bookofjoe

5 rules for living in a New York City subway tunnel

1. Always keep a light on you.

2. Try to wait for a rainy day to look for a room. You don’t want to get things all set up and then find out there is a leak.

3. Always have more than one spot.

4. Anything you need can be found in the garbage.

5. Always clean out a spot before you go dragging a carpet down there.
....................

They appear in Sewell Chan's October 7, 2008 New York Times story about "Pitch Black," a graphic novel by Brooklyn artist Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton, "... a homeless man who used to spend most of his nights underground in nooks and crannies wedged around subway tunnels."

Here's the article.

Graphic Tale of Life in Subway Tunnels

In the four years that Youme Landowne, a Brooklyn artist, has known Anthony Horton, a homeless man who used to spend most of his nights underground, in nooks and crannies wedged around subway tunnels, Ms. Landowne learned several basic rules for subterranean life. The rules are spelled out in a spare, affecting book of illustrations, “Pitch Black,” published this month by Cinco Puntos Press, an independent publisher based in El Paso, Tex. Here are some:

* Always keep a light on you.
* Try to wait for a rainy day to look for a room. You don’t want to get things all set up and then find out there is a leak and you have to start over.
* Always have more than one spot.
* Anything you need can be found in the garbage.
* Always clean out a spot before you go dragging a carpet down there. (It just makes it easier.)

Ms. Landowne, who graduated from the New School and has lived in New York City off and on for 20 years, met Mr. Horton in 2004, around the publication of her children’s book, “Sélavi: a Haitian Story of Hope,” based on the real experiences of street children who set up a radio station.
Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton met shortly after she published a children’s book in 2004.

As the book explains — in prose set against the black and gray watercolor images — the two met on a subway station downtown and struck up an intense conversation that continued on several train rides.

Ms. Landowne, 38, is an artist and activist who grew up in Miami. Mr. Horton, 40, grew up in foster care in New York City and has struggled with homelessness and addiction. (He has a criminal record and is now serving time in prison.)

The book details the filthy and often frightening conditions in the subway tunnels and introduces the readers to a handful of colorful characters, though its focus is on the two main characters’ friendship and collaboration.

Ms. Landowne worked on the illustrations since 2004, even while spending about a year living in Laos. Mr. Horton’s words inspired the text, and he is given credit as a co-author; he also made drawings used at the beginning and end of the book.

Although the book is suitable for a young audience, Ms. Landowne said in a phone interview that she hoped “Pitch Black” would inspire adults who ride the subway to notice more of their surroundings.

“I don’t judge people who need a little bit of space when they’re on the train,” she said, “but I feel I benefit from all the stories that people share with me.”

Too many riders, she said, just have their iPod earphones on. “I’m shocked by how many people on the train are tuned out,” she said.

“Our memories and dreams walk beside us, informing everything we think we see,” Ms. Landowne and Mr. Horton write in the book. “We are scavengers of stories. We seek hidden messages of hope and find them. We gather evidence of resistance to oppression and despair.”

Fifteen years ago, a book by Jennifer Toth, “The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City” (Chicago Review Press, 1993), drew attention to the plight of homeless adults living underground, many of them suffering from substance abuse or mental illness problems. The book was criticized for geographical inaccuracies, and its depiction of large, well-organized, tribal underground societies of people who had eschewed surface life has been dismissed by many scholars as an exaggeration. Nevertheless, advocates for the homeless believe that there are adults who live semiregularly in subway stations and tunnels, though no reliable estimate of their numbers is available.

Representatives of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs a homeless outreach program, said they had no comment on “Pitch Black.”

Ms. Landowne said that Mr. Horton’s time underground was mostly spent in and around subway tunnels under the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The book depicts the spaces he inhabited as dark and dangerous and life there as anything but well-organized.

Mr. Horton is no longer living underground. He is serving time at the Mid-State Correctional Facility, a medium-security state prison in Marcy, N.Y. In March, shortly before his 40th birthday, he began serving a prison sentence of 18 to 36 months for criminal possession of stolen property in the fourth degree. He is eligible for parole in November and could be released as early as May. State records indicate that he was also in prison from 1990 to 1991 for attempted assault and from 1999 to 2003 for assault.

In the phone interview, Ms. Landowne acknowledged that her friendship and collaboration with Mr. Horton had had its ups and downs, but pointed out that his life has been filled with struggles against addiction and despair.

Mr. Horton was not available for a phone interview, but he wrote in a letter to his publisher: “I was real glad when I received my copy of the book. I thought that it came out real good. I want to thank you for the opportunity for giving me a chance to publish my book.”

....................

"Pitch Black" is $12.21 at Amazon.

Pimienta y Sal

Se habla español?

When I first saw these I thought they were guerilla iPod nanos.

From the website:

Pimienta (pepper) and sal (salt) shakers

Español vocab and euro metrics season black/white porcelain "tins" with industrial flavor — a pinch or dash or just a smidgen.

Black and white graphic design on glazed porcelain; holds 2.5 ounces.

Shaker dimensions: 2.75"H x 1.75"W x 1"D.

....................

Each, $3.95.

Listen to the musical road of Lancaster, California

Long story short: It's the only one in the U.S. created to generate music — in this case, Rossini's "William Tell Overture" — using your car as the instrument (above).

Kate Linebaugh's article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal has the details, and follows.

Good Vibrations? A California Road Plays 'The William Tell Overture'

Drivers Heard the Music and Approved; Neighbors Grumbled About the Rumble

In early August, this quiet desert community got an odd request from Honda Motor Co. The car maker wanted to cut a pattern of grooves into a stretch of road so people in passing cars would hear the theme from "The Lone Ranger." Footage of Honda Civics "playing" the famous tune would be used in an advertising campaign.

Eager to attract business to the Antelope Valley, Mayor R. Rex Parris gave the project the greenlight. "It was a way of singing the city's praises," said Mr. Parris, wearing black cowboy boots with his business suit on a recent sunny afternoon.

Instead, the novel "singing road" bitterly divided this city of 145,000 people. Residents living within earshot complained of constant noise from the song. "Why don't I come to your house at 3 a.m. and butcher the 'William Tell Overture' and see how you like it," grumbled Brian Robin, a 43-year-old public-relations consultant who lives in a two-story house with his wife, two kids and four cats a quarter-mile from the musical road.

Opponents like Mr. Robin pushed to fill in the grooves, posting homemade signs around nearby neighborhoods. Proponents, however, saw the stretch of asphalt as an American icon — the country's first melodic sequence of rumble strips and thus a piece of history for their town and their children. They urged the mayor not to give in to the will of a small minority. In the past few weeks, both groups have had their way.

Singing roads first flourished in Asia. Built in three locations in northern and central Japan, they were the product of a team of researchers at Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute. After driving over the marks on a road left by a bulldozer, the Japanese scientists determined that cutting grooves at measured intervals onto a road's surface created vibrations producing notes up and down the scale.

A similar road in South Korea plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb," according to a video on YouTube.com. More than a decade ago, in Denmark, another road used a technology that made use of buttons above the road's surface.

The idea that led to Lancaster's rendition of the cavalry charge in Gioacchino Rossini's "William Tell Overture" came from Honda's Santa Monica advertising agency, Rubin Postaer & Associates. Advertising executives there were inspired by a YouTube video of a man playing Mozart by attaching rods to his Rollerblades that hit water-filled bottles as he skated down a street.

RPA hired a production company that enlisted former punk drummer K.K. Barrett and his mathematician-musician friends to tune the pavement. Mr. Barrett, whose career began as the drummer for the Screamers, a Los Angeles techno-punk band, went to work on the Rossini piece.

By cutting ¾-inch deep grooves set 2 inches apart into asphalt, he was able to find a high F. With the same grooves 4 inches apart, he got a low F. From there, he measured his way to find all the 12 notes in between.

The width of the grooves determined the loudness of the sound. Half an inch was too soft, Mr. Barrett said, so he made it an inch. In retrospect, he says, that may have been too much. "We wanted to make sure it was loud and it was," he said. Nobody measured decibel levels, but city officials found the music could be heard half a mile away.

The noise catapulted the Civic Music Road, as it was called, from civic attraction to civic dispute.

The road was completed in early September. And just days later, residents began posting videos of the 30-second drive online, attracting thousands of hits and hundreds of visitors to this quiet dusty city about 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The new popularity of the stretch on Avenue K soon created traffic problems and lots of illegal U-turns made by listeners who wanted to hear the masked Texas Ranger's theme over and over again.

For some of the hundred homes within half a mile of the road, that was a problem. Debra White Hayes couldn't sleep through the noise, which she described as incessant droning "like monsters." Thinking it was local teenagers partying, the retiree called the sheriff. But the noise didn't stop. With each interrupted night's sleep, her asthma got worse, she says. When she discovered the tune was to be a permanent fixture in her neighborhood, Ms. White Hayes says she wrote Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mr. Parris says it wasn't the complaints of nearby residents that caused the city to decide to repave the road. "Quite frankly, I would have saved the road if it weren't for the safety concerns." After the mayor ordered the repaving, he said City Hall got 500 phone calls from residents demanding that the musical road be saved. Fans lined up for two miles on the desert highway to experience the final days of the melodic rumble strips. David Gilroy, whose house is about 500 feet from the road, painted a sign to get people to call City Hall and advocate to keep the road. "It's history for our kids," said Mr. Gilroy, downing a Bud Light behind his house. His daughter and a 12-year-old friend collected three-and-a-half pages of signatures at their school to save the attraction.

"Of all the things you think people will react to," mused Mr. Parris. "It was immediate." The campaign "was vitriolic and it even had a level of organization. Their complaint: How dare you cave in to a few complainers."

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 23, 18 days after the musical road was created, construction crews steamrolled fresh new asphalt over the music-making grooves. Honda footed the $20,000 bill. A day later, passing cars produced nothing but a gentle hiss.

Mr. Parris, however, didn't want to give up the tourist attraction and the marketing potential for his city. He marshaled city officials to find a new location — a stretch of road out toward the airport with a median to make U-turns safer, and no nearby residents. He reached out to Honda to finance a repeat performance. But, this time, the car maker wasn't interested.

The city went ahead anyway and 24 days after the first road was paved into silence, a new one had been put in, with 1,270 feet of grooves tuned to Rossini's score. The city paid $30,000 for the job, and officials are confident they'll find a new sponsor, or even "a revenue-generating application," Mr. Parris says, "like a jingle."

Stand Umbrella

A 2006 design by Hironao Tsuboi, made from aluminum/ABS resin/polyester/fiberglass.

Dimensions (closed): 97mm W x 810mm H (3.8"W x 32"H).

Weight: 320g (11 oz.).

¥4,200 ($41; £24; €31).

[via Alistair Why]

Doing real time for a virtual crime

The possibilities are endless, witness the latest extension of the internet into the "real" world, this time in Japan: a 43-year-old woman was arrested and jailed after she "... became so angry about her sudden divorce from her online husband that she logged on with his password and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday."

You could look it up or, if you can't be bothered, read all about it in Brennon Slattery's story in today's Washington Post, below.

Woman Jailed for Murdering Avatar

A virtual divorce prompts a virtual world murder — with consequences back in real life.

The line between virtual reality and its flesh-and-blood cousin blurred a little this week as a 43-year-old Tokyo woman was jailed for murdering her virtual ex-husband's avatar.

After she suddenly found herself divorced in "Maple Story," a popular 2-D side scrolling MMORPG, the unidentified woman used her ex-husband's ID and password to log into the game and kill him off. Call it Death by Deletion.

When the man discovered his beloved avatar was gone, he contacted authorities, which led to the woman's arrest. "I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning," the woman told investigators. "That made me so angry." The AP reports that the woman had no intention to carry out violence in reality.

The charges are "illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data," which carries a sentence of up to five years in jail or a fine up to $5,000.

This is the first time I've ever heard of real-life authorities getting involved with virtual homicide. While the charges have nothing to do with the avatar's death, but rather the woman's illegal methods of bumping it off, it certainly illustrates how emotionally involving online MMORPGs can be.

....................

More here, here and here.

Tons more where that came from here, should you require more grist for your procrastination mill.

I know you so well — but I digress.

"The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today." — William Gibson, in the superb documentary "No Maps For These Territories."

The Maple Story murder isn't quite "Minority Report" but things are certainly headed in that direction, no?

Rock Lamp

From the website:

Rock Lamp

Warm light reflects off the natural tones of Appalachian stone.

Each handcrafted stone is unique, varying in shape and color from russet to green to slate gray.

Small lamps [top] are approximately 5" x 8" with a single wick.

Large lamps [below] have two wicks and measure approximately 7" x 11".

Included are a 4 oz. bottle of clear oil, a funnel cap and a permanent wick.

....................

Small: $29.99.

Large: $49.99.

WordCount.org — 'Interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words'

Right here.

Details here.

Back story here.

iBangle

Put me down for one.

"The iBangle is designer Gopinath Prasana’s vision of a future iPod where the devices have become darn close to becoming jewelry."

"The iBangle is a thin piece of aluminum with a multi-touch track pad that includes music controls, a hold switch etc., just like an iPod."

"To achieve the perfect fit, a cushion inside the ring inflates to keep itself taut against your wrist."

[via pulp.co.nz]