I watched The Limits of Control, by Jim Jarmusch the other day and really enjoyed it. Beautiful art-direction! (((Notice how the suits fit the colors of the surroundings))) And it was filmed in Madrid and Seville and features a very nice Flamenco cante. (Link to preview)
BEST OF ECHOES 2009-The Listener Poll « The Echoes Blog This is the first year that download only releases made the Top 25. Two recordings accomplished that, Under the Rose, by Ottmar Liebert & Rahim Alhaj, and 3 Cities in Dub by Bombay Dub Orchestra.
Heroic Rats Trained to Sniff Out Landmines Most people view rats as nothing more than pests, but one organization regards the critters as heros. APOPO, an African-based non-profit, trains African Giant Pouched Rats to sniff out unexploded landmines. Organizers hope the rodents, or HeroRATS, will eventually be deployed across the globe as a cost-effective method to safely and efficiently detect and detonate hidden landmines. (Via Inhabitat)
Brian Eno writes for Prospect Magazine:
The death of uncool « Prospect Magazine The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.
No wonder he enjoyed hanging out with zen masters:
There is no such thing as spiritual practice except stepping out of self-deception and stopping our struggle to get hold of spiritual states. Just give that up, other than that there is no spirituality. – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, “Myth of Freedom” Weekly Words of Wisdom
I am sure I’ll feel better tomorrow. At least I can look forward to no more flights for three weeks…
Several concerts were quietly added to our 2010 schedule, including the beautiful Gusman Center for the Performing Arts in Miami on January 6th and the lovely Infinity Hall in Norfolk, Connecticut, in May. More dates were added if you want to take a look and many more are still to come.
Here is a photo from last Thursday in Manhattan. It took me a moment to figure out what’s going on here. The projected image from Tibet is reflected in a Window that is to my right. More images can be found here.
On Wednesday Evening I had dinner at Cholo with Dafna Yachin, the director of Digital Dharma, the movie about E. Gene Smith‘s work. Cholo is an eclectic Indian restaurant on East 58th Street. To complete the Manhattan experience Woody Allan sat at the next table.
Thursday Morning I went to the MoMA – I am a member and go just about every time I am in New York – to see the Tim Burton exhibit, the Bauhaus exhibition, and a member-preview of a new Gabriel Orozco exhibit. All three exhibits were most captivating. Orozco seemed like an urban version of Andy Goldsworthy to me. Very mercurial, creative, working in sculpture, photography, video, installation, and drawing. If any of you visit the city in the coming weeks, the current exhibits are all fantastic.
In the afternoon I went to the gallery on the eighth floor of a building on 17th Street, one floor below TBRC. We checked sound and video. For this occasion I had put together a slideshow using only images from my 2006 Tibet journey.
Afterwards I was introduced to Gene Smith, upstairs. The work of TBRC is quite amazing. They scan every Tibetan book they can get their hands on, over a million pages so far. In a hundred years they hope to have everything available on the internet, translated into five or six different languages. Already a huge amount of material is available, albeit mostly in Tibetan.
Later, at the reception preceding the Digital Dharma movie previews, the speeches and my performance, I spoke to a man from TBRC about mind. Once we thought that the brain was mind. Plenty of sci-fi stories from the Fifties and Sixties described brains, separated from their bodies and kept alive in some kind of fluid, hooked up to speakers etc…. then we discovered that brain + body = mind (I wrote about the gut brain)… In my opinion eventually science will show that mind extends beyond our physical body. Mind is also a shared space, influenced by each person, and I think I should say by the bio-sphere, the landscape, the animals, the plants. Standing next to some people I can experience crystalline clarity and others just muck up every thought. Some landscapes inspire and others dull the mind. Once it becomes clear that mind is a shared space, we have nowhere to hide. Everything is interconnected. We know that. But how different it will be to eventually show how two people create a third space, the shared mind-space.
I am not sure I am very clear about this. I don’t mean that people can talk about something and arrive at a shared view. Talking about bicycling is still not moving. I mean actual brainwaves interweaving. Interesting patterns, I bet.
Here are some related links. This one is about Manhattan:
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Confirmed: New Yorkers Reap Health Benefits From Walking and Biking The NYC Department of Health announced the results of a citywide survey today [PDF] assessing the health benefits of regular walking and biking. Based on telephone interviews with more than 10,000 New Yorkers, the health department reveals that people who incorporate walking and biking into their daily routine are significantly more likely to report good physical and mental health than those who don’t. The report concludes with recommendations to encourage walking and biking, including steps like building safer infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.
The next link is interesting. I found it among Eric’s public Delicious Bookmarks. He remarked:
Buddha and these guys are saying the exact same thing, just in different language and context. And with a 2500-year gap between them. Also for the record, Buddha didn’t intend to start a religion – he just wanted people to meditate for their own happiness (and thus the happiness of all). Any Buddhist who considers his/her meditative practice “religious” is missing the point.
The last part of the quote I selected below is very interesting to me. It regards meditators being able to differentiate more easily between narrative and experiential information. I find that very important.
The neuroscience of mindfulness | Psychology Today You can experience the world through your narrative circuitry, which will be useful for planning, goal setting, and strategizing. You can also experience the world more directly, which enables more sensory information to be perceived. Experiencing the world through the direct experience network allows you to get closer to the reality of any event. You perceive more information about events occurring around you, as well as more accurate information about these events. Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world. You also become less imprisoned by the past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.
In the Farb experiment, people who regularly practiced noticing the narrative and direct experience paths, such as regular meditators, had stronger differentiation between the two paths. They knew which path they were on at any time, and could switch between them more easily. Whereas people who had not practiced noticing these paths were more likely to automatically take the narrative path.
The Bullitt cargo bike and Steve McQueen’s Porsche! Photos on Flickr. Story on Larry Vs Harry’s blog.
A big snow storm was forecast for Monday Evening and I decided to get out of Dodge before it hit. Made it to Albuquerque without a problem and stayed at a hotel near the airport. I am told Santa Fe received more than half a foot of snow and I-25 was closed, in other words I wouldn’t have made it to the airport on Tuesday Morning.
The flight from Dallas to New York felt worse than the flight from Dallas to Tokyo last month, because I am still battling a cold. The drive into Manhattan seemed to take forever in rush-hour traffic and I developed quite the headache. After I checked into the hotel I took a little walk to clear my head. Bergdorf-Goodman‘s windows on Fifth Avenue were quite a sight, as you can see here and here. (((Google Image Search)))
After sleeping longer than usual I woke up feeling a little better. It was raining and so I didn’t take my Leica with me. The best camera is always the one you carry with you. After the rain cleared around noon, the light became magnificent and I had to make do with my phone. The 99 cent Tilt-Shit Generator application makes up for the lack of focus-control by allowing selective blurring of the image. I quite like it.
And elsewhere…
An installation at Hermes in Tokyo. If only more advertising was this lovely.
Cargo bicycles are specially designed bikes that can haul several hundred pounds. Long popular in Europe, they’re starting to make their way into the United States.
