I’m very pleased that my cousin Matt and I were able to get a nice website for him started during his three day visit to Austin. He’s a fantastic artist and now he’s got a place to showcase his work online. His pseudonym is Faullyn Skautch. Check out FaullynSkautch.com.
Technology is anything invented after you were born. Technology is anything that doesn’t work yet. I love these two half-comic definitions quoted by Kevin Kelly in this TED talk.
Paraphrasing Kelly: The real tricks are exploring the exploration. Technology is about better ways to evolve. The infinite game. A cosmic force begun at the big bang. It’s the expansion of options, possibilities, differences, freedoms. Technology wants a trillion zillion species individuals discovering differences. It’s a way of playing the game by playing all the games.
Every person here has an assignment. Your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is. That recursive nature is the infinite game. If you play that well, you’ll have other people involved so that that game extends and continues even when you’re gone.
That is the infinite game, and what technology is, is that medium in which we play that infinite game. And so I think we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of finding out who we are.
I love it. What a freeing view of technology. An assignment to discover.
Maile knows a wonderful Russian woman named Vera who studied drama and taught it to kids. So when we were looking for someone to speak Russian for a kid’s album I’m working on, Vera immediately came to mind. Tonight she came over, preformed and translated this poem.
Улыбка
От улыбки хмурый день Ñветлей!
От улыбки в небе радуга проÑнетÑÑ.
ПоделиÑÑŒ улыбкою Ñвоей
И она к тебе не раз еще вернетÑÑ!
И тогда навернÑка вдруг заплÑшут облака,
И кузнечик запиликает на Ñкрипке!
С голубого ручейка начинаетÑÑ Ñ€ÐµÐºÐ°,
Ðу а дружба начинаетÑÑ Ñ ÑƒÐ»Ñ‹Ð±ÐºÐ¸!
Smile
With a smile a cloudy day brightens!
With a smile the world is colored like a rainbow.
Share your smile with a friend
And your smile will return to yo!
And suddenly clouds will be dancing
And the cricket will play the violin!
With a blue stream the river begins,
So friendship starts with a smile!
Since Maile’s skater-cousin Addison arrived in Austin to work for a few weeks, we’ve been spending weekends hanging at skate parks and discovering new spots. I alternate between remembering how to ride a skateboard and shooting pics and vids of him.
Finally, today, Adds and I cranked out a little montage of the best footage we’d got so far. We were pleased.
Thanks to Lib, I got out to hear a great Montreal band called Timber Timbre. I thought of M Ward singing Tom Waits. Taylor Kirk delivers his wonderful lyrics, a kind of carnival biblical blues (Waits, Cohen) with a steady kick and occasional intense twitch. And on either side of him eerie, atmospheric strings, a violin and a steel guitar, both through arrays of haunting effects. Wonderful show.
