https://youtube.com/watch?v=uORo2CMUUsk

Got in on Jet Blue red eye at sunrise. I never can sleep on planes, so got to my hotel at 35th and 6th Ave groggy and yes, a room was available at 7AM. Bliss! It’s the Hilton Garden Inn and I got a rate of $209 due to publishing friends’ corporate discount, it’s a place I would never have chosen, and it turns out to be perfect. Halfway between the Village and the park, nice room on 21st floor (window looks out at Empire State bldg.), cool staff (let me carry my own bags), Le Pain Quotidien for breakfast a few blocks away…

After showering and resting a bit yesterday, I headed uptown on 6th Ave. Got to Bryant Park, and the noise of birds in the trees was surprising. Hey, am I out in the woods or something? At the same time, cabs were hurtling down 6th, busses roaring.

San Francisco is my city and I love it for its beauty and variety and clear ocean air, but this here is the big daddy, the big sister, the Big Kahuna. Nothing like it. Something else fer shure. Each time I get here it grabs me.

I have with me in NYC, a K2 scooter, which I took out yesterday afternoon. (don’t understand why more people don’t get around this way.) I rode up to the park on 6th, then down to the Village on Broadway, using the green bike lanes in the street, or riding on the sidewalks. I can cover 2-3 times the ground I would walking, and it’s fun! Because of the handle, I’m a lot more secure than on a skateboard, plus it’s got a brake (press down on rear wheel fender). I fold it up to go into a store or restaurant.

Washington Square is really torn up right now; most of it is under construction and fenced off, but in a small section was an old guy on guitar, young harmonica player, sounding good. “Your mama can’t dance, and your daddy can’t rock and roll.” (Oh my!)

The city’s an energy infusion. Just walk out into the street, turn in any direction, and vwooom! The sights, sounds, smells, people, store fronts, the endless images — brain goes into overdrive. There’s a level of, what to call it? — maturity — here not found on west coast. Window displays, quality and variety of the shops, faces in the street, newspapers (Village Voice compared to SFWeekly), the CBS TV city newsroom anchors, the culture in general — it’s just the Big Time. There’s depth.

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The event was jammed with people. It seems to get bigger each year. Amazing that so many people are interested in making things. Here are a few random photos from Saturday:

This is glued-together strips of cardboard, done with a software program.

A build-it-yrslf car

Everyone, including Stewart Brand, likes this exhibit. In an article on the NY Times yesterday, Ken Johnson wrote a perceptive article on the WEC. As Kevin Kelly says, “They get it.” True that.

“Brainchild of the visionary techno-hippie artist Stewart Brand, this compendium of resources for the New Age is the subject of ‘Access to Tools: Publications From the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974,’ a modest but stirring time capsule of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Whole Earth Catalog did for counterculture youth in the ’60s what the Sears Catalog did for children of the Great Depression and what Google does for people of the Internet age: provide a way for ordinary people to connect with and make use of the global economy. Against the dominion of capitalist profiteers and the top-down cult of technocratic expertise, it aimed to put practical, intellectual and spiritual means of self-determination into the hands of the people. A telephone-book size tome printed on cheap paper in black and white and in all kinds of typographies, and peppered with sharp, often funny commentary on its products by its editors — as well as essays, short stories by writers like Wendell Berry and letters from readers — the catalog was nothing if not user friendly.”

Runs through July 26th. Since I’m heading for NYC Saturday, I’ll be able to check it out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/arts/design/access-to-tools-and-whole-earth-catalog-at-moma-review.html?_r=1