Arrested Development/Fox

So you have daddy issues and you hate your mother, which has led you to experiment with different identities and take risks like visiting Oakland. For you, the best way to watch the newest season Arrested Development is amongst a crowd of people you are DEFINITELY not related to, who don’t know your real name, age or whether you are in fact confined to a wheelchair. Luckily the Parkway is marathoning the season in two sittings and costumes are encouraged. Possible costumes include: Leather Daughter, Studio Executive or Victim of BS Disease

2. Marathon Alone in Your Apartment: George Michael

Bad things are always happening to you. First off, you’re in love with your (maybe) cousin, everyone hates your actual girlfriend (her?), and you spend your days shilling fruit at the beach. Because of these factors and your general goodie two shoes-ness, no one wants to hang out with you and you end up spending a lot of time face down on your carpet…alone. So there’s really only one way you can watch the new season of Arrested Development: in your bed, under the covers, all at once, eating mayoneggs. You’ll be gone for days but don’t worry, no one will call the police.

3. Test Your Relationship by Watching on a Schedule with a Partner: Buster and (either) Lucille

Arrested Development/Netflix

You’re never sure how much your partner (or your mom) really cares about you. Yes, they want you around to zip up their dresses and participate in mother/son beauty pageants but who’s to say they won’t trade you in for a younger model (“Annyong!”)? Who’s to say they won’t murder you when they go off their meds? Here’s a way to find out if they REALLY love you: make them watch the new season of Arrested Development with you on a schedule, one episode a night. That way you will know where they are every night and if they start speaking along with lines at any point, you will know they’ve been cheating!

4. Throw a Theme Party: Lindsay

We know you’re great at throwing a fundraiser, whether it’s to end circumcision or your cause is TBD. Also, you’re a shopaholic (you’ve been looking for the right time to wear your lotion made of diamonds) and you’re an attention whore (because your mother doesn’t love you). All reasons why you should throw a theme party and try to forget that you’ve never seen your husband naked.

5. Watch Alone “When You Get To It”: Michael

Congratulations. You’re SOOOOO practical and responsible. You probably don’t even have Netflix. We would write more about you, but that about covers it. You’ll probably spend the next two weeks acting all superior to your friends and saying you’re too busy riding your bike or saving your family business to watch the new season of AD. Have fun up there on your boring mountain top of predictability but don’t be surprised when your son finds more entertaining (drunker) relatives to hang out with.

6. On Google Glass, Constantly: GOB

Everyone hates you.

Season four of Arrested Development goes live on Netflix on May 26.

By Emmanuel Hapsis and Lizzy Acker

If you haven’t used at least three different highlighters in your calendar to mark the release of Arrested Development’s fourth season this Sunday, you’ve made a huge mistake. To celebrate, Don and I collaborated on an exclusive, special edition of “Whilst in SF” featuring the Bluth family.

Taste the happy, readers!

WHEN I CHECK THE WEATHER AND REALIZE IT’S GOING TO BE OVER 80 DEGREES

VISITING NORTH BEACH ESTABLISHMENTS

ANYTIME ANYTHING HAPPENS ON MUNI, IT’S JUST LIKE:

WHEN I VISIT A PACKED DOLORES PARK AT 2:00 P.M. ON A WEEKDAY

TRYING TO ORDER A COSMO AT ZEITGEIST

THE FIRST TIME I VISITED FISHERMAN’S WHARF

MOVING TO THE PRESIDIO

Want more? Lucky you! See the rest of the GIFs (including some that aren’t KQED appropriate!) over at The Bold Italic.

Unless you live under a rock with no Internet access, you’ve likely seen dance moves like the Harlem shake and twerking making the rounds through memes and viral videos. We’re fairly certain that KQED Pop readers crush it on the dance floor, and we want to see your moves! Show us your signature dance move (or make one up) and give it a catchy name. Then capture it in a short video and send us the link via Vine, Twitter, or in the comments section below, and be sure to tag #DoNowDance. The most creative dances will be featured here on KQED Pop. Everybody dance now!

UPDATE: check out our dance moves for inspiration!

Video Produced by Kristin Farr and Matt Williams

You know how I know data visualization has gone mainstream? Because it’s only a matter of time before someone starts saying he was into it before it was cool.

No, wait, that happened. In San Francisco, as you’d expect.

“That would be me,” laughs Eric Rodenbeck. He points out that if you’ve looked at a weather map, you’ve used a data visualization. Really, even my dad can check his commute traffic on Apple’s Maps app, and this is a man who until recently dealt with email by dictating to his secretary. Mainstream.

graffiti archaeology

Rodenbeck isn’t posing as a hipster; he really was into it. In 2001, he co-founded and still is the creative director and CEO of Stamen, which has built data visualizations for clients from the ACLU to Yahoo, on topics ranging from Crimespotting to Graffiti Archaeology.

That’s not to say the visual representation of data can’t be data first and science last. ScienceOnline Bay Area holds monthly discussions on using visuals to present science findings online; the pretty pictures that NASA and other astronomers build not only sell space in a sexy way but help uncover real discoveries easy to miss in a data stream of numbers. Want to inspect the Firefox codebase? There’s a visualization for that. But did you understand it? Me neither. There’s a lot of serious cogitating going on.

But independently, in the wider world, data visualization has become data viz which has become #dataviz; the contraction traces the medium’s infiltration into our lives. Driving this is what drives most media: narrative. Narrative is the potent virus embedded in data viz that helps it spread and replicate in pop culture.

Lee Sherman, co-founder of SF-based Visual.ly, has bet heavily that data viz is the next form of storytelling, of narrative. How sure is he? The first line of his professional bio says that that “visual storytelling will save media.” Data visualization, when done well, is a story.

The linking of story and data was something Rodenback was learning in the days before broadband, before mobile, before most kids pitching at Y Combinator were able to ride a bike. When at Quokka Sports, he was trying to “embed the internet” into coverage of the ’97-’98 Whitbread Round the World yacht race. It was new. It pushed the state of technology, and it was cool: you could track racing sailboats automatically by GPS data, with video and images pushed from mast-mounted satellite dishes.

They’re joined in this crusade by Alberto Cairo, who says in his book The Functional Art that good visualizations tell a story, or at least allow us to discover one. “An illustration with a few figures,” he recently tweeted, “… not the same thing.” Or, as Sherman says, “nobody’s going to read a spreadsheet,” but a visualization with color and shapes and maybe motion? “All these things are looking to engage all our human senses.” Data suggest that readers eat up data viz: the Knight Foundation saw that “Data visualizations are 30x as likely to be shared as traditional text articles.”

This is leading major media outlets such as the New York Times to advertise for an “Interactive Storyteller” position; much of the Times’ data viz efforts are powered by hires from the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting and the SF locals behind D3.js. And recently, the media think tank Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley ran a data viz symposium attended by designers and writers from around the world.

Inequality & Mass Transit in the Bay Area

SF was, and is, definitely a hub of this new medium, say both Rodenbeck and Sherman (and not just because their companies are based here, though you can’t ignore Visual.ly’s Giants visualization). Check the number of data viz Meetups in the Bay Area; look at the mapping of income inequality along local mass transit; see Sha Hwang’s use of local company Trulia’s data to show commute times; read Wired’s Tim Leong’s recounting of Vertigo comics.

And, ultimately, it seems that data viz is becoming what most people think of when they think of visual design. Of course, everyday objects such as street signs and shoes are designed, but as more and more news and entertainment is propagated this way, and the more and more we turn to interactions to find our route, or connect with others, or figure out where to live, it’s going to be an infographic or data viz that pops to mind when people think, “design.” It’s kind of their own damn fault for making data so pretty.

Welcome to Tuesday, the day of the week that isn’t called Monday but is still basically a whole week away from Friday. There are two ways to look at the week stretching out before you: one, you can be sad, listless, overwhelmed by the never ending work and the mounting TPS report situation. Or two, you can think of it as almost four more days to practice your twerking skillz before the weekend!

What’s twerking, you say (okay, you didn’t say that but hypothetically, someone could have said it if they have been on an internet fast since like 2010 and don’t believe in watching hip hop videos)? Why, it’s the dance craze sweeping the nation faster than the “Macarena”! Basically, it involves shaking your hips and hindquarters in a vaguely or super, depending on your skill level, suggestive way. All the kids are doing it, though some of them are getting suspended for doing it because there is apparently still a group of people alive who haven’t seen any version of Footloose.

Now, without years of dance training and hours of daily practice and a unicorn onesie, you’re never going to reach the twerking heights of Dame Miley Cyrus. That said, you can probably get enough of an idea of how to do it from the video below that by Friday you can at least entertain your friends at parties. Remember, there is no wrong place or wrong outfit for twerking (see above, work function and clogs). All you need is strong thighs and a big heart. Happy Tuesday!

/doandroidsdance.com

A week ago I was driving home with friends from a hike to Alamere Falls in Point Reyes and had been listening to some Joni Mitchell, some Phosphorescent, a little Bob Marley, perfect tunes for the sunny weather. The hike itself was about eight miles in total, moderately rocky terrain and glimpses of the ocean, much needed time to rejuvenate. Almost as soon as the radio was voted on in the car, I heard a chorus full of singable hooks, the voice indisputably that of Justin Timberlake. It was “Mirrors” from his latest half-LP The 20/20 Experience. I’ve never been a Timberhead and can go so far as to say I didn’t even know he was making music anymore. It’s been seven years since his last album, and now after taking that time to explore, he is back to what he does best. A celebrity or an artist, just like everyone else, deserves the right to a hiatus, a gap year, or in Justin’s case, years.

When Justin was 11, he made his first appearance on Star Search and spent two years on The Mickey Mouse Club alongside megahits Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Ryan Gosling. At a very young age, it was clear to Justin (or to his parents) what his dreams were, what his talents were, and how to capitalize. When watching old footage of Justin he doesn’t seem too awkward like many child actors forced into the business by their parents, pupils dilated on the verge of tears, Justin seems to be a natural, genuinely enjoying himself, someone—and I hate to say it—born to entertain (e.g. River Phoenix, Shirley Temple, Drew Barrymore). From that Star Search performance, it’s clear this little guy can sing but when starting so young and burning so bright, is it inevitable the—ahem—little star will burn out? Someone like Justin did not have the run-of-the-mill childhood but he is still a human and humans like to check out their options.

For as ubiquitous as he is, Justin only has three full-length albums. I was surprised myself when doing the research. After the huge success of FutureSex/LoveSounds in 2006, Justin split off the music scene for a good amount of time. It’s crazy to imagine someone at the height of their popularity in one artistic medium, raking in millions, pulling the proverbial plug. It would be like Michael Jordan playing baseball or Joaquin Phoenix becoming a rapper… oh wait. We definitely saw Justin in those seven years but not necessarily with a microphone in his hand. As Napster-found Sean Parker in The Social Network, he proved he could definitely cut it as a dramatic actor. As Beyonce’s backup dancer in an SNL skit for “Single Ladies,” he proved he could cut it as a comedian. He was doing his thing and doing it well, just not in a recording studio.

What we come to expect from artists is once they give us something spectacular we want them to give us more and even more than that. And when we don’t get it, the artist either becomes iconic or simply an iconic joke. To keep in the music realm, take for example a band like My Bloody Valentine. Some would argue the band’s 1991 album Loveless as one of the best records of all time, defining not only a decade but a generation of kids, and over the likes of Radiohead and Nirvana. I’m talking big deals here. How does a band follow genius with bigger genius and do we denounce them if we get nothing? My Bloody Valentine became iconic and 22 years in 2013 they released the follow up to Loveless, picking up right where they left off. On the other side of the coin is—and I may get some slack from my gay community for this one—Britney. Her hiatus didn’t quite work as well. In the mid-2000s, we followed Britney from meltdown to meltdown and had to bear witness to one of the most superbly terrible “comebacks” in pop culture history: her 2007 MTV Music Awards performance of “Gimme More,” where she appeared sedated like a sleepy puppy. Britney has become an iconic joke. I understand it might not be fair to compare little shoegaze pioneers with the enormous fame of a pop act but both took breaks and one just worked out better than the other.

With Justin, he not only traveled different career pathways, he also fell in love, which is something we both tend to forget about celebrities, that they have families just like you and me. Recently I was in a pizzeria and the man behind the counter was ringing me up and checking his phone at the same time. When he saw no one called, he put his phone on the counter and we finished our transaction. As I turned out the door, I saw the wallpaper on his homescreen was a picture of what I assume to be his wife and children. And my heart melted. Of course he has a wife and of course he has children! Our meaningless interaction just became human, super human. We engage with celebrities and artists because they entertain us, we want something from them, but like US Weekly says: They’re Just Like Us!

Justin is just like us. We return to what we know, what we’re good at, and what can help us keep moving forward with our lives. But not without exploring other options. In his latest single “Mirrors,” he sings: and I’ll tell you, baby / it was easy coming back into you once I figured it out / you were right here all along. Sometimes you have to just take a break from tackling the city and go out and conquer the forest and the sea.

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Garden State is one of the most disappointing movies I have ever seen. I loved Zach Braff when it came out, I was in the perfect demographic for the movie (you know, in my 20′s, white, vaguely anxious about everything) and I had been waiting for it with bated breath.

And it was so bad. The story was cliched, the images only mildly interesting, the entitlement palpable and the second half, from the moment the gang “screams into the void” until the classic airport chase-down, almost unwatchable. But it had a great soundtrack.

And now Zach Braff wants to make a sequel-type-thing called Wish I was Here. And he wants us to pay for it.

I’m not going to lie. My first reaction after seeing this video was: “F YOU ZACH BRAFF I DON’T WANT A SEQUEL and stop trying to win me over with the dreamy Chris Hardwick.”

But since I went to meditation last night, I decided to become aware of my response and then actually listen to what he was saying.  Basically, it seems like Zach is suggesting that we change our model of movie funding from top down to bottom up. We stop letting some big studio dictate what we see and vote with our dollars for real, from the beginning, and not just at the box office. He got this idea from the Veronica Mars Kickstarter that just funded a movie of the show, and even if some parts of this whole process seem annoying (like do I really have to give money to the super-rich? If I do, will they pay at least a MONTH of my student loan debt?), the idea is kind of awesome. Like give-it-back-to-the-people free market art support.

I really, truly find Braff obnoxious and I will absolutely not support his movie Kickstarter but I guess that’s the point…I don’t have to! I didn’t support the Veronica Mars Kickstarter either. I have supported things on Kickstarter though, for local comedians, my friend’s band, things like that. It’s interesting to note that arts funding in this country is so totally messed up, on every level, that the unknown, poor artists can’t get money to do their thing and the well-known ones are forced to compromise their vision and do whatever their funders want them to. If Kickstarter is a way around this for both the known and the unknown then you know what? Let’s do it. Maybe it won’t fix the state of the arts in this country but at least, until the whole system implodes and we start turning to Scandinavia for all of our entertainment needs, it will keep artists in the US afloat and the rest of us engaged in the process of creation.

So, what do you think? Will you help Zach Braff fund Garden State 2.0? Should I go start a Kickstarter for my student loans?

Friends Forever

Google is making us stupid. Our phones are damaging our hearts. Zadie Smith thinks social media has us pathologically caught in the consciousness of a snarky teenage boy. Rebecca Solnit has some scathing observations about SF’s tech boom. So too, I imagine our ephemeral Facebook connections must be leaving some psychological imprint on us, especially those friendships that we might not otherwise still have or want. On one hand I’m inclined to write off these concerns. The novelty of Facebook is gone for many of us; even my teenage students find it “boring” these days. So, does it really matter? In the early days of Facebook we all rushed to find everyone we could think of, amazed that it was possible, not considering whether we really wanted to or not. Part of the psychological imprint is that now we’re all somehow connected without actually interacting (sometimes without interacting in person and sometimes without interacting at all) to hundreds of people. Robert Kelly, my writing teacher in college, once told us that everyone we ever loved would exist forever as a ghost around us. I found that sad and thrilling and hoped it was true. He didn’t mean Facebook, but he certainly could have, and I’m less sure I hope it’s true now.

I had looked right through, when I wanted a universe that sustains looker and looking and the seen forever, detail after detail never ending. -’Looking’ by Robert Kelly

Recently I “unfriended” someone, an important person from my past who renders me an irrationally passionate teenager. And the unfriend is truly the last resort of the irrationally passionate teenager. In an era of sophisticated privacy settings I can hide anyone who annoys me and I can control every piece of information I share. The unfriend is unnecessary; it’s the violent, tangible act we turn to when no other expression of our over-it-ness will suffice. Where before door slamming and shouted threats of never speaking again would get the point across, it’s now the click that quietly disconnects us.

In the aftermath of this unfriend I conducted a casual survey and it seems many of my friends have never unfriended anyone. Reasons include fear of seeming too invested or concerned, of offending, of giving Facebook too much validity, that they might change their mind (though in what dramatic statement about an interpersonal dynamic might we ever be sure?) and so forth. They rightfully hide the offending party and continue on. It’s a reasonable and sustainable approach where no one’s feelings are hurt and we don’t seem crazy. After all, there are plenty of people I’ve merely hidden and soon forget. It’s easy, painless and non-political. I can unhide if I want and I don’t seem fickle. Due to this clandestine option, I forget half the people I’m friends with, but therein lies part of the strangeness and the question. Why do I stay invisibly connected to someone I want to hide, no matter what the reason?

I was curious as to why this particular person, and a handful before him, inspired me to forego such social niceties as would make sense. I wanted him to know he was no longer allowed to see me and that I had no interest in seeing him. Not only did I want to disconnect from him symbolically (and literally) in a way that he could potentially be aware of and upset by, but I was also willing to give up the idea that he might get the occasional glimpse at the curated, controlled moments of my perfect, amazing, digital life and I was thereby severing all ties, including the unspoken one where we’re at least allowed to spy on each other. All levels and layers of our connection are obsolete, says the unfriend. If the newsfeed hide is when you pretend you don’t see someone at a party, the unfriend is when you throw your drink in their face and cause a scene. Who actually inspires that? And even if they do, should we give them the pleasure?

George and Martha would have unfriended each other.

There have been others, albeit slightly less dramatic ones. The acquaintance who was a jerk the last time I saw him, who never sent a message or interacted with me, but silently sat there as my hundred and whatever-eth friend doing nothing. Finally, when I still couldn’t remember if I liked him in real life or not, I unfriended him. Or the guy who wanted me to “like” his band (ten times!) but walked by me in Dolores Park because he didn’t recognize me. Or the guy who took me on three dates in college and was a hell of a breakdancer but had nothing to say since. Or an old girlfriend who seemed to have forgotten clearly telling me we weren’t friends anymore (in our early 20′s). These people shouldn’t be connected to me because they aren’t. We don’t know each other anymore or we never did. What does it do to my brain/heart/psychology to know they’re there anyway? We’re not even actively looking at each other’s lives most likely, but instead just absent-mindedly, occasionally looking, listlessly and invisibly bound to one another. In what unconscious, tiny ways are we changed by revealing ourselves like this, by looking at others and being seen within this framework?

Once this most recent person was unfriended, I felt calmer, less seen, more myself (and fascinated that these were all equated). He wasn’t there, wherever there is. He was gone, not hidden. What further interested me was that he was as absent from my offline life as ever, but the palpable sense of getting him out of my online life felt substantial. And that speaks to the odd importance of our online selves, how they mirror or reinforce who we really are. In my informal survey many had obviously unfriended exes but others had purposefully kept them around so as not to give them the “satisfaction” of being unfriended, a funny twist. Are our experiences any less if everyone can’t see it? Some part of our experiences include us wanting specific other people to know about them. There’s some secret part of ourselves that must admit we want that. But the unfriend is saying I don’t and therefore has some actual meaning and significant social power.

Facebook has made us forget that we don’t want to know everyone. We’ve forgotten it can be nice to be alone, as it can be helpful to be quiet. I’ve made a ritual of not going on my phone first thing in the morning, or taking it out when my dinner companions excuse themselves and this helps me have one or two quiet moments inside my own head. Along the same lines I’ve also decided that the unfriend is allowed. The art of the unfriend can range from the occasional housecleaning of people you really don’t know or will never see again, to the psychological protection of ridding yourself of someone bad for you, to no longer aligning yourself with someone you don’t want to be aligned with. Don’t avoid the unfriend for fear of seeming melodramatic or one day changing your mind. Delete your ex-boyfriend if he makes you so mad you forget you’re a grown woman. Delete the friend you wouldn’t want to meet for a drink in real life. Grow apart like you should.

The road trip, running around in the woods at night, the car crash, when he played piano in the empty auditorium, those are the fleeting actual moments of my life, the relationships that dissipated or strengthened, that evolved or ended, in real time. Those living moments of our friendships happened and are remembered or not, mattered or didn’t. This person’s status as my Facebook friend was an electronic glimmer that distracted me.The inexplicable nature of why we’re drawn to one another and why we stay or go is the endless fascination of my life. If only it were simple to understand, but in the meantime, even if he does exist forever as a ghost around me, he doesn’t exist on Facebook because I unfriended him.