It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That map is notable for the way its line curves match the street grid.

This reminded me of the KickMap by Kick Design, which takes a similar hybrid approach in its attempt to display the entire subway system and its relation to the city as cleanly as possible. The KickMap is stylized for clarity but its stations are location-accurate and a comprehensive street grid is used.

The KickMap is I think the most successful current map of the amazingly complex New York City subway system (the MTA thought otherwise), and you can put it on your iPhone.

Berman also uploaded this 1939 map of the never-built IND Second System, which would have put a subway stop within a half-mile of anyone’s home in New York City. They’re just getting around to construction of the Second Avenue line proposed then.

But much of Berman’s efforts lately seem to be focused on creating maps of entire city transit systems, particularly in areas served by different transit agencies that ignore one another. Here’s a map combining the regional commuter rail lines of Greater New York:

And here’s San Francisco’s complete rail system (BART, CalTrain and SF Muni united! Downloading this now because this always baffles me when I visit):

He’s also got some ideas on bicycle infrastructure for the suburbs.

(Gratuitous Picture of Your Book Shelf Sunday)

Annotated on Flickr.

A personal announcement: After more than four years immersed in all things web-, blog- and ecommerce-related at the 92nd Street Y (new look/season/brand launching Thursday)—a place I love and have had the privilege of contributing to while working alongside some truly amazing people—I’m moving on to another amazing place: Etsy. Specifically the product team. And the busiest and Best Summer Ever continues.

Given the number of performances, talks and events at the 92nd St. Y, you’d expect a blog about same to be compelling reading and viewing (lots of videos). And so it is.

I didn’t want to admit it to myself before, but I’ve been in training for my street Scrabble debut in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Anagramming, stocking up on brain supplements, the works. Scrabulous on Facebook is wholly to blame. That and the movie Word Wars, which features Marlon Hill, my favorite Pan-Africanist Scrabble player; G.I. Joel Sherman, who’s currently getting the profile treatment by my friend Tom Brennan; and three-time National Scrabble Champion Joe Edley, who will be leading a Scrabble master class at the 92nd Street Y November 4. Read all about him on the 92Y Blog.

That’s an animated gif above of Joe Edley’s 2000 championship game vs. Brian Cappelletto. It’ll stop looping once you get a feel for the blistering rhythm of championship Scrabble gameplay. You can learn from the masters with the NSA’s annotated Scrabble games.

Putting aside the liberated columnists, who I look forward to reading again, the truly great thing about TimesSelect was the access it granted to the Times‘ rich archives. Beginning today you still have to pay to download material from much of the 20th century up until 1987, but the public-domain content from 1851-1922 is freely available and searchable and waiting to be mined.

This calls for celebration in the form of downloadable highlights with excerpts.

Joseph Collins’ 1922 review of Ulysses [PDF]:

That [James Joyce] has a message there can be no doubt… [and] he is determined to tell it in a new way. Not in straightforward, narrative fashion, with a certain sequentiality of idea, fact, occurrence, in sentence, phrase and paragraph that is comprehensible to a person of education and culture, but in parodies of classic prose and current slang, in perversions of sacred literature, in carefully metered prose with studied incoherence, in symbols so occult and mystic that only the initiated and profoundly versed can understand—in short, by means of every trick and illusion that a master artificer, or even magician, can play with the English language.

Before proceeding with a brief analysis of “Ulysses,” and comment on its construction and its content, I wish to characterize it. “Ulysses” is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and “The Brothers Karamazov” Dostoyevsky. It is likely that there is no one writing in English today that could parallel Mr. Joyce’s feat, and it also likely that few would care to do it were they capable.

Oscar Wilde’s Disgrace: A Mother, Wife, and Two Children Must Share His Shame (1895):

Aside from the depravity that it has been necessary to make public in the downfall of Oscar Wilde, people who met him here, and accepted his letters of introduction as an accredited English gentleman, are curious to know something of his family, his mother, his wife, his children, and almost everybody else upon whom he has brought absolute ruin.

CUBISM IS BARRED FROM AUTUMN SALON Special Cable to The New York Times (1913):

“Cubism and Futurism are officially dead. We sealed their fate at the jury meeting last week… Until this year there have been more Poles and Russians on the jury than French, but last Spring, at a secret meeting, a rule was established preventing a foreign majority, for they were first responsible for the freaks, and they are solidly this year for everything freakish, and also everything off color morally.”

Vorticism the Latest Cult of Rebel Artists (1914):

The inevitable paradox has occurred. Futurism is a thing of the past. Vorticism has come.

What is Vorticism? Well, like Futurism, and Imagisme, and Cubism, essentially it is nonsense. But it is more important than these other fantastic, artistic, and literary movements because it is their sure conclusion. It is important not because it is the latest, but because it is the last phase of the ridiculous rebellion which has given the world the “Portrait of a Nude Descending the Stairs” and the writings of Gertrude Stein. It is the reductio ad absurdum of mad modernity. The symbol of the Vorticists is an inverted black funnel apparently spinning on a perpendicular rod. It looks something like an extinguisher and something like a dunce-cap, but probably it is intended to be the portrait of a Vortex.

Bolsheviki Stern Critics of Art: Discourage Mediocrity by Making Painters Scrape Off Pictures Exhibitions Reject (1920):

“Art is greatly encouraged by the Bolsheviki. There are frequent exhibitions, each containing about 1,000 pictures. Therefrom 300 of the best are selected and bought by the State at a handsome price for distribution throughout the country. The rest are burnt—an effective but somewhat drastic method to discourage mediocrity. At least that was the original practice, but recently owing to the shortage of canvas, &c., I am informed that painters of reject pictures now get them back with orders to scrape off their wretched daub and try to accomplish something better next time.

“A sign of the changed times is the great interest taken by the masses in art. One of my friends wrote that literally hundreds of people crowded round him while he was painting a futuristic picture of the market in Moscow. One Philistine, who declared the artist was making fools of them because the picture resembled nothing on earth, was ducked in a nearby horse-trough. Evidentally futurism has come to stay in Russia.

More to come I’m sure.

“The Facebook guys are betting that the next fad or fun thing will be built on Facebook, not the internet.”
-James Hong, co-founder, Hot or Not

“I’ve been writing a blog comparing web 2.0 to hip-hop. The five elements of web 2.0 vs. the five elements of hip-hop. You know about the five elements of hip-hop, right? There’s breakdancing, DJing, graffiti, MCing and, um.. another one. Then there’s the five elements of web 2.0: blogging, RSS, podcasting, tagging and embedding.”
-Guy in the row in front of me

It was not a good time for the arts. We barely worked at all, and could not obtain a commission to present our songs during the five-day festival of Minerva. The atmosphere was grim and deteriorating daily. An occasional lyrical collaborator of ours, primarily a writer of Atellan farces, had just been burned alive in the amphitheater for penning a line which had an amusing double-entendre. Another collaborator, best known for the short poem in hexameters titled “Reply to Brutus’ Eulogy of Cato,” was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Mnester the comedian, and, as punishment, was sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a snake and a monkey, and cast into the river. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on had been expelled from the city. People could now be executed for carrying a coin bearing Augustus’ head into a lavatory or brothel. Foreign kings were detained in the capital – Maroboduus the German, Rhascuporis the Thracian, Archelaus of Cappadocia – all of whose kingdoms had lately been reduced to provincial status.

We survived on meager payment from the occasional private concert given on a Sunday afternoon in the quarters of a wealthy family originating from Aricia, which boasted many ancestral busts of senators. Woe to us, the payment from these private concerts was made in barley bread instead of the customary wheat ration. While we played for varying members of the family, others congregated in the anteroom and gesticulated violently, plotting an attack on the Senate House to kill as many senators as convenient, bickering and accusing one another of incompetence for a recent failed attempt in which the ringleader did not give the agreed upon signal of letting his gown fall to expose his shoulder.

We waxed reflective on more prosperous times. Gone were the days when our great patron and protector held sway, and we were paid handsomely for our performances: ten packs of grain and an additional ten pounds of oil, fresh hand-pressed cheese and green figs of the second crop. Back in those days of vanity, we would find the time to soften the hair on our legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells. Who among us cannot recall our great benefactor, resplendent in his glory, the abolisher of the half-per-cent auction tax, attending the garrison Games and throwing down javelins at a wild boar let loose in the arena? On the discovery of his passing, because of the dark stains which covered his body and the foam on his lips, poison was greatly suspected. With his death announcement, the populace threw their household gods into the streets, and princes shaved their beards as a token of profound grief. Not knowing how to survive in this difficult environment, we debated whether to consecrate all our songs jointly to Neptune and Mars, and cautiously venture back into the wild interior, with the intention of subsisting there indefinitely. How else could artists such as we hope to practice their art in such godless times?

There’s a lot more where that came from on the Twenty % Tippers’ website. No idea what they sound like but they’ve earned a following with these subway flyers.

Previously: The Christ Conspiricy [sic]

• Art song: “Considered by afficionados to create musical experiences unsurpassed in sophistication, subtlety and dramatic truth.” Well, then.
• Pneumatic tubes: Did you know about the 60-kilometer pneumatic-tube mail-delivery system in Prague? Paris had a similar network of pneumatic tubes in use for mail delivery until 1984.
• Savile Row: Mentally preparing to shell out for a bespoke suit.
• Travelator: That high-speed walkway they have in Paris should immediately be installed at the Columbus Circle subway station here in Manhattan. Note: “it has been estimated that commuters using a [high-speed walkway] twice a day would save 11.5 hours a year.” Don’t we need these in New York more than they need them in France? This Wikipedia visit took place after idly searching for the name of the song in the background of the Geico commercial with the indignant caveman at the airport (it’s “Remind Me” by Royksopp).
• Cumberlandite: Extremely rare rock that only exists in Rhode Island. Often mistaken for meteorites; deemed sacred by the Nipmuck Indians.
• Steampunk: Cory Doctorow’s posts on Boing Boing finally got me to investigate this further. I told you history blogging is the new Twitter.
• Graham cracker: Originally developed by Reverend Sylvester Graham to suppress “unhealthy carnal urges.”
• 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + · · ·: Good visuals.
• List of places blurred out on Google Maps: New York is currently the most blurred-out state.
• Coral Content Distribution Network: Cory Doctorow (there he is again!) used this to help distribute our recent 92Y Blog podcast of Kurt Vonnegut. Had to find out what the hell it is.