I miss the damn place again

I wanted to respond to my spectacular weekend. I attended Cornell's Orientation Weekend to see old friends and stuff. I wanted to write about it but I couldn't so instead I wrote a letter to a pair of professors of mine. I'll post the response sometime.

Hello,
This is Ryan Gomez, a student from a class of yours a while back. I've recently graduated and wanted to report that I'm doing well as a graduate of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering looking for a career in Mapping, Cartography and Data Visualization.

I also want to be a better writer. I'm inspired this late evening to write to you because you were a writing teacher of mine. College happened to me in a big way, in the most typical of ways. I expanded my mind, I took a lot of classes, met a lot of cool people and went to a lot of parties. I learned about how the process of forming words happens in a specific place in the brain. I've read beautiful stories of wit and struggle. I learned the world is much bigger than me and that I want to react, participate and create.

Do you have any advice?

I just came back from Orientation Week to see my old friends, now in whatever place I was in for my Sophomore, Junior and Senior year. I wanted to react on a blog I'm writing to help me communicate but I'm stuck. I can only imagine what a professional writer must discuss through the analysis and creation of literature. When I try to write, all those things flood to me. Where do I begin? Point of View? Rhetoric? Plot? It's as if in my search for a formula, that word-forming part of my brain shuts off. When I do start to write, I want it to be perfect, and such the cycle of perfectionism and procrastination repeats.

So allow me to ask:

• Why is it that your write over why I make maps or others say, go into business or medicine?
• When do you get inspired to write and how do you follow a piece of writing to the end?
• In what proportion do you write prose, poetry, analysis, stories, non-fiction? - professionally and personally.
• Is it really like elementary school? - the Writing Process - and what are your thoughts on the process of composing?
• What familiar patterns do you use in your compositions?

Respond at your leisure. Any thoughts would be appreciated..

Thanks for being a Teacher,
Ryan Gomez '09

Post-Graduation Movies

Salon.com features an article about post-graduation films in the wake of the movie's "flunking grades."

College and High School fare has always been aspirational. College Films offer dreams of debauchery to High School films. High School films offer paths to popularity. What are we to make of these films that cater to 22 year olds? Many appear to deal with friendships that were suppose to last forever. Listlessness settles in as the future constructed then is muddled by reality.

For the record, do I have the same angst? Many of these films, faultlessly, show upper middle class straight White kids who attended schools like Berkeley, Oberlin and Georgetown. Adventureland particularly deals with a kid who graduates with a liberal arts degree only to find himself working as a carnie at a fair.

As a point of reference, my family came to this country in the year I'm about to have. I didn't know what that felt like until I went to the Philippines over the summer. I respect my parent's generation so much more for leaving such a beautiful but flawed place. Even those endowed with dynastic gifts have to deal with the traffic and the hustling and the heat. I was born here as a result. My trepidation lies in the fact that I'm convinced, more than ever, that I was born to do something specific. There's no Newsweek cover that talks about Data Visualization and Mapping, so I'm not too late, but there's no Time cover that gives me the ammunition of words, labels and paths that I can use to defend against my own doubts.

I'm really not scared. I suppose I can't decide to be of the financial aid disaster that may loom or the friends that may scatter. Many of these films deal with marriage, which is beyond my radar. Each offer a time capsule of generations of young actors, the Brat Pack, the Baby Boomers, Generation X and even our own.

Given the 'specificness of being an American youth,' I thought my friends were the most special, certain bunch of kids in the world. I thought my experiences were my own, unrivaled by no one. Multiply this by the hundreds of thousands and the result is the Class of 2009.

My time was damn special though, for I decide it to be.

As a service to you, I present these trailers.

Adventureland (2009)



St. Elmo's Fire (1985)




Kicking and Screaming (1995)



Reality Bites (1993)



The Graduate (1967)



And for the record, a College Film, of our former life?

Speaking with Lee Byron

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Lee Byron on the work he's done in Data Visualization. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Lee has worked at the New York Times, IBM and Facebook and has produced some of the space's most celebrated installations.

I'll post more about our conversations later, but I was struck most by these points:

• I think he produces great work and it was my pleasure to let him know that.
• Coming from a design background, he holds such principles as playfulness, wonder and interactivity in his work.
  
• This sense of play has helped him build his extensive portfolio. He simply loves what he does and works on things he enjoys.
• His celebrated Olympic Medal Count Map over Time took three weeks to build.
  
• His background is rooted in Design and his programming background began with learning Actionscript in Flash.
  

Additionally

• I learned more about the Human Design and Interactivity program at Carnegie Mellon
• The cultures at IBM and New York Times and Facebook are similar and different. IBM is more academic in a corporate setting, the New York Times is rather fast paced and Facebook is growing from its classic Silicon Valley roots.
  

A complete recollection of our interview, including links to his work and other musings should be posted before I leave for Ithaca this weekend.

Musical Selection.

Documentaries for Monday

The Truth According to Wikipedia, by the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO in English on Web 2.0

The devil's advocate: "It's no coincidence that it was those hippies that built the technology that enables Wikipedia and the bloggosphere, it's no coincidence that the fathers of the Internet now in silicon valley are these pot-bellied older guys with ponytails."

He's right. The Internet will be just as human as the book. In China today, there's heavy controls on the internet and massive propaganda powers. But the Chinese aren't stupid, they themselves contribute to Internet life heartily. And here am I with a blog.

The humanity of progress is no argument against progress.

My Brilliant Brain- Make Me a Genius.

From Channel 5 in Britain brings an uplifting profile of Susan Polgar, first woman chess grandmaster. I'm always sensitive with the word genius, because in some senses it's dehumanizing, as if geniuses are calculating machines measured against such standard of perfection. Modern science, the documentary above and Ms. Susan's own father make the case that any child can grow up to be extraordinary.

The special itself is rather public, in the classy British sense. It employs CGI and a few gimmicks along with simple but generated drama.

First off, we can only hold 7 things in our heads at a time, like phone numbers. 867-5309. Ms. Polgar can recreate the 28 pieces of a chessboard from memory because she can chunk these pieces into about five or so ominous groupings in her mind. She cannot do that with randomly places pieces.

It touches on much of what Malcolm Gladwell discussed in Blink. Experts, through training and dilligence, move instictively rather than calculatingly. Firefighters are shown pwning chessmasters at fighting fires. A digression on faceblindness, standard for cable cognitive fare, features a London Times reporter who's "colorblind" to faces. We recognize faces new and old by measure the proportions of face features and comparing it with the face ratios of faces we've seen before. [Well, probably a hell of a lot more complicated than that.]

Ms. Polgar's genius is revealed at the end of the episode through brainscans. She recognizes chess patterns with the same pattern recognizing part of the Brain that recognizes face patterns and instictively reacts.

The idea that anyone can be a genius is comforting.

Oh: And this shit is hilarious. Barack Obama reading from his audiobook. NSFW. Also here.

Musical Selection.

Portfolio Additions

Let me take this time to link to some pictures I've taken. This set features me and my close friends Leah, Amanda and Dave.

On Woodstock

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair of August 1969, whose 40th anniversary was this weekend, has always been an inspiration for me.

This is an opportunity for me to reflect, amidst the slow news cycles of August, on a favorite topic of mine: the March of the Generations. I really like the music from the 60s, it's what I study. When Woodstock happened my own parents were 9 and 10 and 12 timezones away in the Philippines. And I had little concept when I was their age, when preaching about the 1960s, of the Vietnam war and all that. I was a bit of a dork when I was younger, but I do know now that I wanted a world where I could be whatever dork I wanted to be, even if it pained me, and that peace and love's embrace would reach even me.

I just moved back from the rolling hills of Upstate New York and I'm going back this weekend. It was there where a floormate Freshman year, I'll call him Graham Nash, played me the famous 1970 documentary. He found most significant that Joe Cocker's backup singers were male. Over the weekend I finally watched the movie. I know all the music by heart, so it was the faces of the young people that fascinated me the most. Lining up at phone banks calling family, the hustling of cigarettes and the drum circles. I'm happy to learn that being young in America is that specific, even for someone who looks more like the Viet Cong than GI Joe.

It's been written that Woodstock was a moment rather than a movement. That too soon, not that people got old, but that first with Madmen, the Graduate, Woodstock then Fear and Loathing in Las Veas, the world stayed as sketchy as ever. Sketchy as hell, where people succomb to greed, lust and anger but have to hold it in. (Not to say that vice will go way. I'm charmed by its eternity, especially when people are honest about it.)

Hunter Thompson has a beautiful passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was about how being in San Francisco in the mid-60s was such a specific and special time. The forces of evil in the world were to lose, not out of violent means, but because the momentum was on the side of the fresh, and the young, and the love. It was "riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave..."

"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

The Baby Boomer generation did okay for themselves. According to a VH1 History Channel special, the couple above in the embrace are old now, grandparents. Harmless, cheerful and near retirement. I guess the same goes for the milenials. Some how I can't imagine snooty sixty year old hipsters in skinny jeans in 2046, but I can imagine a whole generation with a grateful world behind and an incomplete one ahead. We'll all be alright.

What do I mean to say that hasn't already been said? I'm tired now of thinking of a world defined before Marley and Jay-Z, without wikipedia, without ringtones. Back then, my place was set mainly decided by who my Father was. People were drafted into war. In America you can be whoever you want to be, but the market for Freedom is tight even today. Nostalgia aside, it was very difficult back then. I wanna look ahead now. A better question to ask, thus, is what bears saying even if a million times forgotten and a million and one times said?

That Love is the Answer. Let's Love ourselves and each other and build our new Century ahead.

Musical Selection: Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together and love one another right now.

Hello World

Hello world, my web log begins.

May it give me focus, to break the cycle of procrastination and perfectionism. For a mind like mine, its easy to get stuck in the details of bridges ahead. Of reciprocal blog links, google ads, designs reminiscent of Moroccan bank notes. Is my writing good enough? Do I have enough to say? What if I speak, and what I say doesn't matter?

It feels good that starting today, that it is written is better than how what is written might be better. By focusing on that, it will be better. Every day.

I am also committed to providing a rich, multi-media experience. Maybe on the internet, you can speak over no ones head. May no allusion be left behind.

With that:

"No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say."

Designer Jack Shultz interview. In fact...

"What other people think of you is not your business."

I got that from Church yesterday. Perhaps its also the title of a book.

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Musical Selection.

Marked a shift away from guitars to keyboards and marked a new reliance on studio musicians.