Caine's Arcade

Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

A video about a kid in East LA who built a cardboard arcade in the back of his dad's used auto parts store.  I'd seen this referenced around the internet a lot this week, and finally got around to watching.  It's well worth the ten minutes to see the whole movie, not just for the portrait of Caine (who is an awesome kid, by the way), but what happened when it hit the internet, and the arcade was mobbed with hundreds of visitors.  Looking at the movie's web site today, Caine has had upwards of $38,000 donated to his college fund, and climbing!  Go, internet!

I'll be showing this video to a class or two this semester - will keep you posted on the reactions in China...

How to Be Alone

As we know, we humans are generally social creatures, deriving a large portion of our happiness from interaction with others of our kind.  However, we are also by definition individuals, who obtain our identity from within.  Thus is born the continuum between extrovert on one hand and introvert on the other.  For some strange reason, we are, generally speaking, much more comfortable with the first end of this scale than the second.

Take this weekend, for example.  A fine weekend indeed, and spent almost entirely at home with Zekey and Ysa.  Highlights included finishing up a short video that I'd been working on, reading a bit, making black bean chili, editing some photographs, and chatting with Jane and a few friends in the States on Facebook and Skype.  The kids played inside most of the day Saturday, half by themselves, and half with a (very loud) young friend who came over for a three hour long match of... Jedi knights?  Ultraman?  In any case, something involving a lot of swords and yelling, in (to me) nearly incomprehensible Chinese.

Sunday, more of the same in the morning, followed by an afternoon following the kids on their bikes as we went first to the exercise park (a small plaza fitted with generically dangerous clunky metal workout equipment that passes for our playground) and then to the paved lot in front of the elementary school, where I watched the kids interact with a streaming succession of friends, older schoolmates, friends' parents, giggling college girls trying to get them to pose for pictures on their cell phones, gaping grandparents who had never seen a foreigner before - still! after us being here for two years!! - trying to push their two year olds into playing with Ysa, who now knows how to deal with such behavior by a simple humph! and a turning away that is just charming enough not to be offensive...

Aaanyway, my point in all this is that, through all this, I don't think I had a face to face interaction with an adult that lasted more than ten minutes.  And was fine about it.  (Notice the obligatory disclaimer.  You see what I mean about us humans feeling much less comfortable with the introverted end of the spectrum, right?) 

All of this a long, round-about intro to this video, which, now that I've gone on for a while, really speaks for itself:



A good reminder that no matter where we travel, the most comfortable, and the most challenging place to live is inside your own skin.

Where children sleep

Pictures of children and the places they sleep, from all over the world.  The images do most of the talking, right?  Worth clicking to the source article to see more from this series. 

Anti-Intillectuatism in America, part 647.5

Yes, we're all populists now!  I'd comment a bit more, but I think the title of the post says it all...

Harvard-Supported Harvard Grad Mitt Romney Criticizes Obama for being a Harvard-Supported Harvard Grad

Stuff we all should know by now - Doing the numbers

So then, class, let's get back to my posts about consensus, numbers, and Cookie Monster proclaiming the end of the world, shall we...?

To review a bit:

A:  We humans in general, and we Americans in particular, have a few problems that we need to figure out.
B:  An important step in solving these problems is coming to a consensus on what, exactly, these problems are.

To which I now will add... 

C:  It would be very helpful if everyone started with the same facts, then, wouldn't it?

Or, put in to question format:  What can be proven?  What do the facts suggest, versus what is merely commonly held opinion?  Put scientifically, then, what is actually observable in the world around us?

Let's take, as an example, the huge income disparity that now exists in America between its wealthiest citizens and everyone else.  This can be represented in any number of ways, but let's simply take one statistic: today, the top 1% of Americans earn almost 25% of the income every year.  Okay, big deal, big deal - what we need is more context, so let's compare it historically.  Twenty five years ago, the figure was about half as much, at 12%. Turns out the last time this particular number was this high was in 1929.

Now, this is America, right?  (Or, more globally speaking the internet.  Readers from other countries, please bear with me for a bit...)  You're free to think this is a good thing, or a bad thing.  You can argue about the causes of the inequality, or its possible results.  You can rephrase it, as in "Hey, the richest top ten percent pay 60% of the taxes."  (Well, yeah, that's still saying the same thing, but less directly.)  And, if all else fails, you can start to yell "Class Warfare" whenever someone who may vote you out of office brings it up.

What you can't do, however, is pretend otherwise, which is what it seems that many of us are doing.  Here is a video of people taking a look at another statistic - the distribution of wealth in America.



For those of you with slow internet connections (or those with aversions to Warren Buffet for whatever reason), skip ahead to around 1:15.  To sum up: here is the chart that most Americans surveyed selected when asked to chose one that  shows what wealth distribution in America looks like (yellow representing the share of wealth held by the top 20%):

Nope!  Sorry, that's Sweden.  Here's a chart that shows the actual distribution of wealth in the US:

Good thing?  Bad thing?  I've got my opinions on the subject, and I hope that you've got yours.  What we can't do, however, is pretend like it's otherwise, or tell ourselves that it really doesn't matter.  Unless you live in Sweden*.




*in which case, you may want to feel smug for a moment or two, and then start looking at statistics for wealth distribution globally...

Cookie Monster tells it like it is

"Who are the ones that we left in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers.."

Maybe it's just me, but Cookie Monster seems to be not only channeling Tom Waits on this video, but a couple of Old Testament prophets as well.  (Wonder if Jeremiah & co. had as much fun...?)

Saving the World, one bicker at a time

Sometime last spring, I was having a Facebook "conversation" about some political thing or other, and, as sometimes happens when friends of friends start putting their two cents in there into an online forum, it turned into a Facebook argument shortly thereafter. Well, not an argument, exactly, but a heated discussion, carried on fairly intelligently, considering it was limited to bursts of 140 characters or less. Such is the life of an American political junkie in China...

I don't even remember the topic that we were discussing, but one comment that I do remember was something along the lines of "What's the use sitting around and discussing what's wrong with the world, anyway?"

...and I started to think, "Wellll... if we all could agree with what's wrong, we could all start to fix it, couldn't we?"  You know, how a flock of birds hangs out in a clump of trees for days and days, some flying off, and then all flying back, and you can hear them chirping and bickering for miles around.  And then one day - pow! - their collective mind is made up, and off they fly.  Together.

So, if we go with the idea that all of this chatter about what is wrong with this or that or the other thing in the world at large is really just the noise of the global flock making up its mind, then the individual conversations start to take on a greater meaning, don't they?  What may seem like an isolated argument on someone's Facebook page may actually be an artifact of the human community struggling to come to terms with its most pressing problems, in the same way that the chirps and hops of individual birds at some point add up to an action taken by the flock as a whole.

Don't know if this Tipping Point argument (see Malcolm Gladwell, et. al.) is true or not, but it does become an interesting way of looking at global change, politics, and the world at large.  From this point of view, discussions of issues among friends on Facebook are not just so many tempests in so many teapots, but our species' way of building global consensus, hashing out our issues on a molecular level.

A bit grandiose, perhaps?  Maybe.  I have certainly become increasingly suspicious of any kind of "Save the Word" argument in the last couple of years.  After all, the world has gotten along just fine without us for the last 4 billion years or so, and it will do just fine for the next 4 billion, regardless of whether us humans are on it or not.  But as a species, I'd like to think that in spite of everything, we're still worth keeping around.  Or worth improving, to put it more accurately.

Maybe our mantra should be, not "Save the World!", but rather:

"Hey everyone, let's all keep bickering back and forth good-naturedly for a while until we all can agree on a couple of simple ideas that are slightly less idiotic that our previous ones!"  

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't scan quite as well, does it?  But it does become more catchy after you repeat it a couple of times.  Give it a try, and let me know what you think.  I'll be posting the best results onto Facebook.

Greetings from In Between!

So for all of you out there that haven't been following me on their personal GPS trackers, I'm now sortof back in China.  I say "sortof" because I've been here for only two days and the beginning of a third, and the afternoons of both of those days have been spent in a jet lag haze with me trying desperately not to fall asleep and generally failing. 

Which means that Zekey and Ysa and I have been awake for long stretches in the middle of the night at varying times, with the general rule that if a kid's awake, I'm awake.  At least there are no diapers or 102° fevers involved...

Which further means that the kids and I have been spending some quality time in the third country we inhabit, the Free and Autonomous Republic of the Internet.  Or better said, the land of the imagination...?



An example: an early film of the pianist Glenn Gould going completely hyperballistic (in a good way) on a Bach - two part invention? (help me out here, piano folks)  Zekey and Ysa were bored with this one until right in the middle, when Gould's hands simply explode on the keyboard, eliciting whoops of joy and serious giggles for the next fifteen minutes of playing and replaying the clip.  And is it my imagination, or does Glenn do some serious channeling of Harpo Marx during the piece?

The video comes courtesy of The Kid Should See This, a web site that I highly recommend, even for grownups.  As the author puts it:

"There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here."

Even if they're not jet lagged.

Coal Cares

Yes, coal does care - you can even get a free asthma inhaler for your child! Because if it's on the internet, it has to be true...

When Life Gives You Lemons....

Another way of looking at things, I suppose...

Home is a Fire

Via Boing Boing, a video made by graffiti artist Sheperd Fairey (who you should know about, already) for Death Cab for Cutie (okay, I'm probably supposed to know about them, but don't).

Ties in almost perfectly with Jane's ESL classes that she's teaching - theme: subcultures - except that I found this about ten minutes after she went to teach the class where her students are presenting on graffiti art. Oh well, such is timing sometimes...

Also like the video because (surprise surprise) it presents a city (LA, in this case) in the way that I tend to see it. Time to get out the video camera...


And a p.s. - also saw the graffiti art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop a couple of weeks ago, which features Shepherd Fairy, Banksy, and other graffiti artists of the 90s and 2000s. Highly recommended!

It's a documentary! It's all really happening!

Helping us get the week off to an appropriately surreal start is this post from If we don't, remember me, a blog that features oddly subtle animations from all kinds of movies. Strangely addictive, and poetic to boot.

Theft has its advantages...

Yeah, it's been going around the web a lot, but still worth posting (if only as a reminder to myself every now and then).

How to Steal Like An Artist, by Austin Kleon

Decree

Speaking of observation....

Think the text says it all. From PassiveAgressiveNotes.com.

Building elsewhere

A link that I meant to post a while ago when I was on a construction in China kick: photos from Bas Princen of new construction in the Middle East. If you've been in China, it all looks quite familiar... (only the climate has been changed to protect the innocent)

Books of Note

A while back, I posted pictures of a few of my Chinese notebooks here, along with the inspirational quotes that grace their covers. A week later, the entry start getting tons and tons of hits from Notebookstories.com, a web site devoted entirely to, you guessed it, notebooks, and people who collect, save, and fill them. Who knew? (Though, given the nature of the internet, not entirely surprising.)

Being as I'm into sketchbooks, notebooks, journaling, cool graphic design, and found poetry, (intentional and otherwise), I've got a few photos of notebooks lying around the archives myself. Sooo - here's wishing everyone a happy Asian notebook week! Or month. Or couple of days. Whatever. Hey, they're notebooks, okay..?

First up: some cool books that I picked up in Thailand, featuring vintage ads on the front and excerpts from old textbooks on the back:







As always, click on the image to enlarge. Enjoy!

"Do you hibernate?" "Only with friends."

The Lost Thing

A cool story from Australia (or anywhere, I suppose) about a Lost Thing, finding Things, and... well, a great metaphor for many other Things as well. Oh, and lots of cool Things to look at in the meantime. Won the Oscar for best animated short, and totally deserves it...

Slow and Fast

Speaking of slowing down to notice things, a very cool slow motion video above. Find out how they did it here. (Hint: Einstein was right!)

More teapots, more tempests

Viewing the American news cycle from afar over the internet has been very illuminating. Suddenly, a HUGE POLARIZING ISSUE appears! It came from nowhere, but all of a sudden, this HUGE POLARIZING ISSUE is of vital importance, and how you stand on this HUGE POLARIZING ISSUE represents your outlook on (choose one) freedom, security, totalitarianism, or even The Continued Survival of America Itself! It is, of course, vitally important never to rationally discuss the HUGE POLARIZING ISSUE in any public forum, because to do so will cause your ratings to drop and your voter approval to plummet. (And discussion is for wimps, anyway, right?) Better to shoot off a rant or two, and then hope that the next HUGE POLARIZING ISSUE will further confirm your polarized world view.

Oh, whoops, was I off on a sarcastic rant of my own there? Whoops, my bad. (Or actually, good for me, right? I mean, I'm just following the rules myself, aren't I?) Anyway, far be it from me to imply that I'm away from all this - I read way too many articles on HUGE POLARIZING ISSUEs myself, and of course, get all armchair quarterback-y forming elaborate personal opinions about them. Sigh. Going through my links, however, I have found what I believe to be a few clear well-reasoned voices (okay, clear well-reasoned voices that I also happen to agree with) that I'm reposting below, if only for a sense of perspective the next time one of these HUGE, um... thingamajigs, comes around again on the news cycle.

Here then, some perspectives, starting at the present and working my way back:

• Some excellent questions for all parties involved in the latest Wikileaks scandal.
• Two interesting views of the whole TSA bodyscanning security theater bruhaha, one from a pilot, and one from a guy with several pounds' worth of titanium inside him.
• And, from back in prehistoric last summer, a good postmortem on the whole Ground Zero Mosque thingie, that I may or may not have posted already.

There, that's out of my system. Now, stop paying attention to things and get back to work, already!