Years ago when I was a teenager I was on a camping trip with my relatives and some of their family friends. I went for a walk in the hills with the daughter of one of the families. I took my walkie talkie with me and was radioing the camp. I thought it would be fun. At one point as we were walking down the hill back to camp we lost track of the trail. I said “We’ve lost the trail” and later “There are a lot of trees here, it’s getting dark”. I was not worried in the least. We had no map, and we had no trail, but there was a road by the campground and all we had to do was keep going down and we would have to hit the road at some point.

I think the problem when people try to compare New York with Los Angeles is that people tend to compare them as though they were the same *kind* of thing: cities, or metropolises, or something. But they’re just not the same kind of thing, they’re not really directly comparable. New York is a city of neighborhoods, Los Angeles is more like a country of regions. One radio station here likes to say that it is based in “Pasadena, Los Angeles” — I remember listening to one DJ saying about that tag line, “I keep saying it because it keeps being true.” Los Angeles isn’t better or worse than New York, it’s not really possible to compare the two places, because they’re not comparable. It’s like trying to compare and contrast Paris with England.

Like any non-psychotic human being, I’m appalled at the horrific massacre in Paris. At the same time, I find many of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo pointlessly inflammatory and tasteless, particularly those showing Mohammed in sexual positions. Yes, they targeted every religion and many public figures on the right and the left — but there’s something dark, mean-spirited, unfunny, and racist about some of these cartoons, and so while condemning the violence I can’t bring myself to post “I am Charlie Hebdo.” I am not Charlie Hebdo. There does seem to be a problematic attitude towards othering subcultures inherent in these cartoons, which for some reason many in France found funny, but I really don’t. We can abhor the horrific violence without valorizing everything the victims did in their lives.

Addendum: this is not about assigning blame to the victims for their murder, it is about whether or not victims should always be praised as unalloyed heroes for everything they did. The former is insane, the latter, however, I am uncomfortable with and have been from the beginning of this.

An article lamenting the art scene in Toronto…

http://www.artslant.com/ew/articles/show/41530

I think New York sucks people and energy out of many cities in its vicinity, not just Toronto — certainly the entire “suburban” area surrounding it (New Jersey, Westchester, Connecticut, Long Island), as well as cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore… speaking about the culture as a whole, not just the art world. Being from Los Angeles, originally, which is a kind of Borgesian infinite expanse of points which contain all other points, a city with no center, a city in which things fold in on themselves at increasing distances, it feels disorienting to be in a place where there’s such a clear center which radiates itself outward and where everyone attempts to find the last place, closest to the center, where they can afford to live. Occasionally I drive to Jersey (yes, I have a car, an Angeleno transplant who cannot fully admit to being in a place where owning a car is an absurdity) and encounter a world both familiar and strange — there are the same sort of malls and suburban life, out there, that exist in my hometown metropolis, but strangely evacuated of what one takes for granted in California, the sense that nestled in between the gleaming, sprawling malls and big box stores may be, and are, treasures you have yet to discover. You can feel it, everywhere there, but it’s been vacuumed out of all but the most proximate edges of the suburban landscape around New York… and it must be because it all heads towards the center, towards New York, eventually.

Los Angeles breeds its own kind of one-way rivalry — no one ever says bad things about San Francisco or Northern California there, but Northern Californians (people from the SF Bay Area like to call themselves “Northern Californians” perhaps to establish themselves in a much larger geographical context) love to hate Los Angeles, seemingly unaware the rivalry is entirely one-sided. Angelenos have no idea that San Francisco hates them. Even with the rise of the tech industry and the international significance that has placed in that region of the world, the one-way rivalry lives on, for reasons I’m not sure anyone fully understands.

I’ve often remarked upon the culture among the artists of my father’s generation — the abstract painters and other artists working then — how generous they are with each other. How unconcerned with commercial success, notoriety, fame. They sit together, my father (who is completely unknown and has never even attempted to have a commercial career), and his friends, some of whom sell their works for tens of thousands of dollars a piece, some of whom don’t even make work anymore, and they all talk completely as peers, swap work and stories, because they have a kind of existential appreciation for each other as people, and have never been competitive with each other. Today’s art world, not only in Toronto but it seems throughout the world, does seem remarkably less cooperative in many ways, though that same character exists in New York, as well, but perhaps because it is New York, that doesn’t stop art from happening here. I’m not sure how long this will last, however… art now is the harbinger of rapid gentrification and sky high rents, a trend that cannot continue forever, but one which has already priced most people out of most of Manhattan and much of nearby Brooklyn. The future will not be like the past.

There are so many things that are actually the opposite of what they seem… and it causes so many life problems. For instance … the usual way people tend to think about making something happen in life is that you should make a huge effort, and the opposite is that is to laze around and do nothing. So “struggle” is associated with “effort” which is associated with “doing things”, and “relaxation” is associated with “not doing anything”. I.e.:

STRUGGLE <-> EFFORT <-> FOCUS <-> DOING STUFF

RELAXATION <-> BEING LAZY <-> FUZZINESS <-> STAGNATION

But, this is not right, at all. This ignores context, scope, spaciousness. That is, if you’re making an effort, struggling, and “doing stuff” but it is all towards some “goal” that is itself conceived of a narrow or limited perception, in fact you may just be reinforcing the same habits and thoughts and world view that got you into whatever dead end you might find yourself in in the first place. Struggling without insight, without spaciousness, is a great way to keep things exactly the same as they always have been.

There’s another way, of course: relaxation, but not a vague, fuzzed-out, foggy relaxation — but instead an alert, present, open spaciousness — that can open you up to possibilities far, far beyond your habits. Relaxing can be hyper-present and aware and offer the possibility of revolutionary change, and mindless, reactive struggle can be just another way of embedding yourself in the same traps. Allow me to suggest an alternate schema:

STRUGGLE <-> NARROWNESS <-> REACTIVITY <-> STAGNATION

RELAXATION <-> FOCUS <-> SPACIOUSNESS <-> REVOLUTION

Most things, as you progress along, you can see you’re getting steadily closer to the goal, step by step. But with coding, quite often, you can work for hours and hours, or days and days, on something and you imagine that you may never get to the point it is totally working. Everything seems hopeless… until, suddenly, impossibly, everything works perfectly and you feel like a genius. Again. And in your mind, the problem that just seemed like a dark jungle of twisted complexity appears to be “trivial.” Everything always seems trivial when you get it working.

But then, you voluntarily decide to jump into the darkness again.

After a while, you learn that no matter how dark it seems, the light of beautiful function is hovering on the unseen horizon. But even with that accumulated experience, in the back of your mind, you still have that nagging feeling… maybe THIS time is the time I NEVER figure it out…

The best programmers are the ones who manage to push that thought deep into their pile of repressed fears, and charge ahead once more into the unknown.

http://steampunkopera.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-two-kings-and-the-two-labyrinths/

I was walking with Heather and Jungmin today and we were talking about this and that, and in the context of our conversation, Heather asked, “Why do we die?” She meant it in a biological sense — why do organisms die, rather than just live forever?

I said “I don’t know, but let’s think about this a bit… one hint might be that most species engage in sexual reproduction, which allows for a variety of different genetic possibilities to be tried. Dying is part of this, because the species can only explore different genetic possibilities if previous generations die out to make room for the newer generations. But then the question arises — how would this evolve?” I paused for a second to think about this a bit more deeply. “Consider two species, one which had individuals which never died of old age, and another which explored different genetic possibilities through sexual reproduction and death. Clearly, the second species would explore a lot more possibilities, genetically, than the first, over the same time period, giving the second species a huge adaptive advantage over the first.” We talked about this idea some more and Heather pointed out that, in some sense, while we all are often assholes to each other, and are often selfish, we are also all engaged in a highly cooperative activity, as well; by living, reproducing, and dying to make room for future generations, we’re collectively helping our species adapt and evolve.

The most dramatic and meaningful stories and events always seem to have to do with the boundaries of life: reproduction (love and sex), and death. Somehow we’re all subconsciously aware of this.

It’s really a wonderful world. Being. It’s quiet and seems like everything is still. Yet it includes all movement. All movement is actually stillness and vice versa. It strips away fake importance and in its place is real meaning. It is difficult to hide there. Maybe that’s one of the scariest things about it.

Instead of coercive needs, it has acceptance. But the acceptance can have desire and affection and love in it. The most intense and scary things are right there alongside the everyday and familiar. but the everyday and familiar takes on a different, initially unfamiliar cast. Exactly like going through the looking glass. Everything on the other side is still there, but it’s a vastly wonderous strange world.