What little I know of the Off-Broadway production “Staring out the Window” is derived entirely from my own experience with it this very evening: my girlfriend reminded me that I had agreed to go see this double-feature theatrical event with her and some friends; I showed up at the Red Room, a little-known theater stowed away one flight above the semi-famous KGB in the East Village; I watched, first, a production of Don Nigro’s “Specter” and, immediately afterwards, Jhon Doria’s “Eye Can’t See You,” both one-act plays united by the fact that their principal players spend much of their time on stage staring straight ahead. I really, really enjoyed “Specter,” a funny and unexpectedly frightening conversation between two strangers in a car. Apparently, I’m in good company: a Google search reveals that it’s been produced many times by small theaters around the country. It was a fun night; I need to get out and see more theater.

I approached Montréal with skepticism; here was a population of Caucasian North Americans who spoke English but preferred French, and what’s more, the Queen of England’s face was all over their money. The very proposition of such a city seemed contradictory, at best, and schizophrenic, at worst. But as soon as the temperate air of a Montréal summer evening hit me, I was in a more open mood for having escaped the New York swelter, at least. It’s a pleasant, clean city, exceedingly moderate in everything I could see, from architecture to debauchery, though of course I only saw downtown. I had a good time, I’d go back and take in some more sights, listen to some more Canadian French, spend some more American dollars. But right now I am exhausted.

Later this afternoon, I’m leaving for a 3-day trip to Montréal on the occasion of a good friend’s bachelor party. The number of things I know about Montréal are few: it’s clean, everyone speaks French, they have a famous jazz festival which I fear that I will be forced to attend, and it’s generally cooler than New York — at least it had better be, because it’s sweltering here. I imagine my experience will be somewhat like the experience I had in Syndey: pristine, elegant and pleasant, yet small and mediocre. I’m such a snob! Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and keeping an open mind.

Continue Reading

It’s almost a sure thing that I will never buy anything from Amazon.com’s ‘Apparel & Accessories,’ ‘Magazine Subscriptions,’ ‘Home & Garden,’ or even ‘Camera & Photo’ stores, and yet, in random order, they show up repeatedly in the navigation each time I return to the site. It’s a wonder to me that Amazon, perhaps the most highly personalized experience on the Web (as in architecturally responsive to user profiles), doesn’t allow me to configure the tabs that appear at the top of my screen.

Continue Reading

It’s hard to know when I can trust myself when it comes to applauding new Apple announcements, but I had that same familiar excitability come over me when Steve Jobs unveiled new PowerMac G5 desktop computers at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference today. From the online images, these new machines look dead sexy — sleek, angular and forbiddingly cool. In a way, they remind me of the industrial design language that informed high-end stereo systems in the 1980s; I’ve also seen a few recent automobile dashboards modeled in this fashion. Maybe it’s time I broke out my stash of skinny ties.

Unexpectedly, the battle that’s truly at the heart of “The Hulk” is not the one that the titular green antihero fights with society at large, the massive arsenal of the U.S. Army or even the tortured depths of his own soul. Rather, it’s the battle between the moviemaking prowess of Ang Lee, who has been responsible for some of the most intricate and touching personal epics committed to film, and the cantankerous spirit of Stan Lee, controversially-proclaimed father of the famed stable of Marvel Comics super-heroes. What results is a movie that pits a grotesquely literal interpretation of the graphical storyteling of comic books against a psychologically complex exploration of human horror. It’s not an altogether disastrous experiment in opposing sensibilities, but it is ultimately, hugely, disappointing.

Continue Reading

Last Thursday, I dropped off my PowerBook G4 ( Titanium) at Tekserve for a little upgrade. Its original 30GB hard drive had been bursting at the seams for a while, and so I finally bit the bullet, forked over a few hundred dollars and had it replaced with a new, 80GB model. The always-helpful Tekserve technicians encased the old one in a portable FireWire drive so I can still access the data on it, and they gave me a fresh installation of Mac OS X Jaguar on the new one. So today I’m spending the day installing everything from scratch, from applications and utilities to fonts and all of my old documents.

Continue Reading

I’m feeling kind of time-pressured today, because I’m trying to leave the office early to go see “The Hulk,” which unfortunately got a pretty poor review in The New York Times today. This is a shame, because I had so many high hopes for Ang Lee’s foray into multimillion-dollar box office spectacles as a sign that the characters of popular mythology can actually be treated with truly artful hands. I don’t know why I do this to myself each time I head out to see a comic book made into a movie, because I tend to be let down. It’s just that I think these characters have so much potential for mature, literate dramaturgy that it’s a shame that Hollywood is not aiming to make true classics out of them, rather than just box office smashes.

“The Invisible Girl” is the title for my latest contribution to the Squat mix CD club. It’s not as late as its predecessor, but it wasn’t on time, either; I only shipped it today, two and a half weeks after the original deadline of 31 May. If I can offer any excuse, it’s that my packaging for this round was more complex — and expensive — than ever.

Continue Reading

In a weekly email question-and-answer column, NY Times advertising reporter Stuart Elliot addressed a reader’s question about this online ad for the “Parents: The Anti-Drug” campaign. The reader remarked on the fact that the ad was “designed to recall the display from the early Macintosh computers,” and wondered whether it was meant to be “lifeless enough to drive away teens, but familiar to the eyes of young parents like myself, who grew up with the Mac and its display quirks.”

Continue Reading

Five hundred posts is a milestone of some kind, right? At least it feels that way to me. When I launched version Six.5 of this site, there were only around 420 posts or so. That was just two months ago, and now I’m halfway to a thousand! I worried back in April that the new format and the writer-friendly Movable Type software would make it difficult for me to be able to keep posting to this site daily; together, the two changes practically demanded lengthier entries.

Continue Reading

This 600 megabyte video clip documenting the “Half-Life 2” demonstration at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo 2003 is ridiculous. What I mean is that it’s an embarrassment of technological riches. This video is ostensibly a preview of this much anticipated video game’s unconscionably advanced depiction of science fiction terror and violence, replete with gorgeously overwrought scene locations, nearly frightening use of artificial intelligence, and an absurdly detailed sense of a world in complete panic.

Continue Reading

In an email exchange with Naz of Absenter.org, I got to thinking about some of the limitations of the categories feature (Subtraction.com refers to them as ‘tags’) in Movable Type. While powerful, this feature doesn’t allow me to do one thing that would be very handy for me: I’d like to be able to string together a few arbitrarily chosen posts in a kind of ’series’ — almost like a regular category, but more limited in purpose.

Continue Reading

This Friday the Thirteenth turned out to be kind of a bad one for the Macintosh, as today Microsoft confirmed recent rumors that it is discontinuing that platform’s edition of Internet Explorer. This, coupled with the Redmond behemoth’s recent announcements that IE will no longer be a standalone product but will instead be entirely integrated into future versions of the Windows operating system, confirms that the Clinton-era Department of Justice was right to sue for monopoly abuse and that the Bush II-era DOJ was wrong to settle the suit so willingly. This is a decision that surely would never have been made in 1999. (Thanks Ralph Nader!)

With its 95 percent share of the internet browser market, Microsoft’s cancellation of IE amounts to a kind of condemnation of the Mac platform. It remains to be seen whether the strategy that Steve Jobs has pursued with Apple over the past few years — shooting for consumer dollars while half-ignoring the common wisdom that the Mac and Windows machines should be as interoperable as possible — will bear fruit through this unfortunate turn of events. Things don’t look so great, though I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Safari will continue to keep up with the ever-changing demands of the Web browser market.

My contribution to the CD mix club of which I am a member is tardy yet again. I had burned thirty copies of my mix and handed out a small number to some friends, and one of them pointed out to me that the tracks on the disc don’t match the tracks listed on the sleeve. Somehow the master CD I burned was missing a track. Since my packaging this time is somewhat complex and pricey, it was easier and cheaper for me to throw away thirty CDs and burn thirty new ones. Ouch. Anyway, the whole act of got me thinking about what I actually enjoy about being a member of a CD swap club.

Continue Reading

As part of an exercise in strategic planning at Behavior, I had to write down my thoughts on where I think the company will be in the future. This kind of thinking is tough, but it’s a useful way to try and reconcile vague aspirations with reality. I had to project out five years, and I set a goal for roughly twelve times the revenue we made in 2002, six times the staff, a broader client base and the luxurious market context of a second Internet boom. I think optimism is important.

Sometimes I write about politics or design or technology, but today I am going to write about clothes. I like suits. I like the way they serve as a kind of social uniform and armor, and the way they allude to a world “at a sort of moral attention for ever,” to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite writers. And yet, I have never owned a suit that I can say I’ve been one hundred percent happy with, and it’s that frustration that I’m afraid will be with me forever.

Continue Reading

Two anecdotes from my daily walk to the office: First, it was a beautiful morning to release a new Radiohead album; the skies were a calming, solid blue and the sun is finally, after weeks of miserable precipitation, pouring down clean, bright light again. There’s a Virgin Megastore at Union Square and as I walked past it I saw one satisfied consumer after another exiting its doors with a copy of “Hail to the Thief,” happily heading off into the springtime. I walked a little further into the park and I saw a young woman sitting on a bench beneath an old, old tree, already listening to the CD on her Discman and reading along with the lyrics intently.

Continue Reading

These days I’m getting my fill of the world of print design. We’re getting ready to send out a new marketing brochure at Behavior and I’m lending a hand to get the production files out to the printer. A lot of Web designers would like this change of pace, would like the opportunity to work on something tangible and based in atoms rather than dealing with the world of the Web, but not me.

Continue Reading

Knowing that I am a bit quick to cry foul over anything the Bush administration does, I have tried to reserve judgment on the current, somewhat desperate, so far unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the run-up to the recent war there was predicated on half-truths, falsehoods and specious intelligence; a decent overview of the situation as it stands this week is available at The Economist. Clearly, any WMD program that Saddam Hussein may have had in place does not live up to the tremendous advance billing given to it by the Bush administration. If weapons of mass destruction are indeed found in Iraq, I’m convinced it will be a discovery guided by serendipity rather than intelligence.

Continue Reading

It’s a relief to me that earlier this week Apple finally gave a presentation to independent music labels on the subject of getting their music into the iTunes Music Store. As these first-person notes on the meeting suggest, the company is serious about diversifying the content for sale via their breakthrough foray into music retailing. That’s great news, because as I mentioned when the store debuted, its offering of actually interesting music leaves much to be desired. If enough indie labels come aboard — and all signs indicate that they’re champing at the bit to do so — it will exponentially improve the value of the iMS, at least to my mind.

Sooner or later I’ll go see “Finding Nemo,” but the Pixar movie I’m really waiting for is “The Incredibles,” which is set to be released late next year; a terrific teaser trailer was released just this week and it had me laughing pretty riotously and getting pretty excited.

Continue Reading

The latest version of Apple’s iSync will synchronize bookmarks across multiple installations of Safari. So if you have a Macintosh at work and a Macintosh at home and you pay US$100 for Apple’s .Mac service, you can always have your bookmarks handy without even having to think about it. This new iSync feature is an attempt at solving a crucial problem with which I’ve been living for five years, but unfortunately it seems like a case of ‘close but no cigar.’

Continue Reading

I had one of those moments of consumer rage this morning, when I realized that it’s now virtually impossible to buy blank CD-Rs with nothing on the label side, meaning that if you want to buy some CD-Rs to back up your data or record some music, they will almost certainly feature branding from TDK, Memorex, Sony, Maxxel or some other company. You used to be able to find the kind of discs I’m looking for — you could call them generic CD-Rs — virtually anywhere, but after searching J & R, Circuit City, Best Buy, Staples, DataVision and even a few shady camera/electronics boutiques along Fifth Avenue, I came up with nothing. My guess is that the bigger CD-R manufacturers have shoved the smaller players from the store shelves, or there might be something going on with the RIAA here — maybe it’s easier to prevent the illegal copying of music CDs when the supply of generic CD-Rs is less plentiful? Who knows, but I’m tired of everything being branded when it simply isn’t necessary.

If, at anytime during the past year or so, you wrote an email to desk@subtraction.com or happened to make a typo while sending a message to my ‘real’ email account, or you just decided to make up an email address like, say, spam@subtraction.com and send me a note there, then you probably think I’m really kind of stuck up. See, I wouldn’t have replied to any of those emails, but the reason isn’t because I’m a self-centered bastard; rather it’s because, unbeknownst to me, those messages weren’t being forwarded to me as they should’ve been.

Continue Reading

Starship Dimensions is a phenomenal piece of work and a staggeringly detailed attempt to apply metrics to imagination. “This site is intended to allow science fiction fans to get an impression of the true scale of their favorite science fiction spacecraft by being able to compare ships accross genres, as well as being able to compare them with contemporary objects with which they are probably familiar.” It reminds me of a project I once had an idea to do: a unified timeline of science fiction histories, showing when the various post-20th century apocalypses happened and trying to show how the world of, say, “Logan’s Run” and “Star Trek” might all fit together. Don’t ask me why I would actually have an idea like that; I’m a geek.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell and his two Republican cohorts sent a powerful message today to companies that already control much of America’s television networks, newspapers, radio stations, and cable television systems: ‘No more will we coddle you in your duties in upholding the First Amendment. From now on, media companies had better grow up and learn how to promote the values of free speech and democracy all on your own.’ At first shocked by the sudden turn of events, the media companies are expected to rise to this great patriotic challenge by further consolidating the principle venues for broadcasting, publishing, communication and discourse. It’s a great day for this great country. Ugh.

For the better part of two years, I’ve been debating whether I should buy myself a TiVo, and as a kind of corollary to that, whether I should subscribe to digital cable television. The first question I always ask myself in trying to resolve this debate is: how much more time am I willing to devote to watching television? The closest I can come to answering that is, “I probably can’t devote much more time, but I’d probably find some way to devote lots more time.” Which begins to explain why I neither own a TiVo nor subscribe to digital cable.

Continue Reading