Urban Computing: It begins.

So today’s the big day: our longtime-aborning class, Urban Computing, kicks off at ITP at 18.30 Eastern Standard Time.

The class, we are told, was the program’s most-requested this semester, and currently appears to be way oversubscribed. There’s something like fifteen seventeen students on the waiting list, which doesn’t sound like very much at all until you remember what an intimately-scaled program ITP is. (There’s a story about how I was originally apprised of this fact, which I’ll tell you if you buy me a G&T.)

Thanks to the hard-workin’, hard-drinkin’ crew at if:book, the innovative class platform they built for us will have more than dummy text in it by H-Hour, and you’re all invited to play along. And I will do my best to enjoy the ins and outs of beginner’s mind. I think this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Non-caustic biomorph

I’ve never been 100% on Ross Lovegrove, finding him a bit hit or miss. He’s kind of like the thinking person’s Colani; when he’s on, he’s on, but when he’s not his designs seem to go unusually far of the mark for such an accomplished eye and hand. So I’ll be interested to see what I make of the exhibition he’s got coming up here in March.

Which side of him do you think we’ll see? On the one hand, he authored this flawless washbasin for Vitra, and I’ve always loved his magnesium Go chair; on the other hand, he likes Justin Timberlake. (Maximum points off/decrement register to zero.) I suppose we’ll see, soon enough. Either way, though, I have to say I rather admire his ability to keep a sunny disposition despite working with what have to be some of the highest-maintenance clients I can imagine - compare/contrast to the legendarily stormy Zaha Hadid. Maybe there’s something I can learn from him.

Other than the Justin Timberlake, that is.

(UPDATE: Ironically enough, I forgot the whole reason I was going to post this today in the first place, which was to point out that Mr. Newson is also showing hereabouts for a spell. As Liz Danzico would say: Mmmmm.)

Aux armes, [virtual] citoyens!

You know - you know - how skeptical I am about Second Life, and all such virtual environments. And while to all my usual reservations I must in this case add further questions as to the wisdom of discourse via Gatling gun, there’s something undeniably stirring about this. In both senses. Tip of the cockaded tricorne to M. Nova.

Live a little better

Every time I head out to JFK for a flight, I pass the 1960s-vintage Lefrak City apartment complex on the LIE. Each time, I find myself haunted by its slogan, “Live a little better.”

I cannot imagine a more note-perfect appeal to the complex’s original target audience, second-generation American Jews hauling their way out of the laboring class, scrimping and saving to send their kids to dentistry or accountancy school. It’s the “little” that does it - you can almost hear the echoes of the Yiddish ein bissel in that one canny word. It captures everything you need to know about the people this complex was designed for, and the (largely self-imposed) limits they lived with.

To say “self-imposed” is not to deny the impact of the very real quotas, barriers and other manifestations of a thoroughly institutionalized anti-Semitism they endured. But the walls were internal, too, and I’m tempted to say that these were the truly insurmountable ones. The constrained sense of possibility was something surviving from shtetl life; in one light, it might look a lot like self-effacing modesty, but in my experience it more usually took the form of public martyrdom. It was a way of seeing the world that literally was not capable of conceiving of a life more than a little better.

LeFrak’s masterstroke, clearly, was to find an aspirational formulation acceptable to a people with a comprehensively crippled sense of self-worth. But better than whom? Better than what? Is the proposition that one would, in enjoying Sam LeFrak’s “total facilities for total living,” improve on everything one had known before? Or ascend to a status “a little better” than one’s envious peers and extended family?

I may never fully know. The original target audience is fled and gone, and I don’t suppose there will ever be another cohort so bereft of the sense of entitlement our society specializes in instilling in its members. Even in humble, hardworking Queens, it’s hard to imagine there’s anybody left who only wants it “a little better.”

Why Apple is the only company that matters

Need I say more?

Apple is the only company that can give me quicksilver shimmering total-adrenaline-dump shivers over a product announcement. It hardly even needs to be said that this will change everything. Again.

Let’s talk a little bit about why. And let’s be very clear about it: this is an everyware phone, the very first, a true ubiquitous device. You no longer need mobile providers, you no longer need to suffer Windows Mobile, you don’t need to compromise anything at all to have direct and immediate access to every networked service in existence right there on your phone.

Can I think of a few things they left out? Sure I can. But that’s just the point: the iPod was able to achieve market hegemony not because it did everything a music player could do, but because it represented the consummate refinement of what most people want from a music player most of the time. Same here. (I actually heard Steve enunciate the words I’ve been croaking out for years: a phone’s killer app is making calls.)

You’ll notice, too, that what Apple is offering here is the first platform for reasonably accessible mobile-application development. I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these. Like you couldn’t tell.

In which I admit to being a l4m3r

How lame am I? So lame, apparently, that I now discover gorgeous pop music primarily from…television commercials. This is admittedly some kind of new nadir for hipness, beyond even the feared Hilfiger threshold; nevertheless, I defy you to find any of the following anything less than thoroughly charming:

- Brazilian Girls, “Lazy Lover” (Axe Body Wash, a product I devoutly hope is neither purchased nor used by anyone within two degrees of separation of me.)
- The Icicles, “Sugar Sweet” (Motorola)
- Joy Zipper, “Go Tell The World” (Nike)
- The Speedies, “Let Me Take Your Photo” (HP)
- Stereolab, “OLV 26″ (can’t remember, sorry)

This doesn’t even count the times I’ve heard the increasingly ubiquitous Goldfrapp turn up on the soundtrack, let alone utter anomalies like hearing Mark E. Smith-uh shilling for Nissan (the uncompromising and curiously apropos “Blindness”). About all I can deduce from the above is that, for those of us d’un certain age, McCann, Grey and their ilk are likely to function better than Pitchfork as a means of discovering new music. Sigh.