Three months (/forever) ago, I spent ten days in the Bay Area visiting friends and family. Shit weather but good times otherwise… mostly just ate ridiculously well.

Made it up to Napa—iPod video below (looks better smaller)—but not the Wave Organ.

Reprise:

Explore Beijing from the comfort of your living room with Baidu’s 3D maps:

I used to live in the future...

I can only assume that Google is still reticulating splines for NYC…

The map ends a few short blocks from Rem Koolhaas' CCTV building...

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the boroughs…

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Chinese Globe

The Daily Mail has a feature on ““Ten of the greatest: Maps that changed the world,” in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition at the British Library. (via Freakonomics Blog)

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In other geography-related news, GOOD has posted the submissions to their open call for ‘Neighborhood Flags‘; unsurprisingly, the majority of them represent the likes of Portland, New York, boroughs in the Golden State (Nor- and So-)… and Minneapolis? (via FreeWilliamsburg)

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Be On Guard! - also via Daily Mail

Os Gemeos & Blu (Works in Progress) in Lisbon

Street art’s symbiotic relationship with the Web makes you wonder whether the genre’s broad popularity stems from the fact that its characteristic features—swift execution, quicksilver response to pop culture and politics, the dominance of quotation and commentary, snarky attitude, fragmented statements embedded in the world rather than meant to stand apart from it—actually reflect the way that plugged-in people process information, more so than “traditional” art. There is something particularly contemporary about street art’s whole M.O., in this sense.

–Ben Davis, Is Street Art Over?, Slate, May 26 2010 (Highly recommended)

Fresh Stuff from Ron English in Queens

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Two perspectives on Marina:

She and MoMA have brought some magic back into art—the sort of magic that all of our courses in art history and appreciation had encouraged us to hope for.

–Arthur C. Danto, Sitting with Marina, The Stone blog on NYT, May 23 2010

There are euphoric moments and then intensely sad feelings of heaviness. Whatever you’re feeling becomes intensified. Certain truths about things I need to fix in my life are revealed to me. Marina says that in her own life she’s not so disciplined—that the performance gives her structure.

–Deborah Wing-Sproul, The Performer Made Bare, NYMag, May 23 2010

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• Bill Simmons’ awesome Guide to Mikhail Prokhorov. (Recommended; thanks Tony)

[As Prokhorov] explained to “60 Minutes,” “I don’t use a computer. We have too much information and it’s really impossible to filter it.”

You know what? He’s not necessarily wrong. Do we REALLY need all this information? Like, right now—you’re reading this column and hopefully enjoying it, but ultimately, could you have survived the weekend if you missed it? I say yes. Just about everything online fits that mold—you have to sift through loads of bad writing and irrelevant information to find the occasional entertaining/funny/interesting thing, and even then, it’s not something that’s making or breaking your week. Ever been on a vacation and had little-to-no Internet access that week? You survived, right? Maybe the big Russian is on to something.

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Candy reminds us of the postmodern notion of self-creation—the way we don social signifiers with the same ease as clothing, constructing our selves bit by bit from cultural cues and images. Rather than the solid frameworks we cast them as, our selves are more like sweaters we put on and take off. When it comes to social identity, we’re all a wee bit in drag.

–Caroline Hagood, New Documentary Tries to Solve the Riddle of Andy Warhol’s Candy Darling,
The Huffington Post, May 21 2010

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• With the 2010 World Cup just 16 days away, Nick Hornby and Sean Wilsey debate the U.S. vs England match on June 12. (GQ)
• Five Bold Predictions for the 2010 French Open.
• Jamie XX’s [dubstep] mix for Colette.
• Play Me I’m Yours: public pianos in NYC this summer. (Animal / BV)
• Michael Pollan on the Food Movement, Rising.
• Eddie Huang of Baohaus on Foodies and Hypebeasts.
• Carl “A.C.” Newman of New Pornographers fame talks maple syrup with T Magazine.
• The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells.
• Alber Elbaz of Lanvin on the Future of Fashion.
• Magritte’s Missives (The Economist)
• McSweeney’s via Salon: 20 Fascinating Self-Portraits.
• Sony’s roll-up digital display (Bits)
• Don’t Ice Me Bro! When Memes Meet the Marketplace. (Thanks Em)
• AT&T / BBDO Worldwide vs. Christo & Jeanne-Claude. (Media Decoder)
• Pay what you want to see the Whitney Biennial for the next 48 hours (Artsbeat)
• Wired has a feature on traffic theorist Charles Komanoff, who makes an ironclad case for congestion pricing. (Highly recommended—seriously, I love shit like this.)

The problem of negative externalities [refers to] costs that accrue when the self-interested actions of one person leave bystanders worse off. The biggest example of a negative externality is global warming: When we burn carbon-based fuels, we benefit ourselves while imposing a great cost on billions of other present and future inhabitants of the planet.

–Felix Salmon, The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic, Wired, May 24 2010

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GOOD Picture Show has a gallery of J. Bennett Fitts' incredible photos of Middle America

Tobey Maguire interviews KAWS

Andrew Kuo's cryptic Glo-Fi infographic for NYT

Mapping tourism—predictable but interesting nonetheless.

Hedi Slimane looks a little fed up with Terry & Mary Kate...

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It’s true for the most part, though the 3,274 seems a bit over the top.

In any case, here are a few of the better infographics I’ve seen lately:

Julian Hansen has created an extremely thorough visualization of typography for dummies.

Click the image for the full, unadulterated 1983×1402 version.

Inspiration Lab

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Yesterday, before I discovered the video above, I came across a dollar bill with a red “Where’s George” stamp on it and I decided to enter it into the database (I’ve logged a couple in the past). It seems that I’ve since spent said dollar, as it is no longer in my wallet, but I managed to find it in my Firefox history. Apparently, it was in Greenpoint almost exactly a year ago; who knows what sort of wonderful adventures George #B2078 7046J has had in the mean time…

Follow the Money via Visual Complexity via PSFK

Almost (but-not-really-at-all) related: Redesigning the Dollar Bill; UPDATE: The new $100 bill.

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Gizmodo’s guide to the current fronts where the Big Three are vying for tech/information world domination.

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This one on the correlation between digital music sales / artist revenue also surfaced in the past week; click the image for the full infographic (my one complaint about a lot of these: they’re huge image files. You’d think these supposedly tech-savvy types would think to break it up a little…).

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Sha Hwang’s subway ridership visualization, via Flowing Data’s traffic thread.

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Cartographies of Time is getting rave reviews from the likes of NYT and Kottke.

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While we’re on the topic, a classic:

Last week, the NYC media was abuzz about New York Magazine’s recent report on our great city’s most livable neighborhoods, a “quantitative index of the 50 most satisfying places to live,” complete with an interactive neighborhood ranking feature. Statistician Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight.com  weighted and rated each neighborhood against a dozen criteria, from practical concerns like affordability, transit and schools to a full range of cultural factors (Silver explains in more detail on his own blog).

Semi-relevant humorous graphic via Very Small Array

Park Slope takes first, followed by the Lower East Side and (surprise?) Sunnyside, Queens. My own ‘hood, Fort Greene, is 18th, representing a purportedly objective improvement over my previous home in Williamsburg (20th), though adjacent neighborhoods such as Prospect Heights and Greenpoint (which apparently did not lose points for prevalent vinyl siding) place ninth and fifth, respectively. The fact that half of the top ten is within the two miles east of my current home is an obvious testament to the city’s density—a 30-minute walk (or 5-minute bike ride) in any direction takes me across up to five distinct neighborhoods—while the disparity in ranking suggests that even adjacent blocks may be worlds apart.

Conversely, I find that ethnographic data is perhaps more telling than the pseudo-scientific approach. While it’s hard to draw grand conclusions from a 5,000-person poll (conducted in conjunction with Silver’s number-crunching), I tend to think that these pithy gems constitute a more accurate snapshot of present-day New York than the algorithmic approach. (There are too many fun facts to list here; I recommend viewing it for yourself.)

In any case, the content and information design is well-executed, though I wish NYMag.com gave the option to view full articles as a single page (and, similarly, view all of the comments at once as well). Technical issues aside, I’m impressed with the depth and breadth of the content: as a conscientious urbanite, I am fascinated by both the social and cultural dynamics of city life and the concept of conurbation.

Lots of words with no images:

I am especially curious about outsiders’ perception of New York City: before I moved here, I thought of the city in abstract as a cultural epicenter, where subterranean genius in art, music, fashion, etc. might see light of day—a sort of Platonic ideal, which has been affirmed time and again with empirical instances now that I live here. However, I would imagine that much of the world at large regards the Big Apple as that place they see in movies and TV shows (i.e. the lowest common denominator of pop culture… not that there’s anything wrong with that), some absurdly fantastical pastiche of Spike Lee joints and Sex and the City drama, etc.

(Nevertheless, I was disappointed when Beijingers were not particularly impressed that I was from New York—I secretly hoped that this fact would impart an enviable Gothamite savvy upon my person, which I could ultimately parlay into some kind of renown. Instead, they were more impressed that I could navigate the capital city’s subway system, an ability that is certainly informed by my nominal NYC heritage but by no means characteristic of it.)

That said, the New York Magazine editorial is (cloyingly or otherwise) an insider’s look at the inner workings of our awesome metropolis, most tellingly in the revealing, if niche, article on “Hipsters, Hasids and the Williamsburg Street,” which is about as local as it gets.

The relevance of the article, for me, lies largely in firsthand experience of the conflict at hand—I was run off the road by a van in the heart of Williamsburg’s Hasidic enclave, while in a bike lane no less—which suggests that an inside/outside phenomenon occurs on every level in the urban setting. In other words, the city represents a macro-segmentation, where the differences between the boroughs, the neighborhoods and specific communities within them are far more essential to an individual’s character than merely claiming residence in New York City.

In other words, each neighborhood has a distinct identity (or lack thereof), a character that may be embraced, rejected, disregarded or altogether transformed by its denizens (Justin Davidson examines these historical and contemporary trends in a diverting, if somewhat ambivalent, essay for NYMag). Hence, the caricaturization of certain neighborhoods: Park Slope as double-wide stroller territory and Williamsburg as a sprawling hipster mecca, with colonies along an easterly frontier of L-train stops. As per the cliché, it’s a chicken-and-egg situation: does one move to Williamsburg (or Bushwick, these days) because he or she likes art, music, etc., or did hipsters start moving there (20 years ago because/when it was still cheap) and make it that way?

The economics of real estate development and its cultural implications are far beyond the scope my knowledge (and, by extension, this essay), though I generally see the urban growth and decay as intrinsically organic, where the organism could variously be considered on the scale of the block, neighborhood, city, state, etc. For example, Atlantic Yards will certainly redefine its immediate vicinity for years to come, but the massive, purportedly destructive influx of wealth—concretely as edifices; abstractly as cultural capital—is not necessarily artificial: it represents the continued evolution of Brooklyn, New York City and the Tri-State Area as a whole.

But I digress: New York is the first city where I’ve lived and worked—in a word, been independent—for long enough to appreciate it for what it is. Someday, years after I’ve moved on to another city, I will return to find that this or that restaurant, bar, gallery, venue, etc., is or isn’t still there, that everyone now lives in Neighborhood X and no one lives in Neighborhood Y any more, or maybe just that it hasn’t changed very much after all. (See also: a technophobic Christopher Walken returns to Astoria for the New Yorker.)

Related by zero to two degrees:

• Silver has written a lengthy addendum to clarify both the methodology and the intent: his data model provides “worthwhile information [to] complement one’s subjective take on the relative quality of different neighborhoods.” (Fivethirtyeight.org)

  Additionally: “The choice of neighborhoods, and the geographic boundaries assigned to them, were determined by New York magazine staff.” I suppose that New Yorkers’ colloquial demarcations are more fine-grained than those of the City. “It’s not trivial to include additional neighborhoods because a lot of this involves counting things—whether landuromats, toxic waste dumps, or murders—by hand. The 60 neighborhoods within our scope are not necessarily the 60 best neighborhoods.”

• To my point about the scale of the organism [it sounds so pretentious out of context], Richard Florida deals with urban growth and decay on a national level, with mixed results. I have yet to read Rise of the Creative Class, but I would say that Silver’s rankings reaffirm the fact that NYC (and Brooklyn in particular) at once epitomizes, consummates and transcends the notion of urban renewal qua creativity [*cough, "Christ, what an asshole"].
• GOOD has just released their own Neighborhoods Issue with a broader focus on (sub)urbanism, including a moderately interesting interview with Richard Florida, a Habana Outpost shout-out, and a blurb on a hypothetical, even more auto-centric NYC.
• Dan Hill of City of Sound has a new take on the age-old question of the city of the future: 14 Cities, hypothetical metropolises for 2050 Australia.
• The Upper East Side (#35) will get slightly worse (in terms of Environment), then much better (Transit)… thanks to the incredible machine pictured below. (Previously; MTA via Gothamist updates)

Matthew Picton’s sculptures are right up my alley: he makes roadmaps into art.

DB; more at Toomey-Tourell.

Claire Burbridge & Matthew Picton
Absence and Presence
Toomey-Tourell Fine Art
49 Geary Street [map]
San Francisco, CA 94108
415 / 989-6444
Through May 1, 2010

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Connie Brown makes detailed, vintage-y (not to mention pricey) custom maps. She’s giving at talk at NYPL on April 10th. Much more info (and images) at NGS, linked below.

National Geographic Society via Boingboing.

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The Times has an interactive feature on taxi pick-ups (in Manhattan), a nice to their piece on taxi traffic and, by extension, Jonah Lehrer’s musings on commuting. Now if only there was some way to track the Cash Cab…

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I happened to mention Sam O’Hare’s captivating short film “The Sandpit” and the 8-Bit NYC meme in the same post a couple weeks ago: watch the rough equivalent of a mash-up via Asciimeo. It’s not nearly interesting as either of the originals; ASCII-conversion technology was YouTube’s April Fools’ Day joke. (TechCrunch)

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Lastly: SXSW, geolocated.

On his blog the Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer recently explored the ‘Commuters Paradox‘:

When people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. [People] mistakenly believe that the big house in the exurbs will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional hour to work

Of course, as Brooks notes, that time in traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

I’ve found that this is true of public transportation as well: since I moved to Fort Greene from Williamsburg, the lack of public transportation has been an immeasurable source of psychic distress. However, I must say that the big apartment is definitely worth it.

In fact, like several of the commenters, I’ve found that commuting on bike circumvents the arbitrariness of automobile traffic, following a different set of rules: travel time has a regular rate based on distance, terrain and, sometimes, fatigue.

In other words, I am in complete control of my journey when I am on my bike, performing a split-second cost-benefit analysis of running a red light or deciding to take a shortcut that goes against traffic for a block. The only variables that are completely beyond my control are poor road and weather conditions, both of which are fairly low on the list of drivers’ discontents. Meanwhile, the subway is subject to all manner of hindrance and impediment, and I doubt that any New Yorker has gone for more than a dozen trips without the inconvenience of some kind of delay.

Furthermore, I echo one reader’s cyclists’ envy: on occasions when I opt to take the subway or walk, I can’t help but envy bikers as they speed by, liberated from the oppressive gravity of concrete jungle.

(Streetsblog also took David Brooks’ lead and covered the topic of commuting, with more good comments, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

In other bike news, the Brooklyn Greenway, a 14-mile bike and pedestrian path spanning the East River waterfront from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge, is underway. I’m all for it.

Last but not least, Revisiting the Idea of a Bicycle Tax and revisiting the idea of congestion pricing. I’ve never been a hardcore cycling proselyte (=procyclyte?), but I’m far more amenable to the latter idea.