April 2005 Archives

In New York and free this Sunday afternoon? My friend John Geraci's got something going on:

My new project, FoundCity, is a collective mapping tool that lets people map any point in Manhattan from their cell phone, and attach a folksonomy tag to that spot. These points can then be seen by everyone at www.foundcity.net, where visitors to the site can generate maps of the city by keywords or by usernames, and surf from keyword to keyword, or user to user, learning what individuals like about the city as they go.

This Sunday, May 1st, I am holding a FoundCity Walk, to kick off the project. The walk will begin in Chelsea, and go wherever we want it to. As we walk we will map and tag things that interest us. If you are interested in coming and mapping your own personal Manhattan with us, I would love to have you along.

The walk begins at 1 PM. We will meet at the Paradise Cafe, 139 8th Ave., just north of the W. 14th st. subway station (take A, C, E or L lines). To spot me, look for the guy with the orange backpack.

John's also responsible for the super awesome Neighbornode, "group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public." See you on Sunday!

All you really need to know about Amy Phillip's Village Voice piece on Colin Moloy & Co, you can probably figure out from its subtitle: Theatrical indie heartthrobs the Decemberists give gawky drama-club girls something to dream and blog about. But here's the last paragraph of it anyway:

I ask Meloy how he feels about being a heartthrob. "I feel great about it! I would certainly rather be that to a bunch of English majors and drama fags than a bunch of sorority girls." He laughs. "It's one of our main m.o.'s to try to make the world safe for pansies."

Andrew, who got as much a laugh out of that as I did, said, "I still don't like their songs, but then I'm a jock." I was popular in high school but did drama (and debate, and yearbook) so yeah, a dork, and yeah, I like the Decemberists. I saw them last June while they were still working on their latest, Picaresque; the new songs are even more fun live than you'd think, especially The Sporting Life and Sixteen Military Wives.

Your friend and mine, überblogger Jason Kottke, can now be seen modelling t-shirts on Defunker, the newest venture from the Busted Tees & College Humor kids.

Jason, does this new career mean we'll be seeing you in the pages of Sweet Action someday?

I've always wanted to see Sweeney Todd and I love love love Cyndi Lauper, so I've got my fingers crossed hoping this works out:

Pop songstress Cyndi Lauper is in the running for the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd heading for Broadway this fall, Playbill.com has learned. (...)

A source confirmed to Playbill.com what New York dailies are reporting, that Lauper has auditioned for the stageshow's lead role of Mrs. Lovett. The role was originated on Broadway by Angela Lansbury in a Tony Award-winning turn. No official casting has been announced.

A recent casting notice reveals that the role would require an actress who "Ideally, plays trumpet, glockenspiel, cymbals or other instruments, but may not play an instrument." Lauper has performed on a number of instruments including guitar, dulcimer, zither, recorder, bass recorder, omnichord, banjo, ukelele, tin whistle, and drums among others.

Also she's got a serious set of pipes (5 octave range, baby!) and has fantastic stage presence; the quality of her singing live easily puts what most singers can only achieve in the recording studio to shame. I can't recommend At Last, her album of covers, to people enough; my favorite track on it is the understated Until You Come Back To Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do).

[ via NewYorkology ]

Songbird Ocarinas' Sweet Potato Ocarina is "a replica of the actual Ocarina of Time from the Legend of Zelda series from Nintendo." You can see movies of someone playing songs from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask on the Sweet Potato Ocarina as well as learn finger positions from the two games on their site.

The ocarina comes in two sizes, regular for $39.95 and extended range for $49.95, both of are a pretty blue ceramic color and have a triforce painted on in gold. Is this a Nintendo-sanctioned product? I'm guessing not, but it's still pretty cute and will probably make a great gift for any hardcore Zelda fans you know.

How awesome are these bacon strip bandages from Archie McPhee? $4.95 buys you 15 rashers, err, bandaids.

[ via hustler of culture ]

Great interview with Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi by Michelle Goldberg in Salon, Sexual Revolutionaries, in which they talk about sexual mores and how the US government isn't far removed from the mullahs in Iran. My favorite exchange:

You said something interesting before—that fears about security make us conservative. Can you explain the connection?

First, people have stopped talking about pleasure. Eating is a pleasure, but they will tell you if you eat you're going to get high cholesterol. If you make love, you're going to get AIDS. If you smoke, you're going to get cancer. But smoking is a pleasure—I'm a smoker, I can testify. Eating is a pleasure. Making love is a pleasure. OK, it's a risk sometimes.

The fact is, the world is very fearful, because we don't know who the enemy is. The world is at war, but at war against who? Bin Laden turns into Saddam and Saddam turns into someone else. They all the time talk about security. Security, security, security. But when you talk about security, then everything is about being safe. And being safe also means having less freedom.

It makes a society much more conservative, looking for security. If you have freedom, then you have more risks. It goes together. Myself, I prefer to take some risks, and once in a while it's going to hurt. My grandmother always said the saddest life is to be born a cow and to die a donkey.

What does that mean?

That means you are born stupid, and you're going to die even more stupid.

In your life you have to experience things; you have to see things. What is the interest of life if you're always scared and you don't see anyone and don't go anywhere? What is the point in living? Just eating and shitting and making money?

The interest of life is somewhere else.

Satrapi's latest book, Embroideries, explores the lives of Iranian women through stories they tell about their relationships with men. Hope to pick this up soon.

Today's New York Times Magazine has an essay excerpted from Steven Johnson's latest book Everything Bad is Good For You, out this coming week. Watching TV Makes You Smarter introduces what Johnson calls the Sleeper Curve, which I guess is the main theory behind his book:

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that "24" episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of "24," you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like "24," you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all.

Okay, so I don't care overly much for 24 in particular, but I do understand what he's getting at with Sleeper Curve; the shows that get my attention and manage to retain over the course of seasons are the ones with the twistiest of plots and multiple stories woven into each other, that require the closest attention be paid at every turn or I risk being completely lost come next week. He mentions The Sopranos, which I do love, but the first show I ever felt this way about was The X-Files, its byzantine mytharc as appealing to me as the detective stories and Gillian Anderson.

Johnson goes on to explain the Sleeper Curve as it relates to reality shows and why we love them:

Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings. That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?

So now you know why contests like Project Runway and America's Next Top Model are as addictive as crack, but can we admit that many reality shows, especially those that follow celebrities around, really are about "watching other people being humiliated?" No one questions that Anna Nicole is drunk and high and will do something embarassing or that Jessica will say something painfully clueless. And then you have your choice trainwreck moments on shows like C.O.P.S. or Showdog Moms & Dads, the latter one being the show that dog people like myself watch because seeing people two or three orders of magnitudes crazier about dogs than we are is reassuring, reminding us that while we put bandanas on our dogs every once in a while, we're nowhere near THAT bad. *cough, cough*

Anyway, I'm tired, sleepy (and somewhat bloated from this afternoon's Taste of Chinatown snacktravaganza, more on that later), so I'll stop blathering on now, except to point out that you can pre-order Everything Bad is Good For You on Amazon and read Johnson's blog post on how he came to the idea behind the book while thinking about games. Can't wait to read it!

I love the New York Times Fashion & Style section because it poses questions like Who Pays $600 For Jeans? and then proceeds to natter on for 30+ paragraphs when really, the answer is short and simple: assholes.

If you still feel like reading the article, know that these last two paragraphs are the only essential part:

"Right now you could have a pair of jeans that cost $1,000, and people would buy them," Lawrence Scott, the owner of Pittsburgh Jeans Company, said last week. What, Mr. Scott was asked, is the indispensable element in the making of a perfect pair of luxury jeans?

"Same as always," he said. "It's going to come down to how your behind looks when you pour yourself into them. No matter how good the wash or the detail or the label, if it doesn't look good on a behind, it won't sell."

I really liked Butch Dalisay's most recent column for Newsbreak, Why I Left The Church, triggered by the recent hullaballoo over the Philippine government's Ligtas Buntis program:

I’m glad, in a way, when the Church speaks and thinks like this, because it reminds me of all the reasons why I left it. Sometimes—usually during one Edsa People Power uprising or other—I’m actually tempted to believe that this Church has come out of the Middle Ages and institutionalized the liberal progressiveness it manifests in other aspects of our national life. And then, just about when I feel like going back to church and genuflecting, I get a dose of what some bishop has to say about birth control, divorce, sexuality, women in the clergy, euthanasia, and censorship, and I feel happy and relieved to be away from all that—well, not exactly, since there’s no way of escaping what we used to call “clerico-fascism” in this country of ours.

As some of you may remember, I had a great time at last year's Night of a Thousand Stevies with Chris. I'd just like to point out that this year's event is two weeks away, May 6th at the Knitting Factory, so you all have plenty of time to throw together appropriate^* attire. No excuses, people; Spring means it's warm enough for chiffon.

^* Where by "appropriate" I mean "Total Stevie Realness" regardless of period of Stevie-ness being attempted.

Google Maps' London map has stops for the Tube marked on it, something I'd wished the NYC map had launched with. I'm sure this is a feature relatively high on a list of things to do, but till then I'll have to make do with MonkeyHomes' unofficial Google Map + Subway Stops, which is alright but kind of cluttered—it would be even more useful if you could toggle particular lines on and off.

Anyway, since I still get a little disoriented when travelling to neighborhoods I don't know very well (the Upper East Side, the Financial District, every borough that isn't Manhattan...), I'm going to be using HopStop, which figures out the best way for you to get you from Point A to Point B in NYC depending on whether you want to travel by subway or by bus, or are willing to walk more and transfer less or walk less and transfer more. Hooray for options!

If you live in New York and take the subway a lot, chances are good that you've encountered Natalia Paruz at least once or twice. If the name doesn't sound familiar it's probably because you know her as Saw Lady, the woman who sits on a rickety chair and plays sappy songs on her musical saw while making the most disturbingly orgasmic of faces. I have a great appreciation for most of the MTA's Music Under New York performers^* but her I can do without because every time I see her it's exactly like I just walked in on a stranger in the middle of frosting her muffin of love. I've come to know the sounds of her musical saw from a distance, and they fill me with dread.

Anyway, I bring Saw Lady up because I've finally found someone who I think would be an appropriate replacement for her, should she ever decide to retire from playing the subway. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Belinda Bedekovic, purveyor of the hottest Keytar action you've ever seen straight out of Croatia. As a friend said, "That's got to be the most sexually laced piano playing I've ever seen." Take that, Tori Amos! Watch the video, I promise you won't regret it.

^* My runaway favorite is Floyd Lee & his Mean Blues Band. I own two of their cds!

If I never hear another story about the sex lives of the following, I will be happier for it:

• Michael Jackson
• Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie
• Charles/Diana/Camilla
• Brit-Brit & K-Fed
• Paris Hilton
• Joanie Laurer (as previously discussed)
• cast members of Desperate Housewives
• giant pandas

Most especially the pandas because, well, I know I'm a tomboy and it's a good week if I've managed to comb my hair twice, but the reception Bai Yun gets from her man is making me think I should consider primping more:

Bai Yun had displayed the signs of being receptive to mating in recent days, including yipping and raising her tail, walking through water — creating a "wet dog" scent that researchers believe may attract male pandas — and scraping pine tree bark onto her head and face.

"It's getting her perfume on for the date," Lindburg said. "It's really quite a sight, because she backs up against the tree, sits, and scrapes the bark onto her head. Then she rubs her hair, her face. It's very catlike."

Gao Gao responded by becoming visually aroused and trying to tear through the wire mesh "howdy" gate that separates the two most of the year.

Granted that after his reaction they only got it on for a measly fifteen minutes and they only get in the mood once every year anyway, but still. Tearing through a gate? That's almost as hot as... taking my dog out to poop after midnight.

Okay, so I lied. I'll never get sick of Angelina Jolie. I mean, hello! Also you know Felicity Huffman is the Desperate Housewife you secretly lust after, you dirty dog.

I get holla'd at a lot here in New York (so typical that the only guys with the balls to flirt with me are the ones I'll never see again) and though most of the talk is generic and instantly forgettable, every once in a while I'll get something custom-made like this bit from tonight:

Shorty: Hey baby, I'd walk your dog for ya.
Biggie: If I was your man, I would walk your dog for you.
Shorty: If I was your man, I'd open the door for ya and walk your dog.
Biggie: Why ain't your man out here walking the dog with you? If I was your man, you wouldn't be out here walking your dog alone!

I don't have a shopping list of things I'd like from a boy but yeah, if you want to walk my dog with me, that would be great. It would be nice to know.

The 3rd run of 24in48 in the San Francisco Bay Area just went live, so please go check it out! Much thanks and love to all the participants and everyone who helped me put it together.

If you'd like to find out about the next editions of 24in48 or put yourself or your city forward as future participants, sign up for the mailing list on the site or drop me a line at 24in48@gmail.com. Next month: Chicago!