April 2002 Archives

Ten18 a mysterious site somewhere close to the center of the web. It is all about the work. And the work is of clean, high quality for high profile clients. Look at the work, click on “what’s next” and try to find out more. Hmm, we will try to find out more...

One more tiny post from Pixelpalais. Zwischenraum, one of several interactive flash pieces by Silvia Burghardt. This one somehow about New York, isn’t it?

Just came across a fascinating little journey through 70’s Germany by Josef Sauter. Enjoy this sweet little photo-story. It is a story, isn’t it?

Neille has a Point (see the last comment for Regular, with two sugars.) , the Starbucks article was also meant in a way that Starbucks is so popular because it is an office extension of the living room for many, many New Yorkers. I know the situation has improved recently, but I remember almost renting a room that had no doors. (it had a curtain). Or this other friend lived in a room with three walls. (It was a bit like a cubicle in a fashion studio.) Another friend who now moved back to Germany once rented a room that turned out to be a bunch of walls built around a bunk bed. (What she thought was a window, turned out to be a picture of a window.) Apartments can be tiny in New York. (I know some are not, and there are many great large, beautiful ones with spectacular views). Starbucks offers this predictable business friendly environment. (I can not find this Cartoon which I think was in the New Yorker, but might have been in the HBR where three business people enter a starbucks and order a workstation and lattes.) In a city where so many are writers and freelancers and small-entrepreneurs, Starbucks is like these Airport lounges for business travelers. A controlled, predictable environment. It is much easier to meet in a starbucks or to write a story in a starbucks or to even read the paper in a starbucks sometimes than it is to do the same at “home”. And then there are the distances. When we had an office in the woolworth building I would often have freelance meetings in the starbucks across the street from city hall, because I did not need to travel anywhere, it was a quiet place and it was less than an office somehow.
So while Starbucks is turning into an office for many New Yorkers, the Gym supposedly turns into the new living room. OK, maybe more than that, but that’s another story.
I have this strong feeling that I will need to rewrite this post a bit, but I need to run now, because I finally managed to get an appointment with a dermatologist this morning. The guy was so booked, I had to book almost two months in advance. Yesterday his “automated confirmation system” called to remind me of my appointment. Really. A Robot called our answering machine and even went through all the menue choices with her. “to confirm your appointment, press one”... And so on. My answering machine was not smart enough (yet) to give the right answers. My machines will call your machines... I will probably get 3 minutes with a real human being this morning. OK, have to run.

Marie-Chantale Turgeon from wheniridemybike now also has a {Weblog}. Please comment on her blog, because right now I am the only person commenting... (in my lengthy, lengthy way, poor Marie-Chantale).

Eric "the Redd" Feliciano started his blog today. Get ready for the real real look behind the scenes how this city works. Looking forward to reading all about it, Redd!...

Ok, I can not hold it back anymore. Here are some places I visited today... preshaa-robots and I got their link from guigalaxy who’s link came from the pseudoroom. And then there was MUROI's Art Factory and this: Ra's Page and all of this happened because of Pixelpalooza 2002.

This morning, there was this good Veni, Venti, Grande article by Terry Pristin about Starbucks in The New York Times. Now New Yorkers know that the Chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz was raised in Brooklyn and that there are more Stabucks in New York now than Duane Reade Pharmacies. (Duane Reade Pharmacies are this local Pharmacy institution since 1960 that has so many stores that their jingle is:"Everywhere you go: Duane Reade". You get the idea.)
There are more Starbucks in Manhattan than one might think are needed in this already pretty well caffeine saturated place. There were no Starbucks branches before 1994 and now there are 124 (113 Duane Reades). (Only 3 or so beyond 125th street and NONE in alphabet city.) I can see a Starbucks across the street, and if I lean out well enough I can see two more.
David Sipress observed the situation quite well in the New Yorker.

I remember my first Coffee (Coowofiee) in New York. It was 1993 and I had only heard the tales about the coffee being especially good here. I was 23, on my second visit from Germany, I was definitely not a coffee drinker, what did I know? I noticed all these little carts with strange looking bread in their windows and these guys seemed to sell coffee too. I walked up to one in Midtown and requested a cappuccino. This request makes me smile now, but I was all serious, I did not know any other coffee “names”. I was basically clueless. (at least when it came to coffee, ok?) So the guy in the cart looks at me for a second or two, turns around, pours me a coffee from his machine in the cart, sprinkles something on top and hands me my “cappuccino”. It was coffee with milk with cinnamon on top. It was sweet too, which came as a positive surprise, I had forgotten to ask for sugar. I tried the stuff and I knew that it was not cappuccino, but it was fun, I had just ordered my first coffee in New York, and I was a bit proud of myself. I then walked over to times square, at night, and got the full Times Square experience. Every thing was happening at the same time and I had this incredible feeling of pure happiness. So the coffee was good stuff. (I am not using any code language here. I am talking about real coffee, ok?, no other stimulants, just coffee and sugar... Ok cinnamon.)
I have never ordered another cappuccino from a cart again.
When I moved to New York a few years later, I lived on 46th street, basically in Times Square, in a hotel for a month, so my breakfast came automatically from the cart on 46th street and 6th avenue. I would buy a “regular coffee with *two sugars* and a sesame bagel with butter”. It comes out to be exactly $1 and it takes about 7 seconds to make. I would always stick the buck into the window and the guy in the cart would just hand me a brown paper bag with my bagel and coffee. Blue cup, “we are happy to serve you”, a moist napkin on top, and this super dry wannabe bagel with butter, warm on one side from the hot coffee. I would always order regular coffee with two sugars, because regular coffee in New York is a small blue cup of coffee with milk and sugar, but I wanted be more specific. Have it more my way. Two sugars does not mean that there are two cubes of sugar in the coffee. The guy in the cart usually has an empty 1gallon milk container with the top cut off, filled with sugar and he has this big, sly crusty spoon with which he reaches into the container to pour the sugar, in big scoops over the milk he just poured into the little paper cup. Everything happens in seconds, so the milk sometimes splashes onto the spoon, making it all sticky, thus the sugar crust. Good stuff.
The Starbucks article made me think. So here we have New Yorkers, who are, according to the Starbucks chairman: "too lazy to cross the street for a cup of coffee”, and then these people are paying $4 for a cup of coffee with milk, while I try to get mine for ¢50 at the cart. I know I am comparing apples and oranges here, and I know that the starbucks coffee is pretty good. And they have all these sorts of coffee... But they do not have my “regular coffee with two sugars”, so Starbucks-shmarbucks...
I decided to interview my coffee guy who has his cart on 93rd and Broadway, just across the street from a Starbucks actually, about the various sorts of coffee he has to offer.
Witold: Hi, I have been having Regular Coffee with two sugars for the last 6 years or so. What is the difference between my Coffee and the regular, regular coffee.
Man in cart: It is the same thing.
Witold: It is the same thing?
Mic: Yeah. A regular coffee is a Coffee with milk and two sugars.
Witold: (amazed) I see.
Mic: (smiles)
Witold: so what is this “ and sweet” coffee?...
Mic: More milk and four sugars. (Four huge spoons of white sugar!)
Witold: Wow. That is a lot. Ok, I’ll have one of those then. In large.
Mic: That’s gonna be 5-6 sugars, are you sure?
Witold: Yeah, what the heck, let’s try it.
Mic: haha...
Witold: So what other sorts of coffee do you sell.
Mic: I sell Sanka. That is with no caffeine.
Witold:(as he takes the huge cup in a brown bag and pays $1 for the largest coffee)... Thanks...
Interview took about 8 seconds)

So here we have it. I have been ordering a regular coffee for all these years, except I have been ordering it like a tourist. It was a bit of an upgrade from my cappuccino days, but still, obviously not a real new yorker.
This is going to change now. I am going to order my regular coffee. (and still get the two sugar spoons...)
And when I grow up, I hope to be able to order my coffee like REDD. He is from Brooklyn and a *real* New York guy. His order goes a bit like this...
Redd: ’s up?... Thanks. (Pays, takes coffee...)
(Redd usually already knows the guy, and the guy knows Redd.)
Some day. Some day I will also be able to do that. (Redd is my hero.)

Mememe, all about me.... Here is the truth about my age:

You said your birthday is 12 / 20 / 1969 which means you are 32 years old and that you were:

27 years old when Princess Diana died
(and I remember watching the news in my tiny Apartment on 73rd street, in complete disbelief)

25 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing
(I know this will sound completely horrible, but for some reason this horrible tragedy did not make the news as much in Germany as it did in the US, so I could not quite relate as much. I obviously lived in Germany at that time.)

24 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder
(This one was a very US specific phenomenon. German Television just gave us tiny glimpses of it.)

21 years old when Operation Desert Storm began
(I lived in the Bettina Strasse in Offenbach and the Planes would fly over our city because of the proximity of the Frankfurt Air base. If was pretty scary. War felt very close. A bit too close. I was an art student at that time)

19 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall
(I remember driving in my old Mercedes in the middle of a rainy night, when the news hit the airwaves. I cried. I cried immediately and for a long time. We had escaped from Poland in 1981 and I had just refused to serve the Western German Army, because I did not want to be in a conflict in which I might have to shoot at my former friends and family. Among other reasons, of course. It was just a very personal thing. The world was about to change. It was a very big event for me. I remember driving into East Germany a few weeks later, a bit in disbelief that it actually happened)

16 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded
Saw it live on Television. And it was heartbreaking. I do not think I really understood.

14 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh
I remember this one quite well. A friend’s brother bought one as soon as they came out. He had an apple IIe before that. I had an atari600XL and loved it.

13 years old during Sally Ride's travel in space
I do not remember.

11 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.
We were in Poland, I think... It was shocking but it was ok that the president was so protected. I had no idea.

9 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began
It was a big story on the news. But I was more interested in other things, for sure.

6 years old on the U.S.'s bicentennial Fourth of July
An event not global enough to shake the Airwaves for a 6 year old in Poland.

4 years old when President Nixon left office
I was too young to know. I only remember the following presidents. I thought it was really cool that one of them had the name of a car. I was a kid, you know.

2 years old when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot
I had just written my first novel... No wait... Not really... Do not remember this one, of course...

Taken from Boy the Bear's Age Gauge

Let’s get ready for another show of grand proportions. Tomorrow’s New York Times will feature an article on the upcoming Exhibition of new Thomas Struth Museum Photographs at the Marian Goodman Gallery on 24 West 57th Street. (4/30-6/15) Looks like this is another show we can look forward to, as the photographs on display will be even a bit more like Paintings again, grand in scale and sharp in focus. The images will be of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the human objects in them will be extras, not random visitors, a first for Thomas Struth, making this Exhibition an important transition for him from observer, to creator of a constructed reality. His influence on the image will be the one of a director, not the one of a painter, but the reality is not just the pure observed given anymore. It is created for the sole purpose of art making. Less Cartier-Bresson with a huge camera, now more a Gursky, a Wall, a Muniz or a Lauck. A slow move and a very controlled one. The show will certainly be a success, no matter how success is measured. The Gallery is a high profile place located on the most expensive street in the world, Struth is a high quality artist, taught by the Bechers, and before by the Über-Master, Gerhard Richter himself. Struth is now friends with the Richter/Moritz family and took some pictures of them as recently noted. Saying more would be too much. I can not even offer the link to the article which will come out tomorrow. (The Times actually wanted to charge me for the link you might have just clicked on, so I am putting the Struth picture in cold storage on my drive, just to make sure I can “fair-use” it once any link comes with a price tag attached.)

How much more New York can I stuff into this Blog? To tell you Nothing But The Truth, not much. This blog has been spotted by the radar of a journalist of Deutsche Welle, Konstantin Klein. Konstantin’s primary blog has linked to this site, which makes me quite happy, because his Blog is written in German. This might make some of us happier than others, but I feel encouraged to start a Zweitblog in Deutsch.
If you read German, you should definitely get to know Nothing But The Truth, as it is not only written in German but also with this unique German sense of humor.
If you really want to find out all about it and can not read German yet, try the English version which should be called Nichts als die Wahrheit. (which now actually makes me get the joke, as it means “Nothing but the Truth” and at the same time almost:“Nothing as the truth”. See, quite a brilliant guy.) How does he manage to write several blogs in two languages and make them look so great, and get it all together? Only time will tell. Sehr Beeindruckend. (Very impressive.)
Worth a visit, worth a link. I am adding Nothing But The Truth to my daily information sources.

If you happen to be in New York and would like to see many people this weekend, as well as flawless paintings, go to see the Richter Show at the MoMA. I will probably be there too.
If you would like to see fewer people and some flawless drawings, go see Jerry Phillips at Feature Inc in Chelsea. The show starts today and there will be other artists in the Gallery, but this should not confuse you too much. Go to the back room of the gallery, the so called south gallery (I am writing this in the West wing of my living room).
Jerry Phillips makes these excellent, excellent pencil drawings that are could be the most excellent pencil drawings you will see this summer, so go, go, go. I was not even sure if it was pencil, at first. The man at the entrance of the Gallery was not helpful at all. He did not have a press release, as the show opens on the 27th!
Jerry lost his cool in one of the drawings, thank God, so one of the darkest gray gradients in one of the drawings had some sign of human-pencil-paper interaction. Otherwise... The drawings look a bit like perfect computer printouts, except they must have taken days and days to complete. Unless he uses some sort of mask-trick, but who cares, the images are just brilliant, these islands of shades on otherwise perfectly untouched pieces of paper. The drawings are pencil versions of overexposed images Phillips found in various publications. There are images of grass, some pornographic vegetable, gorgeous little birds. That’s it. They are drawn on paper that floats in the frames. There are maybe 15 drawings in the exhibition and they are all quite brilliant. The largest drawing in the show is the one of a drawing of a horse. Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it? It looks great. The drawing is maybe 6 feet tall and the graphite on paper looks like graffiti at dawn. The drawing is still a drawing but then all the lines have this subtle continuous 6 ft. gradient. Tour de force.
Another wall of the show is occupied by a small drawing with an immense amount of depth to it. It looks a bit like the Powers of 10 drawings, but in pencil and a little bigger.
I like the little Q & A page on the feature inc site. Makes me feel that Jerry is just a regular kind of guy, who is just a tiny bit obsessive-compulsive, and who likes his pencils sharpened. My kid of guy. Let’s see. I have the feeling we are going to meet. I am certainly going to meet with his drawings again. They are quite impressive and now I have a place to go to, once they close the doors on the Richter Show at the MoMA.
(btw. I think it is permitted to take photographs at feature inc...)

Today everybody seems to be linking to Heather Havrilesky’s Salon article with the appropiate title: One ring to rule them all. This comes as no surprise, as she is the one who made suck.com’s writing so funny and who now runs one of the very best blogs ever written, the one with the embarrassing URL (tinylittlepenis.com, thus the title of this post), the one and only rabbit blog. So just imagine a writer of this magnitude writing about the show of the moment, The Bachelor on abc. She gets the angle right, she spells it out. She creates “wedding porn”, she made me laugh. She made me laugh by writing in a style Karl Marx would have been proud of, a style so dense and complex it feels like reading a collection of new mathematical formulas at times. I know it is me. I know that I am far from mastering this language of the most abundant vocabulary, so I do not want to complain.
Heather’s great accomplishment in the article is to translate certain aspects of Americana which I am still only able to observe with my jaw dropped, quite surprised how this place with these rules can call itself the “land of the free”. A German friend once said, (and I am quoting him, because quoting myself just feels narcissistic this second): “We do not date in Germany, we have relationships”. Can you imagine?
What is going on in America, why do people even agree to this strange square dance called dating?, what is it all about?, the first date, the second date, the third date. The first base, the second base, the you know what. All the rituals seem so scripted. When watching the last episode of “the Bachelor” (unbelievable, but I actually watched it...), it became clear again, that there is this reality track to the life of some young Americans and then there is this scripted straight from television emotional track, which just can not be real, it must have been bread in General Hospital, or on All My Children. Dr. Phil?, can you translate in your rude, simplistic way? There is so much talk about feelings and emotions, and love, while it all feels like nothing more but the build-up for the next commercial break, a shopping break, some other gender pre-programmed break. The language that can be used to express anything in American English can be intensely beautiful and very complex. What some use as the language for their inner most feelings to themselves, internally, is just this bland, pidgin English, a mutilated NeoVictorian zombie.
Remember the jokes about the Taliban dating scene that made their rounds on the web during the high time of anti foreign infotainment? Have you seen Barbara Walters being amazed that women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive and the 20 Minute Commentary on how one of the students she interviewed did not want to shake her hand because she was a woman? (Mind you, she was not surprised that he was able to explain exactly why he did not want to shake her hand in perfect English).
How free are women in America really? Is the ability to drive really instantly freedom? Is the ability to choose over a vast amount of cosmetic products really the peak of liberation? How far are we really if many of the most intimate thoughts many American women might have today are scripted by the writers of the large Entertainment networks. (Male thoughts are often scripted by owners of small entertainment Web-sites.)
I remember growing up in Poland, when the only advertising in the streets were the red banners on bridges, promising the completion of the five year plan and the grand campaigns to celebrate the 1st of May and the anniversary of the great October Revolution. But the minds of people seemed to go against the grain. There was a freedom in the heads of at least the people I knew. Something that ultimately led to the Solidarity movement, and to the liberation of Poland, the demolition of the Berlin Wall. The totalitarian systems rarely owned the souls of their people. It might all have looked pretty scary from the outside, but we had some really creative fun.
The “freedom” as we now know it, seems to be a sugar coated set of rules written onto the very thin membranes of the inner parts of the soul. There will be generations after us that are going to laugh about us, (unless Laughter will become unaffordable, of course.) I promise.
This post is getting out of hand, isn’t it? I am not organized enough as a writer to make my idea clear.
I guess the core of freedom is that I am able to write all this, that I am able to publish it, and that the only reaction I might get from doing so will be an angry email, or some tiny comment, and not 10 years in prison. So God bless America for that.
As far as emotional freedom goes in America, I sometimes get the Angst that is not much of it left in the open or anywhere. Maybe the American dream does not leave room for tender love and care (unless they are a music trio)... Maybe the economy just urgently needs to breed consumers, not people. Maybe this is the price that some of us need to pay in order to live in a place that can be open 24/7 7/11 with overnight delivery, free shipping, no tax...
Hmm... As I am writing this, somebody has lit some 50 candles in their bedroom across the street... Maybe it is all just some strange vision I am having. Do you date?, what are the mating rituals where you live?, how would you describe the emotional state of your surroundings. As most readers of this blog seem to be email harvesting robots, the answers might not appear as comments below this post.
And one more thing... The German model is certainly no solution, neither is the Polish one and we should all be glad that the Taliban does not allowed to oppress women in Afghanistan, for sure.
Thank you Heather Havrilesky. You made me write all this really strange stuff. I am going to now just link to your blog and stick to the things I know something about. Nothing. : )

Not the freshest of links, but still moving. shakeitbabe has apparently brought so many hits to its creator that he was able to open his own little agency. Talking about movers and shakers. Speaking of movers and shakers... Mick Stevens is the creator of one of my all time favorite New Yorker Cartoons. Shake it baby.

It is easy to forget sometimes that New York City is quite a birder’s paradise. It must be the parks or maybe the location of the city on the route of many migrating birds. Just minutes ago two majestic Great White Herons flew by my window here, choosing a path low between the buildings to fly towards their fishing grounds somewhere west from here. The Hudson?, New Jersey?, River Side Park? The event was a reminder that time flows at different speeds for each one of us. They slowly plowed through the air as if it were a barely viscose liquid, while just a few meters below there was another jam of New Yorkers at the entrance of the 96th street subway station and the traffic police woman barely managed to redirect traffic at the busy intersection. It is a crisp morning today and the shadow of the American flag on the façade of the building across the street flickers nervously in the strong west wind.
(the birds might actually have been two Great Egrets, but their size and speed made me imagine they were the much larger herons. What do I know? )

It might be a late post, since he posted it more than a month ago, but Greg Storey posted some quite great New York pictures on his site:gregstorey.com Just click on the large blue field and take a stroll through New York. I really like the pictures and I really like the presentation. Impressive job.

There are more images in the 600x250 section now.

This huge cloud just moved over Manhattan, entering at exactly 96th street, it seems. It was one of the most spectacular sky moves yet. Lasted maybe 30 seconds, but because it coninsided with the sunset, it looked like straight from a CG test. Hmm... or was it the other way round?...

Marie-Chantale Turgeon is a designer who used to live in Quebec, but now moved to good old Hamburg, the place where creativity is spelled with a K. And she is good. She has a really strong portfolio, check it out. wheniridemybike. So what does she do when she does not rideherbike? She might be collaborating with her boyfriend on this united situation another good place to visit. I guess I will have no choice but to link to these sites. They are real high quality sites. No?

As you might have noticed, I decided to remove the 60 small drawings from the blog. It was a bit as if somebody had spilled a large bowl with drawings. They are not all gone. You can view most of the drawings in the catalogue section of this site. The first one posted are the ones from 1999. Enjoy.

There are some really nice personal sites out there. You probably own one, don’t you? Well, this morning I came across the site of Melanie Goux. The site is called brushstroke.tv, and it is called .tv, because she is one of those Television design people, just as I used to be years and years ago. I could not find samples of her work on the site but what I found were exciting links and hints and opinions. And it feels good, because she seems to be in a good place, heading in a good direction, so I have one more place to visit in the morning. I like the site. And I really like the little opening animation in the upper left corner. Good motion graphics sensibility packed in just about a second. Excellent. One more little thing... What I wanted to do for a long time and what she does really well is to host little exhibitions of her friends’ work. Watch this space for some development in this direction. I also wanted to have a little gallery here with some of the works we were able to collect over the years. There is some art here by people like Thomas Demand, Betti Lauck, Madelon Galland, Alex Katz, Julia Oschatz, Ray Charles White, Alex Hefter and even a tiny drawing by A.R. Penck... (currently lost somewhere in the apartment...) Am I going off on tangents again?, let me make some new posts... Melanie Goux has a great site...

Kaliber10000 is back in a browser near you (for a few days now), as reported by Mike K. Novak, from the in-between, the good content site from Canada.

TASCHEN Verlag just posted a series of fun and funny wallpapers for your computer needs. (Your are using a computer, aren”t you? They also published a 13MB pdf magazine, which is have not tried out yet, and a screensaver, which is not really worth the hassle. Natascha Merritt gives us a steamy window. Over and over and over again. I have a folder in the lower right corner of my screen for this one. Sorry. The wallpapers are preety nice though. Enjoy... (until I post some here...) ; )

Jørgen just sent me the following link: Assisted Computing Facilities. I hope he is not trying to tell me something. Do I need to move to one? Have good fun reading the article. It is about time that somebody links to something else than this golfer kissing this trophee.

Esperanca, a surprise visitor of this site from Dubai, has a very complex and intelligent site (HopeWavers). I hope she does not mind that I will add her to the links on this page. Her writing style comes as no surprise. I also just learned from her blog that there is aThe Shadow Project, a bit like the Mirrorproject except there are no mirrors and one can not shoot against the sun.

Finally saw legendary Robert Storr’s excellent Gerhard Richter Exhibition at the MoMA. It is pretty clear that this largest exhibition for a contemporary artist the MoMA has ever had on display is worth its own museum. It is pretty clear that there will be one. A Gerhard Richter Museum will be somewhere in Germany, probably Düsseldorf or Köln and there will be fighting over who gets it and what will be in it. Richter is like the Empire State building of Art, there is this guy who can change colors every night and still remains the crazy Landmark of Art. He is like several artists in one. Beyond what a group of artists might be able to accomplish. The technique is fantastic, the quality/quantity quotient of his work is just seemingly unmatched today. A very enjoyable, very palatable exhibition. How deep does Richter really go though? The work is just so good and so banal on the other hand. He knows he is a superstar. He is chiseling on his own monument. The two only sculptures in the show are obviously Richter, looking at Richter. Richter does Richter, does Richter, does Richter. The work is so focused on Richter that even the really large pieces feel intimate and somehow voyeuristic. I will need to go visit again. I just took a brief appetizer of the show today. It was a bit too crowded for me. It was good to see so many good old friends in one good old museum. Maybe again Thursday?... In the morning maybe? How about Thursday morning. And then for the whole day. No photography permitted. Wait till I pull out the drawing pad. ; )

A great, pleasant surprise, as I read Five Things this morning. My attention was paritculary drawn to "2". Thank you! Thank you, Thank you.

Nathan Jurevicius, the ingenius australian illustrator recently shared the following link:RMX. It is about time to share it here. All good. My snapple cap Real Fact #1 (!) was that Golfish have an attention span of 3 seconds. What was I writing about?... Oh, feeling a little sick...

Well, how about 1800 Mess Away?. Messies Anonymous is an organisation that accepts major credit cards. If you manage to find yours. Quite a fascinating organisation, with a German Division. The German site however, is a mess.

The Camera Lucida Lilies are now also here: witold riedel | catalogue. Enjoy. And let me know if you have any questions.

My view is not the worst one in New York. There is the river, peeking from between buildings, there is the happy and active 96th Street crossing the world famous Broadway.
There are people with much better views, of course. Landmark views. Imagine the view below... (From a friend's apartment on the 44th floor on 44th street...) Yes, this is the Chrysler Building. It is not even across the street, it is on the same block.
Do you see the cars on the facade?... I am not sure these are even visible from street level... Wow...
(Thank you for letting me shoot this one, Augustine.)

(Click to enlarge.)

Before I leave the house for the day, to show New York to friends in town from Toronto, let me post two Hand Drawings on shikishi paper. They are bigger than the Lilies and were drawn in September of 2001. A friend had sent me a little hand cut out and I tried to make a drawing similar to that. The two hands are now a diptych and yes, they are two very different drawings. The original size of each is 27x24cm, so they are not very big, just very labor intensive pieces.
The first hand is oddly enough a 2 hour drawing, the second hand is a 4 hour drawing.

Skipping a day is usually not a good sign. When I wrote my “diaries” as a child, or tried to keep my regimen of a certain amount of drawings in any 24 hour period, skipping a day usually meant the beginning of the end. Looking back into the books, there was always a day skipped, then an apology for having skipped the day and then nothing. Nothing for pages and pages, up to the next book, the next diary, which would be triggered by some On Kawara event. Most of the skipped days happened to be in January.

I actually wanted to write a lot yesterday, but then the things I wanted to write just seemed so banal, so unnecessary. (Not that what I am writing now is terribly necessary.) It felt good to just draw again and scan and read, without posting and writing and telling.
The watch place from Frankfurt left a message on the machine that my watch is ready and that they will send it via mail (they did not trust FedEx, and no convincing worked. It will be German Mail, Einschreiben versichert) I had given my good old black ORIS alarm to Juvelier Pletsch in Frankfurt in December of last year. There was nothing wrong with the watch, it is just a mechanical piece that needs lubrication every two years or so. My Oris alarm had not been opened since 1996. The winder was almost stripped of chrome, and there seemed to be some resistance whenever the alarm needed to be set. (It is a wrist alarm, a minimal mechanical PDA.) My ORIS wrist alarm will be 10 years old soon, but only on the outside. The reason why I had bought the watch in the first place was its strange age discrepancy. The mechanism that runs the watch was built in 1969 by A.Schild, the same year when I was born, and ORIS bought the last contingent of these mechanisms and repackaged them in 1988. Giving the watch in to Pletsch, I knew that there would be some sort of complication, because the watch was such a limited item with a very limited amount of spare parts. (It was this moment when the entire store came by to take a look at the thing). And even though there was nothing really wrong with the watch, the Watchmakers concluded that the ORIS needs to be sent home to Biel in Switzerland to get a new glass and a new electroplating on the entire housing. At this moment it was pretty clear that this was a serious adventure for the watch. ORIS obviously did not have new housings anymore and so the entire watch needed to be taken apart, stripped to the brass and re-chromed. Everything. The winders the lugs, all of it. Then the new glass... No wonder the whole procedure took four months, during which some Swiss specialist must have done the job by hand. (His left hand probably behind his back.) I hope everything will be fine, because it is impossible to find a black ORIS wrist alarm anywhere. Not even google or eBay could provide a picture, so I will need to scan it in when it arrives. Does it really matter though? How obsessed can one get with a watch? I need to stop, right now. Sorry for that.
What really happened is perfectly described by Claire in her Loobylu blog. There is a serious amount of fear in me. I have this strange feeling that I am not doing enough. That I am not working enough, that the things I make are so far from the standard that I want to achieve that it will just take too long to get there for me to actually ever get there. Tom and I had this whole long email discussion in which I must have concluded several times that I will need to go back into advertising and just continue my drawing as a side entertainment. But I do not want to be some old Creative Director who will sit in front of a blank canvas with freshly bought oils, completely out of ideas and scared like a rabbit. The whole reason why I went into design was out of fear. I did not want to fail right away. I needed to convince my parents quickly that it was possible to survive on this stuff I was doing. This whole drawing thing.
I remember this little interview a friend of my ’s friend had arranged for me with the head of graphics of ZDF, the largest TV station in Germany. I had my little portfolio and I was full of fear. He looked through my work, which had nothing to do with design, nothing; and just started telling me how they just bought these new Computers, Paintboxes, which make a designer up to six times faster. Up to six times. Not the computer was six times faster than anything. The Designer was six times faster. He concluded that I should take the path of commercial design. The art thing could be some sort of hobby I could pick up when I retire. Six times faster.
I did not quite understand that the “faster” was a trap, set for me by life, and I walked right into it. From now on things had some timer attached to them. The faster the better. It took me a while to understand that it might matter in some environments, but it is the opposite of good in others. Making a thing faster does hardly make it better. It should not really matter sometimes how long it takes to make a thing and certain things neeed to take a whole lifetime or even longer to find a state even close to complete. It often feels as if it took a lifetime to be born. Some of us never manage to really give birth to themselves. Some just get by, almost born, drugged out by their surroundings. They run really quickly to nowhere.
I clearly need to start a new day now. This writing makes me a bit depressed.

It is just before sunrise again. and the tiny clouds which hover seemingly over the Hudson River are just turning from a dayglow pink to orange. It will certainly be another spectacular day.

The Lilies below were drawn in August 2001. There were two plants and I drew them as they wilted. The Drawings look a bit photographic because they were drawn using a camera lucida, with a pencil directly onto 13.5x12cm white shikishi paper. They are the starting point for many ink drawings. It is very difficult to show these linear pencil drawings here, as they were not created for an online environment. Unfortunately the contrast needed to be increased and the drawings lost most of their very subtle feeling, but at least they can be seen online.
There will be a gallery for these drawings, in the catalogue section. Movable type does such a great job uploading files, that I could not resist and had to use it to generate the thumbnails and popup windows. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger version of each drawing. (Again, they are not as harsh in real live.)

Many really good things come from Toronto. Photo Junkie’s Film exchange Project might need to be added to the list. He could have put the project on nervous but making blogging part of the project gives it the extra edge. So what is it about?
The project is analogue, simple, and pretty brilliant, (if not a bit dangerous). Strangers with a blog and a 35mm analogue camera can sign up to shoot a roll of film and then to send it to another stranger with a blog. Exposed, not developed. Every participant gets an exposed roll in exchange. Each one of the participants has the other photographer’s pictures developed, scans them in and curates a little 12 picture exhibition on their blog. (You know I will be shooting a 36 exposure film for this one)...
It is a WinWinWin situation, not possible with Lawyers, but quite awesome with analogue photography bloggers.
What came to my mind was the photo pickup scene in “Short cuts” (1993), remember?...

This is quite an exciting moment for me here (mind you I had a whiskey or so too much tonight, so I might be more honest than even the usual moomin self) Eeksy-Peeksy added this site to his "look" links, which is exciting because there are not many "look" links, and because loobylu is also among the links. So I feel quite special tonight. Eeksy-Peeksy seems to understand, speak, and even write Polish, which is quite fascinating, because Polish is not among the easier languages and so seeing somebody write in Polish, even though she/he is not Polish is quite rare. Eeksy-Peeksy also has a great Blog, which you should definitely check out. All the best. (I am afraid of the sober tomorrow)... Thank you for linking E-P.

Jarrett Kertesz has done it again. For an 11th time. The new issue of reservocation is here and it is really great as usual. I will write more about the current issue soon, just wanted you to know that it is out and that it is good, so you can go there now and have a good click.

Well, they are tiny little buttons (mere 88x31 pixels in size for now) and they are for you. You can place them on your site, you can collect them, you may use them as links to this site, to any portion of this site, or just for mere decoration. They show that you have been here, or that somebody brought them for you, from their long travels across the world wide web. Souvenirs. Currently in one size fits all, in 49 flavors (7x7). There will be more, there will be different ones. These are the first ones. Enjoy.

Glenn Murcutt, an Australian Architect who specializes in the design of environmentally sensitive houses (those that work with nature, rather than against it), won the Pritzker Prize today. This prize carries a $100,000 grant, but more than that is the most prestigious award for architects. It feels good to see that Murcutt won this year. He works alone, keeps animals, uses simple, non luxurious materials and builds projects of human scale. There is a three year waiting list for his work, which is mainly for private residences.
Murcutt finds himself among famous architects (Philip Johnson was the first Laureate of the Pritzker Prize) even though his goal never seemed to be fame (How unArchitectual of him). Good for him. He is also the first Australian to win this prize. Read more in the Article by Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times.
One more interesting detail (from the article): It has been 11 years since an American received the Pritzker Prize. Muschkamp also does not forget to name the Pritzker Jurors, so I will also honor them here: J. Carter Brown, Louise Huxtable, Carlos Jimenez, Jorge Silvetti and Lord Rothschild.

Today, W. Bradford Paley went live with his TextArc.org. The site allows users to see Texts in polar coordinates and it slices and dices texts to sort them, or better their words according to their importance or frequency in the text? This allows user to see some of their favorite classics from a completely new angle, which is always quite refreshing. If you would like to get a quick overview, try this page. Matthew Mirapaul of the New York Times explains everything quite nicely in his article which was also published today. Read it here. (I will probably need to work on this post, as it does not give away as much information as it probably should.) Is everybody as tired as I am?

Volkswagen today introduced a one Liter car. Which means that the car consumes 1 Liter of fuel per 100Kilometers. This is quite a serious development, I think. The car is not that ugly, even though it might be a bit , and not sport any airbags or other heavy protective gear. Take a look at the 1L car. (Click on “weiter” to see all four pictures.) How much exactly is 1l/100km in Miles per Gallon?... About 235. The Hummer (cool site Hummer.com) manages to use the same amount of energy to move for 10 Miles. Bad comparison, maybe, but I think I would not mind if more people had 1L cars. It is about time, isn’t it?

Dear therapist, instead of posting a resume on this website, I will probably just link to the original superhero of my childhood: Moomin. I always wanted to be like him, more than that, I always wanted to stay like him. Here we go. Am I admitting too much?

The top linked story on Blogdex today saddens me and scares me at the same time. Saudi ambassador to Britain glorifies suicide bombers in poem published in Arabic daily. I understand that the use of language in Islamic culture is differnt than the western understanding of language. But by any means, this seems like another horrifying facet or an enormous problem. Or am I missing something? I do not think I really understand enough to elaborate any further. I just somehow feel helpless.

One good thing about the printed version of the times, as a friend once pointed out, is that one can find connections on a page otherwise not as easily found on some websites (Especially the NYT site is not quite as intuitive as the printed version sometimes). Next to the hoax and the monkey articles was an informative ad for Columbia University's Biosphere 2 I did not know that this is a Columbia project (it was not from the get go, but was turned into one after the original Biosphere2 Project had to be broken off, because of sinking oxygen levels in the greenhouse.). The site is quite nice (easy and simple, what if Biosphere2 were “the apartment”). It actually seems to be possible to apply online, apply to spend some time there?, to work?, to study?, all of the above?. Are there any blogs out there by people who have been inside of Biosphere 2?, any survivor stories?, any Monkey Stories? Quite a fascinating Project, thank you Wally Broecker. (Newbury Professor of Geology, Columbia University)

On the next page of the same New York Times, an article by Sam Lubell: How Hoaxers Save on Stamps, or Don't Believe Everything You're E-mailed. A deful compilation of internet hoaxes ranging from funny to scary. I also did not know that there is a scambusters.org. Let’s visit them too. (I also think that they might need a new logo sometime soon.)

Quite a fascinating little article in the New York Times this morning. Tom Zeller helps us to Blame the Monkeys. The article contains an open letter by Marcel, the vice chair of S.I.M.I.A.N. (Society for Improving the Monkey Image and Name). I am glad this did not make the front page of the paper, especially not today.

A nice article by Chris Ashley, IST–Interactive University, about Weblogs (blogs). You probably know the article, but now you can read it again. Here.
As we continue to focus on the little things... I like how the article handles Links, in a very academic manner, by turning them into footnote links. Following the links might not be quite as comfortable, as it requires an extra click, but the text looks much more complete when printed, doesn’t it? (Did I mention that I do not have a printer? I am running a truly paperless office here.)
A nice quote from the concluding sentence of the above article comes from Kevin Kelly:“The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed”. I really hope it does again. I guess we should be thankful the bubble burst.

Maybe I should just hand over this Blog to Tom, or Jørgen, because they always seem to have the higher quality links. I will probably need to make an extra Blog for that though. This here was supposed to be a private little talk. Well, Tom just sent me this link:LookUpDesign, and from what I see, it seems to be a pretty serious database of design related sites and places. The database might be more serious than pretty, but the seriousness counts. Enjoy. Thanks Tom.

We ventured into the apartment the other day, the store which is supposed to look like a lived in apartment, but somehow does look like another store trying to look like an apartment. The selection of items was quite interesting. The site hurts my headphones a tiny bit. Feels like the interface could pull a bit back on this one.

Enter the orange apartment, which is not in New York City, but in Chicago, oh well, the home of the Skyscraper again. This place calls itself a store but is a bit like an apartment, or a department out of Wall Paper Magazine. And while the name is quite refreshing, the place is called orange skin, the typography of the logotype seems to be trying too hard. I like the interfaces however and the loading animation somehow makes sense. The mailing list screen made my powerbook crash, but many things do these days, so you might be luckier. (It did not crash me on a second visit.) Enjoy a sophisticated visit at the apartment, or get your stuff at orangeskin. (I still get my fashion at salvation army stores around the city... and we might soon need to open out apartment for a sale, to get rid of some high quality products, ok, maybe not.) Good morning Sunday. (Thank you for the link, Tom)

Last time I saw the show it was a bit lower on broadway, somewhere in the theater district. It was a birthday present... last year. It was not quite as funny as when I saw it from really far away from the really cheap seats in a small theater on 43rd street. This time it was all close up and on television and much closer than I wanted to be. And in the beautiful beacon theater on 74th street. I used to live on 73rd street, just around the corner. Sexaholix was funny, what amazes me though is the perfection, the precision with which such a show happens. Everything was exactly the same as it was when I saw it in person. No new jokes, no new inventions or additions, no substractions or shortcuts. Everything timed perfecty, exactly the same. Except that the guy and his girlfriend are not together anymore and that he is probably much bigger now...(financially, for sure, no?) how many shows has it been since last year December?, and now the bigger theater. Now this is success. I guess. How does it feel for him, telling all these love stories again and again, even though the truth is moving farther and farther away from him. I could imagine that he enters a tunnel at the beginning of the performance and just rides that train, until he comes out the other end, with the audience standing up for another ovation, the moment better than anything ever, for a stage performer. It is like this quote at the beginning of Trainspotting, I bet... and I am not going to say what it is, as this blog is blocked on many browsers already and probably can not be viewed in any American library. If not now, soon.
What happened today?, where was I?... let me think... just a second.

chris has finally updated his blog. There are some exciting new Shockwave links there on April 12th. Fascinating. Will need to try them all and then report.

Two white cranes just flew in from the west, probably heading towards . Beautiful.

There are days when nothing happens really and when memories of the past and of the future become a big part of reality. And then there are days, like today, when the tape moves quicker and the hands on the face of the clock try to outrace each other (The Second hand is always first). I need to run now. If you wrote me an email and I have not responded yet, then because of this crazy friday. Rushing, rushing, rushing.

And as we stay in Australia for a bit, please direct your attention to one of the best blogs of any continent: Loobylu, by the Australian Illustrator, Claire Robertson. A beautiful little blog. All exquisitely illustrated. A real diary. Loobylu sounds like the Russian word for "I love" and I love what loobylu looks and feels like (not that I would like my blog to look like hers, I just think it is very appropriate = great). I have the feeling Claire Robertson also uses Movable type. I will try to ask her. Oh this is really good stuff, thank you N.!

As we continue our journey through the World Wide Web, please note that there is some wild activity down-under. Direct your attention to the Australian Illustrator Nathan Jurevicius and his Stuff/Fun. Some of the illustrations and animations scare me a little bit, there are some however that made me laugh. Enjoy the preparation to battle by Tepozton the skater. (We hope to soon see him battle the evil giant.) Over all, Nathan has a wicked little site. Check it out.

The winners are in at the SHIFT | 065 | SSB COMPETITION. SSB stands for Sapporo School of Business and it is not about the beer. It is about nice design. Take a look at how young the designers are and how good some of the work is. (Not related). Shift in general is a good read. Taketo Oguchi does a great job with his online magazine. Check it out. shift

Ananova - Virtual keyboard unveiled at world computer show. It is not even as much about the keyboard as it is about the drawing surface that now can be anywhere. Any piece of paper can be a virtual Wacom Tablet, no? There was actually an article in the New York Times this morning, about a similar device calledInk Link. I really think computers will eventually disappear, leaving us with somehting that looks like the regular reality, only much “better” Monitored. Hello. Are you watching me now?

Anybody who read this Blog for more than a day will know that I love my Leica Minilux. It is my second one and it is currently broken. Most of those who are a bit interested in digital photography will also know that Leica just announced the new and great Leica - Digilux 1. The camera is not available to the public yet, but it can be seen at Leica – Demo days across the country. I also wanted to see the new Leica - M7 and maybe even the legendary Leica Noctilux 50mm f/1.0 Lens, the fastest standard Lens for a rangefinder camera in the world.
The Leica store into which we ventured was The Photo Village, Inc. The store itself was an experience, as it is a tiny place with very experienced staff and a collection of the strangest little leica and minox items. Yes, they had these mini-classics, micro versions of classic cameras. All real and working, no toys.
The store was now all about Leica. The first camera I took in my hand was an M7 with the Noctilux on it.

I took this walk through Car Dealerships on April 4th. Read all about it here. (Attention, it is a very long post.) Jess and Chris and I wanted to meet yesterday to revisit the mini dealership and also take a special look at the new and exciting Leica Cameras in SoHo later in the afternoon. Only Jess showed up, as Chris is busy working on a project. Good for him. There were new minis in the dealership and they were even more exciting than before. The weather was good this time, so the mini in the sun was a bit too hot, while the MiniCooperS had its roof open, which made it quite comfortable and friendly. There are certain details that sometimes only become visible on a second visit. (Or that I forgot to mention last time). The windows in the mini close completely only when the doors are closed. Or they open sly when the door is opened. In order to avoid any stress on the frameless glass in the door windows, BMW designers added this little hidden feature. It also seems to make the shockwave which is the side-effect of closing doors in a car a bit milder. It is maybe a few millimeters or so, and some of the users will never notice what is going on. Whenever the user opens the door. The window opens sly. Is the door closed again, the window slides up into a rubber pocket in the roof, sealing the interior, locking itself into place. A very nice little feature. I really like barely visible little mechanic features like this one.
Another littledetail has purely something to do with the design of the mini. It is about the exhaust pipe. (One on the cooper, two on the S). The story goes, (and I do not quite know where I got it from), that the design team at BMW was about to show the full size model of the car in a preliminary presentation. Everything seemed pretty much designed. Except for the exhaust pipe. It was just this typically shaped piece of pipe. It was late at night, (which makes the story sound true) and one of the designers just had a beer (true?, maybe a soda)... And so she just cut of the top of the can, spray painted it silver and stuck it onto the then exhaust pipe. Just for fun. The designer in Chief liked the look, as did everybody else, and so all minis now have exhausts that look like a bottom of a Beer-can. True story?... I hope it is. I really hope it is. Maybe you know more than me?, maybe you can find out. Call BMW, ask them.

Wow, Max Weber is a web shop in Wroclaw, which is in Poland, or Silesia, as some would say, or in the center of Europe (Poland is, mathematically, the center of Europe). Max Weber have quite a beautiful site, which you should definitely give a look. A sliding design, and motion blur between the categories. Click on the area next to the (cool) illustrations and explore. Animation has a long tradition in Poland and Max Weber use flash to bring some of their brilliant skill to the web. Go to the Cartoons section and take a dive into Max Weber’s Pit. Little Joe-Cartoonish animations require some interaction to be triggered and some are much better than others, but over all. Wonderful. Wspaniala sprawa. Gratulujemy!

The AIGA will hopefully not get angry at me for posting this one. n_Gen Design Machine is a designer’s tireless friend, assistant and court jester. A little design brain-storm machine. This magical piece of software, developed by MoveDesign hmm, Germans in San Francisco... (In 1997, Peter Spreenberg and Samuel Lising established FORK, communication design division of IDEO Product Development. In June 1998, they left IDEO to form MOVE Design.)
What n_Gen does is to tirelessly create Design variations based on a theme. The more you click, the more ideas it comes up with. Just type in your copy and click, click, click. There are various styles, and the results are funny if not close to brilliant. The various plug-ins whip the information into the right shape. Be it California Noir, inspired by David Carson’s stuff, or The Modernist, or even a Future Farmers theme.
Design-process does not end here of course, and no client should think that this is how we do it. Design is a serious game. N_Gen can make a designer smile. I promise. If you are a designer, you will smile. It is a great toy... Maybe a future tool. Thank you again for the link, Jørgen (A Würzburger in New York)
Hmm, what about Auto-Illustrator?, or any other software or plug-in that is comparable to n_gen?... Yes, you can comment, don’t be shy. ; )

Just in case you would like to see what is happening on Mars. On the Themis (thermal emission imaging system) of the Arizona State University has some nice fresh pictures of Mars. (Can not see any men in the pictures, to be honest.) Some of us with printers and plenty of paper might even print out the bits and pieces and build their own red planet. (Red paint sold separately.) Quite an interesting source.

This is a test. Movable type has this great feature which allows me to upload images to the blog. It automatically generates thumbnails and builds a popup window. But how well does movabe type do it? Let us try with the following image of a "food cop" van that was parked right here around the corner. I like how the technologies work together in this picture. Hope you argee.

It is here and the interface is quite deful (Excellent soundtrack!). The Peoples Bureau For Consumer Information. Basically a store with Designer’s Republic products, many interesting products, or "investments" as they are called here.
I tried to sign up, but the interface did not give me an "enter" button. So I am stuck on "research" and playing around with the interface. Hmm, did not feel like investing anyway. Lack of disposable assets. Maybe my clients would like to take advantage of this unique investment opportunity? Click on the link and invest away.

webcamnights.tv - ZDF.online We were just talking about creating a similar interface for Weblogs. Where would most of the activity be? Where in the world are the most bloggers and type movers? San Francisco? New York?, Jastrzebie Zdrój probably not. (I had to add this one, just to find myself in the search results of the city where I grew up.)

There were these other things I was supposed to finish right now, but what do I do? I read dollarshort.org, the fantastic blog of one of the founders of movabletype.
Mena G. Trott describes how she used to be "The Queen of the Mountain" when she was little. She lived in a place with a garden that had a little hill. (Read it. It is quite fun... actually... I might be ale to permalink to this one... here Those of you who know me, will know that I spent large portions of my childhood on the 8th floor of a large apartment complex in a city called Jastrzebie Zdrój, in Poland. I had a beautiful view out of my room. We were on the 8th floor, (European 8th floor, would make it the 9th in the US) but right in front of our house was this huge valley, filled with mud and dirt and freshly planted trees. Jastrzebie was a very young 100,000 soul city at that time and the houses were built and inhabited before there were any streets to lead to them. (See this blog). Across the valley was a large shopping center. Maybe it was not really large, but it felt large because I was a little kid. And because it was the 70’s in Poland, there were bright neon s on the shopping center. The s belonged to a club, but we just called the whole complex what the club was called (Wow, bad English). It was called Havana. Nobody in their right mind would call a shopping center Havana in the States. But in Poland, on the other side of the iron curtain, it felt like this superbly exclusive destination. Havana is certainly beautiful. The Havana I was looking at as a child was probably not beautiful. I do not even know if Havana still exists in Jastrzebie. A search for Havana and Jastrzebie actually returns 2.5 results in Google. (Now it will be 3, I guess). None of the results is actually from the city of Jastzebie Zdrój. (The city is misspelled in the National Geographic Atlas of the World I have here.)

Have you ever been to Poland? (Movabletype understands Polish!) Have you ever been to Havana?... (The real one, in Cuba, or the one in Jastrzebie Zdrój?)

There is a great strategy employed by Camper, the great little Shoe brand from Mallorca in Spain. Whenever they open one of their new stores, and they usually try to open them in high quality areas, they do not wait for the grand opening, they do not wait for everything to be clean in the store, to be prepared for the first customer. Once Camper gets the lease for a store, once they get the keys, once the phone works, they pull out the shoes and start selling. And they just close little portions of the store, or work at night to build that place. And so they sell shoes as they build the store. This is a bit how I feel now. The move is basically done. I have migrated all of my almost 300 ramblings into movable type. Movable type has a completely different way of thinking than blogger. It is going to take quite a while until I understand what I am doing here. Please have some patience. I really want to make this blog a good one. My old blog was missing interaction. Users could not really leave any real feedback. Some of the readers would write me comments which I would post as new revelations. How much nicer would it be if each one of you could just reply to what I write here?
Well, now you can. Each entry is a separate item and so below this entry there is a little comment form. Go ahead, say something. Another thing were the permalinks. I could just not figure them out. There were some archives somewhere, which were basically a strangely broken page. This is much better now. Because each entry is its own page, it becomes possible to link to each one of the entries. Then there is XML. I do not even know what XML really is.
And this is just one of the things which I do not yet understand. Blogger worked with an HTML template. When I started writing my blog, I knew what was possible in HTML, knew all this, but I had always worked with Content Engineers and programmers and information architects. Tom told me how to make a link. Josh told me how to set a target for a page. I was using Tom’s cascading stylesheets. Movable type runs on CSS... when I imported this page into GoLive, it looked nothing like what I expected it to look like. So all I managed today was to add a little accent on top of the page, to add the familiar links on the side. CLicking on the top bar links to the homepage as well. I know this blog does look nothing like the rest of the page. This will change over time. I need some time, some help for sure... But eventually all will be ok again, only this time more user friendly, much better organized. And there are so many more entries which still need to be added... so much more to happen.

This entry was created by using the bookmarklett. Exciting, isn’t it? I am amazed. Now we can just link to the following site:Tom Flemming And the entry remains short, because we can...

So here we are. A new place. Everything is movable, especially the type. Everything can be set in motion here. A beautiful little place. Suddenly it is possible to post comments and to link to files and do all the crazy things not possible before. They probably were possible, it is just that I had not the sest clue how to make them happen. And now...

Looks like we have another gem Zirkeltraining is a peek into the future of design with a good sense of German Humour. Enjoy a look at some fictitious and some real design objects. Pixel furniture, computer Jewellery, or how about a technology update on such design classics like the Braun Schneewittchensarg. Most items on the site come as PDFs or Flash, so bring your own plug ins...

There is a Water shortage in New York City , which means that businesses should not use large amounts of water to wash the sidewalks. (See: Drought Management Plan) This means that the 24 hour Dunkin¹ Donuts across the street needs to wait until there is no Police in sight, like now, at 4:40 in the morning, to wash their sidewalk. What do they care, a smelly sidewalk equals fewer customers (at least human ones), which is worse than no water. (I stopped showering more than a month ago, just to save water for New York City. Who¹s the bravest now?... Just kidding.) One other thing just occured to me, looking at the man in front of Dunkin¹ Donuts washing the sidewalk before sunrise. The pile of trash in front of the 24 hour Dunkin¹ Donuts is less than half the size of the trash pile in front of McDonald¹s next door, which is not even 24 hours. It might be that McDonald¹s get much more business, but I have the feeling that they are producing much more trash in general. Hmm. There is the bad, and then there is the pretty ugly...

Looks like we are back in business. The site is now hosted by: Software Workshop running Linux. They are in upstate New York, they are very concerned about security, and they seem to know exactly how things work and they have this very attractive deal this month, so I had to switch. Because they are hosting on UNIX, it will be possible for this site to run more exciting technologies. So stay tuned. Things might improve soon. A friend complained just recently, that this blog is not very reader friendly. He is right. There is no real structure to the page. Just a looong wall of copy. Who would want to work their way through that? A friend suggested that there be some sort of index, some sort of guide, some sort of more intelligent structure. I am working on it. (Among other things.) One should not blog about the blog. One should not blog too much about the site. It is just all pretty exciting. For me it is. Good morning.

blogger basically does not work for me now. I have no clue where all the data goes. It does not go onto the site. Hmm... It is 3:23 am. going to sleep now.

so I am switching providers and some of the posts just do not seem to appear here. hmm.

Minilux now also makes a hot chocolate. Yumm

This is turning into a never ending story. The shutter of my minilux died today. I was in the middle of a roll when all I got was some stuttering and bad sounds from the camera. The LCD just gave me a blinking E02. I thought it might be the film transport at first, but as it turns out it was the shutter. I will need to send the camera back to Leica-Service, which is in New Jersey. The cost will probably be around $200. At least this is what other users paid. I will soon need to place a donation button on this site. The long time readers of this Blog will know that my original Minilux was lost/stolen. The camera I have now is a replacement I bought via eBay. Who knows if the previous owner had the same problems and if this is the reason why he got rid of the camera. I am going to send it in now. Oh well...

Leaving the house... No blogs until later tonight... but then plenty. (I hope)

Jan Demczur saved himself and five others by using a squeegee to cut through a sheet rock wall and get himself and the others out of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th. The device has now been donated to the Smithsonian. I am looking at the name, and I could bet that Jan Demczur speaks Polish. He probably thinks Polish too. I remember the most disappointing thing about escaping to the west as a child in 1981 was that in Germany there was a tool or toy for everything. One needed to be creative in Poland. One needed to buy the right tool in the west.

update (4/8/05): Here is indeed Jan Demczur in his own words.

Another spectacular sunset over Manhattan.

For the first time there were more visitors using Windows 98 than Mac. I might need to take a look at the site through a PC...

I have tears in my eyes as I am listening to Henryk Górecki¹s Symphony No.3. Maybe because I did not expect the vocals to be in Polish? Maybe because this music reminds me of Poland, or at least the Poland as I remember it. Maybe because the Symphony was created just a few miles away from the place where I was born. I have the feeling that I remember the last three months of 1976 in Katowice. Very powerful music, incredibly cinematic, at least for me... obviously.

Ok, the process has begun. I am going to transfer the site to TheBook.com. $10/Month for basically two hosted domains and all the other features... How could I resist?
If there will be any disruptions in the Blog or other site services, it is all my fault.

John Pompa just sent me a link to his new site, filled with beautiful pictures shot mostly against the sky. He even posted one especially for this site! W. (Thank you John!) John is in Berlin right now, so many of the pictures are obviously shot in there. Great sense of style. Great sense of humor. Way to go John! Not even the sky is the limit.

The Software Workshop, also known as thebook.com has a $10 Special Introductory Rate this month. I am not getting anything out of telling you here, but you might.

correction... I made a mistake... Blogger just reminded me that I made a mistake by not posting my message... ; )

As blogger failed to post the last message, I found myself in the self help section of blogger. And there, on the left hand side it was: {haughey dot com - spring 2002} The personal site of the Blogger Guy, Matt Haughey. Nice work. (He is a mac guy!)

My DSL was down all of last night and all of this morning. I had completely forgotten about it, since I was able to use somebody¹s cable modem. Thanks to the Airport technology, I was able to find this friendly neighbor, who left his airport network open. The reception is not the best... But the speed, especially the upload speed is much better than my DSL.
One of the things that I hated about New York when I came here were the crowded airwaves. I had brought a cordless phone from Germany and it was just impossible to use it here, because I always had the feeling I am calling some sort of Party Line. I was lucky if there was only one other conversation going on in my frequency. So I had to upgrade to 900MHz. Now the density of signal emitters is an advantage. Look ma, no hands...
Just the joy of cordless web anywhere in the house. (Yes, I blog in the bathroom.)... (I probably should have left the last one out...)

Not the picture on the right was wrong, the header of this blog was a bit sad and wintery. So I updated the header this morning. I managed to knock the Blog "off the air" while doing it, but we are back and happier than ever. I might be one of the few people who managed to crash an ATM. Really, it just came back with a C: prompt. They should have ATMs running osX... How did we get here?

And the special award for the smartest 404 page goes to our long time friend and hero: Tom Flemming. Do not be shy, click on the link and then refresh, refresh, refresh. Do you haiku?

About the picture on the right. Yeah, I know it is veeeery happy. Almost "girly". But, it is the spring time, and I got these tulips, and am sorting through the macro shots, so why not. Be happy. It is a good day out there. (It got dark as I was writing this, but now it is ok again)...

Great. The day comes when I decide to leave the house, walk around, take more pictures. The sun shines, it is warm, around 75F, I only take a shirt, the camera and go. What happens?. Dark clouds move in with rapid speed, cubic tons of air move between the houses quickly. The water (rain) just waits to see me out there, unprotected. Here we go. And I was by the Hudson fiord by the time this whole spectacle started. So here I am, in the middle of the water, and there is rain coming down, wind is blowing helicopters with double speed across the sky. What is there left to do? Find a warm place. But where? I was in the park, Hudson Fjord Park, no exit, these are still being built, not even a bus shelter. I finally made it to 54th street. (from 95th!)...(The rain started when I was in the 60’s)...
There is the department of sanitation. And then there are the Car dealerships. Yeah. The car dealerships.
They are technically like Galleries. Cars are art. I did not choose to go to the Auto Show. I wanted to be alone with the vehicle. Think inside the metal box. Be one with the parked machine. Interact with the popular expression of art for the people. The first dealership happened to be an Audi... oooo a tiny place off the west side highway, with only two cars in the window. Never has the interior of an Audi felt nicer. It was just the right amount of everything there. And there was even this big button with a cup icon on it. I pushed the icon and a superbly complex cup holder came out. It unfolded like a transformer. Wild stuff. I guess I would keep a cup there with flowers maybe, or a bowl with a navigator goldfish. (Audi is part of the Volkswagen concern... Remember the bud-vase on the beetle dashboard?) The interesting thing was that even though the cup holder was out, it did not obstruct anything. Well done boys and girls at audi. Next to the cup holder a red triangle. We know this one. And next to the triangle an icon of a credit card. No way. A credit card? Why would there be a credit card slot? I pushed the button and out came a drawer for, I guess, Credit cards. I figure it is a great storage space for those New Jersey Highway tickets. Overall a nice feeling to the car. A good interior. Warm. I guess this is what made me happy.
Next dealer was saab. What happened here. I sat into the convertible saab, the 93 I think, with the hope that this is going to be some great experience. Hey it is a Swedish and smart car. Let’s see. The dashboard gave me the impression that the money guys won. They got the "most effective" vendor for every item on the board and then the designers, probably strapped to some device had to put them all into the dashboard. We have ovals, we have round corners, hard edges, circles. The shapes just do not work together guys. Hmm. I guess this is going to be very cool in a few years. Just hope the Money guys did not win in the Saab Fighter Plane division. And yes, there was a cup holder. Right above the cd player. Plop. I think this was the sound. Maybe a frokkk... Well, nothing attractive. And the cup blocks effectively the cd slot, which means that there will be no changing CD’s while handling hot beverages in the car. A security feature? Saab is famous for them. The best one used to be and probably still is the ignition key between the seats. Why would anybody put the ignition key between the seats? The key is there to prevent knee injuries upon impact. It really makes sense. A great design idea somehow. But now there are these buttons around the place for the ignition key and the hand break (Is this the name for it in English?). So if somebody has some sort of heavy saab key chain, with many toys attached it might be that the key will not be injured, but that there will be some sort of trouble. Ok, no big deal. I like the feature. I did not test any other cars at the saab dealership. Went around the cold and rainy corner to the flagship ford dealership. Yeah, here we go. Range Rovers, Jaguars, they even had a miata, and of course fords.
The little land rover needs to grow up. I spent maybe 10 seconds in that car. It just was not ready yet. I had the feeling something is still about to grow there. On to the big brother. Range Rover. Is this really a car people drive in? This big thing? With these strangely thin doors and a pretty strange feeling to it?. I only saw this years model. It felt a bit bland. I do not remember much. It was not very convincing. (Nice cup holders though.) Oh, now I remember. The storage between the seats was against any logic. The old model opened up to give the passengers in the rear four cup holders. Thirsty kids. Or maybe two Bottles and two glasses, true Brit. The cover was just screwed together with a hinge straight from home depot, screwed in with several round headed Phillips screws. Ouch. I could hear the designers scream at this one. The money people won again. In the newer model there was a bit of a confusion. The storage space has been worked on. Obviously. It really needed it. What happened though was that we now had two storage spaces on top of each other. Which is fine. Except that the big button opened the small department, and the small button the big one. To make it even more interesting, the cover now opened softer, the hinge was concealed, they used a little hydraulic damper. Nice... Maybe... Except the damper was too short, so the cover did not open entirely, even though there were still the four cup holders. Maybe it was some sort of intelligence test? I failed.
On to the Jaguars. Boy, I almost got a little nauseous in the silver presentation model. The leather was gray, the wood on the dashboard was turned gray, so it looked a lit like marble and the stitches in the gray leather were red. Unbelievable. Who would go for this? There must be people out there who are really fancy about themselves and Jaguar can obviously be very adaptive with their interior finish. Car seemed a bit short lived when it comes to design. The convertible Jaguar is not a small car, but I barely fit into it. I tried to pull the chair back tried to move things around, but still. So much car around me, so little space left for me. Sad.
So I left the Jaguars pretty disappointed, on to the fords. The Navigator did not let me in. (Big and locked, there it was), but then there was the New and beautiful Thunderbird. A shiny sleek little car with the hard top on. The round windows inviting to board the ship. Inside a tiny surprise. A red theme made things a bit unusual, but still interesting. There are no back seats, just a space that accepted my bag. A thunderbird logo was a large reminder for the moments whenever a passenger needed to reach to the back. Yes, we are still in the new thunderbird. A beautiful car. The size felt right, the proportions felt right, things just felt right. The numbers on the tachometer could have been less zippy, but other than that... Nice. Then there was the price. The red accent was $800 extra. Hmm. Not sure if I would opt for it then, so the total of the car was something like 39,990.- wonderfully calculated by the money guys. Next to the price sticker, which seems to be regulated here in the US, because they all looked the same, was a small Ford sticker, announcing that this car was part of a Special Edition and thus the total cost of $49,990.- Hmm. Ten thousand dollars more because of the sticker? This seemed a bit unusual. A very expensive sticker. I broke my silence and asked a sales associate for help. He was quite friendly and explained that this was indeed a special edition car. A very rare item, rare and sought after. Black were one of the four colours available. The other ones were yellow, aquablue and red and if I wanted to see the colours, then he would show them to me, because they had cars in the back. I wanted to see them indeed. We walked through a simple glass door into a large garage and there they were seven Thunderbirds in various colours. One of them was yellow with an all black interior, so I joked that at least it would be $800 cheaper, because it did not have this silly “colour accent package”. “This is a black accent package Sir, that is $800 extra”. Excellent. So why did they have so many of the cars if they are so rare and sought after. I happened to be in the flagship dealership. Hmm. Interesting. I asked for a catalogue. He offered to download something off the internet for me. I will try this myself, later.
Across the street from Ford was Cadillac. They have this recent breakthrough and they celebrate research and technology in their advertising, so I was very much looking forward to seeing some of it. The dealer had a collection of Cadillacs from the 50’s and 60’s quite a refreshing site. I guess it was part of the “heritage reborn” concept. And there it was, an orange CTS, a very “edgy” kind of car. On the outside at least. Each corner seemed quite well sculpted. The area between the grill and the s reminded me of my good old Mercedes/8 (another story). So I hoped that the edgy-ness could continue on the inside of the car. But it did not. Inside was a quiet and happy place, but it was grey plastic that dominated. The instruments were quite refreshingly designed, but the middle console was not as much of a breakthrough as one would have hoped. There was an interesting interface in the steering wheel however, which somehow reminded me of a different kind of device. All in all a refreshing kind of car. But maybe it has something to do with my age?, maybe there was something that excited me about a Cadillac that would make the European Witold unhappy? I walked over to the monster of monsters, the Cadillac Escalade, a monster of an SUV. I felt like a little person entering the interior of this thing. I had to take an extra step to just get to the seat. I would not stay for long, everything was very big, not for me. Just wanted to open the door. And there it was a strange and unusual door opener. I understand what was intended here. Imagine you buy such a car because you want to feel secure. You would like to think of it as a safe, as something that will keep you and your family in a warm and happy place, while out there becomes a battle ground on which you can now really win. The doors to the outside should open like safe doors almost, shouldn’t they? The designers at Cadillac could not install a wheel with a combination on it. What they wanted to install was the experience of this last moment, when the save is actually opened. The large handle is swung to open the heavy steel door. So there it was, the big handle, positioned very low, so it was a bit like lifting a weight to open this 6 foot monster of a door. (At least it felt like 6 feet tall.) I wish the design had stopped there. The handles on the doors of the new Cadillacs were like twisted ribbons of steel. Quite a refreshing idea. In the Escalade however, or at least the one I sat in, they had this organic, maybe ergonomic shape that felt like some body part. To make the experience even more interesting, they seemed to be made out of plastic. Hmm. Cadillac is part of GM (as is opel and holden(?) One of their cars is the good old Corvette, the car with the reputation of being really good for sly older race drivers. I will not get too excited about the car here. It felt nice, which worried me a bit. The inside felt like a good place. A look behind the seats showed me where the thunderbird got the Logo idea from. The red accent of the corvette I was in continued as a Metal piece right into the passenger area. It was also possible to reach right into the trunk. I also liked the instruments or the “Driver Information Center”. The corvette felt like a sports car. Certainly after the monster SUV experience.
Not far from here was the BMW dealership, so as a conclusion of the car excursion, I wanted to see the new 7. The car did not look right in the pictures I had seen of it, so I wanted to meet it in person.
As I arrived at the BMW dealership, which is a large place on 57th and 10th (as far as I remember), the surprise was big, or should I say it was mini. There was no Flagship 7 in the window, but several cute mini cars. (congratulations on the URL of the site.) This might have been one of the most refreshing moments of the day. The cars were obviously cute, and they felt very smart too. The interior was not that small at all. And the exterior was quite a good looking car. No bad angles here. Many surprising intelligent details in the design. The inside of the door did not feel right to me, but otherwise, not sure what could be improved in these little cars. The speedometer in the center of the console was the size of a Beatles single. The main instrument behind the steering wheel was the RPM meter (is this the right name for it?). A wicked little racing machine. I remember a friend in High school, (Gerritt?), he had a black mini. I had my /8 Mercedes at that time and the wheel of his mini was the size of the hub cup of my car. Driving the mini was quite funny too. (He let me test it, of course.) The steering wheel was on a very odd angle, I remember. It was like driving an 18 wheeler, except the thing was tiny, and wickedly speedy. The current mini has the steering wheel on many angles. It looks like it is even more a wicked speedster even though it might not really matter as much in the land of unlimited possibilities as it did in Autobahnland. The car costs about half as much as the Thunderbird, even with out the special sticker, and I even felt secure. Then again, it was not parked next to the Escalade... More later. This post is getting out of hand.

Who knew that X-Men were catholic? The Xaverian High School Web Site

We all know Segway or Ginger, or It. And we all know that the device claims to make walking a new experience, while it actually makes standing a new experience. Enter Jason Kottke¹s: Megway Transporting Human. While the idea of Megway might not be all that new, we all know it works. It has been tested for thousands of years and it is safe and very user friendly. It even works for the visually impaired. I worked for the Goethe Institut in Frankfurt in 1995. One of the foreign students was 100% visually impaired and I sometimes worked as his eyes. His hobby was running. So we arranged for him to be in the runners club (he is member in runners clubs all over the world). He used an earlier version of Megway (runners clubs all over the world have Megways available for the visually impaired, just ask) and he would use it without a helmet and hold on to it with just one hand. But he was fast, and he was perfectly safe, even at very high speeds. (He was generally even a faster walker than I am.)
So I like Megway very much. I would like to get one myself as soon as they become widely available to the public. Until then I will dream of all the places I could go to with my Megway.

would not like to trade with Chris this morning.
It was his Birthdayparty yesterday...
(if I have a headache, what must he have?)

The Comment link did not really work. Now it does.
so feel free to leave comments. (link below)

"I check your site like twice a day to see what links you have". (A real quote by one of the readers of this site.) witoldriedel.com will be moving to a different provider soon, and I wanted to keep it a secret, but if you really would like to finally give some feedback, try this (for your eyes only) link: Comments
Thank you Tom. (Tom and Tom again.) Scroll down to the bottom of the page, click the comment button and leave your mark. Try to keep it clean. : )

The beginning of the end?, or the end of the beginning? eBay: Professional Services - eLance Great idea, right up there with "The Bachelor" or "Who wants to marry a Millionaire".
Maybe not, maybe this is a great idea.

Spread the word.
Send the info below to your favorite Gallery or Art Friend.
You can put your name under it. This is the mildest form of spam. Sort of like Tofu-spam. It is good for you and it is good for your heart.

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Only ten days left to see "Powers of 10", a series of ten complex
drawings on Japanese Shikishi Paper by Witold Riedel, an exclusive presentation at reservocation.com.

The work was inspired by the Ray and Charles Eames film "The Powers of 10"
(1977) and is the second part of a 21 drawing series.

About the Artist:
Witold Riedel was born 1969 near Katowice, in the "Iron heart" of Poland. He
escaped to Germany in 1981. After Graduating from Hohe Landesschule in
Hanau, he studied Painting and Typography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in
Offenbach am Main.

He currently lives and works in New York.

About the drawings on view:
The works shown here are from a series of complex black-blue ink drawings,
created in a technique that does not allow for any corrections and requires
the highest level of concentration and skill from the artist.

Shikishi Paper is one of the finest Japanese paper surfaces first created in
the 8th century and manufactured with minimal adjustments since.
The Shikishi used here is a 135x120x2mm two gradient Torinoko Shikishi.

Reservocation presents 10 drawings by Witold Riedel as a "Flash-Werk", a
custom Flash Presentation. (1.3MB, requires Macromedia Flash)
The natural resolution of Witold Riedel¹s complex drawings is generally too
high for an on-screen internet presentation. This is why the artist chose to
introduce each of the drawings with a glimpse of key details of the
presented drawings.

The presentation is interactive. Users can choose their own sequence of
drawings. Users can discover reoccurring symbolic patterns in each of the
pieces named after ten powers of magnification.

The work can be seen at:
http://reservocation.com/03_10_02/flash_riedel/index.html
Minimun screen size for presentation is 1024x768

For more information please contact :
info@witoldriedel.com or art@tomflemming.com.
Or log on to :
http://www.artincontext.org/artist/witold_riedel.html

To view some of the photographic work by Witold Riedel, log on to :
http://witoldriedel.com/catalogue/

This Email is being sent to you because you might have expressed interest in
the work of Witold Riedel in the past. If you wish not to receive any
further information about Witold Riedel and his work, please send an email
to remove@witoldriedel.com

Thank you.

(Your name here)

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Thank you for your interest and help.
-w

I wanted to replace the last address with ignorance@witoldriedel.com, but it feels a bit wrong. ; )

The next quest will probably be this:Stereflex.

Easter is over, Jesus is back. And he is back in style. So in 2002 America, what exactly would Jesus do? Four possible answers can be found here: Inspirational Sport Statues Yeah. Joy to the world. Or as Arnold Schwarzenegger put it... "I¹ll be back". But seriously, are these statues really "inspirational?"

And this is how it all started: Susan Kare . Who would have thought that five dots 9 is almost 20 years old. No Aqua here. (Thank you Tom.)

A place with nice things.www.azumi.co.uk

soon, very soon, there will be a Home for minilux.org. It is currently just a page that redirects.

Leica - M7 is here. And it is almost exactly like M6TTL. Hmm, almost. This is very interesting. It now has automatic shutter speed controll. Aperture priority. No motor drive. The camera is still silent, mechanic, needs two batteries though. Hmm. I wonder how much M6TTLs are now. Very interesting.