Rich Mintz  

One more quick comment about my three days in Baltimore: that Maryland accent is still alive and well. And I don’t just mean in the mouths of old people and diner waitresses, although there is of course that too. Apparently, they’re still making new people, young ones, who talk like they have a mouthful of chewing gum. (I kid, I kid!) Who knew?

Every time I left the hotel — when I went out to Little Italy, for example — I encountered people half my age or younger who spoke in frank, unattenuated Baltimorese. There were one or two (I’m thinking in particular of the host at one restaurant) who I could barely comprehend — and I’m not new to this accent, I lived in DC for years!

This is a marvel to me. These kids live in the same culture I do, absorb largely the same national media, but come out talking in the local way anyway. This despite Baltimore’s being more tightly bound than ever to the vastly more generic DC metro area. For my whole life, people have been griping about the loss of local color in America, but regionalism seems very much alive to me — if anything, it may be stronger now than 15 or 20 years ago.

I’ll have plenty to say about the conference that’s just concluded over the next few days, but right now, I want to call your attention to one of the most colorful threads that ran throughout the entire event: the New York Neo-Futurists.

The Neo-Futurists were part of the opening, a feature of the closing, and ever-present throughout the long middle of the event. They were waggish tweeters, made a spectacle of themselves at tables in the banquet hall, closed down the bar at the Saturday night networking party, and generally served to lighten the mood of an event that, at times — despite the fact that we are, after all, artists and arts administrators and arts service professionals — tended at times toward the serious. I was blown away by their energy — and I didn’t even see their closing performance!

I want to thank all the Neo-Futurists who participated in this year’s conference, and promise that I’ll be seeing you real soon at a performance of “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” in the East Village.

Below are some of my photos from their participatory afternoon break on Saturday:

As a subquest to my endless quest for personal productivity, I’m trying to get a more efficient system in place to handle the blog queue. I honestly don’t understand how the people who blog for a living keep up with everything (although I realize that some of them, like Andrew Sullivan, do have interns and/or the occasional paid staffer to throw at the problem).

I am generally speaking an adherent of the Getting Things Done tracking philosophy (slightly modified to fit my own personality a little better). If you’re feeling reductionist, this reduces to five principles:

• Keep only one* queue of “things to be processed/evaluated,” and process it regularly (e.g., daily) and systematically, into…
• One master list of things to do, ordered by project, on which you…
• Clearly identify for each project what is the single next action you need to take;
• Review the master list on a schedule (high-level review daily, detailed review weekly) to prune it of cruft;
• When processing the queue, do right now anything that you think you can finish in less than five minutes.

*I actually have more than one queue, but I process them into a single list.

(I won’t get into the philosophy or practice behind this, which are amply explored in David Allen’s books and in a host of cultish Web sites all over the place. But I will say it feels right to me.)

I had a pretty good system going, using the spectacular open-source Taskwarrior command line app. Unfortunately, two things happened. First, my task list got way too long to handle effectively inside a terminal window; and second, I got this iPad, which has Changed Everything.

Now I’m all about the cloud — about finding ways to make my data accessible from anywhere, on any device. And so I’m afraid that a command-line app that ties me to my laptop probably isn’t the right answer anymore.

The Evernote Web site turned me on to Nozbe, a GTD implementation for Web and iPhone that has a new iPad application that launched this week. Like Evernote, all your Nozbe data syncs magically across all your devices. I haven’t had much luck with task management software, which always feels way too heavy, but this one seems a little gentler, so I’m trying it out.

I’m testing it first as a blog workflow management tool. Right now I have my blog post queue stored in about five places: in Taskwarrior, in Evernote, in Google Reader, in my WordPress drafts folders, and in my head. That’s way too many places. I tried centralizing in Evernote, but Evernote (just like Gmail) is more useful as a storehouse of heterogenous, unstructured information that’s universally available and easily searched than it is as a taxonomic tool. So we’re going to test things out in Nozbe and see what happens. So far I’m optimistic. It can’t be any worse than my current tracking tangle is.

No offense, Charm City, you know I love you, but if frat dudes in Baltimore are wearing it…

It’s over.

And with that we inaugurate a new feature of this blog, “I’m Just Saying,” in honor of Kerri Case.

Via Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal: Tyra Banks is producing a fantasy novel trilogy about magical models, which she promises will be a joy for people from 8 to 80. As someone who lives smack in the middle of that range, I have to say I’m eager for this. If it has Tyra’s typical touch, it’ll be genuinely empowering without being schmaltzy, will expand the definition of beauty or shed light on discrimination somehow, and will be a lot of fun. Bring it on!

I didn’t get inside the budget-shuttered Public Works Museum, but tonight I achieved my second-most-important side objective for this conference weekend: I took myself to dinner in Little Italy, which starts about 3 blocks from this hotel. I went to La Tavola, where I had a delicious peppery cold zucchini soup and a plate of agnolotti, perfectly prepared and presented, in the bar. Afterwards, I walked a block up and picked up some chewy pignoli cookies from Vaccaro’s (one of the few places in Baltimore I have known how to find without a map since the mid-90s) and ate them next to the Christopher Columbus Monument near the edge of the Jones Falls River. A nice quiet end to a hectic day.

A pointer is off by one, or something — new posts are clobbering old ones. The revision trail is saved, so in the Web interface I’ll be able to fix it, but it’s still alarming. May be related to my vague nagging sense that the app doesn’t always do the right thing when the Internet connection times out during a transaction. More if I can figure out what’s going on.

Full day yesterday at the Americans for the Arts convention, and we’re already partway through day 2. I fell asleep last night at an embarrassing early hour with the lights on, so I’ve decided to take a few minutes now and start catching up on yesterday.

First, the venue. I can’t say enough good things about Baltimore as a meeting destination. From where I sit, looking west over the Inner Harbor from the waterfront Marriott’s convention annex, I see a panorama of thoughtfully developed waterfront public spaces, half a dozen museums, even a pirate ship (alas, not pictured below) loaded with children sailing into port between Piers 5 and 6. The tent in the foreground is where Peter Frampton (!) played last night.

This new development where the Marriott is located, occupying what I think of as the no-man’s land between the Inner Harbor and Fells Point, is a great success, bringing residents, office workers, tourists, and entertainment seekers into the neighborhood at all hours, and tying the eastern waterfront into the central city. And Little Italy and Fells Point entertainment districts are only a few blocks’ walk.

There are too many museums here to count (I think I’ve passed 7 of them personally and I’ve barely left the hotel), and I do plan to make time for at least one. I had hoped to make a visit to the Baltimore Public Works Museum, located in the iconic building at the edge of the Inner Harbor that I think of as the “pumphouse” (presumably because, once upon a time in a previous life, someone once told me that that’s what it was).

It combines three of my passions: museums, urban infrastructure, and buildings that look like Victorian workhouses. However, I just learned from the Internet that it was apparently closed a couple of months ago due to the city’s dire budget situation, so I might have to choose another.

And, of course, the American Visionary Art Museum, the site of last night’s party, will get its own post, but let me ask right now: what happened to Federal Hill? This once-edgy neighborhood, where the city was selling abandoned townhouses 25 years ago for $1, is now one of Baltimore’s most desirable residential and entertainment districts — I’m looking across the harbor right now at Ritz-Carlton Residences, for chrissakes. Compared to what it was in 1980 or even 1990, the neighborhood is nearly unrecognizable, after one of the most successful transformations I can remember seeing anywhere.

I’m sitting here in my Baltimore hotel having coffee and the music coming over the loudspeaker is the music that was popular the last time I came frequently to Baltimore, when I lived in Washington, in the mid-90s: Everything but the Girl. That could be coincidence.

But from the place I’m sitting, I can look out the window at Pier 6, where Yes (who was current when I was in college in the 1980s) and Peter Frampton (who was current when I was in high school) performed last night.

If the next thing I hear is this or this or this, the music I remember from elementary school, or God forbid this — a song I associate with “being on the way to the dentist, which I know will be followed by a visit to Ship’s if I’m a very good boy” — well, that’ll pretty much prove that someone is messing with my head.

Thanks, Apple Store, for turning the repair around so quickly. But did you have to accidentally slash on purpose forget to put the Civilization IV disc back in the drive?

Are you in league with another of the Great Powers to overcome our civilization, take over our cities, and win the space race?