general magic

ed brought a little piece of technology history to coffee this morning. they had better logos back then.

tableau vivant

the days are just packed*

ninth street espresso, hi-collar, fresco, japan premium beef, bohemian, the future perfect, mile end, matter, il laboratorio del gelato, the reed space, amor y amargo, umi no ie, and flatiron wines. it takes a great deal of effort to pack this much research on urbanism, design, and frozen confection innovation into just one day, but our commitment to scholarship is unwavering.

*

execution success

nice things.*

* ?: Le caroubier est un arbre dioïque de la famille des fabacées, originaire des régions méditerranéennes (îles Canaries, Afrique du Nord, Proche-Orient, Europe méridionale). [more]

the cow and the computer operator

It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.

paul rand, conversations with students

rivers of the windfall light

cambridge, ma; june 2013

"famous among the barns"; july 2008

michael david; "july 2005."

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

dylan thomas; 1945

tacit, inexplicable knowledge

There’s a lot of work being done today that doesn’t have any soul in it. The technique may be the utmost perfection, yet it is lifeless. It doesn’t have a soul. I hope my furniture has a soul to it. I do not feel that it is possible to make a working drawing with all the intricate and fine details that go into a chair or stool, particularly. Many times, I do not know how a certain area is to be done until I start working with a chisel, rasp or whatever tool is needed for that particular job.

sam maloof

the barbican

odyssey

sweetgrass, by lucien castaing-taylor and ilisa barbash, documents an instance of the long-standing practice of grazing private livestock on public land: the summer pasturing of several herds of sheep in the montana mountains. in 2003, we trailed a sheep band during our poorly planned foray into the bridger-teton wilderness in wyoming's wind river mountains; for ten days, we walked through montane forests filled with crushed saplings and grassy bowls stripped of grass and roiled into mud. public land grazing is perhaps ill-suited to the scale of industrial ranching.

but this is incidental in sweetgrass. for much of the film, the camera is the stable lens into a world of sheep, dogs, and people running, walking, eating, and being frustrated at each other; it achieves the appearance of the true ethnographic eye—invisible to the participants and capturing the range of their daily experience.

remarkable and worthwhile.

the german tradition

Volkmar Arnulf stresses that to him bespoke tailoring is about the customer’s need, not imposing a style on the customer ... As a tailor you are embedded in a certain history of tailoring but a first-class bespoke tailor should try to find out what serves the customer using all his knowledge and tools. "I always try to figure out, which line will make the customer look as good as he possibly can. Later, when striking the pattern, I apply various thought models to reach the right result ... How can a computer do that?"

torsten grunwald

in galbraith's house

the perks of ease and convenience

I traveled with West to New York. We stopped at a grocery store in which the cash registers were equipped with one of those devices that reads the price of an item automatically, a computerized checkout system. This one wasn't working well. West got down on his hands and knees and poked his head in under the cashier's counter to have a look at the thing. The clerk made her mouth an O. When West came out, dusting off his hands, he explained that he had helped design this particular model when he had worked at RCA. "It's a kludge," he said grinning. The clerk had some trouble figuring what the beer we bought ought to cost, and as we left, West said, out of her earshot, "Ummmmh, one of the problems with machines like that. You end up making people so dumb they can't figure out how many six-packs are in a case of beer."

tracy kidder, the soul of a new machine

(where are they now? a status update from december 2000.)

buff til shiny

this is wim delvoye at sperone westwater.

on the road again

new york, 2013; paris, 2009.

the right beer at the right time

When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it
When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it
When the teenage car gets the cop down on it
That time is here for one more year

jonathan richman, that summer feeling*

(for illustration only; what we're actually Drinking now is la clarine on the fifth day.)

(and if you're watching jonathan richman anyway, you can't not see the one with the camel outfit.)

priorities

those visiting the motherland for the first time often ask me for advice. fortunately, the best places to eat in singapore are the ones which have been around for years (the wave of new food has been generally trumped up but mediocre). even so, i routinely consult my agents on the ground for Hot Tips about the latest and greatest.

minzhi: must your 4 friends go for chinese fine dining? can't they go to chin lee and have great teochew food?
vt: i suggested liang kee also. chin lee's better? never been.
mz: when are these people coming?
vt: they are in town already.
mz: what?! then what are these people feeding on NOW? this is terrible! they could be eating all the wrong things this very moment!!!!

it is important to always have the right priorities.

and, public service announcement: qun zhong, once purveyor of excellent guotie and xiaolongbao, is no more. an establishment styling itself jing hua xiao chi (confusingly the name once on the qun zhong storefront) has reopened in the same space and serving approximately the same menu. it is a new management and a new kitchen, however, and reportedly vastly inferior. so the cookie crumbles.

katsuhira's tiger

this long but worthwhile video documents ford hallam's meticulous reconstruction of the lost half of a pair of tsuba by hagiya katsuhira. nearly every stage is embedded in the workmanship of risk: the further along, the more stands to be lost by the commission of even a small error in work.

slow is always better ... you have to feel what's going on. this is why i reject power tools. they're simply far too fast. you can't feel the irregularities. the tool simply takes over.

[found thanks to joakim]

observation

In short, men will find out that the men of our days were wrong in first multiplying their needs, and then trying, each man of them, to evade all participation in the means and processes whereby those needs are satisfied; that this kind of division of labour is really only a new and wilful form of arrogant and slothful ignorance, far more injurious to the happiness and contentment of life than the ignorance of the processes of Nature, of what we sometimes call science, which men of the earlier days unwittingly lived in. They will discover, or rediscover rather, that the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.

william morris, "the aims of art"

on which, also see david pye and t.h. white.

downtown

i came to las vegas on monday night and spent much of yesterday and today walking around the old downtown, outside the region covered by the downtown project. in a 3-hour, 4-mile walk this morning, i counted over 40 small law practices, numerous bail bond shops, and an improbable number of motels. there was one grocery store and a handful of 7-11s. this town makes me wonder what people were thinking as they decided to set up shop here. on the other hand, there is an abundance of great thai food and a truly spectacular taco.

intentional ambiguity

Monday, 4/22/2013; 10am to noon

Baker Library 102, Harvard Business School [map]
Amy Edmondson (co-chair), Christopher Winship (co-chair), Jeffrey T. Polzer

Intentional ambiguity

Vaughn Tan

Organizations increasingly operate in uncertain external environments which are not only risky (uncertain in quantifiable ways) but also ambiguous (unquantifiably uncertain, featuring unclear reality, causality, or intentionality). Though the two types of uncertainty have different implications for decision-making and action, organizational theory and practice generally neglect ambiguity by conflating it with risk. How should an organization respond when the uncertainty in its environment comprises both risk and ambiguity? And what are the intended and unintended effects of these organizational responses?

I answer these questions by analysing data collected over four years from observations at nine high-end avant-garde culinary groups and 80 interviews with respondents working in the industry. My findings suggest that external ambiguity can be managed through costly internal processes that make it more likely that a group and its members can detect and respond to changes in the environment—processes that result from intentional internal ambiguity of member roles and group goals. I then describe a general mechanism by which intentional internal ambiguity supports group adaptability.

My findings complement the risk-management view of managing uncertainty by re-stating the distinction between risk and ambiguity and documenting organizational responses that are specific to the latter and not the former. I suggest that an appropriate approach to managing the unquantifiable uncertainty of ambiguity is to increase the likelihood that a group can adapt as ambiguous conditions change and show that this can be done by incorporating ambiguity into the internal operations of the group.

the oak tree

The final shape of any one particular oak tree is unpredictable ... And a town which is whole, like an oak tree, must be unpredictable also.

The fine details cannot be known ahead of time. We may know, from the pattern language which is shared, what kind of town it will be. But it is impossible to predict its detailed plan: and it is not possible to make it grow according to some plan. It must be unpredictable, so that the individual acts of building can be free to fit themselves to all the local forces which they meet.

The people of a town may know that there is going to be a main pedestrian street, because there is a pattern which tells them so. But, they cannot know just where this main pedestrian street will be, until it is already there. The street will be built up from smaller acts, wherever the opportunity arises. When it is finally made, its form is partly given by the history of happy accidents which let the people build it along with their more private acts. There is no way of knowing, ahead of time, just where these accidents will fall.

This process, exactly like the emergence of any other form of life, alone produces a living order.

christopher alexander, the timeless way of building

boston, mass.

stimulus, response

jens stoltenberg, who is still the prime minister of norway, had this to say after the 2011 bombing and shootings in oslo and utøya, before the identity of the culprit was discovered:

We do not know who attacked us, many are dead and injured. Norway will stand together in a time of crisis, we suffer with the wounded. I have a message to whoever attacked us, you will not destroy us, you will not destroy our democracy, and our ideals for a better world. We are a small nation and a better nation. No one will bomb us to silence, no one will shoot us to silence. Our answer to violence is more democracy.

this is the correct response.

new chardon street

on top, alfred duca's computersphere (CNC-milled cor-ten steel, 1965).

a big room, vast

There is one timeless way of building ... But though this method is precise, it cannot be used mechanically. Indeed it turns out, in the end, that what this method does is simply free us from all method ... To purge ourselves of these illusions, to become free of all the artificial images of order which distort the nature that is in us, we must first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationship between ourselves and our surroundings. Then, once this discipline has done its work, and pricked the bubbles of illusion which we cling to now, we will be ready to give up the discipline, and act as nature does. This is the timeless way of building: learning the discipline—and shedding it.

We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things—that they are extraordinary. This is only the shallow refuge of the person who does not yet know what he is doing. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful—these are not less ordinary than most things—they are more ordinary than most things. It is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core.

christopher alexander, the timeless way of building

rock star

at 150 w 25th st, in the heart of the manhattan floral district, you can find the H.I.T deli and korean diner. the bibimbap ($8.95) is superior but i cannot yet say the same about the other menu options. for instance, it is a good idea to order the ramen ($5.95) only if you have successfully exited your startup and wish to recall fondly the days, now thankfully long-past, when you survived mostly on cup noodles. rock star, on the second floor, will satisfy many of your commodity and non-commodity geological needs. for instance, the need for kunzite, a heart stone that spreads around it an irresistible aura of calm and healing ($4/gram).

kiosk

at kiosk, the neon is almost as good as the stuff.

good things

a coily bronze snake from ancient greece, exact provenance and age uncertain. and gudea of lagash, whose diorite hat and stony gaze are cool.

metropolitan

now that my friends have children, i sometimes find myself at the met on a saturday morning observing little people playing african instruments under a ceramic relief of striding lions from ancient babylon. i left when i could no longer bear the thousands of people gazing cowlike at ancient statuary. (about 20 minutes.)

the interview

My secret as an interviewer was that I was actually impressed by the people I interviewed ... awed by people who take the risks of performance[,] I become their advocate and find myself in sympathy.

roger ebert, life itself