The Pigeon Wars

I don't know how I missed Pitchaya Sudbanthad's excellent story about the culture of pigeon keeping in Brooklyn that ran in The Morning News back in August. If you're as interested in the autonomous clouds of pigeons that are ever-present above most New York City neighborhoods as I am, it's a must read.

Personal Compression

Since Saturday morning I've been wearing a shirt/jacket that I hadn't pulled from my closet in a couple years. I had forgotten how much I like it, though I'm still not sure how it's meant to be worn.

It's a somewhat rave-inspired (think Berlin '99) black brushed-cotton windbreaker with more zippers, snaps and adjustable elastics than necessary. While choosing (for an extended period of time, in front of our antique mirror) how to wear it today, I figured out why I like it so much. Once you understand all of the different adjustments you can make, and how they affect the fit of the garment, it's remarkably easy to make this thing fit perfectly.

Even better, it's easy to make it snug. For whatever reason (some attribute it to mild autism) I love my clothes to exert a mild and consistent pressure on my body. In other words, I prefer them considerably tighter than my average peer. This desire for personal compression affects more than my attire.

I like my shoes tied tightly, with precisely equal pressure applied to each foot. I like my seat belt tight, reminding me that I'm a human, in a container, traveling through space much faster than I should be. I like the wrap around my wrist taut enough to make that creaking leather sound when I bend it.

Related: Deep Pressure

Quotations

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

Right

The dawning of the Conceptual Age? I hope so.

Thermometer

We wisely opted to paint the floor of Heather's studio with oil-based paint. Which meant that we had to clean our brushes with mineral spirits. I emptied a coffee can into a baggie and used the empty can to rinse our tools and fingertips. Because it took us a week to paint it (each coat took 24 hours to dry, and it took 4 coats), we've had the can full of milky solvents for a while now.

What's interesting is that the vapor above the polluted liquid in the can must expand and contract within the exact same temperature range as our loft. About fifteen minutes after we give up on layering and turn on our expensive heat, the can makes a distinctive "bloop" popping sound. It makes a similar sound 20 or 30 minutes after we turn of the heat, as the can contracts. Like clockwork.

Exhaling

A hot-air balloon accident at the 2004 Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

Stowaways

Sometimes when I look at an empty bright blue sky, I instinctively shift my focus from the height of the absent clouds to just micrometers above each eye. I can somehow focus on the thin layer of Lacrimal Fluid surrounding my eyes, and in it I can see the ghostly outlines of active microorganisms swimming around in my tears.

I mentioned this to Aaron (my biology lifeline since the 10th grade and current medical student), who admitted to having seen them as well, but suggested that they might be lint rather than protozoa. My sister agrees they are alive however, and has corroborated me, stating that she tends to "watch the 'worms' in oncoming headlights".

Experienced this?

Orotones

Images by Edward S. Curtis

Midair

Image by Jamie Boud

Balloons

Please view the first and second full-scale images as well.

Weathercube

Have I mentioned that I can get the police band on this thing?

"Male in jersey headed southbound on Atlantic."

Container

In December 2004, Holger Beisitzer sold plastic grocery bags filled with helium at a German Christmas market as components of a piece called Flying Rubbish. This beautiful work succinctly discusses issues of both sustainability and artistic value. By taking seemingly worthless objects and modifying them only through the introduction of an invisible and nearly weightless gas, Beisitzer has asked the public to pay only for the artistic gesture itself, repurposing the bags as containers for an idea rather than physical commodities. Elegant.

Via Near Near Future

Related: George Kuchar's floating plastic bag and Sam Mendes' knock-off version.

Negative Six

Apparantly, most people deal with the cold much more poorly than I do.

They complain, oblivious to the fact that the weather just is. They slow down, as though their physical and mental energy is directly proportional to the thermal energy in the air (or perhaps the amount of skin seen on city streets). They pile on unnecessarily oversized garments and huddle around illegal ceramic heaters under their desks, desperately calling Facilities Management to request that the office heat be raised. They shamelessly decry New York, opting to applaud softer, sandier locales.

I like the cold. I like that it hardens my shell and allows me to walk tautly and briskly past shivering women with high heels in paper bags. I like that it interiorizes my thoughts in a way that summer can't. I like protecting my ears with headphones, protecting my lungs with a cigarette, and thinking to myself: "I've fallen through a frozen pond, and waded out casually, breaking pieces of ice with my fists to clear a narrow path. This is easy."

Expanding Cluster

The Frozen Shore

Image by Witold Riedel

Quotations

"Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always." - Guy Debord

Phosphenes

When I was 5 or 6 I discovered what I wouldn't know was the phenomenon of phosphenes until the age of 14.

After I was put to bed, I'd lie awake with the palms of my small hands applying firm pressure to each closed eye. Patterns of deeply saturated color (reminiscent of fireworks or fireflies) would fill what had been my central and peripheral fields of vision. Initially I would watch, critical and entertained, enjoying the novelty of a personal light show. However, over time I began to allow myself to sink into these visions. I would look past that primary layer, towards the receding blackness rather than the dancing light.

I got good at it, and by the time I was 8 or 9, I was able to completely loose awareness of myself as a viewer, as body lying in bed. Using this method I cultivated minor out of body experiences for much of my youth. I always felt very comfortable, being just a mind and eyes.

Then, one day I was unable to achieve this absence. As an adult I tend to think that I lost it as soon as I comprehended the physical nature of the phenomena itself. Though to be honest, I think I lost the skill gradually, as my interest in defining the parameters of reality moved on to other aspects of my life. I miss it, though I still keep the company of the colors.

Images: The 2001 Leonids

Trees

I think Terra's on to something, suggesting a shift from birds to trees, one of my other iconic fascinations. A fascination that I know is sure to resonate with Mick as much as the birds have.

I lived in Connecticut for four years when I was in late grade school/junior high, and my memories of the period are marked by one tree in particular. Standing in the middle of West Mountain Road (where it T's with Cherry Brook), was a beautiful oak (maybe an ash?) nearly 4 feet in diameter.

Living nearly at the crest of West Mountain we had to drive past the tree every time we left our house (to the right on the way up, to the left on the way down). It became a gate of sorts, signaling to us each time we returned from a roadtrip or errand, and to guests following handwritten directions, that it was only minutes to our home.

White Fireflies

Kyouei's Balloon Lamp is a simple and inspired object. Arguably just a latex lantern sans cord, the Balloon Lamp could become so much more. Modified with a Lithium-Coin battery, the illumination provided by the LED can last up to 100 hours. Now imagine substituting the breath used to fill its volume with helium. You'd have a floating, ghostly orb perfect for stringing around a pool during a summer party. Alternatively, (environmental concerns aside) I'd definitely want to see thousands of these set loose on a still night. White fireflies on a macro scale.

Via Sensory Impact

Related: AfroditiKrassa's World View Lamp which will be put on the market by Innermost.

Morning Sunlight

It's been a little over a month now since the Winter Solstice, and I'm beginning to see the difference in the light every morning. Two weeks ago I was leaving for work just as the sun was coming over the chimneys and skylights of the adjacent rowhouses. These days, sunlight has a good five minutes to start passing through our prisms before I lock the door.

Prisms have hung in every bedroom I've had since I was in the fifth grade. There's just something about a silent process creating such pure forms. Our cats love them too, chasing each little rainbow like a phosphorescent rat.

Lighting Tints

While setting up my Senior Thesis Exhibition three and a half years ago, I stumbled upon an interior design idea that I've used ever since. If you replace a standard lightbulb in an incandescent fixture with a Bug Lite bulb, the space illuminated instantly becomes the coziest, warmest, most inviting part of your home. You'll want to smoke some opium, make some coffee, watch Twin Peaks and then make out until you fall asleep. Perfect for frozen days like these.

A slight twist I tried a year or two later: Soft Pink bulbs. They do everything they say they will, calming a room with minimal visual change.

Snowstorm

Orange Julius Recipe

So, listen to this. Because of the blizzard, Heather decided to make her favorite veggie chili. We had trouble finding the recipe though, as our cookbooks and recipes haven't really found a home yet; they live in a box beside the fridge. As I flipped through one of them, glancing at all the folded papers and index cards crammed between its pages, I found this:


Please view the full image as well.

A recipe for an Orange Julius! If it's any good, I'm set (as soon as I get a blender).

Yoko Devereaux

Yoko Devereaux launched their new website yesterday.

I've known the folks behind the label for a while now, and let me say, they're just as amazing as their clothes. If you're fed up with the fact that nobody makes decent, edgy menswear (that isn't eurotrash), then you're in luck. Yoko D. combine fine tailoring, conceptual thinking and highly street-conscious accents to make items I've consistently drooled over, season after season. Support them.

Sunset Buttons

Please view the full-scale image as well.

In 2002, I was going to sell these buttons at a friend's store, but after making a few, determined that my button machine was sub-par. I ended up writing a book for her instead.

My dad's the only person who ever got one.

Lost Balloons

A cluster of lost balloons. I saw them on the way to work today.

XML Music Registries

XML registries are a brilliant idea. It basically goes like this:

You export an XML file from your audio player that contains all of the metadata from every song in your music collection. It's really just a light-weight database that contains a list of all your artists, all your albums and all your songs. It knows how many Pavement albums you have, and that you've listened to Bows and Arrows more than any other album. It knows how often you've played, and how you've rated, each track in your library.

You then setup an account with an online registry, and upload your XML file. Every 4 Gigs of music you have accounts for about 1 Meg of XML data, so be warned, it can take a while. For instance, my collection which weighs in at about 53 Gigs, generates a 14 Meg XML file. Once the registry receives your XML and parses it, there are a lot of really interesting things you can do with that data.

Musicmobs has taken the power of your own listening history and applied it to the concept of social networking. Basically, it knows your taste in music and is able to accurately suggest other people that have similar taste. It's a great way to discover new music, and other people who are into the same shit you are.

As an extension to it's online interface, Musicmobs has created Mobster, an OSX app that runs alongside iTunes that automates the whole process. It can handle the upload procedure for you and it will suggest other artists to check out. What makes it really clever though, is the Hipster to Mainstream slider.

Because it knows the specific tastes of thousands of people, their system is able to see which artists are the most popular and which are enjoyed only by folks out on the end of the bell curve. What the slider does is allow you to filter in real time, the suggestions it's making, based on whether the system views a given artists as being Mainstream or Hipster. Brilliant.

A few other concepts that are equally compelling:

Audioscrobbler, an audio player plug-in that does pretty much the same thing, the only difference is that your remote database is updated every time you play a song, as opposed to manually uploading periodically.

The Internet iTunes Registry, will tell you "More than you ever wanted to know about what you listen to." It's claim to fame is that it can generate a million different charts, visually showing you your listening habits.

Last.fm, isn't based on XML, but it is in similar territory. Their master plan is to create internet radio that is tailor made for each listener. They figure: if their system knows what you like, and it can find other people that share your taste, and it knows of tracks that they love, but you don't have yet, then it's pretty easy for it to give each listener a constant stream of music they haven't heard but will probably like. Genius.

Ketchup Packets

Ketchup packets are poorly conceived. They don't contain enough ketchup, and when you do try to harvest what little Heinz they hold, you can only ever squeeze half out. It's such a waste of ketchup.

Why doesn't ketchup come in creamer cups? The kind with the thin plastic shell and foil peel-away top. They would hold a lot more ketchup; it would be a lot easier to squeeze out; and it is a fucking cup in which to dip your French fries (a la the pleated paper cups at Wendy's). You could get every last bit of ketchup if you wanted, using your French fry as a tool, like a chimp. It would be so much better.

I know I'm promoting disposable plastic, but it couldn't be much worse than the current packets, right?

Orange Julius

I'm convinced the most delicious beverage ever invented is the Orange Julius. If you spoke with anyone I know, they'd tell you that I love the shit. I've made road trips to dying malls just to get a large.

Unfortunately for us all, they're going extinct. In three of the places I've lived, I've watched as the local mall aborted its Orange Julius. The closest franchise is 16.95 miles away. What the fuck?

Fields

Scaled Perspective

Unlike many I know, I still get excited to fly. I love airports with their dated attempts at modernity. I love planes, of all kinds, it doesn't really matter to me if their from Cessna or the Skunkworks. But what I really love, and what I anxiously await each time I'm in a Town Car driving up the BQE, is the perspective I gain for the minutes I'm in the sky.

There's something about the shift in scale itself that allows for both personal and systemic insight. While I'm aloft, an awareness of how rare and productive those minutes can be is never absent. I've had some of my best ideas staring out of an acrylic porthole at the shimmer of human progress, and I take full advantage of that altitude every chance I get.

Consequently, I'm a total asshole about which seat I get. Fighting for a window seat is a given (it should be noted at this point as well, that Heather, for many years, has generously conceded to sitting on the aisle).

What I get picky about is the side of the plane I'm on and my proximity to the wing (there's nothing worse than walking onto the plane behind a couple of haggard old ladies and a young couple, litter in tow, only to discover that my seat is above the wing and my view will begin and end staring at worn rivets).

Before booking my tickets, I mentally map the flight path, assessing which side might have the superior view. For instance, if I'm flying down the East Coast, I'll opt for the right-hand side, providing views of organically forking rivers and crowded malls rather than less stimulating, though still calmly beautiful, sea. If I'm headed home, I go with whichever seat lets me watch the post-Verrazano harbor fade into Lower Manhattan.

For those that enjoy looking down as much as I do, download Idle Time's wonderful screensaver, Holding Pattern.

Glowing

Heather found these on Thorsten Van Elten, and I think the designers had a vision of our apartment when they made them. They're perfect.

Believe

Even though I've gotten back into indie rock over the years, there are still moments in which I wish I were 19 and had an MDMA tolerance again.

Listening to track 3, Believe (featuring Kele Okereke (frontman of Bloc Party)), on the Chemical Brothers' new LP Push the Button for the first time was one of those moments. This tune could destroy a Phazon Soundsystem.

Breaker Painter

The simplest thing I've ever done to beautify my home was to spraypaint my breaker panel. It's virtually free (if you're the kind of person with spraypaint around), and it makes an immeasurable impact on the visual order of your space. I promise.

A tip: to give the screws a nice even coat of paint as well, punch them through a piece of cardboard until their heads are flush with the surface of the board, and then spray.

Space

Other people's treehouses, other people's caves.

Seagulls vs. Pigeons

Growing up, I never lived in a place that had seagulls. Of course, I had seen them at the beach on vacation, and above landfills on TV. But I never once thought that they might hang out on top of street lights or parked trucks, the way pigeons do.

So when I moved to Baltimore and then Brooklyn, it always startled me to catch seagulls in my peripheral vision. They're so much bigger and faster than the pigeons that I can't help but root for the pigeons. I imagine them competing for the prime French fry spots in some sort of inner-city turf war.

Seeking Stasis

I got desperate this week. Anti, you understand.

Grafedia

The thing I love most about the developments emerging from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program lately (e.g. Pac-Manhattan), is that they're all heavily influenced by the street. They aren't lofty proof-of-concept articles, nor are they prototypes clearly designed to win the hearts of venture capitalists. They're technologies that real people can understand, interpret and participate in, the entire time with two feet planted firmly on dirty asphalt. I like to think it's the influence of The City itself.

The latest nugget of genius to hatch at the ITP is John Geraci's Grafedia. It's basically a way for the average city dweller to encounter hyperlinks, written on walls, as they navigate the five boroughs. An initial user can post media content to the system, and then write (in blue, with an underline) a hyperlink to their posted content on any surface.

When a second user encounters the link (it might be the word hum, though it could be any word or series of words the initial user chooses) they can send an email or text message from their phone to hum@grafedia.net. A few seconds later the piece of media originally posted to the system is sent to the viewer.

The system has many, many possible uses. The first that came to my mind was that we can now tag tags with metadata. Allowing the casual fan of graffiti to quickly download information about the artist, when the piece was put up, what materials it employed, etc. Consider it the open-source, networked version of gallery placards for the street.

Via Rhizome

Remaining Items

Heather and I went through our very last box. Five and a half months in, we are done moving. Here are the things we agreed I could keep (if I was willing to stash them away in my studio):


A Realistic Weathercube.


Modified mousetraps that I had been using as organizational clips at our old place. I removed the latch mechanism, drilled some holes (so I could screw them into the wall) and then gave them a coat of polyurethane. They worked well (we used to store unpaid bills in them)—we just don't have a place for them now.


An old lock that my mom brought back from Utah as a gift for some reason I never quite understood.


Scale models (made in 1974) of an Iguanodon and a Diplodocus from the British Museum of Natural History. I've had them since I was a child.


A broken Colibri lighter that Heather bought in Baltimore's Inner Harbor when we were in school.


One of the horseshoes that Heather's mom sent us as a housewarming present when we took our last apartment.


The front-cover die from the hardcover edition of my book.


A piece by Andrew Sutherland.

Sunsets

Another stellar sunset from the roof of my office.

Full Mixes

One of my biggest complaints about iTunes, is that it has such lousy support for full DJ mixes. If you've bought a mix CD containing tracks that play seamlessly on a standard CD player (due to zero-second gaps between songs) they will inevitably gain annoying pauses between tracks when you play them back on either iTunes or an iPod.

Until Apple adds a way to eliminate the gaps, the only option (and their official suggestion) is to re-rip your CD as a single track. The biggest limitation of which, is that you cannot pause the track, play another album entirely and then come back to your mix where you left off (the way you can with Audiobooks, for instance), a feature that is really useful on a 74-minute song. And that's not to mention all the valuable metadata you lose if you take 30 songs and make them one (but that's another debate).

To help alleviate some of the frustration, I offer OSX users this work-around:

1. You'll need to start off with a AAC of your full mix. You could do it Apple's way and re-rip your CD (which presumes you own the CD in the first place), or you could splice together a bunch of songs using this Applescript. You can avoid this entire step if you download your mixes as unified files. Please note however, if you have your unified mix is formatted as an MP3, you'll need to convert it to AAC using iTunes built-in converter.

2. Once you've got a unified AAC, run this Applescript to make your track "bookmarkable". Effectively, you are turning your mix into an Audiobook.

3. Remove the book from the iTunes library (do not delete from the hard drive).

4. Find the AAC file in the Finder and change its extension from .m4a to .m4b.

5. Import the new .m4b file into iTunes and sync with your iPod.

After that, you should be all set. All your mixes will play gap-free and will be bookmarkable, making for a half-way-decent user experience until Apple gets their shit together and listens to the torrent of complaints coming from beat connoisseurs worldwide.

If you'd like to add your voice to the cacophony as I have, you can drop Cupertino a line here.

Quotations

"Let me be clear about this: I don't have a drug problem, I have a police problem." - Keith Richards

A Plane In Front of The Sun

Graffiti Analysis

This shit is so up my alley, I was destined to read about it.

Fi5e (AKA Evan Roth, an MFA student at Parsons) of All City Council fame has done it again. This time around he has developed a piece of software that analyzes the strokes, hesitations and other gestures generated as a writer throws up a tag. After the computer has captured the motion (via what appears to be a simple foamcore box and a DV camera) it can then plot the movement of each coordinate crossed by the letterforms, creating stunning minimalist pieces that he then wheatpastes throughout the city. Of all the people actually elevating Street Art to Fine Art, this kid has rocked it on the most conceptual tip. I'm impressed. Watch a video of the system in action here.

Via Wooster Collective

Deep Pressure

I love my subwoofer. Probably too much. I liken my love for it to the comfort Temple Grandin's Squeeze Machine provides. An evening alone, laying on the floor, listening to any of the Y4K records leaves me more sated than a bowl and a glass of Glenfiddich. I don't think it's my emotional attachment to the music either. Give me a nice 80 Hz tone, and I'd be just as content.

Trendspotter

So, I went to the AIGA's Small Talk #5 with Dee Dee Gordon last night. She must have used the word "Maven" 100 times. I think she also mentioned something about pimping out the cultural wisdom of children to transnational corporations for candy and videogames, but I'm not exactly sure...

Ligatures

I know I should expect this kind of consideration from Apple by now. But I'd just like to applaud their proper use of ligatures in the new iPod shuffle logo. Thank you.

Gnats

Neckface

I feel like the world is divided into two camps: Folks that know and love Neckface's work, and those that haven't had a chance to, yet. Often celebrated as a successor to Basquiat, Neckface's naïve and illustrative public pieces are changing the graff game for years to come. Check out this amazing fotolog documenting his ongoing exploits.

The Mac mini

It's about time that I can do more than proselytize to all my loved ones, pleading that they make the switch. I can actually suggest a realistic option now that Apple has debuted a $499 desktop dubbed the Mac mini.

I'm willing to bet that within a year I will have sold 4 or 5 of these things based purely on my zealotry. If only they had a referral reward program, so I could get one too...

Blink

Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking hits shelves today. Every trend forecaster, media critic and McSweeney's reader is gonna be on his dick all over again, so read it now before its actual value gets diluted by all the hyperbole.

Bent MetroCards

The Post is reporting today that the MTA has begun modifying the subway system's turnstiles so that they will no longer give free rides to those who know how to bend their expired MetroCards in a particular way. As that group of people includes myself, and occasionally a bent MetroCard is my only ticket home from the bar, I am understandably sad that an era of quasi-legal free transit is over.

It'll take them a while to finalize their testing though, so we may very well have a few more free rides left during this period of twilight. I recommend bending the magnetic strip on your expired MetroCards a little over three-quarters of an inch from the right-most edge (between the C and the A in Card). Swipe 3 times, and on your 4th swipe you should be let through (if you've done it right).

If the above instructions fail you, and they likely will (it takes practice), you can learn the way I did. Just start picking up as many bent cards as you can, eventually you'll see the consistencies.

Via Gothamist

Loops From The Bergerie

I might be the only person on the web that thinks the increasing addition of vocals detracts from, rather than strengthens, the music of Swayzak. That said, their new record, which I was a bit slow to pick up, is really quite good. These kids have nice sounds, and even nicer equipment.

Lost Lighter Telemetry

Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear have done something both incredibly simple and incredibly transcendent with their piece Traces of Fire, which they exhibited in Vienna recently. In this work they fitted a dozen-or-so Bic lighters with radio transmitters and then "lost" them in a dozen-or-so pubs. They then tracked the lighters throughout the city of Limerick, documenting the unplanned travels of each Bic. The resulting maps, charts, images and other documents of process constituted their exhibition.

Though many have pondered the fate of the lighters that walk, few have made the effort to examine both the actual circumstances under which they disappear and the human reaction to the loss of a inexpensive yet highly personal object.

Hopefully it's only a matter of time before I have RFID in mine, and the days of finding myself needing a cigarette without the means to light it are over.

Customer Images

Finally, I will be able to download decent cover art from Amazon, as they've made a very smart (and interesting) move. Instead of bumping up the res of their cover images (as they've done in the past) they've gone with a much more innovative, broad, and cost effective solution: They're letting their customers submit images associated with every product they sell. You can not only upload gorgeous scans of vintage records, but also any image you'd like. The idea is that through a user-generated visual forum, potential customers will get a much better idea of what they're buying. I think Amazon will be right.

Amazon's "Customer Images" Program

Ball Lightning

Did you know you could make Ball Lightning (AKA Plasma!) in your microwave? Neither did I. And it can be done with just a glass bowl, some super glue and a pencil lead. Here's a step-by-step guide.