Plan B

I love cooking, but I don’t cook. I love gardening, but I don’t garden. I love dogs, but I don’t have one, love the ocean but can’t get to it. These things bother me.

I live in New York, but I am not a New Yorker. The city doesn’t buoy me, doesn’t move me. I need more. I need less. I no longer want to live in the in-betweens.

I want to count the stars at night and feel cold, wet grass beneath my feet and go to bed tired from having spent a day working hard. Working hard for ourselves, for our sustenance, for our land. Working towards something that has an output, an end result. Something tangible.

I want a creative idea to lead to another and another. I want to try things, even if they don’t work out. Fix things, build things, make things, bake things.

Coldplay Singer Finally Out of Words

The hallowed day has finally arrived! Chris Martin has officially run out of things to say... That doesn't mean he's actually stopped whining, sadly, but he just has no more words.

Except these ones:

"Um....yes...yes, yes....exactly..."

Oh yeah, and this...

"I always say stupid things..."

Coldplay has a new album out and during a press interview with BBC's Radio 4, Martin decided he did not really like "having to talk about things". He walked out of the interview after announcing he was "not really enjoying this."

But he didn't walk ALL of the way out. After abandoning band member Will Champion to answer the rest of the questions, Martin came back to offer his aforementioned views on finding new musical territory...

"Um....yes...yes, yes....exactly..."

Reminds me of that episode of Absolutely Fabulous where Patsy is interviewed on a morning chat show and all she can say is "yeah, cheers, thanks a lot."

BBC Link

Twice in One Day

For the second time in 6 hours, some kook decided it would be a good idea to climb up our office building. The first guy claims to be a proficient climber who has done a number of similar stunts around the world. He was arrested when he reached the roof. His mission, or so it would seem, was to spread a message about the evils of global warming. He carried a fluorescent green banner that read "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week."

The second guy must have just not had enough attention as a child. His t-shirt apparently carried a message about 'malaria' but I doubt very much that he was climbing the building to raise awareness about the need for nets in Africa. He climbed past where I was sitting around 6:15pm. My colleague Kim was walking towards the window and said "That's weird... Is that the same guy?" I looked around and saw his legs and then peeked behind the shade and saw him go past. I'm on the 4th floor and he was moving pretty quickly at that point, but apparently he seemed to get tired and stopped to rest later on. He made it to the roof around 6:35pm and was immediately arrested.

The crowds on 8th Avenue were part of the amazing spectacle. Traffic was stopped for at least 10 blocks and there were hundreds and hundreds of people thronging the sidewalks for blocks. Women at the Lucille Roberts exercise studio across the street from us stopped their workouts and crowded the windows to grab a look. People walking to their cars on the roof of Port Authority were glued to their cell phones and were trying to snap shots from wherever they could.

The Police and Fire departments showed up in pretty big numbers and they were just beginning to inflate one of those big balloon mats when he reached the top. We only knew he had finally got up because of the crowds cheering on the street.

Never a dull moment!

Metro Mapping

Back in 1972, a New York City subway rider was greeted with a map that looked similar to the London Underground map. It wasn't to scale and it wasn't geographically accurate, but to design groupies, it was HOT. Designed by Massimo Vignelli, it was hailed at the time as an instant classic.



But though pretty, the map wasn't a keeper says Design Observer:

The problem, of course, was that Vignelli's system logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners' Plan for Manhattan. In London, Henry Beck's rigorous map brought conceptual clarity to a senseless tangle of streets and neighborhoods that had no underlying order. In New York, however, the orthoginal grid introduced by the Commissioners' Plan set out its own ordered system of streets and avenues that has become second nature to New Yorkers. Londoners may be vague about the physical relationship of the Kennington station to the Vauxhall station: on the London underground map, Vauxhall is positioned to the northwest of Kennington when it's actually to the southwest, and it doesn't seem to bother anyone. On the other hand, because of the simplicity of the Manhattan street grid, every New Yorker knows that the 28th Street number 6 train stops exactly six blocks south and four blocks east of Penn Station. As a result, the geographical liberties that Vignelli took with the streets of New York were immediately noticable, and commuters without a taste for graphic poetry cried foul.

As a result, Vignelli's map, which put form above function, was replaced 7 years later with the less elegant but perhaps more accurate version that persists in revised forms today.

The modern map, introduced in 1979, may not be the collector's item that Vignelli's is, but it makes sense... At least to me. And to John Tauranac, one of its original designers. In a 2004 New York Times piece, Tauranac said the 1972 map was incomprehensible, based on what he said was "a certain cynical reality." The piece goes on to say:

Subway lines ran implausibly at angles of 45 and 90 degrees. To preserve its aesthetics, that map put the 50th Street stop on the Broadway line west of Eighth Avenue, far from where it belonged.

In contrast, subway lines on the 1979 map looped across the city more or less as they do in reality. Better yet, you could see where you actually were when you emerged above ground.

Some geographical distortion was inevitable, and still is. "We had to open up Lower Manhattan and squeeze the Bronx and Queens a little bit," Mr. Hertz said. But the new map was a revelation compared with the old, which often left the rider geographically clueless.

Anyone feeling nostalgic for or curious about Vignelli's design marvel can download a scanned version from nycsubway.org. Men's Vogue magazine also urged him to update the design for the 21st century, which he has graciously done.



A limited run of signed prints was available exclusively through the magazine, but sold out on May 1, 2008.