June 2009

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So you can’t stop moonwalking

30 June 2009 in music, the ancient past | No comments

I won’t bore you with my thoughts on Lisa Marie Presley’s MySpace thing about Michael (“I wanted to save him. I wanted to save him from the inevitable which is what has just happened”), or relate my story of finding out that the rumor was true (upon reading this tweet from Lil’ Jon: “RIP M J!!”), or discuss Justin’s excellent email about how MJ helped him stay in his “eight-year old zone.”

I will only spread some love about my favorite MJ recording, which is a very scratchy demo version of “Working Day And Night” from the Special Edition of “Off the Wall.”

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Enjoy.

Remember when Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads and returned with a whole new kind of blues? Last night, we watched “Notorious,” the Biggie Smalls biopic, and there’s a similar moment. The movie sort of glosses over where Biggie’s style came from, implying that it began on the street, but that Biggie really enhanced it during nine months in a North Carolina prison. It reminded me of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. Where did the Dylan sound come from? Scorsese diligently goes through all of the members of the 60’s Village scene, but then there’s a gap in which Dylan leaves the scene for a few months and then re-emerges with the style we all know. What is it about creating a new style that it has to happen in secret? “Notorious” is terrible, by the way. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to make a wooden, utterly uninteresting movie about Biggie, Brooklyn, the early 90’s, and East Coast v West Coast, but they found a way to do it.

30 June 2009 | No comments

A man with a shopping bag

13 June 2009 in photo, politics | 1 comment

The NYT’s Lens blog recently posted a couple of great articles about the photographers who captured the Tienanmen Square protests in 1989. The first offers four riveting oral histories from photographers who captured the “Tank Man” in his moment of defiance, and the second adds a new twist: this amazing image from street level.

Tank Man at street level - New York Times - Lens Blog

Disorder. People fleeing. This was happening as the Tank Man, seemingly so calm, stood in the street. I also think it’s interesting that all the men in the photo are wearing — as a commenter on the NYT blog put it — “the same drab clothes.” A true illustration of how much has changed in China in the last 20 years.

The Roshomon-like details in all of the photographers’ stories are vivid and heartbreaking: “Vehicles were smoldering,” “a line of students facing a line of soldiers and a column of tanks,” “another volley of shots rang out from where the tanks were, and people began ducking, shrieking, stumbling and running,” “some guy in a white shirt runs out in front,” “a man waving two plastic shopping bags,” “waving his jacket and shopping bag,” “remonstrating with the tank driver in an act of defiance,” “he then disappeared into the crowd,” “the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away.”

And then what happened?

Charlie Cole: “I then placed the tank roll in a plastic film can and wrapped it in a plastic bag and attached it to the flush chain in the tank of the toilet.”

Stuart Franklin: “The film was smuggled out in a packet of tea by a French student and delivered to the Magnum office in Paris.”

Jeff Widener: “I gave all my rolls of film to [someone named] Kurt/Kirk who smuggled it back to the A.P. office in his underwear. The long-haired college kid was wearing a dirty Rambo T-shirt, shorts and sandals.”

Arthur Tsang Hin Wah: “A colleague rode over on a bike and picked up the film.”

And Terril Jones, the reporter who captured the shot at street level: “I never published them, and only showed them to a few friends and fellow reporters.”

And the rest is history. That keeps unfolding, I guess.

How cool was Hong Kong in the early 60’s?

7 June 2009 in cinema, the ancient past, travel | 1 comment

Walking around the Maxwell Food Market near Singapore’s Chinatown reminded of Wong Kar Wai’s excellent movie about Hong Kong in the early 60’s In the Mood for Love. After I watched it last night, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to actually travel back in time, or just walk inside an imagined version of the past.

For the love of shopping

6 June 2009 in ixd, tech, web | No comments

I’m doing some work in Singapore right now, and I’ve quickly noticed a couple of things: Singaporean people love to shop, and they love deals. But they don’t have access to certain brands — American Apparel, Forever 21, Victoria’s Secret, etc. To get stuff from these places, they have to order stuff over the Internet, and have it shipped across the world. And this can be really expensive.

A community of practice. The practice of finding deals.

So, some industrious, deal-seeking shoppers have created LiveJournal communities in which shoppers can band together to save shipping costs from online retailers. These so-called “sprees” usually correspond to global shipping deals offered by a retailer, and they’re available until certain criteria are met — minimum amounts for the shipping deal, or whenever the spree-launcher decides to take care of the order.

In the above example, the spree is for a retailer called “Apparel,” it’s open, and there are 35 “comments,” many of which are actually “orders.” That’s right, you submit your order in a public space, so that others can see how close the spree is to being filled.

In order to build trust among their users, the community above provides a way to give feedback; they’ve created a separate community called “spreefeedback” where users leave comments about the trustworthiness of the users who launch the sprees. Hacky, but apparently effective. Pretty cool, huh?

On related notes, Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design is filled with intriguing examples of everyday hacks in the physical world. Last summer, I wrote about my friends Kristen and Rob and their Flickr UI navigation cues that helped the non-savvy folks in their family find their wedding photo albums.