sitelanguage

Sounds I miss when I wear my ipod

I've read stories where someone snores like a buzzsaw, but I'd never actually heard it until yesterday on the subway. Though come to think of it he really sounded more like a Harley.

And now the mawkishness sets in

This is the last time I'll watch the sudden blooming, over a couple of days in late spring, of our misbegotten crab apple tree. The tree pokes out of a two-foot-diameter hole in the concrete in front of the building next to ours. Ten months of the year it's the unprettiest tree you ever did see. Its stunted trunk evinces past prunings like a series of permanent bad haircuts. Twiggy little growths stick out all along the trunk's length until finally it branches out into a few limbs, a couple of which appear dead and none of which reach higher than eight feet or so. Having no idea what kind it was when we moved in in '96, I couldn't have been more surprised the first time I saw those pink flowers—they were just so garish and improbable. They lasted a few weeks, longer than the cherry blossoms across the street, and by the time they were gone the live limbs had grown a respectable covering of reddish-green leaves. Needless to say, since then I have thought of it as our tree, especially since it's our stoop that benefits from its fractured shade. Of all the signs of spring in New York this is the closest and the best. (First in what may be a series of posts that begin "This is the last time I'll..." I warn you, if sentimentality makes you cringe you'd best stop reading this blog until our cross-country move is over and done with.)

Pink shadow

The cherry blossoms are falling on my block this week, a sad reminder that I had to be out of town during this year's Sakura Matsuri at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Still, I love shuffling through these pink piles and sifting the soft little petals through my hands like confetti. Resolved: I will not totally miss the lilacs.

From the air

(11/24/04) I love flying coast-to-coast. Perhaps this is because I don't do it as often as some people, but I find it very calming to be in the air for a few hours, required to sit still, with no media imposed upon me except on tiny or distant screens that are easy to ignore. What's intriguing me on this trip, though, is the effect of the plane's particular "room tone" on my state of mind. The Boeing 757 I was on from NYC to Denver had a dense, airy hiss that seemed to fill my ears and make me feel a bit spacey. I found I could do some rather procedural, rote work on the project I'm doing, but couldn't really put ideas together. Now I'm on a 767, hearing a much deeper, layered white noise,  a low continuous whoosh with an underlying rumble. This is a wonderful sound: now I can think.

Hello, did I miss this?

Hi Lia,
I'm so sorry I flaked on participating in this. I was in the middle of dredging up my favorite camphone self-portrait to send you when a client called with some revisions needed to a project and I got caught up in work and totally forgot.

No matter though, since it seems that Ranjit is doing the exact same things this weekend that I am--out in Manhattan late Friday, going to the GAP greenmarket Saturday, searching the web for a recipe to cook what he's bought, cooking... jeez, we even both bought radishes. It's been so interesting looking in on the project as it goes on, seeing all the uncanny resemblances between these folks' lives and mine which are of course not really uncanny at all, for a bunch of 20ish-to-30ish media types all living in NYC, in some cases mere blocks from one another.

Anyway, glad it's going so well, just kicking myself for missing the chance to join in.

BTW, nice wristphotos; I love that they're square. I've got to ask Ranjit how he got that oldtimey lavender cast on some of those Sidekick shots he took.

Best, Andrea

Behaving only just forgiveably in public

This morning I ran out of money in the middle of paying for a muffin at the deli below my office. I scraped the bottom of my change purse for pennies (I was late already, no time for an ATM stop). Failing to come up with enough change as the cashier alternately scooped coins off the counter and stared, I grabbed all fifteen cents in the "take a penny" cup and vowed to her I'd give it back next time. As I left the office this evening and slunk past the deli, still without a cent, it seemed to me I was on the verge of running down what slack I could reasonably expect to be cut around here. True, the company is moving its offices to another building at the end of the year, which will likely end my visits to this deli, but I've lived in this city twelve years, working in this neighborhood on and off the whole time, and I know with Seinfeldian determinacy how one comes back around to people and places. Then of course, no sooner did I start toward the subway than I felt ravenously hungry and remembered the cup of yogurt in my purse. I'm compelled to admit it: not only did I stop at another deli and collect a plastic spoon without buying anything, but I proceeded to eat the yogurt on the subway, risking certain calamity and dry cleaning liability if the train had stopped short. All gone, I thought, scraping the last spoonful  out, the slack is all gone.

(Be warned, subway slackers: Bradamant stands poised to capture your transit faux pas. Or sits, if she was able to get a seat.)

I giggle helplessly

Timely: David Brooks Also Eats Cereal (via Ishbadiddle)
Timeless: Strindberg and Helium (via the Good Experience newsletter)

Hunters and collectors

Mike recently alerted me to Fraudfrond, a photo archive of cellcom towers disguised rather haplessly as trees. "Have you seen these things??!" asks Mr. Fraudfrond. It's a question that seems to be motivating a growing number of phonecam-blogging obsessives. Like birdwatchers of the human-made world, we notice an odd but recurring streetborne phenomenon a few times and we're off to the races, photographing every instance of it we run into, accumulating screenfuls of examples on our blogs and exhorting our site visitors to join the hunt. There are collections of abandoned bikes, stencil graffiti, subway faux pas, my own tagmobiles, and so on... As they say, "Seen any more? Let us know!"

Last May I launched a networked photography game called New York Snap Exchange, where the idea was to come up with absurd photographic "commissions" for other players and surprise others with your reponses to their "commissions." Now, as I think about how to revise the game for relaunch, I'm wondering how to design communities for visual hunters and collectors. What makes us want to track the blossoming of some super-specific visual submeme? Is it important to be (or feel like) the only person seeing what you see?

The economy of the worthwhile

I confess I didn't have very high expectations for Tuesday night's blogs 'n' politics panel "IMHO: Blogging, Politics, and Personal Voice." I figured that since it was programmed to coincide with the Republican National Convention, it would probably degenerate into either Bush-bashing (which I agree with, but don't need to pay $7 to see) or superficial buzzword-slinging about how empowering blogs are. In fact the panelists--including my favorite DNC blogger Jay Rosen, Jen Chung of Gothamist and Douglas Rushkoff--offered nuanced analysis in a humanist vein and actually managed to talk with one another and not just to the audience, while moderator Jeff Jarvis periodically interjected with bursts of jargon to remind us that this was a bleeding-edge, digerati type of scene. Late in the hour, Rosen observed that blogging forces "people and institutions... to decide what free speech is worth to them." I think he was responding to things like the Olympics banning athletes from blogging, but I heard it as a general point about the whole mixed money-and-gift economy of the web.

In the United States we typically speak reverently about our priceless right to free speech, but the majority of us don't give it much of a workout, at least in a public forum, in part because it has historically been a costly or inconvenient right to exercise effectively. For those who already have computers and internet access, blogs have zeroed out the cost of maintaining one's own, dedicated outlet for public speech. They've made free speech not only cost-free, but also travel-free and not even technically difficult. So now it's up to me: How much time will I spend writing and conversing in public, presenting ideas for anyone to access for free? Will I give up paying opportunities in order to blog more? More interestingly, will I imperil the quality of my work by habitually posting whatever comes into my head? Rushkoff remarked that as a professional writer, he sometimes thought of his blog as "instant gratification," which seemed to resonate with quite a few in the room. He can come up with an idea and just shoot his wad without doing any of the persuading, defending or refining that might be needed if he wanted to get it published by someone else. What do I lose when I "go it alone" by blogging instead of producing ideas collaboratively? Is that loss outweighed by what I gain in comments? And that doesn't even get into the issue of how much my blogging might be worth to others, or the overall value of an environment in which people blog freely.

There's an underlying assumption among creators of interactive spaces that what people do in those environments is more valuable than what they do when they watch TV. So what's the nature of that value? The blog phenom seems like a perfect opportunity for Web builders to stop trying to "monetize" every interaction and consider how the surplus of speech opportunity could enable other life-sustaining systems of exchange. Rushkoff got big ups from me when he called the interactions around blogging "ecologic, not economic." But that's just a starting point for what could be a much richer analysis. (One great example of this kind of thinking: Grant McCracken's provocative medititations on the gaze economy.)

The holodeck inside out

Big-screen, immersive videoconferencing never quite took off in the business world, but now Economist.com reports on a planned public version, coming soon (well, probably not that soon) to a picturesque European central city near you:

The Tholos, named after a Greek temple from the Mycenaean period, is a 3-metre high, 360-degree screen that sends and receives images between two locations, in effect providing a window between the two cities. If you're in London, you'll be able to walk up to the screen and have a chat with someone in Vienna, as though you were meeting in the town square. A panoramic view of the other city will be visible in the background, and it will always be on.

The accompanying visualization is pretty striking. It really does look like a piece of cityscape has been scooped up and plunked down somewhere else, through it's clear that for maximum effect, the system would have be set up in highly iconic, historic spots. More interesting, though, are the kinds of planned and spontaneous meetings this object might engender. While the panoramic view from one city into another is public, the audio is spacialized and privatized, via "22 directional microphones and loudspeakers [that] will create “sound-cones” around the Tholos to enable private conversations to take place." Imagine yourself walking through the Piazza San Marco. You glance passingly at the Tholos system, which displays a panorama of Trafalgar Square. Then you notice a person emerging from that landscape, moving toward the camera. He's clearly seen you from his side, and he's motioning to you--'hey, come here.' Would you approach him?