David Byrne now has an Internet radio station of what he’s currently listening to.

It’s my kind of stuff—and he has mixed in a bunch of world music that I hadn’t heard (from his label, presumably). His journal is also good—he’s a good writer.

Speaking of which, I just read half of “This Must Be The Place” — a
poorly written biography of Talking Heads by David Bowman. Don’t go near it. It’s a potboiler for sure, “unauthorized” because I can’t imagine that DB and the gang would waste trees on the silly old rumors and downright solipsism. It seems like he’s writing to an audience of obsessed rock-n-roll fanatics. I was looking for more insight into process, and group dynamics. Knowing what a process-head David is, I thought I’d get it. But this book doesn’t deliver on that.

The book that IS delivering for me right now, however, is Against The Odds by James Dyson, the excellent British inventor who made that lovely cyclone vacuum cleaner. It’s beautifully written and very inspiring. A real review is forthcoming.

Speaking of Dyson— they have come out with a new vacuum: “the ball.”
Very smart looking.

Under the iTunes model of digital music, a single song is the new album. It’s not much different from what they were doing with radio hits before, but nowadays a hit doesn’t have to have a whole album behind it. At this moment, half of the top ten selling songs on iTunes are singles. You could picture one day having a slow-release model: pay $10 now and we’ll send you a new Green Day song every month for the next year. After the year, the 12 songs are grouped together into an album. Green Day can spread the hype about their music across the whole year and gradually add new material to their set list to keep the show exciting. CDs never provided a convenient way to do this.

In 2002, New York-based photographer Zana Brinski started a class called Kids with Cameras to teach the children of Calcutta’s red light district how to photograph and what constitutes an engaging image. She sent the kids out into the streets with cameras. She taught them to edit with their hearts. She taught the joy of making art and the practice of focus in chaotic urban back-alleys. The result of her work is a series of beautiful photos made by the children, a documentary film (Born Into Brothels), and a chance at a boarding school education for a handful of kids who would otherwise have no choices.
The film itself alternates between profiles of each student and glimpses of their lives, slideshows of their work backed by tabla music, scenes from the classroom, and the story of Brinski’s struggle to find schools for the children. “I know about what my mom does for work,” says one of the girls at the brothel, “and I don’t want to do it.” With mothers beaten and murdered by pimps, fathers drugged up and useless, and bitter grandmothers blasting them with demands and insults, these children have learned 1,000 lessons of suffering by the age of twelve. But their eyes filled with the hopes and curiosities of childhood. With no real path in front of them, they don’t have feelings of entitlement or inflated expectations of what life has to offer. Their photographs show a stark freedom, and they are stunning because of the colorful world around the children, the comfort they have with their subjects, and their natural desire to work hard. The kids soak up everything they can learn from Brinski; they apply themselves fully. And their spirit of caring and kindness in an uncaring and unkind environment is totally refreshing.
In locating schools for the children, Brinski faces a struggle against time, social stigmas, and often the children’s families. At the cusp of adolescence, facing increased pressure from their parents to make money for the family, you get a sense that things are about to get a lot worse for these children: they’ll be out on the line in less than a year, or dealing drugs. Brinski searches for months before finding a school that will accept children of sex workers. Once she does, she must push through webs of red tape, dig up birth certificates and ration cards, drag everyone to the clinic for HIV tests, stand in the passport lines for eight hours. But as she battles Indian bureaucracy and discrimination for the children, she leverages her American connections to build a non-profit to support their education. She finds galleries in India and New York for their photography, she gets their work into a Sotheby’s auction, and she wins a scholarship for one of the most talented students.
The parents—many of whom desire an education for their children—struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis and have neither time nor contacts to devote to this task. So Brinski’s footwork is ultimately her biggest contribution to the kids’ lives. Of the eight children, three are now in boarding schools. But the success of Born Into Brothels puts Brinski’s organization on the map. She now has the means to help more children. The Kids With Cameras School of Leadership and the Arts is scheduled to open its doors in Calcutta’s red light district next fall.

(found in a Denver library book by Karl’s grandfather)

I just got my Annual Appeal letter from the Boston Athenaeum, the private library that Karl and Freddie gave me a membership to on my last birthday. The Annual Appeal is the library’s drive to make $525,000 in additional funding beyond the standard $100 (if you’re under 40) or $250 yearly membership fee revenue. I don’t doubt the library will need the extra money: they occupy some of the best real estate in Boston, right next to the State House; they buy books, they buy paintings, they host all sorts of programs and research; they are constantly working to restore and preserve their aging building and its collection of half a million books.

The Athenaeum is nearly 200 years old. It holds a place as a unique American literary resource, a national historic building, and a cultural-intellectual institution. Yet the Athenaeum always feels underutilized to me—I never see anyone under 75 in the place, and the 75-year-olds are few and far between. I often spend an afternoon in the library and see only a couple staff members. An enormous reading room with a pristinely restored vaulted ceiling lies empty most of the day. Dozens of early American bronze sculptures lounge around feeling underappreciated. Beautiful antique study carrels and leather chairs remain unoccupied. Stepping into the library from the busy downtown street, I feel like I’ve entered a cathedral on off-hours. There’s a deafening quietude; it’s a social anti-node, and I’m compelled to tiptoe even though no one is around.

I think the Athenaeum is kept clean, quiet, and unoccupied on purpose. I think its life as an institution parallels the lives of its geriatric membership. They are birds of a feather, both nurturing an obsessive desire to freeze time that I’ll only fully understand half a century from now, if I’m still around.

Maybe it’s just the timing of my visits. I go during the day on Thursdays and Fridays, when most people under 75 are at work, and anyone not working is also not wandering private libraries. I’ll have to visit on the weekend sometime.

Anyway, I received a donation letter from them yesterday. It was a normal appeal for money, like all the rest that come in weekly from non-profits. But toward the end there was a bit that brought up the now-familiar penurious feeling I get in my stomach when I walk into the library:

“I am happy to report that, as of today, we have received $400,000. … I hope that you will join the more than 600 donors who have already made a commitment …”

Six hundred people donated $400,000, so the average donation for these 600 people was $667. Compare this with the NPR crowd, another group with an above-average income, where the average donation is around $60.

Given this bit of information, and the feeling I already get from the place, I can see why more people in my tax bracket aren’t members. There are cultural pressures at work here. The upper-class intellectuals of Boston have this place swen up tight. The library is an excellent resource for me, at $8 a month, but the membership presents a personal challenge: am I prepared to be at the short end of intergenerational chatter with upper-class socialites looking for a place to hang out and quirky bookworms doing literary research?

Yes! Ultimately, this is too good of a resource to not be involved with. The people are friendly. The funding is plentiful. So I think it’s time I got more involved before my membership runs out. Karl and I are going to the annual April Fools reception for the members under 40. If there are more than a dozen people, I’ll have to revise my perspective.

I’m fascinated by the working style of successful teams and individuals, specifically in the creative realm. I think that’s what’s been drawing me to diaries and biographies lately. I’m not expecting to find some key to unlocking creativity, but I have been collecting guidelines that I can cling to in the limitless expanse. One of the guidelines is the Buddhist principle about learning to let go, so I should probably throw my whole list into the river right now. But let me indulge myself for a moment instead. The problem is, I’m sick of feeling both overbooked and underlimited, so I’m looking for ways to either accomplish more with less, or more with the same, or simply less. Less means stabbing my ambition and letting it bleed a little, and I’m not ready to stick the knife in yet.

So I’m stuck hunting for design principles and working styles that can help me make sense of my work. I’m attracted to them because they’re about understanding the medium—any medium. They are solely about process, but they are not Life’s Little Instruction Book entries about having a solid handshake. So in a way they are constrained: they contain no subject and no emotion, no social etiquette. They’re not supposed to make you happy in life; they’re simply there to boost creatively productivity. They aren’t too general; they’re just general enough to be useful. We all find inspiration but apply it differently.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is about split-second decision making. Specifically, it’s about having loads of experience to draw from when making split-second decisions. It’s a roller-coaster ride—a fast read that hurls armchairs of psychology at you that are surprising enough to make you want to stand up and tell someone what you just read. Gladwell takes us through food tasting labs and military exercises and murder cases and lie detectors and improv comedy and numerous psych experiments that bring up a variety of questions about the workings of the subconscious. He shows us marriage councilors and car salesmen and art collectors whose success is based on the ability to make split-second decisions, or decisions about a split-second in time, by distilling their lifetime of experience quickly.

Gladwell also shows us places where quick judgments go wrong: novice cops, unable to handle their first high-pressure encounter smoothly, or politicians and businessmen who rise to power on dignified looks and stature alone, fooling everyone along the way. He shows us an ER where a finely-tuned and thoroughly researched decision tree, posted on the wall, replaces doctors’ judgment calls and improves the success rate in isolating heart attacks among patients with chest pain—traditionally very difficult to predict because it draws upon dozens of medical and emotional indicators.

There are many tangents on Gladwell’s path. The book feels like a series of New Yorker articles. But I like that about it—my easily distracted mind was fully engaged. My favorite chapter covers the Facial Action Coding System, an encyclopedia of facial expressions, photographed and numbered, by psychologists Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins. The FACS provides a vocabulary for the most common facial expressions, and once you have enough experience with it, you can improve your interpretation of facial expressions. Gladwell is quick to point out that we already interpret facial expressions continuously, subconsciously, but that we’re not always able to tap into our interpretation directly, so our detection of someone lying, for example, might bubble up to the conscious brain in the form of a vague feeling of discomfort or fear. Ekman and Tomkins can see things more clearly, though, because they’ve built a vocabulary and spent years studying and making faces.

That’s the real point here: The best art historians may be able to spot a fake from across the room, the best cops can quickly and accurately size up a tough situation, and the best food tasters can taste the difference between Oreo cookies that came from two different batches, but none of this is possible without vast experience placed in a well-developed context. So don’t expect to start mind-reading tomorrow.

This is Gladwell’s second book after The Tipping Point, and while I don’t think it’s quite as powerful in its conclusions, it’s still a lot of fun.

The glorified chat software that we once attempted to use on an outsorced software project eventually became the “Virtual Office” that appears to be a P2P e-mail/discussion/file sharing/IM/project management suite. I like this as a VPN-less solution…it looked interesting until it got swallowed up by Microsoft today.

What do you think Microsoft is up to, with all their acquisitions of disparate technology companies?

The Winslow Green Growth Fund stood out to me in a New York Times mutual fund round-up from early this year. This fund was among the best performing mutual funds of 2004 and it invests only in environmentally friendly companies.

The minimum initial investment is $5,000, and you can set up monthly or bimonthly automatic investments of >= $100 after that. I’d like to set this kind of thing up while I’m young and am not locked into long-term investments in environmentally unfriendly corporations.

Now, where did I put that $5,000?

PS. On the subject of evironmentally friendly companies, I noticed that Nike considered improving their corporate image this year. What I love is how this is a special product with a special website targeted toward a special audience, not a wider business practice for Nike.

Grandma brings out the tea tray and sets it down on the table. “So where do you live now?” she asks again. “Cambridge,” I say. “Oh, my! I grew up in Newton, you know,” she says. Again she describes her daily commute from West Newton to Cambridge, and how a nice Harvard Law student gave her and another girl a ride in his car each school day in exchange for gas money. Her voice is very musical, so I start listening to the notes and the rhythm of her speech this time. Again she tells me how she found it so amusing that her “great big Harvard professor” had to walk all the way from Harvard Yard, in all kinds of weather, to teach her and the three other Music majors in Radcliffe College’s class of 1936.

This is the routine that she and I have. She lives behind my parents’ house now, and when I’m in Nashville I have tea with her two or three times, so we can go over the routine again. Her stories are a key to her longevity. She always tells them with the same exuberant sincerity. Sometimes I try refining my role a bit, but the conversation doesn’t change much.

She pauses for a moment and takes a sip of tea. I look up at her painting of Cambridge in the mid 1800s, the one that used to hang over the fireplace when she lived in Westport. The Cambridge Common and the First Parish are the only things I recognize in the painting. She asks again, “Tell me, do they still have cobblestone streets in Harvard Square?” “Yes, a few streets still do,” I say, and I leave it at that. She smiles. I’m not compelled to give her many details about my Cambridge, and I can tell she’d rather not have hers tarnished.

So she continues her questioning, in the usual order. “What are you doing up there in Boston?” This is always the most difficult one for me, so I stop to take a sip. It’s not that I don’t think she’d understand what I do—I could tell her anything and she’d be happy with my response. Her question is simple and straightforward—so much so that it throws me off. For a moment I see myself through her eyes, and it turns my whole life into questions. “Yes, what the hell am I doing?” I think. Am I still just as unfocused as I was last time we had tea together? I say something to move the conversation along. It’s an empty response, and she’s happy with it.

But I can’t get the question out of my head. We finish our tea and start cleaning up. Next time I see her, I think, I’ll have a real answer. Maybe I’ll write her a letter once I’ve untangled more of my life. I want my answer to be as simple and straightforward as her question.

A couple weeks after I wrote this, I got a letter from grandma, in which she recounted exactly the same stories about Cambridge and her time at Radcliffe.

I wonder what stories I’ll have on repeat when I’m 90 years old?