"Never Not the Oldest Person in the Place That I Am"

So Ken came home from the American Association of University Presses meeting in Minneapolis with a copy of New York Magazine, required plane reading, and showed me a full page photograph and interview with Bob Stein, the leader of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a small nonprofit out in Williamsburg that investigates (so sayeth its website) "the transformation of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens." Bob's group is working on Sophie, a next-generation online reader, and lots more. I know about them because the collaborative concept paper that David Theo Goldberg and I are doing ("The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age") is up on a collaborative online writing/thinking/comment tool hosted by and developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. Anyone can read our text and make a comment. Anyone can then make a comment on the comment. We can make a comment on the comments, and so it goes, writing as an interactive process. Pretty great.

But not as great as having your photograph and an interview in NYM as an intellectual AND a style icon. Bob has been a style icon as long as I've known him (only a few years, actually, come to think of it) but I'll never forget the grand entrance he made at "Electronic Techtonics" in, well, cloth. I don't know what else to call it, swirls and twirls and mobius loops of pale neutral cloth, Yohji Yamamoto or beyond. I thought I was looking pretty darn hot (Yohji too) that night until Bob walked in.

Great photo, great interview. And with an absolutely unforgettable quote too: "I’m never not the oldest person in the place that I am, and I think that’s what’s behind my evolution." I know the feeling. As a teenager, I was a singer and hung out with people twice my age. Now, I'm often in rooms talking about new media with people half my age. Both ends of that equation are part of my "evolution," to use Bob's term.

I like what he says in this article . . . especially about our society's very extreme and uncreative age segregation. It's great to see a fellow traveler (in various ways) singled out for style. But I sure wish I could steal that amazing woodblock printed jacket . . .

To see the photo and the interview, go to: http://nymag.com/fashion/lookbook/33120/