encounters

Last spring I did a project out in union square called "MY SPACE" it was a physical version of the myspace website.. I was trying to just talk to people out in public space and while doing so I met this guy called Joshua. He left some poems on my wall and I saw him a couple of times after that. Today I was walking on 14th st and I was stopped by none other than Joshua. It was pretty amusing, he came up to me and said excuse me but have we met before? I loved it. I told him yes we had and where. He was very happy to run into me. He told me that since the spring he's been to a lot of places. He just packed up and went to the midwest and traveled around with some friends by bike. He went from state to state, just being a wanderer and finally decided that he had to come back to NY because he had been having dreams about it. And now he was back, he just walks and wanders talking to whoever he feels a connection to, trying to figure out the questions of life. Why are we here? What are we doing? What is the point? What I loved most was... If a man spends his entire life working in aerodynamics, and builds plane after plane, figuring out the most efficient way for them to fly, how to carry more people, how to make them go higher... is it more meaningful than a man who spends his entire life at home making paper airplanes? 

I love people who just wander, in fact I'm very jealous of them, its very nice to not have anything to tie you down and no borders nor limitations.... Soon :)

more smiles

I was riding home today, and I got to the union square platform and saw a guy with an entire piano. He was playing "here comes the sun". It was quite a nice site, to see that it wasn't a guitar player, nor a drum player but a piano in the subway. I stood there listening for a while and I started to look around at the people who were watching him. It was really awesome to see people taking off their headphones just to hear the sound, and watching as some peoples faces changed from the usual manhattan scowl to a genuine smile. The guy who was playing got up and grabbed a piece of paper from the bucket where money was thrown in and told me he got a love letter. The letter said "Hey Mr piano man, I think that you are really awesome and I'm sorry that I don't have any money to give you but I genuinely want to thank you for making me smile and making my day, thank you." It is moments like these that make me love NY. I wonder if music really is the most powerful thing to change people.... "sing us a song you're the piano man, sing us a song tonight, cause we're all in the mood for a melody and you got us feeling all right."

or here to convert atheists into believers

"I ain't here to argue about his facial features or here to convert atheists into believers."

Today was an interesting day, from Obama the Antichrist to Obama the Freemason, to Jay Z and the Rockefeller's being reptilian organisms, to god never existing followed by god existing, followed by whats the difference between us and monkeys and finishing up with aliens teaching us the wheel and mathematics and the icing being the end of the world in 2012.

All these thoughts made me think a lot. Religion (a topic I didn't necessarily want to touch) seems to be a heated topic. I watched the Bucket List yesterday and I liked Nicholson's characters views on 2 things. One was about reincarnation. According to karma you move up and down the list according to how you live your life. Nicholson said, that's all fine but they lose me at one point, what the hell does a snail have to do to move up the list--- leave a perfect trail of slime? I thought that was great. And secondly, His views on life. He didn't say he was an Atheist per se he said I only know 2 things, one is that you are born and two, you die. That was a beautiful argument. I personally feel that there is no difference between religion and science, between the theories that aliens put us here and nursed us. The big bang and the 7 days are all the same to me. Because when you try to bring any of those arguments back to the start it always leads to the same answer, an unknown. And the entire difference in arguments is that some label that unknown as God and believe that it controls everything, some label that as aliens, and some label that as "science hasn't told us yet." Essentially its the same thing. A friend of mine said that its different because we know what God is, we have it figured out. That was probably the stupidest thing i've heard in a while. If we knew what God was, if we had him figured out then we would each be God. But honestly the only difference I see between Religion and Science is that Religion is based on trust and Science just asks more questions. 

christmas

So it was christmas yesterday. I just got home. I decided that I was gonna spend this christmas just wandering around manhattan and talking to strangers. I think the holidays are a perfect time to just talk to people randomly, its not that easy regularly in NYC. People's guard just seems to be down this time of year and they are more open to other people. Its a very rare inviting feeling in NYC. The first encounter was actually initiated by a man on the train. He just sat next to me and said "excuse me" and then went on a very long rant about how awful the MTA service is and how its never on time and unreliable and how he hates that the fare is getting raised to $3 this summer. He went on to talk about how the MTA exploits low income NYers as they have no other option to get around. I sat and listened to him for a while and then chimed in a thought of mine. He replied with "oh, god. I didn't even think you spoke english." I find that kind of amusing that in a city like NY so full of strangers this man just wanted to speak regardless of whether he was understood or not. We went on to talk about a lot of issues such as paranoia and anthropology and the need to just leave NY sometimes. We talked of the church and of bars and of irish residents in brooklyn, we covered alcoholics anonymous and being homeless on 42nd street. And then I wished him a merry christmas. The next encounter was very brief. As I was getting out of the train station a lady asked me if I would swipe her in, no please, just bluntness. I swiped her in, she said thank you and left. I started to wander around and admire the lights on the trees and the couples walking around spending christmas together. I gave all my change to a homeless woman and had a conversation with a doorman at Armani Exchange. The doorman talked about how he has to work on christmas and that the employer has no heart. How he was going to go on a cruise with his fiance to Chile and Colombia and wanted to sneak his own liquor in because it wasn't included into the 3000 dollar ticket fare. But with the state of the economy he had to postpone this trip. We smoked a cigarette together and then parted ways, I continued wandering and he went back to his post. After that I somehow ended up on 42nd street talking to all the various hotdog vendors looking for a pretzel that didn't cost $3, finally I found one for $2, I savored it. I had a short conversation with a black guy who saw me admiring sneakers in a shop window and asked if i was interested in anything, as he had "blackmarket" connections. Afterwards he commiserated with me about the fact that I didn't have enough money for anything that I wanted and we parted ways. I wandered around central park and on the outskirts ran into 2 girls who were looking for the building where John Lennon was shot. I regretted not knowing the answer and kept wandering. I found the building and thought of those 2 girls looking way in the wrong area for it, but there was nothing to be done about that. I kept wandering and luckily ran into those girls again and told them that this time I knew where the building was and pointed them in the right direction. That was pretty much everything and me and my friend hopped onto the train and went home. I think that this was a pretty awesome christmas filled with random encounters and strangers. It is nice to realize that it really isnt that difficult to talk to people, and comparing this day to life, it seems that life is just a series of random encounters. The guy on the train was called Brian btw. I like him and I wish him lots of luck. He wants to pack up and leave NY but he cant seem to find the strength. If any of you run into a brian on the N or R line in NY, let him know that his friend Rostislav says hi. Merry Christmas everyone

Smiling

I think that one of the things that we don't do enough as a society is smile. And I know how foolish that sounds, but I personally love to laugh, and I love to make people smile. I want to draw attention to one of the greatest things I have seen in a while. This was sent to me by a friend in a very down time of my life, basically the last 3 months of my life haha. It is a video on youtube called Validated, and though its longer then most youtube videos, I highly encourage everyone to watch it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao. I think that as a society not enough people are taking care of each other, we seem to be too concerned with ourselves and our own lives. If more people did movies like this, and more people led their lives like this, I'm positive even our economy would rise again. Please watch it and enjoy.  :)

The Media

Hey guys, there's something that I've been wondering for a while. Have you ever decided to go travel somewhere or have friends in other places in the world and you read the news and you hear of something really awful and you get worried and start to call your friends to find out if they are all right. last year i spent a month in Israel, Egypt and Jordan just traveling around. I did this all without the permission of my parents, we had been in a little fight and I was a little homeless ha ha, but regardless, we did keep in touch while I was there. I remember  my parents calling me constantly and saying this just happened and that happened and he was killed and there was a bombing here and how am I not scared and when am I coming home. Now this is all fine because that is just a natural parent thing, that I'm sure we are all sick of. Also there was a huge storm in the New York area last year sometime and my roommate got a call from relatives in California asking if he was okay, if he had managed to keep his stuff from flooding, if the electricity was all okay and so on. My roommate stepped outside and said that it wasn't even raining. Now what I am actually getting at is that I'm trying to understand why the media is biased. The media only seems to talk about the bad things that are going on. while I was in Israel I never experienced any of the things that were being talked about in the news, sure perhaps I was lucky, but I would like to believe that we are getting biased information. The media reflects and talks about the things that we want to hear. It wouldn't be successful if they talked about things that people didn't want to listen to. Which makes me believe that we as a people seem to only get pleasure out of hearing negative things. Earlier today I was watching a talk on Ted.com by Cameron Sinclair who is one of the founders of Architects for Humanity. he was talking about a bunch of projects that they had done in developing countries developing housing for them and also local areas in the US. After Hurricane Katrina, we all heard about everything negative associated with the rebuilding process, about how so many people lost their homes and had to move to other areas, about Fema and about the government not being able to handle the situation. But he also said that there was something that wasn't mentioned in the media, and he didn't understand why the media selectively portrays what it wants. He talked about the town of Biloxi, Mississippi that didn't wait for the government to aid them, and didn't wait for Fema and instead took the rebuilding of the town into its own hands and started a volunteer organization amongst its own residents to rebuild their entire community. And there was no word of this in the mainstream. So my question is this. Is the information provided to us in the media catered to what we actually want to hear? Do we as a people only ask to hear the bad things? And if so what are the reasons. I feel that there is a huge problem with this and that perhaps we need to reconstruct our entire information system in the united states. I don't think I know how this can be done, but I feel that it is possible. There exists such a thing as a Measure of Happiness, and Americans are some of the unhappiest people in the world. We strive to achieve so much, we are one of the most developed countries in the world, we have all the opportunities in the world open to us. We don't live in shanties and we have sanitation and clean drinking water. Every necessity in the world we have and yet we are some of the unhappiest people in the world. This strikes me as somewhat of a strange occurrence. We strive so much to be at the top but we sacrifice happiness int he process. We need to rethink our situations, and perhaps this starts with just changing our demand, and surrounding ourselves with happy thoughts. Media surrounds us with everything negative we could ask for and if we don't want the negative we have to look for the positive, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't we be abundant with everything positive and then try to take ourselves down to earth to see the negative? Any thoughts?

Getting Famous

I've been wondering recently on how easy it is for people to make a name for themselves. Is there a definite formula and a guaranteed method or is it just entirely random. This has been circling around in my head because I ran into a couple of clips on YouTube about 2 Chinese boys. These boys became famous for what seems to me to be an entirely absurd reason. All they do is they lip sync. Here is a link to a clip of theirs Chinese Backstreet Boys - That Way. They have a whole series of songs that they lip sync to and they became quite the craze and the clip I linked has as of now 8,477,598 views. But what struck me most about their situation is that they became so famous for nothing that they had people interviewing them and they even had a concert, two Chinese boys:a show. It makes me wonder about what it actually takes to get media attention and become successful in this world. As artists, and designers we have a goal to get our names known, so that we can have a constant flow of jobs, of publicity and so that we wont be "starving" as they myth states we will be. Looking at cases such as the two Chinese boys and others such as that of Sanjaya from American Idol maybe there is something that we as artists and designers can think about. Sanjaya became famous for bad singing. And when I say bad, I mean it in comparison, because I know for a fact that he sings better than I do, I'm completely tone deaf. However he still made the limelight thanks to the make Sanjaya win website. And the media attention he received by not being voted off when he should have been. There were many factors that played into it but regardless he became very famous if only for a short while, and I personally don't remember any one else's name besides Jordin Sparks so that says a lot. What I'm wondering is if this phenomenon is limited to the music scene or if it also spreads out to the world of design. We live in an age where more and more people are graduating from college and a degree doesn't mean as much as it did in ages past, so there is something that we need to be doing on top of that. Skill will get you far but we all need to be salesmen also. A good work is sometimes not characterized by how good the work actually is, but rather how well it is presented. If the two Chinese boys were able to have a concert for their lip syncing and Sanjaya became famous for mediocre singing, what does it say about skill and hard work in the world?