Okay, I’m going to try something different for a little while. Please check out Rainshadow on Posterous!

[Image: General Electric, via The New York Times].

I’m full of inspiration, but I feel like I don’t have the right outlets for it. I’m debating over what direction to take this blog in, and it seems like Tumblr or Posterous might be a better fit for me than WordPress.com. Alternately, I may take up the pen, paper, scrapbook, and/or Photoshop (again). I wish I hadn’t freecycled my tablet!

“Science fiction? Magical hyper-realism? Who cares?”

Man is called by the ancients a world in miniature and certainly this name is well applied, for just as man is composed of earth, water, air and fire, so is the body of the earth. If man has in him bones which are the support and armor of the flesh, the world has rocks which are the support of the earth; if man has in himself the sea of blood, in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its oceanic sea which also rises and falls every six hours for the world to breathe. If from the said sea of blood spring veins which go on ramifying throughout the human body, similarly the oceanic sea fills the body of the earth with infinite veins of water.

—Leonardo da Vinci

The above quote appears as the epigraph of You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. I’m feeling inspired today, and I plan on buying a lot of books. Another on the list is The BLDGBLOG Book. I’ve only browsed BLDGBLOG once or twice before (this is soon to change), but a few passages from the book’s intro absolutely hooked me:

BLDGBLOG was born out of these circumstances, then, and from almost literally day one it was full of archaeology, astronomy, and underground cities; Gothic cathedrals and Celtic burial mounds; Mars, green roofs, and translucent concrete. Somewhere between science fiction and architectural theory, J. G. Ballard rubbed shoulders with H. G. Wells, W. G. Sebald, and H. P. Lovecraft; there were London floods, earthquakes, William Blake, and James Bond. Ruins, climate change, and the apocalypse. Cape Canaveral. Hadrian’s Wall. Homer. Anything that could, in however distant a way, be related back to architecture, in its broadest and most interesting conception. [...]

Architecture surrounds us at all times, everywhere; we live within shaped environments. From airports and shopping malls to blockbuster action films, from Bioshock and prison camps to the canopies of giant sequoias, there are structures and spatial frameworks everywhere. Mars rovers are architectural; they are structured explorations of landscape and space. Haunted house novels are architectural. Mt. Everest base camps, Tokyo storm drains, abandoned biowarfare ranges in the former Soviet Union, and the inaudible songs of Libyan sand dunes: These are all wide open to architectural discussion.

I’m done. I’m out. There is too much delicious material here, and I’m going to be dreaming for days.

Maps are cool, but color ramps are cooler

I made a map! Check it out. I think it’s rather pretty.

Paprika and Moon

I’m a little late to the punch, but Paprika (2006) was pleasantly mindblowing.

Satoshi Kon did a fantastic job of distilling and capturing the “absurd” and “ludic” and summarily “ridiculous” nature of dreams. It might be that I identified with Paprika so well because those are the terms I’d use to characterize my own dreams… In any case, I loved that the imagery cheekily and unceasingly walked the line (Venn intersection?) between sensual, grotesque, and apocalyptic. Sasuga Madhouse!

On top of all that, it was dizzyingly referential: Tinkerbells and Oedipuses, a hardline detective whose own dream is a skirmish of film archetypes, a dead ringer for Professor Xavier as the self-proclaimed guardian of the dream world—the last bastion of humanity in a technological age. I suspect that Dr. Shima’s below tirade must allude to at least a few waka or other premodern texts:

Even the five court ladies danced in sync to the frog’s flutes and drums. The whirlwind of recycled paper was a sight to see. It was like computer graphics. That I don’t support Technicolor parfaits and snobby petit bourgeois is common knowledge in Oceania! Now is the time to return home to the blue sky! The confetti will dance around the shrine gates. The mailbox and the refrigerator will lead the way!

And my last thought on the movie: Paprika is a mesmerizing character. Every time I, as a female viewer, felt the least bit creeped out or scared, she dove headlong into the fray, fighting with only her wit, surroundings, and no second thoughts (as when she leapt into the painting to become the Sphinx to Osanai’s Oedipus). What a gal.

I also saw indie sci-fi flick Moon (2009), which was very different in mood. And due perhaps to the combination of live-action and silver screen that was absent during my viewing of Paprika, I felt like I’d really been transported to the drama on the lunar surface, in a near-term but retro-styled world. I was a little shaken upon leaving the theater and finding that it was still daylight outside.

I prayed fervently that my dreams would not feature the maniacal parade (above), so instead they’ve been drawing liberally from Moon and the random vestiges of years-old cinematic and pop-cultural experiences that have never been purged from my brain. (Like finding a crashed shuttle-rover and removing the astronaut’s helmet to reveal a dead Vegeta.) I think this is telling me that Millenium Actress (2001), as a story that blurs reality and cinema, is the Satoshi Kon film I should pursue next.

It doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to defend myself for long, though, because I’ve already started to see signs of the parade infiltrating my waking life. The dream world is merging with reality! The future is bleak.

Just kidding. But this chair made out of dolls is pretty creepy, huh?

Red tape

I had the pleasure of stumbling upon the open letter “Dear American Airlines” by Dustin Curtis, in which he suggests a redesign of the American Airlines website. I recommend reading the article and looking at his supplementary redesign, which is really miles (hah) better.

But the response that Curtis received from American Airlines, “Dear Dustin Curtis,” is truly illuminating. If you don’t want to click through, the gist of it is that a user experience architect who works on AA.com completely agrees with Curtis’ arguments, but because AA.com is such a huge corporate undertaking, with so many different departments who have their hands on it, it’s impossible to push anything through the red tape.

Simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part [...] Those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome.

But Curtis thinks that the simple fact “I work for a large company” is a cop-out. He blames the AA.com suckage on a corporate culture of bad taste; the company is so complacent that it never strives to achieve greater things.

The ideology permeates the entire organization, lowering the required level of awesomeness expected from each employee. Companies like this just float along, in the background of capitalism, exchanging goods and services for money. And that is it. They suck. [...] The reason large companies with bad design are the way they are is because they are run poorly from the top, with philosophies that force the entire company to behave like its lowest common denominator.

Indeed, when his superiors found out about the letter he wrote to Curtis, said UX architect was fired. How’s that for forward change?

Now that I’m taking on a more managerial position at my job, I find that these are exactly the roadblocks I’m encountering: superiors whose styles are more “reactive” than “proactive.” They don’t want things to get better. They want things to keep in step. Design overhaul? Sure. As long as it matches the rest of the godawful university website—which isn’t even consistent with itself.

I do want to change the system, and now it looks like I’ll have an even longer timeframe in which to attempt it. But it can’t be a revolution; it has to start with baby steps. And that is perhaps the most frustrating thing of all.

Big decisions in little minutes

Yesterday morning, as I was checking my email before class, an unbelievable subject line caught my eye: “USRP – Internship Offer.”

No way. It couldn’t be the same thing I applied to four months ago… could it?

But it was. So, starting in September, I’m going to be a NASA intern working on Mars data analysis at JPL. It’s going to involve “studying the composition and aqueous evolution of the martian crust” and “generating global maps of Mars, zoomable to the full dataset’s resolution to be ingested into a Google Earth type of engine.”

I’ll be withdrawing from UCLA for fall, and it means I’ll probably have to stay two extra quarters next year, but holy cow. I’m beyond excited.

Artificial life, culture, and evolution

As the school year comes to a close, so too does my affiliation with Human Complex Systems Society. I was the vice president this year, in a healthy position to take over as president. So why quit?

I’m out of touch with the HCS program at UCLA. I picked up the minor at the end of my freshman year because I didn’t know what I’d be majoring in, and HCS classes seemed like an interesting way to pass the time; I finished the requirements by junior year. My first class, Artificial Culture, was difficult. Every week there was a new 4-6 page reading response, programming assignment (C++), and a writeup on that. I felt like it was jolting me out of high-school slacker mode and into the college academic life.

But now that the professor who taught it has departed UCLA for Duke, I haven’t felt myself quite as challenged or as invigorated by any of my classes. Sure, geography is cool, but if HCS were a major I’d probably opt for that instead (or too—would it be overachieving of me to have three majors?). And despite the Society’s best efforts, I don’t foresee the program making that crucial step anytime soon.

That’s why someone’s suggestion to “just teach it yourself” has been pulling at me for the past couple of days. The thought is taking over my brain, energizing me to the point of frenzy. It’s why I’ve been up since 5: because I’m thinking about the readings I would use. Yeah, why not do an undergrad-led seminar? Wasn’t I thinking about going into academia after college?

As hat-tips to that professor I admired so much, I’d have to include “A New Cosmogony” or “Finite Nature” by Edward Fredkin, Permutation City by Greg Egan, and Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky.

But the majority would probably be popular pieces, such as this Wired article. I’d likely include selections from Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake, the first in a trilogy about the emergence of consciousness in the World Wide Web. I’ve yet to read it, but it sounds like it’d be up my alley. That’s sort of the focus I would want to take—less theoretical, more real world… at least in imagination. Realizations of artificial intelligence or environmental modeling (not really HCS?) in popular culture and media: Jennifer Steinkamp’s interactional artwork (right); 200,000 CG extras in the Helm’s Deep battle sequence in The Two Towers (made possible by a program called MASSiVE); even video games. Is my nerd showing yet…?

Anyway, it’s just a think project for now, and it may implode under the pressures of self-doubt, but this is something I’d truly like to embark on. Suggestions would be welcomed.

Thoughts on BBC/Disneynature’s Earth

Argh. The American release of Earth is every bit a Disneyfied version of Planet Earth. And being a faithful fan of the latter (and David Attenborough’s narration), I am half giddy at the movie-length adaptation, half all-too-eager-to-snub-it.

The magnificent visuals, much of the footage rehashed from the series, didn’t disappoint one bit. But the artificial injection of suspense and good vs. evil binaries into natural occurrences, which as explained in the beginning provide plenty of story fodder on their own, was annoying. Must every chase scene become such a dramatic affair that we’re supposed to sympathize for the poor gazelle or caribou calf? It’s nature, guys, and predators eat prey—leave your morals and cultural values out of it.

Okay, maybe I’m decrying the good/evil binary while subscribing to the nature/culture one behind my back, but I can’t help it if some of these scenes were just bad. The slow-mo scene of the cheetah chasing, and eventually killing, its prey was done in such a way that I almost felt like a voyeur—it was so slow, and so incongruous with the nature of the cheetah, that my mind wandered and I started thinking: the way the cheetah (lithe, sleek, powerful, virile?) was ultimately depicted mounting the prey and taking it down with a slow-mo bite to the neck, it was very sexual, almost like rape. Then I promptly struck those thoughts from my mind and wondered why I had been thinking them during a G-rated movie.

Similarly, I didn’t like the 10-12 slow-mo replays of chicks jumping out of their nest, or the good sixty seconds’ worth of two great white sharks breaching and eating seals. One scene would have sufficed to get the gist of it—that is, great whites are crazy and launch their entire bodies out of the water (which deserves a sincere wow). All in all, this had diddly to do with the humpback whale migration to which it was related, but I guess that’s what happens when you have tons of great footage and only a very loose storyline to tie it all together (and Darth Vader er, Mufasa I mean, James Earl Jones narrating).

On the plus side: an amazing soundtrack. (You can listen to a few tracks here.) Composer George Fenton returns, this time with the Berliner Philharmoniker; I don’t know whether the pieces are new or if they’re re-arrangements of the ones from the series, but they seem a bit poppier and less adherent to overarching musical themes. It’s a good thing. I want to find a copy of this CD!

My favorite Japanese films

I’ve been so enamored of geography that I almost forgot I was a Japanese double-major. Well, I was harshly reminded of that reality on my first day of Japanese Linguistics. It’s awfully hard to tell the professor (who remembers you from third-year Japanese, which you can’t speak anymore) that you want to enroll in her class when you open your mouth and Portuguese comes out. I guess that’s a testament to the efficacy of immersion learning. Now I just need to go study in Japan, too.

Anyway, the 2009 Japan Film Festival was this weekend, and is still going on! I had a chance to see The Sky Crawlers, a 2008 animated film by the same team behind 1995 masterpiece Ghost in the Shell (director Mamoru Oshii, composer Kenji Kawai, and studio Production I.G).

I was completely underwhelmed. Maybe it’s because I re-watched The Matrix last week, am currently into Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, and touched on the idea of a PMC-run world in a previous post, but The Sky Crawlers gave me little in the way of fresh food for thought. Instead, Oshii works with tropes that are by now hackneyed—although he renders them beautifully, and sadly. The concluding scene had just the right atmospheric touch of melancholy and futility, but the characters were all so unsympathetic, whether that was on purpose or not.

Going on retreat this weekend meant I missed some of the festival’s (IMO) most exciting offerings. Especially Mushi-shi (live-action adaptation of one of my favorite anime, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo [creator of Akira]) and Ichi (a female re-imagining of the blind swordsman Zatoichi). Boo. And so the list of J-movies I’ve seen remains paltry. But I do want to take this moment to recount some of my faves (in five words or less, for kicks):

• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006): romantic, real, on Ghibli-level. Heartwrenching.
• Love Letter (1995): participate in dual protagonists’ revelations.
• After Life (1998): memories, so fickle, duly celebrated.
• Metropolis (2001): inspired and memorable, atypical remake.
• Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997): sweet, and so 90’s (radio!).
• Paprika (2006): haven’t seen yet, but should.

I’m lacking in the post-2000 department. Suggestions?