December 2nd 2011
Breathing Life Into The Common Camera
One year later...
A year ago today, we reached our fundraising goal for the Common Camera Project in 24 hours. I wrote this piece a few months ago as a short reflection on the whole ordeal. Thanks to everybody who jumped on board, helped out, assembled cams, spread the word, and provided general cheer. It really shook things up for me, and it’s been a wonderful adventure ever since.
There I was, sitting on my living room floor in a circle of highly capable soon-to-be Berkeley grads applying sticker label after sticker label to disposable cameras. We were only half way done, but already on hour five. My lovely roommate and longtime childhood friend, Sean, stood up amidst the carnage of paper bits and child-sized scissors to announce, “Man… Kevin sure is lucky he has friends.”
The Common Camera Project is a social art experiment that’s distributed over 300 disposable cams to be passed from person to person around the world. Each unique “Common Cam” comes in a nifty cardboard box and is labeled with a simple set of instructions:
1. Take a pic of something that inspires you
2. Pass the camera on to someone you trust
3. If you’re last, mail it back to us.
As of today, cameras have been “checked-in” as far as Alaska, Kenya, India, Brazil, Vietnam, Moroco and the Netherlands as well as all across the U.S.
This wasn’t what the project originally looked like to me. For me, it started as a curious question: What would happen if I gave a stranger a disposable cam and told them to take a pic and pass it on? That’s all. It was a silly question–that sounded more like a wedding reception or a photographic disaster waiting to happen–that I sat on, forgot about, and let simmer for over six months before doing anything about it.
What would change is that I eventually took this simple sideproject seriously. I didn’t’ start working on it because someone told me to, or as part of a job, or to find a girlfriend (for the most part). I started Common Cam and roped in some amazing friends because I wanted to create something just because I believed it was meaningful.
I think we search for reasons a lot to rationalize how to expend our efforts. I’ll read this because I need to know it for work or I’ll put this together to make some money. But as of late, I’ve come to believe that some of the most fulfilling experiences emerge from applying that same level of hustle, structure, critical thinking to a personal project just because it naturally sticks with you.
Things changed when I started pulling in my friends. I think it’s when you’re willing to solicit honest feedback, and bring in some relative expertise that your curious question or idea becomes something more.
And in the following months, Common Cam (which wasn’t even the name at the time), would transform to involve a Kickstarter campaign, a website for people to share their story, and a mass-mailing of hundreds of tiny packages at the Post Office. All of this was in large thanks to good people willing to make their mark and badass friends willing to spend a Saturday completing incredibly remedial tasks.
You should ask them, but I don’t think they did it for the free pizza. I think they helped out because they saw something worthwhile. It doesn’t matter if it’s an idea big or small (in fact I think starting smaller is better) as long it resonates with you and you’re willing to take it out of your head and ask someone else about it.
For us, we patiently await the return of most our cameras. Who knows how many we’ll get back, but the project has already given me so much more than I expected, most significantly an intoxicating taste of how it feels to work on something just because it feeds your soul.
I may not have any more cameras to send out right at this moment, but I’ll try my hardest to at least pass along that same infectious feeling to you in the meantime.
November 19th 2011
I Like To Meet People I’m Never Going To See Again
Pleasure to meet you.
There’s something magical about talking to someone you’re never going to meet again.
I was boarding this bus getting ready for a return trip from Boston to New York. Settled in my window seat, tucking my water bottle into that crevice between the chair and wall, I childishly spied on my fellow bus-goers as they attempted to fend off other passengers from picking the seat next to them. You know the dance, you place your bag on the aisle seat, spread out your legs an absurd amount, or just blatantly stare people down, shamelessly praying that no one will claim your precious personal space and you may be so lucky to escape victorious without a seat-mate for the ride.
I admit, even I was guilty that day as I placed the box of cheap Chinese food that I planned to eventually gulp down mid-trip directly on the seat next to me. Of course, by no surprise probably the very last woman to hop aboard the Megabus that fateful day miraculously looked around and tersely asked as she gestured towards my Beef and Broccoli, “This seat taken?”
Naturally, I smiled amidst admitting defeat through my teeth and replied with a short, “Of course.” And that was that, we were locked in.
Little did I know, I would soon spend a good lot of the next four hours getting to know Asal, an Iranian girl my age with twice my ambition and 10 times the street smarts, currently serving as Director of Business Development for a luxury fragrance company. She told me about her company, her long commute, her not-so-stimulating MBA program, and that one guy back home who she should probably marry. Hell, I even quickly photoshopped an image for one of her presentations.
I like talking to people
I’ll never meet again.
I like talking to people I’ll never meet again. Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy talking to friends I plan to see often, but there’s something uniquely genuine about a conversation between two people that have no expectation of the future between them. I think we often put a lot of pressure on the people we interact with, and that’s fine. We trade favors, field emotions, and work intimately. We have goals and sometimes you need to meet someone specifically to make something happen. That’s natural, that’s expected, that’s what you do to build depth whether it’s with a business partner, a love interest, or a best pal.
But when you intersect with someone else on a train, you’re isolated with that person for sometimes a hefty amount of time, and I believe you have the magical opportunity to enter a conversation with no agenda but to learn about their life out of pure curiosity. Because soon enough, you will part ways and leave with only what you’ve learned.
My boss, friend and mentor, Jerri, started a project called Subway Friends. It involves meeting someone new on the subway every day and handing them a small card with an invitation to a “Subway Friends Get-together” at a public place at the end of the month. Whenever I’m surrounded by unfamiliar people, I think about Jerri talking about her frustration with how a train packed full of folks can be deathly silent, all staring at the floor sheepishly avoiding contact via their iPhones, earbuds, and books.
Who knows where your random encounter might go. You may never get their name, you may trade business cards, you might find the girl of your dreams (part of why I take a lot of buses). But even amidst all that, I still think the majority of the time these serendipitous conversations go one of two ways: either you don’t get past the “how are you” phase or you meet, learn and leave. It’s that simple.
Someone did once tell me, “You meet everyone twice,” which, who knows, may be true in a poetic, Lion King Circle of Life, unquantifiable karma sort of way. But whether you’re meeting Asal the 24 year-old fragrance prodigy, Dan the love-struck upcoming sophomore at Rutgers, or that psychology student on the subway reading the book about why men cheat, I think you have the most to gain by not only welcoming but embracing that interaction just for what is, two people getting to know each other.
November 13th 2011
The N Line Is The Most Powerful NYC Subway Train Of All Time
It'll blow your mind.
Let’s begin by getting one thing straight, the N line may very well be the most powerful NYC subway train of all time. It jumps from the heart of Brooklyn to Canal St. in Manhattan within a single stop. It zooms past the silly local R train which crawls through downtown Brooklyn and pitifully, painfully drags its sad, screeching metal shell as it lumbers into the city. To put it another way, if Vin Diesel was reincarnated in subway train form, he would probably be the N. And moreover, he would likely smoke the crap out of the other underglowing Honda Civic subway train street racer wannabes.
But on top of all of that and maybe most importantly, the N runs across the Manhattan Bridge above the East River while many other cross-river trains use those underwater magical tunnels I don’t understand.
The view from the N train is beautiful, and I feel like
I’m the only one who notices it.
The view from the N train is beautiful, and I feel like I’m the only one who notices it. It doesn’t matter if it’s day or night, as the train emerges from the labyrinth of dark tunnels, the world peeks in, and for a maybe a minute or so, the hustle of the subway, that I’m-busy-and-need-to-walk-faster mentality, the iPhone-checking, cyclically-caffeinated, eating-lunch-over-your-laptop, too-tired-for-the-gym, I-need-wifi-while-underground, never-get-enough-done weight in your lungs… seems to pause.
I like to sit on the West side of the train. That’s because as you look over your adjacent train-mates the windows of the N frame the Brooklyn Bridge perfectly as it spans the two cities.
I never see anyone else peering out the windows. It’s as if the view is no different than the cracking, gray, moist tunnels that seem to wire the city. I don’t get it.
I’m not sure if my fellow ear-bud wearing passengers look at me thinking, “Man is it this guy’s first time in New York or something? Why’s he gawking out the window as if he just spotted Jay Z?” I’m not sure if it’s indeed a product of just being a 4 month New Yorker, or if I just have a weird engineering fetish for bridges.
But I have to say, I really think those other kids are crazy.
The N line is the most powerful NYC subway train of all time. It quantum leaps you from the Target at Atlantic Terminal to the bottom of the fancy, shmancy SoHo stores in a blink of an eye. It puts the tortoise-paced local R, the Snorlax of Brooklyn-bound subway trains to embarrassing shame. And it takes you over the bridge… over the bridge, out of the depths of the blackhole tunnels where I still childishly ponder if underground people actually live down there. The N train breaks up your day. It stops time. It’s the fucking Stargate of subway cars as it glides along the Manhattan Bridge like a beautiful, metal phoenix-like time portal of public transportation. It takes the world out of context and lets you see. It moves. It pauses. It’s magic. And yet, it’s still just a train.
October 26th 2011
Steve Jobs Tribute
Made by my friend, John.
Here’s the original: