Brief vacations - SFO 06/24/10
Out of Office Auto-Reply 06/24/10
I’ll be in Los Angeles from about 10:30pm tonight through June 30th.
Ask me questions 06/18/10
At dinner a few nights back with @alexismadrigal and @sarahrich (Spork on Valencia was delicious), I mentioned that I have a hard time getting motivated to use question/answer web services like Quora. This is regardless of how potentially useful and well-executed they are – personally, I think @quora is remarkably frictionless and elegant from UI/UX perspectives.
Vaguely, I think it has something to do with my wanting (sub-consciously, mostly) to “own” the stuff I am contributing and not have it accessible only in the ecosystem of yet another social web app. It’s probably short-sighted, I know, given that you only get the benefits of a vast database on question/answer communities if, well, you have a vast database. But just the same, I can’t seem to work up the motivation.
Alexis mentioned the idea of poll-blogging, which I had never heard articulated as such, but which made a lot of sense. It reminds me of what Fred Wilson does on AVC and I know that the /ask functionality on Tumblr is widely used.
I came across Formspring thru @sacca’s twitter feed (follow him on Formspring) some time ago and know that it’s gotten a lot of traction recently. So I’ll try it out for a while (doubtful as I am that anybody has questions to ask).
Back in San Francisco 06/16/10
After three disorienting and relaxing weeks of travel – seems like I was gone so much longer – I’m back home in San Francisco. Despite all the running around, I managed to get a lot done for both Cairn Co. and Artlog.
I’ll write about Cairn Co. and Jetty in a bit, but I published an update about @artlog developments on Artlog’s blog this morning covering our new staffers and the sitewide re-organization.
Evening at Plage la Paloma 06/16/10
St. Jean Cap Ferrat 06/12/10
I’ll be posting more snapshots and videos from last week’s trip to France later today or tomorrow, but, in the meantime, here’s a shot of sunrise on the peninsula of St. Jean Cap Ferrat – Villefranche side.
I never adjusted to the time change and was massively jetlagged consequently while in Europe. So I went swimming or took long walks around sun up most mornings – before knocking off for a couple hours of sleep.
Flying back and forth 06/09/10
I’ve had a busy few weeks. I spent the last week in May in New York City – getting ready for a big @artlog product relaunch. Had one night at home in San Francisco. And I have then been in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, France visiting family this last week.
Here are some photos taken while in transit.
Late camping photos 06/09/10
I’ve finally imported some photos from a Russian river camping trip from two or three weeks back.
Elizabeth's Installation & Episco Disco Call for Work 05/26/10
From At Episco Disco, the Sacred and the Profane by Reyhan Harmanci at the new Bay Citizen website:
“…successful ones, like Elizabeth Parks Kibbey’s suspension of more than a thousand flowers in main hall this past winter, make the most of the vast space…”
Elizabeth and Eve Ekman are curating Episco Disco this summer and looking for artist submissions:
Paradise Now is a nondenominational curatorial team exploring this commonality by showcasing artists who engage the awe-inspiring space within Grace Cathedral through multi-media installations and performing arts, in collaboration with the monthly musical social gathering EpiscoDisco. Grace Cathedral’s ongoing relationships with artists and its unique legacy of open-mindedness and inclusion has provided us with this incredible venue for the arts community…
Past artists have worked around these constraints by using our access to a balcony above the entrance from which installations have been hung, and overall space in the cathedral is abundant. There are a number of alcoves throughout the cathedral that offer opportunities for artists to carve out a more intimate setting within the greater space. There is also 40-foot screen that can be employed for projection purposes. We are seeking new or existent work for this unique event for July and beyond
Room with a view 05/24/10
I went camping on Friday night and woke up to this view of a pond, a lavender field and olive vines.
California.
In New York City for the week 05/24/10
I’ve previously used Dopplr to manage my travel schedule, but I just let it languish. So I am thinking up better ways of pulling travel data straight out of the Google Calendar I keep.
In the meantime, tho, I am in New York City for the week working with the ever-growing @artlog team. I arrived yesterday, am staying in my old neighborhood – Boerum Hill, Brooklyn – and will be here through Memorial Day.
Then on the 2nd, I’m taking a week-long vacation – the first I’ve taken in a couple years – to see family in/around St. Jean Cap Ferrat, France.
Artlog will be launching several platform expansions the second week in June. I’ve also scheduled to start letting more folks use Jetty – the flexible publishing app I’ve been working on – and to officially launch Cairn Co. that week as well.
Big things ahead.
Spoiler Alert: Exit through the Gift Shop 05/05/10
I saw “Exit through the Gift Shop” a few nights back. It was a fascinating, well-produced movie. Great footage and charismatic people on the screen.
If you haven’t/won’t see it, the movie is generally a view into contemporary street art and more specifically a bildungsroman about Thierry Guetta/Mr. Brainwash. Fair warning: I am going to go through pretty much the whole narrative arc in the next few paragraphs for the folks who may read this and haven’t seen it (can you make a venn diagram from just one person?). I leave what may or may pass as analysis for the last two paragraphs.
A French expat living in Los Angeles with a thriving second-hand clothing business, Thierry Guetta finds himself compelled to videotape his and his family’s day-to-day life. On a trip to Europe he follows his cousin, a noted street artist, and finds a subject matter that seems to justify his videotaping at least to himself. Guetta pretends to be a filmmaker creating a documentary about street art. That seems like a reasonable enough thing to most observers and the artists he tails evenings in the US and Europe accept it. He revels in that acceptance. The thing is he isn’t a filmmaker. He’s just playing one. In acting out the part of documentarian as best he can, Guetta gets incredible access and collects hours and hours of footage. He looks like he is having fun! After years of filming, he gets put on the spot and is forced to produce a film from his footage, he overreaches and cuts an unwatchable oeuvre.
At this point in the movie – if you trust Banksy or Guetta, the duel narrators, as reliable – Banksy tricks Guetta into giving over his footage so that a real movie can be made from it. To distract the bumbling Frenchmen, Banksy half-jokingly suggests that Guetta stage an art show of his own work in Los Angeles. And as you might expect given his tendency toward obsession, Guetta throws himself entirely into the thing. He mortgages his home. He sells his business (or something along those lines, these details are a little blurry). He starts performing the part of a street artist and mimicking the folks he has followed up until this point. He starts timidly – he pastes a sticker to the inside of what looks to be a refrigerator – but you watch his ambition and the sense for what may be possible build. You see him at Kinko’s making big stencils just as Fairey had done. You see him on rooftops spray painting his graphic just as he had watched Fairey, Banksy and numerous others work (with an unnamed assistant here a stand in possibly for Guetta himself – whoa!). He rents an enormous disused space in downtown Los Angeles that reminds everybody of the enormous show that Banksy himself had put on in that city and he hires a staff of designers to churn out work that borrows heavily from just about everybody. He goes for it without a real purpose – there’s reason enough in the doing possibly. He begins call himself Mr. Brainwash in commentary on how we (the public) are seduced by the ubiquitousness of things. We begin to believe that the only person really brainwashed here is Guetta himself.
In the process of assembling the show, he proves himself an inept manager and not up to the task. He falls from a ladder and breaks his foot. He phones Banksy to ask for help. Consultants are hired. In haste an enormous exhibition that looks how a street art exhibition should look is put together. The local weekly newspaper takes the bait and runs a cover story. Billboards around the city are rented. And people come to the exhibition. They come in droves. Los Angeles is seduced. Millions of dollars worth of (arbitrarily priced) work is sold.
The film was directed (or at least credited to) Banksy. In it, Mr. Brainwash comes off as a blundering clown while pretty much every other artist is either taken at face value or – in the case of Banksy – cast in museum quality flattering light (even in the ridiculousness of the false shadow that serves to obscure his identity). Indeed, everybody pokes fun at Mr. Brainwash and accuses him of letting them down. But he persists and is a global brand and commercially successful artist (for now I guess).
MBW is a clown but the thing is that his attention-seeking, process and products are nearly identical to those of guys like Fairey & Banksy. They all work in studios with assistants. They all “borrow” heavily. They are all marketing machines (in the run up to the film’s release in San Francisco much attention was called to the Banksy works popping up here in the city). You can say that his work is simply derivative, but that’d be too easy a foil. I think. The way the movie is structured, his work’s shallowness makes the other artists’ work seem profound by comparison. But of course that doesn’t mean that the other work is profound. It isn’t in my opinion. Outside of it’s ubiquity and the commercial value pegged to the work by the art market most of the street art in the movie is pretty boring – formally and conceptually. If anything the Guetta/Mr. Brainwash story simply makes it easier recognize that most of the artists in the film work by producing a surfeit of imagery that swirls in a gyre around an empty center.
48 Hour Magazine 04/29/10
A few weeks back, @alexismadrigal mentioned that – having just turned his book in to his publisher – he was eager to work on something collaborative and with a quicker turnaround. Along with @mat and @sarahrich, he’d been drumming up support for this project – 48 Hour Magazine.
They’ve put an awesome team together for @48hrmag with @hchamp (Happy Birthday, Heather) as photo editor and @fraying leading print production. I’ll be designing the website and building an app to facilitate submissions and the editorial process. It’s a project that will let me put a lot of the tech that I’ve built for Jetty to practice before Jetty’s official launch and it’ll let do some thinking about streamlining workflows for publishing to multiple environments (on the web, on mobile devices and in print). I’ll be posting more about what I learn along way soon enough.
We published a call to arms of sorts on 48hrmag.com on Tuesday and it has received lots of positive attention and commitments from some phenomenal artists and writers. This is an excerpt about the project from the site:
Welcome to 48 Hour Magazine, a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits. As the name suggests, we’re going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.
Here’s how it works: Issue Zero begins May 7th. We’ll unveil a theme and you’ll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We’ll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.
Since posting this we’ve had something like 3000+ people sign up to be notified of the theme when it goes out next Friday. If only a small percentage of those folks submit good stuff, we’ll have a lot of editing to do. It should pretty crazy, but we’re all stoked.
Go sign up for to collaborate with us on 48 Hour Magazine and/or follow us @48hrmag.
Work with me 04/29/10
Ay Are Tee, the company responsible for Artlog and Arlo that I run with Manish Vora, is expanding. We are hiring several people to help grow the businesses in New York City. It’s pretty exciting.
On the editorial side, we are looking for an Editor-in-Chief for Artlog who’ll help us set the tone for editorial on the site and a Gallery Liaison to be the point person between Artlog and the gallery community.
And on the technical side of things, I am looking to hire a talented Ruby developer to work with me (but in New York City) as we expand Artlog and finish building out the Arlo/Galleries product.
You can find more info here: http://artlog.com/pages/71-jobs
Last weekend's drive 04/29/10
I drove back up the coast again this past Saturday from Los Angeles to San Francisco. We couldn’t have asked for better weather. If you were to ask me for a list of the 10 best bridges in the world, I’d say “1 thru 5 are the Bixby Bridge and the rest don’t matter.”
Giants 04/13/10
I’ve seen the Dodgers play at Dodger Stadium over a dozen times. They’ve lost every game I’ve ever seen in person. It hurts.
Last night – courtesy Pete Jamison – I watched the Giants rout the Pirates 9-3 at AT&T Park. Most discomfiting, tho, the highlight reels on the jumbotron periodically have “Beat LA” spliced in for no apparent reason.
Little Truckee River in the Morning 04/08/10
On my birthday last year – 17 October – I went up to Truckee, CA with my dad to spend some time fly fishing on Little Truckee River. This is a quick video from about 9 am. The fog is starting to lift and the fish are starting to rise – not that the latter is apparent in the clip.
It’s a restful minute or so, but beyond that these several months later I get a kick out of the exchange about 16 seconds in. My dad – having watched me stand very still with the video camera – asks, “What are you waiting for?” I mumble something to clarify – “video landscape picture” or something – and he responds, “Oh sorry.” It’s a small moment, but an interesting one. I was shooting for some kind of silly aesthetic experience that we interrupted and I think putting us back in the video makes it all a bit more interesting.
I am going to be uploading a bunch more videos that feel more or less like this one – that are of places and that have people in them – to test out Jetty’s video encodings and to work through the ins and outs of displaying video in Jetty’s themes for the web and mobile devices.
Jetty by the way is inching closer and closer to a real round of beta testing. Stoked.
The tallest flagpole in Calipatria, CA 03/25/10
And to follow up on yesterday’s post here’s another thing up in my apartment. It’s a photo I took a couple years back in Calipatria, CA.
The “World’s tallest flagpole” stands in Calipatria, CA or so the sign at the flagpole’s base says. At 184 feet tall, though, the flagpole is dwarfed by poles in Aqaba, Jordan (400 feet) and even in Sheboygan, Wisconsin by the Acuity Insurance Flag (338 feet; tallest in the US).
The crazy thing is that the Calipatria flagpole stands 184 feet tall and its top is at sea level. Calipatria is in fact the lowest city in the Western Hemisphere and likely better known as home to the Calipatria State Prison.
"Databases are for pussies" 03/25/10
Chris Lloyd at the the newly redesigned The Lincolnshire Poacher writes about his new code generator/prototyping library – Tyrone. I haven’t used Tyrone, but he makes some good points on an idea that I’ve likewise been thinking about recently – that there is a difference between computer scientists/engineers and practicing web developers.
Phil Karlton is quoted as saying: ‘There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.’ You’d think that because I’m a programmer studying Computer Science (I love the capitals!), that would make me a Computer Scientist. That misconception only occurred to me recently. 99% of programmers out there aren’t Computer Scientists. Therefore, I’d propose the two hardest things in programming are not cache invalidation and naming, but business and interfaces. I’m not going to talk about why I think business is so hard for programmers now: that point, I think, should be fairly obvious. I’m adamant, though, that interfaces are the other most important thing for programmers.
I gather Myles Byrne is responsible for the quotation from which Chris draws this post’s name.
Test prints 03/24/10
In the little time I’ve had on press recently, I’ve been playing a lot with gradients – really just inking two or three colors on the rollers and seeing how they blend over time.
Jordan came to the studio to experiment with the presses some time ago. We ran these test prints. I think he said something about these colors looking like San Diego.
Anza Borrego bloom 03/22/10
I could get used to this weekend thing. I spent these past few days down in the desert with my dad and sisters. On Friday night, we visited family at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells – a tennis tournament that my uncle Charlie built – and got a tour of the stadium. We stayed the night at a hotel there in town that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid – memories flooded back while sitting by the pool and contemplating the waterfall (pictured below).
Saturday, we trekked to Anza Borrego. We dropped in on a neighbor from Los Angeles who has a house there in the desert. Then wandered around the bloom. On our way out of the park, we drove out to Font’s Point for a view of the badlands in the valley below.
So that happened 03/18/10
And then there are days when sit at your desk and tear through some code you had thought a bit about on your morning run only to look up at the end of the afternoon wondering why exactly you built an RSS feed reader into your blogging app.
Too easy 03/17/10
Seriously, airlines ought to make changing your boarding group more difficult.
An environment conducive to work 03/15/10
Ay Are Tee rents several desks at the offices belonging to MediaBistro on Park Ave So in New York City. They are around the corner from Manish’s soon-to-be-former apartment and, after about a year of making him come into Brooklyn to work and after I moved west to San Francisco, getting office space more convenient for him made a lot of sense. It’s a neighborhood, I never really visited when I lived in New York. It’s actually been kind of nice to get acquainted with another part of the city on my periodic trips back East.
In any case, last time I was in town, I went in early on a Saturday morning – nursing the previous night’s excesses – to write some code. I was greeted by an hour’s worth of this mournful dirge (recorded in frustration and disbelief on my iPhone).
Android, Droid Sans and Typekit 03/15/10
I’ve been tinkering with and really digging the Android SDK this weekend. I have/am satisfied with my iPhone (despite ATT’s outrageously spotty service here in San Francisco and in New York City). But Ben Fry inspired me to take a quick look at Android after his widely-linked, opinionated and reasonable post on the closed system that is the iPhone/iPad App Store from Friday:
[The iPad] represents an incredible opportunity, but I can’t get excited about it because of Apple’s attempt to control who creates for it, and what they can create for it. Their policy of being the sole distributor of applications, and even worse, requiring approval on all applications, is insulting to developers. Even the people who have created Mac software for years are being told they can no longer be trusted.
I find it offensive on a very basic level, because I know that if such restrictions were in place when I was first learning to write software — mostly on Apple machines, no less — I would not have a career in the field. Or if we had to pay regular fees to become a developer, use only Apple-provided tools, and could release only approved software through an Apple store, things like the Processing project would not have happened. I can definitively say that any success that I’ve had has come from the ability to create what I want, the way that I want, and to be able to distribute it as I see fit, usually over the internet.
In any case, I was curious to get a sense for one of the other major mobile platforms and already liked that the Android project is open source (and free to try). I grabbed the SDK and started learning/hacking through some primitive apps. It was easy enough to get a very basic sense for the geography, but I don’t have a whole lot of time at this point to dig in too much deeper than that.
A surprise for me, tho, was how much I like the typeface – Droid Sans – Ascender Corp designed for Google. It is one of the primary system fonts packaged with the SDK.
Timing-wise, I’ve been putting together this basic theme for my personal site and meaning to start using the Typekit account I bought a while back during the initial rush of excitement after that service’s launch. Going through the Typekit library this evening, I was pleased to find Droid Sans in there. So, I’ve set this site, dylanfareed.com, in Droid Sans.
Fence 03/13/10
This two-by-four balancing act was up 30th Street between Madison and Park Avenue South. It did the job – keeping folks off new ground – but looked more like an installation than any kind of actual barrier. It reminds me a bit of Fred Sandback‘s string sculptures. The construction speaks a bit to how important perception is to architecture and design. For a little while – I don’t know how long it was up (hours? days?) – this was a wall. It’s an inspiring efficiency and a reminder to me to use as little material or effort as possible to accomplish the task at hand.
Looking out 03/10/10
I took my first real weekend in about two years on a Monday and Tuesday in February and drove up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The whole trip was beautiful and we managed to stay just ahead of the rain until Sunnyvale (paradoxically), but I was blown away by the view walking out after our late lunch at the Whale Watchers Cafe in Big Sur.
The first post on Jetty 03/10/10
So, I am starting to build out my personal Jetty site today as I finish work on the initial release of the backend and API. This is very much still a functional prototype, but it’s been a long trek getting the code this far along and I am stoked already.
I am going to use this personal site for short writing and to organize images/sounds/videos. I’ve never really been able to keep focused on blogging through a number of attempts. We’ll see how this pans out. The reasons I never stuck with it before are many of the same reasons I started building Jetty some months back. I’ll post a bit more about that later, but in the meantime, I want to commit to record several of Jetty’s guiding principles – primarily to remind myself.
Jetty is a different take on identity, publishing and collaboration.
- Let folks use the same tools to broadcast publicly and communicate privately
- Reduce barriers to posting (email, SMS, mobile app, web app) and keep the workflow simple
- Be social but don’t expect social web activity begins or ends on Jetty (play nice with other services)
- Allow for wide latitude in presentation and use through a few well-chosen constraints
- Make attachments painless and keep image, sound & video upload file-quality high
Oh and I’ll be pushing the code for my personal theme and for all the default themes to Github here: http://github.com/dylanfareed/jetty-themes