The artist with his Snowdecahedron

SnO-M-G! read facebook status updates from Bostonians today. It’s true, we’ve been dumped on this winter, and for many of us on the east coast that means the particular kind of cold sweatiness that comes from shoveling sidewalks and driveways before municipal trucks plow them in again with snow from the street. But for Boston-based Dan Sternof Beyer, who packs the white stuff into esoteric geometric shapes, the right kind of snow can be the perfect medium for creative public expression. Here, on the second day of spring, a day following a weekend of sun and coatless walks, many of us are cursing at the skies, but Sternof Beyer has one more chance.

I met Sternof Beyer when I was photographing one of his creations with my phone outside of the ART building in Harvard Square, where a one-man show about the life and work of Buckminster Fuller was playing. I was intrigued by the 12-sided snow-shapes sitting on banisters and dotting the sidewalk around the theater. A voice behind me asked, “Want to see how I make them?”

Dodecahedrons, the only platonic solid that doesn’t appear in nature, have fascinated Sternof Beyer for a long time. He explained, “Greek Pythagoreans were sitting around coming up with platonic solids – where every vertex, side, and edge, are identical. Only five of these shapes exist: the tetrahedron (4 sides), the cube (six sides), the octahedron (eight sides), the dodecahedron (12 sides), and the icosahedron (20 sides). An element was ascribed to each of the first three and the last one (fire, earth, air, water, respectively), but to the dodecahedron they ascribed the whole universe. The Pythagoreans released the four lower shapes to the public, but kept the dodecahedron hidden. Hippasus showed the public a dodecahedron and the Pythagoreans drowned him for it.”

Sternof Beyer has created “snowdecahedrons” all over Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston. For him, filling public spaces with dodecahedrons represents giving the people back this hidden knowledge, especially in such proximity to MIT and Harvard. “I don’t think that anyone coming across one on the street would get any of this,” he said, “but I like that it’s there, and if they wanted to they could look into the back story. Also as objects the angles are kind of intoxicating to the eye. In our world we’re surrounded by right angles, dodecahedrons are pleasing to just about everybody.”

Snowdecahedron at South Station

The secret to these shapes is the wooden mold Sternof Beyer created, the only method that leads to a perfect dodecahedron. He originally made his molds for cement models, or carved dodecahedrons straight out of wood with a Japanese saw.

Sternof Beyer at work on a dodecahedron from a stump

But because of all the exact angles, every slight error, which is an inevitability with the human hand, compounds. When he moved to Boston from Berkeley six months ago and it started snowing and he thought that snow was a less intrusive, more ephemeral, and free medium to work with.

A west coast native, 28-year-old Sternof Beyer grew up in Cedarville, California, population 100. He didn’t see a stop-light until he was eleven years old. Raised by eccentric parents – his late mother was a collage artist and a painter, and his father made hovercrafts to fly over wetland environments without damaging them – Sternof Beyer was surrounded by geometry and abstract mathematical principles from a young age. “You know how little babies have mobiles?” Sternof Beyer asked. “My parents took down all the fat planes and horses and put up geometric shapes. We valued ideas above anything else – we’d argue about an idea like platonic solids or black holes and not really worry if the other person was offended as long as the idea reached its fullest completeness. Geometry has always been fascinating to me – geometric forms were what we’d argue about the most.”

Dodecahedron Stump

So it’s not a complete surprise that Sternof Beyer has long wondered how many ways could you unfold a dodecahedron. “The first few platonic solids are easy – the tetrahedron only unfolds two ways, the cube unfolds 11 ways. I imagined a dodecahedron would unfold 100 ways, but it turns out, the answer is 43,380.” To test this, Sternof Beyer has experimented with making dodecahedrons and chopping them apart, but unsatisfied that 43,380 is really the number, he is working with an MIT mathematician on this now. “I may go down as adding something very esoteric to science,” he said.

When he moved to Astoria, Oregon, population 9,813, at age 11, Sternof Beyer would stand gazing at full parking lots outside of grocery stores – he had never seen so many cars in one place before. He would bump into people on sidewalks, not knowing how to move through a crowd. He supposes it’s likely that his isolated beginnings planted the seeds for his passions in sociology. He majored in sociology and multimedia design at the University of Oregon.

Sternof Beyer strives to make his projects “art that borders on sociological experiments, giving people opportunities to be creative. Activation of the art by people.” Some of his favorite projects are two enormous bronze feet planted outside of a used car dealership in Alexandria, Virginia; a children’s coloring menu for a restaurant in Portland, Oregon; and strategically-placed large blank canvases under trees and in rocky crevices along the Albany bulb in Berkeley, California. He dreams of one day making a harp escalator that people can play on their way up and down.

For more pictures of snow dodecahedrons in Boston, click here. To check out other projects, see Sternof Beyer’s website.

Benched

The post Plato: There’s no decahedron like a snowdecahedron appeared first on The Faster Times.

Rob Alexson, a sturdy man with an impressive mustache, was the second to greet us upon emergence from our vehicles. The first to greet us was an overwhelming stench of shit. Not fresh, familiar shit like you might smell in your own bathroom, but thousands of tons of shit in all stages of processing and decay from tens of thousands of Connecticut residents. I cannot exactly describe the smell, only that it was like shit but worse, and everywhere. Each time the wind blew there was another variation of stench. We tried to inconspicuously cover our mouths and noses with scarves and sweater sleeves, not wanting to insult the workplace of the very congenial Rob, who didn’t seem to mind the smell at all. In fact he grinned, took a deep inhale of morning air, gestured around as if to comment on the beautiful weather, and said cheerily, “Well, gang, why don’t we get started.”

We were a group of fifteen environmental educators out on a Sunday field trip mandated by our boss (who opted not to come). The Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) processes 7 million gallons of sewage per day, and maintains about 163 miles of sanitary sewer lines and 14 wastewater-pumping stations throughout the city of Torrington, a small city in northwest Connecticut. It is financed by residents who pay sewer use fees, and by the occasional grant. We were there to understand the impact and incredibly high tech workings of the modern sewage system.

Our first stop was at a small concrete room inside of which there was a waterfall. A poop waterfall, if you will. This is where all the fresh sewage comes in after the good 35,000 residents of Torrington and portions of Harwinton and Litchfield flush their toilets. The waterfall culminated in a swirling frothy pool. Clumps of toilet paper and feminine pads floated to the top. In this room, solids are separated from liquids. The strangest thing Rob, a WPCA employee of fifteen years, has found at this stage of water treatment is a fetus, perfectly intact. He also frequently finds socks, condoms, toys, money, and pet fish – both alive and dead. The solids are sent to a thickener tank where they’re concentrated and get trucked off in bricks to be incinerated. Liquids move on to a settling tank where “floatables” are skimmed off the top and “settleables” are raked away.

The next stop was at long, moving pools – aeration tanks – where water is aerated and biological treatment begins. It still smelled horrible, but the long tanks were almost completely liquid, which was more aesthetically pleasing than a tank full of “floatables.” At about this stage in the process, my co-worker Aharon Varady recalled, “I remember the small birds which flew down and perched on top of the bars coated with poo. And I remember my fear that I would drop my phone through the grate we stood on.” Phones aren’t the only things that fall in the water tanks and get lost. Rob informed us that water treatment facilities have pretty high workplace injury and even mortality rates because there are so many pools to fall into, gears to get ground in, and machines to malfunction. But there are also small miracles. Rob recalled a goldfish that came floating in on the waterfall, and lived through all stages of treatment, migrating from pool to tank through hundreds of feet of piping along with the water. It made it to the last stage of treatment, where water is chlorinated, but was unfortunately ground alive in the motor that spits the treated water back into Connecticut’s Naugatuck River. So close.

Before the water is fed back to the river, chemicals are added to convert ammonia into nitrates and then nitrates into nitrogen gas and carbon dioxide. The water then moves through a clarifying tank, is sometimes chlorinated, and then in the end is fed back to the Naugatuck River. In one of the last tanks on the property, Rob finds about $400 to $500 dollars annually floating on top. Because the dollars are unfit for circulation, Rob bleaches them, heats them, mails them back to the bank, where they are destroyed. The bank sends him fresh bills.

After several more visits to tanks and pools, I couldn’t help but ask Rob what drew him to this line of work. “When I was a little boy,” he said, “I’d lie in my bed and look out the window. It just so happened that right outside of my window was a hydrant, and I’d often see a fireman or another municipal worker letting the water out or testing the water. I knew then that I wanted to work with municipal water.” Two days after graduating high school, he got a job working with municipal water, and has been at it ever since.

A few weeks after our visit I called the office to clarify some points. Rob wasn’t in, but I spoke with another WPCA employee, John, and asked him what he liked most about working at the WPCA. “The camaraderie!” I heard one of his colleagues shout in the background. John chuckled. “Well, it’s not much to look at from the outside, but there’s a lot going on biologically. I like the chemical work, the flood dynamics, electrical equipment, hydraulics, the various emergency skills I need to practice. It’s a good place for me as an engineer to spend the last five years of my career.”

I asked John about the goldfish who lived through each stage of treatment. He didn’t know about the goldfish, but he did tell me about a family of trout that lives in the clarifying tank. “They’re native from the river,” he said. “They seem to like the high aeration of the water. Hey, we’ll have to have you over for a fish dinner.”

In the days that followed I thought about flushing notes and fun toys in Ziploc bags for Rob and his colleagues to find, but I learned that where we lived our toilets flushed into our own septic system that stayed on our property. I was amazed, though, each time I flushed, to know how much work and how many resources goes into making my little bowlful of leftover burrito into something the ecosystem can handle. I also realized why poorer countries often don’t have sustainable systems for dealing with their sewage – the sheer money and technology needed for the chemistry, raw materials, property, equipment, and worker’s salaries for the WPCA was humbling – all to deal with something so elemental and mundane as the processed food that comes out of our butts.

If this plant served 35,000 people, I couldn’t imagine what a wastewater treatment for a place like New York City must look and smell like (actually, the 14 treatment plants that deal with NYC’s 8 million residents process 1.4 billion gallons daily, employ 1,900 people, and have an annual operating budget of $262 million. You can read more about it out here). Facing the work my flushes create made me appreciate the composting toilets that use saw dust and leaves to break down human waste, the outhouses at campsites which are simply pits that get full, are covered up, and are dug anew ten feet away, and all the times I’ve dug a hole in the ground and squat when I’ve lived in rural places, instead of taking good clean water, flushing it down with a little human waste, and laboring over and throwing money at separating the waste out of the water. It makes me want to dig a hole again.

Photos by Aharon Varady and Elissa Brown

The post Shit Goes Down at the Water Treatment Plant: Facing Where It Goes After You Flush appeared first on The Faster Times.

Riding the top of the New York Times’ “Most Emailed” list the past week has been the article What Is It About 20-Somethings? Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up? It centers around the work of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a Clark University psychology professor who believes that the 20s should be recognized as a distinct life stage between adolescence and adulthood, characterized by somewhat aimless wandering into and out of jobs, relationships, and locations. “Emerging adulthood,” as Arnett calls it, can also be marked by what Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston called “youth” forty years ago: “pervasive ambivalence toward self and society,” “the feeling of absolute freedom, of living in a world of pure possibilities” and “the enormous value placed upon change, transformation and movement.” Possibly exacerbated by the terrible job market, or conversely encouraged by a life of privilege, it is easy to see “emerging adulthood,” or  “youth” in more and more twenty-somethings who have one foot in adulthood and the other in their parents’ homes, as they continue to rely on them for emotional and financial support.

Now safely eight months out of my twenties, I can look back at the past decade – a decade during which I lived in rural Arizona, rural Pennsylvania, three towns in the Berkshires, four neighborhoods of Boston, and New York City; worked as a holistic health counselor, Hebrew teacher, journalist, mountain bike leader, yoga instructor, backpacking leader, health food store cashier, farmer, editor, staff writer, and writing instructor; and enjoyed a handful of committed relationships, and many more handfuls of non-committed ones – with grateful distance. But I can still smell the “the enormous value placed upon change, transformation and movement” on my clothes.

Each job, location, and lifestyle change offered an entirely new way of experiencing the world that I didn’t want to miss. No trip to the post office, dentist, Laundromat, university, or bank was without a voyeuristic scrutiny of the life of that profession and at least a few days’ fantasy about the merits of being a postal worker, a dental hygienist, a Laundromat owner, a professor, or a mortgage lender. I couldn’t drive through a trailer park without being overcome with the need to live alone in a double-wide, and I couldn’t pass through the suburbs without envisioning myself in an apron happily baking brownies for a backyard full of kids.

I wasn’t alone in my indecision about life choices, and my chronic envy of others in theirs. My best friend left Harvard Medical School to work on a farm, tapping metal stints into trees to collect maple sap when only a month before she’d been poking metal stints into the valves of human hearts. Another friend alternated between writing and modeling, spending half of her time interviewing peasants on the dirt floors of their straw huts in Cambodia and the other part in Union Square posing for a camera in thousand-dollar lingerie. Yet another ditched a Harvard BA and then a Princeton PhD in favor of moving to the country and studying esoteric healing with a shaman.

We always understood that most people in the world couldn’t afford to vacillate this way, that jobs were scarce and many were desperate to take any they could get. But this was not a dilemma of flakiness or ingratitude for the opportunities in our lives and the privilege of choosing between them. Rather, it was a dilemma of paralysis in the face of the sheer limitless array of possibilities before us, and the near-obssessive mantra we had grown up with – you can be anything you want to be, your work should be meaningful to you and good for the world, you can do anything you put your mind to. A friend in his fifties once commented, “If my mother ever heard the term ‘fulfilling job,’ she would have broken down laughing. Her family lived on a dairy farm during the depression collecting eggs in a basket and walking two miles to town to sell them.” His comment called to mind a favorite Franz Kafka quote I had written on the inside cover of my notebooks for years: “You are free and that is why you are lost.” I never didn’t want to be free, but was acutely aware of what a burden it could present. As more “emerging adults” are choosing to explore longer and waffle longer, often forgoing such practical virtues as financial stability and career advancement, I wonder what distinguishes a healthy period of experimentation from a disorder of rootlessness and confusion, an endless quest to emerge.

I’m now readying to leave New York City for a while. After three years of living in the city, writing and teaching and finishing a masters, the growing realization that I needed some more quiet, some slower folks, and less crowds around me, finally came to a head. When I was recently offered a job in the Berkshires, I took it.

The night I decided to leave New York, I went downtown with some friends to hear bluegrass. It was a spirited and ruckus open jam in the back of a bar. Minute by minute more people flooded the bar with banjos and mandolins strapped to their backs. They stood in an expanding circle playing, singing, and yehawing with refreshing abandon. Amidst the joy and revelry an extremely annoyed and persistent waitress harassed us about keeping up with the drink minimum, refusing to bring us water until we had each ordered the required amount. Unwanted glasses of beer and shots piled up on our table as we tried to focus our attention on our friends playing music and not the ever-ticking demand we open our wallets. On the way home I was crossing the street and looked up to point out the full moon to a friend. A taxi gunning it through a yellow light nearly ran me over. Rounding the corner to my apartment, I barely avoided colliding with a couple on the sidewalk. The woman was saying to the man, “the eye is a self-cleaning organ.” The sentence struck me as an auspicious sign, as I thought about all I’ve seen here that I would have preferred not to have seen – my neighbor across the street touching himself while staring into my window, the shoeless men sleeping on the steps of the church near my house, the fights on the subway, the weariness in peoples’ eyes – gradually draining from sight.

This move and change of jobs doesn’t feel like the moves of my twenties, when I was compelled to try on identities and locales and relationships like magical dresses that would transform all aspects of life and personhood. It feels like a change rooted in a solid knowing of who I am and what I want. If you asked Arnett, perhaps he’d be quite sure I’m still exhibiting the behaviors of an ‘emerging adult,’ dragging the questions of the twenties into my third decade. But if I were to judge from how I feel inside, I have emerged.

Photo: Tiferet Zimmern-Kahan

The post 20-Somethings: You Are Free, And That is Why You Are Lost appeared first on The Faster Times.

On a snowy Chicago night a few years ago, a man named Davy walked to his car and found this letter tucked into his windshield:

Mario,

I fucking hate you. You said you had to work then whys your car HERE at HER place?? You’re a fucking LIAR. I hate you I fucking hate you.

Amber

PS Page Me Later

He loved the note, clearly intended for someone else, which so aptly showed the range of rage, vulnerability, and hilarity of human emotion, and he wanted to share it. After posting it online to a huge response, Found was born, an online collection of found photographs, love letters, to-do lists, napkin doodles, and, as their mission states, “anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.” The site includes links to similar online collections, like found grocery lists, book inscriptions, and abandoned photos.

There are so many ways to steal glimpses into other people’s lives. While sites like Overheard in New York, Texts from last night, FML: Your everyday life stories, My life is average, and FailBlog offer mostly uninspired snipits of overheard conversations, luke-warm musings, and not-quite-clever one-liners and anecdotes, more interesting and artful sites are popping up, like My Parents Were Awesome, which showcases old photographs of young couples before they became mom and dad, and Learning to Love You More, maintained by author and performance artist Miranda July. LTLYM sends readers on assignments which they complete and post, some with quite beautiful results such as: life story told in one day, or freckle constellations.

But taking our wandering eyes to a new level is the Park Avenue Laser Vision, which performs its vision-correcting surgery in a glass operating room that faces 25th Street just off Park Avenue, where it routinely encourages passersby to gawk, and friends and family to come watch the surgery around the chair in the OR, or broadcast on a high definition television in the waiting room where the faint-of-heart could watch from the comfort of leather couches.

Via Facebook, my friend David invited me and twenty others to watch his eyes being operated on. He wrote:

Hey all!! Come see my eyes go from -4.25 to 20/20 or better in about 90 seconds. That’s all it takes for them to laser my cornea, and seriously, you can be in the OR with me and watch. Or you can watch on the big screen TV right outside. Or if you really want to stay outside, you can watch from 25th Street. The point is, they like people to watch…and I’d like my friends to give me a thumbs-up and wish me luck.

He told us they’d even feed us fruit and salads and wraps. I was fascinated by this display of meta-voyeurism – watching a dissection of the thing that watches. So at five o’clock last Wednesday evening, my friends Emily, Jay and I somewhat cautiously entered Park Avenue Laser Vision to find David massaging Dr. Emil Chynn, the surgeon who in a half an hour would fire lasers into his eyes.

“Don’t get him too relaxed,” David’s sister laughed nervously, watching Dr. Chynn’s sleepy face resting in the cushioned face support of the massage chair. Offering massage to staff and visitors of the center was only one of the bargains David struck in order to lower the cost of his vision-correcting surgery. The more significant agreement was allowing his surgery to be performed in the glass operating room, and to let anyone who wanted to watch.

Emily, Jay and I were greeted by a team of sales people who insisted on giving Jay an eye test (Emily and I claimed immunity by explaining we were press), and very strongly encouraged us all to take advantage of a complementary consultation with Dr. Chynn. After Jay’s test, the staff pinned a number that indicated his vision on the front of his shirt.

There was pear-blue-cheese-grape-pistachio-spinach salad, and an array of sandwiches, cookies, and fruit spread on a glass table underneath a wall-mounted flat screen television surrounded by Dr. Chynn’s certificates and diplomas. Ten people who were considering the surgery had come to watch David’s, and lounged on the couches, with their vision numbers pinned to their fronts, eating off plastic plates and making small talk. “This how I imagine a scientology center,” Emily whispered to me.

Before the surgery, David was asked to say a few words about why he’d decided to give up glasses forever. But by then the valium he’d taken about thirty minutes prior had begun to kick in, so he stood in front of the group and simply said, “I’ve had glasses since the third grade and I’m pretty much over it.”

Several doctors then addressed the group, praising Dr. Emil Chynn and the 12,000 successful vision-correcting surgeries he has performed (with no law suits to date, they said). Dr. Chynn took the stage and described the procedure, and how his technique is different from anyone else’s in New York City – there is no cutting involved like in traditional Lasik (his surgery is called Lasek), rather he moves aside the epithelial tissue, the protective barrier of the eye, and reshapes the cornea with a laser. For three days following the surgery, the patient must keep his eyes closed and wear non-prescription contact lenses while the epithelial tissue recovers. Dr Chynn fielded questions about eye drops (you’ll need them for a while) and pain during recovery (people may experience some “discomfort” for the first day or two post-op).

Emily asked, “Have people ever freaked out that they’re in a different reality?”

Dr. Chynn replied, “Yes, a few people have felt anxious for about a month after the procedure because their vision was too sharp and they weren’t used to it. But people acclimate,” he assured her. He also said he could also change their vision back to poor if they really missed the blurry edges. He also explained that he wasn’t in the business to make money, rather because he simply wanted to help people see (though he didn’t address why he also offers Botox and eyelash extension services at the same facility).

Finally a nurse handed out blue booties and bonnets for anyone who wanted to join David in the OR, where from the waiting room I could see he was laid flat in an operating chair that looked like a dentist’s, receiving nitrous oxide through a plastic mask.

David’s eye soon filled the screen in the waiting room.

“Your iris is more unique then your thumbprint,” offered the South American doctor who stood in the waiting room with us. Dr. Chynn explained that David wasn’t feeling a thing, as he removed the “skin” of his eye. In addition to the valium and nitrous oxide, David also had numbing drops in his eyes.

After the first poke at the eye, I realized I did not have the constitution to watch, so I watched my friends’ faces instead.

It was Nip/Tuck come off the screen, Nurse Jackie played by Dr. Emil Chynn.

I soon needed a break from the doctor’s play-by-play narration, and Emily and Jay’s gasps of horror, so I took my basil mozzarella tomato panini outside to where a group of high school students had gathered to watch Dr. Chynn finish removing the skin off David’s eyeballs.

“If I come in, will they give me free coffee?” a few of the boys asked.

“They will,” I said. “There are cookies too.”

Ten kids lumbered in off the street, their backpacks bouncing behind them. The receptionist welcomed them and took all of their names and contact information. The lounge occupancy doubled as they continued to watch from inside.

I stayed outdoors where I could watch the proceedings in the fresh air.

A woman passing by paused and asked me, “Excuse me, what is this, a school?”

“No, it’s an operating room.”

“And anyone can just watch?”

“Yep.”

A receptionist from inside saw us talking and rushed over with her clipboard. “Would you like to come in for a free consultation?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Do you wear contacts or glasses? This is only for people who need to correct their vision,” I offered, trying to save her the hassle of getting involved.

“No,” she said, “my vision’s fine.”

“Well,” the receptionist countered, shooting me an annoyed glance, “you might have friends or family who could benefit from this procedure. You’re still welcome to come to a free seminar.”

“Even if I don’t get the surgery?”

“Yes.”

“That would be great! I’d love to come just to watch.”

The post The Public Eye: Watching My Friend Get Lasered appeared first on The Faster Times.

Within minutes three police cars arrived, then two large fire trucks, and an ambulance, and dozens of uniformed help swarmed the scene. I didn’t get close enough to see the woman trapped beneath the car – I didn’t want to crowd her, and I also wasn’t sure I was ready to see how gory or bleak the situation might be. There was no screaming and no blood oozing down the sidewalk, which I took as a good sign, and the faces of bystanders gazing down at her seemed more troubled and concerned than horrified or frightened. The drivers and passengers of the cabs seemed unharmed, they hovered anxiously around their vehicles, phones to ears, hands on hips, talking to police men when they were forced to, otherwise waving people away.

After about thirty minutes, the paramedics hoisted a small middle-aged woman strapped to a stretcher over the hood of the car. The crowd stilled, hushed and cleared a path to the open ambulance doors. She wore a light blue fleece and black running pants. I watched her hand clutch the guard rails as the EMTS carried her through the crowd and towards the idling ambulance. I saw her reach up and touch her forehead.

When the woman was loaded inside, people turned to each other and began comparing stories of what they had seen and heard, and discussing other accidents and near-misses they’d seen or been part of. The bizarre thing was, once the ambulance doors were closed, the gathering had the feel of a block party. It was seven o’clock on a beautiful May evening and all the neighborhood regulars were there – the doormen who stand out in the street and smile and nod when I pass by, the Thai ladies from the dry cleaners who like to ask me about my love life, the Chinese food delivery men who are always chaining and unchaining their bikes outside, the orthodox Jews who run the copy center and UPS store, it felt like an episode of sesame street.

Except that one woman in the crowd kept repeating, “It could have been any of us, any of us could have been walking there.” And a red-headed teenaged girl excitedly retold the story to anyone who paused while passing by. I began to rant about how horrendously recklessly the cabs in this city drive, how every time I take one we seem to narrowly avoid hitting numerous pedestrians, bike riders, city buses and other cars. A small group of us speculated about the insurance policies taxi companies must hold in order for their drivers to seem so legally and financially comfortable with the prospect of hitting someone or something. A friend in the crowd who had recently returned from India said he saw these types of accidents, and much worse, almost everyday. But when accidents happened there was often no help on its way.

The ambulance didn’t take off for ten minutes, and when it did it drove away slowly, which we reasoned was reassuring – if she was in critical condition wouldn’t they have flashed their lights, sounded the siren, and torn off? That this crowd of people had gathered and stayed could be an example of rubber necking, where people just can’t resist a good crash, but I was hoping it was more than that, that others in the crowd like me wanted to stick around to make sure this woman got to the ambulance ok, and to be there in case there was anything useful I could do. I didn’t live in New York during the 2003 blackout, or on 9/11, but I imagine this was a small example of the feeling of community and helpfulness that people talked about for months after. Though I was getting later by the moment for the friend I was supposed to meet, I couldn’t seem to leave the scene without knowing for sure that the ambulance would soon drive the woman to the hospital, or while the people of my neighborhood, the daily minor characters of my life, were stopped here in their evening routines, together.

Since I was a child I have struggled with occasional bouts of anxiety, which lately have taken the form of an irrational fear of fainting when no one is around to help me. When I feel an anxious dizziness start to gather in my head, I have taken great comfort in telling myself that someone will always be close by in this city – there is almost nowhere I can go where I would be alone whether a dizzy spell comes on the street, in Central Park, or at the store. I don’t know how the woman felt, surrounded by close to a hundred people while under extreme physical and emotional duress, but there seemed to be something terribly safe and comforting about all these people witnessing and waiting with her and wanting to help. The clogged arteries of the city can be infuriating when riding a bike, or running, or trying to move quickly through any long line, but in situations like these, when we’re flat on our backs and in need of help, it can be a comfort to know that there will always be others nearby, hopefully good and honest others, to dial 9-1-1, to stay until the ambulance arrives, to bring a cup of water, to check a pulse.

No one is alone here, whether they like it or not.

The post Struck: A Neighborhood Accident Reveals the Flip-Side of Rubber-Necking appeared first on The Faster Times.

Sunlight flooded the white foyer at the center of the Guggenheim, empty except for a boy and a girl wearing grey low-rise jeans and green tee shirts, pressing their hips, their lips, and their foreheads together in front of a crowd. A spectator in a fur coat turned from them with pursed lips. “Vulgar,” she said. An older couple took a seat on a stone bench, their backs to a wishing fountain floored with pennies, and seemed to be trying to figure out just where the art was in this new generation. An overweight couple joined hands, moved to a periphery of the performance space, and started their own slow motion make-out session, smiling smugly as if they were the first pair to think of such a thing. “Kiss,” a performance piece created by Tino Sehgal in 2002, in which two professional dancers press against each other, is the first work you will see when entering the Guggenheim (on until March 10th). But the distance established between performer and viewer will be quickly dissolved as you make your way up the first white ramp of the Guggenheim spiral.

A small boy with sand-colored hair thrust his arm at me. I gave him my hand to shake. “Hi. I’m Aiden,” he said quietly. “This is a work by Tino Sehgal. Would you like to follow me?” He led me into a brightly lit alcove with blank white walls. Other people were staring at the walls up close, trying to figure out what art they were missing. “May I ask you a question?” the-ten-year-old asked me. “What is progress?” While I attempted an answer (“Progress is moving forward,” I said) Aiden guided me up the first ramp and challenged me to clarify my thoughts. “Can you give an example?” he gently prodded. I said, “A computer.” After rounding a corner we stopped in front of a teenage boy in jeans and blue sweatshirt, leaning against a column. “This is William,” Aiden said. Turning to William he explained, “I’ve been told that progress is moving forward. An example of this is a computer.” He pivoted and walked down the ramp.

I only half-listened as William shared half-baked philosophy about personal progress and change, while I scanned the empty walls of the rotunda. After some unsuccessful attempts at engaging me in conversation, William delivered me into the hands of a woman in her early thirties. She wore a black dress and had dark brown hair and wide brown eyes. She began matter-of-factly, “In our age, where all landscapes are mapped and viewable online, it seems harder and harder to get lost.” She encouraged me to walk up the spiral with her while she explained her nostalgia for an age where people truly could explore untraveled terrain, a mysterious frontier. “Do you think it’s a shame we can’t get lost anymore?” She asked me.

“I get lost all the time,” I answered, growing impatient with the forced conversation and what I might be missing by being ushered through the museum so quickly.

She opened her wide eyes wider. “How?”

“In my mind, in my life, in the city.” Encouraged by beginning to feel like I’d managed to retain some wild disorientation in my life, I continued, “I lead backpacking trips and have gotten lost in untrampeled woods beyond cell phone range. I was the most truly lost one spring in southern California when I hiked a few miles away from a friend’s house on a morning walk and found myself profoundly turned around under hot sun where the small shrubs and sandy earth looked the same in every direction. It was the days before cell phones and the time before college, when I was wandering the country with a backpack. I was lost in almost every way I could have been.”

“I wish I were more like you,” she said as we came to a narrow space between a column and a low wall. She motioned for me to go ahead of her as she continued, “I feel like I set…” I turned around to catch the last of her sentence but she had vanished. There was only the white column behind me, and I was alone. In that moment my brain froze, trying to grasp the trick it had been dealt, and it was then I got on board with the “piece.” In my vision was glowing white space, in my head the shock of silence after her sentence was cut short. I felt like a character in the movie Waking Life, in which a disembodied protagonist walks through a dreamscape encountering strange characters who quickly, awkwardly, and randomly morph from one to the other. When I turned forward again a woman in her fifties stood before me and greeted me warmly, sensing my surprise.

We continued to walk, now on our last ramp of the spiral. She chatted bout the dilemmas she faced as a progressive parent. Her son wanted to join the boy scouts but how could she let him be part of an organization that doesn’t allow gay members? She asked me what I thought my parents might have done. At the top of the spiral she said, “This piece is called ‘This Progress.’” She smiled, shook my hand, and disappeared into the back stairwell.

If you say ‘no thank you’ to the child who approaches you at the beginning (as about 50 percent of visitors do), you miss the only entrance to the main exhibit at the Guggenheim right now. Some angry museum-goers who had rushed by the children–in such a hurry to take in art that they missed it–demanded their money back at the end of their visits, angry at having spent $20 on an empty museum. (This is the first time in the museum’s fifty-year history that the entire rotunda is cleared of art objects–and the space is even more stunning when empty. It provides a rare chance to look up at the Guggenheim’s glass ceiling, which is almost always covered to protect the paintings hanging on the walls.)

Sehgal’s work asks the mindlessly shuffling consumers of art to do something more than gaze at paintings and read texts on the walls. There is nothing to take in from the main museum other than the interactions taking place, the people moving through the space, and the ideas being discussed. He wants patrons to engage with the work on display, and to shift from being voyeurs to participants who create the museum and its art as they walk through it.

The post More Than a Fleeting Glance: Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim appeared first on The Faster Times.

Thanks to the internet, you don’t have to leave your house to be a voyeur. You don’t even have to look out your window. It’s old news that there’s really nothing we normally do in person that can’t now be done on the web, and that includes helping search for the missing in Haiti and mourning the crash victims of Ethiopian flight 409. The past month has been a particularly harsh one, for our country, yes, but especially internationally as the earthquake in Haiti and the Ethiopian Airlines crash off the coast of Lebanon left thousands grieving and thousands more wishing they could somehow help. Though most of us are stuck on native soil watching the disasters unravel in papers, on televisions, and online, the internet has provided ways we can help and condole from our desk chairs.

The New York Times hosts an interactive feature for the missing in Haiti that feels like the back of a virtual milk carton. The home page displays a photo of a young girl in a yellow dress; a smiling man in a cap and gown, the blue tassel hanging to the left; an older man leaning back in an easy chair, smiling while he reads a book, and many others. Clicking on a photograph directs you to a page with the person’s name, their last known location, and comments from the friends or family who posted the photo. The family of the man in the cap and gown posted, “Davidson is DEAF and in his 20′s.  He and his wife live in Port-au-Prince…There has been no contact with friends in the US and nobody here can make contact with anyone in Port-au-Prince.  Please help!!!” Beneath the description is a field for anyone with helpful information to leave a comment. You can also type “found” into a search box on the site’s homepage to see a list of names of people that have been located. Next each name it says either (Found, Alive) or (Found, Deceased).

It’s unclear how effective the site has been in its goal of connecting the missing in Haiti with the people looking for them overseas. The Times posted daily updates on who has been found immediately following January 12th, but that seems to have tapered off around January 16th. As we move farther from the day of the quake, the site is  reminiscent of the trees tied with ribbons, tacked with letters and photos, and covered in melted candle wax that mark accident sites along main roads. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also maintains a Family Links Site for those “seeking to restore contact with family members after the earthquake in Haiti.” There are three links on their page: “List of Names,” “I am Alive,” and “Missing Relative.”

The crash of Ethiopian flight 409 has garnered online support as well, as Facebook users have created a page aimed at supporting and informing those affected by the crash. The group Support of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 Crash, created the day of the crash, offered its “fans” updates on the search effort every few hours (“passenger seats, baby sandals and other debris washed ashore. At least 34 bodies were recovered.” January 25, 2010 10:45 am), and continues to post related status updates like this one from January 29th: “Great News! The black box is found! The flight data recorder, critical to the accident investigation, was located about 4,300 feet under water and would soon be retrieved.”

These online glimpses of other people’s dog-eared family photographs and heartfelt pleas for help take our natural rubber-neck syndrome to its philanthropic potential – an attempt to help, or failing that, to offer support. Prayer and words of comfort have always been immaterial, now they float through our ether in a different way, sent from computers to satellites in space, and back down to earth to a different glowing screen, set before a different pair of eyes, in a very different place.

The post Like Faces on a Virtual Milk Carton: Searching for the Missing Online appeared first on The Faster Times.

The other day I was riding the bus from my apartment in the nineties up to Columbia University. It was too cold to walk there; too cold, I deemed, to even walk the extra block from the bus stop to the subway. So I sat in the back corner of the bus where the warm air from the engine blasted through the vents, heating the blue felt seats. A boy and a girl clambered on, hunched under their big backpacks. They were twelve, maybe thirteen years old. The girl sat next to the window on the opposite side of my bench, and the boy sat next to her, one seat from me, leaning into her so that she was smashed between him and the window. He put his face next to her face. “Smile if you like me,” he said. She held her mouth in a tight line. “Aw come on. Touch me if you like me,” he said, sliding his hand up and down her jean-clad leg. “Yeah, you’re touching me. You like me. You want me.” The girl rolled her eyes but her head was turned away from him, towards the window and the passing blocks outside.

Tiny faint hairs spiked above his upper lip. Her hair was pulled into dozens of tight braids bunched in an elastic at the back of her neck. “Why you so serious all the time?” he asked. “What you thinking about in your big eyes, huh?”

I wanted to give him a shove. “Give her some space,” I wanted to say. But I’ve read the paper. I know kids these days. They’ll fight you. They have knives and guns. They’re not afraid of adults. This kid was scrawny, he didn’t seem dangerous, but you never know. I turned and glared at him from a seat away, arching an eyebrow and narrowing my eyes in what I hoped would be discouraging disapproval. He glanced over and frowned at me, but I kept my gaze steady at him until he turned away. Facing the girl again, increasing his pressured lean onto her body, he reached into the deep pockets of his coat. He took out an oblong red and yellow mango. “You want it?” he asked, shoving it under her nose.

“I don’t want your mango,” she said. “Back up off me.” She gave him a weak shove.

The boy tucked the mango back into his jacket and kept pushing her against the window and she kept staring out that window, not saying anything, not pushing back, not even looking at him, all the way up Amsterdam Avenue. She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself, but she didn’t get up and walk away either. I was sweating inside my winter jacket, less from the barrage of hot engine air than from thinking that this kid would grow up pushing women around his whole life, getting in their faces, whistling and calling out names, and women would politely give him an ineffectual roll of the eyes, a little push away, but mostly endure it.

When my stop came at 116th Street I glared at him again before standing up and heading for the door.

“Bye bitch,” he said to me.

I froze in front of the door at a loss for words. I wanted to say, “She doesn’t like you. Leave her alone.” But who says that to a young kid? The back doors were open and the driver looked up into his rearview mirror to see what the hold-up was. I gave a little snort and arched my eyebrow trying to insult him wordlessly one last time, then stepped off the bus feeling silenced and disappointed.

As I stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change, I wondered if I should have taken the opportunity to educate this boy. “This is not the way you get girls to like you,” I could have said. “You are rude and unattractive,” I could have pointed out. Meanwhile, the boy had slid across the row of seats to the window nearest me, and was pressing his middle finger to the glass, making a snarling face. I stuck my middle finger up and snarled back. He seemed shocked then delighted at the image of an adult carrying a laptop in one hand, flipping him off with the other. The boy bounced on his seat and clapped his hands over his mouth, waving the indifferent girl over to see the crazy lady in the street. “She doesn’t like you!” I yelled over the idling bus engine as I jostled my finger around in the air. “She can’t stand you!”

A friend once told me I’d know I was a true New Yorker when I started swearing at women pushing strollers down the street. Standing on the sidewalk, waving my middle finger at a fifth grader, I wasn’t quite there yet, but I realized with a start that I seemed to be moving in the right (wrong?) direction.

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