Closer To The Ideal

Lark and I took off our pants yesterday and rode around on the New York City subways. It was the 9th Annual No Pants Day. A few thousand people took part. This is one of those ironic, subversive jokes that’s lets you see, very visibly, who else belongs to your tribe (your cultural tribe, that is). The event was organized by Improv Everywhere. The way it works is, people gather at a few points around the city, then go to the subway, and get on the trains. Once you are on the train, you take off your pants. It is important that you act totally normal. You should not laugh. You should not look at each other. You certainly shouldn’t act like something odd is going on. If anyone asks you why you don’t have pants, you are suppose to respond with something like “I was feeling warm. I think I overdressed this morning.”

The reactions we got from people were priceless. We had about 15 pantless people on our particular train car. Commuters would get on the train, look around, see that most of the train was dressed in their underwear and… well, we got all kinds of reactions.

The context is important, especially the weather. It was 16 degrees when I woke up. At the warmest part of the day, it got up to 25 degrees. On a hot summer day this stunt would be less obvious, but when it is 25 degrees, no pants is noteworthy.

The event started at 3 PM. Lark and I went into Brooklyn, to a park near the DeKalb subway station. There were something between 100 to 200 people there. A man with a bullhorn explained to us the rules. There were also 10 captains – as I said, this was well organized. We divided into 10 teams, each to target a particular subway car. One of the rules was that only a few people should take off their pants at each stop. We divided ourselves up into 2s and 3s of people who would take off their pants at each stop. Another rule was, after you take off your pants, you have to get off the train at the next stop, then get on the next train – this is to ensure that a lot of people end up seeing a pantless crowd.

Then we walked to the subway. We talked to each other while waiting for the train. Once the train arrived, we had to pretend that we did not know each other. We all got on. The train started moving. The first couple took off their pants. Then they got off at the next stop. Lark and I had volunteered for the 3rd stop, so after the 2nd station we took off our pants. There was a very large, heavy set black man sitting between us. He kept looking back and forth at us, more than a little puzzled.

We got off at the next station. There were 3 or 4 pantless people getting off from every car in the train, so now there were about 30 pantless people standing on the landing. The landing was dead empty of normal people, so we felt free to talk to each other.

Then the next train came. We again pretended we didn’t know each other. We got back on. We were headed into Manhattan.

The urge to laugh was so strong that for the first 15 minutes I had to stare at the advertisements, which I read over and over and over. Once I made the mistake of looking toward Lark. I almost instantly started to laugh, so I went back to reading the ads.

I’d say we got 2 basic reactions – “You are a freak” and “This is a hilarious joke”. The younger people generally got that this was some kind of stunt. Older folks didn’t necessarily get that it was a joke. One woman got on our train, looked around, saw that most of the train was in its underwear, and immediately she stepped off the train.

I was standing by the door. One woman came in through the door, saw how I was dressed, decided I was some kind of freak, and then she immediately backed away from me, and turned to move elsewhere in the train. Then she realized the whole train was full of freaks. She
simply stood there, rigidly, for the rest of the ride.

At one point some women were taking off their pants next to some teenage boys. Their facial reaction was something like “Oh my god, are all my secret fantasies finally coming true?”

Among the commuters, I saw a lot of women who were trying to be polite by not laughing out loud. They would get on the train, look around, then cover their mouth with their hand. I could tell they were laughing from the way their shoulders shook, but they did not laugh
out loud.

Once I’d been on the train for 20 minutes, it got easier to not laugh. One 20-something guy got on our train, did a double-take at all the half-dressed people, and asked me, “Why is everyone on this train in their underwear?” I was proud of the fact that I never broke a smile when I replied, “I was feeling warm. I think I overdressed this morning.” Frustrated by that answer, he turned to Lark and asked her. She said, “I have no idea.”

One of the oddest reactions we got was from a young guy who got on the train, saw how we were dressed, and started photographing all of it with his cell phone. Possibly because we were trying to act normal, he felt no need to respect our normal personal boundaries. He would lean in close to people’s crotches and take close-up photos. Of course, we all pretended that this was normal. We ignored him.

Some gender stereotypes were mostly true – the men had boring underwear (boxers) the women had cute underwear, but a few of the guys wore very tight briefs, so you could see everything underneath. With both genders, there was a range of exhibitionism, some showing more, some showing less.

All of the various subway rides ended at Union Square, where there was a big pantless rally. The tourists were walking around us trying to figure out what was going on. It would be an understatement to say they were confused. They went around taking photos of this interesting New York fashion custom. Benjamin Franklin once said, “3 people can keep a secret only if 2 of them are dead”, but he would have changed his mind if he’d been at the rally. The tourists kept asking “Why isn’t anyone wearing their pants?” and no one ever gave them a straight answer. “I was just getting comfortable” was a common answer, though not very believable on a day that was 24 degrees. I also heard “InStyle had an article, they said skin is the new black.” This is rare – hundreds of people all keeping the joke, not breaking character.

I guess because this has happened 8 previous years, but there were jokes being made on the joke, irony piled on top of the irony. One guy at the rally was going around evangelizing people about pants: “Have you accepted pants into your life? Millions of people, all over the
world, have accepted pants into their lives, and it has brought them joy and fulfilment and meaning.” He did a fantastic parody of a Christian preacher. This was a very elaborate joke, too, he had printed up hundreds of pamphlets about the history of pants, pamphlets with testimonials from other people who had accepted pants into their lives and found happiness, and he had a big sign around his body that asked “Are you missing something?”. He stayed in character the whole time.

The biggest surprise for me was how long it was possible to deal with the cold. I was worried I wouldn’t last 5 minutes, but somehow the nervousness, maybe the adrenaline, made it easy to withstand the cold for a long time.

If I’m around next year, I’ll do this again, but in a business suit, with expensive shoes and an expensive silk tie, and loud, polka-dot boxers. The contrast should be pretty damn funny.

Here is a reason I love New York – aside from San Francisco, where else in the country can you organize a joke like this and get a few thousand people to participate?

There is a video of last year’s events on the Improv Everywhere site.

Richard Ankrom’s art is also an example of the power of direct action to fix social problems.

An artist named Richard Ankrom had the same experience, and so he did what any fed-up Los Angeles driver would do: He began designing a simple directional tool to help drivers prepare for the 5’s poorly-marked, hairpin exit. He designed and sewed a Caltrans uniform, cut the shield-like “5″ shape as well as a “NORTH” from sheet metal, and affixed the reflectors to match the existing system. He even gave the signage a nice dusting of L.A. smog-sheen so it wouldn’t look glaringly new. And on August 5, 2001, in broad daylight, he hoisted a ladder onto Gantry 21300, walked onto a catwalk above one of the city’s busiest arteries, and installed his own freeway sign. This collage of six time-lapsed photos shows how he did it. There are more on Ankrom’s site.

Maybe Angelenos really are too busy text messaging against the steering wheel and applying mascara with the help of the visor mirror to truly pay attention to the view out their windshields. And perhaps we do have a bit of a bureaucracy problem with our state government. Either way, no one noticed it for nine months.

Ankrom eventually leaked the story to the Downtown News, stunning millions of duped commuters, and effectively coming clean to Caltrans. But Caltrans knew Ankrom was right. For eight years, the sign remained. Christopher Knight reviewed it for the Los Angeles Times as if it was a public art piece. A video and an exhibition were created of Ankrom’s work, and he was featured on pretty much every news outlet you could imagine, from local to international. And every time I saw the hand-applied NORTH 5, I felt like the ultimate L.A.-insider for knowing the story behind it.

To me, it was Los Angeles’s Single Greatest Secret—and it became my single favorite L.A. thing to share with people. Most people who lived here had never heard the tale, so like a cultural ambassador, I felt it was my duty to tell them. I worked it into a review I wrote for Print Magazine about a book on effective wayfinding systems. When giving people directions I would point it out like a landmark. (”Be sure to look at the sign as you’re heading north on the 110…no, no don’t go north on the 5, look at the sign.”) Anyone lucky enough to be in a car with me while heading northbound on the 110 would get the full narrative, which I had timed perfectly to a grand reveal as we sailed under the glittery, counterfeit characters.

I’ve been reading John C. Bogle’s book, Enough. He makes the argument that we live in an era where our business leaders have forgotten what enough is. However much they have, they need more: more cars, more jets, more yachts, more homes, more money. Bogle feels that the ethical lapses we’ve seen in recent years were facilitated by the loss of the concept of enough. It is a good book. People who are interested in questions of business ethics should read it.

On a related note, today the news page over at YCombinator pointed to this old article “How Much Scratch is Enough?” written by Ryan D’Agostino.

Okay, let’s see. Say I give myself eight years—no, better make it ten. Just to be safe. I figure I’ll definitely want a great apartment in Manhattan. Near Central Park. Plus a summer house in, say, the Carolinas. Nothing too big, but nice. Also, enough to put a couple of kids through college. Prep school too. Oh, and Colorado. A condo, on the slopes. Gotta have a nice set of wheels—Beemer—and an SUV (to get around Colorado). Then maybe I’ll open up a little cafe somewhere, or get a boat. Yeah, a boat would be cool. Ten years. Figure $15 million. I think I can do it. But then I’m out. Definitely. Out for good. Just sailing around on my boat.

This is how it starts: with a pledge. A promise to yourself that you will make a certain amount of money—that you will hit your number—by a certain age, and that you will, upon reaching that carefully calculated goal, get out. Go sail your boat. Or open your bookstore or your bed and breakfast, or be a philanthropist or whatever. You won’t have to worry about money. You’ll invest a big, juicy nugget and live off the interest, which will be more than enough.

For some people, though, that word becomes a stumbling block: enough. It makes the calculations tricky, and sometimes, it changes the plan. Enough creeps slowly but steadily upward, like ivy spreading imperceptibly over an entire side of a house, and once it does you can’t picture what the house looked like before. At first, you aim high—way into the millions—and while part of you knows that chances are you won’t really end up with that much, part of you knows there’s a chance you will. You see the number in big, block numerals in your mind, and the corners of your mouth curl up into a little smile, just for a second, when you picture yourself hitting the mark.

Bogle and D’Agostino are both criticizing consumption (cars, houses, jets, etc). I’ve no problem with that. I’m critical of consumption too. But I think it is odd that they both write as if consumption is the only thing that a person might want money for.

For my part, I will never have enough money.

I have in my head an unlimited number of ideas for new businesses. Some are web-based, and of these, some are content sites and some offer a software service. But also, some of the businesses I’d like to pursue have nothing to do with the web. I’ve some software ideas to help biologists and, in particular, to help people learn biology (I’ve just been studying biology myself, so I’m aware of things that could help me learn it better). Some of these ideas are simple, such as a calculator that allows certain kinds of very easy programming (easier than Matlab). And having only recently started studying advanced math, I’m aware that people who take up math as adults, and who are self-taught, may have a set of questions that are different than what high school students ask. And I’ve various creative endeavors I’d like pursue. For instance, I’ve been writing a screenplay for a movie loosely based on the events that occurred at Enron.

The various ideas I’ve got in my head right now could keep me busy for 40 years, and I could easily burn through $200 million pursing them all. I really doubt that I’m going to succeed at all of these endeavors, and I seriously doubt I’ll ever have anything like that kind of money, but I figure I might as well just give it a try and see how far I get. And if a miracle happens, and I end up with $200 million, I’m very certain that by that time my overall goals will have expanded to the point that I’ll need a billion to fund my further ambitions.

I will never have enough money.

D’Agostino suggests that when you finally get the millions of dollars that you’ve been aiming for, you smile: “You see the number in big, block numerals in your mind, and the corners of your mouth curl up into a little smile, just for a second, when you picture yourself hitting the mark.”

I think the opposite is true: the most exciting part of launching a new business is the first dollar that you get. The first few dollars bring a huge thrill, even though the numbers are trivial:

“Our first $100 dollars!”

And then:

“Out first $1,000 dollars!”

And then:

“OMIGOD! Our first $10,000 dollars!”

After awhile the thrill starts to fade. No one celebrates when a new business reaches the $30,000 mark. I assume there is some satisfaction to reaching a $1,000,000 (never been there myself) but I have trouble imagining it is as exciting as the first few dollars that come in, those early dollars that give you your first clue that maybe you’ve a product or service that people will actually want to give you money for.

I do not need multiple cars, houses, jets or yatchs. 10 years from now, I’ll be happy if I have a small apartment in New York City, my current Volvo, which I hope to keep going despite some body rust, and $100,000,000 of software projects that are all going well.

In his fictional scenario (I assume it is fictional) D’Agostino says: “But then I’m out. Definitely. Out for good. Just sailing around on my boat.”

I can’t imagine ever wanting to get out. The thrill of launching and running a business is the most fun thing I’ve yet discovered. If I got out, what would I do? I’d simply get back in.

Darren Hoyt and his wife discovered a remarkable scene one day of a turtle, a frog and a spider. They took a photo of the scene, which became popular. And then, sad to say, some newspapers began stealing the photo without attribution:

Apparently, she first discovered the photo and backstory in OK! Magazine, one of England’s sleazier tabloids. I hadn’t given permission to any magazine, so I started Googling around.

Turns out another British publication, the Daily Telegraph, had also published the photo, initially crediting it to WENN (World Entertainment News Network). WENN is largely known for supplying paparazzi/celebrity photos to the entertainment media.

In fact someone from WENN had contacted me months before, but I’d refused to provide a hi-res photo unless I was told what in what context it would be used. I never got a response, but the photo was taken from Flickr anyway.

The lady at WENN seemed a little startled that I’d called their London office directly. She agreed to remove the photo from their database, but offered little in the way of an explanation, apology, or disclosure about how much money was exchanged for the photo. Since then I’ve been told the photo had been scooped up and sold by mistake, and would be removed from WENN’s database. Mistake or no, I suspect this isn’t uncommon at all.

My dad had a popular lecture that he used to give to amateur photo clubs about the value of the occasional great photo. During his 57 year career, he took 700,000 shots, of which he would immediately discard 90%. He was left with about 70,000 high quality shots that got picked up by stock agencies and other organizations that agreed to represent his work. Of these photos, about 80% never made a single sale. Only 5% had multiple sales. The best 2% (of the 10% he did not discard) accounted for more than half his income.

When I was a child, I heard story after story about the surprise best sellers. One morning in 1970 he walked out the front door with a camera in his hand and, seeing a butterfly on a flower in the front yard, took a picture of it. He had taken dozens of other butterfly photos, but for some reason that one went on to make $17,000 over the next 15 years (triple the figure to adjust for inflation).

One 4th of July in the early 1980s he took some night shots of the fireworks, which he then comped together in his darkroom using traditional photo overlay techniques (this is more than 10 years before Photoshop). Though he had dozens of other fireworks shots (which didn’t sell), this one went on to make $36,000 over the course of many years.

His biggest surprise was when he went to Morocco as part of a tour for other professional photographers. For two weeks they were taken around in a bus to famous spots. He recalls one time they all got out at a famous mosque and stood their photographing its golden dome. He looked to his left and to his right and saw 15 other professional photographers clicking away. He thought to himself, “I’ll never make any money on these shots. We are all pros and we are all taking the same shot.” But the next day they were out in the desert, photographing a ruined, abandoned fort. There were no other human beings in sight, only the bus and the bus driver and the photographers. But then my dad looked off to his right and in the distance, saw a man, dressed all in white, come over a sand dune. The scene reminded my dad of one of his favorite novels, The Martian Chronicles, a scene of infinite desert, and there in the middle, the impossibly lonely figure of a single human being walk across a vast expanse of pure sand. So my dad took that shot, which the other photographers did not think to take, and that became his best selling photo of Africa. Several encyclopedias and travel guides bought the rights to it.

In the late 90s the arrival of Photoshop and CDs full of royalty free images changed the industry, and it became harder to make a living, but my dad found that the top 1% (of that 10% he had not discarded) of his photos continued to generate some good sales.

He worried a great deal about amateur photographers who were giving away the rights to their photos without realizing the value in the occasional photo. When Flickr emerged, he had some deep reservations about their too casual promotion of the most open Creative Commons licenses. When the story broke about Virgin Mobile using a photo of a girl which the novice photographer had marked for “commercial use” my dad wrote several long articles for local amateurs about the dangers of offering photos for commercial use without securing a release from humans that appear in the photos. It was clear, in the Flickr case, that the photographer hadn’t really understood what the words “commercial use” meant. My dad developed a lecture on this subject and was invited to speak at over a 100 amateur camera clubs in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

All of this is to say, when we take photos, we should be aggressive in defending their value. If we wish to share them with the public, we should all do so having educated ourselves about what rights we are sharing, and what value we are letting go of. Every once in a long while, people take photos that are worth a great deal, and even when they are not interested in making money off that photo, it doesn’t seem fair for others to do so without the permission of the photographer.

Interesting bit from the New York Times on the changing relationship between musicians and their fans:

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.

Coulton welcomes his fans’ avid attention; indeed, he relies on his fans in an almost symbiotic way.