I will be traveling for the next several months in Southeast Asia and will be writing infrequently on this blog but devoting time to finishing my book, which I’m tentatively calling Buddha to Brooklyn - a Reluctant Memoir.
The book explores my perceptions on the co-evolution of modern marketing and the social sciences primarily from the 1960s to the present, along with the subsequent loss of (and yearning for) spirituality and meaning in the post-modern world. It’s written primarily from the first person in a lyrical style similar to the blog entry of the same name. I’d like to think of it as Malcolm Gladwell and Cornell West meets Charles Bukowski and Alan Watts, but that could all change as the story unfolds and manifests.
I will be in Thailand Nov 5-Dec 1, Vietnam Dec 1-13, Myanmar (Burma) Dec 14-Jan 10, and the rest is up in the air. Please be in touch. Pics above Bagan, Myanmar, and below Ko Tao, Thailand
I’ve always been fascinated with sound and believed since an early age that rhythms contained and could unlock intrinsic patterns to the underlying core of our being.
This reminded me of my early days studying Eastern religions and my former professor Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega’s work on the Hindu Tantra, in which he studied a non-dual mystical tradition of Abhinavagupta. Perplexed by why sacred texts repeatedly referenced different vowels of the mantra “OM,” Muller-Ortega came to the realization that Abhinavagupta was discussing how the patterns in sound mimicked the underlying patterns at the heart of all reality.
Practitioners could attune to these internal resonances through discipline of the mind via meditation on mantras, thereby both merging with and dissolving the misperception that one’s true nature is separate from the underlying fabric of all reality. It’s interesting to see the possible validation from modern science of perspectives dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in India.
This excellent time-lapse video by Peter Belanger follows him and Rob Schultz in their collaborative process of creating a recent cover of MacWorld featuring the new iPhone. Focus is on photography, layout in Photoshop, and design.
It’s fun to see the actual execution of a creative concept from start to print - literally, with a box of magazines arriving at the end of the video. I have a new appreciation for print design after seeing this!
My colleague Jeff Malmad posted a link to the above video by Jon Rawlinson, a cinematographer and editor who specializes in documentary projects. His shorts serve as poignant reminders of the simple beauty found in mother nature.
The uninterrupted shot of the oceanic underworld provides a glimpse into the majestic beauty of the sea. Rawlinson gives the following description:
The main tank called the “Kuroshio Sea” holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.
Rawlinson calls us to protect our oceans and nature, take a pause and appreciate his vision. Enjoy!
I rarely post about personal experiences but felt compelled to share and reflect.
Last Sunday my good friend Pepe Lopez Waldron and I went to Blue Cliff Monastery to see the venerable Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, who is in the U.S. for two months for a short tour. Thich Nhat Hanh joined the monkhood at age 16 and began his work of public service in Saigon during the 1960s. He was banned from returning to Vietnam when he left to the U.S. and was instrumental in convincing Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. MLK would later nominate TNH for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Thich Nhat Hanh eventually founded Plum Village in France, a training center where he has lived in exile since 1983. Now 85-years old, he is one of the most renown teachers in the world and we are thankful to have had the opportunity to see him and be in his presence.
Thay, as he is called by his students, gave a dharma talk followed by walking meditation and a communal meal. About 1,000 people were in attendance for the afternoon.
Thay spoke of what he termed inter-being, a oneness and connection we have with one another cultivated through mindfulness and concentration. Pepe shared the following reflections among our close friends:
He talked about inter-being and the absence of any independent reality “I inter-am, you inter-are.” He said this insight is the fruit of practice. He said that mindfulness develops our awareness and ability to be present in the moment. “when our mind and body is present, we are fully alive.”
Mindfulness frees us from the past and future and makes it possible to enjoy every moment. Concentration help you penetrate ‘what is there’ and produces the insights of “emptiness or suchness or inter-dependence, or inter-being.”
He said these insights cannot passed through words – “like the taste of a mango, it cannot be transmitted by words.” The person must taste it for him or herself to know mango-ness. He said that concepts and notions are useful only as far as the foot of the path to insight, they are like a map.”
Pepe and I were fortunate enough to have strangers offer to take us to and from New York City to the monastery. Upon our return in the early afternoon we headed to Sunday Best at The Yard hosted by our good friends Doug Singer, Eamon Harkin, Justin Carter, and MeanRed Productions.
Motor City Drum Ensemble headlined the day and played an excellent set ranging from classic disco and house to Detroit techno and some original dance tracks. Pepe and I danced with close friends and eventually we all relaxed at his nearby brownstone on his backyard deck by his pool (a rareity in Brooklyn). It was truly the best Sunday ever.
There is a widely held misperception that the peaceful compassion of Buddhism and contemplative practices are incompatible with the diverse lifestyles found in places like Sunday Best. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The sense of communal harmony that tied together a thousand people of the sangha in a day of dharma talks, singing, walking meditation and eating was the same sense of inter-being that unified my fellow Brooklynites in a night of dancing under the stars.
Similarly, the soft-spoken voice of Thay pierced through our hearts and touched our spirits in ways that parallel the DJs inspired us to connect and share with one another with their music track selection. The day truly made us appreciative of the simple and beautiful mystery of how there is a unifying inter-human core to our diverse cultural heritages.
A number of disparate stories and new technologies broke in the past week that sparked the following thoughts about the evolution of visual representations and content distribution.
Facebook will roll out live streaming video within their platform with in-player calls to action to like and befriend/fan publishers, while YouTube, Hulu, and other video publishers start to bring HD quality video. As I write this I’m streaming video live from Lollapalooza and listening to Animal Collective as you can see from the screen shot I just took below.
All of these amazing innovations across emerging media platforms open a new realm of possibilities for anyone to become a content publisher. The cost of entry is so low, while publishing tools across social media channels have become accessible to all, giving instant access to millions of people that could feasibly make anyone a competitor with a major publisher. Kudos especially to Comcast and UPenn’s recent launch of the New Media Exchange, a massive initiative to connect thought and industry leaders in social media with nonprofits. The move both furthers the public good while also fostering dialogue among academics, who are often at least two steps behind the industry professionals in the field.
I agree with Jeff Jarvis’s thought piece in the Guardian that Murdoch (and now AOL)’s move opens the doors for competitors, and as a former academic I’m happy to notice a quazi-Marxist trend emerging where quality content publishing seems to present challenges to monetizing it across ALL media (though music and movies are a whole other can of worms to touch in this blog post).
Anyone who works within the content publishing space knows that often times people at the top are not in touch with technology trends, and are surrounded by “yes men” who provide opinions that validate views of their superiors and stakeholders in traditional media who want to save their jobs. My personal sense is that there probably are too many nervous decisions made to perpetuate funneling billions into creating content and not enough listening to the nerdy guy in the corner of the room who understands where all of this is headed in the next 5-10 years.
This is how empires fall and new leaders emerge. On the subject of new media and user-generated content, I couldn’t help ending with a recent video of Jay-Z at All Points West opening with a Beastie Boys cover of “No Sleep Til Brooklyn.”
John Hughes helped define my childhood and the generation that grew up in the 80s. The above YouTube video brought chills down my spine thinking back to my teens and before the age of mobile communications, emails, the internet, and the archipelago of technologies and platforms that we call social media.
I’m fascinated how rapidly our society has changed since the time of Hughes’ films, and as I look ahead I wonder where we’re headed if malaise has taken over our youth to the extent that they’ve already transcended beyond the online communities. I spent a decade studying youth cultures from the 1960s to the present, and understand how media perceptions of the counterculture shaped emerging lifestyle markets of music, media, clothing, and merchandise.
Those kids of the counterculture grew up to found the advertising business we see today, and their appropriation of social scientific methodology into trendsetting, forecasting and focus groups contributed to manufacturing the niche stereotypes captured in Hughes’ films. How ironic that the people who were so against the establishment in “The Sixties” would put in place the mechanisms to feed sparks of individuality back into consumer habits via advertising, marketing, and PR.
Understanding the recurring patterns of the past makes us more conscious of how naive we are to attach ourselves to the present. Nonetheless, I find myself identifying with the following clip from Conan O’Brien, and I can’t help but wondering what’s next. John Hughes sadly died at 59 years old, but the simple pleasures he brought us through film serve as poignant reminders that everything is still amazing.
Despite a 34% decrease in sales Lamborghini continues to push forward and above is a pic of their latest model, the Gallardo LP560-4 Spyder. Classic cool, the economy continues to be weak, speculation about Twitter, Brazilian Graffiti, and much much more in this week’s trends:
I stumbled across this video today and it made me happy. You should watch it. Bobby McFerrin talks about the universality of the Pentatonic Scale and how audiences always respond to it around the world.
Jump ahead and I come to reflect on a piece in the NYT on “Twitterology.” The author, Ben Schott, reflected on the 140 character messaging system and pondered that in the future people would come to tweet short abbreviations of words, much like they did with the launch of the telegraph. His musings on words appear regularly in the NYT, and are worth a read in his blog
The connection Schott makes to words is interesting, as are McFerrin’s, but the more compelling I think are the ways in which language and music can be used in different contexts for subversion. Around the same time that Morse was inventing the telegraph in the 1830s enslaved black people in the South would sing Gospel songs and encode secret meanings to communicate unbeknownst to their masters.
In doing so they hijacked the religion plantation owners had used to justify slavery and laid the foundation for the vibrant spiritual tradition that would evolve a century later into blues. It’s indeed ironic that centuries after the British brought slavery to the Americas their musical heritage would traverse back across the Atlantic to inspire the UK roots of rock music (check out the BBC video below on the influence of American blues on Brit rock).
It would be interesting to see what Schott, Professor at Cambridge University, might have to say on this.
Thanks to my former professor from Princeton Albert Raboteau, pioneer in the study of Slave Religion, for passing on his wonderful perspective on race in American history.
I’ve been a fan of Ghostly and Spectral records since the labels first launched. I remember going to their parties in Detroit and Ann Arbor when I lived in my home state of Michigan, and buying their records when 99% of techno djs would gag at the thought of spinning with CD’s or MP3’s.
The labels have since expanded the eclectic repertoire of their musical catalog in ways that have co-evolved with the technologies used by their artists and listeners. Ghostly Discovery is arguably the best application I have seen to provide a functional service to a label’s fans while also showcasing its artists.
Simple functionality allows users to select moods based on colors, and then adjust speed/tempo and to find a balance between synthesized and natural sounds. The application also allows users to create favorites as illustrated in the following demo:
Perhaps Ghostly is one of the only labels who could pull this off with the unique variety of artists, tracks, and styles, and in my opinion the app in many ways is representative of the genre-defying innovation the label has supported since its inception.
Ghostly plans to do sneak peaks of upcoming releases exclusively through Discovery, and enables listeners to connect to iTunes to purchase individual tracks that go immediately into your permanent musical library. Now if only Ghostly would sponsor an open bar somewhere in NYC to do a launch party - hey, just gradually turn up the tempo on the app and they don’t even need to book DJs!
If you’re not familiar with the label get the application, and if you don’t have an iPhone check them out. Here’s a great video from School of Seven Bells, Enjoy!
