You’re walking all wrong

I’ve always had a penchant for shoes as a soley aesthetic and nonfunctional article of clothing. It was less about the technology and more about my awkwardness with my flat feet. Though I tried my best to stay in shoes rather than walking barefoot, I’ve gotten used to the specific pains that come with walking in uncomfortable shoes after years of sticking it out with pair after pair of pretty but altogether useless sneakers. New York Magazine has a great feature on the debate between footwear and going barefoot, comparing the alternatives and risks for each side.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

So I’m torn between whether my symptoms are a result of bearing with ergonomically inferior shoes for far too long, or just having flat feet being the cause of not fitting into the mold of your typical shoe.

Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of a painful tingling in the soles of their feet—what she calls “flip-flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.

Having gotten accustomed to wearing shoes while living in New York, I get more of a phantom-itis with being bare foot. Since reading this article a few days ago, I’ve been actively trying to re-enable the equilibrium in my own feet through slower and more intentional steps.

Barefoot walking is, in its mechanics, very similar to barefoot running. The idea is to eliminate the hard-heel strike and employ something closer to a mid-strike: landing softly on the heel but rolling immediately through the outside of your foot, then across the ball and pushing off with the toes, with a kind of figure-eight movement though the foot.

It actually feels really weird to let your own feet roll through each step and use the toes to grasp onto the floor. My only problem is the numbness I get from just reading the actual article; I feel as though I’m in a constant state of sore for all the years of being ignorant to my inability to walk.

Write songs with River

I knew that Rivers was a weird dude, but he’s pretty fucking hilarious in this series of clips. He’s officially making a “sawng” with his YouTube audience, creating each segment of the song with every episode. It’s actually quite entertaining and works quite well. It also reminds me that the song writing process is a very different beast and requires a bit more of a narrative attitude. He starts off with a goal then works his way around themes and ideas before anything else.

Go and brush ya shoulders off

Wait for this video to load and jump to 2:20. Seriously, Barack is getting that dirt of his shoulder… what a B.A.L.L.A.

Trapped in an elevator

A long but effective piece by The New Yorker about Nicholas White, a 34 year-old production manager at Business Week who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. What is most haunting is the time-lapse juxtaposition with the imagined mental state as he endured nearly two days trapped without any means of escape.

Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

Oddly enough you can see this everyday at Tisch when students mash away at the close door button to get to class. I am guilty of it as well, though I’ve sometimes resorted to superstitious things like pressing the close door button and my eighth floor destination button together to “bypass” the other floors.

What is more awkward is the sudden shift in behavior when crammed to the oddly-shaped elongated elevators in Tisch. I tend to bat away or stare straight into the doors, pretending no one else exists.

Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.

One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator.

What’s trickier is that you enter through one door and exit the opposite. Often times I’ll be staring at a wall to deflect attention and realize everyone has already scuttled out of the elevator at the lobby. Sometimes I’ll think about crazy situations that might occur in some freak accident while I ride the elevator up to the eighth floor of my Photography department.

To the age-old half-serious question of whether a passenger barrelling earthward in a runaway elevator should jump in the air just before impact, Pulling responded, as vertical-transportation professionals ceaselessly must, that you can’t jump up fast enough to counteract the rate of descent. “And how are you supposed to know when to jump?” he said. As for an alternative strategy—lie flat on the floor?—he shrugged: “Dead’s dead.”

Yeah, it ain’t happening. Tisch’s elevators are so slow you could probably wedge open the door and jump to safety.

West Wing at the Democratic National Convention

NY Magazine has a feature with former West Wing writer Lawrence O’donnell Jr. writing a treatment for a hypothetical behind the scenes showdown between Hillary Clinton and Obama.

Barack: Hillary, I care about two things exactly as much as you do: the party and getting the nomination.
Hillary: You mean you don’t give a shit about the party and you’d kill to get the nomination?
Barack (smiles): You wearing a wire? (beat) You know, all that ugly ink you’ve been getting all summer about destroying the party, handing the election to McCain—there’s only one person who can make that go away. Me. That brilliant acceptance speech you’re expecting me to give can put you back where you belong—hero of the Democratic Party—can put your husband back where he belongs—respected statesman. Nothing else can.
Hillary: Winning can.
Barack: If you got the nomination, you’d lose to McCain and the Clintons become the official destroyers of the Democratic Party. End of story. Have fun in the Senate after that.
Hillary: C’mon, I can beat McCain. I can—
Barack: Hillary, your negative is at 49 percent. You have the highest negative of anyone who’s ever run. You cannot possibly win in November.

I kind of wish there was some real action like this for us to watch.

Singapore hates the iPhone

Weird. They didn’t tell me about their unbridled hatred for Mac users when I was in town. They must have been harboring it secretly behind my back since I brought my MacBookPro with me.

Cool Hunting and WATM press

Some more coverage via the web, courtesy of Cool Hunting and We Are The Market.

W.A.Y.W.T. Flash Video

I’ve updated my photography site with the flash video that is being played at high definition at Tisch for my exhibition.

View the high resolution vimeo video here. Feel free to share the link to your friends: http://www.vimeo.com/850772

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