William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

It's a long road, it's a long and narrow way

New Yorkers didn't want the New York City Marathon to proceed this weekend, and runners who paid good money to travel to New York are upset that the cancellation wasn't announced sooner.

Nobody's asking me, but here's a 20/20 hindsight suggestion for what the organizers might have said earlier in the week: "We want the race to take place. We believe we have the support of the mayor. But the situation here is uncertain. We'll do our best, but don't be surprised if city resources have to be diverted and the race has to be canceled."

West to East

My thoughts this morning are with friends, old and new, on the East Coast.

The folks I know all seem to be safe. Most will be dealing with property damage and a lack of electricity, sounds like.

One friend meant to make his way east to west Monday night. But flights were canceled and there are none to take today.

Residents, travelers, all, take care.

Dark Flatiron Building this morning; photo by @lvlewitinn.

The High Line in New York City

In the tradition of Hiking Disney Concert Hall and Spelunking Disney Concert Hall, here is brief post about another elevated urban walkway, the High Line in Manhattan.

I accessed it Thursday last from stairs at West 23rd Street and walked south. The air was autumn afternoon warm and the sky late summer bright. People moved in both directions in small groups. Those walking unaccompanied, as I was, were few, suggesting that use of the High Line is predominantly recreational.

Where the path widens, there are places to sit, and I did see loners parked on bleachers, reading (books and phones, not tablets) or brooding.

One sitting area found the benches pivoted, perpendicular to the path and cantilevered over 10th Ave. A glass wall allowed an aquarium-like view of the vehicular traffic ushering from directly beneath your seat.

The views I liked best along the walk were of the backsides of billboards and the tiny, mechanical, elevated, antiquated Chelsea carparks.

Around W. 14th St. I bought some chilaquiles and a Mexican Coke from a taco vendor sat and looked east at the traffic in the Hudson River.

Then it was time to get to Dumbo for the Docracy Legal Stuff Explained 2.4: Equity Crowdfunding Dissected event.

John Chamberlain sculptures outside the Seagram Building

Here are three photos I took last Wednesday evening on the plaza of the Seagram Building in Manhattan. They are of sculptures by John Chamberlain. I took others and you can see the full set here on Flickr.

The works are hard to describe. They do an odd thing with scale, because at some level they read like colored aluminum foil, wrapped over cardboard tubes or perhaps playdoh extruded from one of those playdoh presses you had as a kid. That is to say, they evoke associations with household objects, toys and kitchen tools.

But if you focus less on the material and more on the shapes, particularly as the shapes shift as you walk among them on the plaza, they seem somehow organic, acquatic.

I'll bet they look very different during the day. They probably relate to the Seagram Building differently, too, in daylight.

Thursday's equity crowdfunding talk to be livestreamed from Brooklyn

I'm on my way to New York to participate in "Legal Stuff Explained 2.4: Equity Crowdfunding," an event organized and to be moderated by Veronica Picciafuoco for Docracy.

It looks like the event is "sold out" for attendance in person, but Docracy intends to livestream it. Follow Docracy on Twitter to look for breaking details on how to catch the livestream. The event is scheduled for 6:30 PM Eastern, 5:30 PM Central, 4:30 PM Mountain, 3:30 PM Pacific. And we're talking about tomorrow, Thursday, October 18.

I'm looking forward to meeting Veronica IRL. I feel like I know her from her generous contributions to this blog, in the comments. I think I will get the chance to meet her colleagues at Docracy, as well. Docracy is an exciting startup, working to innovate in a very important area - the legal documenting of deals - in a potentially (hopefully) very disruptive way.

I'm also looking forward to hearing what Larry Baker of Bolstr has to say about crowdfunding. With his Bolstr co-founder, Charlie Tribbet, Larry wrote a guest post for this blog a couple months back, bringing a different perspective on the nascent equity crowdfunding landscape: they believe the kind of fundraising they are enabling today, in reliance on Rule 504 of Reg D, is in fact the crowdfunding of the here and now, not dependent on implementation of Title III of the JOBS Act. Rule 504 just isn't something I or most other startup lawyers use, and I'd like to learn more about how Larry and Charlie have made it work.

David Rose, another speaker for the event, is everywhere. His answers on Quora just about set the gold standard on subjects related to early stage investing. And he is CEO of Gust, the online platform for angel investing. (Online platforms for angel investing are very interesting places to be right now, particularly with the changes wrought by the McHenry Amendment that made it into Title II of the JOBS Act. In point of brutal reality, equity crowdfunding is already here and booming - it's just restricted to accredited (angel) investors.) It will be good to hear David's take on whether the twain - angel investing and non-accredited crowdfunding - shall meet.

Photo: Bömmel / Flickr.

Roosevelt Island

I have absolutely nothing to do with the Cornell-Technion "winning bid" to build a tech campus in New York City.

But I do hold two degrees from schools on Cornell's provincial, upstate campus; learned how to watch movies by teaching sections of a Cornell freshman English class, Writing About Film; and am proud of President Skorton and the institution for meeting Mayor Bloomberg's challenge so handily.

The campus is to be built on Roosevelt Island, which won't be all that far from my favorite place to stay in midtown Manhattan, the unpretentious Cornell Club on East 44th Street.

What makes Cornell cool, over and above anything else, is a kind of ancillary Heisenberg principle in action - that a focus of study, directed at any human endeavor, makes that endeavor a discipline and worthy of study. So you have a department of theoretical physics and a school of industrial labor relations and a major in agricultural economics and a laboratory of ornithology . . . I could go on, but the point is that anything anyone thinks is worthy of study, is.

This particular project in New York City, of course, is part of the city's push to make New York the hub of technical innovation in America. NYC has more skillfully vocal champions - Mayor Bloomberg, Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon, others - than Seattle, but if the citizenry of my adopted state decide that education is worth the investment, I think it more likely that the Northwest will take the baton from California.

But great to have Cornell serving or even driving New York's ascendance as another hub!