My wife is tinydiva. She is a musician. Her band is called Masolit. They are awesome. Seriously. And you should see them play their world debut performance live this Saturday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Timing:
Saturday, March 22, 2008
7:00 pm: The Creationists
8:00 pm: Masolit

Location:
MTAA
60 North 6th Street, 2nd floor
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC
(L train to Bedford Avenue, 3 Blocks west on North 6th, just shy of Kent St.)

Visit the Masolit web site or myspace page to get a taste of the rocking that will ensue this Saturday night.

This FREE performance is part of the Over the Opening series of art events sponsored by the artists known as MTAA.

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It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times:

The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to electronic versions that — with a touch of a finger — visitors can flip through, page by digital page, from cover to dog-eared cover. (The real notebooks can also be seen under glass nearby.)

Facsimiles they may be, but they instantly communicate the show’s intent, which is to clarify the way the silent, classical remove of Seurat’s impeccable, stylized paintings was distilled from an active, socially aware engagement with the world that registered most fully in his drawings.

If you haven’t guessed already, the touch-screen interfaces in question were designed and built by my studio mates at Behavior, both as kiosk installations in the MoMA exhibition gallery and viewable on the web as a gorgeous online exhibition.

Roberta Smith of the Times is one of the the most important art critics around. So when the opening sentence of Smith’s review of Georges Seurat: The Drawings focuses so enthusiastically on the interactive kiosk that my colleagues put together these past few months, it’s more than just praise for Georges Seurat and for the great curation and leadership by the team at MoMA. It’s also praise for Behavior.

Touch Screens in the Age of the iPhone

Most of the Behavior folks attended the exhibition’s lavish opening festivities last week, and we all got a chance to watch dozens of very fancy people interacting with the twin touch-screen kiosks. It was such a joy to watch the gallery-goers flip through the pages with looks of, I swear, genuine delight on their faces. No lie: I definitely heard “ooohs” and “aaahs”.

As with any usability test situation, of course, there were also the occasional moments where a user would try to do something we didn’t think of. Of particular interest was the fairly common attempt by users to treat the traditional touch screens as if they were iPhone-style multi-touch screens. People expected to be able to smoothly zoom in by spreading two fingers apart as they can on the iPhone. As with so much of what Apple does, the bar has apparently been raised in unexpected new places in the interactive landscape.

What About the Art?

Oh, and the show is absolutely luminous. I hope you check out the web site, of course, but if you enjoy art at all you must see the show in person. The sketchbooks are just a tiny piece of the exhibit. The rest of the show, and the online exhibition, includes drawings and paintings, historical conservation information, and of course the sketchbooks.

The exhibition is getting rave reviews from many other sources as well, and deservedly so. We’ve all seen Seurat’s famous pointillist paintings, especially the revolutionary A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But Seurat’s drawings reveal the intense thinking and talent that went into his painterly work.

The drawings excel in two areas simultaneously: Form and light. In a vivid metaphorical image conjured up by my wife Peggy (seen above), some drawings suggest that 19th century Paris would be transparent or even invisible if not for the industrial-era soot filling the air and collecting on any and all solid objects and forms. The charcoal on the page reflects the density of the matter in the space.

And yet other drawings emphasize light itself, with the space articulated only by where the light exists and where it does not — where traditional drawing marks like contour lines are banished. The relationship between this thinking and the daguerrotype photography of the time is hard to dispute.

The best works attack form and light at the same time, and it’s easy to see how Seurat’s eschewing of contour and lines — and embrace of volume and light — leads directly to La Grande Jatte, even without the extraordinary discoveries in color he is most famous for.

La Grande Jatte was painted when Seurat was just 26. He would die five years later, at 31. It’s staggering to imagine what he would have gone on to accomplish had he lived into the age of Matisse (born the same year as Seurat), Kandinsky, and Picasso.

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Photo from A Typical Joe of some Georgia roadside signage. Why don’t I ever see anything like this in New York City?

The opening sentence in today’s Times Magazine cover story (about the state of political confusion in America’s Christian Right) depicts a phenomenon I’ve long wondered about:

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war.

Indeed, whenever I travel in Bible Belt country or in so-called “red states”, I am often struck by the absolute depravity and crass exploitation that I see all around me — in places where, as conventional wisdom would have it, the people are supposed to be the most morally upstanding Americans, especially when compared to people like me, an amoral atheist New Yorker.

New York City has its seedy side, of course, but what you see in the red states is way different. If you drive along the main highways of West Virginia, rural Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana — almost anywhere, it seems — you are bound to pass long stretches of seedy strip clubs, quasi-legal gambling venues, drug and alcohol addiction centers, DUI lawyers, and corrupt check cashing places for miles and miles. You’ll even see billboards for abortion clinics.

But among these you will also find a seemingly equal number of churches and religious groups whose primary mission is to save local people from the very businesses that operate next door. Driving down the highway it’s a moral checkerboard: church, strip club, church, slot machines, church, payday loans, etc. These two opposing forces are literally positioned right next to each other, like opposing armies in WWI, entrenched a hundred feet apart. You get a distinct feeling that there is a war going on from door to door in thousands of American communities.

Maybe I just don’t notice it, but I can’t think of any part of New York City, or anywhere in New England, where you can find this kind of Sodom & Gomorrah right out in the open where families have to see it every single day. Which is why I’m often more than a little startled when I see gigantic billboards of ecstatic naked porn stars in exactly those parts of the country which are, by conventional wisdom, supposed to be the most righteous and moral places on Earth.

Can it really be that I have a puritanical streak in me? I personally don’t find the sex businesses offensive, exactly– at best they’re sad and stupid, and that’s enough for me to not really want to look at them — but IMHO the casinos and rip-off lenders are downright evil and thoroughly destructive to society.

All told, you can hardly blame red staters for thinking that America is in a culture war when their highways are already raging moral battlefields. But the war is not what the media or the leaders of the religious right would have you think it is. It’s not Blue States vs. Red States. I think the Times has it right: The front line is within the red states, where husbands are fighting wives, parents are fighting children, and neighbors are fighting neighbors.

Red staters, in turn, cannot blame New York and LA for their addictions to gambling, pornography, crystal meth, or easy credit. They should look to their own governments, Democrat and Republican, and into their own souls.

One might be tempted to attribute this phenomenon to simple moral hypocrisy, concluding that that the most religious people are, in fact, the most depraved (as seen in recent GOP scandals). But that’s just too simple. I think that people are driven to embrace religion, and then to back religious political movements, because of the moral corruption they feel directly threatens them and their families. But that meanwhile the broader culture, unanchored, confusedly drifts from one extreme to the other, from righteousness to sin, in the same town, the same family, and even in individual people.

The problem, I suspect, is that most of the leadership of the religious right is obsessed with political objectives that do not even attempt to address the real problems that people face and fear — poverty, addiction, teen pregnancy, ignorance — and instead they attack problems that have nothing to do with real-world core moral and social challenges. They want to lower taxes for the wealthy, make gay marriage illegal, prevent discussions of sex and contraception in school, roll back or oppose civil rights for immigrants, women, religious minorities. These issues are powerful for getting political backing and electoral popularity, but they do not help in the real battlefield where people’s lives are ruined by ignorance and addiction.

Until the religious right realizes that New York City is not Mordor projecting a beam of evil at them and tearing their families apart, and that the real problem is right in their own backyard, they, and we, will never be at peace.

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The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the people who run the subways) have done a test installation of a new feature to help riders orient themselves as they exit our often-labyrinthine subway stations. They’re placing sidewalk-level signage to tell riders which way is north and indicating which direction the nearest streets and avenues can be found. The Times has the full story today, and I’ve copied their photo here.

I think these are great. Despite what many New Yorkers will claim, we all get disoriented when we exit subway stations in neighborhoods we are unfamiliar with, and often it takes a minute or two to figure out exactly which way is north. (This has, by the way, gotten a lot harder since we lost the World Trade Center as a landmark).

I like two things about these orientation medallions:

1. They make a relatively high estimation of people’s knowledge of New York City geography. I don’t have any data to back this up, but based on the truly abysmal performance by Americans in general at reading maps, I’m not confident that many people, even in New York, are cartographically literate enough to even know north from west. Such people would certainly find these medallions somewhat hard to use. Designers and urban planners commonly design for the lowest common denominator of their user base, or at best they aim for features that are understood by and useful for a solid majority of their users, and as a result they don’t build features for the slightly-more advanced users of their systems. So cheers to the MTA for trying something that will clearly help those riders who already have a good general understanding of New York’s lay of the land. Who knows, the medallions may even have the happy side effect of educating the commuters who don’t quite get it.
2. I really dig the nice touch of deliberately making the compass a little bit inaccurate in order to conform with the average New Yorker’s mental model of the city. You see, the long slender island of Manhattan is not actually oriented directly north to south. The island and its avenues actually run a little more north-north-easterly, rotated slightly away from the true N-S axis. But most people think of uptown as due north, so that’s how the MTA oriented the compass directions and the street IDs. No hobgoblins of foolish consistency here.

Also, it’s delightfully surprising to me that this idea was originally proposed by a regular New Yorker, and the city somehow made it happen. Nice job.

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This is the least humiliating frame from my whole clip.

I’ve recently started a swimming training program so I can competently complete my weakest part of the trifecta: Running, biking, and swimming. Hopefully by next summer I will be ready for my goal, to compete in the New York City Triathlon.

An interesting aspect of this swim class is the use of technology. In our very first meeting, the coach shot underwater videos of each student crossing the pool, capturing all of our flailing arms and gasping breaths. He then wrote up a critique of each student’s swimming technique and gave a CD with all of the videos and critiques to each of us, giving us all a powerful insight into what we are doing right and wrong in the water. It’s astonishing how many things I can instantly see that I need to improve, especially when I watch my own video next to that of, say, Olympian Ian Thorpe.

What’s great about this is how incredibly low-fi and accessible the whole deal was. You would think that underwater cameras as a training tool would be reserved only for competitive swimmers at the top of their game. But there I am! The video camera looked like a regular consumer model attached to a long pole with some kind of jerry-rigged periscope involved, and immersed in the water. The coach shot by simply walking along the edge of the pool and following each of us as we swam across. And because it’s digital, it was easy for him to bring 20 copies of the videos on CD-ROM to the next class a week later.

He’ll be recording us a few more times over the 12-week course, so we can track our improvement. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the next taping. I swear, I dream about swimming now.

This blog post has been brought to you by “Our Swimmer”, by Wire:

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The New York Times is ending their TimesSelect “service” as of tomorrow, September 19th. Despite my deep resentment of the whole TimesSelect idea in the first place, I applaud the Times’ decision to end it and to finally align themselves with the way the web’s culture of thought actually works.

During the 2004 election cycle, Times columnists like Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and the rest of the Op-Ed talking heads would regularly be part of my daily readings, and they were an important part of the national political dialogue. Countless blogs would link to them, quote them, and respond to their influential voices. But then when the Times instituted the TimesSelect paywall, all of these thought-provoking voices were silenced, almost overnight. They became invisible to me and literally millions of other regular and loyal readers.

Sure many of the Times’ paper subscribers (who get TimesSelect memberships as part of their subscription price) continued to read these columnists. But the rest of us, those who read the Times online only, pretty much lost contact with them completely. Bloggers ceased linking to them, and eventually they ceased even talking about them. They lost relevance, influence, and credibility. And, as a result, the Times did, too.

As I’ve said before, I have no idea if TimesSelect was a good business decision in 2005 or not. My gut tells me that, ultimately, it was not. It probably didn’t drive many additional subscriptions (people who want a paper delivered to their homes will subscribe anyway, regardless of online add-ons), and it’s hard to imagine that there are more than a few thousand people in the world who are willing to pay the annual fee for just web access to the TimesSelect content.

I’d guess that the total number of people who actually paid the annual fee was tiny in comparison to the number of people who simply stopped reading the Times as much as they used to. The lost revenue from advertising impressions and page views may have been comparable to the revenue gained from the small number of subscriptions and online memberships they gained.

But more importantly, the Times lost some of their their momentum in being an influential force in the blogosphere, and thus in the emerging zeitgeist of the political and cultural dialogues that occur increasingly online. They stopped investing in their own reputation and positioning in today’s networked conversations. And unfortunately, damage like this is hard to repair — it’s like spending two years without contributing to your 401k plan, missing out on two years of accrued credit and growth.

They’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but I for one will glady jump right back in. Welcome back to the interweb, Op-Ed columnists!

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This weekend I built my first single-speed bicycle. It’s not a fixed-gear or track bike — it has a single gear in the back with a freewheel mechanism, and as you can see it has brakes, too.

For years I’ve wanted a single-speed bike just to see what all the fuss is about, but also I wanted to experiment with what I’ve heard are the benefits of single-speed training. But most importantly I also wanted a basic bike that I would feel comfortable leaving locked up in my lobby or even on the street for hours or days on end. My other two bikes are a just little too attractive to thieves, so I can never leave them anywhere for long. Basically I needed a kick-around set of wheels.

Speaking of thieves, this whole project has a little bit of a shadow over it: Over the years I’ve been collecting enough of my own bike parts for this project, but I was missing just one critical piece: the frame. It finally occurred to me that a pile of abandoned bikes locked up in my building’s lobby might be ripe for the picking. There was one bike, an old Nishiki, that looked my size and had the requisite horizontal dropouts. I knew the bike hadn’t been touched in two years, but still I put up several signs in the building’s lobby seeking the bike’s owner. After a few weeks of hearing nothing, I made my move and, yes, I stole the bike.

I like to think I salvaged it, and I did my deed during a high-traffic part of the day so as many fellow residents as possible would see me doing my work (I merely unbolted the rear wheel, which was the only part locked up). But honestly I am still a little afraid that the bike’s owner will someday return from his three-year ’round-the-world hike, or kick his drug addiction, or whatever has kept him from his wheels, and he will see me on a bike whose dents and angles look a lot like those of his beloved Nishiki. Such worries are the wages of my sin, I guess.

I stripped the bike of nearly every part it had, dramatically reducing the weight by replacing the bike’s original parts with my own slightly-higher-quality parts (the original handlebars were made of steel!) or by just leaving certain parts off the rebuild entirely. The only part I’m (literally) stuck with is the seatpost: it seems the previous owner installed a replacement post that was too big for the frame, so he simply hammered the thing into the seat tube as far as it would go. As a result, the seat is immovably positioned about an inch too low for me. Even if I figure out how to remove the seatpost, I’m not sure a properly-sized seatpost would even work anymore since the seat tube seems permanently expanded.

On my first test ride of about 15 miles, I came to enjoy the single-speed’s simplicity, and it was surprising how often I managed to keep up a steady pace without shifting gears. On the hills I had to stand up and hammer, but even then I managed to keep a good pace.

The best part was that with this beater bike I can stop riding, lock up the bike in the park, and then do a few miles running on foot. The toe clips require me to wear normal sneakers, so I didn’t need to pack an extra pair of shoes. And, as I said, I’m not overly worried about the bike being stolen. Hooray!

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I want to go to the IDEA Conference, which starts in two weeks here in New York.

Conferences generally come in two categories.

1. Conferences to meet people who do exactly what you do, and where you learn about how to do what you do better.
2. Conferences to meet people you can do business with, and where you learn about how they work and what they need.

IDEA looks different. While it is clearly aimed at people who design interactive experiences (and the lineup of speakers includes more than one card-carrying information architect), the speakers and the program are more specifically designed to spark innovative thinking, to expose and educate participants to interaction worlds they may not be familiar with, and to generate a broad spectrum of ideas from many inspirational and thought-provoking angles.

In short, it’s a conference to inspire you to do something you’ve never done before.

(I didn’t pre-register for this conference since I had already had plans for those days in October, but my schedule has recently changed. What’s more, the organizers are offering a free pass to the blogger whose published desire to attend pleases them the most. I shamelessly hope I am that blogger!)

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I’m the skinhead in the red shirt.

A year ago I entered my first bike race. It didn’t go well.

Yesterday I entered my second race, and my first multi-sport race. It was a “duathlon” — running and bicycling — around Brooklyn’s lovely Prospect Park in the twilight hours of a perfect summer weekday.

How did I get myself into this situation? It all started so innocently, in a late-night AIM chat with Adam Greenfield in which I mentioned that I heard about an event called the “Brooklyn BricK Duathlon“, and that it looked like something I might be able to handle. Next thing I knew, Adam and I were both registering online at the same time, spontaneously and impulsively. There’s no way either of us would have done this if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement you get from having even just one person to commit with you.

The start was at 7:00pm on a Wednesday night, just as the park was getting dark and the streetlights were coming on. This alone made the race attractive to me: I am not a morning person, and my evenings on Fridays and Saturdays tend to involve fine wines and good spirits into the wee hours. This makes early morning weekend racing a bit of a problem for me. Having a whole day to eat properly and prepare mentally for the race really helped.

The BricK was what they call “sprint distance”, a cynical term for what is still an endurance event for most mortals. It consisted of:

• A 3/4 mile run through wooded trails.
• A 10 mile bike around the park loop.
• A 3.2 mile run through the woods and around the meadow.

So how did I do? I think I did pretty well. Of 133 entrants, and 89 finishers, I came in 35th overall (results here). I did equally well in both the run and bike phases, and felt pretty good at the end, too. Which means I am definitely doing this again.

The event was inspiring, to say the least. Adam and I felt like we were surrounded by superhuman professional athletes, and the carbon-fiber stealth-fighter looking machines most of them had put ours to shame: me on an 18-year-old steel frame, Adam on a single-speed (!). Many of the competitors were tricked out in team gear, ripped with muscles, sleekened hairless, and sharing war stories about the other triathlons they’d triumphed in lately. Nonetheless, the whole event was really low key, very DiY and ad hoc, and completely devoid of the kind of aggression I felt all around me in when I was racing in a cycling pack. In a triathlon/duathlon, drafting behind other cyclists is illegal, which means it’s just you and the wind — which is how I like to roll.

The race was brisk, of course, but the vibe was pure fun. A great first-time experience. The best part was on the last run, where the race leaders would pass the rest of us on their return trip to the finish line. Most of the top five finishers took the time to cheer on the rest of us as they ran by us: “great job, way to go, great pace!”. That meant the world to me.

I want to commend the information design by the kids who chalked the directional arrows on the roads. The running route was fairly complex, the maps they prepared were god-awful messes, and the race director could barely describe it without just confusing people even further. But some young kids were sent on a mission to put directional arrows on the paths using chalk, and they did a great job. The route doubled-back on itself, and there were two runs on the same trail, so the signage needed to indicate which way to turn on the way out and which way to turn on the way back. Here’s what they came up with. Not bad, huh?

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