Notes and Notices

Haiku for 2020

2020-12-18T10:40:00.001-08:00

I've never written a haiku in my life, but it seems that for a year as long as this one feels, an abbreviated version of this year is appropriate. A longer rumination will probably come soon.

~*C

Small bodies blowing
bubbles, go far, far away
as we stay inside

Fear and confusion
collide in the pandemic
while we wash, wash, wash

Chalk marks meet pavement
Scribbles of dreams still going
As the world rages

Faces just on screens
No hugs, kisses, or visits
Only showing, telling

Sequestered in rooms
We work, heedless of children
At arms and at play

Death counts are rising
While our families are safe
Privilege showing

But people persist
Amid protest, terror, strife
Waiting patiently

The new year begins
Bubbles blowing in the wind
Freedom feels so near

A stay in my childhood house

2017-02-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

I've been under the radar for quite some time. And part of that is because I've been away from the country. At the start of the new year, I found myself in an unexpected place.... among my decade-old things, from before I had even been married.

If you've ever returned to your childhood home, you would know the strange feelings it evokes. There is a sense of coming home, but also being a stranger in foreign territory. This is true especially when confronted with your childhood room. It is a room that has moved on despite you not being present. Some objects might still remain (if you're lucky), but subtle shifts in placement tell you that it's all been tinkered with even as you weren't looking.

I slept in my old room for about a month. After all that time, it still felt a little odd to walk around among my old things, catching ghosts of old memories in every corner. That, to me, is the power of place. Even as it changes, it still retains its mystical quality to bring you back in time.

I found this poem and I thought the poet, Eric Ormsby beautifully captured the feeling.

Childhood House
by Eric Ormsby

After our mother died, her house, our
childhood house, disclosed
all its deterioration to our eyes.
While living she had screened us from, or we hadn’t seen,
the termite-nibbled floorboards and the rotting beams;
the wounded stucco hidden by shrubbery; the frayed,
unpredictable writing and the clanking labor
of the hot-water line into the discolored
rub; the fixtures in the dining room
skewed and malfunctioning.
I remember thinking with a
swarm of confusion that this was the true state
of our childhood now: this house of dilapidated girders
eaten away at the base. Somehow I had assumed
that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself,
and that what we had once possessed remained our possession
forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that
memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence,
flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes
all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters
unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but,
instead, speeds away from us backwards terrifically
until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered
wall, the stones are friable, crack and sift down,
and we could cry at the swiftness of that velocity
if our astonished eyes had time.

A new year...again

2017-01-26T18:12:00.000-08:00

When it comes to the new year, I never get to post right on time. Good thing there are many "new year" opportunities to do so.

There's the traditional Roman calendar new year, which most of us celebrate. There's Chinese New Year, which is coming up tomorrow. There's even Nowruz, the Persian new year on March 21 this year.

In short, there are many opportunities to begin anew again, perhaps even (gasp) every day.

This past year, my family celebrated it a little differently from our usual ruckus in Manila. Instead of noise and firecrackers, we greeted the new year with a little solemnity in a Buddhist temple. All of my family, including grandkids trekked through Fukuoka's streets at night. We looked like a merry band of wanderers, as we navigated the byways of Japan. Then, we lined up with others inside a smaller, less popular Buddhist temple called Enkakuji. We waited to ring a bell once to thank the year that's gone before and to pray for the new one. It's a practice they call joya no kane, literally the bells of the remaining night.

After you rang the bell, you would then be served amazake, the warm sweet non alcoholic drink. With that in your hand, you could talk in hushed tones with your family or simply take in the rest of the night, with the bells tolling in the background.

I liked this kind of celebration. It was devoid of the usual gaiety, which can sometimes be forced and instead it was more contemplative. It gave all of us a chance to think about what really did go before and what else we could do in the coming year. I'm still figuring out my answer, but that night was a good place to start.

Happy new year, everyone...whichever one you celebrate!

The Internet in real life

2016-10-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

You and I are living on a different dimension every time we step up to a computer. The internet is a place that isn't tactile, yet has created profound change in the way we live. We're used to thinking of the internet as a place, Other Than Here.

But, in reality, the internet can still be a real place. It could even be in the vicinity of Wilshire and Grand in downtown LA's Financial District, in a building called One Wilshire. Angelenos would most likely recognize the place as they emerge from the 7th and Metro station. Its big block letters announce One Wilshire with no argument.

Courtesy of Center for Land Use Interpretation

Yet, this isn't just a building, New York Times reveals that it "is one of the world’s largest data-transfer centers — tenants include network, cloud and information-technology providers — and serves as a major West Coast terminus for trans-Pacific fiber-optic cables."

Philadelphia-based photographer David Greer captured this building on film, and many other across the country, the obscure, anonymous buildings that house what we know as the internet.

What else make up the bones of this ghostly ether we call the internet? Check out Greer's photos on New York Times. For a tour of One Wilshire, check out the Center for Land Use Interpretation's online exhibit.

Living trees as buildings

2016-10-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

It's not only glass and steel that can become buildings, so can trees. When I talked to Vancouver architect Michael Green a few years ago, he was getting ready to break ground on North America's tallest wood building. He says that because of the size of trees required to make these buildings, they are actually quite fireproof.

But, trees are natural building materials, even when we don't cut them down. There are people in the world that make bridges out of them. Now, Barry Cox of New Zealand has made a church by training semi-mature trees around an iron frame.

Cox, owner of a tree moving service, used his knowledge to grow a church. The enterprising tree-lover says that he used live cut-leaf alder trees for the roof canopy and copper sheen for the walls, as well as camellia black tie, Norway maple, and pyramidal white cedar.

What if we stop looking at trees as a resource only when cut down? What else could they be?

Here's a video of the Tree Church:

h/t ASLA

Changing the city for our children

2016-10-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Since having my son, I've noticed how many parents opt to take their children to indoor playgrounds rather than spend time outside. One indoor playground even touts, "we keep children healthy by making fitness fun," as if our children don't naturally know how to have fun themselves.

I must admit, it is hard to relax as a parent, when the city seems to unwelcoming to its twenty-pound residents. Just outside our door is a busy street full of cars and trucks zooming past every few minutes. Across us, the sidewalk suddenly disappears, making it harder to push a stroller to your destination. The situation becomes even more frightening knowing that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for children aged 2 to 14.

It's not just Los Angeles that has made childhood in the city daunting. A UC Davis report says childhood in the modern age has become over-controlled and over-structured, which has led to children spending less time outdoors (including the streets) and more time in these overly safe, manicured spaces. As a result "children are increasingly disappearing from the urban scene."

That's a sad state of affairs, especially since I know my son loves to go outside, to explore and to figure out something new in the streets surrounding us.

Exploring the sidewalk. Photo by Carren Jao.

Oh look! Our neighbors introduced us to a "rock garden" a few blocks away. Photo by Carren Jao.

It would have been easy to sigh and say, "That's the way the city is," but Curbed LA editor Alissa Walker's post reminded that there is a lot we can do to change the city back in favor of our children. We can encourage 20 mph limits on the street (the speed where survival rate is 95 percent). We can support segregated bicycle lanes that make bike riding easier. Most especially for Angelenos, we can support Measure M, a half-cent sales tax increase that would go toward making our rail and bus systems even more usable. It also includes improvement on bike and pedestrian infrastructure like

fixing potholes or painting crosswalks.

In the meantime, we can all keep the end-goal in mind by taking our time and walking with our children outside or even taking a bus ride with them. As Walker beautifully writes:

... the time I spend with my daughter getting around LA without a car is a different kind of quality time—it’s specifically reserved for me to experience the city with her. A few extra minutes waiting for a bus isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a time to slow down, admire murals, and count pigeons. (Besides, she’ll let me know when I’ve walked too fast past something she wanted to see.)

In a car, no matter where we go, the experience never changes: I’m sitting in traffic, staring out one window, while she stares out another window in the backseat...

Wouldn't it be great to do more with your children than strap them into a car seat and then step into the driver's seat facing away from them?

Read more of Walker's thoughts on raising children car-free and the solutions on the horizon for LA's multimodal future.

What my child has taught me about urban design

2016-10-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

I love walks, but in the walking/exploring department, I think my son has me beat. He lives for walks.

In the year or so that I've had my son, I must have walked thousands of steps, trying to keep up with the him. When he was smaller, and less mobile, walks were a perfect way for me to get out and take in the sunshine, while introducing him to a little bit more of the world. Now that he's moving more, he's become his own explorer.

While accompanying my son on these walks, I've learned a few things about living in the city myself. Here's what I've picked up:

Walk, rest, repeat.
My son loves to walk outside. He does it incessantly. Since he needs company, I find myself dragged outside, even on days when I'd rather not.

Our walks have become so routine that I've started to see the same people out sharing the streets with me. At first, I shared a few nods and greetings with these strangers, but as the months went by, and a sense of familiarity settled on both parties, we began to have longer conversations.

Soon, it didn't feel as if we were walking in intimidating new territories; it felt as if we were extending the range of our home base. Every few blocks, a familiar person or pet came into view and we'd fall into easy how-do-you-do conversations.

I realized, this is how neighborhoods used to be made. Neighborhoods aren't just blocks of similar homes. They were places where people interacted on a daily basis and thus created a sense of belonging.

No walks? Just hang
Walks aren't the only way to get to know your community, so is staying in one open place.

My son's favorite hangouts are usually in front of multi-family staircases, or a particularly leafy, patch of sidewalk. As the minutes ticked by, we'd see neighbors walking their pets, people cycling or other children taking their adults outside. It gave me the perfect opportunity to say "hi."

A little mess is a good thing
Cities love clean, manicured spaces. It's our instinct to keep things organized, but to be engaging, sometimes you need a little clutter.

Falling leaves are nature's toys. Photo by: Carren Jao

Before he learned to walk, one of our favorite activities was simply wiping a leaf on the concrete and listening for that low scratching sound. Or throwing pinecones in the air, like makeshift balls.

Now that he's walking, it's a new opportunity to explore the same place in a different way. A few days ago, I set him down by a patch of dried leaves. I stomped on a few, which produced some satisfying "crackling" sounds. With this, my delighted little one promptly plodded all around the sidewalk, crunching leaves as he went.

Variation adds interest
Children love texture, and so do adults. We love varied environments. It's great to walk by a block and find a Zen rock garden on one hand and then a grassy spot with a sign in the other.

The same principle goes for heights. My son loves stairs and little overlooks, because of the new sights at that elevation (I think.)

When we're looking to design something for the public space, it's great to have more than one kind of texture and color in a small space. We've all walked through large concrete parking lots and those are never fun to navigate, right?

Have you walked with a child? What did they teach you about the city?

A Life Lesson from Bill Cunningham

2016-07-07T09:14:00.001-07:00

Bill Cunningham at Fashion Week photographed by Jiyang Chen via Wikipedia

Bill Cunningham died a few weeks ago. I never knew the man, only of him, but nevertheless his life is a one lesson in the most difficult challenge of all: staying true to who you are.

Everyone knows Bill took photographs. He photographed socialites, downtown kids, street dancers. He trained his 35-millimeter camera, put his energies on something everyone had previously dismissed, and became a voice in fashion.

But I didn’t particularly care what he took photos of, I cared about the manner in which he did it: in uniform. Donning a blue French worker’s jacket, khaki pants, and black sneakers day after day, he chased after his images, often astride a bicycle.

He wasn’t a Chase Jarvis, the century’s poster boy of success in photography. (Jarvis is a photographer turned entrepreneur who worked with name brands, wields an impressive online platform and has a web series to his name.) He was simply Bill, a man who slept in a single-size cot and, until 2010, showered in a shared bathroom, and then went out on the streets to photograph.
He went about his business and he did it, in Frank Sinatra’s immortal words, his way, without any excuses about his looks or his taste in clothing.

It was a bold choice, at least in my eyes.

Image is at such a premium nowadays. Celebrities have stylists that ensure every piece of clothing they wear telegraphs the right message. Us regular folks have to settle for our best friend’s opinion. All of us browse magazines and websites to make sure each accessory, piece of clothing, even the way our hair is coifed all contribute to a visual of what we want people to think we are. Bill, it seemed, was above all that. He just was.

Perhaps that is the quality that drew most people to him. His integrity. He lived a life without doubt. He lived with the utmost courage to be himself. He was a puzzle, shooting beautiful, interesting, aha people without himself wanting to be them.

Bill will most likely be most remembered for his photographs, his yearbook of New Yorkers on the streets, but his most important lesson for me was his steadfastness in being himself, in what made him happiest.

If only more people would be so wise.

The Longest Shortest Time

2015-12-10T11:15:00.001-08:00

I've been incommunicado for many months now. Those who know me well know it's because I've entered into a new chapter of my life: motherhood. While it hasn't been all rainbows and roses, the experience, as many harrowing ones often do, has taught me a lot about myself and my own capacity as a human being.

Being a parent, especially in the early days, is very, very, very difficult. Now, when I see moms and dads in the park or in the grocery, I silently think, "What heroes, they all are." The experience isn't always pretty either. In fact, it's probably 87% not pretty, but we're surviving anyway.

One way we do that is by finding a community of people that will remind us that it's okay not to be picture perfect. I've been fortunate enough to find that in the actual real, people friends I've made, the mommy groups I've joined, but also this amazing podcast that will re-launch in January.

Those who need a dose of reality in parenting, tune in to: the Longest Shortest Time, "a bedside companion for parents who want to hear in the middle of the night (or day—what’s the difference, really?) that they are not alone." It's a show that's featured single motherhood, a mom who has an unusual way of putting her child to bed, one about the emotional pitfalls of breastfeeding. The show is real in a way that not many parenting outlets are. There is no judgement (which is refreshing as well.) One of my favorite episodes is this one with 99% Invisible's Roman Mars, talking about raising twin boys. He says of the experience, "Being a parent of multiples is like the worst thing that can happen to you that you wouldn't wish away if you had a wish you could wish away. It's that hard but you'd never want it to be different." Even if you're not raising twins, I bet it feels that way too.

To this, the show's creator Hilary Frank writes, "Motherhood is not always giggles and hand-clapping and learning to walk. But things do change and often they get better. And the things you’re going through, even if they’re not in the books, they happen to other people, too. In this blog and podcast you can hear other moms—and sometimes dads—tell stories about their longest shortest times. And maybe, in your darkest hours (both literally and figuratively), you’ll hear a voice that reminds you that this part is only the beginning of the rest of your life with your new little person."

Read to the show's dramatic beginnings and listen to the podcast.

Boring Streets Breed Unhappiness

2015-09-02T09:33:00.003-07:00

While walking Los Angeles (and other cities), I often take time to think about how I'm reacting to the city around me. Even in L.A., different neighborhoods leave me feeling happy and energized or listless and bored.

Here's a great piece on Aeon about just how different street designs can affect the people that make use of it. Truly great streets really enhance our lives both physically and even mentally. Here's what Aeon has to say:

Merrifield and Danckert suggest that exposure to even a brief, boring experience is sufficient to change the brain and body’s chemistry in such a way as to generate stress. It might seem extreme to say that a brief encounter with a boring building could be seriously hazardous to one’s health, but what about the cumulative effects of immersion, day after day, in the same oppressively dull surroundings?

This question has long interested psychologists, especially after the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb’s discovery in 1962 that rats who lived in enriched, more stimulating environments were markedly superior intellectual beings to laboratory rats living in more spartan surroundings. Hebb’s enriched rats could solve more complicated maze problems in shorter times than their less-fortunate labmates. Later work carried out by the psychologist Mark Rosenzweig at the University of California at Berkeley showed that such enriched rats were not only superior performers, they also had a thicker neocortex with more richly developed synaptic connections between brain cells. The brain mechanisms responsible for the enrichment effects discovered by Hebb, Rosenzweig and many other researchers are so fundamental that it would be extraordinary if these principles did not apply to us as well.

Next time you're out for a stroll, see how you're feeling.

This grocery for ugly food is good for us

2015-07-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

The world will be a hungry one come 2050, so the myth goes, says Jonathan Foley over at Ensia. Foley says that the myth usually goes like this: The world’s population will grow to 9 billion by mid-century, putting substantial demands on the planet’s food supply. To meet these growing demands, we will need to grow almost twice as much food by 2050 as we do today. And that means we’ll need to use genetically modified crops and other advanced technologies to produce this additional food. It’s a race to feed the world, and we had better get started.

Foley says this myth is just that, a solution created when all the information is not yet available. By doing simple math, he points out that we would only need an increase of 28 percent in food production to meet future food needs. The reason why we would require double is because of increased demand from developing countries such as China and India.

While the prospect of increased world hunger is frightening, the answer isn't in GMOs. It's changing our diets to be less meat-intensive. It's decreasing food waste. There is more than one solution.

Noemi Sosa shops at Daily Table, a nonprofit supermarket in Dorchester, Mass. Jesse Costa/WBUR

One of the most exciting for me is this one from Trader Joe's ex-president, who opened a store that sells aging food and cheap meals. Why would anyone want to buy there? Because "it's selling canned vegetables two for $1 and a dozen eggs for 99 cents. Potatoes are 49 cents a pound. Bananas are 29 cents a pound."

It's food donated by donated by food wholesalers and markets. It's all perfectly good food, just that it's not pretty, it's getting too ripe, or any of the myriad of reasons why food doesn't get on the grocery stall. Rather than land in the dumpster, this food is getting to where it will be appreciated.

Good news to me, you?

Navigating without street names

2015-07-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Making your way around the Philippines is a crazy prospect sometimes. We have street names, but often they've been changed into something else by another government altogether. Lots of streets were formerly named something else. Not only that, but little alleyways and one-way areas, make tourists vulnerable to tickets from cops and makes Google maps practically useless. Friends rely more on apps such as Waze to get around.

Apparently, the Philippines isn't the only place with such a freeflowing concept of direction. Beirut and India share the same DNA, according to the Guardian.

The crowded cityscape of Beirut: ‘There’s usually a very clear order; you just have to understand it.’ Photograph: Karim Mostafa

As a result residents like Bahi Ghubril has created what is basically a crowdsourced Google maps, culled from government data and on the street conversations:

Ghubril went around each neighbourhood in the city systematically, from Dahiyeh in the south to Dbaye on the eastern coast. His first stop, he says, was always the municipal office collecting taxes and fees from local businesses, since they would know the names of all landmarks.

“Then I continued, asking shopkeepers and people sitting on chairs on the pavements.

Ten years later, imagine how many conversations have fed into the data we have.”
Ghubril’s wayfinding mission soon turned into Zawarib, a company taking its name from the Arabic word for narrow alleyways. It has grown to publish all kinds of atlases and maps – including coverage of Beirut’s NGOs and its informal bus network.

“That data was already available from the ministry of transportation, but they never thought it would be useful,” Ghubril explains. “We mapped the buses – but then, of course, you have to find out exactly where to catch them.”

In India, "the notion of location...is highly social and visual, relying on memory and experience. “Addresses are very particular, with detailed references and directions like ‘nearby’, ‘opposite’ and ‘in between’, because roads often have no signs.” Instead they tend to take creative, often literal, names like 'The Road with the Oak Tree.'"

It might be intimidating to navigate such streets, but I think it's also a bit enthralling. Unlike other predictable cities. These places serve as opportunities for adventure, for the city to tell you what has happened there. In a way, it's a more human way to navigate. Instead of cardinal directions, we orient ourselves based on the things around us: trees, billboards, distinctive buildings; stumbling onto little, precious city secrets like that wonderful takeout place, or that cute shop, along the way.

Read the Guardian article here.

Badjao architecture has to teach us about resilience

2015-07-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

We normally look to academics and engineers to solve our problems in building during climate change, but this post from Arch Daily reminded me that some gems lie within.

Badjao child rowing near coast. Image © idome via Shutterstock

The Badjao are sea-living people. I grew up with their image in my brain thanks to a elementary civics class. Their homes on stilts seems fragile things in the face of the wide ocean that they choose to live within, but it turns out, their lifestyle has a lot of lessons to offer for those of us trying to figure out how to live within a new norm.

Temporary construction in Southeast Asian ocean. Image © asnida via Shutterstock

In the post, the writer points out how the Badjao build within nature's whims. Like Buddhists, they do not hold onto the concrete, but are willing to let go of their creations to rebuild again and again and again.

Most of us build to last for a lifetime, but what if, like the Badjao, we learn to accept that we are fragile against nature, and instead learn to live within its rhythms?

Read more about the Badjao architecture here.

Why Japanese bathrooms are awesome

2015-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

The bathroom is the most intimate place I can think of, and the Japanese have surpassed expectations when it comes to its design. At first, I thought it was just toilets, but this adorable video shows me that Japanese people can be amazingly thoughtful when it comes to spaces and amenities. I'd love to have a bathroom like this in my home, wouldn't you?

High Heel History

2015-06-30T11:38:00.003-07:00

High heels are the symbol of sexy, at least to many men and women, but it's also killer on one's feet. I've never been much for them, but they do have psychological effects on its wearer, be it man or woman.

Did you know historically, men and women wore heels? This Quartz article notes:

...some 2,000 years ago male Greco-Roman actors wore thick, cork-soled platforms to exaggerate their heights as they portrayed gods and royalty, bringing to mind the more recent adage, “the higher the heel, the closer to God.”

Persian cavalrymen brought heels into the West in the last millennia, influencing 16th century Venice. Venitians then took this heel and created chopines that ranged from 6 to 20 inches (!) King Louis XIV also enjoyed a silk covered heel.

But now, the heel is mostly a feminine fashion accessory and one that's starting to separate us, as my friend Meghan Cleary notes in her Boston Globe article. What was once something to be proud of, is something that's now forced on the female of the species. In response, wearing flats is now seen as an act of resistance.

“It may seem somewhat overblown to declare the seemingly trivial act of wearing flats to a formal event as an act of resistance, but the potential impact is truly significant. After all, it’s not that long ago that women were forbidden from wearing pants in public,” says Juliet Williams, an associate professor of gender studies and associate dean of social sciences at UCLA. “By this logic, the expectation (if not formal compulsion) that women wear high heels may be seen as one more shackle that needs to be cast off if women are ever to truly compete, toe-to-comfortable-toe, with men.”

Isn't it strange that what was once an accessory that brought us closer to God has become a chain around the female ankle? It is after all just a heel, but what symbolism it carries depending on its context. So the next time you try on a pair at a department store, think about the message you're telegraphing to your public.

Manila then and now

2015-06-24T12:20:00.005-07:00

Famed Manila tour guide, artist and provocateur Carlos Celdran once commented to me that Manila is "sincere and it's real. It's not the most gorgeous city in the world. World War II, poverty and mass commercialization have eroded much of it's charm. But the city is very open. Love it or leave it. Manila won't give you an apology. It's appeal isn't easily revealed but if you can't find beauty and poetry here, you won't find it anywhere."

It's hard for me to imagine a Manila that is the Pearl of the Pacific. All I saw of Manila was its grunginess, its dirt, the consequences of something as far removed from my lifetime as World War II. This Google Cultural Institute tour does a lot to remind me that this city that I've called home for three decades once held so much beauty and promise--and it can once again be that. Its photos capture more of the city's lost legacy of grand architecture than words can. So, in anticipation of the Philippines' "Independence Day" from the Americans this July 4th, here's a good overview of Manila way back when and now.

What Marina Abramovic Taught Me About Labor

2015-06-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Marina Abramovic, called the "grandmother of performance art," knows endurance and pain. Throughout her career, she has subjected her body to public scrutiny.

In Rhythm 10 (1973), she recorded herself hopskipping a sharp knife across the spaces in between her fingers, eventually cutting herself multiple times. Once she finished, she took the recording and tried to recreate that same heart-stopping movement, breaths, bruises, cuts and all. In Relation in Space (1976), she ran into her male performance partner again and again, violently, supposedly mixing male and female energy until there was only 'that self' left.

Her most famous work is perhaps The Artist is Present (2010), where she sat in a chair stationed at the Museum of Modern Art, mostly unmoving for three months, eight hours a day. It may seem like an easy task, but as anyone who had to sit still can attest, it is grueling. We already know sitting can kill the body, Abramovic's feat simply reinforces that. But that's not the point of her work.

In the 2012 documentary of the same name, we learn that The Artist is Present is about slowing time, opening oneself to the person sitting across the artist. By focusing just on the person that sat in front of Abramovic, she allows herself to be a mirror for all the thoughts and emotions for those that sat with her. By the smiles and tears her piece engendered, Abramovic's piece was particularly moving.

I was transfixed. Each frame revealed just how many people were lined up to be seen, really seen. It showed me that too many people feel invisible.

I was also drawn to Abramovic's commitment to her piece. Despite sheer pain that I imagine only got worse day by day, as she sat in the chair motionless, she persisted. She could have stopped the performance at any point, but she continued to the very end. Indeed, as I watched the documentary, I could see her struggle with the pain. Her eyes were bleary, her gaze unsteady. It was only her will keeping her upright. Toward the end of the three months, she admits, "This is about the limit, even for me."

When asked why she did not draw away from the pain, she said in an accented Yugoslavian voice, "There is pain, but the pain is a kind of keeping secret. The moment you really go through the door of pain, you enter into another state of mind. This feeling of beauty and unconditional love and this feeling of 'there is not border' between your body and environment. You start having this incredible feeling of lightness and harmony with yourself. It feels holy. I can't explain. That's when others start feeling that something is different."

As I heard her words, my mind conjured up an image of another long moment of pain that almost every woman would experience: labor.

Labor, the long interminable period before a new life arrives in this world, can last anywhere from six hours to days (at least that's what I've heard from friends). It comes with pain, but pain that is productive to say the least. Though Abramovic has never birthed a child, her words surely applied to all women who have experienced what it is to labor.

Pain, while not pleasant, does come with rewards. It may seem ludicrous to some, but its physical effect also produces a kind of bliss. Based on Abramovic's words, it also helps erase the hesitant, thinking part of the human mind, forcing us to rely purely on instinct. I only hope I can be as ruminative when my turn at the metaphorical artist's chair is up.

Catch The Artist is Present on Netflix. You can watch her struggle with her art piece and the pain that comes with it around the 1:18:00 mark.

Urban is?

2015-06-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

We've all have probably heard the statistic that more than half the world's population live in urban areas, but did you know that "urban" doesn't really have a formal definition. What defines cities and non-cities?

Nothing, it seems except arbitrary population figures. In 23 countries, 2,000 inhabitants is enough to qualify as a city. In 21 others, 5,000 residents is enough. Given that figure, Los Angeles suddenly becomes even more of a megalopolis than I had first surmised. As the Sustainable Cities article notes, 2,000 people is about enough to host one large office building such as Facebook's Menlo Park campus. Should Facebook be designated its own little fiefdom then?

Facebook's Menlo Campus via Quartz

Lounging spaces inside Facebook's campus via WSJ

A flower mural inside Facebook's campus via WSJ

It's interesting to see even as populations are growing around the world, we still have no definition for the most basic things. Soon, we will need it. Urban is a key characteristic and might soon be included as a Sustainable Development Goal. Classification as urban also has consequences. Those that fall within its confines need to know how they affect the larger ecosystem.

Do you live in a city? What makes you say so? Read more about defining what urban means here.

Words we use

2015-06-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Our words are telling. They speak of what we've observed, experienced, and internalized. In his forthcoming book, "Landmarks," author Robert Macfarlane poetically points out how some words that stem from experiencing the outdoors are fading away, in favor of a more digital experience.

Wildflowers found at Acrosanti, Arizona. Photo by: Carren Jao

He writes:

Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for different trees and creatures. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place.

It is a sobering thought. As a soon-to-be parent, I wonder if my children will be able to appreciate the physical, as they would the digital. I know they would at home in the midst of 1s and 0s, but will the visceral be as appealing? Can I find ways for them to fall in love with the natural?

I'm predicting a lot of visits to the wonderful Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, whose expansion I covered a while back. But what else can I do? Any tips?

You can read the rest of Macfarlane's essay here.

"Merchants of Doubt" shines the light on lazy thinking

2015-06-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

When I left the darkened movie theater showing Robert Kenner’s latest documentary “Merchants of Doubt” is based on the 2010 non-fiction book, I realized there is one valuable lesson my child would need to learn--to face the truth with courage and to do something about it.

In Kenner's documentary, many lobbyists and (sadly) scientists play on their audience's fear simply by casting doubt on an uncomfortable truth. They go to such extent that they even fund supposedly unbiased "citizen groups" such as Citizens for Fire Safety (backed by the three largest makers of flame retardants in the world) to back their case.

This doubt-casting technique provides that tiny, precious foothold one needs to avoid an issue altogether. It works scarily well.

Big corporate funders have been doing this forever, it seems. In the 50s, Big Tobacco scientific studies figured out that there were conclusive links between smoking and lung cancer, heart, disease and other diseases, yet their official press stance was that it "could or could not cause harmful effects. We don't know enough." I'm just paraphrasing, but the same statements crop up again today, in an age when global temperatures are rising and we're seeing a lot of anomalous weather.

While watching, I asked myself, "What would we lose by ensuring that we do something earlier rather than later?" Nothing. Corporate interests would lose millions, but as regular people trying to make the best decision for our future survival, we would lose nothing. We would, in effect, be playing it safe by acting as if climate change is real. Yet, we continue to talk ourselves into doing nothing, simply because it is an easier pill to swallow.

With that, I realized, I would like my child to be the kind of person who can think for himself and to act based on his findings. I would like him to realize, just like Chris Hardwick of the Nerdist that we "are warden rather than the prisoner of [our ]emotions. The interesting thing about our minds is that if we don't actively seize control of them, they default to autopilot." His message is beautifully illustrated here at Zen Pencils.

Yes, it is easier to do nothing, to let your immediate society dictate your beliefs, but at what cost? Our survival, our planet, how about our simple human dignity?

Towards a more pluralistic view of pregnancy

2015-06-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

When people find out that my husband and I are expecting, the three most common questions posed to me after the customary round of congratulations are:

Are you excited? (Answer: Yes, but also a little intimidated.)
How are you feeling? (For the most part, good.)
Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?

Just like the perfunctory "How are you?" question, these questions and the answers that accompany them have almost become rote. Every parent-to-be probably has the same answers tucked in his or her back pocket. This is why Andrew Solomon's latest piece for New York Times magazine was such a refreshing read.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Pecino// Flickr

Though it focused on the emergent of reproductive psychiatry, particularly, the darker side of pregnancy--dealing with depression while gestating--Solomon also managed to make the issue relevant for all women whose bodies were changing daily and whose lives would be irrevocably changed. He writes, "We should strive for a more pluralistic idea of pregnancy — for one that accommodates a wide range of moods and attitudes."

At many points, I found myself nodding in agreement and hoping more readers get it. Here are more pithy points of discussion he brought up:

Even in our increasingly egalitarian society, mothers feel the weight of parenthood’s identity shift more profoundly than fathers do; they reconceive who they are, and often do so with both delight and frustration.

How can anyone not be swept up by the momentousness of producing a child who will give her life purpose? The myth of the pregnant mother who is high on hormones has had considerable staying power. Something sentimental in us likes the notion that the physical discomfort of pregnancy is outweighed by the thrill of nurturing a new life within your own body.

In dozens of interviews, I found that each woman had to invent this new identity for herself. A woman cannot know what motherhood is like until she does it — and once she does it, she cannot resign from the program. During pregnancy, she tries to understand who she will be when, as is sometimes said, a piece of her heart lives outside her body. Many mothers experience angst about the persistent admonition to expectant parents that nothing is ever going to be the same. Some imagine this vaunted change as a sentence of doom. Insofar as motherhood is a new language, it is hard to gain fluency before the child has been born.

We still have retrograde ideas about how pregnant women should feel, and we need to revise them — not only for depressed women but for all women. Pregnancy is portrayed and talked about almost exclusively as a time of rapture and fulfillment. But it involves a major shift in identity, a whole new conception of self that can lead to depression and anxiety. Change — even positive change — is stressful, and in this way pregnancy can constitute a kind of elective trauma.

Read Solomon's full piece here.

Buses need better branding...and more

2015-05-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm a fan of public transportation, not only because I am saved the hassle of being behind the wheel, but also because I'm treated to the sight of real people sharing this city with me. It's an experience I shared with Zocalo Public Square a few years back.

I love buses, subways, and trains equally, which is why I was surprised to read this New York Times piece a few months ago, talking about the need for better bus marketing to save on costs to build rails. The article read:

“Riding the bus carries a ‘shame factor,’ ” the researchers found. “Most of the choice riders would not consider using it, or if they did, they would feel ashamed and keep it a secret.”

I'm proud of being a bus rider and I try to take it everywhere it's convenient to go, but I think researchers may be off the mark on this comment. I admit, buses may not have as much prestige as rail lines, but it's probably because of its dependability. I'm more comfortable taking the subway or train because more often it also comes with infrastructure to tell me when a train is coming and how soon it's going to be here. Most of all, it's train tracks assure me that this indeed is the right path I'm taking.

The fear of being late or lost is a constant anxiety. Waiting for a bus at a lonely stop that offers little shade and only a dinky sign is never re-assuring.

This is why I think Los Angeles's Orange Line is such a success. (A Los Angeles Times article says it's one of the busiest routes in the Valley, carrying about 30,000 people every day.) Despite it being a bus line, the Orange Line is unlike other buses. It has its own dedicated lane. It offers a lot of shade and seating. It also tells riders when the next two or three buses will be arriving. In short, it's basically like a rail line, but without the cost.

A recent report says the Orange Line's popularity may mean it's time to convert it to rail, which would cost $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion and take two to three years to complete. I might be missing something here, but I think the bus lane works perfectly fine. I would agree to upgrades like larger buses or added overpasses for faster bus crossings, which would cost up to $350 million, or less than a third of the cost of replacing the route with rail.

Rather than spending money on expensive rail conversions, buses can take a lesson or two from the Orange Line and offer better service and amenities. I do agree with the New York Times article author though, the buses could stand to have better advertising than car ads (which I have personally seen happen).

Lucky me

2015-05-15T16:29:00.001-07:00

There are days when I am hit with extraordinary gratitude at the life I am able to lead. Today is one of them. While battling the curse of the blinking cursor on a blank page, I realized, I have a wonderful life.

Purple sage. Captured while on a mini-hike on a Friday morning. by: Carren Jao

I'm currently working on stories that have taken me to Agoura Hills, where big cats roam and the air is soaked with the smell of salt from the sea, then eastward to El Sereno, on the border of Alhambra.

I was asked a few days ago by someone from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, "What's your favorite part of Los Angeles?" The true answer is that it changes every day. Pockets of this region surface like magic and I find myself falling in love all over again. Lucky, lucky me, to be able to live and work in this city and all its hidden gems.

King King's freewheeling dance floor

2015-04-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

I love to dance, but one of the first exposures I had to Los Angeles was the pretentiousness of the Hollywood dance floor. Women dressed in tight dresses you could hardly move in. Men on the move. Everyone's eyes looking afar, as if waiting for something exciting to happen. I hated it all.

But, I soon found that not all Hollywood dance floors are created alike. Every third monday of the month, just like this April 20th, King King in Hollywood becomes a haven for dance professionals and enthusiasts wanting to just let loose. Gone is the self-conscious atmosphere I abhor and instead it's replaced by a welcoming, experimental vibe.

As Rachel Levin writes for the Los Angeles Times:

...at the Floor, a unique multi-genre dance night held every third Monday at Hollywood's King King, anything's possible (except, perhaps, the sprinkler). Because it attracts professional dancers and dance enthusiasts from all over the stylistic map, you're just as likely to glimpse a swing dance couple sweeping through the circle with flips and aerials as a pair of tango dancers gliding across in a sultry embrace, or a tap dancer banging out a jazzy freestyle duet with the band's saxophonist.

Everyone has a little something to share, from all genres of dance and it comes together in such a beautiful, organic way. Here's a glimpse:

These few clips fail to do justice to the night. They mostly show one or two dancers and their moves, but in reality, many circles form, each with dancers just looking to have some fun.

So, if you're in the mood to dance, but don't want to don skyscraper heels and tight skirts, here's where I suggest you go. The party starts pretty late, so don't enter too early!

Filipino street food inspired wares

2015-03-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

My childhood in Manila is filled with happy memories of buying cheap food from the streets. After classes, I would look forward to buying a small cup of taho, a sweet tofu dish, from the street vendor. Fish balls on sticks or homemade cheese ice cream were just the ticket to fix my munchies.

This happy association would explain my elation when I came across artist Meggy de Guzman's ceramic edition of street food dishware. de Guzman uses bone china to create her quote-unquote dirty ice cream cups, styro cups and paper plates. Her choice of material elevates the dishware, yet its form continues to embody those youthful moments of happiness.

What a way to hold onto the past :)

The dirty ice cream set. All of it is made from bone china. According to de Guzman, it also " works for taho, coffee, juice, gin, vodka, whisky..."