Like Brian Morrissey at AdFreak, I’m not a big fan of tag clouds (or “weighted lists”, to use a description from my visual-design past). Whatever their utility as navigation tools, they’re usually ugly as sin, especially when applied to a blog/site that devotes 90 percent of its content to one or two topics (obviating the need for this sort of filtering in the first place).

But take away the navigation aspect, and apply the size-weighting of fonts to mindshare concepts, and you’ve got something. Specifically, you’ve got Brand Tags, an experiment of name-brand products and services with word-association.

Above is a sampling for Tropicana, with a pretty typical lineup related to juice products. Not all brands fare as well or predictably, though: American Airlines ominously tags high for 9/11, while Jagermeister embarrassingly (for a liquor product) registers a strong false-postive as a beer product.

It’s intriguing, although I’m not sure how much faith you can put into an anonymous and limited sampling. Definitely worth a gander, though.

Speaking of Tom Sachs, he’s a multi-media kinda pop-cultural artist, as evidenced by his collection of short films.

They look to be mostly stop-motion animation pieces with funky soundtracks/voiceovers attached. Sachs collaborated with the Neistat Brothers on these, and the influence definitely shows.

My favorites from this group are: “McDonald’s Teaser”, musically accompanied by the late Wesley Willis’ “Rock and Roll McDonald’s”; and “Bitches and Money”, a 1/25th-scale tour through a ghetto, backed appropriately by NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta”.

In a decided 180-degree from its previous display of Damien Hirst-arranged animal carcasses, Park Avenue’s Lever House is now hosting giant-sized sculptures of Hello Kitty characters.

Why? Because sculpture artist Tom Sachs considers the cutesy Japanese feline to be his pop-cultural muse, worthy of extensive bronze-working, topped with white-paint finishing.

I wandered into this public art display by chance this afternoon. I was heading toward Lexington and wasn’t even aware that I was on 53rd Street until I reached Lever and took a peek. It was a pleasantly jarring surprise to come upon a lunchtime scene festooned with these oversized white beasties. Some of them were working water fountains, which adds a whimsical touch to the overall scene.

From one of my most fave-o-reet episodes of “The Simpsons”, I present “Skinner & the Superintendent”, or (as I prefer) “Steamed Hams”:

And for good measure, the key exchange:

Superintendent Chalmers: I thought we were having steamed clams.
Seymour Skinner: Oh, no, I said steamed hams. That’s what I call hamburgers.
Superintendent Chalmers: You call hamburgers steamed hams?
Seymour Skinner: Yes, it’s a regional dialect.
Superintendent Chalmers: Uh-huh. What region?
Seymour Skinner: Uhh… Upstate New York.
Superintendent Chalmers: Really? Well, I’m from Utica, and I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase ’steamed hams.’
Seymour Skinner: Oh, not in Utica. No, it’s an Albany expression.
Superintendent Chalmers: I see.
[Chalmers bites into a steamed ham.]
Superintendent Chalmers: You know, these hamburgers are quite similar to the ones they have at Krusty Burger.
Seymour Skinner: Oh ho ho, no. Patented Skinner burgers. Old family recipe.
Superintendent Chalmers: For steamed hams…
Seymour Skinner: Yes…
Superintendent Chalmers: Yes, and you call them steamed hams despite the fact that they are obviously grilled.

One last tidbit: Along with the obvious allusions to Pulp Fiction throughout, this episode also owes its title — “22 Short Films About Springfield” — to Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. The title and structure of which, in turn, was inspired by the 32 pieces that comprise Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Something out of my current fiction-reading that rings true for me:

“…I’ve always found the minute portraiture of nineteenth-century fiction fairly useless. For me, those precise descriptions of the hero’s nose/mouth/eyes/moles/forehead never come together as an actual face. Maybe it’s a failure of synthetic imagination on my part, but in my mind they always end up jumbled, like a portrait in the analytic cubist mode. It’s always easier to visualize the minor characters, with their bestial analogues, done in the broad stroke of caricature — Mr. Fox, Mr. Rat, Miss Sheep. Then, too, as a reader I like to take a certain amount of responsibility for filling in the details.”

- Connor McKnight, protagonist from Jay McInerney’s “Model Behavior”

I’ve always experienced a similar shortcoming whenever trying to mentally reconstruct a detailed description of some literary character. It never gets to the “cubist mode” stage for me, though — I simply don’t bother to connect the intended dots, and the visages just remain vague.

For that reason, I avoid prose that goes into such exacting detail, because it does nothing for me, and in facts bogs down the flow. I prefer a sacrifice in that area in favor of better-paced plot and dialogue. And I guess I take that “responsibility for filling in the details” to heart — give me enough of the framework, for character and even setting, and I’ll come up with the construct.

(Yes, my “current” reading material is a decade old. What can I say, I’ve been pretty disappointed by the new releases I’ve sampled lately, and so have gone back to the well, author-wise. And actually, there’s a lot of McInerney that I’ve never read before, including this novel.)

It’s official: Isabella Rossellini has gone crazy.

Or “buggy”, which would be more in line with the theme behind her “Green Porno” series of insect-sex (”insext”?) short films for Sundance Channel. I mean, it’s one thing to produce nature documentaries on the same reproductive topic — that give it a veneer of scientificness. But to (sorta) dress up as a spider, a dragonfly, etc. and act out the wild wiggling? Cute, but way out there, man.

Although, maybe she’s on the crest of a trend. Perhaps Jerry Seinfeld cracked open the door with Bee Movie, with everyone else just now catching on.

There’s no ambiguity about the inspiration for Tyler Knox’s “Kockroach: A Novel”, as the book’s opening line should tell you:

As Kockroach, an arthropod of the genus Blatella and of the species germanica, awakens one morning from a typically dreamless sleep, he finds himself transformed into some large, vile creature.

And if it doesn’t tell you, then I’ll let one Franz Kafka enlighten you, “Metamorphosis”-style:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

I’m a sucker for such literary remixing, as my earlier reading of Joe McGinniss Jr.’s “The Delivery Man” as latter-day “Less Than Zero” attests. If nothing else, it shows off an author’s reverence for the writerly giants.

Notice the level of reversal that Knox imbues in his prose. Not only does he accomplish the bug-to-man change (that “large, vile creature” being a human), but he picks up on Kafka’s granting of “anxious dreams” to Gregor Samsa to, in turn, establish that Kockroach, being a cockroach, would be bereft of any dreaming at all prior to all this. Dealing with more active mental faculties becomes a key driver in Knox’s telling.

I only wish “Kockroach” had held up beyond its opening couple of chapters. A nice enough attempt at hardboiled comic noir, but ultimately a bit of a mess, with most of the characters (including, regrettably, the lead female, who also serves as one of the three narrators) being too underdeveloped to keep the story going. A transformation — in the form of another editorial proofing or two — could have done wonders.

My publishing roots compel me to hit the new MoMA exhibit on George Lois‘ iconic Esquire covers from the 1960s and 70s.

While the heady news topics of those times provided ample raw material for Esquire and Lois to weave their magic, there was a much more fundamental design concept at play:

What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image.

Relying upon a single image to sell an issue (and that’s what it comes down to for any magazine, really) is a chancy high-wire act. Either the casual browser bites on the compelling cover, or else s/he ignores it and moves on. That’s probably why so many publishers hedge their bets by loading, and overloading, their covers with so much accompanying bullet and blurb text.

And for me, it’s become a turnoff. In fact, I recently canceled my subscription to Lois’ old periodical stomping grounds, in large part because I was finding that those text-gorged covers were constantly turning me off each month. Far from enticing me to open the cover and dive in, the instant in-your-face design seems a bit too desperate for attention.

In a way, it pains me to make that observation. For years, I considered the standard teaser-cover to be pretty user-friendly, even to the point of being a good template for online publishing adaptation (think of each of those cover blurbs as a hyperlink). But somewhere along the way, the aesthetic became diluted, I think.

Today, Lois’ image-only style would stand out simply because every other mass-market title persists with the textual path. It’d be a refreshing change.

I just flew Delta down to Florida, and the flights were a pretty big disappointment. I was on older jets both departing and arriving, and so there was no in-seat entertainment and little legroom. It was enough to make me decide to bypass Delta in the future.

However, if the airline actually does install these British-made Cozy Suite space-saving and -creating staggered seats into its coach sections, as is being reported, I’ll have to give it another chance. I’ll have to wait a couple of years, but what the hey — I don’t travel all that much anyway.

What makes these oddly-configured airline chairs so unique?

The Cozy Suite manages to stretch legroom by two inches while fitting airplane seats into the standard economy class 32″ pitch. It does this by offsetting the seats diagonally: they still point forward, but each chair sits behind its neighbor. This staggered arrangement also means that there is space to put in a padded side section to lean against and get some proper mile-high shuteye.

Anything’s better than what’s currently in place. The only thing I can see a problem with: As you’d guess from the design (and as confirmed by the manufacturer), these seats don’t recline. The ergonomic cocoon shape supposedly obviates this usual necessity; have to see that to believe it.

Nothing says Earth Day quite like a giant balloon-animal sculpture on the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It’s not really made out of oversized balloons twisted into shape, of course (if that’s even possible/feasible?). It’s one of Jeff Koons‘ signature pieces, among a niche of balloon-imitation artworks that make him stand out in the pop-art scene.

Sadly, it seems that the open-air environment is not the optimal milieu for Koons’ pooch:

The biggest problem is scale. Seen in an indoor gallery, the elephantine, shiny metallic “Balloon Dog (Yellow),” which rises to 10 feet at its highest point, would have a weirdly imposing, slightly menacing presence. On the roof it appears dwarfed by the vast sky and by the open expanses of space to the south and west of the museum.

Further context might improve the presentation. Maybe the artist can be persuaded to add a few pieces of balloon-like dog turds to the rear, to simulate activity? I’d sure go see that.

I sure to pick the damnedest times to leave town. While I was funning and sunning in Florida, a silent rave broke out in Union Square yesterday evening.

What’s a silent rave? It’s a rave without sex, without Ecstasy, and without music — at least outwardly-audible music:

It was striking for what could not be heard.

On the west side of the square, city workers ripped up the street with jackhammers. On the east side, a stalled caravan of drivers, no doubt frustrated by streets’ closing for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, leaned on car horns.

But in the middle, there might as well have been a Cone of Silence. A mass of people — a head-bobbing, arms-above-the-head, conga-line-forming full-tilt boogie-woogie — emitted what seemed like no sound but rather music visible.

Everyone danced in place, listening to an iPod and prancing to his or her own playlist. For long minutes, in the distance, only the square’s ever-present bongo players could be heard, while close up only shoes, or bare feet, could be heard padding on concrete. Video cameras and cellphones were everywhere.

Note that this go at silent raving differs from the conventional version, where all the separate iPods are synced to the same playlist. Personally, I prefer the Union Square method — more chaotic and freeform.

This couldn’t have been a more perfect opportunity for me. I may not be Facebook-enabled to have RSVP’d, but there were other ways of finding out. And the start time: 6:17PM? Practically my lucky number (don’t ask). Plus, like so many New Yorkers, I’m practically fused to my iPod.

The negative is that this is, obviously, little more than a latter-day flashmob scene. But with a decidedly individualistic edge: While social grouping is the point, having everyone listen and groove to their own private soundtrack injects some self-absorbedness into the experience. It’s really the natural next step in the prevalent iPod cocooning that everyone does daily. (That may be corrosive societal trend, but it’s pretty well unstoppable at this stage.)

I’m going to keep my eyes open for the next edition. A repeat of the Union Square site would be just dandy, but any Manhattan location would do.

Rabid fanboys can splice together the raddest scenes from the raddest movies evahh and get that self-satisfying feeling.

But what do those labors come to? Nothing. Because supercutting reached its peak back in 2001. That’s when artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy did a massive deconstruction of the entire series run of “Starsky and Hutch”, and cobbled together the resulting elements into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation piece, “Every Shot, Every Episode”:

Lodged in the subconscious of an entire generation, the McCoys’ banal source material is subjected to the nonlinear, nonnarrative logic of the computer database, grouped typologically by structural technique (every zoom in, every special effect), stock character (alcoholic, bookie), or action (car chase, drug use). Both novel and traditional, “Every Shot, Every Episode” is a witty and thorough critique of media imagery, a portable reference guide for those raised and reared by television, and an updated version of a tradition as old as photography itself.

I mean, really. Why try to improve upon this perfection with a rapid-fire compilation of Scarface “fucks”? It’s like dissecting gossamer, I tell you.

Casual gaming does, indeed, come more casually than what’s found in online gamelet “You Have To Burn The Rope”.

But most such time-wasters probably don’t reward you with such a cool down-tempo song of gratitude for beating the game (nor reward you so quickly, assuming your brain doesn’t short out). “What will you do with the rest of your day” — isn’t that the ultimate question?

Keep your ultra-complex MMOGs. My affection for oldschool videogames draws me to YHTBTR like, well, a rope to a flame. And if I ever get confused, I can always refer to the manual.

I care not for jelly — neither the spreadable stuff nor the British version of Jello.

But I guess I like Jelly well enough, because I’ll be at the coworking space in midtown this Friday. I’m anticipating attending for a couple of hours in the morning, probably checking out around noon.

I’m not planning on a repeat performance of liveblogging, like I did at last month’s Manhattan gathering. I expect most of my time will be occupied with blog housekeeping, specifically updating this site to the latest and greatest version of WordPress (currently 2.5). Since my past experiences with the supposedly simple upgrade have always been bumpy, I figure I should take advantage of Jelly’s heavy contingent of tech-heads as a go-to help resource. I’m crossing my fingers.

I’m also considering bringing along my XO Laptop, just to show it off to anyone interested. I don’t think there are that many floating around in the U.S., so it’d be a novelty. That doesn’t exactly fit under the working-time concept for Jelly, but what the heck.

What can be gained from reading Mary Roach’s “Bonk: The Curious Couple of Science and Sex”, an irreverent look at the study of sexuality?

If nothing else, you’ll learn that Egyptian lab rats clothed in polyester pants have sex less often than those wearing cotton or wool slacks.

I have a feeling that, for untold thousands of readers, that single fact is the deciding factor for whether or not to pick up this book.

The bad news: Most U.S. middle- and high-school students are lacking in the coherent-writing department.

The good news: Thanks to today’s keyword-driven online writer’s and publishing market, which drives paying-job quality down to the lowest common denominator, no one’s expecting future generations to be particularly lucid with the written word.

No worries. I’m sure podcasting or some other fool comprehension-minimal medium will rush in to fill the void.

As intrigued as I was about “Ladies & Gents”, the offbeat theatrical production being staged in Central Park’s public restrooms, I doubted that I’d be able to find a date willing to share the experience.

Well, luckily I did, and we got to see the show a couple of nights ago. And luckily for her — and for me, come to think of it — the bathrooms weren’t nearly as stinky as I imagined they could be.

Neither, for that matter, was the play itself. It had a unique structure: Two acts, which were played out simultaneously in the separate Ladies and Mens “conveniences” (Irish idiom for restrooms). Accordingly, the audience was split into separate halves, which were then filed into each bathroom to watch their particular segment of the story. At intermission, the two groups filed out and then switched restrooms, to see their concluding half of the play (which, given the nature of this narrative, isn’t properly the “second” part).

Just my luck, my date and I were separated into the two separate groups for the duration of this performance. But that actually turned out okay, because:

Given the cramped conditions, audience arrangement took the form of standing up against the walls, forming a rough circle around the “stage” where the actors did their things. It was the ultimate in intimate, and lent a real unnerving feel to the whole show. But it also meant that there was no opportunity for comparing notes with one another, because even the faintest whisper was impossible to disguise. So there would be no advantage to being paired up during the performance. That’s if it would even have been possible: The staff herded us in brusquely (I even said “Gestapo tactics” out loud), and “assigned” us our standing spots without any regard to preference.

And in fact, we ended up having more to compare and contrast about afterward because of this. We realized that we were experiencing the same story but in a different sequence, so we retraced how that affected our perception of the events. It turned out to be not so much, but I’m not sure it would have come so readily to us if we’d been watching the same sequence at the same time.

You’ll notice I’m being very light on the narrative specifics. You could say that I was more captivated by the format then by the creative content itself. The cloak-and-dagger noir setting in 1950s Dublin was satisfying, but nothing groundbreaking. The story moved along at a rapid-fire pace; combined with the staging elements, it just worked.

I’m not sure if I’m waiting for the next toilet-bowl production. My companion came up with the idea — prior to the night’s actual audience separation — of dividing the showgoers according to gender, thereby having all-women attending the Ladies room portion and all-men in the Gents facility. Maybe some enterprising playwright can work on that concept.

I’ve concocted a new personal timeframe: Starting today and ending April 26th, I’m living “between the Easters”.

Yes, there’s another Easter observance coming next month, and I’m one of the Orthodox Christians who’ll be observing it. Since the gap between the twin holidays is so large in 2008 (five weeks, much longer than most years), I figure it’s a significant enough chunk of time that I can signify it.

Not that I’m going to go hog-wild with this. Just something else to brand. If it resonates with others, I’ll be shocked.

While I managed to do a little live-blogging at last week’s Jelly coworking session, I neglected to add pictures to my words.

Never fear: Another Jelly-er snapped a few photos and Flickr’d them.

In that picture set, you’ll see yours truly up close and personal, along with an action shot of me eating pizza while conversing with the t-shirt aggregator dude. This is what it’s like to live your life in Web 2.0 mode, right?

Maybe I should get into the act and bring my fancy on-loan Nikon camera to the next Jelly, scheduled for Williamsburg (which I’m 90 percent sure I’ll attend). But I hate lugging that thing around, and since I’ll already have my computer in tow, I think I’ll have to leave the visual record to someone else.

Of all the possible spots in Central Park to stage a play, I’m pretty sure the restrooms at Bethesda Terrace Fountain wouldn’t occur to most theater organizers as the optimal performance space.

But the Irish Arts Center, of all troupes, thought otherwise when it came to its production of “Ladies & Gents”. The cramped toilet ambiance was such a good fit for this noir thriller set in 1950s Dublin that the play’s the thing, for $25 a pop later this month.

Of course, they were aiming for toilet space in the first place:

The bureaucracy involved in getting permission to host a play in a toilet was another matter altogether. After the play’s success in European bathrooms — first as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival and later on a small tour of England and Scotland, where it won the Edinburgh Fringe First Award — Heller and the Irish Arts Center hoped to bring it to New York. Everyone underestimated the amount of red tape involved in renting public restrooms.

“It was a big toilet mess,” said Laoisa (pronounced LEE-SHA) Sexton, one of the show’s six actors who was dispatched to help with “the great New York loo hunt.”

Sexton quickly discovered what any frustrated tourist could have told her: “There really aren’t a lot of public toilets in New York City to choose from.”

Of the meager offerings, bathrooms at Grand Central Station and in Riverside Park were rejected for their small size and busy traffic. Then the loo hunters discovered the Bethesda Terrace bathrooms. It took over a year of back and forth with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, including a personal letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to win approval.

With that much attention to detail, it’s just gotta be a winner.

If I can snag a ticket, I’m definitely going to catch a performance (plenty of dates are already sold out). The tricky part is, who to go with? Not every girl will swoon over the prospect of attending a theatrical performance in a stinky public bathroom. That’ll take some work, I guess.

Casting the bilateral relationship between the United States and Great Britain as a dysfunctional gay-male love affair?

That’s theater for you. And for me, as I plan to snag tickets soon to Caryl Churchill’s “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?” at the Public Theater, East Village ways, to see this imaginative spectacle for myself. Sexual politics, without the sexual part — or is that, without the politics part? Either way, brilliant!

It’s not exactly political-thriller material (but that’s okay):

The second of the play’s seven scenes ends with this exchange:

SAM: being powerful and being on the side of good is

GUY: God must have so much fun

SAM: win win win

GUY: love you more than I can

That’s Sam (get it?) and Guy (get it?), in something like love. If you know anything about recent geopolitical history, you can guess who’s the pitcher and who’s the catcher…