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The Greening Of My Thumb

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am a gardener, but ever since we moved to our house in Brooklyn, I have technically been a person who owns a garden, who enjoys hanging out in his garden, and who has spent a little bit of money paying people to come plant things in said garden. But my dad and grandfather are/were ardent gardeners, and I can feel something of it awakening in me (assuming I can get over my bee phobia.) This spring I've ventured out to the back yard every day to inspect the latest developments: the hydrangea buds starting to appear, the wisteria blooms drooping, the ants doing their strange rituals on the peonies. This time of year, every day brings a small change to something in the garden; it's marvelous to watch these algorithms play themselves out with such regularity and precision.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I devoured this week's special issue on Landscape Architecture in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. If you missed it -- and have any interest in this stuff -- be sure to check it out online, though there are some wonderful pictures that might be better on the page. The two highlights for me were 1) a typically brilliant and intimate piece by Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, one of my all-time faves) on his experiences as a transplanted New England gardener trying to grow things in his new Berkeley garden, and 2) a new essay by Jane Jacobs -- as vital as ever, in her mid 80s I believe -- on "The Greening of the City".

Toy Story

Any budding entrepreneurs out there waiting to create the next toy empire? I have the plan for you.

As some of you know, I am the father of two little boys: a two-and-a-half-year-old, and a ten-month-old. Over the past few months, we've been plagued by the younger boy, Rowan, going through the exact same phase that his older brother did at a comparable point: he is obsessed with grownup objects that look vaguely like they might be some kind of toy but emphatically are not. Cell phones, landline phones, remote controls, electric fans, PDAs humidifiers, lamps, anything at all with an electric cord attached to it. The more dangerous, the better. If we had a suitcase nuke hanging around in our living room, I'm sure he'd be in to that as well.

Now, if you've ever spent any time in a modern toy store, you know that the shelves are amply stocked with kiddie versions of most of these things: baby's first cell phone, little plastic lanterns, oversized remote control-like gadgets, day-glo keyboards. We have purchased most of these items, and they sit around our parlor floor and the boys' room like dejected orphans. Rowan has no interest in them whatsoever. I know that this is all about our prohibition: he wants to chew on the humidifier cord because 1) cords are delicious (duh!), but just as importantly because 2) we scream and race across the room every time he goes for it. But the problem here is that he's clearly picked up a general pattern here, one that defines the category of toy objects itself: the shiny, colorful, plasticky things are the things that mom and dad want me to play with, while all the black and beige things with cords are The Forbidden.

So here's my proposal: a line of toddler toys that are totally indistinguishable from Actual Consumer Electronics, save one key attribute: they are incapable of killing or maiming little children. Where appropriate, they sport fake electric cords, perhaps even with fake sockets you can suction-cup to the wall. There are no fluorescent dinosaurs on them, no Disney characters. Everything looks from a few feet away like it's right out of the Sharper Image catalog.

I think there's a quick million to be made here. Any takers?

The Swingers Club

Normally when I post here to point you to a new article of mine, I like to say a few things about the subject matter of the piece, or a little back story about how I came to write it. But for once, I'd like to concentrate on the art direction of an essay, not the actual words themselves. If you happen to have a copy of the latest Wired (the one with Peter Jackson on the cover) turn to page 118 and prepare to have a good laugh at my expense. I'd written a fun piece for them about how accurate golf simulations have become -- basically you can improve your real-world golf game by playing virtual golf on your Xbox. As the piece was working its way through copy-edit, I got a call from their art department saying that they wanted to do a photo shoot for the piece with me as the lead subject. My brain was immediately filled with glamour shots of me wearing my best noted-cultural-critic look of intense rumination, glamour shots of me mulling the blurred line between the real and the virtual. All of my essays should have photos of me accompanying them, I thought. How appropriate that Wired -- with its legendary ahead-of-the-curve design sensibility -- should be the first to realize this.

And then I showed up for the photo shoot, and was greeted by a pair of yellow pants, a green jacket, an argyle sweater, and a hat that hasn't been worn without irony anywhere in the civilized world for nearly thirty years. You can get a sense of the picture from this smaller image here, but I assure you the full-size version alone is worth the cover price of Wired. My friend Rael described it best: I look like a demented leprechaun.

My Love Affair With The Genius Bar

Part of being a great consumer technology company is not screwing up the products you sell people. But sometimes the measure of a great company lies in how it deals with the inevitable screw-ups that do occur. On Friday night -- after a day of waiting, literally, at the window for the Airborne Express guy to come -- my Winter Solstice present to myself finally showed up: a new dual processor PowerMac G5. I spend an hour in that blissful, unpacking-my-new-computer mode: plugging everything in, inspecting the design, launching a few built-in apps to marvel at the speed. And then I go to insert a CD to start installing applications, and -- clunk! -- the optical drive won't open. After a little inspection, I determine that it's been installed just a fraction of an inch too high, and so the CD tray is banging into the case when it tries to open.

My mood darkens.

Then I open up the case, and it's clear that the drive has been mounted at a slight angle, causing the front of it to be higher than the opening. But for the life of me I can't pull the thing out to re-mount it. I try wiggling it around for about half an hour to no avail. (An annoying process: wiggle drive, close up box, restart computer, then press eject. Then shut down computer, pull out power, open up box, wiggle drive, etc.) With each failed wiggle, I can see the next week unfold with increasing clarity: I have to wait until Monday to send the box back to Apple, and if I'm lucky, a repaired machine comes back four or five days later. It's an infuriating thought, because I know this is a problem that a technician could probably fix in five minutes, and now I'm going to lose an entire week with my beautiful new machine.

But as it turns out, when I finally call Apple the next day, they say: "Just take it down to the nearest Apple store and they should be able to fix it right there." So I hope into a cab with my 40-pound machine propped up on the seat next to me, and head into the Soho Apple store, and then lug the box up to the Genius Bar. Sure enough, they whisk it away for all of seven minutes, and come back with the drive reinstalled perfectly. No charge, no paperwork, no wait. The trickiest thing about the whole operation was trying to hail a cab in the middle of Soho on a Saturday afternoon with a $2,000 computer in one hand.

Since then everything has been fine. Not just fine, actually -- blazingly fast. With all this horsepower on my desk, I should easily be able to post to the blog twice a week from now on. Maybe even three times.

Here Comes The Sun

I meant to post a note about this last week, but it was too busy with all the pre-holiday family insanity. But here it is, a few days late:

HAPPY SOLSTICE!

I like the holiday season as much as the next guy, for purely sentimental reasons, and having a two-year-old boy certainly makes everything seem a little more magical than it has since I was a kid myself. But the real landmark for me this time of year is the Winter Solstice. Not for new agey reasons, of course -- just because it's a guarantee that, no matter how brutal the rest of the winter turns out to be, there's going to be a little more sunlight with each passing day. I've often thought that the only thing that keeps Northeast winters from being intolerably brutal is the fact that the shortest day of the year comes at the very beginning. If it kept getting darker all the way until February, I think I'd move to Los Angeles. So do your pagan dances or pray to the sun god or whatever else you want to do -- it's only going to be brighter from here on out!

Remembering Edward Said

My old mentor Edward Said died late last night, apparently from pancreatic cancer, though he had suffered from a rare form of leukemia for more than a decade. I worked with Said during my graduate school days at Columbia's English department in the early nineties. By some strange coincidence, I intersected with him on a few crucial early days of his illness: he taught a seminar on Great Expectations the day he was originally diagnosed, and he started his initial chemotherapy treatment a few hours before my Orals. Whenever I heard word about his health -- I probably haven't spoken with him for five years at least -- I'd think of those two days, and his amazing willingness to show up on the job on what must have been a miserable day.

Like many people, I'm sure, I was deeply influenced by Said's work -- Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, of course, but also some of the earlier less political works, like Beginnings. He was largely responsible -- some might say to blame -- for importing French cultural theory into the American intellectual scene, particularly Foucault, who obviously had a huge influence on Orientalism. But he always resisted the inane wordplay and self-absorption that characterized so much of American theory in the eighties and early nineties. He absolutely despised "radical theorists" like Judith Butler, for instance. I remember him bristling anytime someone used the word "discourse" in one of our seminars -- and I remember thinking at the time that I had first starting using the word myself after reading Orientalism during my freshman year.

I'm sure there will be a flood of eulogies with more insightful surveys of his work (and no doubt some critics, given his political stances.) But I think it's worth saying something here that I've said about Said for more than ten years now: on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I've ever met in my life -- handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing Butler on the world.) I remember vividly one early spring afternoon, sitting through a seminar he was teaching on public intellectuals, in a room overlooking the Columbia campus and the sun setting over Riverside Park, and thinking to myself: there's literally nowhere else I'd rather be right now. I'm sure there are thousands of his students out there sifting through similar memories today.

Father's Day Surprise

Sorry this is a little late, but it's been a slightly crazy week. Our son, Rowan Hazard Johnson, was born on Sunday morning at 9:03 AM, after a smooth five-hour labor. (In other words, I didn't have to deliver the baby myself in a cab on the FDR Drive.) Ro and his mother are doing just great, and his older brother seems to be adjusting about as well as you would imagine. The first day he was pretty sweet to the new arrival, but on the second day, he seemed to be saying, "What's he still doing here?" They're only 21 months apart -- two boys in diapers, god help us -- so in the long run they should have a lot of fun together. But in the short run...

Today is your birthday! We're gonna have a good time!

That's right -- I'm 35 today. I've been thinking about the milestones a little this morning: I graduated from high school basically half my lifetime ago. Got my first computer a little more than two decades ago. First started messing around with online communications (ECHO, eWorld, Compuserve) about ten years ago. It's been a solid six years since I published the first book.

In a funny way, all the numbers seem about right to me, though they're a little crazy to contemplate. It doesn't seem like yesterday that I graduated from high school -- it seems, well, like about seventeen years. It's a little scarier to think that I'm approaching the halfway point to my life expectancy. That is, if you don't count the cryogenics plan.

There continues to be an outside chance that I will share this birthday with our new son -- my wife is due in about two weeks, though the rate of contractions makes us both feel like the little guy is going to arrive before then. I'll try to post -- with pictures of course -- when there's news on that front....

In the meantime, why doesn't everyone celebrate my birthday by purchasing copies of Emergence for their friends, and driving my Amazon ranking up for the day!

The 80s Ate My iPod!

So here's a weird one. Last night, I noticed that, in addition to its normal roster of artists, my iPod now contains two or three songs from Depeche Mode and Duran Duran, only one of which I even vaguely recognize ("Girls On Film," if you must know.) I have no idea how these tracks got onto my iPod. I realize I just posted about my newfound habit of buying crazy songs from the eighties on the iTunes store, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not buying crazy songs in my sleep -- and there's no record of anything by Duran Duran or Depeche Mode in my entire music collection. (I even searched my hard drive and no mention of Duran Duran anywhere -- save all those soul-revealing fan letters to Simon LeBon, of course.) It's definitely my iPod, and it's been in my possession of late. Where did these songs come from? I'm worried that this is some kind of creeping virus, and I'll wake up tomorrow and find the entire iPod library replaced with old Bannanarama and Thompson Twins songs. Any clues would be greatly appreciated....

The Dust Clears

Things are finally settling down a bit in the new house at last, and I hope a more regular blogging schedule will commence next week. Our kitchen will be done as of tomorrow afternoon, and early next week we should get the remaining boxes out of the living room, which will give us pretty much the run of the whole house. We're lucky to be living so close to Prospect Park, and to have had so much good weather -- our son has basically been living in the park all day while the construction guys are tramping around the house. He's only twenty months, so we're not sure if he's entirely clear whether he's moved to a brownstone or to the 11th Street playground.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with support and interest about the new book. It was almost as exciting to hear everyone's interest as it was to hand it in the first place. As far as the book-blog integration goes, I think I'm going to follow a modified version of Bill Seitz's suggestion: once every few days I'm going to post a key passage from each chapter here, perhaps with a brief introduction, and encourage critiques, rebuttals, free associations, suggested reading, etc. When I get to the next revision, which should be in about three weeks, I'll prepare a PDF version, and email it to those of you who wrote in saying that you'd be interested in reading it. There's also an internal debate going on about title possibilities, which I might share with you all once we're narrowed down to a short list of candidates.

If this goes well, I might just give you all a cut of the royalties. Too bad they haven't figured out an online nano-payment scheme yet. Maybe the next book. :)