• Nice interview with Raf Simons (WWD via HB)
• Lengthy inverview with David Andrew Sitek (BV)
• Awesome interview with Bill Murray (GQ)
• Telling interview with Penn & Teller (Telegraph)
• Decent interview with Ari Marcopoulos (Dossier)
• Hip interview with Pedro Winter (Busy P of Ed Banger) (OC)
• Strange interview with Spike Lee (Gothamist)
• Passable interview with Rafael de Cardenas (S×H)
• Brief interview with Tara McPherson (PSFK)

China:

• Urban China, ever the work in progress (NYT)
• China’s Banks: Great Wall Street (The Economist)
• Bad PR for the nouveau riche in the PRC (WSJ via Gawker)
• The other oil spill (NYT / Salon)
• A green movement grows in China (The Economist)
• The Economist also draws an ophidian metaphor for China’s growth / lack thereof.

Music:

• That’s Cool But Can You Make It More Shit?—short James Murphy interview (Nowness)
• The Antlers were amazing at Pier 54 last week (pics / video / new song @ BV)
• Why Music Is Good for You (via 3qd))
• Lil’ Wayne on a typical day in the clink.
• (More on) the Gaga Effect (NYT)
• Trent Reznor scores David Fincher’s The Social Network (NIN via Pitchfork; trailer)
• Inception, musically (NYT)

Media & Technology:

• When cars fly: Wired / n+1 / Bits (Recommended)
• Pure CSS Fail Whale
• Meta-commentary on Old Spice’s post-racial social media marketing.
• Paywall doesn’t pay (The Guardian)
• Apple’s Antenna(e)gate (The Economist / Daring Fireball)
• AWAD items: Frenemies by tongue (NYT); Tech-neology (NPR)… also, autocorrect in theory and in practice.

Food:

• 101 quick grilling recipes. (NYT; Bittman also talks watermelon)
• From table (or kitchen, at least) back to farm; also, a pig in a blanket, six feet under, etc.
• Salon asserts that Top Chef is in top form this season, though I find that the casting and challenges for D.C. have been less-than-inspired.
• Um. (AdFreak)

NYC:

• The High Line, continued (Revs!) (Highly[ne] recommended)
• Diller Scofido + Renfro’s Culture Shed (PSFK)
• The Economist marks George Steinbrenner’s passing with a rough analogy between the man and the city he came to represent.
• The Times wants to know how we do in Brooklyn.
• Hotels host Manhattan’s nouveau nightlife (NYMag); compare and contrast to : “It is part of the legend of New York, real or imagined, that vastly different cultures can thrive quite separately on the same block.”

Random:

• An older article on Messi. (Wired)
• Do Typefaces Really Matter? (BBC News) (Yes; highly recommended)
• Um. (NYT)
• Yoko D is back (Racked)
• Galen Strawson on moral dilemmas; it’s another version the ‘Original Choice’ (which is not chosen but embraced, or ‘owned’) in Sartrean ontology… (The Stone)
• Moral dilemmas, again (3qd), which (sort of) leads to…
• Lebronicles: He got game theory; the China factor; Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is tragic sans his two-time MVP (is the original online anywhere?), but perhaps not as bad as some outspoken critics might suggest.
• What Caravaggio means to me (The Guardian)
• Where America Really Came From (via 3qd)
• 52 architects choose the 21 most important buildings from the past 30 years. (VF)
• Denzel Washington on Wesley Snipes (who is going to jail): “Wesley is like a mighty oak tree… Many who know him have witnessed the fruit of his labours. I have sat in his shade and even been protected by his presence.”

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.

The Second Avenue Subway (SAS) is a rapid transit subway line, part of the New York City Subway system, currently under construction underneath Second Avenue in the borough of Manhattan.
…
As a consequence of the many “false starts”, the SAS is often cited as an example of bureaucratic red tape and government incompetence. However, the reasons for its delay are numerous and complex. The line is sometimes referred to as “The Line That Time Forgot”.

–Wikipedia, Second Avenue Subway

Over the weekend, he MTA posted photos of excavation for the Second Avenue Subway between 91st and 96th on Facebook. I can only assume that the MTA’s PR department has a dedicated 20-something Social Media Coordinator who decided to try his or her hand at creating the next viral hit.

Here’s a selection of my favorites, tastefully re-touched for dramatic effect—where’s Ryan McGinley when you need him?

Second Avenue Sagas via Curbed. Also on Gothamist.

NYMag featured the “Line That Time Forgot” in a 2004 article; read more about recent SAS-related developments here. The G, on the other hand, is the Line That I Wish I Could Forget.

Try as I might to resist an obvious pun, I can’t help myself: the MTA is boring tunnels.

A couple more pics—plus an indie rock classic, a house and an infant—after the jump.

» The Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) (4:48) – 6.95MB mp3 @ 200kbps

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Somewhat related (as usual): Inhabitat recently posted this contemporary cave dwelling:

I feel like this is somehow the inverse of the “New Caveman Lifestyle” that was featured in the Times a few months ago, but paleo-chic is still beyond me.

Lars Tunbjork via NYTimes; also featured on Unhappy Hipsters.

The Persistence of Trite Imagery

Since this Sunday marked Daylight Saving Time, I decided to put my philosophy degree to good use by pondering the psychology and metaphysics of this semi-annual ritual.

First of all, there is technically only one daylight to be saved: contrary to folk wisdom that might suggest otherwise, daylight is an indivisible entity. In a sense, daylight is like money—which is also grammatically singular but conceptually plural (insofar as one would hope to have more than one money)—such that daylight is quantifiable, at least in terms of daylight hours. In other words, official terminology denotes that summer is ‘Time to Save Daylight’—i.e., Time for Daylight-Saving—while the colloquial (if not altogether prevalent) shorthand “Daylight Savings” is a gerund, as per the nominal usage of “Savings” for that type of  bank account. (Even the Wikipedia URL for the Daylight Saving Time entry is Daylight_savings.)

The monetary metaphor is useful in illustrating how DST’s pithy essence “spring forward, fall back” belies the curious phenomenon that either occasion—the turning of the clocks in spring or in fall—can be described as gaining or losing an hour. Common parlance suggests that we have indeed acquired a full 60 minutes, yet this increment simultaneously seems to have slipped through a mysterious temporal rift in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It appears that we have both gained and lost an hour on Sunday, a discrepancy that reveals two divergent systems of belief concerning time and how it is measured: absolute vs. relative. The two views correspond to a scientific picture of an independent physical world and a pragmatic ‘lived’ experience of time, respectively.

The former system holds that time marches forward of its own accord and that to push a clock forward—from 2AM to 3AM, say—disturbs the clockwork of the universe to the effect that humans have erased an hour from their day. Here the bank analogy must be modified: on Sunday, we withdrew an hour on credit, which we will pay back in October; for the next six months, we owe one hour to the universe, or nature, or whatever. We have lost it in the interest of practicality—we need to borrow the hour for the better half of the year—though we plan on restoring balance in six months or so. For the absolutist, the hour is deferred.

Those who abide by the second perspective, on the other hand, see time as more malleable, where chronology is purely pragmatic: we gained an hour on Sunday because we now have an extra hour of sunlight—and, ostensibly, productivity—to the effect that the days themselves grow longer. By springing forward, we stake a claim to the greater daylight afforded by the rotation of the Earth, silently folding one hour into the shroud of slumber in order to extend each and every day in those six months. For the relativist, it’s possible to save daylight like money albeit not in the interest of yielding a long-term dividend: everyone cashes out the same predetermined amount at the end of each day.

Of course, both schools of thought understand that the actual demarcation of time to be incidental (i.e. pragmatic in a broad sense)—otherwise we wouldn’t have license to give and take (or take and give) hours as we please. Nevertheless, I wonder if there is any correlation between the saving(s) locution and the gain/loss dichotomy: are relativists more predisposed to regarding DST as a savings account, as opposed to absolutists who treat the extra time as a line of credit?

Does that even make sense? Rather, does it even matter?

Now for the real news:

• Advertising 2.0: This Time, It’s Personal. FaceBook is now crowdsourcing targeted advertising like social AdSense (=AdBook?). (NYT, Future Perfect) Also, Product Placement: Geolocation is so hot right now (NYT)
• Mattel Mentality x Mad Men = Barbie. WTF. (NYT)
• Google Maps now has (spotty) bike directions: Gothamist blurbs, Streetsblog mentions, Wired crowdsources; Bike Snob NYC is more thorough, with an incisive riposte to the Post
• Big ups to the Alma Mater in the Times. But seriously, the prospect of digitally tracking writers’ inspiration and composition process is quite fascinating.
• Stanley Fish on Pragmatism’s Gift.
• I’ve always been a stickler for free throws (i.e. I don’t understand why every player isn’t shooting 90+% from the line), so I was pleased to see that Wired has posted a guide on How to Nail a Free Throw.
• Old news, but here’s a couple of interesting articles on sports video games and their source material; specifically, how video games are have become increasingly true to life for athletes: League of Gamers (ESPN); Gamechangers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes (Wired)
• Speaking of video games, Virtusphere. Just watch the damn video.
• G4 (correctly, I think) identifies Chatroulette’s ‘Merton.’ NYMag’s Vulture (correctly, I think) identifies Ben Folds as a “Fin de siècle singer-songwriter.” Just watch the damn video.
• (Over)analysis of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” music video. (Vigilant Citizen)

Music news:

• What Would They Know: Matthew Perpetua interviews Liars for Pitchfork.
• Time to Get Away: LCD Soundsystem finishing up their last record. (Daily Swarm)
• Wanna Be Startin’ Something: MJ posthumously lands a massive record deal. (WSJ, NYT)

Art news:

• Deitch Mark II (ArtInfo)
• Rhizome / New Museum presents Seven On Seven (April 17th).
• Marina Abramovic at MoMA: Reperformance art or selling out? See for yourself or read all about it. Plus a short intro vid on Nowness.
• Saltz on the demise of Dia / X-Initiative / Independent (NYMag)
• Ai Weiwei in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this October (ArtForum via the Guardian)

Bonus Trailer:

Ikea France has launched a new marketing campaign: furnishing Metro stations.

Perhaps Parisians regard the Swedish furniture juggernaut differently than Hamburgers & Beijingers.

More pictures at Freshome, via Gothamist.

Ok so that's laying it on a little thick, but I was pretty pissed.

Before we start, I should mention that I love New York for its extensive, 24-hour subway system (among other reasons). It certainly has its ups and downs, but the fact that you can go just about anywhere in four out of five boroughs (let’s face it, Staten Island shouldn’t count anyway) is really quite amazing.

cue extemporaneous rant

That said, Fuck the G Train.

So I’m trying to get back to Clinton Hill from Midtown East this morning and I figure I’ll take the 45 to the L to the G (instead of the 45 to the C at Fulton) so I can swing by Choice Market and grab a coffee+pastry on the way home.

45: no problem. L: no problem (a high percentage of weirdos, but I’m on a Brooklyn-bound train at 11AM, that’s probably how it goes.) G: FAIL.

I get down to the G platform at Lorimer/Metropolitan and there’s already a lot of people waiting, which (as seasoned subway riders know) is usually a good sign because that means a train hasn’t come for a while and the next one is probably on the way. Except when it means the opposite: something is wrong and hundreds (or at least dozens, in the case of the G) of workaday Manhattan (or Brooklyn, in the case of the G) commuters (or weirdos, in the case of the G) will be inconvenienced for want of some bullshit malfunction or otherwise opaque excuse to fuck with my day.

Everyone is staring down the track, pulling the train with a sort of collective willpower: we can see the headlights of the train but its moving really slowly. Bad sign. No announcements or flyers posted either. Also a bad sign. Not that I have anywhere to be, but I’m starving and I have a lot of things to take care of at home.

The train finally pulls into the station (total wait time: 10 minutes) and actually seems to be running pretty smoothly for the first five stops, lulling me into the false sense of security: ’twas but a fluke, silly ol’ G, you got me that time, ha. Honestly, the delay at Lorimer was only a minor offense, hardly worth getting upset about, much less blogging about.

But now it gets interesting: as the train approaches the Classon stop, I prepare to get off, licking my lips in anticipation of a delicious almond croissant.

Well, (guess what?) the G’s not having it: we cruise right by the Classon stop. No announcement, not so much as a pause. A weirdo who also intended to alight at Classon is muttering to himself. Strike one.

Ok, I think to myself, I’ll just get off at Clinton-Washington and walk, it’s about the same distance anyway.

No dice. Apparently Clinton-Washington—two of the more famous and well-regarded presidents in American history—is not worth the trouble. Strike two.

Ok, I think to myself, I’ll just get off at Fulton and walk, I can deal with this.

Wrong again. Fulton doesn’t even get the time of day. Weirdo is pretty pissed now—I’m patiently waiting on iPod iLand, but he’s a simulacra of my id, fuming and stuttering. Strike three.

Ok, I think to myself, I’ll just get off at Hoyt-Schermerhorn and hunt down Barry Kluger.

The damn thing finally stops at Hoyt-Schermerhorn—probably for the transfer to the AC, but who knows at this point. Schermerhorn, schmermerhorn. I have to cross to the opposite platform to catch an outbound G or C. The latter arrives a few minutes later and I’m on my way, out twenty semi-precious minutes of my life, more if you consider that I could have fast-tracked it on the 45 to the C in the first place.

I was so discouraged by this sordid turn of events that I couldn’t even bring myself to make a detour for a pick-me-up at Choice—the MTA has so willfully (even hatefully) conspired against me that I took the hint, that there would be no slightly overpriced baked goods in my future.

Pretty shitty story, I know, but I just needed to get it off my chest. Thanks for playing.