Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

 

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Art In Culture , July 2011

                 my photos are introduced in art magazine!  <Art In Culture , July, 2011, p. 52>

SPRING: a book, a cup of coffee and Sun shine

soooooooooo wanted to pack a bag and run to the airport. Instead, I calmed myself down first. then, booked flight tickets to travel in May. next thing, i grabed coffee and went outside to sit under the sun and read a book, A WEEK AT THE AIRPORT/ A HEATHROW DIARY by ALAIN DE BOTTON. the book is not a mere anecdote of airport nor travel, it is such an insightful and aspirational narrative of writer's journey through his encounters with people and places! experiencing the airport as a "living entity". btw, I love spring!

Pixels and Places, Video Art in Public Space/ Catrien Schreuder

p. 6
The concept of 'public space' also requires further explanation. The most common interpretation of public space is the urban space of the streets. ... The term refers to spaces that are accessible to everyone, in which no other rules but public ones apply.

p. 7
The increase of video art in public space is inseparably connected with a huge increase in the number of commercial applications of video in the street, such as outdoor screens, projections on the facades of buildings, or forms of interactive applications as part of the architecture.

p. 14
Within this interdisciplinary tendency, video proved to be an extremely suited medium, much used by artists.

p. 59
... The message was that video art needed to reinvent its own visual idiom.
   From its inception, video art has focused on looking across the borders of other disciplines. In this context, art historian Rosalind Krauss spoke of a 'post medium condition'. ... In Krauss's view, video had thus determined the end of the modernist medium-specific approach to art.

p. 60
Just as many video artists nowadays show a selection of their work on the internet, they also seem to be less and less hesitant about presenting it on the street, despite the limitations. However, an opposite reaction can also be seen in the work of artists who only show their video installations under strict conditions and want to guard their exclusivity through limited presentation rights. ... This dichotomy in fact corresponds to the historical development of video art, in which the search for a visual idiom specific to the medium has developed in tandem with the search for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Video art in public space is first of all a flexible form of video art, in which artists are repeatedly prepared to let their images relate to the different media and images at different sites in public space.

p. 86
The street is seen as a new platform, a meaningful environment for the selected works of art.

p. 87
Bakker thus capitalized on the 'visual noise' caused by the many advertising expressions and signboards, but also other sources of light such as lampposts, traffic lights and shop windows. Even when you project on an isolated minimalistic structure, even when you show a video with only abstract show on the screen, a work presented at such a location always derives its meaning from its urban context.
   For that reason, existing works that are shown on the screens are also carefully selected for the twist they can give to such an urban context. Cineboards 2007, whose theme was 'Architecture Year' in Rotterdam, showed many works that humorously, but certainly not without earnestness, showed how the rise of digital media has shaken the core values of architecture.

p. 88
... as a kind of 'video graffiti', ... the video work becomes part of the noise of the city. At a rapid pace, the building is overgrown, the plants burst into flower and subsequently lose their leaves.
...
   To different degrees, video artists are using the city as a new exhibition space. The above-mentioned examples are all unilateral interventions by artists where the video work is added to existing facades.

p. 89
Not only the people living in the neighbourhood, who are bothered by the flickering lights, but also the architects are not always enthusiastic. After all, this video art, just like the commercial videos in the streetscape, is simply added to the architecture that they design.

p. 93
Aitken says something about the experience of art, which in his eyes should be part of a greater metropolitan experience. Literally and figuratively, he breaks through the walls of the museum with his work.

p. 95
By connecting through the internet, the limitations of physical place are overcome and the design truly becomes a 'terminal'. As a result, the public experiences the physical and virtual environment as an inseparable whole.

p. 129
These works not only make these differences visible, but simultaneously address inter-passive individuals, who farm out their subjectivity and retreat into virtual capsules, on the subject of their personal involvement in the urban environment.

p. 132-3
Various video art works focus on creating a collective experience in an environment through which the individual generally only travels anonymously. ... Through its inherent stratification and temporality, video art is the medium par excellence for emphasizing the heterogeneity and variability of public space.

p. 151
   Allan Kaprow saw the boundary-crossing power of video art as one of the most important characteristics of the new medium, but also detected a huge concentration in the medium itself and an enthusiasm for its newness. ... Through this increasing accessibility, their gadget value will soon diminish, while the actual boundary-crossing value of video art will be used increasingly effectively to play a role in the daily lives of twenty-first-century city dwellers.


Pixels and Places, Video Art in Public Space  (2010, Stichting Picos de Europa, NAi Publishers: Rotterdam.)

Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan

The perspective of Experience


p. 3
"Space" and "place" are familiar words denoting common experiences. We live in space. There is no space for another building on the lot. The Great Plains look spacious. Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.

p. 6
(2) The relations of space and place. In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. "space" is more abstract than "place." What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. ... from the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.
(3) The range of experience or knowledge. Experience can be direct and intimate, or it can be indirect and conceptual, mediated by symbols.

p. 8
Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality. These modes range from the more direct and passive senses of smell, taste, and touch, to active visual perception and the indirect mode of symbolization.

p. 12

What sensory organs and experiences enable human beings to have their strong feeling for space and for spatial qualities? Answer: Kinesthesia, sight, and touch.

p. 14
A person who handles an object feels not only its texture but its geometric properties of size and shape. Apart from manipulation, does skin sensitivity itself contribute to the human spatial experience? It does, though in limited ways. The skin registers sensations. It reports on its own state and at the same time that of the object pressing against it.

p. 34

"Space" is an abstract term for a complex set of ideas. People of different cultures differ in how they divide up their world, assign values to its part, and measure them. ... Man, out of his intimate experience with his body and with other people, organizes space so that it conforms with and caters to his biological needs and social relations.

p. 67

But the mind, once on its exploratory path, creates large and complex spatial schemata that exceed by far what an individual can encompass through direct experience. With the help of the mind, human spatial ability (though not agility) rises above that of all other species.

p. 73

When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place. ... Spatial knowledge enhances spatial ability.

p. 85
Myth is often contrasted with reality. Myths flourish in the absence of precise knowledge. ... Myth is not a belief that can be readily verified, or proven false, by the evidence of the senses.

p. 99
Mythical space is an intellectual construct. It can be very elaborate. Mythical space is also a response of feeling and imagination to fundamental human needs. It differs from pragmatic and scientifically conceived spaces in that it ignores the logic of exclusion and contradiction.

p. 118
The experience of space and time is largely subconscious. We have a sense of space because we can move and of time because, as biological beings, we undergo recurrent phases of tension and ease. The movement that gives us a sense of space is itself the resolution of tension. When we stretch our limbs we experience space and time simultaneously - space as the sphere of freedom from physical constraint and time as duration in which tension is followed by ease. ... -  spatialized time.

Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan (2002, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis)

Lost Dimension by Paul Virilio

p. 10
Construction no longer derived simply from traditional technical constraint. The plan had become a function of the risks of "terrorist contamination" and the disposition of sites conceived of as sterile zones for departures and non-sterile zones for arrivals.... The architecture that resulted from this had little to do with the architect's personality. It emerged instead from perceived public security requirements.

p. 11
When the French built "Maximum security cell-blocks," they used the magnetized doorways that airports had had for years. Paradoxically, the equipment that ensured maximal freedom in travel formed part of the core of penitentiary incarceration. ... In banks, in supermarkets, and on major highways, where tollbooths resembled the ancient cit gates, the rite of passage was no longer intermittent. It had become immanent. ...Users of the road were... now interlocutors in permanent transit. From this moment on, continuity no longer breaks down in space, not in the physical space of urban lots nor in the juridical space of their property tax records. From here, continuity is ruptured in time, in a time that advanced technologies and industrial redeployment incessantly arrange through a series of interruptions, ...

p. 13

... a difference if position blurs into fusion and confusion. Deprived of objective boundaries, the architectonic element begins to drift and float in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial dimensions, but inscribed in the singular temporality of an instantaneous diffusion. From here on, people can't be separated by physical obstacles or by temporal distances. With the interfacing of computer terminals and video monitors, distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything.
   This sudden reversion of boundaries and oppositions introduces into everyday, common space an element which until now was reserved for the world of microscopes. There is no plenum; space is not filled with matter. Instead, an unbounded expanse appears in the false perspective of the machines' luminous emissions.

p. 31-32
The great divide-between the reality of temporal and spatial distances and the distancing of various video-graphic and info-graphic representations-has ended. The direct observation of visible phenomena gives way to a tele-observation in which the observer has no immediate contact with the observed reality. ... Irrespective of the vector of the spatial conquest, observation machine is not so much the vehicle or apparatus of the physical displacement of observers, but rather of an image.

p. 43
   The space-time of the opto-electronic representation of the world no longer involves the visual horizon, nor the vanishing point of perspective. Depth now pertains exclusively to the primitive grandeur of speed, the grandeur of this new void, the vacuum of speed, that replaces all extension and all depth of field, including geometry and geophysics.
   The center of the universe is no longer the geocentric earth or the anthropocentric human. It is now the luminous point of a helio-centrism, or better yet, of a lumino-centrism, one that special relativity helped install, whose uncontrolled ambitions derive from the purposes of general relativity.
   Thus, in the new representations of the form-image of the sensible world, the "point of light" replaced the vanishing point of perspectivists. the luminous point became the vanishing point of the speed of the light, the non-place of it's acceleration, a photon, electron acceleration that contributes to the present formation of the dimensions of infinite space, just as the point without dimension of ancient Greek geometry served to establish the dimensions of the finite world, including the development of arithmetic and mathematic numeration, as well as the geometric and geographic formulation of the image-form of the "planetary globe."

p. 44-45
...Schatzman, ... : "Finite or infinite, the universe and every fraction thereofis condemned to struggle against attraction by movement." This dromological vision of the universe promotes the exclusive importance of the Newtonain cosmology, the central role of the constant of gravity, as well as the centrality of the constant of the speed of light, the two essential constants of current physics. According to Schatzman, "The existence of gravity allows a difficult to escape from expansion. For every value of density in the universe there exists a minimum speed of expansion if it is to avoid collapsing in on itself. It is for this that the kinetic energy of movement compensates exactly the potential energy due to gravity."
   Strangely enough, the Newtonian cosmology involves the necessity of an explosive universe, or - after an initially dense state of contraction, and practically unlimited inertial confinement - space_time would have exploded in a spectacular, blinding light  preceding all particles of matter. All of this explains the "gravitational catastrophe" as the unique motor force of the cosmos.

p. 67-68
   Only the point remains, this absence, this suspension of physical dimensions that, unlike the atom, is never broken down since it is the ultimate reality, the figurative reference for all disintergrations, for all mathematical and morphological irruptions, and likewise for all lasting or momentary interruptions, since matter that is extended in space is also and simultaneously extended in time.
   Why do we stand amazed before the assumed properties of the black holes of outer space? ... These are the black dots of the line wherein begin and end our rational representations. As Bachelard slyly suggested, "The original sin of reason is that of having an origin." According to the most recent theories of the origin of origins, the principle of causality of the universe will not be a primary substance; it will be an accident: an absolute and necessary accident which rendered all subsequent substance relative and contingent. This original sin was to human nature.

p. 69
   According to Walter Benjamin, architecture, like cinema, "presents material to a simultaneous collective reception." This is what filmmaker Rene Clair meant when he claimed, "The art that is closest to cinema is architecture."
   This sudden confusion between the reception of images from a film projector and the perception of architectonic forms clearly indicates the importance of the transformation of the notion of "surface" and of "face-to-face" that gives way to the appearance of the interface. ... Matter, for example, like architecture, is no longer even what it pretends to be, since this matter is "light." It is the light of an emission, of an instantaneous projection that results in a reception rather than a perception.

p. 70
   We already know that all representation involves reduction of scale, proportion, content, or nature. But now reduction is rejected, for the simultaneous collective response acts as a ubiquitous eye that sees everything at once. ... Benjamin's earlier phrase installs architectural space in an "alter-world," and alter-world that cinematographic techniques, building on photographic antecedents, tried to conquer. These included the multiple superimposed images of Gance and Eisenstein, Painleve's rapid - and slow- motion filming, and the systematic use of new means of transport - such as camera rigs, trains, elevators, airplanes and so forth - by people  like Fromiaut, Vertov, Griffith, and Moholy-Nagy. We see that the material presented by architecture to the simultaneous reception is, in fact, the total matter of materialism itself- and especially of historical materialism - that gives its meaning and dimension to time and history, as well as to space.

p. 71
For Benjamin, the architectonic no longer operates among the registers of resistance, material and appearances; it occurs now instead within the order of transparency and the ubiquity of the instantaneous, both mythical qualities that predict those of the great political and social liberation: "By close-ups we inventory the world of things around us, emphasizing the hidden details of everyday objects and exploring commonplace sites under the genial guidance of the camera. If, on the one hand, the film helps us understand the necessities of our lives, it also leads us into an immense and previously unsuspected field of action. ... the film... abandoned in the midst of its far-flung debris, we take on adventurous expeditions. With the close-up, space expands; with slow-motion, movement takes on new dimensions. With film, we begin to see entirely new structures of matter."

p. 73
The office, which was once an other-place, an architectural aside, has now become a simple screen. In the bourgeois apartment, the space reserved for work and study has become the terminal of an office-viewfinder, in which the data of tele-information instantaneously appear and disappear as the three dimensions of constructed space are translated into the two dimensions of a screen, or better of an interface, which replaces more than the volume of the ancient dwelling, with its furniture and their arrangements, its contracts and blue-prints. This new arrangement also directs the more or less distant displacement of the occupant. This transmutation - where the inertial confinement of the new office has become the axis of gravity and the nodal center of techno-bureaucratic society - explains yet again the contemporary, post-industrial redeployment.

p. 84
We live today in an ever-growing fault between the promptness of the  broadcasts and our own capacity to grasp and measure the present moment. The question of modernity and post-modernity is superseded by that of reality and post-reality: we are living in a system of technological temporality, in which duration and material support have been supplanted as criteria by individual retinal and auditory instants.

p. 101
   Jorge-Luis Borges once remarked, "If something were unforgettable, we could never think of anything else."
   Essentially, memory - electronic or other - is a fixation. ... a momentary absence of consciousness, a picnoleptic interruption, is the existential prerequisite for time, and for the identity of time as lived by individuals. In a parallel manner, the absence of the dimension of the point, or punctum, that iconic cutting of the representation of physical dimensions, is the basis for the past.

p. 108
   "Form is the base that rises to the surface." This poetic definition of interface now extends beyond the aerodynamic mode of formation that emerges from the informational capacities of air plane electronics.

p. 127
   No longer a struggle for space, now time is interrupted.

p. 131-132
   In this interactive environment, the absence of extension is equivalent to the absence of delays. Time is so short between the first and second strike that it virtually abolishes any difference between unexpected attack and massive reprisals, ...

Lost Dimension by Paul Virilio (1991, Semiotext(e): NY)

"...it is to recall some traces some cities have left in me" by Victor Burgin

Some people just know what to say...
amazed by how Victor Burgin discribes the city.
well... it's not simply about city but also about our life, memory and relations to other people.
which is also a main theme of my work like lots of other people.
I can pretty much emphasize my emotions and thoughts with his words about city/relations with people.
besides reading this book evoked me to recall exactly how i felt and what i thought while i was traveling.

happy to find such a captivating work of his. :)

I haven't been able to clarify my thoughts neatly nor project it successfully onto my work yet.
however this book surely is giving me a positive influence to move forward and has stimulated me to initiate a new project!

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from a book, Some Cities by Victor Burgin. (1996, University of California Press: California)

p.7

Our relations with cities are like our relations with people. We love them, or are indifferent toward them. On our first day in a city is that is new to us, we go looking for the city. We go down this street, around that corner. We are aware of the faces of passers-by. But the city eludes us, and we become uncertain whether we are looking for a city, or for a person.

We cannot know a 'city', only those of its places we come to frequent. Aspects of a city may be revealed to us only as we leave it forever, just as people who have been intimates for many years may glimpse certain aspects of each other only in the moment they part. Remembering the cities we have left, we recall only certain times spent in certain places. Places we almost never think of when we are awake may repeatedly return in our dreams. The most persistent of these are places we did not choose - those of our childhood.

As adults, we have our own reasons for being in one city rather than another. Michel Leiris anguished: 'To be, or not to be. That is not the question which bothers me. To be, or not to be there. To be here, or to be elsewhere. That is the burning question so far as i am concerned.' For most of us, work settles the question. Part of my own work has been in response to invitations to make visual art works in and about cities. One recent invitation stated that the purpose of the commission was to have the invited artist 'leave a trace' in the city. This is not a book of such traces, a pocket edition of the works i have made. On occasions I describe a commission, to indicate what circumstances provoked the otherwise desultory displacements registered here. But my aim is less to record traces I have left in some cities than it is to recall some traces some cities have left in me.

Cities new to us are full of promise. Unlike promises we make to each other, the promise of the city can never be broken. But like the promise we hold for each other, neither can it be fulfilled.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo3535909.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7HyjtEQK1PYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=some+cities+burgin&source=bl&ots=WCVXhJNjrN&sig=eHjE64GQivLL-G38h8VmZaFHv28&hl=en&ei=PuxyTeysLIjLsgbV84yEDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

STRESS is everywhere

I found it unbelievably easy to get stressed from even a very tiny little disturbance.
not sure whether i should find comfort from learning the fact that I'm not the only one who feels vulnerable about being stressed.
been learning small tactics to relieve stress. hopefully to have some progress soon.
below is a quote about 'stress' from a book, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education.

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The term 'stress' is so widely used that it has no meaning outside engineering and there is a free for all in attempts to define it. The concept is free floating and is now routinely applied to anything that people feel is unpleasant, or unwelcome. (Patmore 2006; Wainwright and Caplan 2002).

In Patmore's account of what people call 'stress', by far the biggest group of states or attitudes in her list refer directly to people's 'feeling'. The list could be doubled by adding less direct mentions of emotion:

Feelings

feeling abandoned; feeling appalled; feeling brow-beaten; feeling crestfallen; feeling cut up; feeling demeaned; feeling disheartened; feeling disrespected; feeling downtrodden; feeling driven; feeling frantic; feeling hell-bent; feeling ill-used; feeling insulted; feeling neglected; feeling nerve-racked; feeling overwhelmed; feeling overwrought; feeling paralysed; feeling petrified; feeling rattled; feeling scorned; feeling sickened; feeling stricken; feeling stunned; feeling suicidal; feeling tainted; feeling threatened; feeling thwarted; feeling trigger-happy; feeling troubled; feeling unlucky; feeling unmanned; feeling unnerved; feeling useless; feeling victimised; feeling worthless; feeling wounded

(Thirty-eight of 277 'internal' states and conditions to which the term 'stress' has been applied: Angela Patmore, The Truth About Stress, 2006: 392) 

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D (2009). The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. Oxon: Routledge

'being' vs 'having'

CSI LV season 11, ep. 5

why's 'having' become so important?
and impact on everyday life with a huge influence?
'having' certainly brings a pleasure and fulfills satisfaction onto certain extend.
though there is no such thing as 'enough' and we will eventually desire more of it soon again.
then what's the point of 'having' if it only makes us to crave even more rather than giving comfort or relief.
why can't we just let it go and give up on 'having'? and find happiness from experiencing a life and being oneself.
the problem is giving up on 'having' requires tremendous effort because 'losing' which you have to face when you give up 'having' is in fact rather fearsome experience and makes you feel insecure.

A few days ago, someone told me "everyday is a struggle."
very true!

에리히프롬의 책은 고등학교 입학 전 필수도서 목록에 있었다. 분명 읽고 독후감도 써서 제출은 했었지만... 당시에는 내용에 대한 이해는 없이 간단한 내용 요약에만 급급 했었다.

사실 무슨 소리인지 당최 알수가 없었으니...
지금 다시 읽음 조금은 이해가 가려나?

truth is...

loving it! hehe

found the book, Travel Photography
at a book shop last weekend.
been reading it since then.
wouldn't say it's a must read kind of book.
but giving me good tips to take photos
in different situ.

more importantly,
it reminds me
how much i love these two,
'travel and filming'.
better make it useful!  ;-)

where am i going next!?
can't wait!!!

Lack Of Sleep Doubles Risk Of Death, But So Can Too Much Sleep

According to the research as below, someone like me who sleeps 4 or 5 hours a day for a few days and then sleeps more than 12 hours all at once will die at very early age? 

gotta fix my sleeping habit!

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2007) — Researchers from the University of Warwick, and University College London, have found that lack of sleep can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. However they have also found that point comes when too much sleep can also more than double the risk of death.


In research to be presented to the British Sleep Society, Professor Francesco Cappuccio from the University of Warwick’s Warwick Medical School will show the results of a study of how sleep patterns affected the mortality of 10,308 civil servants in the “Whitehall II study.”

Those who had cut their sleeping from 7h to 5 hours or less faced a 1.7 fold increased risk in mortality from all causes, and twice the increased risk of death from a cardiovascular problem in particular.

Curiously the researchers also found that too much sleep also increased mortality. They found that those individuals who showed an increase in sleep duration to 8 hours or more a night were more than twice as likely to die as those who had not changed their habit, however, predominantly from non-cardiovascular diseases.

“In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around 7 hours per night is optimal for health and a sustained reduction may predispose to ill-health.”