Monday through Friday 9am to 7pm are spent at an interactive ad agency coming up with the creative concepts for a certain Nazi airline’s social-network infused travel tracking web and mobile application, continuously bearing the brand’s distinguishing factor in mind – their ability to pump fuel into the gas tanks with impeccable timing and efficiency until the journey comes to its successful conclusion. I charge for lunch.

By mid-day, New Jersey Art Director B, Connecticut Creative Director S, and I battle it out over the whiteboard, where we pore over my never-ending supply of diagrams and flow charts, printed fresh each day, discovering previously undisclosed nuances with every hour, debating each blot of ink until one of us submits to the other’s persistence.

S, who has final decision-making rights, stands an inch closer than comfort, eyes fixed unwaveringly on the target, my face, often seeming to not quite understanding exactly the details of B and my fervent discussions, but always making the correct high-level decision regardless.  S waits a bit too long with uncomfortable silence after I emit my usual delay tactic response to his asking me if I am interested in permanent employment.  He is not afraid of silence or proximity.  This ability to create uneasiness and action on the part of his minions (myself included) demands respect, and I am taking notes.

Meanwhile young chatterbox B waxes loquacious about social media, interactive design, usability, Toffte, and just about any other topic placed in range of his curly goldilox covered ears.  He, and the rest of the agency crew, maintain poise and courtesy throughout most of the 9+ hour workdays, finding joy and comfort in each others’ company.  Sometimes I think B is a genius just through the sheer level of his commitment to the otherwise inconsequential minutia of interactive media, his lack of anxiety, and what I perceive to be a certain level of premature wisdom.  But he is no doubt young and idealistic, and I have no doubts that the final product will be mediocre but nevertheless a flagship product for this interactive agency which has apparently never created anything quite so interactive before.  (Mind you, I’ve created a dozen of these things at a tenth of the budget with a twentieth of the people…. lessons to learn abound.)

Project Manager, W, a Kenyan seemingly by birth, once a day trots her stuff by and begins to talk about the status of the project in a deceptively offhand manner.  Like S and B (without the pickle soup of the true S&B in Williamsburg), W is also surprisingly intelligent and understands the impact of most design decisions without requiring a spoon feeding of soup.  Her observations are usually acute, and I admire her ability to maintain control while I repeatedly question her authority with my snide remarks, arrogance, and unintentional but conscious airs of nonchalance.  We are all in all getting along very well.

H, the Jewish senior designer of Romanian genetics, is soft-spoken but witty when spoken with a flat affect. She believes men should be men, and not sing mopey songs about unrequited love.  I feel that we share generally similar tastes, although our interaction is relatively limited.  It is due to her that I and you have now discovered her friends’ band, Tiger Flower, although she is by no means a metal-head.  H is a skilled designer and grasps conceptual matters with little effort.

At least once or twice a week, S, B, W, and I conference with R and H, the developers in England who will most likely actually build what we have designed.  The Brits do not restrict themselves to technical discussions and frequently question my design decisions without quite addressing them as such.  S, B, and W, seem somewhat unfamiliar with these aggressive tactics of programmers, so I take it upon myself to assuage the developers’ concerns while attempting to restrict their mental meanderings to only those areas in which they will be put to use. 

Nevertheless, the Brits are clearly positioning themselves to gain control over this project, its timing, and high level decision-making through the guise of technical issues, and my crew seem none-the-wiser.  Despite their being an internal group of the London sister office of the same agency, originally, the Brits were meant to be just one of many teams of developers who would bid on this project.  Without any bidding, they have de facto claimed status as the only developers in consideration.

Thursday 7:30pm, you can see my taking nosedives off of the diving board in the NYU pool, sometimes slipping and injuring myself as I try to impress the skinny young almost-but-not-quite asexual Chinese girls under the instruction of C, the flamboyant non-professional diver extraordinaire.

diving boards are dangerous

Friday morning, 8:30-9:30, I hit balls around on the tennis court with buxom instructor A, also of Romanian descent, and the busload of middle-aged Catholic women.

Saturday and Sunday 9am to 6pm are devoted to my hard-working students, health insurance, library rights, and a meager retirement plan. Somewhere there is time for banya, booze, and social networks, vegetarian meals and naturally caffeine-free tea.

As Trina says, “I’m gonna put that pussy on top.  I’m gonna ride you until that dick drop.  I’m gonna keep going non-stop until I hear you say, ‘Trina, god damn you a bad bitch.’”

While Obama is cracking jokes about how his detractors are missing the point, I am deeply involved with my new client down on Hudson Street near the Passport Office.

Very little natural light makes it in from the two walls of windows.  The cubicles irregularly shaped and arranged in an ad-hoc abandoned honeycomb pattern.  I sit at one of several steel tables half a foot too high.  My neighbor, who’s name I immediately forgot, is a freelance front-end coder.  He is young and seems far too happy to be an HTML programmer.  Sometimes he can’t contain his excitement at how “neat” his own code is.  Planning his own obsolescence…  But he, being relatively neat, tall, good looking, personable, and clean, is not what I would usually imagine a programmer to be.  Based on this and my last office experience a few weeks ago, I am starting to detect that the breed of geek who works at these ad or interactive agencies is not at all the same as the antisocial, dirty, drug-obsessed geeks I am used to.

Behind me, in the dark cavernous space, full-time employees in the production division exchange the latest technology gossip.  They swear a good amount and talk in authoritative voices a few steps too deep for their natural range.  Today, my third (and second-to-last) day, I made my second presentation, this time to the accounts department.  The head account woman picked cucumbers out of her gourmet deli salad and alternated between twiddling her Blackberry and iPhone, interjecting occasionally with justifications for why the high-profile system I am designing should not do anything different from what has been done previously.  I agree entirely, but unfortunately, I must keep myself entertained.

Everyone says you have to see the Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim, so I took a peek yesterday, not realizing it was the final day.  I agree with everyone not because his art is so interesting, but because by following the reverse chronology of Kandinsky’s work while spiraling down the Guggenheim turret’s ramp, you see firsthand the deconstruction of his late complex abstractions as you descend towards his earlier, easier digested works.

One thing which seems clear is that Kandinsky, like many people in postmodern culture, was focused on symbols and their meaning in shifting contexts.  Certain motifs consistently repeat themselves from his earliest works up until his final paintings, despite the drastic changes in style.  Certain hatch marks, marine forms, and what appear to be feet and toes appear again and again in the most unexpected places.  And it is this which gives the retrospective meaning.  Repetition turns “Kandinsky” into an emergent body of work amenable to discussion and analysis.  If every work was unique, how would you address it as a whole?

A late work

On of his works, unusual in its style even for such a varied artist, seems to serve as a legend to the symbols prevalent in all others:

Thirty (Trente), 1937. Oil on canvas

A "typical" Kandinsky composition

An early work

Celebrated the arrival of 2010 with two flutes of champagne with Mom, Dad, and Daniel.  And spent the first few hours of the year revisiting a 5 year old application I wrote in Max/MSP that takes time-lapse video.

Screenshot of Time Lapse Max Patch

Here is documentation of our crazy New Years:

Breakfast & Coffee

Daniel & Toast

Want to try it out?

1. Download the Max 5.1 Runtime
2. Download and open this file
3. Once opened, click the “open” button under where it says “use live camera for input”
4. In the pink box where it says “set smallest lapse in msec”, set it to 1 to start with.
5. Click the checkbox that says “Click to start/stop time-lapse”
6. Indicate a filename where you want to save the video
7. When you are finished, unclick that same checkbox.
8. Find the video file and watch it

Thank Otso and family for these photos from the early 80’s.  I have just remembered that I slept on a blanket in our dining room while our families lived together.

Brothers

Parents

Fathers

A Thanksgiving overview of the past year’s blog statistics:

Growth in visitors over the past year

Traffic sources

Click here to see a full list of search terms that have led people to this site.

How to apply for a rifle and shotgun permit from the New York Police Department (NYPD)

Insights from this analysis:

• There are definitely things I can do to optimize SEO keywords on this site to bring visitors in from Google.
• Forgive the use of big fonts, redundant text, and unnecessary links – I’m optimizing my keywords in this post.  In case you didn’t know, that is why most websites are so irritating, poorly designed, and badly written – they want more visitors.
• It seems like searches for my full name are leading some people to this site.  I don’t mention my name anywhere, and this site doesn’t show up in my own Google searches for my name…. what’s going on here?
• Thank you Handy for all the traffic – you’re a popular guy.
• Clearly there is a dearth of information online about how to apply for a rifle and shotgun permit from the NYPD.  I’m going to see how much of that traffic I can grab by optimising further for those keywords, so forgive me for redundant content.
• But don’t forget to check out my post: Acquiring a Gun, Part I (How to Apply for a New York City Rifle & Shotgun Permit from the NYPD), which goes into great detail on how to call the NYPD to get information on how to call the NYPD.  Part II is coming.

Ramen Noodles:  Rai Rai Ken, Setagaya, Menkui Tei, Bibim Bar

• There is a significant number of people looking for a good ramen.
  
• Rai Rai Ken is really not very good ramen.
  
• Bibim Bar is ok for a quiet Korean meal.

Russian Baths – Banya – Sauna

• There is room for a competitive site with information about banya (Russian baths) locations and reviews.
  
• BRC Sauna amd Spa (the New Jersey Banya), Mermaid Spa, and the Wall Street Banya (i.e. Spa 88) all feature strongly in the search terms that have led people here.
  
• However, the search terms used to find Russian baths are not standard, probably because the word banya is not familiar to many people, and there is no good translation, although sauna is the closest.
• Have 42 people really searched for “Paul Glimcher what kind of person is he”?