True Colors

Blue Boy is a great book about a funny kid who doesn't fit in. Written by Princeton grad book editor and sometime cabaret singer Rakesh Satyal, it depicts the challenges of an Indian boy growing up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. The main character, Kiran, is a bright young boy who always gets it wrong. His attempts at great art and theatrical flair always fall flat, reminding him that he is not quite of the world that he inhabits. The title refers not to an eighteenth-century English portrait of a young gentleman, but rather the mission of Kiran to make good on the lie he made to his mother who catches him in the master bath covering his face with her lipstick, mascara and eyeliner. When confronted by his mom, who "has four terms to describe the looks of young Indian girls: "ugly," "passable" "presentable," and "That is the type of girl you vant to marry, Kiran." he says that he was making himself up as the Hindu deity Krishna, who is usually depicted with blue skin. The book follows young Kiran through his hostile, mostly white school, his forays into the (for him) equally uncomfortable Indian community in Cincinnati, and through the daily routines at home with his stern and distant accountant father and his spendthrift, loving mother. Preparations for the school's talent competition and Kiran's plan to appear as Krishna provide the narrative thread that ties the central part of the book together.

This morning I read a few pages of the book before heading off to work, a relaxing moment before the hustle and bustle of my daily life. Out the door and up the street, I saw my morning bus pull away from the stop as I prepared to cross The Boulevard. Damn, the number 10 bus that I take to Journal Square is erratic, it's often a long wait, then three buses pull up all at once. Whew, today I am lucky, the one I missed is the first in a convoy. Another quickly pulls up and I hop on. After paying my $1.45, I grab a seat, settle in and open Blue Boy to continue reading. Before I get too absorbed in the book, my eye wanders. Across from me is a South Asian woman with her distinctive Indian attire. By chance it is blue. In the other direction is a young Filipino woman, beside her is a Latino kid. An African-American mother and daughter are further back. Once I do a full scan of the bus, I realize that I am the only white person on board. The tables have turned, and now I can imagine a bit of what young Kiran feels in his white Ohio school when he doesn't look like his peers and he doesn't fit in. Of course it's not that simple. In this society whites have privileges, whiteness has power.

I lived in the West Village of Manhattan for over twenty-five years. At one time the neighborhood was gritty and bohemian. The process of renewal and gentrification has transformed it to an expensive, upper middle class, mostly white neighborhood. Each wave of big bucks and house renovation in the neighborhood removed some of the grit and a lot of the life of the area. Multi-tenant buildings have become grand single family houses. Instead of stoop parties and street fairs, drawn shades and the hush of limousines mark street life in my old haunt. The move to Jersey City was a BIG transition for me, out of the city, across the river, into the wilds of Jersey. Once I overcame my fear of change I began to embrace the idea and the fact of my new home. Rich and I are a mixed race couple, he's Filipino and I am a white Canadian, though we are both American citizens, he by birth, I by choice. Among its other assets, the multi-racial tapestry of Jersey City appealed to us. The mix on our street is like the mix on my number 10 bus this morning, and it's engaging and interesting and reassuring to me. Our little hybrid family is going to fit in here. Jersey City is home to a huge variety of races and ethnicities, making it one of the most diverse cities in the United States.

In this life I have come a long way. I grew up in Montreal, in the English part of an overwhelmingly French city. In that context, white privilege was English privilege. One of the French-Canadian separatists of the late 1960s, called his powerful book about the French-Canadian experience in Quebec, White Niggers of America. The French-Canadians were tired of the way we Anglos controlled business in the province. As English-speaking kids, we kept apart, as Protestants, we went to different schools from our Catholic neighbors. We learned French but we never spoke it to the French-Canadians who lived and worked all around us. Things came to a boil in the mid- to late '60s. Those were trying times in Quebec, I remember standing in the playground when our school was evacuated because of a bomb threat. As we stood there in taut rows of nervous kids on a warm spring day, we all shuddered when the bomb went off, blowing up a mail box just a few streets away and maiming the policeman who was trying to defuse the bomb that had been inside the box.

Times and place have changed me. Back in the 1950s or early '60s I remember that the sister of a friend was getting married. She belonged to the United Church of Canada and her husband-to-be was Anglican. At the time I wondered, how would this work, how would they fit together, how would these different kinds of people form a family? That long ago concern seems bizarre and rather quaint to me now when I celebrate the differences that surround me and that define my own relationship and household. These days I am engaged and stimulated by this diversity. I hope that I am showing my true colors.

By the way, I haven't finished Blue Boy yet, but I have a sinking feeling that Kiran's performance as Krishna at the talent show isn't going to go well. Read the book for yourself and you'll find out what happens. I think you'll enjoy it, Rakesh Satyal is a good writer.

Life is (Bitter)Sweet!

On Monday, just before heading back to Jersey City, I grabbed my big steel knife and marched off to the rhubarb patch across the road from my farmhouse. Several years ago I discovered some rogue rhubarb growing in the field, a possible remnant from the time when our farmhouse was the residence of actual farmers, not city dwellers playing as country people. Whoosh, whoosh, the large, very sharp blade cut the abundant plants. Another whack of the knife and the leaves, which Rich tells me are poisonous, fell away from the firm green and red stalks that were the object of my foray into the fields. I got just one little nick to my finger from the blade which would have done Lizzie Borden's job very nicely. It's a scary damn thing, but that knife cuts like the dickens when I sharpen it on the whetstone. Note to cooks, steel blades are much easier to sharpen at home than stainless steel knives, just don't put 'em in the dishwasher, they will rust.

My hoard of rhubarb was dumped into a bag which was then piled into the car with the rest of the crap that travels between the city and the country each weekend. (WHY is there always so much to pack each time we go back and forth between the two houses?) After a long side road detour to avoid Memorial Day traffic on the Quickway, which was not so very quick on Monday afternoon, past pretty small towns and the most amazing black, black earth planted with rows of tender young vegetables in a small, very flat patch of Orange County, we arrived home. Rich headed to town for an appointment and I headed to the kitchen with rhubarb in hand. I like to make (and eat) pies, and rhubarb is one of the easy ones to make. Cut up the rhubarb and put it in the pan lined with crust, dust with flour for thickening, put in the sugar mixed with an egg to make it custardy, sprinkle with ground nutmeg, dot with butter, put on the top crust, and stick it in the oven. Rhubarb pie practically makes itself.

That pie, a lovely fresh salad with baby greens from the garden, and a pork roast ringed with carrots and new potatoes made for a very nice topping off to a delightful weekend in the country. Sweet! Over the long weekend, the country vegetable garden was planted, a delicious lunch was had with friends at the charming Old North Branch Inn, a restored hotel in a pretty little town not far from the farm, a dinner party offered us amusing new friends and a Saturday night dance brought together the gay Sullivan County community for the first time this season. It was a perfect mix of hard work and good social time. But best of all, I was published by the New York Times this weekend. Now that was really SWEET.

Inspired by the Nutrition Facts box that appears on all food products, some design colleagues and I had a clever idea for a new kind of simple, clear credit card disclosure that should be placed on all credit card offers and statements. The Times liked it and published it as an Op-Chart in the Week in Review on Sunday, May 24, 2009. Since it appeared, I have been called brilliant, very brilliant, and really smart. What this tells me, other than the obvious about my intelligence, is that simple, strong design ideas are smart and can be effective tools to help everyday people make credit choices, buy mortgages, decide what to eat, and so on. My co-authors and I are part of a group called Design for Democracy. We are using design thinking and design ideas to improve the quality of public communications in America.

As the D for D team were making plans Tuesday to spread the word about our triumphant New York Times editorial, word arrived that the California Supreme Court had upheld the legality of Proposition 8, the ban on same sex marriages in that state. Damn, that was BITTER news. It is curious how easy it is to legalize discrimination and how hard it is to end that discrimination. My only hope is that this defeat for gay marriage will fuel the righteous anger of gays and lesbians who once again feel excluded from the mainstream with its rights and protections.

There was a demonstration yesterday evening in Sheridan Square to protest the court decision. I wanted to go, but it was cold and damp out and I was tired. Leftovers from Monday night's dinner beckoned, cold pork, fresh broccoli shoots from the city garden, more salad, and of course leftover rhubarb pie. The prospect was enough to fuel my journey back home after a long rollercoaster day at work. What greeted me as I entered my beloved Jersey City kitchen was a pile of just picked broccoli shoots and an EMPTY pie pan. Rich had loved my pie so much that he just had to eat the whole second half of the pie himself. Now that's BITTERSWEET. I gladly ate the leftover pork, the broccoli, and the fresh salad. Delicious, but I wanted a sweet. So I made some cookies...but that is another story.

Back to Basic(s)

When we are in the city, Jersey that is, I usually do our weekly shopping at the big A&P near the Holland Tunnel. I have scouted the various supermarkets in the area and this one satisfies my, as Rich would call them, "double pinkie instincts" for a quality food market where I can get a wide selection of good grub at a reasonable price in nice surroundings. I get the basics and the odd treat here and there, ice cream, some decent cheese for snacks, and so on. Frankly, the selection of cheeses at A&P could be a bit better...OK, I AM double pinkie! I am trying to lose some weight (there, I've said it) and so I resist the cookies and most sweets these days. In any case, the cookies and cakes that I bake are much better than the ones I can buy at the A&P.

Since I moved to Jersey City I have enjoyed doing a weekly shopping trip to get a house full of food. For a long time, at my old home in the West Village, I would buy food for just one day, more Euro-style I suppose, except that I did it in a supermarket, not at the high street provisioners. You could fit four or five of that West Village D'Agostino's in my Jersey City A&P, where the the quantity and variety is positively delicious. When I am at the A&P, as I head from produce to the meat section, past the bread (none of that these days!), there's an issue that weighs on my mind. It's the Chicken Question—should I buy the organic chicken, the natural chicken (whatever the hell THAT means), or, heaven forbid, the big fat Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster? Why are are the organic chickens at A&P always so small? If I want a good-sized chicken (I got the "Make enough food for several days' leftovers" lecture this morning), the Perdue wins out. If I am feeling an impulse to eat healthy, I balance the merits of the organic and natural birds. Is it worth paying so much more for the organic bird? Sarah, one of my colleagues at work, had this advice for me: "Buy the smaller organic chicken. Eat less meat and more vegetables." My biz partner Ann is a good bargain shopper. She goes to Fairway in Brooklyn and follows the store sales to guide her weekly food choices. She says the markdowns help her decide what to buy in any given week when confronted with a giant Big Box full of food. If organic chicken is not on sale that week, her family won't eat chicken.

I was a bit overwhelmed by my first visit to the huge new Fairway in Paramus on the way back from the country last weekend. The range of produce and the scale and quality of the meat was dazzling. Lots of organics here, and cheaper, too. Until I know the lay of the land in a supermarket I am always a bit disoriented and discombobulated. It's rather like visiting a new city or country while you're trying to figure out the local conditions in the first couple of days. Wayfinding happens in countries, cities and yes, in supermarkets. Last week I got a cart full of well priced groceries at Fairway but I didn't enjoy the experience. After a few visits I'll figure out the Fairway drill and get in the groove.

The choices we make each week at the supermarket have so many implications for our health. Eating healthy is obviously important but not always so easy to figure out—think of the Chicken Question. The shopping cart is full of items and decisions to be made. It can be tough making the right healthy choices every week, balancing appetites, budgets, availability, time, and pleasure. Is there time to make a good, healthy, delicious meal each night? Will my budget allow for the organic chicken? Will I really enjoy the whole wheat pasta? These considerations can sometimes override the healthiest choices. If I shop when I am hungry, I can end up buying things I regret, things I don't need. Food activist Michael Pollan had good advice the other week on NPR: buy food that can spoil. In other words, buy fresh, unprocessed foods, not packaged ones filled with chemicals and preservatives.

On Sunday afternoon, when I go and buy the basics in Jersey City and I have some time, I stop at Basic, one of my favorite spots in my new hometown. It's a great cafe-restaurant in the lovely neighborhood near Hamilton Park. The sign in the window at Basic advertises "The Best Coffee in Jersey City." The thoroughly adorable staff serve breakfast, and throughout the day, sandwiches and wraps, salads and sweets, tea and coffee, of course, and a nice selection of gelati. My current Sunday favorite is the bul-go-gi sandwich, slices of Korean-style marinated rib eye steak with greens, basil mayonnaise on a nice focaccia roll. It makes for a very satisfying lunch. Check out Basic, and tell me what your favorites are there. I wish there was a place like Basic up the hill in my section of Jersey City. And now back to basics, I have to get myself over to the A&P. Fortunately, I have some chicken in the fridge so I don't have to make THAT decision this week.

Sign and Accept

I was shopping at my local hardware store in Jersey City last weekend and the line at the register was long. As she rang up the totals, the cashier chanted, "Sign and accept," while the customers were swiping their credit cards, signing in the little box on the card reader and pressing accept to send their signatures to the electronic file. This mantra, sign and accept, repeated over and over again, made me think of how Congress is working right now to protect the interests of ordinary credit card holders like me. Recently the House of Representatives passed a bill designed to make credit card companies act more responsibly towards their customers, regarding terms, interest rates and so on. The President weighed in during his weekly address on Saturday. He stated, "Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe. But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties, and hidden fees that have become all-too common in our credit card industry." This week the Senate is considering a similar bill.

As you know I am a graphic designer and it seems to me that there is an opportunity to make good design standards a part of this new legislation. What if the Federal Government mandated a Credit Card Facts box similar to the Nutrition Facts box that appears on most food products? This box could appear on all credit card offers and statements. Simple, clear writing and good information design could make much clearer, the tangle of rates and fees that confuses and often blind sides most consumers as they sign and accept each day with their credit cards and then look at their monthly statements with disbelief. And imagine if our national government was mandating good communications policies that really benefit all Americans. I'd sign on for that and I think many Americans would accept it too.

The PATH Not Taken

Yesterday morning I was sitting on the PATH train headed to work, scanning the arts section of The New York Times. I read with interest Nicholas Ouroussoff's report about the unveiling this weekend of a new design for Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center site PATH and subway station. He spoke of the budget challenges to the project and the architect's attempt to maintain the integrity of his glorious design, surely one of the boldest conceptions for a transportation center in New York since Grand Central Station opened in 1913. Calatrava is a great architect and this is clearly a beautiful building, but all is not well with this new PATH station. Ouroussoff points to the secrecy of the recent design process and some of the compromises that have been struck to preserve the experience of Calatrava's soaring winged roof structure. It seems that the experience of us daily PATH riders has been neglected, ". . . in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be." In fact this grand and very expensive building has a limited function, direct links to two transit stations under the building, the World Trade Center PATH stop and the Cortlandt Street stop on the N/R subway lines, and a secondary connection to the Fulton Street subway station several blocks away. To shortchange us PATH riders seems an odd and unfortunate decision by the planners.

What struck me about the failings of the building, as Ouroussoff described them, was the unwillingness of the designer to accommodate the experience of actual people in his building. As wayfinding designers who often work on large public facilities, we have a people-focused process that we use to create signage and wayfinding systems for buildings like this. We call this process user-centered design, whereby we focus on the needs of the users of a public space, anticipating what information they require and how they will navigate a place and find the destinations and pathways they need. It seems that on this project, there was no advocate for the user guiding or challenging the architect as the building's elements were being designed and arranged. If a user focus was the goal of this public design project, the building would not have become what Ouroussoff described as,"a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else."

Ouroussoff's review is surprisingly harsh. As a citizen and a PATH user, one wonders, where do we go from here? Perhaps the Port Authority has some explaining to do. Was this routing of PATH traffic designed to enhance the viability of the commercial element of the building? These days, most transportation centers are a mix of transport uses and retail, dining, and entertainment venues. Is there more we haven't seen in the way of public art, exhibits, and environmental graphics that might engage people on the circuitous journey that Ouroussoff complains about? I am an optimist, let's hope that the design evolves and the PATH experience is designed holistically and thoughtfully so us Jersey folks will celebrate our arrival each day in the Big Apple and not curse the moment we left our lovely Garden State. 

Don't Forget to Vote on May 12th

May 12th is voting day for the Jersey City municipal election. There's a big roster of candidates for mayor and city council. You have just a few more hours to do your research before you cast your vote. Polls open at 6:00 AM and close at 8:00 PM. Check out the sample ballot sent to you by the Jersey City Commissioner of Registration, it's a helpful guide to casting your vote tomorrow, describing the categories where you can vote and the choices you have in each category.

I am still new to Jersey City and I am embarrassed to confess that I didn't do enough homework to have a fully informed opinion about how to vote in this election. Check out the editorial from Saturday's Jersey Journal, our hometown newspaper which presents their endorsements for the election. I found it a useful discussion of some of the local issues. Read it and decide for yourself how you want to vote. Just make sure to vote. I'll see you at the polls.

Miami on the Hudson - Jersey City Deco

At some point in my travels through the neighborhood, I started to notice a set of small apartment buildings on the side streets off of JFK Boulevard, between Montgomery and Communipaw Avenues. I found these buildings tucked in between the houses and larger apartment blocks and they reminded me of the great Art Deco buildings in Miami Beach, minus the stucco and the bright colors. They're smallish, four or five stories, mostly light yellow brick, with stylish Deco details. This being Jersey City, they're in various states of repair, the bones are good, but the in some cases the details have been knocked about. The doorways are mostly charming, with nice brick details and some fancy ironwork. The cornices have some great details as well, terra cotta I suppose. I rode around on my bike and took these pictures - I thought you might enjoy this taste of JC Art Deco.