OUTSIDE, INSIDE -- A Report from Japan

The rugged landscape all over Tanegashima Island in Japan camouflages the vigorous, motivated culture all around. 

Steering wheel on the right side of the car, my windshield wiper slaps back and forth every time I try to signal a turn at an intersection. The controls are opposite their placement in The States, and deeply wired muscle memory is a tough thing to reprogram. I regard each and every moment at an intersection like brain surgery, with one false move potentially causing irreparable damage.

Driving on Tanegashima Island to the eponymously named Space Center presents a visitor with powerful reminders that Japan is an intentional, motivated nation. With a land area smaller than California, the country boasts a world-class space center, carved into a rugged stretch of Pacific beach. Tectonic activity through the ages aggressively defined the formation of the terrain, with huge cliffs towering over deeply folded valleys. Ancient upheavals of Earth's suboceanic crust sent sandstone spires rising, the sedimentary stone establishing rugged rules for hearty inhabitants while occasional outcroppings of harder, volcanic matter remind visitors that they're squarely in the Ring of Fire. The intensely sculpted geography forced road builders to draw inspiration from bowls of udon noodles; wild twists and turns test drivers concentration every single kilometer. It's over these roads that NASA must gingerly truck the GPM satellite from the Shimama Port, a few kilometers distant as the crow flies, but a substantially longer drive across tangled, winding roads.

Tanegashima Island is broken into three sections. Most of the NASA crowd lives in a warren of small hotels in the southern section called Minamitane. It's an unassuming town, clearly a bedroom community for the nearby space center and its support services. School kids in brown uniforms and smart black backpacks scamper on the narrow sidewalks each morning, running to school. Far from the blazing neon and sodium glare of downtown Tokyo, Minamitane flickers while the great capitol city to the north blazes. But like small towns everywhere around the world, the affairs of distant places matters little compared to day-to-day realities of making a living. Hotel and restaurant workers realize an unusually large crowd of jet-lagged and hungry Americans are in town, and it's clear that beyond a short term business opportunity, there's a genuine local enthusiasm to be part of this extraordinary multinational effort.

Minamitane shows signs of the hardscrabble existence that must attend its remote location. Few lights glow after the sun goes down and restaurants are best found with a good plan before setting out and a map in hand. Many buildings need paint. Outdoor commercial signs--fewer than a visitor might initially expect to see--have clearly weathered many seasons. But despite its apparently weary presentation, Minamitane has clearly tried to show it's best face. Yellow banners welcoming NASA flutter along streets and not a scrap of trash appears anywhere.

It cannot be overstated: this is a profoundly intentional nation. To support the army of American staff who have descended like starlings, a flock of matching silver Toyotas have been shipped from the larger island Kyushu. Each morning that flock flits at forty KPH across circuitous roads until it punctures the Space Center's security perimeter, alighting outside a building humbly called STA-2.

If the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, is the soul of Tanegashima Space Center, it's clear that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the brains. Mitsubishi manufacturers the HII-A rocket on which the satellite will fly to space, and Mitsubishi runs the operations on site. But the cosmetic polish of the austere, white building where we work has long since faded. There are no markings, insignia, logos, or even lights on its outside, and signs of long use without any frills suggest the decades of Japan's storied economic power continue to recede into the past. Rust mottles the metal front door, while discolored institutional tiles line the dreary, featureless hallways.

NASA staff occupies emotionally vacant third floor offices, with metal desks of 20th century vintage pushed together to make rows of work tables. On the first floor, teams of engineers have comandeered air conditioned rooms and installed racks of computers and electronics and other vital equipment. A small room for donning "bunny" suits leads through an airlock into the cavernous brightly lit clean room. Through this portal visitors who make the transition realize in a heartbeat that the tumbledown trappings outside have nothing to do with the most fundamental characteristic of the place and the culture. Like the town's support that makes this possible, like the exceedingly polite nation that graciously hosts a horde of loud, blue shirted foreigners, this is a profoundly intentional room, maintained by a focused, intentional company, working for a deeply focused agency. Inside the cleanroom a twenty-first century space program hums vigorously. The gleaming GPM satellite reflects lights from around the room like a great jewel hewn from the surrounding mountains. Inside this aging relic of an industrial giant, there is still majesty and promise of great things to come.

--MS

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SPECIAL CARGO -- A Report from Japan

The tough mathematics of orbital mechanics describes how satellites fly around a planet. But the alpha-dog engineers who get satellites into orbit are tough orbital mechanics of a different sort. 

Two days out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, I'm traveling with a no-nonsense team of engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center on a mission to deliver a billion dollar research satellite to the spaceport that will send it up. If you're thinking that Andrews is an out-of-the-ordinary departure zone you'd be right, but then again this is no ordinary trip. When you're shipping a one-of-a-kind, school-bus sized satellite halfway around the world, you don't simply check it at the counter. That's why the team booked a ride on one of the nation's biggest beasts of the air, the legendary C5-M Galaxy Cargo plane. Way atop the cargo hold, the team tries to settle in to the windowless passenger compartment. Down below, in the airplane's cavernous belly, a massive white box surrounds our spacecraft, clearing the ceiling only by centimeters. A large flat bed truck trailer rides a'foredeck as well, just to make sure the satellite has a comfy ride from the airport to it's next destination.

The mostly middle aged team mixes easily with the young Air Force crew shepherding us. A crewman offers us blankets and pillows at the start. We understand the flight is going to a be cold one, and those who accept the offer are intensely grateful. We also receive earplugs, something that turns out to be more than just a good idea. The C5 rumbles like the inside of a locomotive; it's relentless and exhausting. The cabin temperature has most of us in hats and gloves beneath our blankets, but it's our feet that scream for attention most. Just like road signs that say, "bridge freezes before road surface", the floor loses heat to the vast open cargo space below. No one complains, or at least not much. The galley is stocked with fare far better than any commercial flight, and hungry, frozen team members fill plates with chicken wings, crab cakes, sandwiches, and cheesecake. 

The plan is to partially circumnavigate the globe in about sixteen hours, but nine hours into the trip, we're wheels down in at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, near Anchorage. It was not supposed to go like this, but things change on one-of-a-kind itineraries. An initial plan to refuel in mid-air got scotched because of intense headwinds that threw off range calculations. Now overnight in Alaska, a cascade of logistical complexity has the team grumbling…but not for long. After all, this is a NASA mission through and through, and the "can-do" spirit that made the Space Agency the country's shining star has the team considering options with laser beam focus. Contingency plans are in the works, and the plan is to press on tomorrow for Japan. Traversing a frigid Alaskan parking lot,we find ourselves at the Elmendorf AFB bowling alley, scrounging for supper. 

This morning it's back to the sky.  A team waits for us in Japan; there's an H2-A rocket there waiting for it's payload. After all, scientists can't think about science, let alone orbital mechanics, without orbital mechanics getting their machine up into orbit.

READ A BOOK

Put that tablet computer down.

I mean, don't put it down if you're reading this blog. Send messages to all of your friends about the blog, and THEN put it down.

And don't reach for your TV remote, either!

See those stacks of thinly sliced trees across the room with the colorful cardboard covers? Those are books. You used to read them. They miss you, and more to the point, you probably don't realize just how much you miss them.

I know you do. You're just numb to the surrounding din. If you're reading this blog, you're a reader already. Blogs like this one, about creativity and philosophy and life and all that artsy-airy stuff, tend to attract people already inclined to the slow-motion pleasures books. But there's no prejudice here: books ought to matter to wide populations more than they do these days.

Listen to Public Radio and you'll start to think books grow on trees rather than get manufactured from tree pulp. "So-and-so is the author of a new book on…" seems to be the opening line to interviews all day long. To a lesser, but still significant degree this phenomenon appears on television news programs, too--an ironic reality for a medium that often appeals to viewers who'd never think of picking up a book. The message from mainstream media is that everyone writes books. Therefore it would be easy to be suckered into a false belief that people actually, y'know, still read 'em.

You already know what the problem is, don't you? The ubiquity of electronic devices and the ease of consumption for the data they serve outweighs the comparative work of focusing on black words on white pages. No pictures! No sounds! No birds knocking bricks out from above thieving pigs! What's more, the stories we consume in books often take days to experience. Pages go by in minutes, not seconds. Action scenes happen only in the mind's eye; characters unspool only if we apply ourselves to the words writers use to bring them to life. I'm not opposed to electronic books, per se. But I sometimes wonder if the ability for them to facilitate quick jaunts to email is like having doughnuts on the kitchen counter when someone else in the house is trying to lose weight. It's a temptation that simply stacks the deck against even the toughest resolve.

The loss of a book culture is incalculable. Electronic methods of communication simply do not function in the same way. In the singular way that sustained reading focuses the mind, books ask us to absorb precisely because we must make room for them. They require our participation to work, where videos and blog posts and photos and tweets barely require our attention at all. Words function differently in different formats, and pictures are not replacements at all. I say this as a guy who not only makes his living making pictures, but genuinely loves good pictures. It's simply that they're not interchangeable. Pictures do not replace books.

The loss of a book culture is the transformative process in a culture that cannot sit still and has trouble thinking complex thoughts. Can the culture do complex things? Sure: cell phone networks are intensely complex enterprises. Next day package delivery systems require astounding algorithms and organizational plans. But there's a difference between complex technical requirements and introspection. Values clarification never comes from technological achievement, and morality--flexible and fuzzy though that term may be to diverse audiences-- can not accrue without introspection andexperience.

This lament does not confine itself to fiction. Non-fiction books matter, too. Countless titles on the miles of non-fiction literature shelves can thrill and inspire in ways just like fiction. But even here, the trend is to wade ankle deep in Wikipedia rather than dive into the deep waters of a full length tome. Science may move faster than the speed of conventional printing presses these days, and not for a second do I suggest that it should slow down. But practical information skimming as a replacement for deep knowledge acquisition are not equatable.

The irony here is that people read now more than ever. Short non-fiction on the web has exploded, with texts of all sorts evolving in real-time. Blogs, new journalism, long form articles, tweets, comment forums, and more constitute an ocean of content that never existed before and competes ferociously for time. But while the level of wordplay may have risen in some sectors as a result of Darwinian pressures in the marketplace, I worry about audiences losing touch with the merits of sustained focus on singular topics.

Modernity has also turned us into consumers of endless instruction manuals, often hyperlinked on electronic platforms, chockablock with detailed information. Are they books? Technically they are. But to claim that instruction manuals for video cameras and networkable toaster ovens and programmable vacuum cleaners have the equivalent heft of novels and histories and other works of sustained thinking is to misunderstand the value proposition. Even pulpy trade paperbacks, showcasing soapy romances or endless spy capers of limited literary legerdemain have are a loss. In the sustained focus of reading the culture learns how to critically assess detail and imagination and opportunities that are not simply simply a click away.

In a thought experiment that will never find it's way into real-world practice, the best way to make non-readers pick up a book may be to lock them in a prison for a few months surrounded by richly stocked bookcases and no hope of escape. Given a paucity of stimulation people are naturally curious.  With nothing else to do but read, I have to believe that most captives would rather open a book and escape. Outside prison walls, the very same action--picking up a book-- is the very opposite of escape. It is an act of quiet engagement. But faced with the beeping, blinking stimulations of the real, non-captive world, natural curiosity often struggles to overcome the ubiquitous distractions all around. Books require a measure of mental isolation, of focus. The modern world does not like to leave us alone.

I don't read nearly as much as I would like, despite my best intentions or druthers. The books that matter to me stay with me everyday. Characters are my friends, my advisors, my foils. Stories become my maps and my inspirations. In a culture that sees the power of this old fashioned technology fading into a quaint antiquity, I lament the implications even as I struggle to find the time to  turn the page.

--MS   (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)

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VIDEO IS DEAD. LONG LIVE VIDEO.

The teenager next door is doing it in his bedroom.

The grandparents up the street are doing it in the park.

The school guidance counselor is doing it in the auditorium.

They're shooting video, and sometimes even editing it.

But who cares? Video plays everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's so omnipresent as to be ordinary. It's about as surprising as a text message, as novel as a horseless carriage.

This never used to be the case, but as with all things technological, the extraordinary becomes ordinary faster than milk sours at room temperature. Is anyone surprised that you can add electric light to your dark living room with just the barest finger pressure against a plastic switch? Perhaps not, but if you lived in the middle of the 19th century, you'd be totally amazed.

Video has mutated into new, strange forms of micro-modernism and also harkened back to older forms that have been transmogrified into contemporary dialect.

Let us not even speak of embedded YouTube links. There's no point in deconstructing the value propositions for different creative groups to choose Vimeo over Vevo, Dailymotion over The Daily Show. The issue is that as the new lingua franca, video will eat itself if it cannot remember its origins.

Remember writing? Photography? Music?

What's interesting is how much those disciplines and countless others continue to play essential roles in the modern video lexicon, even if their cultural pedigrees are often buried under push-wipes and snap-pans and other electronic filigree.

The lament is that video's ubiquity has dampened the power of the medium. Like the thrill of seeing electric light for the first time in a world's fair pavilion, lightbulbs have no thrill at all when you're stumbling for one in the middle of a twenty-first century night. Video has only become omnipresent in the past decade.  Insofar as it's a tool available to millions if not billions of people, I have to wonder if the trend going forward is not the evolution and development of newer, better videos, but irrelevance. The moment we are inured to the power of something -- lightbulbs, for example--the moment they lose their hold on our consciousness. Video isn't there yet, but it was only a few years ago when it was an extraordinary thing to click on and play a video link in your web browser. Now it's ordinary to gulp down entire seasons of episodic television on a wireless tablet sitting on your couch or a stiff airport lounge chair. Sometimes I even catch a glimpse of people doing this in traffic, stopped at a light. (Put that phone down, please.)

Clearly there will continue to be new stories and new storytellers who bring all sorts of invention and power to this rapidly changing medium. But the era of amazement and thrill stemming from the medium itself has long since past. What's left to separate signal from noise, as it's always been throughout the history of creative enterprise, is the value of the content. Content is always king. Now that the dawn of the video era is over, no one can foretell what the long day of video's ubiquity will bring.

--MS

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THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY WAITS TO REVEAL ITSELF

It always happens. Days, weeks, sometimes even months of grinding work suddenly reach a crest in the shadowed road and then pass over the rise into exhilarating bright light. Intangibility turns solid. Ideas become real. Light floods the space and suddenly something exists in the world in a way that didn't exist a moment before.

That transformative jolt is not simply an epiphany suddenly making it's presence known. That jolt is akin to the lighting that reanimated Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Hard, incremental work prepared the space, with little emotional resonance. Hard work yesterday turns into hard work today, with the promise of more to come tomorrow. Intellectually we may understand the trajectory of an undertaking, but emotionally it's hard to believe that tiny steps taken day after day will actually amount to anything useful. But then the lifecycle of a project reaches a mid-point, and something must transform somehow, or at least make room for new components. When it's clicking some sort of new, élan vital enters the body, takes a breath and fires cells to life…

…and here's the crazy thing: those moments are hard to predict.

But sometimes you can get a hint that they're coming.

I'm writing this blog entry sitting in a recording studio in Athens, Ohio while our music master Andre (Hey! Check the rest of our website for a photo and bio!) is hunched over the piano working on a score for our new Science On a Sphere movie WATER FALLS. I think I speak for the whole team when I say that we all look forward to this phase of a big production, even as we're all starting to feel the strain of exertion and fleeting time. The work is serious and hard but simultaneously joyful. The process is a complete embrace of the best parts of life. It creates matter from void; it declares emotional resonance from nothing but memory and inspiration. For WATER FALLS, months of effort have led us here. We finally have a rough cut of the film capable of supporting serious dialogue between itself and musical ideas. No doubt that music will re-inform the visuals, and we'll be in a sudden pas-de-deux between the two, pictures influencing audio, audio influencing picture.

I've been doing this work for decades, and it still makes my heart rate pick up the pace. A moment ago, something that never existed before suddenly sprang into being, achieving enough mass and complexity to transform from a pile of matter into a gleaming structure, a temple, a town, a soul. There's music behind the pictures, and an a flooding list of notes running off the the pages in my notebook, and though the hour is late, I am wide awake and scribbling as fast as I can.

Moments of discovery are rare. The do not come easily. They are milestones along long, often forced marches, and they do not, by themselves, pay the rent. But placed against the endless labors of ordinary days, they are gleaming cracks in the often opaque facades of what we're all forced to endure in ordinary days. Moments of discovery shine light on what we all so desperately want to believe could be great, meaningful, shimmering substance of lives worth living.

--MS

--MS

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Like what you see? Set it free.

Darkness in the Photo Department

The Chicago Sun-Times recently announced that it was laying off its entire photographic staff. Not long ago this would have been regarded as an almost incomprehensible decision for a credible journalistic enterprise, especially at one of the nation's larger newspapers. Now it seems like only a short-lived, below-the-fold feature. For people of a certain age who regard it as confirmation that an era has faded into the mists (and don't mind a little ink on their hands as they try organize pages through the jump), the mass photo firings are a temporal touchstone, even as it may mean little to the nation's youth. But the newspaper's actions reinforce just how much we have no idea what our culture is going to look like ten minutes from now.

Stepping back from the Sun-Times decision it's not particularly shocking to anybody who's followed trends in digital media. Sad, but not shocking. Everybody has a camera and everybody is snapping pictures. It therefore stands to reason that the value of all photographs must fall. It's simple supply and demand, right?

Yes and no.

Photographs as a commodity, regardless of their value, are no longer magical demonstrations of humanity's ability to freeze time. Yawwwn: these days everyone freezes time with a digital "click". The thrill is gone, baby.

But photographs as a means of capturing a moment, a feeling, an image of a place or idea so that it can be shared and pondered far and wide is still as powerful as cave paintings in primitive cultures. Photography as a collective activity is a talismanic wellspring about our beliefs and our fears, our pleasures and our sorrows. Photography is not about individual images anymore, for better or worse. It's a medium that's consumed in huge gulps, dozens of images in a sitting. It's our mode for distributing memory so that it fades less fast, our highway to insight about places and circumstances we might otherwise struggle to fully appreciate. But perhaps most relevant in the context of the Sun-Times's decision, photography is easy to do in a technical sense, suddenly a fully democratic expression, and it never used to be this way. There's one problem, though. The newspaper's staff weren't ordinary representatives of the democracy. They were comparative craft masters, and thus available for potential insights and acumen through an endlessly compelling art.

Has the ubiquity of photographic images completely reduced their value so that anybody with a camera is therefore equal of a professional photographer? Is professional photography, save for the most elite fashion and commercial photographers completely depreciated?

If the answer to any of that is "yes", then we must ask ourselves if all of the electronic arts -- there are many these days -- are therefore on a exponentially eroding value slope. Everybody now has the tools to do the impossible, at least compared to what you could do if you were alive in 1975.

Here's the circle I cannot square: if there's more to taking photos than just a point 'n click, but NOBODY CARES very much, do the merits of "philosophical quality" matter that much either?

Here's what I believe: even if in the hands of a joyful democratic majority, the potentials of photography to capture more than just random electronic signals is vast. Without pretension, photography pledges artistic, journalistic aspirations, fleeting moments of passion, a tension of muscles and breath and light as a photographer engages directly with the world.

I struggle with this intellectually, emotionally, personally, deeply. I cannot answer it in a way that I feel certain will win my case. I feel low. The Chicago Sun-Times has reduced its decision about staff photographers to a purely economic case, to money.

BUT OF COURSE THEY HAVE, you shout at the screen. (It's okay: let it all out.) As a business, that's their obligation. They're in it for the money in the first place.

Well, it may be their obligation, but it still causes me distress. This is serious business that goes way beyond business.

The blog this week began about photography, a discipline intent on finding inner truths, and it ended in a place decidedly in a different galaxy: money. That's why next week, we're going into battle. Next Monday, it's a grudge match: money versus everything else. Bring your camera. You're going to want to post a picture on your Facebook page.

--MS

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PROPERTIES

What is the property of a flower? Diaphanous petals--curvaceous of course--daring declarations of intention to all who notice, seductive edges radiating from a central core: flowers announce themselves. They do not hide. Inherent properties of flowers vary from species to species, but each type has its own list of specifics: bright colors here, spiky there, smooth and round, flat and bold. The properties of a flower define it's identity.

Now, turn to consider the following: what is the nature of ownership? To possess is to govern, or at least define rights of access. To own something is to assert influence. Property defines place, identity, even parameters of time.

There's a fascinating relationship between the two ideas, the concept of property as a description of something's inherent nature, and the thought of property as a concept of ownership, of something belonging to something else, singularly, personally, perhaps intimately. When we consider the properties of a thing, we focus the concept of identity inward on the subject. Properties of an object or an idea itself, a flower, say, resist external ownership. They are inherent; they cannot be bolted on or transferred by contract. A rose by any other name doesn't give a damn who owns it; it smells as sweet no matter who possesses the receipt. Even the mighty Immanuel Kant suggested that the attributes of a something do not come as a direct result of existence; they are inherent unto themselves, with matters of existence demanding compartmentalized vocabulary. Attributes do not prove existence.

I hear my creative Muse impatiently tapping her coffee spoon against her demitasse. Are we talking creativity here or are we talking about law? Or even more exasperating (she's edgy this morning), are we waxing philosophical in this space without good justification?

Properties of individual creative works defy ownership. They defy the concept of becoming "property" even as they often belong to a person or an institution. A painting, a sonata, a superb bowl of French Onion soup each have unique properties. Where the last in the list may have an exceedingly short, delicious, life span, the principal obtains for the lot: what can it possibly mean to own the unique nature of something? (Calmer now, my Muse smooths out her sundress, a faint grin on her face as she stares out the window.) No doubt it's possible to own a Monet, a Moore, a Mondrian, but to assert the potential for transformative "properties" of those works in the same ways that "property" transfers with each contractual writ is to pretend something substantial. It's to assume abilities beyond us. It's hubris.

The most easily identified property, of course, is real estate. But when well made, buildings not only outlive their creators, but begin to abnegate the identities of those who conceive of them. Buildings may be owned in a contemporary, legal sense, but the essential natures of their beings accrue over time rather than by declarations at the bank. Properties of a real estate property evolve over time, tumbledown or exquisite, storied or infamous.

Paid? Sure, we should get paid for creative work. The relative value of creative work varies with each piece, with each category of work. Sidewalk caricatures probably ought to get less per piece than detailed urban planning schematics. Without financial appreciation for the hard labor of creation, those who create would not be able to do so. But payment for work is not the same as determination of property, of who it belongs to. More importantly, payment is also not the determination of it's unique properties.

Creators all of us, each in our own unique domains, we therefore achieve a sense of freedom in our actions when we release philosophical ownership of our works. We discover the properties of exotic flowers each day as we do the labor of traveling through the hard lands of our inventive efforts. Once discovered, the work leaves us, like children flying away to their own new lives, seeds of a blossom borne on the wind, with hopes that they take root somewhere healthy, appreciative, and peaceful.

--MS

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