Three quick things:
1) A piece I wrote about The Gates: “They Draw Your Eyes Up“
2) A piece I saw in The Guardian: “TV soaps just don’t ring true any more – where are all the people staring mutely at their iPhones?“
3) The fact that I happened to look up on the train yesterday morning and I saw an origami crane, with its tail stuck into a gap in the metal so that it was suspended over our heads. It was like being underground and suddenly looking up to see a bird flying overhead.
But of course nobody else noticed it, because their eyes were all aimed down, at their cell phones.
🙂 I love finding those little things that no one else sees because they’re not looking.
Today I was walking outside the front of my office building and someone almost walked into me because he was staring at his cell phone while walking. I was staring at a point in the distance, daydreaming. Either way, totally detached from reality.
Bryna: A woman at my work does origami, and I told her about seeing that. She got a kick out of it. She said there are origami masters who can do it faultlessly even though they’re blind. I drew the analogy to Beethoven, who composed some of his most powerful music after he’d gone deaf.
Maggie: That was my point to my mother when she used to complain about being on the subway and seeing everybody staring down at their phones — they’re probably reading books or newspapers, or playing games, or daydreaming, and that’s what people have always done on subways. Now they’re just doing it on a screen. New Yorkers have always gone around looking down and avoiding eye contact (the piece about The Gates was written ten years ago, after all). Smartphones have just provided an excuse.