Chicago. A man is about to get on a routine flight. Suddenly he pauses and decides to walk away. He doesn’t know why. An hour later the plane goes down in flames. It’s dismissed as chance … Britain. A woman has an image of a black mountain that’s moving, with children underneath it. Two hours later, a Welsh schoolhouse is buried in an avalanche of coal slag. It’s dismissed as coincidence.¹

New York. A book designer named Chip Kidd begins to read his New York Times. On the cover is a photo of new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a suspected puppet of former president Vladimir Putin. The photo has been torn across Medvedev’s midsection to reveal a word: Trickery. It’s dismissed as something that could only happen to a famous book designer who has been known to use this sort of graphic element.

But really, was it all in his mind, or was it much more than that? You decide.

¹ If you were a TV-watcher in the 80’s, you probably saw a commercial for the Time-Life books commercial for a series called Mysteries of the Unknown. This was my favorite: “The Midwest. A mother feels a sharp pain in her right hand. Far away at that exact same moment, her daughter screams as she touches a hot pan. Just chance?” Check it out, for old times sake [YouTube].

Part one of two: The home page. It’s where the “navigation” is. There’s no keyword search, no “categories.” Just you, the name of each mix like a sticker on a cassette tape, and the sense of rooting around in a cryptic virtual shoebox, popping a mix in, listening for a little while, striking gold, or not, and moving on. It’s a really lovely and evocative of the simpler, more mysterious times.


Part two of two: The “player.” It’s genius. No “friends” or “people who are also listening to this” or “messaging” or “you may also like.” Just the songs, links to buy them, and an indication of which track is playing.

For the record, I don’t think it needs much else. Whatever happens, I really hope this stuff is NOT added:

• Search. Please, no search. Of course search would make it easier to find mixes that “match” your keywords, but who wants that? Well, I did, at first, but after I poked around I realized that I was having way more fun exploring, letting go of the way that I normally explore. We need more non-keyword-oriented ways of exploring! Seriously! It’s way more fun to roll the dice than to look for what you think that you want, and it’s somehow more appropriate to music
• Any kind of “profile-generating.” The madness must be stopped somewhere, sometime. A way to connect with mix-makers would be nice, but no names, birthdays, pictures, blogs, or any of that.
• Any kind of more “predictable” homepage. Please. Just show the random stuff. Let people start here. It’s scary and frustrating and annoying at first, but it becomes fun, magical. Perfect! Done!

33. Hit a jump shot in pool. It’s not something you use a lot, but when you hit a jump shot, it marks you as a player and briefly impresses women. Make the angle of your cue steeper, aim for the bottommost fraction of the ball, and drive the cue smoothly six inches past the contact point, making steady, downward contact with the felt. Illustration: Leif Parsons.

There are some good, less predictable skills: 5. Name a book that matters; 21. Argue with a European without getting xenophobic or insulting soccer; 52. Step into a job no one wants to do.

And then there are the predictable things:

Drinking-related stuff: 17. Make one drink, in large batches, very well; 24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope; 32. Describe a glass of wine in one sentence without using the terms nutty, fruity, oaky, finish, or kick.

Outdoors-related stuff: 14. Chop down a tree; 26. Cast a fishing rod without shrieking or sighing or otherwise admitting defeat; 51. Build a campfire; 55. Point to the north at any time; 68. Find his way out of the woods if lost; 69. Tie a knot; 74. Know some birds.

Sports-related stuff: 4. Score a baseball game; 11. Swim three different strokes; 65-67. Throw a baseball over-hand with some snap. Throw a football with a tight spiral. Shoot a 12-foot jump shot reliably.

Social context?

I would think that Esquire has made lists like this in the past, and if so I think it would be interesting to compare lists across time. For instance, there’s nothing explicitly sports-knowledge-related or steak-knowledge-related — “Have a favorite team,” “Know the difference between a New York Strip and a T-Bone” or something like that — all of which seem like they’d be requirements in the past. It would also be interesting to know if lists like this are recent developments. Would the Esquire magazine of Norman Mailer’s era craft a list like this? Probably not, actually. Or, if they did craft lists, they’d be one-item lists: “1. F*** lists.”

Via BuzzFeed.

[Donnie Nelson, Avery Johnson and I] went back and forth about whether or not we should trade Devin [Harris]. We knew he was a good point guard, with the potential to be amazing. What we didn’t know was how long that would take. On one hand, we didn’t have enough confidence in him to let him call his own plays, but on the other, he is a one man fast break, his shooting was improving by the minute, he is a good defender and his potential was undeniable. In Jason Kidd, we felt we would get a player that would make it easier for Dirk, Josh, Jet to get open shots. That Avery would no longer have to scream to push the ball, that JK was the best in the business at pushing the ball in the open court. Plus, our rebounding had suffered this year vs last, JKidd is a great rebounder and the presses that had caused us problems, would no longer be a problem.

I buy that. For all of Devin Harris’s virtues, he’s still one of those guys who has very obvious limitations — never going to be a good rebounder, effective at getting in passing lanes but never going to be a great defender, only going to get slower, didn’t seem to be progressing in a basketball smarts sense (i.e., needing to constantly be reminded to push the ball upcourt). I didn’t think it was a bad trade, really, but I love that Cuban goes on to talk through his rationale in what appears to be an open and honest way …

It wasn’t an easy call. Between AJ, Donnie and I, we would change our minds by the minute. I don’t think there is any doubt that the pressure and closeness of the Western Conference race had something to do with our decision making process. In my mind, this season was becoming analogous to the most agonizing season I had been through, the 04-05 season. We were having the same home vs road record delta, multiple players asking to be traded and even more internal tension about our lack of consistent performance than we had in 04-05.

Speaking of that “internal tension,” Cuban goes on to discuss another elephant in the Mavs’ room …

I also know what I learned from Nash leaving. As great an offensive coach as Nellie is, Nash wasn’t playing at MVP levels with us. A change of scenery and coaches and system, some payback motivation and he became a very, very deserving 2 time MVP.

Aside from the implied (or inadvertent?) dig at Nellie’s “failure” to get the best out of Nash, this approach makes a lot of sense to me. There are obvious precursors to it, in addition to Nash’s renaissance in Phoenix — Webber to Sacramento (much younger than Kidd, of course), Shaq to Miami (a little younger than Kidd), maybe Barkley to the Suns and Walton to the Celtics (different situations, but similarly positive effects). Anyway, whether any of this is accurate, true, or whatever, I appreciate that Mark Cuban is saying it. He clearly feels accountable to the fans, and he’s leaving it all on the court in a PR sense.

This was in Sunday’s interesting pool, and it’s a pretty strong example of the “Flickr style,” i.e. heavy-handed, post-processed and much-adored by like-minded members of the community. Photo: James Neely

I don’t patently dislike post-processing, but I find that the photos deemed “interesting” frequently have a creepy unreality about them, a flatness, an obsessive visual “perfection.” The result is that many of these photos seem like scenes from Dune, or Lewis Carroll, or a Bjork video, or a Thomas Kinkade landscape. Everything is in focus, perfectly lit, tightly composed. In short, I dislike “interestingness” because it feels like a sort of Pixar-ization of photography. (I love Pixar). But I don’t like that CG-esque feel creeping into a medium that, for me, derives its essence from its simplicity and imperfection.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with post-processing and unreality

I just appreciate when post-processing supports the natural aspects of the photo, when it adds layers to the scene. The photo below is called “The Flooded Grave,” and the photographer is Jeff Wall. It’s a montage of 75 separate photographs from two separate graveyards and Wall’s studio. Why all the cutting, pasting and blending? Well, If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s actually a small coral reef growing at the bottom of the grave.

Wall says, “I worked with oceanographers to create a momentary fragment of a real undersea corner. I didn’t want an aquarium display, a cross-section of sea-life from the area, or anything like that. I wanted it to be a snapshot of everyday life at a certain depth of sea water.” Read more at the Tate Modern’s online catalog.

So where does the Flickr style come from?

I’ve been excited to talk about Virginia Heffernan’s article in last week’s New York Times, Sepia No More. She addresses the disconcerting popularity of high-dynamic range cheesiness in the Flickr style, and she strikes at the heart of what is emerging as a formula for popularity on Flickr. She discusses Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir, one of the Flickr style’s “leading proponents:”

[Gudleifsdóttir] discovered … how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Gudleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Creating images that look good shrunk

I’m intrigued by the interpretation of the UI’s effect on the Flickr style, i.e. that the Flickr interface for browsing thumbnails informs the way in which people compose and upload photos. It makes sense to me. The browsing mechanism is tightly-tiled matrix, so photographers are going to want to craft individual elements that look good when they’re (a) cropped to be square, (b) shrunk down small, and (c) snugly packed together.

Here’s an example from a photographer I like, a nicely differentiated matrix with some intriguing juxtapositions. Photos: Feedbacklove.

Is “Flickr style” a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Maybe the early users and founders were graphic designers? Maybe they really liked glossy, vivid stuff that often looks like the background of beer billboards? Whatever it is, I feel like the “Flickr style” is much less free-form than most may think. The formula behind “interestingness,” as stated on the site: “Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” Interestingness as a function of the community actions makes sense. Tagging, assigning photos to groups, favoriting, commenting — all of these things seem like useful vehicles. But my sense is that everything that’s being folded into “interestingness” is coming from a fairly closed system, a group of like-minded people with similar tastes promoting the same stuff again and again. Back and forth, forever. ))<>((

Un-interestingness

I’ve got a list of my own “un-interesting” photographers, mostly gleaned from the group I Shoot Film. I also follow the feeds of a few Flickr photographers — This Is a Wakeup Call, Feedbacklove, and Last Leaf, to name a few.

Still, it seems like most interesting stuff still lives outside of Flickr. I look at SUCKAPANTS and The Constant Siege pretty often, both of which can be NSFW, by the way.

If The Wire had a literary analog, this would be it, not only because it takes place in East Baltimore, but because it presents a morally complex view of the relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry with whom they interact (mostly poor people in desperate circumstances). It also adds academic underpinnings and a truly excellent set of footnotes that provide avenues to a variety of interesting sources, one of which led me to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles, a 1998 installment of the Cop Diary called “The Word on the Street” about the language of NYC cops. The author, the pseudonymous Marcus Laffey (actual name: Edward Conlon) recently wrote a memoir called Blue Blood, which is going on the list for sure.

I really appreciated his discussion of research methods because it puts in high relief some of the challenges that any researcher (e.g., one who is trying to understand how people use high-tech tools) interacts with their interview subjects. So much of it is very un-objective, and Moskos addresses his skeptics early on:

Some will criticize my unscientific methods. I have no real defense. Everything is true, but this book suffers from all the flaws inherent in ethnographic work … Being on the inside, I made little attempt to be objective. I did not pick, much less randomly pick, my research site or research subjects. I researched where I was assigned. To those I policed, I tried to be fair. But my empathy was to my fellow officers. Those nearest to me became my friends and research subjects. My theories emerged from experience, knowledge, and understanding. In academic jargon, my work could be called “front-and-backstage, multisited, participant-observation research using grounded theory rooted in symbolic interactionism from a dramaturgical perspective.

You can read more in an excerpt here [PDF], and he’s got a blog that discusses media coverage of the book here.

I just discovered that Thames & Hudson has published a stunning collection of Tarkovsky’s polaroids, taken of his family and travels. The Guardian displays of number of them here.

Lots more at this blog. In Russian, too. Nice.

So every few weeks I sift through the mostly asinine archives of SFist, and today, against all odds, I found something interesting: A llittle blurb about urban beekeeping in San Francisco with a link to a CurrentTV short.

The director profiles this guy Jon Ralston, someone I vaguely recall from my time in the bee club. He’s younger (in beekeeping age, anyway) and takes a very similar approach to beekeeping that I did: Just get a hive, put it in your backyard, let the bees do what they do until someone complains. Worked for me until my landlord stumbled upon it during a very active day (that turned into a swarm), and became terrified.

I also identify with Jon’s reasons for getting into beekeeping in the first place — feeling closer to the outdoors, and having a source of cheap gifts. He seems like an interesting guy, and he’s got a funny blog, too: My robot is pregnant.

It’s kinda strange (and thrilling) to browse through the many alleyways and avenues of Flickr and suddenly unearth a photo of … yourself. Just now I came across this picture of myself and a shadowy figure, who I suspect is UX it-guy Jan Chipchase taken last summer during UX Week. My hazy recollection: We met and hung out during a late-night trek through the Mall to the Washington Monument, a epic walk that included UX Week speakers, the entire event staff, and the multi-talented Maggie Mason of Mighty Goods (and, more recently it seems, Mighty Junior), who recorded the journey here. We left late, got back *really* late, and somehow Jan looked none the worse for wear during his keynote the next morning; epic, indeed.