Do I want to get more personal?
The structural editor of my book, Sam Holmes, advised me not to make my blog about "me."
In other words, don't make it about the nuttiness of my branded muesli that morning.
As far as I can see, there are three areas I could cover:
What do you reckon?
What about the balance between words and images? More images? More volune of words?
I want to live in the Both/And world. It is a great place. A secular land of milk and honey. It is where legends will be made. It is the world where things may have binary roots, like the zeros and ones in software code (maybe not much longer with quantum computing around the corner though), but have positive sums, that people can gain without someone else necessarily losing.
The Both/And world likes abundance, where more and more information is available and cheap, where storage and distribution are afterthoughts. It is a world of multiple roles, multiple careers, of crossovers and mashups; it is valuing thoughtfully remixed work as wholly original. This is the Both/And world and I love it.
We have all these dichotomies: black/white; fat/thin; rich/poor; young/old. You can’t blame a cynical person for saying “you can’t have it all.” Around the corner though, there is a creative and reliable person. Crossfit challenges one aerobically and anaerobically. I have seen people lose weight and gain muscle. To quote Voltaire: we mustn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I do think the world can be messed up. I do believe there is a crooked timber in people. But that is not to say that if someone does well, they necessarily cannot do good. And to foreclose that possibility is to live in a dark place. I remain cynical about cynicism.
Chefs don’t just make tasty food that they always have, for the expectation today is to dine with a chef who knows the underlying science underpinning her or his gustatory creations. We expect a chef to scoff “too easy” at allergies or fine-tuned dietary restrictions; we expect them to tempt us with new textures and flavors, and synthesize all these new requirements into cuisine, and present it to us as if we were at the theater. The greatest fear of Hong Kong parents is that their child enters the wrong profession, (the mandarin for which is ru cuo hang). The concern centers on getting all the details right, whereby you have the right grades, academic pedigrees and credentials...But what if you do everything right by precedent, and by consensus... but unwittingly enter a sunset industry?
Detail and context is important.
Detail and context is a cornerstone of this both/and world I'm talking about. The dream of any architect is to erect a building that gets right the threading, fastening, pouring, cladding, of course. But can people get in and out? That is the question. To achieve detail and context is the dream of dreams. It is the fable of the forestry guy who knows trees, the legend of the electrical engineer who gets the physics.
As Aaron Koblin, the data artist said, the 21st century is the century of the interface.
And he's right. We have huge amounts of data sloshing around. It is growing geometrically and we know it. We throw around words and phrases like "algorithm," "data mining," "social graph," and the like as if we know what they mean. I don't really know what these terms mean exactly. I have an idea but, with exactitude I'm a little lost. Yes, we can analyze it all this data. Yes, we can make dashboards and build colorful analytic tools and record it and store it and make it watertight and immortal.
Yet, data fundamentally only has value once it can tell a story. what we do with the data is what matters.
Read MoreAt the poles you use references like “sleeps,” because “nights” don’t make sense to a circadian rhythm of 24 hours (the polar night is 6 months long). The polar lands are in effect “deserts”, void of the sorts of things humans need to live healthy, fulfilling day-to-day existences. In a word "lonely."
So, sure, there is "polar" in that the poles are lonely and sometimes when people don't "get you" it can be lonely too--"polar," I guess makes sense in that vein.
There's "polar" as desert but, also another aspect worth considering. That is polarities, of something, something, something, something, something, which then becomes anti-something, anti-something, ad infinitum, this idea of Arctic and Antarctic as simultaneously opposites and mirror images, twins separated at birth subconsciously competing, one with the other.
Read MoreThe industry mythologizes the local. Heritage and tradition, it all reduces to local.
And before you are dazzled by the immaculate finishing, remember that part of enduring appeal of that watch is the association with non-cosmopolitan grittiness. It is the quaint image of the watchmaker toiling away at his workshop, squinting and suffering for his art. It is the hopelessly unscalable nature of the Swiss Alps, bucolic as they are, far from any port, a spaghetti of mountains and valleys.
Read MoreWhether you are operating in a Shanghainese or Cantonese, or some other food culture, a meal begins with soup because it prevents you from overeating. This is the Chinese way. To have an elaborately brewed broth, that may contain something exotic, or maybe its just the freshest carrots and pork bones available, seems to be an indulgence. But, then again it is just water molecules with flavor.
Read MoreThis sets up a bit of a false choice here. After all, we are programmed to feast. It is a survival mechanism that when we haven’t eaten for awhile and suddenly come upon food we voraciously over-consume, our bodies notifying us that if the past is any indication, there aren’t any regular mealtimes coming up soon- so eat up. But evolution has a built in tripwire. Our ancestors who came across putrid, bile-smelling carrion likely did not consume it. Others that did may have gotten a mild case of diarrhea, or maybe an intestinal infection, conditions that are benign with modern medicine, but altogether another matter in the pre-historic savannah. Those who didn’t have a gag-reflex triggered by the sight of maggots might not have made it to pass on their genes. Even if you were starving, the tradeoff of eating something that would make you sick, and dehydrate you might not be worth it. Restraint is just as evolutionarily necessary as indulgence is.
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Du Bois, put it this way: “one ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
In Booker T. Washington it was clear there was a heavy emphasis on the “self” in self-help. But in the integrationist leanings of W.E.B. Du Bois, one can’t help but think the enterprise of being black in a white America was fraught with irreconcilable differences. Du Bois often spoke of the “color line,” which was his characterization of the dichotomy, the stacked relationship in American between black and white. The existence of intermediate racial steps like the awful-sounding “quadroon” and “octaroon” in the U.S. Census in the 1800’s betrays a stark binary. Nonetheless, the duality Du Bois and other black intellectuals grappled with conjures a Faustian one, where as Goethe’s Faust said: “two souls, alas, are housed within my breast.” It seems to be an implacable duality, one not easily quieted, one not easily realized.
When I think of bothness as it pertains to being mixed Chinese-Western, I imagine lumpy Cream of Wheat. It sounds strange yet the metaphor is clear. Bothness does not mean smoothness.
Read MoreNice piece in the NYT today by Bonnie Tsui.
Using the latest Pew research on being multiracial in America (more to come on that) as a springboard, Bonnie Tsui talks about her Chinese-Western "Hapa" 5-year-old son in the SF Bay Area.
3 key takeaways:
On the other hand, the West pushed too far. The Crimean Peninsula is a historically Russian enclave; indeed, a place that even the best-known Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, argued shouldn’t have been cleaved from Russia when Khrushchev did so in 1954. Ukraine is the Slavic breadbasket. It is the home of Kievan Rus for god sakes! No Russian leader could ever survive another day in office if he did not act as if Ukraine was the reddest of redlines.
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