sippey.com

r.i.p. jeanne-claude

2009-11-20T11:30:53-08:00

Back in the fall of 1991 Trina and I took a long day trip from San Francisco down to the Grapevine to see Christo's umbrellas.

They were incredible to see in person, especially knowing a little bit about what went into the production of the piece. A finished Christo piece is like the tip of an iceberg -- you see this beautiful little bit above the water, while the terrifying process of financing, planning and constructing the work lives under the surface and gives the work its mass.

The artists entirely financed their 26 million dollar temporary work of art through The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and U.S.A. Corporation (Jeanne-Claude Christo-Javacheff, president). Previous projects by the artists have all been financed in a similar manner through the sale of the studies, preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, early works, and original lithographs. The artists do not accept any sponsorship.

Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, Christo's wife and collaborator, died this week. (Obits from the New York Times and Bloomberg, and a post from Time's Richard Lacayo.) If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend 5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a collection of documentaries on the creation of five of their pieces including two of my favorites, "Running Fence" and "Valley Curtain."

i like the way you play

2009-11-20T11:08:32-08:00

via www.youtube.com

Via Rex, this really is amazing.

speaking of hills and valleys...

2009-11-20T09:48:49-08:00

I found this great blog post by Chris Dixon via Twitter.

The core services built on top of the internet – the web (HTTP), email (SMTP), subscription messaging (RSS) – were made similarly open and therefore distributible across institutions. This explains their remarkable system-wide reliability. It also explains why we should be worried about reliability when core internet services are owned by a single company.

(See also.)

even my 5 year old knows better

2009-11-18T16:51:27-08:00

Rule one: no hands.

bit.ly + red laser

2009-11-18T14:57:46-08:00

via www.youtube.com

Hey, bit.ly -- I see an opportunity here for integration with Red Laser for a UPC shortening and aggregation service so that it's easy for people to blog/tweet about products. Price comparisons are one thing; how about scanning items to get social data, and not just Amazon product reviews, but posts / tweets from around the web, whether my friends own this thing, whether they recommend this thing, whether this thing is green / socially responsible, whether this thing tastes great or is less filling, or whatever.

no toyo ito for BAMPFA

2009-11-18T14:47:23-08:00

The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive won't be getting this:

Kenneth Baker in the Chronicle:

Museum Director Lawrence Rinder explained the decision to change course - taken by the chancellor, the museum's board president, its chairman and Rinder himself - as a consequence of the global economic downturn over the past two years.

"It is ultimately the chancellor's decision," Rinder said, "but I agree with his analysis. ... We had set some interim fundraising benchmarks to have a standard by which to judge our success. ... The trigger point was in November, this month. By then we had brought in about $81 million toward our $200 million capital campaign. ... The gap was just too great, looking forward." The $200 million included anticipated cost overruns.

we shouldn't blame jason. we should blame ourselves.

2009-11-18T14:35:22-08:00

Jason Kottke, on his weblog.

Before reading this interview, I didn't know much about [Cormac] McCarthy -- he's a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute? -- but now I think I need to read The Road.

If this truly is the first time that Jason mothereffin Kottke has been interested in Cormac McCarthy than WE HAVE FAILED AS A NATION.

mena writes a great letter to tavi

2009-11-18T14:02:20-08:00

Mena wrote a great letter to Tavi, the Style Rookie. (I blogged about her last week.)

I'm sure you get thousands of emails like this but since I don't write thousands of emails like this I felt it was worth sending.

And worth reading. +1 to the parenting goal of raising daughters that are as strong and independent as Tavi.

creepy v. really creepy

2009-11-18T11:53:13-08:00

Sure, Joe Cocker doing You Can Leave Your Hat On is creepy in an "Adrian Lyne softcore porn creepy" kinda way. Randy Newman, on the other hand, doing You Can Leave Your Hat On (which he wrote, by the way), alone at the piano is really creepy, in a "holy shit this guy sounds like a serial killer" kinda way.

announcing typepad micro

2009-11-17T12:59:37-08:00

Sharonda Woodfin has a great post about what we're up to with TypePad...

TypePad has made a lot of changes over the past year, but the one that's coming next will be the biggest of them all! SixApart is rolling out a whole new, free-of-charge level of TypePad service: TypePad Micro!

Posted here thanks to TypePad's new reblog feature. (You should try it yourself!) Huge congrats to the TypePad team...

imagine the rehearsals

2009-11-17T08:46:06-08:00

Microsoft store employees "break out" into dance and a "customer" captures it all on video. Their performance comes very, very close to capturing the exciting, authentic performance of the Blackeyed Peas on Saturday Night Live.

it's like they're always amazed...

2009-11-16T21:39:29-08:00

I really should have one of those New York Times alert thingies for mentions of "bloggers" or "blog" or "blogging," because whenever the gray lady deigns to report on said things (other than, you know, in their blogs) it's always so "human interest." Two from the last couple of days...

Bloggers eat taxpayer-purchased cookes! In From Treasury, an Invitation to Financial Bloggers...

Some of the bloggers were acutely aware of the effects of being welcomed inside “the brain trust,” as Steve Randy Waldman put it on the blog Interfluidity. “The mere invitation made me more favorably disposed to policy makers,” he wrote in his summary of the event, even though he abstained from eating any of the cookies at the meeting, “on principle.”

And in Writing a Sports Column Far From Print, and the Game bloggers become influential sports journalists! And write best selling books! All while rarely attending actual games! But not without the scorn of the Times...

“I will never write a traditional sports column,” [Bill Simmons] said. “But there are opportunities to spend time with people that I couldn’t before. Maybe I could do a running diary from spending four days with a player on the road.”

Think of the possibilities: You follow a team. Ride with the players from game to game. Interview the star about why he missed the big shot at the end of the game. And then write it all up.

Groan.

the holidays are coming...

2009-11-16T17:36:14-08:00

...which is the perfect time to hole yourself up in your house, lock the door and watch all five seasons of The Wire back to back to back to back to back. Whet your appetite with this superclip of the 100 greatest lines from the series, I'm sure only available for a limited time. (via)

My favorite in this bunch? Omar. "Money ain't got no owners, only spenders."

hotel beds

2009-11-16T09:36:09-08:00

Bryan Boyer is taking photos of Hotel Beds. They're weirdly anonymous and intimate at the same time. Subscribed.

frog on apple and bloomberg

2009-11-16T09:07:49-08:00

An unplanned companion to Tim O'Reilly's piece this morning is Tim Leberecht's post at Frog Design design mind blog comparing Apple and Bloomberg as "Old Champions in the New Economy."

Apple and Bloomberg, in some ways, are the antidotes to a marketplace that – propelled by the forces of the Social Web – is becoming increasingly atomized, hyper-distributed, open, and transparent. Secrecy, compliance, top-down hierarchies, rigid communication policies, and walled gardens are characteristics that may be somewhat outdated in this era, and yet they seem to be the very cornerstones of Apple’s and Bloomberg’s success as the two firms thrive as the surprise champions of their respective categories.

Worth reading in full, though what's surprisingly missing in the post is a stronger recognition that both companies have built their reputations on nailing the user experience. Back in the mid-nineties when everyone thought Bloomberg was ripe for being picked off by "the web," I remember talking to one trader who basically told me that I could just try to pry his Bloomberg terminal from his cold, dead hands.

hills and valleys

2009-11-16T08:54:44-08:00

Tim O'Reilly previews his keynote for Web 2.0 Expo this week.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

Excuse the early Monday morning metaphors in the following, but... I don't think there will be one king of the entire hill. Instead, what we're seeing are attempts to own individual hills: Amazon with commerce, Apple with mobile, Google with search, Facebook with identity. And it's up to the entrepreneurs who are building applications in the valleys between those hills to make the tough choice: do you live off the largesse of the feudal lord on top of the hill, and enjoy the short term benefits of their comfortable development environment / distribution channel / social graph, regardless of the long term impact on your business? Or do you go your own way, and attempt to amass enough strength to take the hill yourself?

new drawing from timothy buckwalter

2009-11-13T12:49:34-08:00

via timothybuckwalter.typepad.com

Love it.

sorry you lost; here's your invoice.

2009-11-12T15:37:09-08:00

The AP story reviewing the "highlights" of Sarah Palin's book had this interesting bit:

She reveals that about one-tenth of the $500,000 [in legal bills] was a bill she received to pay for the McCain campaign vetting her for the VP nod. She said when she asked the McCain campaign if it would help her financially, she was told McCain's camp would have paid all the bills if he'd won; since he lost, the vetting legal bills were her responsibility.

Wow. Really?

inbound: houston

2009-11-11T16:44:45-08:00

Inbound: Houston is a public art project that will replace highway billboard advertisements with images of what the viewer would see if the billboard wasn't there. Here's an example:

Via (and more photos at) notes.husk.org.

yes. you should call him.

2009-11-11T10:24:53-08:00

Inspired by clusterflock...

I love the web.