Google Chrome Artist Themes

8:38pm

EH: "raw milk" is the hip new thing in brooklyn
which is hilarious
ML: by raw they mean unpasteurized
which means
"you will die of botulism"
which means
"you sacrificed yourself in the glorious anarchist struggle against consumerism"
which means
"you'll have an unmarked grave because the anarchist society is out of money"

the cuckoo's nest, just down the street

In his riveting account "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Fred Turner takes us through the rise of the digital utopian ideal that has become the framework from which we perceive technology and the Internet today. He traces the roots of this idealism to the communalism of the post-Vietnam counterculture movement (with focus on Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Network and the LSD movement legitimately (surprisingly enough) spawning in San Francisco as an offshoot of tests and experiments that were conducted in the Veteran's Hospital down the street in Menlo Park). The constituents of the Whole Earth Network appropriated technology and the Internet from their military-industrial-complex milieu and transmuted the metaphor of the "machine" from its Luddite associations into an enabler of a greater egalitarian network of transparency, access, and augmentation of the authentic self.

I am barely in the early stages of the book, but one particular paragraph strikes me (hyperlinks to Wikipedia entries of the individuals added for context):

"Like the Net, my life is decentralized," wrote Dyson, reminding her readers of how much and where she traveled. "I live on the Net," she explained. "It's the medium I use to communicate with many of my friends and colleagues. I also depend on it professionally: It's the primary subject about which I write, talk, and consult, and the basis of most of the companies I invest in, both in the United States and in Eastern Europe." Likewise, Barlow reminds his readers, "I live at barlow@eff.org. That is where I live. That is my home. If you want to find me, that's the only place you're liable to be able to do it, unless you happen to be looking at me at that moment---physically...There really is no way to track me. I have not been in one place for more than 6 days since April." Metaphorically, Barlow and Dyson had become packets of information, shuttling from boardroom to conference to media outlet. Their sense of place had become dislocated and their sense of home, like their notion of a home on the Net, distributed."
(p.14, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Fred Turner, hyperlinks added and are not part of book)

I remember, when still in my teens (about ten years ago) and at that point in time still, in my ingenuousness, heralding the part of my week that was graced by the arrival of the latest edition of Newsweek and TIME back in La Malaisie as a temporal mecca of erudition, reading a glowing one-page in Newsweek about the rise of a new generation of "corporate gypsies"--armed with laptops (which were still clunking, unwieldy machines back then, and I had not yet seen one at that point in time) and mobile phones.

I'm just beginning to parse the paragraph in my head as I write this--what does it claim as implications?

1.That the Internet, in its distributedness, has allowed for the rise of such a distributed lifestyle

2. And yet in its distributedness, provides, in that paradoxical way, a singular rooted sense of home for that rootless, continually mobile part of society that Newsweek once called the "corporate gypsy" (and which we, today, broadly call a global citizen)

3. But to take it a stretch further, does the wide, far-flung distribution of the Internet then partially dissuade the need for actual physical distributedness? In other words, if we can vicariously live, experience, and communicate with worlds beyond our immediate physical contact through the distributedness of the Internet, amplified by technologies such as Google Earth, live web cams, Flickr, blogs, video, Photosynth (link to a phenomenal TED Talk here), will there perhaps be no longer any real need to be the literal corporate gypsy, physically jetsetting from one continent to another? Perhaps we are no longer metaphorically moving packets of information--instead we have, quite virtually, become packets of information trundling down the tubes in the many incarnations of our digital extensions (Facebook profile, web conference live feed, IM chat, live blog, etc.)

Speaking of the Internet providing a sense of home, the web-based communications startup GrandCentral has come to the forefront in the past few months since its acquisition by Google, but more saliently to this post, I had noticed them about a year ago through Project CARE. GrandCentral essentially allows you to own one phone number for all of eternity--which can then be directed to any or multiple physical phones that you own. With that comes a panoply of features, but more pointedly, GrandCentral partnered with the city of San Francisco and Oakland last year in a project that issues free phone numbers and voicemail boxes for the city's homeless. The one thing about not having a home or the wherewithal to acquire devices that can provide some semblance of contactable persistence (i.e. mobile phone) is that it completely obliterates the capacity for the homeless to pursue courses of action improving their chances of socioeconomic mobility. For instance, the homeless would be hardpressed to follow up on potential job applications if they are perennially nomadic, uncontactable with no home base or persistent touchpoint. By having a persistent phone number and a voice mailbox for life, they are essentially empowered with one of the basic hallmarks of (or perhaps even the right to, in this technological imperative age) a "home" in the digital age through which communication with friends, family, potential employers, and social workers is enabled.

--A heartening example of the true empowerment of technology, even in this often self-reinforcing resonant echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.

The Mission, San Francisco

N.B. Shout-out to DW for introducing Fred Turner's book to me

one hell of a good universe (here) next door

(writer's preamble: it has been a while since i've telegraphed a précis of my wanderings both internal and external. in the spirit of demarcating personal-zeitgeist-rambling posts from the more substantial ones dedicated to larger and more interesting topics than that of the machinations of the vertical pronoun, the former will be written in ode-to-bauhaus-eternal-lowercase (free-form, written with abandon and without rigorous filters or neurotic revisions), the latter in properly punctuated, properly formatted style as evidenced in posts 1 and 3 of this oh-so-sparse blog.

i am, sometimes, a method writer--the nature of the music playlist, the color of the sky, the temperature, the room scent, all set a certain backdrop and ambiance to even the most derelict attempts at writing.

currently listening to:
"friend of mine" - the national (merci, Mish!)
"ageless beauty" - stars (most serene mix)
the excellent feist album, "the reminder"
the stealthily addictive sea and cake album, "everybody"

color of the sky: a surprising light blue, it is 7:52pm here in the san francisco bay area

temperature: cool, after an ebulliently hot day

room scent: non-existent, although i purchased a massive handful of lavender stalks from the local farmer's market a few days ago)

and now, off to the races.

1) collisions, coalescence, convergence

this past weekend marked a one-year ripening since graduation--that ritual process of seemingly premature, begrudging, simultaneously writhing and rejoicing expulsion into the world and all its perils, through the invisible membrane that once constituted the protective sac of college life. this one-year mark is, quite naturally, a good time to prendre un pause, to reflect on how the past year has changed us in both apparent and subtle ways, to take stock of where, even in very rough and fuzzy orders of magnitude, we stand in relation to life and the swirling cosmic brew.

the quiet pause is made salient by the occasion, but rendered absolutely magical when it is filled with a confluence of disparate melodies, each carried by a critical and necessary artist, interweaving in syncopated tempo and sonic exuberance, propelled by some unseen force of happenstance. shortly after my dear, dear friend lizzie--my intellectual opiate--arrives in a whirlwind for a transitory reevaluation of california and a necessary spot on my futon in the living room, there we are, two of us and the intrepid matt and renee, riding the invigorating night wind, hurtling down the 280 to Half Moon Bay at night with a bottle of champagne to accompany a night watch of white walls of Pacific foam roaring into shore underneath a star-streaked cloak. days later megs, reubs, lizzie and i are on the futon cackling, musing, deliberating, like the old days. with lizzie, the great magnet in the universe, i find myself in the company of two precious souls who live so fully and fulfillingly--daniel and ryan, whom i did not know well before, but from this one brief tryst nourished something latent from the depths of my restless, flailingly endeavoring spirit. in daniel's words, "waiting for the brain stem to drop" (into the mid-cavity of feeling, knowing). ryan, on a transitory stop to italy (and to return with an absurdist play, that is his charter), in an infinitely sapient, remarkable and coruscating statement brings sense and order to this grappling of our places in the world: we are all translators. translators between those who live fully in their madness and those with one foot on solid ground, between the fervent idealist and the stridently practical--we are dots on a coherent continuum, making sense of the world and translating them for ourselves and our neighbors and by extension for every individual and collective that claims a place in this continuum-world; we are all necessary. and there is no need to feel obliged to some aquinian logic, putting an end to an infinite 'regression' of relations. on this weekend, one year ripe after graduation, we have all come together to check in with each other, propelled by some unseen force of happenstance, abetted only by the minimal logistical planning required to avoid the necessity of crawling into a decompressed airplane cargo cabin to get to the other side of the country.


2) i am reading again. my friend sundar pointed out, quite accurately, that all this frenetic joie de vivre of doing everything, seeing everything, and seeing everyone requires some respite, some space to become. there are books strewn all over every nook of my abode by deliberately chaotic design to maximize the chances of caprice fatiguing and choosing to indulge, instead, in the life of the mind in earnest, namely sitting for a few quiet hours to crack a book open and remain with it long enough to have myself descend into a state of deep investment or levitate to utter captivation and rapture. i am far from making it through tolstoy's tome of war and peace but i have, at least, modestly begun: "founders at work" by jessica livingston, "another day in the frontal lobe" by katrina firlik, "the selfish gene" by richard dawkins.

twilight descends.

"il n'ya pas de Cubisme," he said blithely, and then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey

ode to the bauhaus and their affection for the egalitarian lower case.

lists, when heft and substance devoid: this passing post will do very little to compensate for my neglect of the blog (as a function of far too little time, but more pertinently, complete absence of a clear, blog-amenable frame of mind). as a painless exercise for 3:20am, here's a list of exciting happenings in music and the arts that i look forward to, in the good company of motley crews, in this finite time horizon (and here i partially revert to the common way we punctuate Proper Nouns):

Motel de Moka: unmistakably sublime, a true gem of a music blog. stuff that feeds the soul and rivets the senses, where shakti resides side by side with arve hendrickson, bobby mcferrin, esmerine, and tom waits.
http://www.moteldemoka.com/

The San Francisco International Film Festival!
http://fest07.sffs.org/films/

Ravi and Anoushka Shankar at CalPerformances
http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/world_stage/rs.php

Laura Veirs and the Saltbreakers @ Cafe DuNord
http://www.cafedunord.com/brilliant/cal/p.event.php?E_id=1173142095&B_id=1095736502776&P_id=3

Vienna Teng @ The Palace of Fine Arts
http://viennateng.com/tour/

Picasso + others @ MoMA

Vivienne Westwood + others @ the DeYoung


should you have more suggestions or care to partake, i'd love to hear from you.

C'est incroyable! The first REAL blog post

My biggest barrier to this grand endeavor of keeping a blog is, very simply, writing.

Visions of potential blog posts percolate giddily up to the frothing top of my addled consciousness during the course of the day as I observe, muse over, and interact with the world. And still, every time I set myself down to write, the very thought of immortalizing, irredeemably and irrevocably, my follies of thought on this omniscient beast that is the web is enough to send me back into a life of happy, silent Internet anonymity. But oh, even then, the web is a repository--no, a bedful of fossilized dinosaur tracks--of gestures and signals (to crib off Steve Gillmor's lexicon)--what you click, what you don't, what you comment on, where you scroll, where you stop a piece of media--all this is insight into some fragment of your humanity or inhumanity (and your consumerist consumption patterns).

But as I sit to write my first actual post since the blog christening, I've decided that I might as well make this one as generous on addle-headedness but genuine as one can possibly be. A PayPal alum once said at a panel (and I paraphrase and embellish) the world is perhaps best served by "reformed perfectionists": poor sods who once ran themselves up the wall such that everything in the universe is immaculate, impeccable; checked into reality-check rehab, and then now swiftly appreciate the value of good effort and some acceptable degree of favorable result. It is not a life of mediocrity, it is a life of sanity ("be gentle with yourself, for you are a child of the universe no less than the trees or the stars", Lizzie reminds me of the old refrain from the Desiderata). The world is perhaps best run by those who know where perfection stands and the value of approaching it sanely and untyrannically.

This is a catch-up post. Skimming through very quickly everything I had hoped to blog about but didn't. And so with fond apologies, I begin.

1) Chinese New Year
It's a Pig Year, one to certainly make the best of. Its first weekend was spent in the company of good, good friends; quality human beings.

Here is the wonderful crew at Pacifica battling the Pacific winds beating down our ears as we descend the stony stair into a breathtaking view:

And the day after, a spontaneous rugged drive through the woods that eventually spat my friend Megan and I into Half Moon Bay:






More photos from the spontaneous beach trip here.


2) Agents of change

One of the benefits of living at the periphery of the Stanford bubble is the opportunity to still be a part of some subset of the intellectual going-ons; one such opportunity arrived a few weeks ago at a provocative panel on entrepreneurship and its role in solving world problems. Unlike most panels (diplomatic and frustratingly civil), an interesting collision of opinions between Prof. Chip Blacker (Stanford University) and K.R. Sridhar (Bloom Energy) reminded me, very resonantly, of my own indecisions as to future allegiances to particular agents of change.

I am acquainted with the two worlds that Blacker and Sridhar represent--public policy, and entrepreneurship respectively. Blacker argues for the importance of public policy and structural change in governments in order to enact real, far-reaching, and lasting change. Even in the presence of entrepreneurs who innovate solutions around pain points, accountable and effective governments must exist to swiftly enforce the basic inviolable parameters of a functioning society (for instance, property rights) such that solutions aren't subverted by bad actors and bad behavior. Sridhar, on the other hand, sees entrepreneurial thinking from the grassroots as the ultimate empowering agent of change--decentralized, self-directed, not beholden to the whims and corruption of an intractable centralized bureaucracy. The fact of the matter is, in a system of multiple stakeholders, it takes the mobilization of all the different appendages of government and civil society to create enduring change (and arguably, the way of the Aristotelian mean is the perennial cop-out in any debate. Nonetheless, Jeff Koseff, in the same panel, brought up a real-world example as a testament to the mean--it is the limitations of both worlds that have compelled Muhammad Yunus--the founder of the developing world's entrepreneurial incubator Grameen Bank and Nobel laureate--to go into government). The question is, for a global citizen trying to make informed and discerning decisions about where one wants to be down the road in life, one simply has to pick one of these many, limited, appendages to call one's own. To pick the tool of choice with which to approach the problem of creating change. Pick your poison/ploughshare.

The panel is very much a worthwhile listen--check it out here. The exchange between Blacker and Sridhar happens somewhere in the middle: I recommend starting at minute 38:37 for context till the somewhat unresolved end of that exchange at 47:37.

3) "Drinking the Kool-Aid" (as they say around Silicon Valley) of New Media

Since I have the good fortune of working in the world of new media, I run into a remarkable selection of good media content (podcasts and notably, video) online. I've decided to start putting some of that good embeddable video content into a personal bucket--hence the VodPod video widget on the left panel of this blog. The first two in the bucket are two recent personal favorites:

i) Hans Rosling's hugely illuminating and riveting presentation at the TED conference on the importance of slicing, parsing, communicating, and presenting data in a compelling way; in this case, data on international development.

ii) Charlie Rose interviewing photographer Taryn Simon (watch from minute 11:40) on her latest project on hidden sights in the United States. "Hidden Sights" brings into focus very surprising and intriguing snapshots of our time (and I wish I were in NY to attend the exhibition at the Whitney).

More specifically, I was very much taken by the well-deliberated coherence that frames Ms. Simon's approach to photography. Among other memorable comments, she asserts, quite poignantly, that she "is not invested in risking my (her) life" when asked about whether she is interested in war journalism. "There needs to be an agreement," she affirms. Her work is defined by collaboration and deep calculation, not spontaneous "sneaking" of images (even if they are penetrating insights into raw human condition). One interesting point to note nonetheless is that although Ms. Simon's approach is, first and foremost, purely aesthetical, through the methodical and objective lens of art (as opposed to the subjective realm of a prescribed political agenda), her oeuvre inadvertently takes on implicit sociopolitical commentary. It appears that there are multiple pathways to actions and outcomes that fall under what I simply call "saving the world", even when unintended. Perhaps it is the nature of all good art to provoke (Ms. Simon insists on seducing as the motivation). And all the best acts of provocation are done when they compel us to reflect on the state of the world around us, beneath the aesthetics.

To complete the Kool-Aid, here are two worthy videoblogging journalistic efforts to look into:
Alive in Baghdad and The American Microphone.


Bon alors, this weekend, I hope to repay in kind, here in rather uncharacteristically saturnine northern California, the inimitable hospitality that a few good friends proffered me when I visited (cold and snowing) Chicago. That is, if I can get my body back in working order after a recalcitrant bug.


And if they deem me tour guide, I may just have to let the techie humor loose and show them a piece of architecture I nicknamed the "sinc function house", which I ran into while walking around the edges of campus:

thursday, 10:56am

ML: baudrillard is dead.
EH: oh my dear, i'm not sure how to react to who?
ML: neither do i.
EH: well i'm wiking him
here's a question. arthur schleshinger is still alive
and lives in NY
do you think he'd just hang out with me?
ML: absolutely
EH: how to convince him?
ML: only if you're a seance
because according to my colleague sitting across from me, with whom i was just having a conversation about post-modernism, he just died. last week. feb 28
EH: WHAT??
ML: let me inform you, however, that you could consider hanging out with his son.
EH: this is a disaster!
oh fey fickle mortality!!
ML: but surely progenification (ie, having kids) is immortalization
alternatively, michael says that you could hang out with kissinger.
EH: kids are not old!
I do not like people that are not OLD
BUT I DONT WANT TO HANG OUT WITH KISSINGER
oh min you've ruined my morning