On this thrilling and historic day, here are two photos I took during the course of this year. They’re bookends, of a sort, to this inspiring man’s incredible run. I expect great things of you, sir.

Nashua North High School, Nashua, New Hampshire, January 5, 2008, 12:30 p.m.:

Max Meltzer Community Center, 94 East 1st Street, New York, New York, November 4, 2008, 11:03 a.m.:

For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the Brooklyn Bridge at night and fire camera flashes in sequence, capturing everything on video from a fair distance away. I love the increasingly larger scale of Improv Everywhere’s missions.

But I thought I should note that on two different occasions back in 1999 and 2000, a group of my friends organized a very similar project at the top of the Empire State Building. Led by my pal Tom Igoe, a world-class tinkerer who teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a group of several dozen people gathered on the skyscraper’s southern observation deck to do waves of sequenced camera flashes.

The New York Times ran a story about the 2000 event a couple of weeks later. Both Flash-a-Thons were captured on video, the second from two locations downtown: one at the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway and Waverly, the other from an apartment on East 18th Street. In the low-res compilation video below, the flashes go left to right and then right to left, and then there’s some assorted mayhem at the end.

You can read more about the 1999 and 2000 Flash-a-Thons on Tom’s site.

There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some “minor details” borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film’s first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman’s offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate’s plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man’s late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth.

Here’s the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It’s 11 minutes long. If you’ve seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed:

(If you don’t see the Flash audio player, here’s a direct link to the audio file.)

Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia’s Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise.

There’s also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he’s apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank’s shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank’s friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe Block’s casting was just a coincidence.

If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments…

Even the most conservative, unimaginative logotype can be very effective at putting forth a brand identity. Take the Crate & Barrel logo—it’s basically Helvetica Bold (or a minor tweak of it) with a very round, un-Helvetica-like C:

When it comes to corporate graphics, nothing is hoarier than good old Helvetica Bold. But the Crate & Barrel logo is memorable enough, and it pops nicely when stamped in big black type on the white bags and boxes that customers carry out of the store.

In Crate & Barrel’s early days, company executives probably paid tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the design firm that created the logo, and the company likely considered dozens or hundreds of variations on the current logo before choosing one. The creation of a logo is often a painstaking process, and the end result is supposed to be an unalterable design whose elements are always rendered in exactly the same way.

So I was amused last fall when I noticed that some things had gone terribly wrong with the sign above the Crate & Barrel store on the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston. Below is what the sign looked like in late September. The r in “Crate” and the e in “Barrel” have rotated counter-clockwise, as if drunk, and the second r in “Barrel” is hovering above the baseline, as if it’s trying to float away:

A few weeks ago, I walked through that intersection and noticed that someone had performed first aid on the sign. It looks better, but it’s still not perfect. Here’s a photo from this afternoon:

The r in “Crate” looks fine now, and the e in “Barrel” has been rotated back into more or less the proper position. But the second r in “Barrel” is still trying to escape. Fly away, poor little r! Run off and join the American Apparel logo, where at least the use of Helvetica Bold is somewhat ironic!

Happy new year, and apologies for the extended break. I was both busy and lazy during the holidays, and now I’m waist-deep in my first-ever New York apartment search. I’ve lived in New York since 1987, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to look for a place. After a decade in a rent-stabilized 400-square-foot studio on a great Upper West Side block a few yards from Riverside Park, I’m planning to move downtown in the next month or two, probably to the East Village. I spent most of the weekend racing around looking at apartments in a few downtown neighborhoods, and I actually found a couple of places that I’d be happy to live in. I’m hoping to score one of those places in the next few days.

I have a big backlog of cool links and other material that I’ve been meaning to post. I’m going to be swamped this week, too, but I’m planning to get back to a more regular posting schedule by next weekend.

I’ve got apartments on the brain, so for now I’ll leave you with a link to Architecture of Density, an amazing series of Hong Kong images by the photographer Michael Wolf. Here’s a brief description of the project from Wolf’s site:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades.

The photographs are on display through February 26 at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.

At the end of the night on Wednesday, after drinking here with this person and this person and this person, among others, I worked my way to the 14th Street 1/2/3 stop to wait for the train to take me uptown. After peering south down the express track and seeing no evidence of an approaching train, I reached into my man purse for my iPod … and it promptly slipped from my fingers and down onto the tracks:

I wasn’t about to jump down to retrieve it without being absolutely sure I’d be able to get back up again very quickly. I’ve seen the occasional news stories about New Yorkers who’ve jumped down to the tracks to fetch a dropped cellphone only to be crushed by several thousand tons of high-speed metal. I don’t want the end of my life to serve as a cautionary tale about modern man’s dangerously misguided worship of technology. I just like listening to music on my iPod.

So I stood there for a few minutes pondering what to do. I decided I’d wait until right after the next express train left the station and then recruit a couple of strong men to spot me as I jumped down. I waited five minutes, then ten, before realizing that all express trains were apparently being routed to the local track. And then I spotted my opportunity: A very tall man, maybe six-foot-six, walked by with a burly friend. I approached them and sheepishly asked if they’d help me up from the tracks after I’d retrieved my iPod. But without any prompting from me, the tall guy simply jumped down to the tracks, grabbed the iPod, and hoisted himself back up. I thanked him, and as he and his friend started to walk away, I pulled out my wallet so I could give him a twenty or something. But he refused. Thanks, iPod Man, whoever you are.

…is a rough estimate of the average elapsed time between posts here the last few weeks. (Sorry about that—I’ve been super-busy.) But 7 Days was also the name of a beloved New York weekly that existed for about a hundred issues from 1988 to 1990. The magazine is remembered these days partly because it had an unusually impressive stable of writers and editors, many of whom went on to prominent gigs in Manhattan’s magazine-industrial complex. The editor of 7 Days was Adam Moss, who later edited The New York Times Magazine and now edits New York. This 2002 Greg Lindsay piece from Folio magazine is a capsule history of the genesis, short life, and demise of 7 Days.

I attended college here in New York from 1987 to 1991, and I have vague memories of seeing 7 Days on the newsstand. But I didn’t really become a magazine geek until after graduation, so I’ve known of it only through its reputation. I’ve tried to find copies a handful of times over the years, but they’re surprisingly scarce now. The amazing subterranean magazine store Gallagher’s on East 12th Street stocks thousands of classic magazines from decades past; in its cavernlike rooms you can find stacks of Vogues from the ’50s, Esquires from the ’60s, New Yorks from the ’70s, and Spys from the ’80s. But the last time I went there, a few months ago, they didn’t have any copies of 7 Days on the premises, and I got the sense that they rarely, if ever, have any in stock.

So I was stoked a week or two ago when a friend told me she owned a few issues of 7 Days and would be happy to lend them to me. When I got my hands on them—they’re dated January 10 and January 17, 1990—the first thing that struck me was how big they are: 11 inches by 14 inches, or more or less the same size as an unopened New York Times. I had always thought that 7 Days was a variation on the Time Out model: listings, reviews, short features, little else. But these two issues seem more like a cross between a nonsnarky New York Observer and a budget-strapped New York. According to the Greg Lindsay article linked above, 7 Days became more and more like a conventional magazine as its run progressed. I’d be curious to see what the earliest issues were like.

I’d love to own a few copies of 7 Days, so if you have an issue or two you’d be willing to part with, drop me a line at hearst [at] nyc.rr.com. Thanks.

Here are the two covers; I’ll post the editorial masthead after the jump.

And now, the masthead from the January 17, 1990, issue:

[Continue reading "7 Days..."...]

According to Work magazine’s Work Blog, which is where I found it, the detourned New York subway map below was created by an artist named Marc Grubstein, who actually distributed it to unsuspecting New York tourists a few years back. I wish I had a high-res copy of this.