Squirrel vs. Cop

Do yourself a favor, and listen to this story, about a rookie cop’s first day on the job. It involves a squirrel, fire, an old couch, and silk pillows.

I dedicate this to my brother, the only person I know who got into a hand-to-hand combat with a squirrel that had eaten his French quiche.

Optimus Prime’s version of the “evolution of dance”

I love anything that has to do with Transformers or GI Joe’s.

reaching out to the disenfranchized

This…This is a initiative imbued with inspiration.

A number of years ago, Jeroo Billimoria made news with Childline, her initiative to link and connect India’s nearly 50 million street children. In Mumbai, she developed this toll-free number, operated by the kids, that allowed them to report abuses anonymously, obtain police and health care assistance. Linking, and providing communication outlets to the poor and disinfranchized was revolutionary.

This Google initiative to provide regular, local cell phone numbers to San Francisco’s homeless, allowing them to receive and check voice mails from family, friends, potential employers, is the kind of inspired, simple, revolutionary, appropriate, logical initiative we need more of.

If only to give us renewed faith in humanity. And put a smile on our faces.

soul

This is a fantastic portrait by my good friend Stef, an amazing, talented artist. This portrait is one of my favorites lately, the face is so kind, the eyes so soulful. I love everything about it. The gentleness, the medium, the tones. Even though the colors are cool, it is such a warm portrait, and the juxtaposition is beautiful.

Merci Stef!

Check out the rest of his photostream: there are some lovely vistas and postcards of southern california life, as well as fun portraits of his friends, a cast of characters that tell a story of their own.

Paper planes

Some things just hit me in the face at full speed. I encounter them at face value, and no matter how foreign they are to me, I assimilate them instantly. It was like that with Shantaram. With the first word of the first sentence, I knew. when I finished the first page, I closed my eyes, took a breath and paid for it, left the store and went home.

It was the same thing with M.I.A. I’ve never been much of a hip-hop or dancehall fan, but I was scouring the World Cafe, my lingering nostalgia for the times when I could capture XPN live in Philly, and found this amazing, sexy, straight-to-the-gut interview with M.I.A. As soon as it ended, I bought Kala on iTunes and have been listening to it for a good three weeks straight.

I’m trying to write less in my posts, I feel like it makes them harder to get through, so I want to be articulate and succint about why her music affected me so instantly. She is a third-culture kid, she’s a child of the non-Western world, growing up in London, assimilated like a chameleon, she crashed into digital art, film, and finally found hip-hop, and expressed everything through it. Her childhood, globalization, human rights, child soldiers, abuse, consumerism. I understand everything she’s saying, it’s one of those musics that are completely in my head. I’ve tried to share it with a number of people who don’t get where it’s coming from, but for me, she’s prophesizing, she’s a kindred spirit, she’s my sister, my girlfriend, she’s the world. I hear the beats of Africa, the sex, the rain, I hear bollywood, I hear the beat of that real world.

Here’s a video of Paper Planes, one of my favorite tracks on Kala.

big sky and mountains

I figured out why I like it so much here. It’s a big city, BIG, and the sky is big, and the sun shines on the mountains. I used to go through a cycle in Paris where I’d feel like I was suffocating in my tiny apartment, with a view of other buildings, going in underground metros, to my office with a view of other buildings, escaping momentarily to high points in the city…to see more buildings. I’d run away every few months to the country-side to see mountains and wide open sky. In a lot of US cities on the west coast, you can have a big city and the mountains, and the ocean, and the BIG sky, even just by driving around. Seattle, San Francisco, LA. I just took this picture on Los Feliz Blvd, the other day, since it’s from my phone, it doesn’t do it justice: you can’t feel the gorgeous day, the clear crisp sun, the sun rays on the snow covered mountains in the back, the wind through the trees.

Frozen in time

I’ve been following Improv Everywhere but this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen them do. It was forwarded to me by my bro, and there is such a childlike sense of excitement at the end, it will put a smile on your face. It’s great to see people REACTING, stopping in their tracks. A breath of fresh air.

Technology Wo(a)nderings

Technology wo(a)nderings.

Digg has become a daily staple of my internet diet. I mostly end up in email discussions with my brother and our mini-distribution list about these things, but in my “process”, I’ve been thinking increasingly about online communities and technology. I read a great article about “the last thing you changed your mind about”, and Xeni Jardin answered that, for her, online communities was the last thing she revised her thinking on. Here’s the full article.

She basically makes the point that you can’t have comments without accountability.

“I grew to believe that the easier it is to post a drive-by comment, and the easier it is to remain faceless, reputation-less, and real-world-less while doing so, the greater the volume of antisocial behavior that follows. I decided that no online community could remain civil after it grew too large, and gave up on that aspect of internet life.” –Xeni Jardin from the Edge.com article above.

Here’s another article that lists the types of rogue/serious internet commentators, likening them to animals according to their characteristics. It’s perceptive, you should give it a glance.

What is interesting is that I’d started thinking about this before I read the article. I’ve often been entertained by random/funny/downright bizzarre comment threads on YouTube postings, and saw this great video–what would meetings look like if they were YouTube comment threads:

http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1771556&fullscreen=1

I went back and fort on my blog enabling and disabling comments, requiring authentification, allowing anonymous comments. Sometimes, when I had something artistic or personally important to me, that I wanted to share, I often felt frustrated that the comments would spin off on a detail that was trivial, and comments would snowball to the point where the heart of the matter felt lost to me.

The main issue, in my mind, is that technology develops faster than social mores do, and faster than our adaptation skills. Science advances faster than our understanding of long-term implications do (think cloning and the ongoing debate). Technologies develop faster than we grow the ability to use them efficiently (think all the wonders of instantaneous email communication crushed by constant forwards of PowerPoint presentations).

The last thing I changed my mind about was the iPhone.

The hype turned me against it, and then I got to use it and really loved it. I still feel strange about the instant accountability that iPhone users impose on all conversations, fact-checking instantly as you hesitantly quote a statistic, butcher a name or a music lyric, or can’t remember the last movie Dustin Hoffman was in.

But through my hesitation, I have to accept that the internet IS the way we now communicate. And that even as I pull my phone that “just” dials, I find myself in the same spot I was before I had a digital camera, where people were connecting on a technological level I couldn’t access because I hadn’t crossed that marker. Once I got my digital camera, those avenues opened.

I now find myself thinking, a cell phone without instant internet access is old technology, but I am still on the fence.

Because once you give technology an inch, it takes a mile, and you create a dependency that you can’t wean yourself off of.

I joined Facebook this year, and though I often think I should cancel my account, it keeps me connected to people I’d lost touch with. Even though I still feel like I lost my privacy, I accept that “privacy”, in this new technological era, is getting re-defined as we speak.

On the Radio

The beautiful Regina Spektor song was ringing through my head last night as I pulled up to the NPR station KPCC in Pasadena. I became a member a few weeks ago, and in my comments section, just gushed about the radio. I got a lovely email soon after from a production manager asking if I could come in to record a testimonial.

I walked in, and immediately, I felt something I had never felt before: some kind of star-struck quiver of excitement. I saw the KPCC sign, offices of the staff, and then the lovely production manager came out to greet me. We’d exchanged so many emails, and my job being unpredictable, I’d had to cancel twice, so we hugged when we saw each other. She then took me into the studio, and a smile brushed on my face that stayed stuck there for the next hour.

I got to see Shirley Jahad editing news clips, I got to hang out (briefly) in the tech room where things that looked like giant servers were humming. Above was a large digital clock counting in hours, minutes and seconds from what looked like the beginning of time.

The tour of the offices just got me more excited, I got to see the work areas of Larry Mantle and Steven Cuevas, I saw all these familiar names on the wall, for awards won over the years and all the names of the radio personalities I spend so much time with in my cocooned car, sheltered from the traffic in the intimacy of what feels like a living room to me, at times. Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Kitty Felde, Steve Julian, Hettie Lynne Hurtes…

Finally we secured a small soundproof booth and we started talking. We talked for a good ten minutes, and I just shared my relationship with KPCC and NPR, my history of radio listening, my excitement about the medium. I plugged membership with no qualms and gave a number of fun 10-40 second soundbites which they might use in their upcoming membership drive.

As I was recording the soundbites I went back into my childhood. Growing up in Kinshasa and Brazzaville, the sounds of “RFI: Radio France Internationale” and the “BBC World Service” were always in the background. With as many power-outages as we had, the battery-powered radios would often hum in the dark, unelectrified and otherwise silent nights. Later, when I was in high school, in Brazzaville, I remembered that my friend’s dad, at dusk, after a long day of stable work and a refreshing shower, would head out for long, slow walks around the neighborhood, resting his battery-powered radio on his left shoulder, nestled to his ear.

Later, even, when I was traveling in Africa, I remember once I was in Madagascar…in Fianarantsoa, I think. It was raining, damp, and dark, and I rested my radio on my belly. Something I now realize I’ve taken from my dad, who always does this. I closed my eyes, warm in my sleeping bag, and listened to the most beautiful story on RFI. It was an architectural tour of chapels in the north of France, and the whispers and vivid descriptions were such a comfort to me.

I was in Israel once, when I caught a BBC article, a Nigerian woman on the streets of Lagos, biting into a strawberry and the sounds of traffic and insanity all around her, in her joyful and hectic sign-off from West Africa.

Last year, I was driving to work, on the corner of Del Mar and Marengo when I heard on Morning Edition, the story of a US Sheriff, who, having passed a stopped flashing school bus (one of the biggest no-nos in American road rules) pulled himself over, and wrote himself a ticket. I remember laughing out loud! People from as far away as Poland (or was it Ukraine) had written in to help him pay the ticket, inspired by his gesture of integrity.

Now that I’ve been a part of this, talked about my love for radio into the microphone, I can’t wait for my Saturday morning ritual. Making a pot of coffee, drinking it on my porch, listening to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!!” and then calling Beth and laughing about what we just heard, as an introduction into our conversation and catching up.

:-)