The world is a warped virtuality, such that it stretches, bends, folds, tears, and ripples into a construction known as reality.
The "subterranean void" in Mars' surface that has an unknown and undetectable depth -- what unknowns there are, what perplexing unrealities are hidden but ripe within the true fabric of the universe!
It's kind of late, about 11:51pm and I'm sitting at the computer. My nose is starting to run and the portion of my hand closest to my pinky-finger feels warm and stingy-like. My right knee feels a little tight somewhere inside underneath the knee-cap towards the right side. I'm thinking about my body. I don't really understand my body. I'm thinking about my mind, I can control how my body moves and what I put inside of it and how I maintain it. I think in English and can think in other abstractions. I can think in multiple layers of thought and imagine imagery of various three-dimensional contortions that represent or warp my understandings of reality outside of me, but I don't really understand my mind. That's easier to consider than to admit, but so very true. How does the body and mind work beyond what I know?
-5/28/2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Monday, May 28, 2007
MySpace has a website featuring pages for most of the 2008 presidential candidates -- impact.myspace.com
I've been browsing some of the pages and it's really fascinating to see how the candidates appear when recontextualized within the MySpace page layouts and YouTube video. Gov. Bill Richardson's featured video includes a couple of TV ads that characterize him as very "down to earth" or "real" and someone whom young people frequenting myspace could relate to.
Contrast Richardson with the likes of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and the later two come across as incredibly stuffy and self-centered. The favorite friends Hillary displays on her page are all "I love hillary" or "hillary2008fanclub" type of groups or pages... and McCain's layout aesthetic plays on a very stiff and formal, military-style branding (Likely, I guess, to appeal to some youngsters).
And then there's the video by Chris Dodd. Dodd is a Democratic candidate. While I think he has an admirable message in his video, on the one hand, it's poorly produced with bad lighting and sound. His video is very jarring when contrasted to the fancy, fast-paced media of music videos or even Richardson's video. On the other hand, the poor quality of the video and the self-consciousness of his addressing the camera shares a lot of common ground with the quick-and-dirty work of casual video-bloggers on YouTube.
Sam Brownback also features a speech-to-the-internet video. The 50 year-old, conservative candidate repeatedly states that he's running "for the future" because he's concerned about preserving and improving all the nations culture, safety, and family values. His page includes a picture of his big family in their living room. As I live in a staged house on the real estate market, I know what a staged house without family-personality looks like -- and his living room gives just that staged, plastic impression. And I shouldn't forget to note that MySpace Impact has him currently highlighted as the "presidential focus" with an extra-big image.
Brownback is also very stuffy sounding. He begins the video by saying "Hello MySpace!" and explains that he's running for president. While I'm sure he wants to be seen as a respectable and notable figure with just the right chutzpah to be president, the video message pulls the cloudy clout right out from under him and makes him no more special than the average Joe, or Sam... might this mean any video-blogger could run for President? At the end of his message he says, "Please spend some time exploring my page, and this space, and thanks for visiting the site." Well he's got "page," "space," and "site" covered; it isn't clear to me that he's spent much time on MySpace, social-networking sites, or has much of any idea where today's world is actually heading in the future given this page, space, and site.
MySpace Impact also features sections on various real-world issues ("impact awards"), voter registration, and an "our planet" section with a "go zero featured tip" for reducing one's carbon footprint, among other things.
I've been browsing some of the pages and it's really fascinating to see how the candidates appear when recontextualized within the MySpace page layouts and YouTube video. Gov. Bill Richardson's featured video includes a couple of TV ads that characterize him as very "down to earth" or "real" and someone whom young people frequenting myspace could relate to.
Contrast Richardson with the likes of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and the later two come across as incredibly stuffy and self-centered. The favorite friends Hillary displays on her page are all "I love hillary" or "hillary2008fanclub" type of groups or pages... and McCain's layout aesthetic plays on a very stiff and formal, military-style branding (Likely, I guess, to appeal to some youngsters).
And then there's the video by Chris Dodd. Dodd is a Democratic candidate. While I think he has an admirable message in his video, on the one hand, it's poorly produced with bad lighting and sound. His video is very jarring when contrasted to the fancy, fast-paced media of music videos or even Richardson's video. On the other hand, the poor quality of the video and the self-consciousness of his addressing the camera shares a lot of common ground with the quick-and-dirty work of casual video-bloggers on YouTube.
Sam Brownback also features a speech-to-the-internet video. The 50 year-old, conservative candidate repeatedly states that he's running "for the future" because he's concerned about preserving and improving all the nations culture, safety, and family values. His page includes a picture of his big family in their living room. As I live in a staged house on the real estate market, I know what a staged house without family-personality looks like -- and his living room gives just that staged, plastic impression. And I shouldn't forget to note that MySpace Impact has him currently highlighted as the "presidential focus" with an extra-big image.
Brownback is also very stuffy sounding. He begins the video by saying "Hello MySpace!" and explains that he's running for president. While I'm sure he wants to be seen as a respectable and notable figure with just the right chutzpah to be president, the video message pulls the cloudy clout right out from under him and makes him no more special than the average Joe, or Sam... might this mean any video-blogger could run for President? At the end of his message he says, "Please spend some time exploring my page, and this space, and thanks for visiting the site." Well he's got "page," "space," and "site" covered; it isn't clear to me that he's spent much time on MySpace, social-networking sites, or has much of any idea where today's world is actually heading in the future given this page, space, and site.
MySpace Impact also features sections on various real-world issues ("impact awards"), voter registration, and an "our planet" section with a "go zero featured tip" for reducing one's carbon footprint, among other things.
Friday, May 25, 2007
The rate of suicide among Chinese women is very high: one commits suicide every four minutes. Think about that. Let four minutes pass. Someone has murdered themselves for a reason in which they feel they had a cause.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
We are nothing but growth
Growth is extremely noble. Growth is extremely selfless. Growth is more than an extension, an aggrandizement, a push, an increase, a change in current proportions, dynamics, feeling, and form.
Growth is to go beyond the life that had been emballmed in previous ideas, cast from previous lives. Growth is to pump the veins of this moment's capacities with fresh blood, to enliven the limbs of life and let them dance.
Growth is to have the utmost respect and adoration for time. Growth is to selfessly admit to history and time's permanence, a clever smirk ever gazing over the channels upon channels of growing things stuck and floating in space.
Growth is to admit to the reality of the moment, to look existence right in the eyes and to see that we -- as human beings -- are nothing but growth... and decay, rot, death, birth... For nothing changes except that which is changed, and with change a demarcation of the moment is exercised, and with the recognition of a moment's presence one recognizes change between then, now, and potential change.
Growth is to throw away the fears of death and to embrace a reality of freedom. Growth is to be open to maturation.
Like a "Clock of the Long Now," a Building of the Long Now, a City of the Long Now.
To design a building and a city with -- built into the design -- the intentional capacity for continuous regrowth, growth, and for continuous rearticulation and fabrication, continuous articulation and change, and to design it with a capacity for temporal and spatial expression, both within the original vision -- the seeding germ -- and the contemporary ideals -- the stone beams, broken desires, and careful reflections.
This is what man's presence accounts for! It is a dream. It is a reality. It is a phantasy. It is a fiction. It is a fact of dreams, realities, phantasies, and fictions imagined in the past. Our current state of growths is a current state of growths within many growths.
Such growth is long-range planning. Such growth is the institutions of man. Such growth is the Earth. Such growth is the mind. Such growth is the Universe.
We are a long presence! We -- and extend the word beyond our simple connotations -- are growth! Lives as only bubbles on the surface of the ocean. Bubbles of air both critical to and consequential from life within. Bubbles ever bubbling, gurggling, sucked into the waves and gushed out again.
(c) M. Waxman 2007.
Growth is to go beyond the life that had been emballmed in previous ideas, cast from previous lives. Growth is to pump the veins of this moment's capacities with fresh blood, to enliven the limbs of life and let them dance.
Growth is to have the utmost respect and adoration for time. Growth is to selfessly admit to history and time's permanence, a clever smirk ever gazing over the channels upon channels of growing things stuck and floating in space.
Growth is to admit to the reality of the moment, to look existence right in the eyes and to see that we -- as human beings -- are nothing but growth... and decay, rot, death, birth... For nothing changes except that which is changed, and with change a demarcation of the moment is exercised, and with the recognition of a moment's presence one recognizes change between then, now, and potential change.
Growth is to throw away the fears of death and to embrace a reality of freedom. Growth is to be open to maturation.
Like a "Clock of the Long Now," a Building of the Long Now, a City of the Long Now.
To design a building and a city with -- built into the design -- the intentional capacity for continuous regrowth, growth, and for continuous rearticulation and fabrication, continuous articulation and change, and to design it with a capacity for temporal and spatial expression, both within the original vision -- the seeding germ -- and the contemporary ideals -- the stone beams, broken desires, and careful reflections.
This is what man's presence accounts for! It is a dream. It is a reality. It is a phantasy. It is a fiction. It is a fact of dreams, realities, phantasies, and fictions imagined in the past. Our current state of growths is a current state of growths within many growths.
Such growth is long-range planning. Such growth is the institutions of man. Such growth is the Earth. Such growth is the mind. Such growth is the Universe.
We are a long presence! We -- and extend the word beyond our simple connotations -- are growth! Lives as only bubbles on the surface of the ocean. Bubbles of air both critical to and consequential from life within. Bubbles ever bubbling, gurggling, sucked into the waves and gushed out again.
(c) M. Waxman 2007.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Life Programming
The minds of children -- of the young -- are supple and fragile.
The minds of adults -- those with deeper accrued age -- are congealed and brittle.
The mind of a human is like a puzzle whose pieces come together to represent a map.
The mind is born jumbled and confused, all the pieces mixed-up and with many, many, many missing.
Life experiences -- daily actions and lessons, thoughts and gestures, places and assumptions -- add new pieces that always fit into the puzzle.
But the puzzle isn't always coherent. One piece may fit into another but the path running from the existing piece may be led by the new piece into an abyss, a tunnel, a valley, or a hidden no-man's-land. Yet the pieces always connect. And sometimes the pieces can lead to coherence. Another piece may add an alternate route connecting paths into oceans of opportunity, a mountain range, a nebulous city, or even an entirely new world.
To teach is to give away the gifts of such puzzle pieces. To teach is to hand these puzzle pieces out, bags of them, sacks full of different options.
The best is when a puzzle piece fits and connects the landscape -- the map represented, printed and carved -- into and from the other pieces' material bodies -- to develop new meaningful landscape.
The best is when that landscape then grows new forms, new landscapes, and upon which young minds -- or even the old -- find themselves lost within -- lost within the landscape now emerging within their mind.
And the mind then realizes the detail within this landscape so rich, so rich it is as detailed as the real world itself -- the world of the mind is the real world.
And lost within this landscape composed by the puzzle pieces of knowledge and experience, one discovers they may transcribe new topographies into the surface. The landscape is theirs to make, they learn. The landscape, they find, is their life; theirs to discover, to build, to husband and birth.
(c) M. Waxman, 2007.
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