meaning in the moving design

I know you've had one of these days:

It's rush hour. You get on the MRT/subway and you're convinced that you don't even need to hang onto anything, on account of the sheer density of bodies holding you firmly in place.

So I was on one of these trains on one of these days, and I just had the most amusing thought as I was watching the tightly-packed bodies sway in unison to the subtle shifts of the rail.... it reminded me of the way fish sway back and forth in the ocean, as they're munching on coral; they all swing left to right to left, in lazy unison. It really makes me want to mount a camera on the ceiling of an MRT train, and play it back in slow motion.

I feel like I should put some "substance" into this post, so here's a neat little fact I discovered today. YongHe (my neighbourhood in Taipei) is one of the most densely-packed neighbourhoods on earth, rivaling parts of Mumbai. Check it: 250 000 people live in 5 square km area.
Let's put this into perspective:
250 000 people in 5 square kilometres
= 50 000 in 1 square kilometre
= 50 people per square metre

So, that's 50 people in an area roughly the length of me:



Um... does anyone remember me saying something about wanting to live close to mountains and the ocean, amongst nature n all that? It appears that I've found the polar opposite. But, you know... I kinda like it.

(Thanks to Joe for the photo)

Ok, I know user-generated content and Web 2.0 are sooo 2002, but it still warms my heart when i see it happen. Like, YAY! Go creative energy! and so forth.

I love radiohead. First, it was about the music, but now I've fallen in love with their politics. While every wannabe rockstar is plying myspace for the elusive record deal, radiohead decided to use the same cyber empowerment to downsize, and get a bit closer to the little people. By releasing In Rainbows as a digital download, they let the community decide what their music was worth. In the same stroke, they also managed to send a big "fuck you" to EMI.


But they didn't stop there. Bent on seeing how far creative potential can go with this new-fangled technology, radiohead is now organizing an online contest to make their first music video off In Rainbows- created by the fans, for the fans (musical FUBU!) They've invited fans to choose any song, submit storyboards, and vote on the projects. The ones with the highest votes get $1000 to make a video, which get passed onto the band, who choose the eventual winner.

So. No more sweaty record exec telling the band which song to release as their first single- the fans choose it. And they do it through this collective democracy. So far, a lot of the storyboards are gravitating towards the same few songs- Weird Fishes Arpeggio, Videotape, All I Need.... that's everything you need to know, right there, by virtue of the collective choice. The other massively cool byproduct of the contest is that you don't just get one music video- you get hundreds. The premise of the contest lets hundreds of people from all around the world borrow a little fame from radiohead to burn some creative energy. That is fucking cool.

So's this (there's something about flappy ears atop a flying humpback whale that instills trust):




And here's a T-dot plug:





I'll end with a tangent:
YouTube, once the amateur online version of Jackass, is now my supplimentary news source. I go to BBC, I read about Tibet or Burma. Then I go to YouTube and find the footage.

I will always remember the VCR, carphones, laserdisc kareoke, dial-up, playing with the phone cord during marathon calls. But god how i love my intermanet.

I started writing a short article on Women in Philosophy for work, and I stumbled upon some ideas from Hannah Arendt that really struck a chord. (sorry im starting to use really cliche idioms, but its kind of an inevitable drawback of working for an ESL magazine... we're training all the non-english speakers of the world to sound like Mr Dress-Up... by golly)
Arendt's known for her political philosophy, her most famous piece of writing is probably Origins of Totalitarianism, but the ideas that really resonated with me were from The Human Condition. Mostly because some of her ideas were things that I thought I'd thunked up on my own... [I don't want to sound like a pompous ass, but that happens to me a lot. Like, I philosophize, I practice the rant, and then I realize that it was actually Someone Famous' rant that I've accidentally plagerized, and Someone Famous has not only said it first, but better. But then I think, hey, Someone Famous agrees with me. And I feel really cool, and better about it all. and so forth.]

Arendt theorizes that every action mimicks the act of being born. That is, in every action we have a chance to break out and do something completely new and unexpected. She gives these actions a kind of reverence, like in action lies freedom; you are never more free than when you do something unexpected. And because you are you, and only you can be you, the actions that you bring into the world are a unique and special miracle.
Ok, here's where it starts to get eerily similar. Arendt also says that your actions are a reflection of your self, but that they only matter in the context of the whole; the community. Because we are human, we use the same apparatus to understand each other, and we want to understand each other. But because we are individual, we each act and relate to each other in unique ways. And with our unique wells of experience, we can forge new networks of understanding, new ways of relating, infinitely complex and unpredictable. Our individuality, our sense of self is the driving force behind all this possibility.

She talks about the importance of speech, that it's the story that makes the person; that seals the identity. Stories live and actions die, so to preserve it, we perform an action, then we tell a story to describe the significance of that action. This happens in history all the time, and there's something really cynical about it.. but we won't get into that.

All this got me thinking about how I use speech in relation to action and identity, and I realize that it's massively important. I have a ridiculous capacity to talk shit. I talk too much. I say more than anyone EVER needs to hear. About everything. Anyone whose ever dated me can readily vouch for that.

Ok, actually, that was a tangent. i really wanted to to talk about narrative. The story is incredibly important to me. Before and after my actions, but especially before. It took 10 years of talking about travelling before I was ever able to leave. When I wanted certain jobs, or career paths, I had to talk myself through it; I had to speak to make it happen. I had to articulate what I wanted to myself, over and over again. Same thing with bad habits, old ghosts of me. I have to tell myself to change, I have to isolate the infection with my words.

The story enables the action, hell, sometimes the story IS the action. In my early 20s, I used to think that I could substitute one for the other. Whenever I was angry with people, I would just tell myself a story- resolve conflicts in neat packets of inner dialogue, without the fuss of confrontation, and declare the matter settled. Which is fine... if everyone in the world was just a figment of my imagination. But ho, looky here, people exist.

Narrative after the fact is also important, but less so. i have a shitty memory, and only a partial understanding of the "now", so most of my cards are stacked for the future, which is why speaking things into action is so effective for me. Usually, memory comes down to binary experiences- I file things in the memory bank as either "good" or "bad". Details don't stick unless I've made a point of crafting them into a story, then it becomes a mixture of memory and narrative, which is arguably all we have access to anyway. We immortalize ourselves. In every living moment, I'm a story waiting to be told later. And Im not the only storyteller. Every time any of us tell a story about a friend; about each other, we make ourselves all the more solid, we become more material. I whisper stories about you all the time, I carry you with me everywhere. You are material to people you haven't even met.

Ok, so speaking of Someone Famous paraphrasing me... i just watched My Blueberry Nights last night, Wong Kar Wai's latest. So in keeping with stories, me, you and me again, here's a line:

Sometimes, we depend on other people as a mirror
To define us and tell us who we are.
And each reflection makes me like myself a little more.