Art, Innovation, and America

Let’s go in reverse!

AMERICA

I experienced a great American moment at a mid-town Subway Sandwiches shop this week. I was behind a tall twentysomething, waiting to put in my order. I heard him say in a thick British accent, “I want gherkins and jalapenos (pronounced as spelled) with that.” I looked up at the Subway employee, who must have been Southeast Asian. We exchanged knowing glances and half-smiles without a word, because we both understood what this man was saying.  If the Subway worker and myself were walking on the street, people would likely perceive us as foreign. But here was this tall white fellow who might pass more easily as American, acting foreign. I just loved that the man behind the counter understood the Brit. An unspoken understanding, couched in our Americanness.

INNOVATION

Because of the gloom in journalism these days, people are hungry for innovation and just plain optimism. So when GlobalPost, a Boston-based international news website that launched in January, visited on Monday, it was mobbed. The site has over 60 foreign correspondents delivering on-the-ground reports from around the world, and has three revenue streams. They emphasized that they did their business homework while also committing to quality content. Interestingly, in addition to a moderate stipend, it gives every freelance reporter 10,000 shares in its company- giving a) a huge incentive for reporters to do a good job to build the brand and b) a literal and figurative investment for reporters, instantly erasing the traditional lines of business/editorial. We’ll see how that works out, but it was exciting!

Also, the BusinessWeek editor-in-chief came to speak to us today. He was surprisingly laid-back, funny, and congenial (I guess I thought that a business editor would be strait-laced and stern). When asked how he felt about BW’s coverage of the financial meltdown, he said they did an excellent job and that the media had been writing about warning signs for a long time, but no one listened. Sigh, prophets will always get a bad rap I guess. Jeremiah, Samuel, BusinessWeek.

ART

While I said in my last entry that I appreciate useful beauty, today I enjoyed art for art’s sake. I read in the New York Times about a new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum on Gustave Caillebotte, an Impressionist painter. For those of you who know me, I can be a bit of a contrarian at times, so I thought, “Go see an Impressionist exhibit? Everyone and their mom loves Impressionism. What’s next, Thomas Kincaide?” But the review intrigued me. Turns out Caillebotte is definitely up my alley. As one of the least-known of Impressionists, he painted many scenes of water and rivers (which I’m a fan of), and was also a Ben Franklin of sorts: trained as a lawyer, he also was a soldier, engineer, boat-designer, and rower. It’s always encouraging to know that pursuing all your interests can be so fruitful.  Here are some of my favorites:

Useful Beauty

Beautiful utility, related to good design, is one of my favorite things about human ingenuity.  While I appreciate art for art’s sake, and utility for utility’s sake, when they come together, wow. Perhaps that’s why I loiter longer in museum shops than in the galleries themselves. Elegance is put to use! There’s something brilliant about bringing together the best of practical and aesthetic worlds. Other examples include certain architecture, cars (the Acura TSX is a beaut), personal electronics (Apple, duh- you reading this Dad?), information graphics, and less obviously, quality journalism and nonfiction, which fulfills the utility of facts using the art of writing, cohered by good grammatical and dictional design.

I tend to skim a lot (bad habit from college), so it’s easy to miss such gems. However, when I find very compelling pieces of writing, I slow down and change thought lanes. I read these phrases over and over, with a mental highlighter going over each word, as if the eloquence or cleverness will magically transmit itself into my brain if I just stare at the words long enough. Until I came to journalism school, I didn’t fully understand how much effort, time, and sheer talent it took to produce sentences such as these. Writers meld facts (often arcane) with a turn of phrase that instantly illuminates, inspires, or informs. The best do all three. Here are some cases in point from this week’s New York Times Magazine. Emphases in italics are mine.

On bailing out GM v. financial institutions from this article, by Matt Bai.

“Of all the various forms of corporate subsidy that the American taxpayer is now being asked to shoulder (bailouts for swaggering investment bankers and in­surers, lifelines for overextended homeowners and the mortgage lenders who took advantage of them), perhaps none evoke such complicated emotions in Washington as the comparatively modest plea of General Motors. This is not simply because of its size, but also because GM is bound up with our collective identity, both national and personal. No congressman looks back wistfully at the first batch of securitized mortgages he bought with his hard-earned savings during his teenage years or to losing his virginity in the back of his father’s trading floor.”

On a scientist who is also a global warming skeptic (Freeman Dyson) from this article, by Nicholas Dawidoff:

Ex.1: “Science is not a matter of opinion; it is a question of data. Climate change is an issue for which Dyson is asking for more evidence, and leading climate scientists are replying by saying if we wait for sufficient proof to satisfy you, it may be too late. That is the position of a more moderate expert on climate change, William Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, who says, “I don’t think it’s time to panic,” but contends that, because of global warming, “more sea-level rise is inevitable and will displace millions; melting high-altitude glaciers will threaten the food supplies for perhaps a billion or more; and ocean acidification could undermine the food supply of another billion or so.” Dyson strongly disagrees with each of these points, and there follows, as you move back and forth between the two positions, claims and counterclaims, a dense thicket of mitigating scientific indicators that all have the timbre of truth and the ring of potential plausibility.”

Ex. 2: “On cold days he wears a second vest, one right over the other, and the effect is like a window with two sets of curtains. His smile is the real window, a delighted beam that appears to float free from his face, strangely dynamic with its electric ears and quantum nose, and his laugh is so hearty it shakes him. The smile and laughter have the effect of softening Dyson’s formality, transforming him into a sage and friendly elf, and also reminding those he talks with that he has spent a lifetime immersed in efforts to find what he considers humane solutions to dire problems, whose controversial gloss never seems to agitate him. His eyes are murky gray, and whatever he’s thinking beyond what he says, the eyes never betray.”

How to Make Your Customers Linger

Music matters. After visiting a fair amount of “cheap” eats in NYC this year, I’ve noticed how music greatly affects ambience.

When you’re hungry, only the food matters. But then you settle down and let your belly do its thing and then you notice the music. Sometimes it clashes with the ambience. Other times, it heightens the classiness. And sometimes, it just keeps bringing back memories and makes you want to linger.

Today, I was at a burger joint and they ran through early-2000s pop/rap/R&B hits that kept making me stop my conversation and make a remark about a song. Like when they played 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” and I remembered how my friends and I had tried to dance to this song at a college semi-formal. “In Da Club” is a hot song but is surprisingly slow. The entire dance floor had erupted in cheers when we started hearing “Go shorty, it’s your birthday…” since it had just been released on the radio. We excitedly proceeded to try dancing to it… but then we devolved into merely bobbing our heads and waving a hand in the air like we really did care for the rest of the song. It seemed ironic that a song about a club wasn’t very danceable. Then it ended and all the dance battles and solo circles (you know, where people break or show off their moves and a huge circle gathers) began again. I wish there was a better way to dance to “In Da Club.” Seems like a pity to just stand there and look like an MC’s zombie army. Would 50 Cent want that?

Anyway. Yummy fries, yummy memories.

A few other examples:

- A fairly bare-bones cafe plays French jazz and instantly becomes classy and/or romantic.

- A diner plays classical music and becomes… weird.

- An Indian place plays hyper-Bhangra which adds to the authenticity but also makes you want to eat your chicken masala really fast, which is a really bad idea.

- A classy bar plays extremely repetitive trance (is that redundant?) and becomes annoying yet hypnotic and lowers its age demographic by a couple years. Oh, and said trance music means you can’t hear anything other people are saying. Why?? How does one socialize when the music prohibits any sort of verbal communication?

- A fab tofu house plays 80s and 90s music and makes you want to stay forever and/or sing along if spitting tofu bits out was socially acceptable. My friends and I had finished our meal but kept not leaving because of the awesome songs that kept coming.  “Just one more… just one more.” Really now, can you leave if they start playing “I Want it That Way”??

Buttercream Beauty

Spotted this today in Brooklyn.  Yes, her entire skirt is made out of buttercream. Beauty is going to make Beast very happy and some kid very sick.

Wall Street Journal, the Fed

My business reporting seminar took a field trip to the Wall Street Journal and Federal Reserve Bank of New York today.

For some reason I imagined the WSJ offices to be glamorous or ritzy. Maybe dollar-bill wallpaper, velvet-lined curtains, and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand marble busts. Nope…it looked just like any other office. Maybe it’s because the NYT has such a crazy modern orange-and-white thing going on in their new building and invites an inevitable comparison. But the NYT also just refinanced their mortgage. After lunch with WSJ editors, a bunch of suited, taller-than-usual group of men loitered by the elevators. Apparently the president of the Czech Republic just stepped into one.

More fun was the Fed! They took us to the gold vault, some 80 feet below street level and 30 feet below the subway. There’s about $190 billion of gold down there from all over the world, and we saw those shimmering bricks from behind bars. I used to think $190 billion was  a lot, but that really only finances about 1/4 of the most recent bailout! Each 27 lb. brick is about $400,000 at market value. Smuggle one out, sell it, and you’ve got one year’s CEO salary.

Except it’s probably easier to become a CEO than to smuggle out a gold brick. It seriously was like Ocean’s 11 redux. 90-ton rotating steel cylinder, steel rods, and security cameras everywhere. Plus,  most members of their special police force guarding the vault are expert marksmen. The building has its own firing range. Good place to recruit snipers.

We also received a powerpoint lecture about what the Fed is, how it shapes monetary policy, the board of governors, etc. etc.  It was interesting until free lunch food coma kicked in and I think half of our class mentally nodded off…

The only thing I really remember about the gold standard is from AP US History, something about that famous Cross of Gold speech from William Jennings Bryan. It made negligible sense to me back then. But the tour guide reminded us that we’ve been off the gold standard for awhile, meaning that the American dollar is backed only by faith and trust in the U.S. government.

I find this mind-blowing. Essentially, the cash we have in our wallets only has value because everyone believes it has value. This isn’t profound, but still amazing to me. Even things like gold only have value because we assign it value. It always confounds me on a philosophical level how the stock market runs, how people can trade these completely intangible things and actually make a living on them. I also can’t get over the fact that our entire financial system somehow relies on vagueities like faith and trust in banks, companies, etc., and the market is driven by emotions like fear and excitement. Trust. Faith. Emotions. Hunches. Really?

It’s both awe-inspiring and kind of scary how primitive yet highly complicated this whole thing is. 

Does this mean that if we spammed the entire world and somehow convinced them the dollar isn’t worth their trust, then suddenly all those Benjamins would just be unimportant confetti?

Speaking of confetti, when we left, we got souvenirs of shredded cash (old dollar bills). I’m surprised they haven’t featured this stuff in any 50 Cent music videos yet. Unfortunately, they didn’t give us gold samples.

We passed by the NYSE on the way back. I have no idea why the Brazilian flag is up there, but I was pleased to help it out in balancing out the overwhelming Americanness.

Speaking of Foxes…

My parents sent me pictures from our backyard yesterday. How appropriate!

Firefoxy Lady, Pulitzers

A pretty amazing woman came to speak today at the J-School. Mitchell Baker, “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla gave a very informative Q & A session.  While it only occasionally dipped into over-my-head tech speak (phishing, user interface) and business speak (distribution channels, data exchange), this is what I took away:

1. That the objective doesn’t always have to be innovation. I was sort of shocked to hear that Mozilla prioritizes what it’s best at- browsers- over any new product development. With all the media coverage of Google and its constant boundary pushing  and whiz-bang new products, this stance seemed rather conservative. Conservative and yet risky.

2. Mozilla, or at least Ms. Baker, has a giant chip on their shoulder about Microsoft. I had no idea Bill Gates and crew had such a stranglehold on the browser market. But then I realized that I never knew anything but IE Explorer pre-Macintosh.

3. I completely take for granted simple tools such as browsers, which take legions of people to code and structure and test out. Before last week, I never gave any thought to my browser, or really any software on my computer unless it confused me.

4. I’m in the Macintosh minority of Firefox users. Firefox only has 25-30 % market share of Mac users. I guess everyone else uses Safari, and my dad keeps pushing me to get on it, but it’s so hard to change my ways.

5.  Ms. Baker is just one cool chick. Not only does her haircut look like Firefox logo (see below), but she also wears blue nail polish, eats naan, is a trapeze artist and speaks Mandarin.  She embodies the Berkeley woman. Rockin’.

Also today, students met with Pulitzer Prize panelists who are here to judge entries. Some of us went out to dinner with the editorial writer of one of Hawaii’s biggest papers. The only bummer was getting a fortune cookie without a fortune. That can’t be good. Or maybe I’ll just have to write my own.

Spec-tech-ular

There’s this website tool called Help A Reporter Out, in which reporters just fill in a simple form about their story, it gets blasted to the inboxes of 35,000 people, and then you get responses back without ever having to pick up the phone. It was started by some social media guru. I tested it out for my article on cyberlawyers, and received some 20+ replies from lawyers all over the country (including the lead lawyer for the iFart lawsuit. Lovely). I get sources and quotes for my article, they get free publicity (or so they think, since Columbia isn’t a news organization). A win-win situation!

No song-and-dance-will-he-she-return-my-email-or-call. No awkward, unsure conversations.  No digging for personal information through thinly disguised questions. No spokespeople or unhelpful middlemen, however well-intentioned. No misunderstanding of what both people are looking for.

Hm. I’m talking about reporting, by the way.

In other tech news, I decided to get on Twitter. I finally caved not because the j-school pushes it as essential for media people, or because one of our deans promotes it incessantly. Nope, it’s because I’ve become obsessed with Shaq’s tweets, for their sheer absurdity and comic value. I don’t watch his games, I don’t watch his movies (heavens, should any of us?) but I will follow his twittering religiously. Thank you Shaq for pushing me into the latest tech fad.

Seriously, how can you not love a guy who tweets:  “Just got a fresh cut for da game, dam I’m sugly, dats sexy and ugly mixed in one” ?

A Journalism Day: Magazines, Software, “Koreans”

Gosh. I should blog more, if only because I’ll forget things if I don’t. There was this great quote from a book review:

Life, from day to day, seems hardly to alter, yet it shifts beyond recognition over the years. -Walter Kirn

In that spirit…

This morning one of the managing editors of Time magazine came to speak to our class. Time is such a beloved magazine; my family has been subscribing to it since I was in elementary school. I remember reading them thoroughly and highlighting words I didn’t know and then looking them up later, getting yelled at for not putting it down during lunch or when I was supposed to be doing homework. So you can imagine my dismay when they redesigned in 2006- I noticed that every table of contents or cover featured a photo of some celeb, and a decrease in overall word count was accompanied by an increase in random graphics (like a pop culture meter). It felt dumbed down. I almost wanted to unsubscribe.

The editor said at one point he welcomed criticism, so I figured why not. I asked if the popularity of US Weekly and InTouch etc. contributed at all to the redesign. He said that the editor-in-chief never even mentioned those magazines or probably didn’t even read or think about them during the redesign and it was a coincidence that they moved the celeb page up to the front. Hmm… My BS detector was on the fence about this one. Hmm.

He also said he never reads Newsweek, their closest competitor. Which I thought was odd. Don’t you want to know what your competitor is doing?

In the afternoon, 2 hours were spent interviewing a law student about the Internet for my article on ” the next generation of  cyberlawyers” (sounds cool, don’t it?). Who knew open source software policies were so fascinating?  Essentially, he said, the law is about ownership and power, so lawyers have a hard time wrapping their minds around giving away software for free. This is why this area of law is so challenging, and also so fun, he said. At stake is the future of knowledge. Talk about lofty!

In the evening, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine gave a lecture. It was fabulous; she described how she got her job as a food critic at the NYT and LA Times (luck + pluck), and how kids should eat healthier (by unsubsidizing certain agricultural industries, ie corn.). But…

We were all given free copies of this month’s magazine. A huge spread was devoted to Korean food but the set pieces were basically Chinese- Chinese characters, red lanterns. As usual, the recipes were Americanized (apple pickles, mandarin orange ice cream??).  Sigh… pages and pages of yummy but not authentically Korean food pretending to be consumed by yummy-looking Asian but not Korean people.  The editor said that she received tons of angry letters and she apologized. They also removed it from the website.

A little confusing.. 1. What is it with the Asian as the exotic “other”? Is America ever going to get past this? Is this why people like Britney get tattoos with Asian characters that they don’t even know are wrong? (Maybe I learned that tidbit from Time? Hah.)  2. How can a mag with 2 Asian people on its staff produce something this wrong? 3. Koreans, Japanese, yah, we’re all homies, but we’re not all the same, right? Besides that our food is awesome.

Nonetheless, afterwards I went and bought some Korean pancakes for dinner. Haha. Yum.

Lifting Up, Shutting Down

It’s a powerful thing for someone to believe in you. It can be crippling when someone doesn’t. That’s what I’ve been learning and re-learning through reporting my master’s on black students in Ivy League schools. In some cases, a teacher or a relative introduced the idea of an Ivy League U to a student, and then all of a sudden it became a possibility. In other cases, it seems like some high school kids just didn’t strive for elite schools because they’d been told time and again that they or their “type of people” aren’t good enough, aren’t smart enough, aren’t motivated enough.  The unfulfilled potential of students in this country seemingly can’t be tied so easily to just spending-per-student, small classroom sizes, or standardized tests. A culture of good role models, or just of people who will believe in a young mind, can do much more than perhaps anybody can imagine.

It makes me sad and incredulous when I hear anecdotes about not being considered “good enough” to even apply to a certain school.

Sad because:

1) Given the disparities of education between say, the urban poor and suburban elite, there are probably plenty of really smart or creative young minds who just don’t have the environment or the role models to reach further.

2) I forget sometimes that the Chinese (not going to generalize to all Asians), immigrant mentality of sacrifice, hard work, determination,  are so embedded in our cultural DNA that striving for the best education is almost a cliche. I remember during high school a bunch of my Chinese friends applied to Harvard “just for fun” even though they didn’t have the grades. What a Chinese-American thing to do! I’ve commented before about how the obsession with name-brand educations can be a curse, but it’s also an amazing blessing… in the sense that we are not as confined to the shackles of society’s expectations. (Maybe we’ve just traded them for those of our parents. Half kidding).

I suppose this is all rather obvious to observers of American education. What does it feel like for society not to believe in you? Or for nobody to believe in you?

The only very slight equivalent I can think of in my personal experience was this academic year, when I went to talk to a career counselor.

During the session, I mentioned that I might be interested in working as a press person for government officials.

“Oh yes, I’m sure any Asian-American politician would love to have you,” she said.

I felt like I had been kicked in the shins.

Recounting it hits a bit of a sore spot still. But despite the anger I felt at the moment, it’s not a big deal for all, practically speaking, since it’s SCORE: 1- Career Lady , 2390834837- Asian Parents. Yet I wonder if this is but the tiniest inkling of what it might be for some black Americans in this country, who are stereotyped, or told by the media or their teachers, implicitly or explicitly, that they can’t accomplish what white people accomplish. Or to only be able to be a sports star or a singer/rapper. Or worse… to be in jail or something like that. Obama might change a lot of this. Obviously, I don’t know what it’s like being black, or from a poor area, etc. I just know that hearing something like this made me mad, but barely dented my armor. There’s talk in the certain Asian communities about the burden of expectations. But what would it be like to have nothing expected of you, over and over again, until you believed it?

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