Adventures of a Vagabond

This may sound a bit random: I’ve got a clothing label!

For the few months, I’ve been working with Matt Lu, Mark Guerrero, and other friends to create a clothing label here in Beijing. Matt, who’s an awesome graphic designer, has for 15 years wanted to create a way to give back and and wear cool stuff at the same time. We put in a some time and money to make this real and as a result:

short+savage is a non-profit clothing label for the urban, hip-hop, and skater communities.

Each shirt has a design that’s eye-catching, curious, and a conversation starter for increasingly cold urban societies.

Like: “Why is your shirt missing a sheep?” or “Wunder Bread and Tuna?”

Each shirt also has a little something extra on the flip in English and Chinese.

Last Friday, we got our first batch of shirts delivered. Saturday, at the Forbidden City, we did our first photo shoot. Sunday, with support from stage one productions, we launched our label here in Beijing, selling 110 shirts and donating 1063 RMB to the Oasis House!

We can’t be more thrilled—we’re out there, making an impact!

This is a side project, as all of us have day jobs. Anyone who’s ever done one of these knows that it’s a lot work, late nights, and pushing each other to keep going. Launching is a huge milestone. Our goal is to grow this thing and help the street youth of China—but that’s a future post. =)

Interested in being part of our story? Reach out!

[short+savage website / short+savage flickr]

David and Michael, originally uploaded by SlayerSeattle.

Pulling amazing shots on an incredible machine. More on this very soon.

I look like such a barista!!

South of the Columbia and north of California, scores of wild green rivers come tumbling down out of the evergreen, ever-west forests of the Coast Range. These rivers are short—twenty to sixty miles, most of them—but they carry a lot of water. They like to run fast through the woods, roaring and raising hell during rainstorms and run-offs, knocking down streamside cedars and alders now and again to show they know who it is dumping trashy leaves and branches in them all the time. But when they get within a few miles of the ocean, they aren’t so brash. They get cautious down there, start sidling back and forth digging letters in their valleys—C’s, S’s, U’s, L’s, and others from their secret alphabet—and they quit roaring and start mumbling to themselves, making odd sounds like jittery orators clearing their throats before addressing a mighty audience. Or sometimes they say nothing at all but just slip along in sullen silence, as though they thought that if they snuck up on the Pacific softly enough it might not notice them, might not swallow them whole the way it usually does.

- The River Why

I had a really magic moment when I read that passage sitting in Beijing last May. Slouched in an armchair on the sun room/balcony of my apartment, I was surrounded by natural light. It was a quiet Saturday afternoon and the sky was filled with voluminous gray clouds, with visibility clear to the mountains.

I started by reading the first two sentences of the chapter and awestruck, just had to stop. I shifted to sit up a little straighter and closed my eyes briefly for focus. This was going to be brilliant. I wanted to savor every word. I returned to the beginning and started again, reading it slowly, deliberately.

As my mind reached the last word and hung there, I leaned back and stared out the window. Almost imperceptibly, I felt a weird sense that the world was taking a deep breath. Without warning, the wind began to blow. Hard. Dust and leaves were whipped up from the streets below, flung up into the air and reaching above my ninth-floor eye level. It was a gift—suddenly seeing, hearing, and feeling the amazing power of nature I had just read about. I sat there for nearly an hour, motionless.

In the year I’ve lived in Beijing, I’ve often missed the people that made my life in Seattle so rich and blessed, but I’ve rarely missed the place itself. That day, for the first time, I felt an insatiable urge to go home, starting in the pit of my stomach and rising up to my throat. I needed to into those forests, I wanted to go camping and breathe in the magnificent air and listen to the roar of the rivers and admire the magnificence of each tree trunk.

As luck would have it, three weeks later I found myself on the trail to Annette Lake, less than an hour outside of Seattle, inhaling the wonderful smell of damp evergreens with a backpack slung on my back. It could not have been better. I found a campsite next to the still-partially frozen lake, the cool evening air filled with the sound of a medium-sized waterfall at the end of the lake. When I woke the next morning and unzipped my tent flap, I looked out to see a mystical forest shrouded in fog.

It was beautiful. It was perfect. It’s one of those amazing things you don’t realize how great it is until you don’t have it.

I can’t wait to get back.

Ebert called Transformers 2 “a horrible experience of unbearable length.” Dude, c’mon. No movie with Megan Fox can possibly be that bad.

It’s all about setting expectations. Robots, stuff getting blown to bits, and a thin plot—this is the sort of stuff that Transformers is made of. It’s a movie created to sell toys—friggin’ fantastic toys. The first gen Transformer toys of my childhood still adorn my shelf in my parent’s house and I still love ‘em whenever I make it back there.

I had to catch this movie in real IMAX (vs. faux IMAX) while I was in Seattle. Real IMAX—robots six-stories tall! And it delivered right up on expectations in 150 minutes of boyhood fantasy goodness.

OK—that doesn’t necessarily mean it was good. Right up to the end I was brought to the brink of utter annoyance: I wasn’t sure if Michael Bay had created a “movie” or just a 2.5 hour US military recruitment video.

Let’s replay a (likely incomplete) mental list.

• Army: Elite squad operations
• Army: Medics (complete with arrival via medic helicopter chariot)
• Army: M1A2 tank operations
• Army: Helicopters (Blackhawks and Longbows)
• Air Force/Army: C-17 air drops
• Air Force: Unmanned Arial Vehicle operators and MQ-9 Reapers UAVs
• Air Force: F-22s
• Air Force: A-10s
• Air Force: B-1 bomber operations (I think it was a B-1)
• Air Force: C-17 cargo plane operations
• Air Force: AWAC operations
• Marines: Arriving on Landing Craft Assault Craft (LCAC) hovercraft
• Navy: Aircraft carrier operations
• Navy: Destroyer with rail gun (near-future tech)
• Navy: Submarine operations (Los Angeles class?)
• Joint Command (sort of): Strategic command center operations
• Pentagon: High-ranking officer politics

Not to mention a glaringly deliberate distribution of men/women topped off with a little “we’re gonna do it our way” military vs. civilian government chauvinism. I’m not even going to get into how the military played the “world police” plot angle.

Also, in the product placement category, we still manage to fit in General Motors (lots) and WebEx. I’m sure I’m missing a few more. It’s egregious.

But you know what? I’m writing this on my flight back to Beijing in time to relax for the weekend and I can’t wait to chill out in a movie theater and watch it again. =)

A friend of mine sent me a link to a McSweeney’s article poking fun at Twitter, 140 character limits, staring blankly at handheld devices while others are talking, etc etc. It’s hilarious.

Prerequisites

Students must have completed at least two of the following.

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

In response, I’ve combined my distaste of the insanity that is the Twlight series and composed the following. See if you can follow along. I think it’s better if you read it out loud.

The more things change stop
The more things stay same stop
The telegraph was amazing invention two hundred years ago stop
Costs calculated by word, no matter length stop

Some girl just died, over.
She was eaten by wolves, over.
She was delicious, over.

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! Bella wanted to scream, so desperately wanted to scream a scream that would flatten swaths of land, shatter windows, and cause sonar operators in the sea 200 miles away to abandon their stations with blood streaming from their ears. But she wasn’t scared. She wanted to scream because it would draw her Edward there to save her, but it was a bad idea, for the shooter had silver rounds infused with a garlic and wood concoction, which would rip through Edward’s dazzling skin, and kill him. So Bella ran inside, slamming the door behind her, but simultaneously making the fatal mistake of turning her head to make sure no one followed her as she ran full tilt into the house. And thusly she was promptly stopped short by the door separating the entry from the rest of the house. Full speed into a solid oak door with a resounding thud, snapping her head back with a dazzling series of pops, dazzled with stars exploding in her eyes, and knocking herself dazzlingly out cold. Now little more than dead weight, Bella’s body begins to topple over toward the ground. Without warning, defending her unusual home, a wolf jumps out of the shadows, sinking her teeth deeply into Bella’s throat. And the plain, uninteresting, and clumsy Isabella Swan, crashed on the floor, blood spraying from her jugular, finally dead.

OMG. It was a dark and stormy night. Fail! Suddenly, a shot rang out! Oh noes! i can haz edwaurd? Noe, bullts baad, i can not haz edwaurd. pwned! Must. Run. *BAM* DOOR? WTF? OW! Whoa. Wolf. NFW. Belleh haz died. (Haha! Friggin’ finally!!!!111one)

Im sry I hv died, etn by wlves.

Bella is dead.

Bella @edward Wasn’t scared, wanted to scream, ran and hit head, ended up getting ambushed by wolf who killed me. http://cli.gs/NDy4QY

Win.

As a member of the modern workforce, I find myself driven by this almost carnal urge to handle problems, fit things in, and take on extra responsibilities. These are the values that were espoused to me as the keys to success. Do More! Be Better! Act Faster!

For me, it’s quite hard to turn off this way of life. In fact, I’ve found it much easier just to brand it and turn it into the de facto way of living. “I live an edge-to-edge lifestyle” or “I’m hellza busy this week” or “I have something going on.”

And truth to be told, I often find positive reinforcement and gratification from this lifestyle. “Life is so much more boring when you’re not around to plan stuff” or “way to live it up” or “you always know what’s happening in town.” And so it goes.

Honestly, it’s no surprise that when it came time to do the quick and simple planning for my Europe trip, I found myself saying: “Well, I’m going to pubquiz on Thursday night, I’m headed to the Cotswolds on Friday, back Saturday, out to Geneva on Sunday, and back Tuesday morning before flying back to Beijing on Tuesday night. Hmm, well, I fly in at noon into Heathrow on Wednesday, how about 6p under the clock at Waterloo station?” Actual conversation.

So here am I am, writing this on my flight to Geneva, and wondering, wait a minute, where’s the relaxation and slowing down part of this holiday? I’ve been in a GO MODE before I even landed, calculating when and how long I should sleep for to minimize my jetlag and maximize my schedule. I’ve had multiple instances of dashing home to change and drop off stuff just to dash out again to make a meet up.

It’s not sustainable. One cannot continually exhale in life and dash from one thing to another. It’s almost guaranteed that a wall is lurking somewhere in the future. Therefore, I’ve decided to extend my trip by a couple days, leaving on Thursday instead of Tuesday. I won’t have to dash back after flying back into London from Geneva just to dash back out to the airport to fly back to Beijing. And I plan on taking the time to just sit, have a good espresso from Fernandez & Wells, people watch, and read.

 
Square in Soho

The New York Times has a cool infographic highlighting unemployment rates per-country across the country – really shows where the recession has hit hardest.

It may be surprising to you (it was for me) to see that Oregon has been harder hit than the financial center of New York, given the cutbacks in banking. Discussion on the some of the mailing lists I’m on peg this on big impacts in the housing market affecting the timber industry.

Tangentially, Business Week rates Portland, Oregon as the #1 unhappiest city in America.

Overall rank: 1*
Depression rank: 1
Suicide rank: 12
Crime (property and violent) rank: 24
Divorce rate rank: 4
Cloudy days: 222
Unemployment rate (December 2008): 7.8%

Ouch.

I keep finding good stats on Gallup.

OK, this is really fascinating. Given that statistics on church attendance and the number of people that believe religion is important in their lives is fairly constant, the perception of the influence of religion is all over the map.

Why is this? Looking at the list of major events in 1969, Nixon was in the thick of the Vietnam war and instituted the first military draft that same year.  I can’t figure out a good reason for 1994 and 1995. In the last 3 years we’ve been headed for the broadest gap in 14 years. Was this due to the failure of the Bush Presidency and that administration’s close tie to Christianity? Maybe I’m simplifying the issue—I fully admit I’m not old enough to have deep knowledge of the current and cultural events of those periods. Comment and let me know what you think.

However, it does bother me that the core of Christ’s teachings get lost in the political noise. Christ is not about some particular stance on Israel, abortion, and stem cells. The way of Christ is a way of living—love your neighbor, be humble, the first shall be the last, all that stuff. I can’t imagine how this would not be influential for those who call religion an important part of their life.

Look at this:

What exactly are churches teaching out there?? Even regular attendees aren’t getting something applicable.

If this was my workplace, I’d be asking some direct questions—tell me what parts are working and what parts aren’t working. What do we need to do more of? What do we need to do less of? How can we make the message applicable?

Recently, our consumerism has caught up with us. The economic downturn has longer to run. The recovery is going to take even longer. If there was ever a time for people to hear the story of putting others before ourselves, living generously, sharing, and caring, now’s the time.

I recently discovered the website of Gallup, the polling firm. Not only do they have a really cool site, but their content is both free and fascinating. An unbeatable combo!

For the last week, my friend Ken from Switzerland has been staying at my apartment. Recently, we got into a discussion about the separation of Church and State and how the US espouses this ideal, but it isn’t at all done in practice. I brought up the point that a country is made up of it’s people and that the electorate is primarily Christian. But really, is it? This led me to do some research. For all the focus of the Christian viewpoint in politics, does this represent a large percentage of the people or a concentrated group of people with a (relatively) well-organized PR story?

• 78% of Americans believe in God or a higher power.
• 42% of Americans attend church regularly.
• 56% of Americans believe that religion is very important in their lives.

I should caveat that religion and church here is defined generally–that is to say, inclusive of Judaism, Islam, and others. To get additional context, we can look at this.

Answer: Yes, there’s a substantial (or majority) group of Christians in America. In continuing my conversation with Ken–I feel that while much of our politics are religiously influenced, I don’t think it’s a full or complete lean to one side. We have a healthy dose of being influenced by other thinking and certainly this country has never faced anything like an Inquisition (the Red Scare was political more than religious).

(Full Disclosure: I consider myself Christian, though I often don’t agree with the stances of the Christian viewpoint.)

25 things you may or may not know about me–this is currently a popular Facebook meme. For those of you reading this as a Facebook Note–watch out! I’m coming to tag you!