"It's all about the crowd," says Rich Medina, in a New York Times piece by Alan Feuer (1/22/09). "A crowd's a real relationship -- a legitimate relationship," he continues. It would have to be, because there's not much else to speak of at Santos Party House in N.Y.C., where Rich is a disk jockey. Santos is "a cramped black box of a place in a former discount clothing store in Chinatown, where the clientele is so casually sneaker-clad and the decor so unpretentious it can hardly be said to exist."

Rich's own perch -- the D.J. booth -- "is a dark nook not much bigger than a walk-in fridge and lighted by a single naked bulb. Its one indulgence is the tub of ice that holds the D.J.'s liquor -- nothing fancy, no Cristal or Ketel One, just some cheap tequila and a bottle of dark spiced rum." Out on the dance floor, a "single disco ball hangs from the ceiling, throwing dimes of light at a stripped-down loft for drinkers."

The crowd is suitably laid-back, "which in a neo-hippie sort of way, is unconcerned with seeing or being seen. They are actually there for the dancing. They are also hugely varied, and on a recent Friday night included hipsters, prepsters, fraternity boys in ball caps, soul men with their entourages, East Side girls in diamonds, Howard University grads and an old man pushing 70 in a navy flannel suit." The goal, according to Rich, is "to take diversity and spin it into oneness," and create "a relationship between the people and the jock." ~ Tim Manners, editor.

The eccentric ways and "wandering personal narrative" of the legendary adman David Mackenzie Ogilvy is captured in "The King of Madison Avenue," by former Ogilvy CEO Ken Roman, as reviewed by Paul B. Carroll in the Wall Street Journal (1/21/09). Little did we know, for instance, that Ogilvy's famous campaign for Hathaway shirts -- featuring a man wearing an eye-patch (image) -- was perhaps rooted in the man's personal heritage. It seems one of Ogilvy's ancestors had "stirred up trouble when he became angry at a relative of his wife, who had only one eye: He returned her to her own family on a one-eyed pony, with a one-eyed servant and a one-eyed dog."

It also seems that nearly everything Ogilvy did on his tortured path into the advertising agency business contributed to his ultimate success. During the Depression, he worked as a cook, where he was assigned "to decorate the thighs of cold frogs with chervil leaves," which was "a lesson in (among other things) the value of perfectionism that would serve him well in advertising." He went on to work as a salesman for Aga Cookers, which convinced him "of the importance of companies supporting the poor guy who peddles their products."

Ogilvy's first taste of the advertising business came with a job at his brother's London ad agency, before "working for George Gallup's polling firm, where he learned the value of research." He also did time as a farmer in Amish country, perhaps influencing his habit of using "sharpened pencils instead of ball-point pens." Ogilvy's talent as a writer apparently worked against him "once television ads made image more important than words," but his penchant for data presaged today's data-driven, direct-sales ways. All the while, David Ogilvy opposed" the slippery surface of irrelevant (ahem!) brilliance," and favored the idea that "ads should promote some key attribute of a product." ~ Tim Manners, editor

When he takes the oath of office, Barack Obama might well be thinking of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as much as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, suggests Nat Hentoff in the Wall Street Journal (1/15/09). As jazz historian Stanley Crouch recently wrote, "Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America ... Once the whites who played it and the listeners who loved it began to balk at the limitations imposed by segregation, jazz became a futuristic social force in which one was finally judged purely on the basis of one's individual ability."

Back in the 1920s, Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke were limited to playing together only after hours, since blacks and whites were not allowed to share a stage in public. By the 1940s, a few clubs, like Boston's Savoy Cafe, featured integrated performance -- and were routinely busted for it. In the 1950s, Norman Granz, told whites that if they didn't want to sit next to blacks at his jazz concerts, he'd give them their money back. Charles Black (who was white), a lawyer who worked on Brown v. Board of Education with Thurgood Marshall, says his racist upbringing unraveled when he saw Louis Armstrong play.

"It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy's seeing a genius, in a black," he wrote. "We literally never saw a black then in any way but a servant's capacity." And, thanks to Duke Ellington, Barack Obama will not be the first African-American to travel like a president. As Duke once explained, "Without the benefit of federal judges, we commanded respect. We had two Pullman cars and a 70-foot baggage car ... We had our own water, food, electricity and sanitary facilities. The natives would come by and say, 'What's that?' 'Well,' we'd say, 'that's the way the president travels.' We made our point. What else could we have done at the time?" ~ Tim Manners, editor

"What you do is a function of what you want to do," says Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson of the $200 million Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, a.k.a. Empac, at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, reports Dennis Overbye in the New York Times (9/23/08). More precisely, Empac is "220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and workspaces hooked to supercomputers," where scientists "can immerse themselves in data" while artists "can participate in virtual concerts with colleagues in different parts of the world." According to Dr. Jackson, "To our knowledge there is nothing else like it."

Running the project is composer, Johannes Goebel, who explains: "Art integrates the senses ... Science takes the senses apart and analyzes. The idea of Empac is to bridge the gap between the digital world of data and the physical world of our senses, which is where we make sense of things and decide what things mean," adding, "It's always us human beings who have the final word on what things mean." The center features "so-called immersive environments ... where you will see and hear only what a producer or scientist wants you to." As Dr. Geobel puts it, "You need dead space to create immersion."

Some compare the effect to a "holodeck" like on Star Trek, and say the effect is a far piece from viewing the same stuff on a computer monitor. "Walk into this environment and the data is all around you," says John Kolb, Rensselaer's VP of IT. He adds: "Education is the killer app ... You could have a kindergarten class that walks through a human being." Doctors could use it to teach surgery or conduct tours of through models of hearts or circulatory systems. Empac was designed by Nicolas Grimshaw & Partners and made possible largely by an anonymous donation. It will open October 3rd "with a gala of performances including classical music, virtual reality rides, symposiums and celebrations." ~ Tim Manners, editor

"In a sense, Ford has reinvented the station wagon," writes James R. Healy in a USA Today review of the new Ford Flex (6/13/08). He says so because the design sits higher than "a pure station wagon" but "still has enough SUV persona." Plus, its "long, straight roofline evokes Ford Country Squires of yore." It actually looks a little like a gargantuan Mini Cooper. Whichever comparison applies, James says the Ford Flex is the "best-looking SUV since the now-departed Jeep Cherokee."

The irony of this, he adds, is that the design flies in the face of today's "flowing" look, bringing back the "two-box" design originating with "Chrysler's first mini-van in 1984," and presenting it as "the latest thing." The Flex's interior is also closer in size to that of a station wagon, with cargo space of "about 83 cubic feet, vs. 100-plus in most full-size SUVs. Three rows of seats can be done up all bucket style, or as benches. But you must order the buckets if you want "the optional refrigerator in row two."

The buckets, by the way "allow you to dial out all the lumbar support you wish," writes James, adding: "Comfy seats are a new frontier for Ford." It must have been the seats that inspired Ford to name the car Flex, because it certainly has nothing to do with any kind of "futuristic powerplant." The V-6 Flex "is a conventional gasoline-only machine" that gets about "17 mpg in town, 24 highway," or about the same as other crossovers, even smaller and lighter ones. Calling the Ford Flex "a champ," James says "driving a machine that looks like Flex is outrageous fun." ~ Tim Manners, editor