The Vine

Jon Rafman is a new-media artist and curator of Nine Eyes, a collection of photos culled from Google’s massive (and, to some, controversial and intrusive) Street View project. However you feel about the privacy issues, these raw images—in Rafman’s words, “unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer”—are a fascinating, snapshot archive of our times.

Rafman’s full collection spans the comic and tragic, profound and prosaic, beautiful and bizarre. A handful of my favorites are below.

In a similar vein, from a different source, there’s also this charming and clever short video.

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^ Paved with good intentions.

^ Now that’s vernacular architecture.

^ Freeze this moment in time. They don’t get much better than this.

^ Not everyone appreciates the all-seeing eye.

^ Is anything photographed in Paris not romantic?

^ This one simultaneously lifts and breaks my heart. A makeshift, sidewalk residence decorated with a little girl’s dreams. Add walls and I could be looking at my daughter’s bedroom.

^ Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth.

When your mother-in-law gives you a book and says, “It was too gross for me, but it seems right up your alley,” should you: (a) be alarmed, (b) be offended, (c) be flattered, or (d) start reading it immediately?

I chose (c) and (d), which is how I discovered Charlatan, Pope Brock’s fascinating, brilliantly told, historical account of medical quackery in the early 1900s. Think The Devil in the White City meets The Road to Wellville.

It is, on one level, the story of John Brinkley, who got his start as a transient hawker of miracle tonics, obtained a medical license from a shady diploma mill, and eventually grew famous and wealthy as one of the pioneers of “rejuvenation”—that is, the transplantation of goat testicles into impotent men.

But underneath the bizarre, sleazy and frequently abhorrent practices of Brinkley and many others (medical hucksters fluorished in this more provincial, trusting era), you will find a story of human gullibility, suspension of reason, and willingness to be led, however implausibly, by the promise of a shortcut to happiness. The central characters, then and now, are you and I.

It’s easy to “tsk tsk” those simple, unenlightened souls of an earlier age. Who would pay the equivalent of $8,000 in current value for such a dubious experimental surgery, one aggressively condemned and repudiated by the AMA? (Brinkley would eventually be sued for more than a dozen wrongful death cases.)

But you could just as well ask, why do people today pay $29.99 for an “energy” bracelet whose benefits are acknowledged to be entirely bogus? Why is cosmetic surgery a $30 billion—and growing—global industry? Why did so many of Harold Camping’s followers sell their possessions and quit their jobs in anticipation of the Rapture?

Because we want to believe—in God, in Nature, in scientific discovery, in something beyond ourselves—never more so than when our health and vitality are involved. (We think we’re applying reason, but research shows we’re drawn to evidence that confirms what we already believe.)

“Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into the Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles,” Pope writes. “When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.”

If this sounds misanthropic, I don’t mean it to be. I’m not at all condemning belief. Objective reality has gaps in it, and each of us fills them in with something.

Just not goat testicles, please.

Photo credits: Shane Rounce, Nina Jean, Mike Fisher

PCBC’s new tagline, The Art, Science + Business of Housing, reflects the convergence of disciplines at their annual tradeshow: builders, the design community, the R&D engineers, the money guys (they’re always guys), the product manufacturers, etc., etc.

(PCBC is the parent company of The Vine.)

It also, I believe, speaks to something deeper, which prompted me to sketch (crudely) the diagram that you see here.

There’s a magical alchemy in the blending of art, science and business, and I think the key lies in balancing—and honoring—all three. Diminish art and you lack the aesthetic value that drives emotion and desire. Diminish science and you lack rigorous, analytical, objective inquiry. Diminish business and you lack a means of creating tangible, economic value.

It’s not easy to nurture all three within an organization, but for those that succeed, the results are amazing. Apple. IKEA. Nike. Pixar. GE.

I don’t pretend to know how or when our country’s housing funk gets resolved. (Here’s a promising place to start.)

But I’m convinced the solutions reside within the intersection of these circles.

Midway through last year’s NBA season—back when we still had NBA seasons, but I digress—my hometown Sacramento Kings announced a name change for their building. What had been Arco Arena since the team’s arrival in 1985 would now be known as Power Balance Pavilion. (As in the makers of supposedly energy-optimizing wristbands popular among athletes.)

To locals, the change was sudden, clumsy and, frankly, inconvenient. Around here, “Arco” no longer signifies Big Oil, it’s simply the place where our Kings play(ed). It’s where, in our short-lived but glorious heyday of the early 2000s, “we” challenged—albeit briefly and unsuccessfully—the supremacy of the reviled Lakers, clanging cowbells so rabidly and obnoxiously that Phil Jackson and his coaching staff wore earplugs on the visitors’ bench. (Doing nothing to dispel Sacramento’s image as a hick town, I might add, but that’s a topic for another post on regional identity.)

So when the building signs were hastily replaced and the hardwood floors lacquered with new logos, we were resigned to the name change…and kept right on calling it Arco. (And yes, I’m well aware of the irony of rejecting one corporate namesake in favor of another. But, understand, the old name is attached to our memories now. It’s firmly established in our local lexicon.)

This is the reality of sports in the big money, corporate entertainment era, and we’re certainly not the first—or the last—fan base to wrestle with this. In San Francisco, the 49er faithful make their weekly pilgrimage to Candlestick (not 3Com, not Monster) Park. Boston built an entirely new facility and leased its name to TD Banknorth, but fans still watch their beloved Celtics and Bruins in “The Garden.”

Teams can supplement their revenue by selling the signage on the outside of the stadium. What they can’t do, not by decree alone anyway, is change our vernacular.

Who gets naming rights to our sporting complexes? We do.

Photo credit: Jocie SF

Community grows through small but meaningful acts. Sometimes it’s taking a plate of cookies to a new neighbor. And sometimes it’s getting a postcard from a stranger halfway around the world.

I’ve recently become an avid user of Postcrossing, a website that facilitates postcard exchanges across the globe. Over 250,000 members from 198 countries have collectively sent (as I write this; it increases by the minute) nearly nine million cards.

After creating an account, the system will randomly generate a recipient and a unique code for you. Each time one of your postcards is received and registered, you’re then eligible to get a card from someone else—and that’s where the magic kicks in.

Every postcard that arrives in your mailbox—like the one pictured here, from Mimi in Malaysia—brings a spontaneous touch of culture, warmth and humanity into your day.

And, just as importantly, yours do the same for someone on the other end.

Lana Canova points us to this fun and clever video—an exercise, ahem, “carrot.” One cynical commenter on the Vimeo site complains that it’s using sex to sell bottled water. I say lighten up, it’s a playful way of using human nature to generate a conversation around wellness. Apprécier!

Community is a slippery thing to describe, more easily understood by its absence than presence. Usually it’s best captured through stories of people and places. Here are three wonderful examples.

(1) Wrigley Is Wrigley, and Nothing Else Is

Native Chicagoan Dave Eggers captures the communal essence of Cubs baseball at Wrigley Field—an experience soaked in history, fraternity and beer. Every so often, fans also take in what’s happening on the field.

Known as the “Friendly Confines,” Wrigley is one of the oldest—and arguably the most neighborly—of all major league ballparks. (Bostonians will make their case for Fenway Park, which is two years older, but the fierce intensity of its crowd creates an entirely different atmosphere than laid-back Wrigley.) “I grew up with the Cubs,” Eggers writes, “and I don’t remember the possibility of winning ever being high among the reasons we went to Wrigley.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) the Cubs’ perennial futility and heartbreak, fans flock to Wrigley as “[a] place that celebrates not just a team but a city—and a city’s refusal to plow the past under. [It] is the ultimate neighborhood stadium, the ultimate urban stadium, the ultimate statement that some semblance of tradition is more important than the money you could make with a hundred new skyboxes in some spectacularly soulless new stadium.”

(2) Dr. Don

Don Colcord is a pharmacist in the small, rural town of Nucla, Colorado (population: “around 700 and falling”). As proprietor of Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe, he is, within a two-hour driving radius, the area’s de facto health care provider, dispensing medicine and medical advice in equal measures. He knows his customers’ names, and also their circumstances. When someone’s insurance has lapsed, or he or she simply can’t afford to pay, Don rings up the order anyway and sets aside the receipt for payment at a later date (if at all—each year he writes off ten to twenty thousand dollars in unpaid bills).

“At the Apothecary Shoppe, Don never wears a white coat,” the author tells us. “He takes people’s blood pressure, and he often gives injections; if it has to be done in the backside, he escorts the customer into the bathroom for privacy. Elderly folks refer to him as ‘Dr. Don,’ although he has no medical degree and discourages people from using this title. He doesn’t wear a nametag. ‘I wear old Levi’s,’ he says. ‘People want to talk to somebody who looks like them, talks like them, is part of the community. I know a lot of pharmacists wear a coat because it makes you look more professional. But it’s different here.’”

(3) Keep it up and we could solve our gang problem

(The above link opens a PDF.) The Vine’s own Chris Grant is the architect of an ambitious project in which star players from the Great Britain hockey team (field hockey to Americans) trained and mentored a group of youngsters from East London’s poorest neighborhoods.

“The scheme is quixotic, to say the least,” the writer comments. “Take 30 unsporty 11 to 14-year-olds from tough areas…, introduce them to a sport associated with toffs and private schools, organise a highly competitive fixture in three months’ time, and get star players with little or no background in coaching to teach them how to play.” Without giving away the ending, it’s a Disney-esque story of redemption for the kids and stars alike.

“Society is increasingly stratified,” Chris says. “But the hockey project showed that those barriers can be broken down very easily. People from different backgrounds need to be brought together. We need to revive the idea of the club as a focal point for communities.”

Photo credit: Seth Anderson

As someone who spends a good chunk of every weekend hauling stacks of childrens’ books to and from the library, I had to smile at Jessica Hagy’s clever diagram.

Libraries (and librarians) are perhaps our communities’ most underutilized public resource, which is a shame. Americans collectively hold (and pay crushing interest on) more than one billion credit and debit cards, compared to 90 million actively used library cards.

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” Ray Bradbury once said. “One of them is not reading them.”

I make a point of seeking out—so that I might share with all of you—an eclectic mix of perspectives on community. And it’s usually the unexpected ones that yield the most interesting findings.

One of my favorites is Pulse, an online magazine about the human side of medicine. Yours truly was recently published in the magazine (but don’t hold that against them). My article, Small Talk, is a reflection on the emotions that people experience—separately but together, side-by-side but isolated—while undergoing tests and treatment. Human empathy and comfort are irreplaceable, I conclude, especially when our environments and systems strip those things out.

I hope you find it edifying—and I don’t mean just my piece. Pulse is a powerful source of insights into human connection. Its organizers are helping to re-humanize a profession that, without meaning to, sometimes loses sight of the underlying needs it’s serving. (Kind of like ours does.)

Subscriptions are free, and enthusiastically recommended.

The sad news of Steve Jobs’ passing reminds me of this quote of his—powerful words that take on even greater meaning when you consider how fully he embodied them.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

He was the Walt Disney of our generation. May his passion and vision live on.

Don Anderson is well known to many Vinesters as the creative soul who, for 38 years, led an extraordinary team of designers at Color Design Art. The studio’s award-winning work was informed and inspired by cultural anthropology, human empathy, insatiable curiosity and a spirit of play.

Don describes himself as “mostly retired” these days, and one of his favorite activities is exploring the diverse communities of Los Angeles by bicycle. “I feel it’s the perfect means of getting to know a neighborhood,” he says. “It’s faster than walking but slow enough to see and feel from all your senses.”

While on these bike rides, he’ll frequently stop to photograph the sights—and in particular the “strange juxtapositions”—that catch his eye. Don sent me some of his photos and graciously allowed us to post them, which I’ve done below along with his comments.

Thank you, Don, for helping us see the quirks and character of L.A. through your eyes.

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This apartment is on Overland Avenue in Palms.

Well you know what they say… This guy took it to heart. This castle is planted in the midst of a nice neighborhood just South of Wilshire near LaCienega.

I call this one “Unsuccessful NIMBYs.” These guys are the lucky ones on the South side of Wilshire. Homes on the North side never see the sun!

This is a recently freshened up home nearby. You likely won’t see this color in Irvine!

Rick Mockler—an intriguing guy whose background includes creation of both social and physical communities—wrote to me a while back about Apple’s proposed new headquarters. In particular, he noted the contrast between Apple’s insular, auto-centric, fortress design and Facebook’s declared plans to knit its campus into the surrounding community.

Rick was ahead of that story (I was slow to post), and since then L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has voiced a similar response.

“Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam,” Hawthorne writes, “in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and ’70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.”

The circular building, Hawthorne concludes, “is essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself.” He could just as well have been describing the prevailing approach—among many corporations; I’m not picking on Apple—to office parks everywhere.

Both projects are still in the design stage. Based on what we see so far, though, Facebook’s plan is the one that’s got me clicking “Like.”

In a recent Sports Illustrated poll, major league baseball players named Jim Joyce (by a wide margin) the best umpire in the sport today.

If Joyce’s name sounds familiar, you may remember him as the guy whose blown call—on what would have been the final out—ruined a perfect game for Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga last summer.

With a year’s hindsight, we now know that this story has a happy ending—from the gracious, heartwarming reconciliation between Joyce and Galarraga, to the subsequent outpouring of support from fans, players, fellow umpires, and even Detroit airport’s baggage handlers. But you can imagine the torturous hours, days and weeks that Joyce endured as the healing process slowly, gradually unfolded.

A lot of businesses (and a lot of us, for that matter) resist openness and transparency for fear of losing control of the narrative—what’s being said about us, and by whom. The futility, of course, is that it’s no longer something we can control, if we ever really could. Amy Levi, one of the smartest marketing thinkers I know, likes to point out that “good marketing is telling the truth…so make sure your truth is worth talking about.”

Joyce’s story is a reminder that you can screw up. In the national spotlight. On the verge of a history-making moment. With ESPN and YouTube replaying your mistake endlessly for the world to see. And in response you can conduct yourself with such humility, dignity and humanity that you become more respected as a result.

 If you’re hiding from scrutiny, it’s probably because you won’t like what’s revealed.

Christoph Niemann calls them ‘useless’ stereotypes, and I realize he’s underscoring the tongue-in-cheek-ness of this cartoon, but I can’t entirely agree. I’m not saying stereotypes are useful, mind you. But the reality is we all have a particular frame of reference for seeing the world, and getting that out in the open—even when it tells us more about the label-er than the label-ee—is a step toward understanding.

Plus the cartoon made me laugh. (So says the latte-drinking nerd.)

Saw this short bumper video while watching Nick Jr. with my kids this morning. Bob Marley’s classic “Three Little Birds” visualized in a charming cartoon. Couldn’t resist sharing it here.

Is it sappy and lightweight to offer this up as content on a business-oriented blog? Perhaps. But it’s two minutes of whimsy and encouragement—and two minutes of not checking the DJIA or Irene coverage. We could all use a bit of that right now. Enjoy.

UPDATED: The YouTube video previously linked below has since been removed. (Apparently Twentieth Century Fox didn’t appreciate the user’s copyright infringement.) You can instead view it here on the website of the animators who created it.