Part of a three-part intro around my thinking for stweet public art. I know it's wordy, but I was a philosophy major, and I tend to think in big paragraphs like this. Hope you enjoy it, in any case! :)
Up the Bowery, New York City
Intellects and the City The development of the city was a major turning point in human history, an economic and cultural milestone that altered the way we relate to each other. With the advent of concentrated urban life came a rapid exchange of products, services and, importantly, ideas. The large number of individuals under one civic roof increased the likelihood that those of like and complementary minds would come together in the pursuit of a common goal, thus furthering collective human achievement at a pace faster than might previously have been possible. Think, for instance, to the development of philosophy in Greek city states, the rise of poetry in Heian Japan, the explosion of contemporary art in downtown Manhattan.
Until recently, while communications technology could allow for a dialogue amongst creative intellectual minds living far from each other, it could never come close to approximating the effectiveness of geographic proximity. Namely, one of the unique powers of cities lies in the greater number of chance encounters they allow for, and the possibility of casual intimacy thereafter with a greater number of people. When we meet Jill Artist at a party, we can keep in touch, run into her at coffee shops, meet up for drinks with her and other circles of friends, and just generally get to know her on the level of acquaintanceship. In the city, these chance meetings can happen quite frequently, and they help fuel broad networks that foster creative collaboration and dialogue.
Crisscrossing freeways, Los Angeles
The Digital Megacity In the 21st century, online social media and microblogging have made manifest the late 20th century idea of a global village. As in a physical village, it is now possible, like never before, to maintain relationships both active and passive with people we rarely see or may never have met, whether they live in another borough or another hemisphere. Thanks to technologies such as WiFi broadband and 3G smartphones, the Internet has evolved from a mere tool into an extension of our lives. Indeed, our online social activity can often feel like a walk down a familiar street, composed of friends, acquaintances and the occasional stranger, as intimacy and familiarity build up over time. Social scientists refer to this as "ambient awareness":
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating....
“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” [sociologist Zeynep Tufekci] said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
With 160 million people on Facebook and just over 6 million on Twitter, the world of microblogging media has created a veritable megalopolis of individuals, a stream of miscellany not unlike 5th Ave. or Oxford St. A quick glance at the Twitter public timeline or a popular Facebook user's status feeds makes this readily apparent. Most of us, of course, have learned to filter this stream of information, just as any sane city dweller has to, but, as in any large city, this overwhelming activity brings the potential for a great exchange of ideas, a global cultural marketplace limited only by language. It exists in concert with our own geographic dwelling space, both a part of it and extending past it, with its own rules, habits and practices.
Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, Chicago
As an artist, I see some amazing potential in this direction, particularly as this megalopolis grows and defines itself. In my next post, on Sunday evening, I'm excited to talk more about how I see the role of art in the digital megacity, particularly how the "stweets" of social media can serve as a medium for public art.
A penguin at the Santa Barbara Zoo. Apropos of very little in this post, except that it's in motion and will need a visiting card to announce its arrival!
Had a great little conversation on Twitter yesterday afternoon, as I remembered out loud a funny incident involving my business card. I'd just been to an excellent dinner party and enjoyed everyone's company. As we handed each other our cards, I gave this one fellow my last one, which was upside down. However, when I flipped it over, it was totally blank! I was out of cards at that point, so he gave me mine, and I agreed to find him on Facebook.
It got me thinking, though: in a Google-able world, couldn't I just pass out cards with only my name on it? Granted, I have an uncommon name, but I feel like, these days, cards need only the bare minimum information necessary to contact someone. So a John Smith or Mike Lee, for instance, would simply need to list their Twitter account, or their web site, or "John Smith, Plumber, Dayton, OH." Or, as Meghan Maguire noted, a card with Google search terms.
Apparently, such a thing was done among Victorian aristocrats and even further back, amongst Chinese elites. Suzanne Fischer and Menachem Wecker graciously pointed me to resources about visiting/calling cards, i.e., cartes de visites, which were used in the Victorian era to announce the arrival of the card owner. They were quite elegant and lovely, though the idea seemed a tad strange to me: Why do you need a card to announce someone's arrival? Can't your servant simply pass the message verbally?
Got me thinking about a modern-day equivalent, some kind of analogy that I could understand. I was pondering all of this when I realized I was running a tad late for dinner with a friend. So I pulled out my phone and texted him: "Will be there in 15." And I imagined what he saw on the other side, as the message popped up on his screen. Just "An Xiao", followed by an announcement of arrival. Sure, I could have called, but having something written makes all the difference, doesn't it?
Been seeing a lot of these around New York lately: little cigarette disposal units for smokers. Curious how these serve not simply as disposal units but as indicators of where smokers should and should not congregate. In that sense, they double as tethers to movement. I'm also remembering the indoor smokers' rooms in restaurants and night clubs, like little glass prisons filled with smoke.
See Smoking norms in the San Fernando Valley. Gets me thinking about calorie counts on food menus, signs that encourage walking vs. taking the elevator, and the various ways we stigmatize life practices considered not simply unhealthy (high heels, for instance, are pretty unhealthy) but unattractive.
Some times I wonder if the impulse to scratch out a message on a subway window isn't much different from the impulse to tweet, to blog, to share something of ourselves online in a medium with assumed longevity.
Assumptions around permanence, broadcast and reach. When you scratch out something on a window, who is your audience? When you tweet something, who is your audience? Anyone and everyone can see the ephemera we leave with the world, but who really connects with these specialized messages?
Also wondering about the why of it - why we feel the need to express ourselves in writing.
A birthday gift for a girl friend. Why do gift bags and the corresponding tissue come separately? What's the environmental impact of getting too much tissue for one gift? Depends on if you're a packrat, I suppose.
I'm also curious about gender norms in gift gresentation--why do I feel more inclined to get a stylish gift bag for a stylish woman, vs. standard wrapping for a man? To what extent is the gift presentation as much a part of the gift as the gift object itself?
In a busier and busier world, and a world where climate change is becoming a top priority, I'm thinking about how we can simplify and streamline without losing sincerity.
I'm simply thrilled to be listed as part of The Guardian's "who's who of the twart world" (Twitter art world), in this great piece by Ruth Jamieson:
Cynics will chirp that Twitter is just another in a long line of fads providing new ways to market, promote and generally whore oneself to the world. The rest of us might ask whether artists who Twitter are grinding away at some of those elitist notions about the way art is created (in private studios) and for who (the very few who can afford to buy it).
Can following an artist as they create a new work democratise art or simply demystify the creative process behind it – or both? One week and a lot of tweets later, I've compiled a who's who of the twart world.
Los Angeles is a city that remakes itself constantly, so drawing boundaries for communities can be perilous. City officials are happy to designate community names, but have never been willing to set borders. But we at The Times are preparing to do just that, and we'd like to invite your help....
Because L.A. is always changing, Mapping L.A. will change with it. As communities gain in size or importance, or diminish, we’ll reflect those changes in these maps. But, in contrast to the past, the boundaries we recognize today will not be lost. Every time we move a city block from one community to another, we’ll keep a record of the original map that can be republished any time it’s needed. We’ll also keep a log of changes on the site for use by anyone seeking to trace the city’s evolution.
One of the funny things about trying to explain where I'm from in LA is that neighborhods are so ill-defined. Unlike New York's SoHo, which begins South of Houston and ends at Chinatown, or Alphabet City, which is contained in the letter avenues on the east side, or Manhattan itself, which begins and ends with the island, Los Angeles's boundaries stretch and fade and meld. I just love that the Times is soliciting reader opinions via a Wiki-like structure, because frankly, neighborhood borders do come down to what people define them to be.
So where am I from? Silverlake, technically, according to the map, but since few people outside of LA have heard of it, I often say "near Hollywood", and there's a hint of recognition till say, "No, not the glamorous Hollywood." Though I did grow up under the Hollywood sign, which I took for granted like I now take for granted the spire of the Empire State Building.
I've been photographing Coney Island for almost two years now, ever since it was first announced that it would be closed and renovated by Thor Equities. It's a crazy hectic week, so I don't have too much time to dig through the hundreds of photos I took, but I was so struck by the differences in February 2009 vs. May 2007, when I began my Coney Island series. There's a deep story here of the swiftness and completeness of urban change, of impermanence (anitya), of neighborhoods across the U.S. morphing into something else, and that's what pulls me back month after month, not to document but to respond.
With the recession in full swing, who knows how long it will remain like this:
"We might be looking at vacant lots for a long time to come,” said Charles Denson, executive director of the Coney Island History Project. “Everybody’s broke. These massive plans, these visions, don’t usually work. But I hope for the best.”
More of my Coney Island series can be found with the Brooklyn Railand on my web site. I have literally thousands more to dig through, process and then upload. Life is so busy. Sigh.
This is exciting: my portrait of Matt Held, master portraitist, is in The New York Observer, for Gillian Reagan's article "Paint Me, Please! Facebookers Clamor for Peeping Portraitist." I'm quite happy with how it came out and love the article about him:
Mr. Held scoured his Facebook network for more inspiring portraits, and within two weeks he had painted five of his friends’ profile pictures. In late December, Mrs. Held, an assistant at a private-equity firm, created a Facebook group called “I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held,” which now has about 1,500 members from which Mr. Held can choose. He has created 30 Facebook portraits so far, all for free, in exchange for permission to use the portraits as he likes. He has painted friends—including fathers from Otto’s local school and one maudlin-looking fellow enveloped in a pair of giant headphones—and strangers, too, like Peter Downes, deputy director at the Brooklyn Museum. In his portrait, he’s grinning in a elaborately decorated shirt.
Spotted on Lex. It's curious how the alphanumeric system of one of the most violent empires in history has come to suggest classical elegance and sophistication. How does the passing of time influence perceptions of style?
Reminds me of Laver's Law, the idea that fashions have a timeline.
In conjunction with my personal reading of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I plan to write a series of response posts, drawing connections between the passages and my own cultural heritage and experiences of race in this country. I know it's all a tricky and complex subject, one rife with emotion and history, and I have to acknowledge that the limitations of blogging hardly suffice. I apologize in advance for any perceived offense or misunderstanding these posts may inadvertently cause. That said, my hope is not simply to reflect on the book and my life but also to engage in a bit of dialogue, if you feel so inclined.
Mountains behind Makati City - Manila, Philippines, by Neil Howard
I've been struck, all of a sudden, by a desire to return to the Philippines for a while. To walk the crowded streets of Manila, to breathe in the mountain air, to hear Tagalog chattered about. The last time I was there, I'd not yet taken up photography (hence the Creative Common shots on this post), but images float in my head like great photographs I never took. A bonfire on the street. Children playing in an alleyway. The shantytowns alongside the railroad tracks. The sunbeams cascading down Taal Volcano. Langka as big as my torso. Fire trees, jeepneys, tsinelas, mamon.
My favorite part of Obama's life story is the fact that he spent a few years in Indonesia, at a Muslim school and at a Catholic school. He saw a world so unlike Hawai'i and the mainland U.S., but not as different, I imagine, from the Manila I saw as a child, still recovering from the Marcos regime. Indonesia was a country under rapid change:
The idea frightened her [Obama's mother], the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant powers of the new president as if nothing had happened, a nation busy developing itself.
Even though I spent much of my childhood among Filipino-Americans in Los Angeles, I will always be grateful for having grown up between countries for as long as I did. From birth till about 2005, my ties and travels to the Philippines were a given; I wouldn't realize until about college that such an upbringing is unusual for most Americans. Obama suggests that the time he spent in Indonesia encouraged a certain precocity: "It had made me extremely self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered compared to other American children." To this day, people think I'm older than I am, not because of how I look but because of how I carry myself, the grown-up version of a child who was no stranger to sacrifice and self-reliance.
To try to define what I learned during my time in Manila would be like trying to define what I learned during my time in Los Angeles; it is so much a part of me as to be indivisible from the rest. Rather, I learned from living between two countries, especially countries as starkly different, yet vaguely similar, as the United States and the Philippines. I grew up seeing so many ways of living, so many paths to happiness, as well as to despair, and I spent my childhood not fully identifying with either nation. Where in one country I fit in visually; in another country I fit in linguistically. In one country, I was wealthier than 70% of the population, in another, not so much. In one, siestas and relaxation; in another, hard work and discipline. The love of family; the love of friends. Humidity and crowds; dry heat and open space.
Of course, to draw any sort of dichotomy would be silly and simplistic, since for any trend, I can easily find a counterexample, especially in this globalized world. But these are the impressions and expectations I carried with me as I traveled back and forth as a child, impressions and expectations that linger today in some sense, as I navigate my way through the international art world and New York's hodge podge of cultures. Since my grandmother's passing, the Philippines comes to me through mementos of her and the little treats I allow myself at the local pinoy eateries here.
I can feel the Philippines calling me--I feel the tug of other-home, extending past Fifth Ave., past Silverlake, Los Angeles, and an ocean way to Manila, Pangasinan, Valle Verde, Tagaytay. I want to smell the sea, I want to hear the chatter, wander the hills of my grandmother's chlidhood, feel the stark heat and humidity pour through me and into my veins. All of a sudden, I want to be there again, home and not-home all in one place.
There's a great article at Nina Simon's Museum 2.0 about 1stfans (with a tiny cameo by me :)
This week, an interview with Brooklyn Museum 1stfans managers Will Cary (membership) and Shelley Bernstein (technology) and artist An Xiao. 1stfans is a new kind of membership launched on January 3, 2009 that combines in-person meetups, private groups on Facebook and Flickr, and a private Twitter feed featuring work by original artists.... It has gotten a lot of attention as a "social media membership," but Will and Shelley are adamant that 1stfans is not about social media. Instead, 1stfans is an attempt to turn the impersonal engine of museum membership into a relationship-based, community-centered interaction for two specific museum audiences.
3. I composed this list over time, as I do with most things. It's hard for me to find long, uninterrupted chunks of time in the day. This is partially my fault (short attention span) and partially a simple fact of my busy, frazzled life.
4. Despite being a fan of instant communications, I'm not very good at returning emails, tweets and phone calls promptly.
5. My ideal schedule would be to wake up at 6 am, work until about 1 pm, sleep till 3 or 4 pm, and then stay up till 1 am. Unfortunately, our society isn't set up to accommodate this. Some have told me I should move to Spain.
6. I can translate ancient Latin and ancient Chinese poetry, but I don't know how to order beef and broccoli. Nor do I know how to ask my armies to conquer all of Gaul. It feels deliciously impractical.
7. One question that keeps me up at night is the meaning of life, the why of it all, and what happens after we die.
8. I have lists and lists and lists of projects I'd eventually like to get started. I wish someone would pay me simply to work on art projects all day.
9. I prefer minimalist fashion as a general uniform. I like blazers, button-downs, skinny pants and pencil skirts, ballet flats, and colorful scarves.
10. In the spring and summer, I tend to dress more girly. These are not hard and fast rules.
11. I was born to travel long distances. I once traveled to Manila via Tokyo all by myself when I was a 'tween, and I can sleep comfortably on long plane rides, even when squished between two people. Unfortunately, I've not been out of the country for many years now but hope to change that soon.
12. One of my greatest fears is boredom, and one of my greatest joys is reading. This is why I carry countless books and magazine/blog articles in my iPhone, even though I'll probably never get to them in a million years. Before things like iPhones existed, I was fascinated with the idea of a memory palace, a world I could retreat to at any time I was bored.
13. And yet, I believe in the value of doing nothing.
14. I'm as comfortable in an Upper East Side dinner party as I am camping in the middle of the desert. Both have their place and time.
15. I've been wearing glasses since fourth grade, and I have no intention of getting contacts. I might get laser eye surgery one day, but I like how I look in glasses. It's just annoying sometimes to have to take them off before going to bed and then put them on when I wake up.
16. I've seen and been hurt by incredible negativity and hatred and ignorance in my life, but I remain steadfast in my optimism about life and the potential of goodness in people.
17. I firmly believe we have a surprising amount of agency over our life direction and the attitude we have about our circumstances. The biggest hurdle is believing--truly believing--that we do have this agency. It gets easier after that.
18. My grandmother was a mango farmer and teacher in the Philippines.
19. Mangos are my favorite fruit.
20. I've been uncomfortably close to the Los Angeles riots, the Northridge earthquake, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, the 2001 anthrax attacks, and the 2004 tsunami without being directly affected by any of them.
21. I once spoke to Bill Murray for 15 minutes before I realized it was him.
22. My ideal living schedule would be New York in the fall, spring and first half of winter, and Los Angeles in the summer and latter half of winter.
23. I like prime numbers.
24. I'm fascinated by the viral nature of this meme, and how it's spread like wildfire through Facebook-land. How do we decide whom to tag? How do we decide what information to share? How does seeing all our friends doing it affect the likelihood that we'll do it too? Does this meme exist in other languages, or is it restricted to the English-speaking world? What part of our selves does something like this tap into? I'm remembering the chain letters we'd send around in grammar school and high school, but this meme isn't just a teenage girl thing. Everyone's doing it, and I find that so interesting.
25. I have nothing more to write. And no one to tag.
Though the responses were so vulgar I concluded it was a junior high school assignment gone awry and then posted to the subway wall, rather than some high-minded social experiment. Hence, the cropping.
But it got me thinking anyway about the power of anonymity/lack of accountability in crowdsourcing. Does non-digital crowdsourcing even work these days? Would you fill out a piece of paper taped to the subway wall? In what contexts can we reliably solicit the opinions of the many?
The telephone number as an information/access method in subway stations. How soon till web sites become the norm, or Twitter profiles? It's already happened everywhere else, but can we attribute this "archaic" technology to the slow-moving MTA machine?
Thinking about expectations around access and assumed lifestyle norms: are subway personnel more likely to use phone or Twitter?
William Deresiewicz wrote a fantastic essay in The Chronicle Review that I've been meaning to comment on. One of his key points is that, with the rise of social media and communications technology, from Facebook to texting, we have a culture of availability, of being in constant contact with one another and therefore, effectively, never being alone. He suggests that the idea of solitute is becoming more and more rare.
Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." . . . [T]he young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.
To be fair, I think the essay can be a bit alarmist about the impact of social media. Critiques of new technology are nothing new, especially coming from those who didn't grow up using the technology as second nature. But I've had a number of conversations with people this weekend, particularly artists and creative types, who have reminded me about the importance of solitude, about that personal nourishment that can only come from oneself.
January was an incredibly busy month for me, with tons of events and parties, emails and interviews, phone calls and tweets, and, by comparison, February is much calmer. Not only does current technology discourage isolation, but so does New York City, with people, people, people buzzing about and running around, and it seems like every day, I'm getting an invite from someone or an arts organization. This is fantastic, but it requires a lot of extroverted energy that this ambivert can maintain for only so long.
Since I've been feeling under the weather anyway (I blame the fluctuating temps as of late), I decided to try something different to help re-center myself, both physically and mentally. After a Friday and Saturday of gallery openings, concerts, parties, and clubbing, I decided to try something different. All of Sunday, I stayed home, closed the door to my room, logged off of Twitter and signed out of Facebook, closed Gmail, closed AIM, clicked out of my RSS feeds, turned off my computer, silenced my cell phone and left one light on. I then put on some shakuhachi music, pulled out my paper journal and a pen and started writing, and for almost the entire day, I was completely, truly alone.
In conjunction with my personal reading of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I plan to write a series of response posts, drawing connections between the passages and my own cultural heritage and experiences of race in this country. I know it's all a tricky and complex subject, one rife with emotion and history, and I have to acknowledge that the limitations of blogging hardly suffice. I apologize in advance for any perceived offense or misunderstanding these posts may inadvertently cause. That said, my hope is not simply to reflect on the book and my life but also to engage in a bit of dialogue, if you feel so inclined.
Just started reading Dreams from My Father, which I've had for months now but just never got around to actually opening up and reading (the timing is fitting, anyway, given that February is Black History Month). I'd frequently heard about Obama's lilting, thoughtful prose, but all the praise of his understatement was understated. His words glide along gently, with a rich awareness of the complexities of identity. It's so strange to think that the Barack Obama of 1995, a gifted and quiet writer, describing the Barack Obama of 1969, a boy with a funny name prone to daydreaming, is now the Barack Obama of 2009, the most powerful man in the world.
It has me thinking about my own complex racial background, which I've written about before but haven't really dived into deeply, at least in a public forum. Like Obama, I grew up between and among worlds. I spent my childhod mainly in the Silverlake/Los Feliz area, an ethnically-diverse neighborhood in Los Angeles, and had close friendships with kids of multiple backgrounds, from Filipino to Chinese to Mexican to Guatemalan, Cuban, Costa Rican, Salvadorean, Polish, Irish, German, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, white, black, Armenian, Iranian. Pajama party dinners involved anything from golabki to siumai to meat and potatoes to pancit to lahmahjoon. At some homes, I had to take off my shoes, and at others, we simply had to wipe them on the mat after playing outside.
But like Obama, the diversity wasn't just amongst friends; it was, and is, within me. I was raised for some time between Los Angeles and Manila, first mainly by my mother and other Filipino family members, and then as well by my Irish-American stepfather. A vague Chinese ancestry informed many of our traditions, including Lunar New Year customs and where we went out for breakfast (dim sum, of course). Not speaking Tagalog, I could never feel 100% Filipino, and with my round face, straight hair and tan skin (which was darker in sunny Los Angeles), I was frequently addressed in either Cantonese or Mexican Spanish. Through it all emerged an education steeped in Western literature, Catholic values and American pop culture, as my curious mind lapped up Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin and Nirvana, rather than José Rizal, Lapu Lapu and the Apo Hiking Society.
Edgemont, An Xiao
I can't help but think, looking back, that children's general disregard for the categories imposed by grown-ups allowed me to unselfconsciously make friends with kids of so many backgrounds. I honestly didn't start to notice these things until perhaps junior high school, and definitely by high school, where, in addition to the jocks and nerds, adolescent groups self-segregated to blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians. Until then, my personal experience of racism--both the overt racism of being called names and the more subtle racism of being made to feel different--came so infrequently as to be quickly forgotten. Perhaps, in that sense, my childhood Los Angeles in the 80's resembled Obama's childhood Hawai'i in the 60's, before teenage self-awareness and the accompanying identity struggles finally, inevitably kicked in:
There were too many races, with power among them too diffuse, to impose the mainland's rigid caste system; and so few blacks that even the most ardent segregationist could enjoy a vacation secure in the knowledge that race mixing in Hawaii had little to do with the established order back home....
In such surroundings, my racial stock caused my grandparents few problems, and they quickly adopted the scornful attitude local residents took toward visitors who expressed such hang-ups.
I've just started reading about Obama's move to Indonesia, and I'm thinking about all that time I spent in Manila, both a part of the culture and apart from it, a world so strikingly different from the America I knew. More on this later.
David Wagoner, who lives in Washington state, is one of our country's most distinguished poets and the author of many wonderful books. He is also one of our best at writing about nature, from which we learn so much. Here is a recent poem by Wagoner that speaks to perseverance.
The Cherry Tree
Out of the nursery and into the garden where it rooted and survived its first hard winter, then a few years of freedom while it blossomed, put out its first tentative branches, withstood the insects and the poisons for insects, developed strange ideas about its height and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters, its self-indulgent thrusts and the infighting of stems at cross purposes year after year. Each April it forgot why it couldn't do what it had to do, and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall, was shown once more what simply couldn't happen.
Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots straight up, blood red, into the light again.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c)2008 by David Wagoner, whose most recent book of poetry is "Good Morning and Good Night," University of Illinois Press, 2005. Reprinted from "Crazyhorse," No. 73, Spring 2008, by permission of David Wagoner. Introduction copyright (c) 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Had a good time at Angel's Share last weekend with some artsy friends. It's a beautiful martini bar, classic and sophisticated, a quiet retreat one floor about the hustle-bustle of the East Village. They have a strict policy about keeping groups at four or under, and no standing, so were it not for the blonde-haired Japanese bartender, it would have felt more like the Upper East Side. As we talked deep talk, we noticed the aesthetics of the various bottles and drinks, a myriad of options this casual drinker is only marginally familiar with.
And then, around 3 a.m., it was closing time, and the cloaks they placed on the bottles glowed like rivers.
The resolution is incredible - it's difficult to really appreciate it at this size, so try out the slideshow below. I'm going to continue testing it for a few days and posting results. Once I really get the hang of it, I'm sure I'll be making music soon. I'm so excited.
I now have a Dopplr account, which is quite fun. I tend to travel to Los Angeles every few months, but last year in particular, especially toward the latter end of it, I was traveling almost constantly, not just to LA but to other cities, and a common question I'd get was, "Where the heck are you, An?" I don't expect to travel that much this year (though in January of 2008 I didn't expect to travel a lot either), but it's still a neat Web 2.0 site. I especially like being able to see my friends' upcoming travels, and seeing when we might coincide with each other.
One of my favorite aspects of the site is the velocity feature. Apparently, in 2008, I was zipping around the country at the speed of a duck:
I've installed a Dopplr badge toward the bottom of the right-hand column so folks visiting the blog can see what I'm up to and where I'm traveling. Looking at my meager travel schedule, I'm thinking I might book some trips to Boston, DC and Toronto. This also has me thinking that I should look into a job at some point that lets me travel 'round the world, a la Jan Chipchase, who travels at the speed of a squirrel.
While doing errands around the city, I ran into a poster of The Pope of Greenwich Village, a lovely film starring Mickey Rourke, whom I've had an inexplicable crush on since I first saw him in that movie. In my review of the film, I lamented that it's a pity his star didn't shine past the 80's. Yet here he is, starring in The Wrestler, looking substantially older and almost unrecognizable, at least in my eyes:
One interesting thing about celebrities is that you can watch them age. You can rent movies throughout their lives and see this happen, or you can just get some of their earliest work and compare it to their latest. Think of Marlon Brando's beautiful muscles in On the Waterfront, Audrey Hepburn's childlike skin in Sabrina, Mickey Rourke's golden smirk. Youthful beauty frozen in time, only to be revived decades later in strikingly different roles, with wrinkly skin, gravelly voices, a tiredness in the eyes.
Until recently, I might have said this is a phenomenon unique to celebrities. Sure, people keep photos of childhood around, but they were few and far between until relatively recently. On my wall hangs a picture of my grandmother when she was married, and another in old age, long since widowed. But I don't know what she sounded like back then, or what her mannerisms were. I have very few intermediary photos of her middle age. In my mind, the beautiful, shining young woman in her wedding dress acted just like my grandmother as I remember her, even though that certainly can't be true. I simply can't imagine my grandmother being my age, making the same silly mistakes I'm making.
But something's changing now. If it's true, as I've mentioned before, that we have all become micro-celebrities, we will all have access to our changing selves to a level that previous generations for the most part have not. I can read through this very blog, which I've maintained for almost four years now, and watch myself grow. I can dig through my hard drive and find old pictures of a fresh-faced, unsure girl just moved to New York and compare them to the more balanced woman of today. And with the power of YouTube, my self at this period of my life is frozen forever, with my quirky mannerisms, sense of style and voice intact.
I'm thinking about an entire generation growing up only knowing YouTube, Facebook and ubiquitous cameras, where we leave digital trails and digital ghost towns of past selves all over the Internet. The web's not been around very long, and already we can use it to look back on the subtle changes over the past 10-15 years. What will it be like when we are 80 years old, poking around Internet archives into a young adulthood perfectly chronicled and frozen in time? And to watch that adulthood through each month, each year, as we grow and develop? What will it be like for our children to look back on our lives, to see everything from baby videos on .mpg files to teen angst in Facebook archives, an entire lifetime recorded, documented, day by day?
About a week ago, a girlfriend and I went down to the Village to check out Sweetiepie, a new restaurant near W 4th. It is, in truth, incredibly girly, with pretty candles and desserts, and an incredible birdcage table where I'm tempted to have a birthday get-together one of these days. The dessert was quite good--I had a hot fudge sundae that I savored even in the cold weather, and my friend had a delicious strawberry concoction--, though the menu overall left a little to be desired.
I didn't have my proper camera on me, or I would have taken better photos, but suffice to say, we both agreed that the interior, with its candelabras and romance, is estrogen-oriented. That got me thinking about what, exactly, it means for a space to be feminine, and why two liberated, feminist-minded women felt compelled to discuss this over girly desserts. We also wondered to each other how the men in the restaurant were convinced to even step inside, and now I'm wondering why we felt that, why we felt that men have to be convinced to enter a space that's so clearly feminine.
Anyway, enough brain babble. You have to check out their web site to really get a feel of it. I'll post better photos next time I'm there with a good camera.
As you may know, I have an open invitation to guest blog here, on any topic related to what I generally cover. This month, I'm pleased to welcome Regina from Simple Neat and Wrong, "a blog dedicated to the idea that if you are certain your position is entirely right and your opponents' position is entirely wrong, then you are wrong." Regina is a great academic philosopher and someone I've called a dear friend for many years now. Her professional interests lie in ethics and psychology, but we've had many late-night chats at her apartment (which, incidentally, has a contemplative view of the Hudson that encourages such things) about broad contemporary issues as diverse as what you see on my blog.
Given my work with the Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans Twitter Art Feed, Regina has composed a guest post about a subject near and dear to my heart: Facebook. If you enjoy this, be sure to check out Simple Neat and Wrong and consider subscribing. She's just started blogging and would be thrilled to welcome new readers.
"Just what is our friendship worth to you?"
It’s hard to think of a situation in which this would be a welcome question. Thankfully, few of us are ever called upon, in the real world anyway, to place a cash or commodity value on our relationships. But Facebook is not the real world – and apparently on Facebook, friendship has its value: one-tenth of a Burger King Whopper.
Last week Facebook brought an end to Burger King’s "Whopper Sacrifice" promotion, which allowed participants to earn a free Whopper hamburger by unfriending 10 of their Facebook chums. (There’s a relevant NYT article here.) One obvious question: did Burger King expect this to improve its corporate image? Surely the company does not wish to be seen stamping its logo on discord, acrimony, the cavalier mass-severance of those fragile personal filaments comprising human society? Right? The Times quotes Burger King marketing VP Brian Gies explaining his reasoning about Facebook:
“It seemed to us that it quickly evolved from quality of friends to quantity,” he said, “which was interesting to us because it felt like the virtual definition of a friend became something different than the friends that you’d want to hang out with.”
From there, Mr. Gies said, the team started wondering: “Do you really want to have all these people knowing what you’re up to and what you’re interested in? We wanted to be part of that conversation and part of that solution, and ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ was born.”
Well, okay, everyone knows that many Facebook friends aren’t really friends: they are random internet strangers (‘random internet’ being the strangest kind of stranger), casual acquaintances who initially seemed worth keeping in contact (but were not), and the regrettably durable consequence of an impulsive ‘what-ever-happened-to-her?’ middle school nostalgia. These certainly aren’t the people who will visit you in the hospital or godparent your children. So maybe (maybe) Burger King has contributed something positive, by dramatically pointing up Facebook’s peculiar formalization of even the most tenuous proto-relationships.
That said, what about those Facebookers who actually did sacrifice their friends to the King of Burgers? What should we think of them? To make my point a bit sharper: do we have any ethical obligations to our Facebook friends? Unilaterally ending a Facebook friendship, however thin and absurd its existence might be, is almost always hurtful to the discarded acquaintance. This seems especially true when an ex-friend learns of rejection from a chirpy public message implying that a char-grilled beef oval is ten times more valuable.
Various western ethical traditions would probably find much to grump about here. Kantians say we must display equal respect for the basic dignity of every person, which hardly seems to be fostered by singling out friends for sacrifice. John Stuart Mill and his band of merry utilitarians tell us to act so as to maximize human happiness, which means that trading people for burgers is only okay if you will get more happiness out of one-tenth of a Whopper than your friends get out of not being publicly humiliated. And it’s really just good old common moral sense: don’t hurt other people for your own benefit - not even for free fast food.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can never unfriend your inexplicable Facebook acquaintances. You are not obligated in any way to remain friends with that semi-cute guy you met at the club six months ago, once he starts using his status updates to opine about the character deficits of various ethnic minorities. But you also can’t just terminate a reciprocal relationship for no reason at all - or for a bad reason, like a Whopper.
What counts as a good reason to end a Facebook friendship is difficult to say in the abstract; like any other human relationship, it all depends. But, as An often reminds us, the fantastically rapid expansion of digital culture may have already outstripped conventional thinking about our connections to information, and to one another. If social networks are to be genuinely social - to be more than just incidentally parallel datastreams dribbling from atomistic blabbermouths – then we need to give some careful consideration to how our undeniably liberating new means of communication might also impose new moral constraints on our lives. If we don’t, then our digital friendships really won’t be worth whatever Burger King is serving.
Photo source: Business Week
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Regina is an academic philosopher, sometime psychologist, compulsive writer, amateur photographer, and friend of birds, based in New York City. See more of her writings at Simple Neat and Wrong, "a blog dedicated to the idea that if you are certain your position is entirely right and your opponents' position is entirely wrong, then you are wrong."
Hi there. I'm An Xiao. I'm an artist, designer and writer An Xiao looking at the intersection of the digital and analog in the 21st century. I photograph, install, perform and tweet and have shown my work in publications and galleries internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Yale/Haskins Laboratories, The New York Times and Art in America. I founded and direct @Platea, a global online public art collective, and serve as a contributing columnist for PBS-affiliate Art21 and a contributing writer for the New York Foundation of the Arts and Hyperallergic.
That Was Zen, This Is Tao is my journey in haiblog -- brief, crisp prose about everything and anything that crosses my mind (which is a lot!), as I try to make some sense of the 21st century and bring a little Zen into it. In no particular order, I enjoy writing about the contemporary art world, Web 2.0 and the Internet, Zen and poetry, modern marketing, fashion and style, GTD (Getting Things Done), American politics and anything else of interest. I lead a hectic life, and I often use my iPhone to make updates in subways and parking lots. I also regularly post my most recent photography. I do hope you enjoy your stay! Below are some news updates from my web site.
