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Last month’s initial meeting of the New York chapter of the Social Media Club went well enough that they had a second meeting last night. As previously noted, Social Media Club is one of the things that BrainJams is doing now. It’s still in the formative stages, and it’s unclear what it’s for and what it’s meant to achieve, and the founders Chris Heuer and Howard Greenstein are looking for input. Yes, that’s right, Social Media Club is itself an experiment in social media.
So, what is social media? That was the first question asked, and there were a whole variety of answers. One person asked “What media is not social?” A good question. Media is all about communication and connecting people. For instance, somebody asked whether if he and his friend both read the New York Times, and then they have a conversation about what they read in the paper, does that make the NYT social media? One of the other attendees, David Berkowitz, apparently disagrees.
I tossed out the idea that social media may have to do with community building. Somebody had pointed out the importance of building relationships - that social media involves identity and reputation, even if it is pseudonymous. I picked up on that and commented about the importance of relationships and reputation in building a community. You can’t have a community with truly anonymous members because there is no accountability and it will degenerate into the tragedy of the commons.
It also relates back to the first example - if there is a community of New York Times readers, then I might argue that while the NYT may not reflect that community, it is a necessary element of the community’s construction. And I think there is a surprising amount that can be done with media even without the direct acknowledgment of the media creators. Henry Jenkins’s book on Convergence Culture (which I’m still only halfway through) is all about re-appropriating media through tropes like fan fiction and fan boards.
My one journey into uber-fan-hood illustrates the power of such communities. When I was a grad student, Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the airwaves. This was the first TV show I watched religiously. I only knew a couple other people that watched it, but fortunately the Internet was there to save the day. I quickly became an active member of the alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer community, where I co-wrote the original FAQ. We fleshed out theories about the show’s mythology, kept better track of the show’s continuity than the writers, etc. There’s definitely an element of “social media” in there, but I’m at somewhat of a loss as to where it is. Is it contained only on the newsgroup? Well, the newsgroup wouldn’t exist without the show. Which part is the social media? It gets messy.
Moving on, we started talking about disclosure and how that applies to social media. A San Francisco get-together had proposed three T’s of social media: Truth, Transparency and Trust. One of the proposals of the SF chapter was that people could self-select to hold themselves to such standards by affixing a badge created by Social Media Club to their sites. Somebody asked why bloggers should even aspire to such qualities and how that could be policed. Bloggers aren’t journalists, and therefore should not try to hold themselves to the same standards.
I think I picked up on that later by suggesting my idealistic world where people actually have some level of media literacy. In other words, if we can’t fix the source (and I don’t think we can or should), then we should try to fix the receiver. We need to teach people that they can not uncritically accept everything that they see or read. In some ways, the plethora of viewpoints out there being made apparent in the blogosphere may drive us into media literacy whether we like it or not. If the same facts are getting twisted one way on one website, and another elsewhere, choosing which to believe may force people to think about what other issues are involved, whether the writers may have hidden interests, etc. Or they could just retreat into their own personal blogosphere, but I hope not.
One other thought I had during the discussion was that we may start treating media sources like we treat other people. In the real world, there are people I trust, people I’ll listen to skeptically, and people who I will just ignore. Why shouldn’t the same thing be true of my media sources? We’ll find media sources that we like, either because they are trustworthy, or possibly because they have a consistent bias (one of the reasons I like The Economist is that their bias is obvious and consistent). Other media sources we’ll check in on occasionally to see what’s going on, but treat the information we get from there as being gossip-level at best. I’m not quite sure how to relate this idea back to social media yet (a Friendster for media sources perhaps?) but I like the direction.
Those are all the thoughts I can remember off the top of my head. Afterwards, several of us went out to dinner and continued a lovely conversation for a couple more hours. It turned out many of us were Bay Area ex-pats, and the get-together reminded us of similar get-togethers back in the Bay. One of my goals is to find more such communities here in New York; fortunately, Social Media Club may turn out to be one of them.
Technorati tags: socialmediaclub socialmediaclubnyc
This past weekend was the Carnegie Hall part of the Steve Reich 70th birthday celebrations. I’m a big fan of Reich, and so I’d bought tickets to all three concerts a couple months ago. There was a Young Artists concert on Thursday evening, where Reich and his musicians worked with a bunch of young musicians on his music for a week and a half before the performance. Saturday night was Pat Metheny performing Electric Counterpoint, the Kronos Quartet performing Different Trains, and Steve Reich and Musicians performing Music for 18 Musicians. Sunday night was Cello Counterpoint, Piano/Video Phase, the American premiere of Daniel Variations, and then Drumming, the piece that introduced me to Reich ten years ago.
It was an awesome weekend.
I have so much I want to share that this post is going to be ludicrously sized. But since it’s for my own memory, I’m going to write it all, and you can pick and choose as you see fit. If you read all the way to the bottom, there’s even a treat!
So here’s a list of all the different pieces I’m going to talk about.
One thing I’d like to comment on before getting into the specifics of individual pieces is how much I enjoy Reich’s music. I’ve talked a bit about how modern art is often conceptually interesting but aesthetically unappealing. Reich is a great counterexample. I find his work to have an interesting theoretical basis, but also to be pleasurable on a purely aesthetic level. I can appreciate the music in a variety of different ways: by trying to follow and understand the different ways in which he builds up his dense musical textures, or by just sitting back with my eyes closed and letting the music wash over me, or by enjoying the visual spectacle of his music being performed. This weekend was a true joy to see his music being performed and get a better sense of how it all fits together. Now on to specific commentary…
Music for Pieces of Wood, performed by young artists
This was the first piece performed during the weekend, and it was a great piece to start with as it illustrated the quality of Reich that I find so compelling: that he can take simple elements and create such interesting combinations. This piece is for claves, which are basically two sticks, one held in each hand, that you hit together. Five percussionists, with five differently tuned claves. One starts by setting up a steady beat. The next jumps in with a pattern on top of the beat. The next starts a very common Reich technique of building up their pattern one note at a time. So playing one note per pattern block of the second clave. Then two notes. Then three, until the whole pattern is built up. Then he fades, and the fourth clave jumps in, building up their pattern in a different way. Then the fifth in a different way, until he hits his final pattern, and all of the claves suddenly are in unison banging out their pattern, and then they fade out and start building up the next pattern, one player at a time. Such a simple idea. So interesting in practice.
The percussionists were great. All of the young artists were. The other pieces in the Young Artists concert were:
Electric Counterpoint, performed by Pat Metheny
This piece was commissioned for Pat Metheny, so this was the definitive version of the piece. It’s scored for “guitar soloist and guitar ensemble of 12 guitars and 2 electric bass guitars”, but Reich being who he is, the guitar ensemble is actually Pat Metheny, taped playing each part to be his own guitar ensemble. It’s a bit hard to follow all the lines happening on the tape as they are not visually apparent (more on this later), but Metheny did a great job with it. Plus, again, the conception is really interesting.
Different Trains, performed by Kronos Quartet
This piece was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet, so another definitive performance. Like Electric Counterpoint, the live performers are accompanied by a pre-recorded tape that includes two versions of themselves as well as other sound effects like sirens and speech samples. Steve Reich’s notes explain the conception of the piece:
“The idea for the piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated, with my mother going to Los Angeles and my father staying in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, as a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period I would have had to ride very different trains.”
He went and interviewed his governess and a retired Pullman porter to get speech snippets describing the experience of American trains before the war, and then interviewed Holocaust survivors to get speech snippets describing the experience of European trains during the war. Then there’s a final section of After the War. The speech snippets have pitch, and he gets the various instruments to accompany and imitate the snippets. This grows particularly effective in the European section of the piece, where the snippet is only played once, but the notes continue to play, as if the words can only be uttered once because they are so painful, but we can not forget their echo. It’s a tremendously affecting piece, and Kronos Quartet does a phenomenal job with it.
Music for 18 Musicians, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians
This was the highlight I was looking forward to after seeing this six years ago. It was just as amazing the second time. The visual spectacle of watching three people play the marimba together. The sheer wall of sound.
But there were things I picked up this time that I had missed last time, and that I hadn’t gotten from listening to the CD dozens of times. I noticed how a couple different sections had the xylophones building up their patterns as they do in Music for Pieces of Wood or Drumming. It makes sense, as that is such a Reich technique, but I hadn’t noticed before until I saw it happening in front of me.
The other thing I really liked this time was how human the piece was. We often think of minimalist pieces as being dehumanizing in how they conform to mechanical variations of a theme. But Music for 18 Musicians has the fundamentally human element of the singers and clarinets taking breaths together (and I read in the notes how they repeat their chords for two breaths each so the whole piece is timed to the human breath). I also liked how they coordinated the movement and different parts. When a section was about to move on to a new section or configuration, people would move to their new locations, get ready, and then make eye contact or nod to the vibraphonist, who would step up, and play the sequence of notes indicating the move to the next section. It was wonderfully choreographed and a pleasure to watch. I need to find out how to contact Steve Reich to tell him that I’d pay for a DVD of his ensemble performing this piece. No commentary, no fancy camera angles. Just a single overhead camera and good sound mixing, letting the music speak for itself.
The performance was excellent, and earned a well-deserved instant standing ovation that went electric when Reich was forced by his group to take a solo bow.
Cello Counterpoint, performed by Maya Beiser
After the thrills of Saturday night. it was hard to see how Sunday night would stand up, but I think it may have even exceeded Saturday. It started out with Cello Counterpoint, performed by Maya Beiser, for whom the piece was commissioned. Like Electric Counterpoint, this piece has the performer playing against taped versions of themselves. The bit they added was that they had actually videotaped Maya recording each of the other tracks, and then spliced together a video of seven slices of her sitting side-by-side, each performing a different track. They displayed that on a big screen behind her as she performed the eighth live track. Normally I find video art to be self-indulgent tripe, but this was _wonderful_. It added so much to the performance to be able to see her do each part, especially in the second movement, where she plays a seven-part canon against herself; watching the melody ripple across the screen through each of the different Mayas just enhanced the auditory experience.
And Maya Beiser did a great job. I’m putting her in my personal category of wonderfully energetic women soloists like Lauren Flanigan and Leila Josefowicz, who throw their entire bodies into the music (I’m not sure why I can’t think of any similarly energetic male soloists. Me, getting a crush on attractive, energetic, talented women? Can’t imagine why you’d think that). She also toured as the featured soloist in Naqoyqatsi with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Definitely a name I’m going to keep an eye out for.
Piano/Video Phase, performed by David Cossin
Piano Phase was an early piece written by Steve Reich, experimenting with phasing in and out of rhythm, a technique he took to the extreme in Drumming. It’s for two pianos, playing the same bit more and more out of phase with each other.
David Cossin took that idea and ran with it. He’s actually a percussionist, so he sampled the piano tune, and broke it up into pieces that could be activated by hitting a MIDI pad. So by playing the right sequence of MIDI pads, he could generate the piano tune. Then he videotaped himself playing the straight line of the piano tune. During the concert, that video is projected onto a screen in front of where he is sitting. So when he starts playing live, he’s playing in sync with the video. As his part phases behind, you can see him get slowly behind his video counterpart. And then phase another beat back. And eventually they sync up again, and start a new section. It was excellent. This was another example of video art that actually added something to the experience; if I had just heard the pianos playing, I might have been able to follow the phasing, but it would have been difficult. But by seeing it visually, with him hitting pads just a split second behind his video counterpart, and then a little bit further behind the next iteration, and a bit further behind, until it’s a full beat behind. So cool. I’d pay for a DVD of that too.
Daniel Variations, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians
This was commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation in memory of Daniel Pearl, the journalist killed in Pakistan in 2002. Reich chose to approach it by juxtaposing verses from the book of Daniel in the Bible, where Daniel is asked to interpret the king of Babylon’s dream (Reich pointed out that Babylon was where Iraq is now), with words of Daniel Pearl. This piece received its world premiere earlier this month in London, and this performance was the American premiere.
I really liked it. It showed Reich’s growth as a composer. Unlike pieces like Music for 18 Musicians or Drumming, it had no artifice in its construction, no technique mechanically applied repeatedly. It was just flat-out good. The Bible sections were heavy on ponderous percussion, which makes sense, and the Daniel Pearl sections were led by the strings, as Pearl was an accomplished fiddle player. I liked the string writing especially, which surprised me because Reich’s strength has always been percussion. The incorporation of the voices was also well-done; instead of wordless humming, the singers got to sing actual phrases set in a variety of different ways. The piece reminded me a bit of some of John Adams’s work, which is interesting, as Reich and Adams are generally acknowledged to be the top two living American composers. In particular, the high interlocking vocal harmonies reminded me a bit of the three countertenor parts from El Nino.
Great stuff. I can’t wait for the CD.
Drumming, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians
And the conclusion to the weekend was Drumming, the piece that started it all for me ten years ago. I went to see the Talujon Percussion Quartet at Stanford, and they played the first movement from Drumming, and I was like “Whoa!” This time was particularly great for me, as I had never seen the entire piece performed - just the first movement.
For those that don’t know, Drumming is the ultimate in Steve Reich’s phasing and beat-adding techniques. He starts off on tuned bongo drums with two players playing a single note repeatedly. Then, like Music for Pieces of Wood, he adds notes, so it’s a two-note pattern for four repetitions. Then three notes, etc., until it’s built up into a 12-note pattern. Then the players slowly get out of phase, until one gets a full beat in front of the other. Then they do it again. Then other drummers come in and add some embellishment on top of the pattern. Then they phase back until they’re in unison, start dropping beats until it’s back to a single beat again, and then they build it up again in a different order. From there, it is passed onto the low range of the marimbas, building its way up through there in a variety of ways, before getting passed onto the glockenspiels, before the final movement brings all the instruments back together.
It’s hard to do it justice with an explanation in words. And even though the CD is amazing, it’s so much better live (another DVD I’d pay for). I had semi-accidentally gotten tickets high up and on the side of the auditorium (because I bought tickets too late to get in the main section of Zankel Hall), so I had a great overhead view to watch how the piece evolved. Watching from above, I could watch the two drummers get slowly out of phase, as one would hit the drum just an instant behind the other, and then further behind until they locked in a beat apart. It also made it totally apparent which parts of the sound were the result of the interlocking patterns, and which were embellishments on top of the patterns. Plus, it made it clear how they switch from the stick end of their sticks to the muffled soft end to get a different sound on the drums when they rebuild the pattern halfway through the first movement.
Once they moved on to the marimbas, we got to see all nine percussionists crowded around three marimbas. In fact, five were playing the same marimba at the same time at one point. And, again, being able to see the players on two marimbas phase away from each other made it clearer what was going on in the music. And I could also hear the overtones that sounded like voices that convinced Reich to add two female vocalists to accentuate those overtones. Neat effect. Later on, Reich whistles to add to the glockenspiel overtones. And as it gets even higher, he uses a piccolo player.
Anyway, it was a thrill to see the piece live in its entirety. I highly recommend seeing it if you ever get the chance. Like Music for 18 Musicians, it got a well-deserved instant standing ovation, and was a worthy conclusion to a fantastic weekend of concerts.
P.S. Thanks for the great comments on my customer service post - I want to pick up on that thread, but I haven’t had time; I was busy on Saturday afternoon prepping for my corporate finance class, concert Saturday evening, more work Sunday morning, Dale Chihuly at the Botanical Gardens Sunday afternoon, concert Sunday evening, then a conference call with my corporate finance group after the concert Sunday evening. Tonight was doing a few pages of writing for my Tuesday class, and another conference call finishing up corporate finance discussion. But I think I’m in good shape at the moment so hence the post.
It’s been over two weeks since my last post. That’s probably the longest time without an update in close to a year. It’s mostly a matter of guilt - I’ve had things I would have liked to write up, but every time I think about doing it, I think about the papers I should be writing or the books I should be reading for class, and can’t justify blogging. Of course, sometimes I don’t end up getting work done on the homework either, so I might as well have blogged. I think I have this irrational belief in a writing energy well where if I write something for my blog, I’m taking energy that I should be using for writing papers for class. Or something like that.
But I’ve got a conference call with my group-mates in 30 minutes, and I’ve finished what I wanted to get done for that, and it’s not quite enough time to get started on my paper for my other class, so I’m going to write something so I can at least catch people up on what I’ve been up to so that when I do get a chance to write something meaningful, I can do so without doing a journal post first.
Class has been eating up a lot of time. Corporate Finance has been going pretty well; one of the nice benefits of being a former physicist is that math and spreadsheets are pretty elementary for me. Plus that class involves working in a group, so I’ve got other people to be accountable to, so I’m more on the ball (as an aside, I realized, both in class and at work, that I am willing to work my butt off for the sake of others, but if I’m supposed to do something that only benefits myself, I’ll slack off - something to delve into at some point). The Technology in the Business Environment class has had interesting class discussions, but I’m struggling a bit with getting my papers into a professor-approved format. While blogging has been great for developing my writing skills in a lot of ways, it appears it has also led me to be a little bit too florid and prolix for executive summaries.
That class also has a ton of reading. We average between 200 and 300 pages a week, which is nothing for English majors, but it’s a lot when combined with a full-time job and other homework. Plus I’ve found some of the reading to be a bit dry. I did like Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation, though; it asserts that the days of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM are over, in the sense that corporations can no longer do all innovation from basic research to product development. Corporations must learn to live in a world where research is happening everywhere and figure out how they can thrive in such a world. Some interesting ideas, although I thought that his recommendations for action were a bit weak.
Outside of class, work continues. Not much exciting happening there.
A week ago Friday, Seppo and Ei-Nyung were in town, and we went to wd-50 for dinner. We went for the 9 course tasting menu, and it was interesting. The chef is definitely a conceptual kind of guy, in that he came up with some really interesting dishes that were well-executed, but not very tasty. It reminded me a bit of the discussion about art and craft we had a few weeks ago. For instance, one dish was constructed like a sunny-side-up egg, with a white disc and a “yolk” on top. Except that the white was some sort of cold jelly-like substance, and the “yolk” was a carrot consomme. It was wacky, but it did not exactly set my taste buds on fire.
Other dishes were more satisfying, though. The “homage to a sandwich” was excellent - it was thinly sliced beef tongue, with romaine lettuce and dried onion diced so finely they looked like micro-dots. There was a smear of some sort of tomato sauce that was vaguely ketchup-like, and deep-fried mayonnaise cubes. All the elements of a sandwich, deconstructed. And yet when you put them all back together on your fork, it was tasty.
We also really liked the miso soup with make your own noodles. The noodles came in liquid form in a squeeze bottle, and as you squirted it into your soup, it solidified, forming noodles. Great fun!
I think we all agreed that the desserts were excellent. One was a “menthol mousse”, which sounds like it might be overpowering, but it worked. There was the mousse, some honeydew sorbet, and a couple other elements all of which worked together for a fabulous taste experience. The other I remember was a chocolate gouache, where there was a beautifully arranged twist of gouache, with cocoa powder at the ends, sorbet on one side, two dabs of mint jelly, and two dabs of some sort of avocado dip (yes, avocado - it worked). It was well plated and fabulously delicious. Hopefully, Seppo will post pictures at some point and I’ll link them here because it was a work of art.
What else, what else. Steve Reich is having his 70th birthday this month. I’ve got tickets to all three concerts at Carnegie Hall this week, including a Saturday night concert of Music for 18 Musicians where I sprung for the best seats, because watching that piece performed totally blew my mind six years ago. I also get to see Drumming for the first time all the way through on Sunday night. Although I went to see So Percussion on Friday night, and they did the first movement of Drumming and it was awesome - watching another percussion quartet perform that first movement live was my introduction to Reich’s music close to ten years ago, and I knew the music much better now from the CD, but seeing it live this time helped me understand how the piece fit together better. I didn’t make it to the Reich mini-marathon at the Whitney this afternoon although I did try - I was at CultureFest and went looking for the 4,5 subway that I could take up to the Whitney, but every single downtown subway station for that line was closed. After walking a mile looking for an open station, I decided it was a sign and gave up to come home and do my class reading instead.
So that’s my life. Work, class, occasional New York events. I do have thoughts, but a lot of my brain is devoted to figuring things out for class and work, leaving me with less idle brain cycles for the random speculation that leads to blogging. Ah well. Now it’s about time for my conference call with my groupmates, so it’s back to homework.
My life, it is busy.
Let’s do the quick update of every night since my last post on Monday, September 19th, when I went to the Social Media Club.
Tuesday: Stayed home and studied. My only day without interaction outside of work in the last three weeks
Wednesday and Thursday: Class (my normal Tuesday class was moved to Thursday due to a scheduling conflict).
Friday: Sailing out in the Hudson with Sasha and Ann. Unlike last time, it was windy and crowded out on the water. Lots of four-foot wakes rolling by, which made this trip less of an idyllic sunset cruise and more of a roller coaster ride, with the whole boat tipping over to crazy angles, or coming half out of the water when going over a wave. Lots of fun, but a lot different; when I took the tiller this time, the boat was much harder to control, and I gave it back after I almost ran us into Jersey.
Saturday and Sunday: The Come Out and Play festival. More on this below after the chronology.
Monday evening: Meeting with my group for my Corporate Finance class, so we could pull together our case study for class on Wednesday.
Tuesday and Wednesday: Class.
Thursday (tonight): Was scheduled for my night off, but then I saw that NYPL Live was hosting a discussion between Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame and Larry Lessig, who I think is awesome (I’ve read 2.5 of his books and loved seeing him speak a couple years ago). So I had to go to that.
Friday (tomorrow): Going to try to check out Art (212), which is free tomorrow evening, $15 otherwise.
This weekend: I could do Wired NextFest or BarCamp, but I think I need a weekend off. Too busy! I’m not letting two nights of classes a week plus the associated homework put a crimp in my social schedule but it’s coming out of my sleep and energy schedule. Hrm.
Come Out and Play festival: Awesome. The idea is to use New York City as a gameboard for many many games. Go check out the variety of games that they were running last weekend. Or read about it at cbsnews.com. I heard about it through Jane McGonigal, who I think I heard about from either danah boyd or Henry Jenkins in the last month. There were dozens of game over the weekend, but I only participated in two.
Saturday was Cruel 2 B Kind, the world premiere of one of Jane McGonigal’s games. The idea is that all of the players arrive in the same public space, where they are text messaged a weapon of kindness and a weakness for kindness. They must go up to other people in the area, and “assault” them with their weapon of kindness. If they attack another team, and the weapon is that team’s weakness, they defeat the team and subsume them. If they attack another team, but don’t hit their weakness, the other team must respond “You are too kind”. If they attack a random person who just happens to be in the playing field, that’s when the fun starts.
In this case, the playing field was Broadway between 48th and 58th. Ann and I broke our fast at Empanada Mama’s (sooooo good), and then headed over. We got there a few minutes early, checked in via text message, and then started scoping for other teams. Since all teams started off as pairs, we were looking for pairs of people with a cell phone ready to hand. This turned out to be relatively easy to do.
At 12:30, we were text messaged our weapon (wish people a “spectacular day”) and our weakness (I can’t remember - perhaps it was being wished a “delicious day”). We had pegged another group near us as being in the game. We walked up to them. I had on my Cubs hat, had out a tourist map, put on my best clueless expression and said “Excuse me, do you know which way Rockefeller Center is?” while thrusting the map at them. They pointed it out to me, I said thanks, and Ann and I said “Have a spectacular day!” They looked at us with this dawning look of horror and said “Wait, you’re in the game?!” It was wonderful. And we’d killed them. Bwa hahahaha.
We pulled the same ruse on two more teams before we got another one. By then we were up to 8 or so people, and the stealth option was lost to us. We didn’t adjust tactics quick enough, and were ambushed by a two person team before we got organized. Oops.
Never fear, our group of ten went on to take out another large group, and suddenly we were 25 or so. This was when things started to get a bit ridiculous. Our secret weapon at this point was offering to help people. So whenever we saw any group that might be another team, even if they were across the street, we yelled “Can we help you?!?” And they’d yell back “You are too kind! We love your shoes!” And we’d yell “You are too kind!” Meanwhile, the tourists waiting for the matinee Broadway shows were wondering what the HELL was going on.
We also had some pretty great reactions from deploying our weapon on unsuspecting passersby. One of them looked us up and down and just said “No” when we asked if we could help him. Most people just looked confused and intimidated.
A fun time was had by all, although it got a bit slow towards the end since no team who was vulnerable to our weapon got within a block of us because we were shouting it so indiscriminately. It would have been nice for the larger groups to get their weapons switched out more (they redeployed weapons occasionally during the game via text message) because we ended up just walking up and down the street for 45 minutes yelling “Can we help you?!”
For those that are interested in reading more, check out the account from the eventual game winners or this CNET article.
Then I went home and took a two hour nap, spent two hours talking to Christy and then Jofish, and then failed to study. Too much excitement.
But wait, there’s more!
On Sunday, Ann and Niko (no, not that one) and Jocelyn and I went out for dim sum before meeting up with Mira to go play the Go Game, which was basically an experiential scavenger hunt through Greenwich Village. We were issued a cell phone and a camera. I called the team Project Eris, in honor of both chaos and of the recently named dwarf planet, which a friend of mine co-discovered. The rest of the afternoon, we were issued missions via the cell phone which often had to be documented by the camera. Among other things, we had to have a mock kung-fu fight with a Matrix-y woman, explain social networking sites to a “grandmother” knitting in a Starbucks, stage a tabloid photo with Batgirl (see below), mock up a video game (we chose Pong), etc. 
They even posted all the game photos (you may have to login - use username nehrlich, password nehrlich and then go back to that link). Plus there were run around the Village missions where we had to enter a local establishment, find some piece of information and send it back to HQ, e.g. go to a Gristedes, find the “most patriotic section” (lots of flags), and look for the green dessert topping (maraschino cherries), and then find the ingredient it shared with antifreeze (we spent way too much time on this trying to google for stuff - we should have just guessed and moved on). But it was fun. Then we all met up back at a local bar for the judging portion, where we got to see what others had down. I think my favorites were the staged photo of Batgirl snorting coke off a dead hustler, and the amazing mockup video the winning team did of Katamari Damacy, where they ended up all rolled up in one big ball (after picking up lots of little things first). It was a fun time, and a good excuse to go run around New York with friends for an afternoon.
And now I shall shut up. I’d originally planned to write a couple blog posts tonight, but maybe tomorrow.
Technorati tag: cruel2bkind
I’m on the Carnegie Hall weekly events list. Last week’s email announced a Community Sing of Mozart’s Requiem, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of 9/11. That immediately became a priority for me to attend.
Some background: The Saturday after 9/11 was our choral retreat. We were rehearsing the Brahms Requiem at the time, and Vance, our conductor, wisely let us sing it all the way through without stopping as our method of mourning. It was a powerful experience as we shared that moment together. The concert was three weeks later, and it was one of the most amazing performances I have been part of. We were inspired, spirit and mind and body all fusing together to pour out our message of awe and sorrow and finally joy (”Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord”). It was the best memorial we knew how to give, and I think it was a worthy one.
So the idea of participating in a community sing to commemorate 9/11 greatly appealed to me. The Juilliard School collaborated with Carnegie Hall to make this happen. My parents volunteered to wait in line to get tickets and to save a good seat for me coming from work, which worked out wonderfully as we were in about the tenth row. The Juilliard orchestra and Choral Union were great, the soloists were excellent, and the audience was surprisingly good. We sang it straight through, and I did relatively well considering it had been five years since I last performed it.
But the best part was just being there. People lined up literally around the block to be part of this experience. New Yorkers came together, even in the middle of a weekday, to pay tribute and homage to that day, in the best way they knew how, by making music together. I was quoted once as saying “There’s this feeling you get at performance. Everyone breathes as one, sings as one. It’s magical.” That’s the feeling I had again today. It didn’t matter who we were outside of that hall. We sang together, we created this moment together, and that was what mattered.
P.S. It was also nice to get complemented by other singers after the performance. Two of them told me I rocked, and when they found out I wasn’t currently in a chorus, tried to recruit me to the Collegiate Chorale, which looks like a great group if I had any free time whatsoever. I was surprised to realize just how much I missed singing. I got the big goofy smile on my face several times throughout the performance as I listened to the intricate complexites of Mozart’s composition. And the sheer joy of blasting through wonderful music together is something I’ve missed. I’ll have to see how my first term of classes go before I can commit to a chorus, though.
More fun experiences in New York:
I got to go sailing with Captain Sasha on Friday evening. Sasha’s an instructor with the Manhattan Sailing School, and took a couple of us out for a sunset cruise. It was lovely and peaceful being out on the water, with just the sounds of the waves and the wind. We headed out past the Statue of Liberty and most of the way to Staten Island before turning back. Sasha even let me take the tiller on the way back for a while. I can’t really afford sailing lessons right now, but I definitely enjoyed the experience.
I spent Saturday afternoon out at Coney Island watching the Brooklyn stop of the AVP. Caught three matches, including the men’s final. What’s fun is that the crowd is still small at these events, so you can get up close to the action. I got a second-row seat for a match featuring Holly McPeak and Logan Tom, apparently in their second week as partners (there was a massive shakeup two weeks ago when the second-ranked team on the tour (Elaine Youngs and Rachel Wacholder) broke up, causing a cascading waterfall of partner changes). I happened to sit near a couple other volleyball players and we had a fun time critiquing the play; McPeak was setting Tom way too low - Tom didn’t get her arm fully extended on a hit the whole match, settling for roll shots which were way too easy to dig. They won anyway because Tom was blocking well and McPeak was picking up digs, but it was harder than it should have been.
After the men’s final (Mike Lambert and Stein Metzger won it going away), I was walking back towards the subway and noticed myself walking right behind Kerri Walsh, the premier women’s beach volleyball player in the world. It’s a bit weird seeing somebody in person who you’ve mostly only seen on TV. She was walking back towards the subway with her husband Casey Jennings (another player) and the AVP announcer Chris McGee. I tried not to goggle too much, but I probably did. As I was crossing the street to the subway station, I came up behind McPeak and Tom, who I’d seen playing earlier. They had to stop to buy tickets while I sailed through with my pass. I guess they’re just normal folks too. It’s easy to forget that when you have a one-way fanboy interaction mediated by television, which makes me wonder about the passive culture that TV is creating. But it’s late, so I won’t pursue the thought any further.
After enjoying my last outing with them, I went to another nextNY event this evening. This one was PitchCamp. Keshava recruited several investors and entrepreneurs (including David S. Rose, the pitch coach written up in BusinessWeek) to serve as coaches while volunteers tried their pitches.
The first hour was three companies doing 2-3 minute elevator pitches with feedback afterwards. The second hour was spent with a company doing a 10 minute pitch presentation with PowerPoint, then taking 10-15 minutes of questions from “investors”, before feedback from the coaches. At the end, two of the three elevator pitches delivered a new version of their pitch incorporating the coach feedback, and results were noticeably improved.
I jotted down a list of the recurring questions and advice from the coaches:
It was really valuable to hear these comments, and I greatly admire the volunteers who stood up there and got grilled by the coaches. While I was listening, I was thinking of how I should be asking the same questions of myself in terms of how I present myself to the world and as a job applicant. I think that’s another post, though.
Technorati tags: nextNY PitchCamp
Updated to add the nextNY tag and post to the nextNY blog.
I’ve got a couple posts floating around in my head, but I can’t make any of them come together right now. Not sure if it’s the heat or general distraction or what. So instead I’ll post about stuff I’ve been up to.
After Monday night at Hallo Berlin, there was bowling on Tuesday (company field trip fun - did you know there’s a bowling alley on the second floor of Port Authority?), and Avenue Q on Wednesday (also corporate-sponsored) (very fun musical, by the way - I enjoyed it a lot - “It sucks to be me” is a catchy song).
On Thursday, I had a little shindig, where about 15 people came over to my place for wine and cheese and conversation. I’d been meaning to do this for a while - I’ve got several sets of friends here in NYC (I later counted that there were four distinct social circles at the shindig), and I wanted them all to meet each other, and there were particular connections I wanted to make between pairs of people. And it was excellent - people showed up, there was good conversation all around, connections were made, etc.
The next morning I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed it so much (yes, I’m over-analytical). I like making connections. I like the fact that I have all of these different people in my life who are doing different things (a sampling of job descriptions of people who showed up: software consultant, intern at Goldman Sachs, publisher, language services coordinator, developmental geneticist, urban planner, and sailing instructor). I really enjoy being able to talk to them, and be able to understand a little bit about what they’re doing and explain it to others - the one time that Jofish and I took turns explaining each other’s work to strangers was a lot of fun. I need to figure out how to cultivate more of these sort of cross-connections in my life.
Somebody asked about cafes with wi-fi on the nextNY mailing list, and one person recommended the Housing Works Used Book Cafe. It’s a volunteer-run used book store/cafe where all proceeds go towards providing housing and other services for homeless New Yorkers. I went to go check it out this afternoon, and it’s a wonderful space. Their book selection isn’t that extensive, but they’ve got lots of chairs for browsing, plus the cafe in the back to chill at for a while. Highly recommended. I’m having thoughts of volunteering there. And, of course, I couldn’t resist buying several books despite having stacks of unread books already. I’m a hopeless addict.
In other wandering around news, I also wanted to go visit art galleries in Chelsea this afternoon, but they’re basically all closed on the weekends, either because their summer hours are weekday-only, or because they’re just closed in August. Good to know.
A few weeks ago, I came across the nextNY site, a networking group for folks in technology and media in New York. It was started by Charlie O’Donnell, an up-and-coming executive (he just left Union Square Ventures where he’d been working to join a startup they’d funded). I was intrigued because they organized a dodgeball league, so it was clear they were a little bit less strait-laced than the typical networking group. Plus, Charlie linked to one of my posts, so that predisposes me to like him.
Anyway, nextNY had a happy hour last night at Bar 13, and I stopped by in an attempt to meet more people here in New York. It was a lot of fun - interesting folks involved in a variety of entrepreneurial ventures. Unlike many others there, I wasn’t trying to pitch anything and I didn’t have an agenda, so I was able to just enjoy meeting people, and hear them talking about what excites them (much like my experience at BrainJam). Plus, I got my first taste of the Joel halo effect - after saying I worked at Fog Creek Software, most folks say “Oh, you work for Joel!”, so that was kind of neat. I had to leave early to meet up for dinner and drinks for a friend’s birthday, but I will be going to more nextNY events in the future.
The last couple weeks have been all about taking advantage of New York. I’d been feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I figured it was time to remind myself that this is NEW YORK, and I should be going out and doing fun things here. So I’ve done all sorts of things, including:
So I’ve been keeping myself busy. In case you were wondering why there’s been a dearth of blogging recently.
P.S. My company, Fog Creek Software, is having an open house this evening if you’re interested in seeing where I work.
I’m attending the Hackers on Planet Earth conference this weekend. I’d heard about this several months ago, just before I moved to New York and signed up then, because it was a cheap conference and sounded like it could be interesting. This is the conference associated with 2600 Magazine, which has been around forever. Anyway, I’m not really a hacker, but I’m interested in some of the same topics, so what the heck.
I think my conference fee paid for itself last night by getting to see a talk by Mike Murray on “Hacking the Mind: Hypnosis, NLP, and Shellcode”, described in the program as:
The similarities between the methods used to exploit a computer network and the language patterns involved in hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming (NLP) are striking. In this talk, nCircle’s director of vulnerability research Mike Murray (who is also a Master NLP practitioner and certified clinical hypnotherapist) will demonstrate the use of hypnotic language patterns, metaphors, and other patterns of influence, as well as showing how a good hypnotist structures inductions in a similar way to the methods of a skilled computer hacker. Hypnotic analogues to buffer overflows, shellcode, and other types of computer attacks will be demonstrated, leaving the audience with a deeper appreciation for language patterns and their effect on the human mind.
As somebody who continues to be fascinated by manipulation techniques, this was probably the talk I most wanted to see at the conference. And it was far far far better than I could have expected.
Murray posted the slides to the talk, but they don’t give any sense of how masterful a performance he gave. He structured the talk to illustrate the techniques he was discussing, and it was so seamless that even though he was telling us exactly what he was doing, it worked anyway. Brilliant stuff.
For instance, he discussed the techniques of buffer overflow using open loops. There’s the well-known information nugget that people can only remember 7 +/- 2 chunks of information at a time. Once you get past that, he claimed that in some sense, you are talking to the operating system of the brain directly. How do you overflow the buffer? You open up a bunch of “loops” and never close them. A loop in this case is a thread, or, as he used it, a story.
He started the talk with a series of four or five stories, and just as he got to the climax of each one, he would say “That reminds me…” and start another story. But the previous story was still there hanging. And as he got into the talk and described buffer overflows, it was obvious that what he was doing was overflowing our brains with threads. I actually started scribbling down the stories so that I could offload them from my brain in hopes of staying clear. And yet I was definitely drawn in - I got a physical buzzing sensation in my ears, and my perception of his voice got much louder, so something weird was happening in my brain. Very spooky.
The next technique he mentioned was using ambiguous content, so that the person can make it specific to their own experience (shades of filling in the blanks posts that I have yet to write). For instance, when hypnotizing someone, he could say “you will feel a sharp tingling sensation in your left leg”, but then he’d be right only some percentage of the time, and if he’s wrong, it breaks the trance. If instead he says, “You feel a sensation in your leg. Focus on it.”, then however they are feeling they stay in the trance. Another example he gave was “You will continue to breathe, focusing on the breath”; as he quipped, “I know they’re breathing - if they’re not, I’ve got a whole other set of problems”. This is reminiscent of the political training that I took:
His [Bob Mulholland’s] example was make your message “Stop Bush!” If you leave it at that, the person that sees it applies their own context and interprets in terms of their own personal woes. If you keep on going and say “Stop Bush because he’s against gay marriage”, then maybe that person goes “Well, I don’t know how I feel about gay marriage, so maybe I don’t agree with this campaigner.” Use the voters’ ability to supply context to your advantage.
Another technique was injecting your own code to be run in somebody else’s brain. That means understanding the unconscious brain, which he says is all about patterns (shades of On Intelligence) and stories (I love stories). I loved the description of Milton Erickson (who I have to read now): “You walked into his office and sat down. Then, Milton told you a story and you found yourself changing.” That sounds so cool.
The last technique was also brilliantly introduced. One slide said “What if there was a language pattern in the world that could ensure that anyone who heard it would execute the program you chose?” Then he said “Can you imagine what such a pattern would be?” Then he said “Don’t you think …?” and we started laughing as we realized the answer. As his next slide put it, “The question can not be avoided by the unconscious mind”. To process the question, we have to evaluate its content. We run the code. It’s similar in principle to the “Don’t think of an elephant” gimmick, where you have to think of an elephant as part of processing the statement. Ask people questions; make their brains make the connections and do the work. If you tell people something, they won’t respond - if they come up with it on their own in response to a question, it’s theirs.
Absolutely brilliant talk. I hung out afterwards in an informal Q&A session with him and several others just so I could hear more stuff. I had actually read several of the books he recommended (including Cialdini and Blink), but I want to follow up on Milton Erickson, and possibly Gregory Bateson, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, as well. Also, he pointed people at the NLP Canada blog, which I plan to start reading - NLP Canada is where he trained.
P.S. One thought I had later in the evening while discussing this with a friend who I happened to meet at the talk: the idea of open loops may explain the flow of great conversations. As the participants start threads, they remind people of other threads, and all of these open loops are left hanging, leading the conversation participants into a state of mutual hypnosis. That’s why it takes time for a great conversation to get rolling, for the open loops to pile up. It’s why any interruption tends to destroy the conversation; the context switch flushes all of the open loops. It’s why the great conversations I’ve had which last for hours often feel like they’re in a timeless state where I have no idea how long we’ve been talking - I’m in a hypnotic state. I’m not sure this is valid, but I think it’s a really fascinating possibility.
