There and Back Again…

10 01 2012

“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
- from The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dining Hall at Christ Church, Oxford

Oxford, England at Christmas-time is simply magical. It’s a small city, mostly dominated by ancient university buildings, students, and a crisscrossing of rivers, bridges and roads. But even on the cold gray winter days, students wove in and out of traffic on bicycles, rushed off to study for finals, and huddled in coffee shops talking, laughing and reading. People who weren’t students seemed to be out with coworkers and friends, strolling to pubs and restaurants, talking energetically about life. The city seems all at once relaxed, slow and thoughtful, and yet… alive.

As I saw some of the kids who go to school there, I wondered if they knew how lucky they were. They literally go to school at Hogwarts. Well, Oxford may not teach magic, but it looks like they do. The dining hall from the first Harry Potter movie was actually filmed in the Christ Church College dining hall. When we visited, it was decorated for Christmas and you could smell the food cooking – it was easy to imagine that Harry, Ron and Hermione were about to burst in for lunch.

The White Rabbit

Christ Church College itself is fascinating. In addition to being the home of one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, who was a professor there, it literally has little bits of history stuffed into every corner. For example, hidden in the edges of one of the stained glass windows in the dining hall are the tiny, intricate figures of Alice, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and other Lewis Carrol creatures.

Edward Burne-Jones Window

The stained glass in the Cathedral at Christ Church was beautiful as well. Each pane told a story; some of ancient medieval scenes, and some were more modern – including a lovely Pre-Raphaelite window by Edward Burne-Jones.

It’s easy to imagine that the worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth were born in this place. The city exudes magic – it simply demands it. Turn your head for a moment, and out of the corner of your eye, you can almost see a faun, a hobbit or a white rabbit scamper by.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were professors, colleagues, and friends in Oxford. They met regularly as part of an informal group called The Inklings at a local pub, The Eagle and Child. In addition to discussing literature, philosophy, language, and theology (both Lewis and Tolkien were Christians, but the Inklings were not all necessarily religious), they also challenged each other to write good fiction. It was there at the pub, to this group of friends and thoughtful critics, that Tolkien probably previewed and read aloud his first drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis certainly shared his own proofs for The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe with the group there.

The Inklings met here at The Eagle and Child

We went to The Eagle and Child for a pint and saw the picture of Lewis and Tolkien hanging above the corner table and fireplace where the Inklings regularly met. What an absolute wonder it would have been to listen in on their discussions.

I remember reading the Narnia stories I was a kid… in fourth grade I think. I was not a cool kid by any stretch of the imagination, and that year was a particularly tough one. I probably escaped into Narnia just as much as the children in Lewis’s story did. And I still remember the feel of those slim library paperbacks… circa 1960’s artwork on the cover, yellowing pages, and that musty old book smell you get when you flap the pages too near to your face. I remember being reluctant to read the final book, knowing that there were no more after that.

The stories themselves were engaging and imaginative, but I was struck in particular by the words themselves and how they sounded. I was baffled by the foreign-ness of new British words and contexts, and I could almost faintly hear the melody of an English accent. Lewis’s writing was charming and simple for young readers to understand, and never patronizing.

Christ Church Cathedral

Still, some of the things in the books were outside of the realm of my American imagination. What was this “turkish delight” that Edmund kept wanting to eat? As a 9 year old, I decided that it must be some kind of sweet turkey. Actually, I tried it a few years ago for the first time out of sheer curiosity, and was stunned to find that it’s more like a rose-flavored gumdrop covered in powdered sugar. NOT turkey. Go figure.

Anyway, now that I’m back home in Texas, it seems a bit unfair that some people get to live in and around that kind of ancient magic and history, and bump into such intelligent, creative and thoughtful people on the street every day. Here, things seem too new, too man-made, too boring, too bland, too sterile. I mean, there is no possible way that I could ever imagine that I could open my standard-issue closet door in my apartment, step into a forest and suddenly meet a talking animal… well, is there?

But maybe it’s all in perspective. Maybe the deceivingly familiar every-day-ness of life blinds us to what’s really out there. Maybe things aren’t as ordinary as they seem. Maybe we just need to look a little bit harder. After all, I suppose if we go looking for Narnia, we’ll eventually find it.

Christ Church College, Oxford


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Categories : Hmmm...., Wanderings

Singularly Human

31 12 2011

Earlier this month my company invited a celebrated futurist to speak with us about the landscape of the future. He defined 8 thought-provoking points which he believes will shape our future as humans. It was absolutely fascinating, and a new way of thinking about the things which could undoubtedly consume our thoughts in 50 years… things like water and food distrubtion, world population expansion, and true globalization.

However, one of the most controversial theories he shared was the concept of “technological singularity,” or the inflection point at which our machines or computers will become conscious, surpass human intelligence, and begin to exponentially evolve their own intelligence at a mind-bogglingly rapid rate. It is said that the machine we build that becomes conscious may need to be the last man-made invention we ever make. Many futurists predict that this event will occur around 2045.

So how do the futurists think that we will arrive there? Well, think of your iPhone. Apple’s Siri is our new personal assistant. “Your Wish is My Command,” says Siri. Surely we have seen how technology has been advancing exponentially: the power of our devices has been doubling, tripling, quadrupling with every new release, within shorter and shorter timeframes. Today Siri is helpful inside a phone; tomorrow it may be attached to you, inside of you, or you may even be inside of it! It may even go so far as to map the neurons in your brain and begin to help you by anticipating your thoughts and needs.

It sounds extraordinary. So extraordinary that you are probably shaking your head, saying that I have surely gotten things confused with the plot of The Matrix or The Terminator. Have I lost my mind? (Well, not yet… read on…)

Truthfully, it all did sound pretty silly to me too, so I decided to do some of my own research. I grabbed a couple of books (referenced throughout this post) and incredibly the more I read up on it, the more I felt like I was going down Neo’s rabbit hole myself. Belief in “the singularity,” and the advent of “machine consciousness” is a very real persuasion among many. I might go so far as to say that it may be a new religious sub-culture. Of course, it exists in various forms – some may go so far as to believe in the singularity itself, but others may simply believe that our technological advances will create some kind of ideal existence.

Some of the ideas behind these beliefs are rooted in reality, based on the technical and scientific innovations and advancements that we are making today. And there are quite a few books, mathematical theories, and research institutes that have been developed to support them. This means that for some, the singularity isn’t just a far-fetched fringe idea. Just google it and you’ll see what I mean. There are articles in Time Magazine, institutes for artificial intelligence and technical research, singularity news sites and even a public endorsement from Bill Gates. Prominent futurists act as advisors and consultants to some of the most powerful leaders in technology today, like Bill Gates, NASA and the US Army. Google, under the leadership of co-founder Larry Page, helped to start up and fund the “Singularity University” in California.

Echoes of these beliefs can be found within our current technology. In the Industrial Revolution, our machines augmented our physicality. In the Information Age, they aim to augment our intelligence. Cell phones predict what I should be saying in a text, Google shows me certain search results based on who I am, advertisers know me so well that they can tailor ads in order to play on my desires, and Siri will be able to guide me to care about certain things on a daily basis. In science, we’ve been able to map genomes, and we’re well on our way to mapping out the regions and neural processes of the brain. If we can pinpoint exactly how the brain works, some scientists say, we may be able to create true artificial intelligence. No doubt about it, we’re making major, rapid advancements in science and technology – many of which the general public may not even be aware of. But is being able to augment a brain, or even create a brain, the same thing as being able to create a mind? This is precisely the point at which we leave the realm of science and enter the realm of faith.

In the book You Are Not a Gadget, web 2.0 pioneer and virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier compares the way that radical singularitarians believe in the “moment” of Singluarity to the way that some Christians believe in ‘the rapture.’ In both events, no one before, during, or after the event would be aware of it, because by definition each are said to happen in a flash, changing the course of our world. If computers suddenly became conscious, do we have any idea what they would do? Perhaps they will decide to eliminate humans altogether, or perhaps (as singularitarians hope) they will decide to ‘upload’ us as virtual minds inside a program. Either way, the transition would happen in a moment, and we can’t predict what will happen. Notable futurists like Ray Kurzweil believe that we will become an uploaded part of a hyper intelligent system, and that in the future we will have no need for our biological bodies. We will be unified virtually into some kind of meta-program, a megabrain of sorts, thus achieving true immortality, ever-expanding universal knowledge, and freedom from sickness, death, and the problems of this world. In short, nerd nirvana. The singularitarian gospel preaches that information will be our savior, and that this unified ultimate machine will save us from the evils of our frail, limited and imperfect bodies.

In the book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil goes so far as to say that this transformation will not only affect our own planet but also the universe at large as well: “The entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current ‘dumb,’ simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial machines.” Interestingly, an undercurrent throughout Kurzweil’s book seems to suggest his strong distaste for man and the natural world, our failings, our inability to perform at a higher level, and even our fickleness in emotions and our our painful unreliability in love.

On one hand, the singularitarian, (or cybernetic totalist) philosophy has a very familiar ring to it. Throughout history, humans have looked around themselves to see the evil, death and failure that persists in our world and we have exclaimed, “Really? Is this really it?” After all, this is the question of all philosophy and faith. C.S. Lewis, Oxford professor and author of the Narnia tales, wrote: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Christians like Lewis (and myself) believe that we are living in a state of the “already but not yet” – we can see glimpses of glorious things that point toward our ultimate redemption and “wholeness” as humans (in BOTH body and mind) – but at the same time in this world we see glimpses of awful things, of hell. Cybernetic totalists are simply defining their own hope for a fulfilled “other world” that they believe must exist – one in which we will make ourselves whole and make ultimate sense of the universe through knowledge, science and technology. We are natural heirs to this bittersweet human craving; like Adam and Eve, we want to know all.

In the 2009 documentary Transcendent Man, Ray Kurzweil commented, “Does god exist? Well, I would say not yet.” I find it fascinating that this worldview purports that man-made inventions will create god. And not only that, it implicitly trusts that this new god will be a “good” god, or in other words, that this superior intelligence will have mercy on us, the weaker race, and will decide not to destroy us. Throughout history, we have shown both our glory and our ugliness through the things we have created. In the late 19th century, we celebrated our engineering accomplishments and the coming golden era of machine innovation – and then we turned around and used our shiny new technology to commit bloody mass murder on a never-before-seen scale in World War I. On the internet you can see the best and worst of humanity. Through the singularity, man hopes he can finally escape that curse; instead of “garbage in, garbage out,” we hope for “garbage in, supreme consciousness out.” But alas, a machine that we construct out of zeroes and ones can no more eternally save us than a golden calf we fashion from melted gold bracelets.

Mexican muralist Diego Rivera explored a similar subject in the early 1930s. The message of the mural is clear: Despite all of our setbacks in the past, if we put the power in the hands of the common man, we will finally come to the crossroads of all knowledge, rise above war and poverty, and control the universe.

******

Belief in the technological singularity is faith-based, and for some of us, easy to reject as such. However, even if we think it’s all hocus-pocus, perhaps it’s worth taking a look at the appeal of the ideology behind it, and what that could potentially reveal about our culture and our own hearts. At the center of every person, worldview or religion is the idea of some kind of ‘ultimate,’ or someone or something that is being worshipped. In order to really understand someone, you have to find out what their ultimates are. They can be literally anything – a god, intellect, achievement, success, approval, kindness, morality, a political party, family, a person, knowledge, information, and so on. Ultimates can sometimes be subtle – often the obvious choice is just a ‘front’ for an even deeper ultimate. For example, ‘money’ seems like it could be an obvious one for some people – but digging deeper, the true ultimate might in fact be a ‘sense of security,’ or the ‘ability to provide for my family,’ etc. And for the record, that goes for religions as well. For example, some so-called Christians may not be worshipping Christ at all, but may instead be worshipping ‘Christianity’ itself, which is a different faith entirely. As the late David Foster Wallace, mused, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” For cybernetic totalists, at a surface level the ‘ultimate’ seems to be “information”, but at a deeper level it could be knowledge, power, achievement, recognition, or even amusement, escape, peace, harmony or personal acceptance. Why do we run to “unplug” within the solace of our iPads and televisions when we get home from work? What causes that desire within our own hearts and what does it mean?

The more that I’ve thought about this, the more uncomfortable I’ve become. Let me be clear: I certainly don’t think that technology, information or the internet are evil, by a long shot. I happen to work in technology, and I think that it can be inventive, creative and helpful. But when we set up imperfect things as ultimates we go too far. We want so badly for our machines to be something that they’re not that we become willing to sacrifice little pieces of ourselves in order to try to force that to be true. And as a result, I think we are in danger of losing too many irreplacable, beautiful things as a culture if we’re not careful.

What do I mean? If more and more we are wrapped up in our phones, iPads and computers instead of looking around ourselves at what is truly happening, we are at a greater risk of devaluing the purpose of the natural world, the beauty and importance of our environment, the physicality of our bodies, and the importance of existing in the here and now – the real, tangible, physical world. The meaning of human connection and ‘friendship’ is lost, and we miss the purpose of being a part of a family.

We may also be rejecting the mysterious complexity of our biological minds in favor of something that is much more limited than we are. We “dumb ourselves down” in order to fit within the confines of the way the machine works. Why? In the name of simplicity? Entertainment? Distraction? Perhaps it’s because we can control them – machines are designed to follow our instructions, they never question us, and we don’t have to worry about thinking about certain things if the machine either distracts us or does those things for us. But what will we have lost? Machines place no value on the necessity of failure and pain as an agent of healthy change. Perhaps our human minds are more creative and more passionately, stubbornly, and ardently glorious in this world because we are forced to wrestle with impermanence, pain, and death.

Furthermore, I think that even now we are in danger of silencing individual voices – perhaps not intentionally or maliciously– but simply as a byproduct of the way that we have started to aggregate, slice, dice, and summarize information at higher and higher meta-levels. It is more and more difficult for individuals, authors, and artists to keep their thoughts and contributions together as a complete, in-tact idea, expression or opinion. We are being systematically parsed, dismantled and blended into larger and larger informational search engines and data-structures, combined and mixed with other information until all that remains is a meaningless mediocre gray goo of “crowd wisdom”. In You are Not a Gadget, Lanier laments this loss within today’s Web 2.0 architecture: “Authorship – the very idea of the individual point of view – is not a priority of the new ideology.” Today, this is Wikipedia. Tomorrow, some leaders hypothesize, there may not be the concept of individual “books” – there may be one dataset from hundreds of thousands of sources that can be searched and indexed together. They beleive that a ‘mashup’ of everything will yield a more powerful knowledge overall. It seems odd that we are so readily and quickly embracing this as a ‘good thing.’ As Lanier astutely observes, “If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form.”

A book that had a profound influence on me as a child was the 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. In the story, L’Engle describes a cloud of darkness that is expanding in the universe. A planet called Camazotz is behind this cloud and is controlled by a giant, pulsating mega-brain – a single unified planetary consciousness called “IT”. IT controls everyone and everything on Camazotz, claiming to protect the residents of the planet from war, unhappiness and inefficency. People on Camazotz subsequently all move and live according to a rhythm and schedule set by IT. Children robotically exit their houses and bounce balls to IT’s pulse, they wear the same thing, walk the same way, and nothing is a problem, and nothing is out of place.

One of the main characters in the story is a boy genius named Charles Wallace who falls under IT’s spell and becomes possessed by the machine because of the wealth of information and knowledge IT promises. IT says: “You see, what you will soon realize is that there is no need to fight me. Not only is there no need, but you will not have the slightest desire to do so. For why should you wish to fight someone who is here only to save you pain and trouble? For you, as well as for the rest of all the happy, useful people on this planet, I, in my own strength, am willing to assume all the pain, all the responsibility, all the burdens of thought and decision.” At the climax of the book, only the heroine Meg, Charles Wallace’s sister, can ultimately save him from the clutches of IT. Meg does this by introducing the concept of love. IT claims to understand love, but cannot – and essentially self-destructs.

Love, in it’s true form – deeply hoping for the ultimate good of another person regardless of the effects or consequences to yourself – makes no logical, biological or evolutionary sense at all. Can anything but a human experience it? Will we forget how to love if we keep plugging ourselves into a daily existence that is less than real?

Like love, we also can’t recreate another important human anomaly within machines: creativity. In the book The Brain is Wider than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World, Bryan Appleyard explores this idea. Some neuroscientists might say that the phenomenon of creativity, insight, or inspiration happens when the brain is relaxed, unfocused, and disorganized. We loosen our brains to allow them to make unusual connections that they might not otherwise make in the rational world. Most “eccentric geniuses” that come to mind follow this pattern. For example, Sherlock Holmes would play the violin in the middle of an important case, much to the frustration of Dr. Watson, and by distracting and clearing his mind with music, his brain would find the answer. I know from personal experience that my mind works this way. If I leave a tough problem alone and allow my mind to wander elsewhere, many times my brain will suddenly put the thing together that I was looking for. This cognitive ability that seems to arise out of a mess of disorganization and unfocused relaxation – perhaps even out of artistic madness – is not the way that machines, search engines and data structures work for us today. A machine may return a thousand insights, but never the spark of human creativity, art, or inspiration that comes out of this kind of introspection. As Appleyard notes, “We do not expect our laptops to be distracted, dissociated or disorganized before they discover how to follow our commands. There is a fundamental difference here between what we now know of the mind and our machines, and, if this difference cannot be explained scientifically, then the human mind in its highest, most creative actions would, once again, be in danger of escaping the clutches of the materialist world view.”

And after all, as computing thinker John Seely Brown notes, “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them.”

*******

So how will I personally reclaim what I believe cannot be lost? Technology is a part of life: I can’t ignore it, run from it, or divorce it. As a culture, we can sometimes over-react and vilify someone else the moment we see something unsavory – but in most cases we have only ourselves to blame. If I lose my creativity, my intelligence, or my individual voice, it’s not Silicon Valley’s fault – it’s mine. These are the questions that I must keep asking myself on a regular basis as I dare to live in this brave new world:

  • What makes a person a person? What is consciousness? Is it simply the synapses in the brain? What is “the mind”? Is it a soul? If I believe that we have souls that are eternally significant, how does that influence how I spend my time and the way that I value other people?
  • Am I protecting myself from becoming a fragmented, disconnected digital version of myself? In my urgency to communicate quickly and simply, am I over-simplifying? Am I taking the complexity of my mind and squashing it down into meaningless, disjointed hollow fragments – shared, uploaded and tweeted? Am I in danger of becoming a robot in the flesh; part of a race that CS Lewis would call “men without chests”?
  • What does “connection” truly mean? Am I hyper connected through social networking, but in reality, not truly connected to anyone at all? What should real human interaction look like?
  • How am I engaging my mind every day? Do I live by the rhythms of “IT” or do I make up my own rhythm? Do I simply move from distraction to distraction, update to update, email to email, without allowing myself downtime to think, process and connect – even to feel pain? And I don’t mean sharing snippets of thoughts on a Facebook wall.

    • These questions may not seem very unusual for some of us, but for the 5 year olds today who will grow up not knowing any other existence, they could eventually sound odd. What will the future look like for them? Eric Schmidt, former director of Apple and CEO of Google prophesies that our children will have two states: “asleep, or online.” Will those children know what it means to be a real person? A real friend? Will they feel and know the difference? In The Brain is Wider than the Sky, Appleyard highlights the research of Sherry Turkle at MIT, who studies the affects of technology on children. “At the extreme,” Turkle writes, “we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other.” Many of these children ‘feel bullied, threatened and exhausted by the hyper-connectivity of their lives – it is almost impossible for them to stand back and exercise judgment about the virtual societies they are now required to inhabit.’

    But as an adult, I can stand back each day. I can choose to remain aware of the choices that I make to participate or not participate in technology, and I can fight against the urge to either worship it or allow myself to live wholly within it. I can resolve to bring up my future children differently. I refuse to live in anything but the real world, which means I choose to live in the “already but not yet” – accepting the peaks and valleys of both beauty and pain. The true danger we face is not a race of machines who might kill us – it is the danger of being lulled into dimming, dulling and supressing our own minds, forcing them to fit into a shape that is not our own. We are breathtakingly, infinitely more complex. As Emily Dickinson eloquently wrote:

    The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
    For—put them side by side—
    The one the other will contain
    With ease—and You—beside—

    The Brain is deeper than the sea—
    For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
    The one the other will absorb—
    As Sponges—Buckets—do—

    The Brain is just the weight of God—
    For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
    And they will differ—if they do—
    As Syllable from Sound—

    A the end of the day, we simply cannot explain the soul. We cannot capture it, find it in the brain, recreate it, or describe it on a wiki. If God in a box is no God at all, the same could be said of a human soul. We are are wider, deeper, more complex and more eternally significant than we could ever hope to imagine. We have the unique ability to create, to think, to recognize and appreciate beauty, to love, and even to sacrifice ourselves in the name of love. These things remain unexplained by evolutionary biology. And these are the things that we should hold onto with all our might, for they make us uniquely, and singularly, human.


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    Categories : Cultural Observations, Hmmm....

    Sun and Moon

    20 12 2011

    The sun and the moon seemed to be stalking me in England over the past few weeks. Every time I turned around, there was the moon, staring at me. The sun put on a show, trying to get my attention.

    I was stunned by light, and I became obsessed with photographing it.

    I’m not sure if the moon is actually bigger in England right now, but it was certainly striking. And of course the sun rises late and sets early – it’s few rays are precious gold.

    Sun

    Sunrise over London

    Sunset at Stonehenge

    The Silver Lining

    Trees of the Field (Cotswolds)

    Cathedral Light (Salisbury)

    Morning Light (Salisbury)

    Sunset at Stow-on-the-Wold

    Moon

    First Light Moon (Bath)

    Winter Moon (Oxford)

    Nebula Moon (Oxford)

    Moon Glow (Oxford)

    Moon-Over-Bath

    Moon and birds (Bath)

    Moon among trees (Oxford)


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    London at 30

    3 12 2011

    Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about my study abroad experience in London at age 20. Sure, I’ve been back to London a few times since, but now, almost exactly 10 years to the day later, I find myself wandering these streets and reflecting on the past decade. Quite a lot has happened… graduating, various jobs, getting married, moving to Mexico for a few years, music, travel, friends, family, art… life.

    All at once everything feels so familiar, and yet so foreign. London isn’t home, but it still feels known. I don’t need a map to find my way around, and the streets and buildings are like old acquaintances I haven’t seen in a while. It is where my addiction to travel all started, after all. Here I am in an Italian coffee bar in central London, sipping a cappuccino and jotting these thoughts down on the back of a tube map. Everyone out the window is in a hurry – Christmas lights cheer up the dark streets, and people scurry about to dinner, a show, the pub, home, wherever. The couple next to me are arguing about what to get their relatives for Christmas, and whether they think that old “so-and-so” should cut his hair. It’s delightfully trivial.

    Earlier I stood along the railing above Trafalgar square, ate a sandwich and watched the sunset behind the big Christmas tree, until a creepy dude came up and tried to strike up a conversation. As a side note, I’m happy to chat with strangers sitting next to me in airplanes and while standing in lines, but random approaches in public places… not so much.

    Am I still the same girl that lived in London 10 years ago? I imagine some things about me are still the same, but some aren’t. I fancy myself a little wiser and a little less silly, but I think I’ve got a much better sarcastic sense of humor thanks to my husband (ha ha), and I’m a little more laid back. I still worry about some things way too much, but I’d like to think that I care less and less about what people think of me. I think I care more about developing a smaller number of deeper friendships.

    But truthfully I hope that the serious business of trying to pretend to be an “adult” these days hasn’t totally eliminated my old romantic idealism. But – like I said, I am currently sitting in a café staring out of the window like a fool, writing on the back of a tube map… so I think the silly side of me is still alive and well.

    … and I wonder what the next 10 years will hold.


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    Categories : Cultural Observations, Wanderings

    Careful What You Ask for… You Might Get It

    8 10 2011

    Christians often say, “Prayers don’t always get answered in the way you’d expect.” To people who don’t believe in God, this sounds a whole lot like an easy excuse to use when prayer doesn’t work.

    But I think there’s an explanation behind the cliché that deserves another look.

    Consider John Newton. Even if you don’t recognize his name right away, you probably already know some of his innermost thoughts well. John Newton grew up a scoundrel and a troublemaker and worked on the sea as part of the British Royal Navy and then later on slave ships in the 1700s. As part of the Navy, he once tried to desert, and was flogged, shamed and punished severely in front of the ship. He contemplated suicide as a result of the shame, but then he was transferred to work on a slave ship bound for West Africa. I don’t think I even need to explain how horribly awful slave ships were.

    A continual troublemaker for the crew and a self-described libertine, the slave trader captain left him in Africa as a servant for his slave wife, where he was brutally abused. How completely lost and alone he must have felt, as his long and painful journey to rock bottom finally left him as a slave to slaves.

    But God had other plans for John Newton. He was found and rescued by a ship merchant who was hired by his father to find him. I find that part of the story utterly symbolic– there is literally nowhere we can become lost that our heavenly Father can’t find us and rescue us. But Newton didn’t see that just yet.

    He eventually became the captain of a slave ship, and on one homeward journey, the ship was caught up in a storm and began to sink. Newton finally cried out to God in the storm and began his own journey to believing in the very thing he had “labored to destroy.”

    Some years later, he wrote:

    Amazing grace! How sweet the sound!
    That saved a wretch like me -
    I once was lost, but now I’m found;
    Was blind but now I see.

    ‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
    And grace my fears relieved.
    How precious did that grace appear
    The hour I first believed!

    What I find both difficult and interesting about John Newton the person is that even after becoming a Christian, it took him years to renounce and to become uninvolved in the slave trade. Some might say that his hypocrisy in the matter proves that Christianity is a farce. I would say that sometimes change happens immediately, like a miraculous transformation, but more often it happens like a slow burn in one’s heart. We’re all hypocrites in one way or another. True Christians pray for their own corruptness to be revealed to them, and changed. But just because humans are always proven to be corrupt (over and over again) it doesn’t prove that God is less meaningful. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite. As we see our own wretchedness more and more clearly, we become more and more amazed by God’s grace.

    Anyway, back to my original point in introducing John Newton in the first place– the statement that prayers don’t often get answered in the way you’d expect them to.

    When I was living in Mexico a few years back, I sometimes felt very angry at God. I went to Mexico to try to help others, and instead at times I just felt attacked, beat down, humbled, and depressed.

    One week before I came back home to the US after living there for a year and a half, I was on a bus winding through the mountains of Chiapas in Southern Mexico in the middle of the night, and I ran across another one of Newton’s poems, “I asked the Lord that I might grow”:

    I asked the Lord that I might grow
    In faith, and love, and every grace;
    Might more of His salvation know,
    And seek, more earnestly, His face.

    ‘Twas He to taught me thus to pray,
    And He, I trust, has answered prayer.
    But it has been in such a way,
    As almost drove me to despair!

    I hoped that in some favored hour,
    At once He’d answer my request;
    And by His love’s constraining pow’r,
    Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

    Instead of this He made me feel
    The hidden evils of my heart;
    And let the angry powers of hell
    Assault my soul in every part.

    Yea more, with His own hand He seemed
    Intent to aggravate my woe;
    Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
    Blasted by gourds, and laid me low.

    Lord why is this, I trembling cried,
    Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
    “‘Tis in this way,” the Lord replied,
    “I answer prayer for grace and faith.

    These inward trials I employ,
    From self, and pride, to set thee free;
    And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
    That thou may’st seek thy all in Me.”

    It was like being punched in the face. Suddenly I realized that God was being active in answering my prayers. If I ask for faith, he makes me find it by testing me with hardship… I ask for grace, he makes me feel the weight of my own corruptness so I can compare it to His perfection. But the process of doing so feels simply awful. I think God knows what most parents the world-over know already… people learn the hard way. People typically don’t change by being patted on the head and given a nice fluffy cloud to rest on… they change by being thrown into fire and becoming melted down and transformed into some other metal entirely. And sometimes it really, really hurts.

    Some would call that kind of change “character building” – I think it’s more eternally meaningful than that. Anyway… careful what you ask God for… because you just might get it. And not in the way you might expect.


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    Categories : Hmmm....

    Venice in the Wintertime

    14 08 2011

    I didn’t like Venice very much when I visited it on my first trip to Europe in 1999. It was hot, in the middle of the summer, jammed with tourists, and our tour group got stuck on one of those “come visit the glass factory” trips where they cheat you into buying fakes. Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing that I got to go, but I was a bit disappointed by it.

    That said, I was willing to give Venice another shot last year when we visited Italy. I knew we’d avoid the summer heat and tourists, and I absolutely love Europe in the winter. It’s typically quieter, slower paced and easier to navigate. Plus, bundling up to walk through snow in Paris or ducking into Roman cafe to savor a warm cappuchino or a glass of wine is quite cozy and romantic.

    Venice was the coldest place we visited in Italy last year, probably amplified by the wind coming across the water. But our hotel was perfect – hidden somewhere in the maze-like pedestrian streets of central Venice, snug and warm, with heaps of Venitian decor and charm, including a circa 1930′s wine bar in the basement. In fact one of the most charming aspects of the place was the elderly Italian owner, who would enthusiastically sit down with you at breakfast and tell you stories about the people he had met and places he had travelled.

    I find Venice extremely dream-like. It’s a place that seems to grow in your memory in a way that makes you wonder whether you dreamed part of it or not. You don’t go there to sightsee. You go there to wonder that a place like that exists in the world, and to wander through the maze of the city and get utterly lost. If you go to Venice, my advice is to simply “get lost.” Walk out of your hotel, and keep walking. Take turns that look interesting. The streets are pedestrian only and they criss-cross each other like a bowl of spaghetti, with dead ends, bridges, and no street signs to speak of. Don’t even try to use your map… it will only make you upset.

    I find Venice a bit creepy at night. I blame the 1973 movie “Don’t Look Now” with Donald Sutherland for that. I had to watch it for a film class in college, and it’s been a while, but from what I remember, the city almost takes on a life of it’s own as Sutherland’s character goes crazy over the death of his daughter, gets lost in the maze of the city, and starts seeing things. It’s a really freaky movie. But Venice is the perfect setting for a creepy psychological thriller.

    We did a few things in Venice though that were very memorable, other than just simply wandering around the streets:

    1) Murano. I love really digging into the local art and craft of a place. And in Venice, art = glass. Murano island is about a 20 minute boat ride from central Venice, and well worth it. You can wander shop after shop filled with glass in all shapes and sizes, wrought into all sorts of items and jewelry pieces. I bought a few beads – mostly hollow blown glass, and I also jotted down ideas in my notebook about things that I could make on my own. Last year Josh and I took a glass fusing class, so we were able to identify the pieces that looked particularly impressive. I loved everything about Murano – the quiet streets and canals, the brightly colored glass in every shop, and the little Italian seafood cafe that we ate lunch at.

    2) San Marco. I’ve always loved this church. It reminds me of a particularly large heavily frosted cake, both inside and out. It’s thick stone and marble layers from ceiling to floor are colorfully covered in tiny gold glittering mosaics and swirling marble in every color of the rainbow. The decorative arches and spires give it that decidedly Venitian style that recalls a middle eastern or Turkish flair. I recommend paying to walk upstairs along the balcony for great views of the square, the inside of the cathedral, as well as some close-up encounters with some really great mosaic work. You can feel the weightiness of the church… and in fact, like many grand buildings built on ancient waterways (Mexico City’s Cathedral was also built on top of a lake bed similar to Venice)… it is sinking and tilting. Quite a bit of work is being done to keep it from crumbling or slipping sideways which is fascinating in itself.

    3) Harry’s Bar. This was Hemingway’s favorite bar in Venice, as well as where the famous drink, the Bellini, originated. We obviously had to try one, but it certainly came at a price – it was arguably the most expensive cocktail I’ve ever had. However, we had a great time, mostly due to the conversation we struck up with another couple at a table near ours. They were from London and the Netherlands – he was a writer and she was an ambassador – meeting for a holiday in Venice. I find people fascinating, and I love the way people are more open to chatting like that when they are on vacation.

    Overall, I’m glad that I gave Venice another chance. It was cold in early January, but it held a fascinatingly quiet, wintery, mysterious feeling that seemed to suit the city well.

    Venice seems to take on a life of it’s own in my mind, with it’s own unpredictable, lovely yet menacing personality. Contrasted against all of it’s picturesque loveliness, from gondolas and bridges, painted doorways against the water’s edge, to twinkling street lamps with rose-colored lights, Venice also seems to keep dark and mysterious secrets, perhaps hidden down deserted, maze-like streets or within echoing, cavernous cathedrals. It’s the kind of city that sparks imagination and haunts dreams.


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    Categories : Art, Wanderings

    MOO-SAIC’s “Ravenna Star”

    26 06 2011

    You may have guessed by now that each of MOO-SAIC’s spots will have a theme. While all of the designs require adaptation so that they will work as part of a cow, some of them will be inspired by and reference a particular style of mosaic art or artist that I love, while others will contain a new design that I’ve come up with on my own.

    The most difficult spot we’ve completed to date is the “Ravenna Star”. Here’s the finished product – of course, keep in mind that it will look slightly differently once grouted.

    Exterior - Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna

    So where did the inspiration for this particular spot come from? In Ravenna Italy is a tiny unassuming building – the Masusoleum of Galla Placidia – that contains some of the oldest most beautiful mosaics in the world. Completed in around 450 AD, the site is now considered a UNESCO world heritage site, and according to the UNESCO experts, “it is the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments, and at the same time one of the most artistically perfect”. The mausoleum itself was commissioned by a woman named Galla Placidia, daughter of a Roman Emperor and a well-known patron of the arts in the 5th century.

    The ceiling of the Mausoleum is literally covered in glittering stars. Josh and I took a side trip to Ravenna last Christmas when we were in Italy and were stunned. The Mausoleum is only one of a handful of UNESCO world heritage mosaics in Ravenna – it’s a jewel of a town in every way, and well worth a visit. If you’re interested in Ravenna, here’s a another blog post I wrote earlier this year about our trip.

    Smalti

    Our star is made entirely from smalti, which is traditional Italian colored glass that is broken into chunky glass blocks and used for things like mosaics. The material itself is really fun to work with. It’s substantial, heavy, chunky, and saturated with color – it’s like working with the mosaic equivalent of a box of crayon colors. However, because the pieces are all so small, it does require an investment of time. It’s also not quite as cheap, like the ceramic tiles we’re using elsewhere. However, smalti was the right choice for this particular spot in order to be true to the mosaic that inspired it.

    Another interesting fact about this design is that it also has it’s own soundtrack. It is rumored that while on a visit to Ravenna in the 1920′s, Cole Porter gazed up at the glittering stars in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and was inspired to write the smash hit song “Night and Day.”

    Here’s Fred Astaire singing it for us on a restored track. You know, I knew he could dance, but I don’t think I realized that ole Fred could sing quite like this – wow.

    As I applied the star onto MOO-SAIC, I was also struck by the thought that the “Ravenna Star” – partly because of the story, location, and even the music behind it – would make a great tattoo. But don’t worry, mom – I’m much too sensible for that. I’ll put it on a cow’s shoulder instead.


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    Categories : Art, Random Happenings

    Cowmmunity

    21 06 2011

    One of the best things about Moo-Saic, our Austin Cow Parade entry, is the community that has developed as the volunteers in our company work on the project together. The cow currently lives in the Bazaarvoice office, and we’ve got some regulars who help us twice a week at lunch, along with various newbies who appear from time to time. It’s a great way to take a break during the workday, relieve some stress by smashing tiles with hammers, and chat with each other while sticking tiles on a fiberglass cow. There aren’t any skill prerequisites, so it’s an easy activity for just about anyone who has an interest in it. I’ve already gotten to know several people I didn’t know before, thanks to Moo-Saic. I’m thrilled that this has truly become a community art project within our company.

    Speaking of “community,” lately I’ve been thinking about what that truly means. Everybody from Facebook to Starbucks to Joe the plumber claims that their business is centered on community these days. It seems like we’ve got more piping hot, fresh-baked community than we can handle right now, right? But if that’s the case, why are people still starved for it? Why is it that some people have 500+ Facebook friends, but still struggle to feel that they are “known” by anyone?

    I believe that in order to have real community you have to have real conversations. You must know each other. You swap stories. You can be real. You will laugh. You might cry. You help the others in the group. Others come alongside you and help you. You have to give up some of your own desires sometimes for others in the community. Community can feel uncomfortable at first, since living in true community means you have to let people actually get to know you. We’re so used to projecting ourselves in the way we want to appear to others on Facebook that allowing someone get to know the real you can be frightening. But secretly we really do crave those kinds of relationships, even if they scare the bejeezus out of us.

    The interesting thing about community is that you can’t force it to happen. My local coffee shop can’t make the regulars who come in on Thursday evenings talk to each other, even if they tried. Community is always organic, always grown, and always driven by the people within it – and never by the structure put around it.

    Authentic community is a hard thing to create, and difficult to put your finger on. So, I’m thankful when I happily realize that I’m part of a real one. And I’m thankful for Cowmmunity!


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    Categories : Art, Cultural Observations, Hmmm....

    Making MOO-SAIC: Our Basic Pattern

    6 06 2011

    Our first day of real mosaic work on our Cow Parade Austin project will begin tomorrow. So this past weekend, I had some pre-work to do in order to get the cow ready!

    The idea is that the spots, horns, hooves, eyes, tail and udder will each be a completely different area of mosaic – each area will use different materials and a very different design – some glass, some tile, but all of them extremely colorful. I’ve got some of the designs for the individual spots already mapped out already, and I’ve started collecting materials.

    The rest of the cow will be covered in shiny black mosaic tile, to really make the spots of color pop.

    But before we can start actually placing pieces on the cow with thinset mastic – we’re going to be using the “one at a time” placement method, like doing a puzzle – the cow’s spots needed to be defined and marked out.

    In order to get it right, I had to have a way to visualize the spots on the cow before actually drawing them on. I wanted to make sure that they looked natural, and not too much like polka dots. So, I used what I had at my disposal in the office: tape, scissors, and blue folders. :)

    After standing back a few times and rearranging the spots, cutting off a few corners and rounding a few edges here and there, I was satisfied:

    Next, I traced out the spots (more or less) with a pencil, and followed up with sharpie. This will serve as our template and pattern as we start to place down tile on Tuesday.


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    Categories : Art, Random Happenings

    Making MOO-SAIC: Cow Parade Austin 2011

    5 06 2011

    Thanks to the incredible company I work for here in Austin (Bazaarvoice, also official winner of Austin’s “Best Places to Work” Award this year!), I have had quite a few opportunities to express myself creatively in the last year.

    The International Cow Parade sensation is coming to Austin later this summer – hundreds of decorated, painted, and creatively posed cows will grace the streets of Austin for several months, and then many of them will get auctioned off for charity. And, as a sponsor of the event, Bazaarvoice will be submitting two cows to the “herd”!

    Last month, we held an internal contest among employees and we submitted our ideas. I was pleasantly surprised that my idea was one of the two that was chosen! My concept is “MOO-SAIC” – an eclectic, colorful cow entirely covered in mosaic. To me, mosaic represents vibrant diversity and creativity – and I can’t think of a better statement about Austin or about the company I work for. The project will also be a true “community” art project – the cow itself will stay in an area of our office while we create it, and two nights a week, any employees who want to help create it can just show up and join in.

    Personally, I’ve been doing mosaics for quite a number of years now… I basically taught myself immediately after a trip to Barcelona, where I was blown away by Gaudi’s masterpieces. When I met my husband a few years later, he had also recently – and serendipitously – started creating mosaics on tables and other things. It’s definitely an unusual hobby that we still share and enjoy.

    I will document MOO-SAIC’s transformation here on the blog – here she is below, primed and factory-ready for the first step. It’s also worth mentioning that she’s also got her own Facebook fan page HERE, and her technologically savvy sister cow, also being worked on by a team inside Bazaarvoice, is called “User Generated Cow” (UGC)- check her out HERE. We’re looking forward to sharing our progress with you!


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    Categories : Art, Random Happenings

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