highways, corresponding to individual dirt trails across the country. As trails expanded, telephone poles became painted from the ground up, sometimes fifteen feet high, so trying to distinguish among colors became dangerous.
See also: The Shape of Design is a book by Frank Chimero about the Whys of Design.
E. W. James changed that. He decided that motorists would be able to figure out where they were at any time given the intersection of any two highways. North/south highways would be numbered: with odd numbers; east/west with even numbers; and numbers would increase as you go east and north. The Interstate Numbering System was designed for expansion, anticipating the future contributions of people, cities, unexpectedness. It’s a tool. It’s a platform. And it’s still not done nearly 100 years later.
If you wish to use this book as a tool, by all means, put it down at any time. Leave the road. You will find your way back as the intersection of two points will serve as your guide. Then wander back. This is the point of any road or system after all: to take you to a destination in a time in need. Or, consider the book as a platform and musical score: respond to a passage, to a chapter. Consider Frank’s call your opportunity to respond, and each sentence your opportunity to create. That is the reason they were written.
I’m honored to say that since that original mail, there have been many Frank mails in my inbox. Later:
I see a platform and it tells me two things: first, other people’s contributions are important. Second, the world is not done. Wow. If I want to believe anything, it’s that.
Start improvising.
The following is only an excerpt from The Shape of Design, a book by Frank Chimero about the Whys of design, published here with permission. It was delightful to be part of the shaping and will be responding to it for years to come. Hurry off immediately to read it in its entirety, bring some into your home, or just follow along.
A grand avenue like Fifth should be adorned with lovely, stately street clocks, right?New York business owners whose shops were located on this pricey stretch of real estate seemed to think so. These towering timepieces (which also functioned as advertising vehicles) sprouted up in the late 19th century until about 1920, when watches became more popular.
I notice the intersection of cities and timepieces when I’m running – in New York and elsewhere. I always head out first thing in the morning before commuters stir, the time a city betrays its secrets, bare with honesty, without its citizens clothing it with attitude. When I do, the relationship of that city with time stands apparent. Run through Brooklyn on a given morning, and you’ll go no further than eight blocks before a church tower, park clock, or intersection reveals the time. Yet other cities are void of public reveals. Time dissipates into the pockets of citizens, and the absence and presence of time and timepieces is just as tangible and meaningful as the time itself.
“Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously — supposing they were noticed at all — by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.” —Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation”
Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness — green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). when the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colors on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness.
But over time, the discrepancy between the green color and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a color that corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change to color to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green.
During a fairly riveting analysis of the discourse marker “so,” the Lexicon Valley podcast gives an unexpected definition of discourse analysis:
Discourse analysts view language as a kind of infrastructure. Just as a city needs roads and telephone wires and computer connections, and its that infrastructure that provides for the possibility of social living, our relationships and institutions require an infrastructure of interaction as well.
Wow. Back as a graduate student – or, I suppose any kind student – I’d only ever endeavored to create one independent study. This was Discourse Analysis. I still, today, consider it often. While I’m not so sure cities need telephone wires, language as infrastructure for interaction! The entire podcast series is pretty terrific.
“Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none, don’t live anywhere.” —Patricio Guzmán, director, Nostalgia de la Luz, or Nostalgia for the Light
[Image: The ESO’s La Silla telescope site in the southern Atacama Desert, Chile. Credit: Iztok Boncina/ESO. “Astronomy and archaeology, Mr. Guzmán believes, are variations of the same quest, with one directed toward the sky and the other into the earth.”]
No one is a foreigner in New York. And in New York, you walk. Your rapport with the terrain is like nowhere else; you measure distances with your bones and your muscles. You build a physical relationship to the city.
Emmanuel Schalitcf. “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only traveling; namely, the strange.” —Jane Jacobs, via Jonah Lehrer
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