TYPES OF PEOPLE

Types of people

Dog people.

Admit it: you know them. These are the people who believe their pekinese are the bees knees. They're people who can tell you everything about teaching Terriers to talk, walking with Weimeraners, and shearing a Sheltie.

How about car people?

You know the type--the kind of people who can spend two hours on a precious Saturday discussing  whether a straight-six has better torque than a V-eight, assuming proportional engine displacement. (I have no idea whether it does or not, but I overheard this conversation the other day and I couldn't help but be fascinated.)

There are subcultures for everything and this truism is a wellspring for narrative.

Then there are creative people. Actors, painters, musicians: they're simply weird. (It's okay. I'm speaking about ourselves.) What makes a creative person? A creative person experiments with his or her world, all the time. They can't help themselves. They're restless because there are a million possibilities, and only enough time to explore a few. Creative people are flowing over with the need to create, and sometimes they don't even know why themselves.

But wait, aren't LOTS of people creative to some degree? Of the millions of office workers selling insurance and shuffling medical records and ordering plywood shipments for the local hardware store, aren't many of them also into playing the guitar in their free time? Into knitting? Cooking? Building with Lego? I may prefer the bassoon player to the basset house breeder, but that's not the point.

I turn to animators for certain solutions, accountant for others. But the ones I like the most are those who are open, even interested, to learn new things always, even as they make certain disciplines  unique specialties.

But it goes deeper than simply being a subject matter expert. It goes to the marrow, to a person's intangible core. Curious people are different than those who aren't, and I mean no malice when I say that not everyone is curious.

There are types of people who instill confidence in little more than a glance. There are people who make you believe they've got your back, no matter how hard the battle ahead threatens to be. There are people with whom you want to spend your fleeting life, just as there are those who's most basic yes or no answer can make you feel like they're consuming your brief, precious day.

These people too: there are those who look for cheapskate shortcuts. There are those who try to sell you on "good enough". There are those who trade life experiences like used cars, always looking for the next better model. There are people who'll sell you short, run you ragged simply because they can, push you endlessly, not give a damn.

I care about those who look for solutions. I enjoy those who gravitate toward collaboration, even as they are just as interested in focusing like singular laser beams, alone.  Those who are curious, who listen, who push themselves and want to discover new ideas always grab my attention. That's because creativity has no singular solution. There are endless ways to bring ides to life, just as there are endless ideas to bring to life. I'm fascinated by the disciplines that people choose to make their life's work, even if I'm not interested in that particular work itself. (I'm not a dog person, for example.)

But among the many, many types of people out there, I'll still always gravitate to one type of person above all others. Regardless of discipline there's a rare breed who makes you believe in integrity above all, in honest efforts and open exchanges of ideas and civil discourse to discuss the vagaries of whatever it is being discussed no matter how challenging the subject. Those are the types of people with whom I most like to create. Those are the types of people who most fire my soul.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

MECHANICS -- A Report from Japan

Heavy metal. 

The choreography rivals precision aerial acrobats. The teamwork reflects the forward line of a pro football team. This is the vanguard of NASA's mechanical engineering corps, and to experience them at their full operational power is to gain a profound appreciation for how much more goes into spaceflight than big, booming rockets.

Ages range from mid-twenties well into mid-sixties. A handful of women in the ranks reflects a slowly changing demographic, but it's still mostly a male crew. A visitor may have to look carefully, however. The clean room "bunny" suits everyone must wear has a way of turning human morphology into ambulatory, genderless marshmallows. They're always funny the first time someone suits up. Then they're not. Proper clean room garb includes non-static jumpsuits embedded with micro-mesh electro-diffusion wires, designed to insure that even the smallest discharge of static electricity has no chance of damaging delicate circuit boards. Face masks, hair bonnets, rubber gloves, and electrostatically inert booties complete the ensemble. Different missions have levels of "clean", necessitating nuanced differences in clean room attire, but generally speaking, wearers get used to the extra layers in no time.

The mechanical team handles physical aspects of satellite readiness. How do you move a delicate, billion dollar bird around the globe? That's mechanical's job.

Wrenches and muscle power come into play, of course, but the mechanical team needs to be knowledgable about a range of disciplines. Working closely with electrical engineers, environmental specialists, satellite designers and more, seemingly simple decisions go through rigorous analysis and consideration before they're implemented lest unintended down-stream consequences accrue.

That is, of course, the plan. When things come down to old fashioned common sense, this is the team you want to have.

Standing next to Mechanical Team Lead Jay Parker, I watch as the crew prepares to extract the satellite from it's L-frame, the mounting skeleton in which it travelled around the world in its shipping box. "See this?" he says. "There's only three inches of clearance between the satellite and the frame. We can't just lift it up and out. Too tight." The massive overhead crane can handle the weight, but the problem is a risk that part of the fragile solar array scrapes the structural girders of the frame. He tells me the plan is to simply release the satellite from it's mounting base, and slide it out of the frame horizontally. To the question about how his guys plan to keep the satellite inside it's narrow safety envelope, he deadpans, "Very carefully." The technique involves little more than horse sense, patience, superb teamwork, and a sculptor's gaze before striking chisel to stone: they're going to eyeball the situation and simply make sure the satellite doesn't swing where it shouldn't.

Twenty-minutes later the satellite hangs in space, suspended from high-tension cables. Free of its shipping skeleton, the team begins moving it slowly across the vast integration facility where it will be attached to a special articulating table. Centimeter by centimeter, the bunny suited experts make these moves look easy. On the way to space, these stately, precision maneuvers on the ground matter just as much as lighting the main engines.

THANKSGIVING 2013

WE LIVE

We are artists. We live in the world. The world is made of stories, not atoms. We are artists. We tell stories. Stories always include people and ideas. We are artists. Stories demand our engagement with the world. Stories give shape to the intangible essence of relationships and ideas.

INFORMATION

Information is not the same as story. Context makes information live. Stories shaped by people automatically invest context. Information is not the same as story. People contextualize information. Contextualization qualifies relevance. Information is not the same as story. Relevance makes opportunities for decisions. Decisions determine invention.

INVENTION

Invention creates meaning from the intangible. Relationships are always intangible. Meaning is a function of intangibility converted into invention. Invention creates meaning from the intangible. Inspiration in service to invention requires effort to make things real. Things that are real have the potential to prove themselves upon our pulses. Invention creates meaning from the intangible. Intangible meaning is much more relevant than physical matter. Reality therefore is a function of making choices.

PRESTO

Nobody creates in a vacuum.

WE LIVE TO LIVE

We are artists. We live in the world, and the soul of our days is the endless transmutation of intangibility into meaning. It's therefore appropriate for the week of Thanksgiving to say "thank you" to the closest people in our lives who empower and inspire us to create, to tell stories, to live.

--MS

@michaelstarobin

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SENSUAL

Sensual beach

Some kisses you remember for a lifetime.

What is sensual? It's more than physicality. It's tied to memory, to emotion, to dreams. It has to be. The sensual immediacy you have recalling that summer when you were nine years old playing at your friend's house, near that gnarled oak tree in the backyard, is just as resonant now as it was those many years ago. You easily recall the roughness of the bark when you climbed the trunk, projected into imagination as if you were climbing the side of a thousand foot cliff. There was the pleasing exertion in your legs as you levered yourself onto the rickety plywood platform perched high in the main crook of the tree. There was the smell of mud and leaves, July's great passion urging the powerful tree to unfurl. You experienced those sensations then, but you remember them all to this day.

That's memory. Memory sends us into the past. But some expressions of sensuality project solidly into the future.

The press of desire you feel when lost in thought about days not yet lived are always sensual. Are you dreaming of a vacation? Most certainly those thoughts are not just abstractions. You can smell the beach, the mountains, the city, your girlfriend, the cafe where you imagine ordering fruit and cheese, even if you've never visited the location of those dreams. It's a conjuring of future moments not yet lived. It's sensual even just to imagine the brush fine Phuket sand beneath your toes. You're sent through time and space, you hear the sea. The aroma of fresh baked bread drifting over the cobblestones on Rome's Via del Moro, the morning sun sparkling on the medieval facades of the 7th Arrondissement in Paris--you always live where your mind sends you.

Sensuality is not always kind. You'll never forget the stuffy, overheated 5th grade math classroom you endured. You'll never be free of the rotting smell from the back of that twin turboprop bound for Grand Rapids you suffered for hours on the tarmac. You'll never forget the angry hunger you felt growing up when your parents lost their jobs and times got tight. Our senses imprint themselves like water etches paths through stone.

These days we all seem to push sensual experience essentially into two camps. Sensual experiences are either extreme or ignored. That's too bad. I hate to miss a minute of my day, but I also know that I cannot easily live in a purely sensual space. I often wish I could, but I know that's not realistic.

But memory or anticipations for the future can distract us from life, right now. Don't miss the sensuality of life lived today. Feel your feet beneath you. Feel the ways your heels contact the ground first, how you roll through your foot, hip joints making endless pendulum swings in their sockets high above.

Perhaps your hip joints are past their prime, bind a little when they shouldn't, cause you to wince. Perhaps you're young and spry, an athlete, a nymph. Either way, the great pleasure of being aware of your own physicality in the world is yours to experience. It's true: aching joints traditionally do not provoke pleasurable thoughts, but you're thinking about this all wrong if immediate pleasure is the only reward. Even in the distress of our days--and some of us face longer lists of distress than others--there are the roots of our future history. Each feeling is a story, and each story we allow ourselves to feel is a moment when we're each more present in our day. I'm not suggesting that you embrace what ails you, that your pains are equivalent to what makes you feel good, but I am suggesting that you reconsider the feelings, that you recognize them for what it can offer. They remind you that you're alive, and the alternative is hard to imagine at all.

The sensual aspects of our days are the essential balance to the intellectual pressure of modernity. We enjoy seeing an attractive person because of the narrative force that inevitably will accrue to that sensual experience, even if that force is pure fantasy. It's okay: you're human. The next time you smell something in the oven that makes you wonder when supper will be ready, you're doing the same thing.

When you think about this all later today, checking your email, waiting for a red light, replacing the ink cartridge in the printer, remember to connect even those most mundane experiences to your own sensual experience. It's not the smell of the ink that makes us thoughtful. It's the fact that we can stop to notice it in the first place that makes us human. The moment we try to ignore, or worse, suppress the sensual aspects of our lives is the moment that we miss the best parts of the short time we have to be alive.

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

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WABI-SABI

One red leaf

Perfection isn't real. Perfection only exists in mind. Therefore, for something to be a perfect depiction of anything else -- a feeling, an image, a sound, an idea-- it must be imperfect.

That paradox gets my heart going every time I think about it.

Say it: wabi-sabi. It's balanced in the mouth like an aged cabernet. It's rhythmic to the ear like controlled breathing to a long distance runner. There is no perfect translation from the Japanese, it's source, but the measure of it's aesthetic is deep and profound. It speaks of balance and peacefulness, imperfection and beauty, and above all, life.

Nothing lasts forever, but in the digital age we're often led to believe otherwise. Everyone's heard that every bit of data we enter into our various electronic devices persists, eternally discoverable. There's always a record, we're told, always a copy backed up on a server, somewhere. Everything is searchable.

Wabi-sabi says otherwise. Impermanence defines all things. Wabi-sabi says that perfection is an unattainable goal. What we create––as individuals and as cultures--exists in finite time. In the digital world those lifespans may be artificially extended but ultimately they reach an end. All things are finite, and as such, all things are imperfect.

It's essential to realize that there's always a new creative discovery, a new idea to pursue, even if nothing lasts forever.  But the moment a creative person thinks his or her invention is so important that it can transcend time's infinite reach is the moment creativity fails to understand it's own finite heartbeat.  Nothing lasts forever, and an embrace of that melancholy thought confers vital license for creative people of all stripes to take passionate risks and dare to reach for greatness.

Perfection may be unattainable, but it is an asymptotic goal, and we can eternally approach it. To achieve the sublime, perfecting imperfection becomes one of the most fabulous koans of all.

--MS

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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.)

PS -- Like this? Like what it does for your day? Do you ever mention ideas you encounter in this blog to someone else in your life? If so, share the link! Sure, it sounds like a ploy for free, crowd-sourced advertising, and guess what: it is! If you do spread the word, we'll simply appreciate. We might even bake you a batch of your favorite cookies. (Just ask!)

BODIES

BODIES

You have one. I have one.

The subject of human bodies carries high voltage. For some the subject provokes an electrical jolt of distress; for others it's an electrical surge of energy. As raw material for creative consideration, bodies bring the sun for an infinite set of opportune days.

Some people have bodies like road-weary Studebakers. Other have bodies that shimmer like rain-kissed Italian sports cars. Fast or slow, sleek or not, they propel us through space, through time, through life. They torment us with aches and pains, and sometimes far, far worse. But don't think about this too hard: look at the next body you see, even if it's your own standing in front of the mirror. No matter whether it treats you well or badly, it's still an astounding thing.

Sages have spent ages trying to separate body from mind. Speaking as someone who spends huge sums of his day blissfully immersed in pursuits of mind alone, this separation makes some good sense. The intangibility of our thoughts do not demand our ability to life heavy objects, nor process oxygen across the alveoli in our lungs. But as we all know, there's no such thing as a life of pure intellect, nor should we ever aspire to such. Even literalism here suggests that the ordinary act of thinking requires respiration--oxygen transfer--to facilitate the alchemy of thought.

Philosophers have also spent great energies trying to reconcile mind and body--to place them in direct contact. Breath is the fuel that powers Zen meditation, an active pursuit of achieving emptiness. Aristotle and Hippocrates both espoused the values of body and mind. Two thousand years later Thoreau similarly didn't separate physical experiences from intellectual considerations of ethics and values.

But bodies: what of bodies?

Science cannot produce them, even as modern science continues to improve our ability to maintain them. Art continues to reinvent them; culture finds endless ways to present them. Taken as geography, bodies are any archaeologist's dream. In their folds there and mountains and hills; there are wide-open expanses; there are areas exposed to the sun. Skin stretched tight over muscles or skin hanging loosely  over bones tell stories. Time develops scar, tattoos of experience unique to every single body that has ever lived. Scars are inevitable, and the roadmaps of time that each of us wear. We live in these shells, and in these shells we act in the world, each similar, each slightly different, just like the narrative threads we all tell.

No doubt there's the potential for prurience here, for slightly salacious implications of objectification and judgmental evaluation. If all that is corporeal of our humanity is only to be evaluated endlessly, baubles in a market, we become nothing but bodies of judgement rather than entities for marvel. That's why I'll suggest the following: it's fine to regard some people as more beautiful than others, some people even more attractive than others. But beyond superficial aesthetics, consider the deeper possibilities. Every body you've ever knows will return to it's constituent elements soon enough. You only get to inhabit your own body for a short time. Therefore, when you consider different bodies as the starting point for endless moments of invention, superficial aesthetics don't  get you nearly as far as knowing the people who inhabit the bodies themselves.

--MS

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