If you follow me on any number of various world wide web portals you know I turned 50 yesterday. The truth is 49 always felt like a desperate, forced age. Like "look, I'm not 50 yet!!!" so for most of the last year if someone asked how old I was I just said 50, so I sort of let the air out of that tire a while ago so to speak. But in case you had any question there's no questioning it now, I'm officially old. And don't anyone older than me reply back with some youngster comment, you are old too, oldy, so shut your old ass up.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity once again to visit Paris with my kid who is about to turn 15 putting his own kid-ness into question, and as most who meet him can attest he's fully into teenage/young-adult awesomeness. The motivation for the Paris trip was a talk and booksigning I'd agreed to, but we also had the chance to see a bunch of new art from the likes of Robbie Barrat, Alienqueen, FelixFelixFelix and Space Invader, among others.
Seeing all this inspired him to finish up a little illustration he'd been working on for a while, which he released as an edition of 25. There's still 22 of those available (at about $25 each) if you wanted to snag one.
Something I love about Paris, which is not terribly dissimilar to Tokyo, but largely unheard of in Vancouver is the ability to take the train to a central point and just walk to an art opening, and along the way discover other art events that you didn't know were happening but are delighted to stumble upon, and do the same thing the next day with a completely different set of artists. And again the next. A 24/7 buffet of inspiration.
We got back from Paris just in time to watch Tara successfully defend her thesis and complete her now going on 6 year evolution into Dr Tara Tiger Brown and yes I got her a Delorean to back that name up, though it's more of the pocket sized variety. A few people have asked me for a link to her dissertation so they can read it, however it's not online yet but once it is I'll link it of course. There are also promises of articles and a book that are more geared to a consumer audience and not hyperfocused on science nerds, so depending on your personal alignment that might be better for you. I can tell you though, having watched the defense, she's brilliant the so cool under insane pressure. I'm still in awe.
Under normal circumstances this would be the top news everywhere, but since the global tire fire continues to burn the chances for anything to grab widespread attention for more than a few seconds is pretty small. I don't know how things look from wherever your vantage points are, but from here in Canada I can tell you that people are not happy with current events. I'm talking about the Canucks trading JT Miller of course, but other things are annoying people too, like Elon Musk, and Canadians are demanding that his Canadian citizenship be revoked. A lot of people didn't know he even had Canadian citizenship but he does and not just as a prank either - actually his grandfather moved the family from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he was a big fan of apartheid and a very public racist which was just generally more accepted in South Africa than Canada. Interestingly, he was also very active in the Technocracy movement which, among other things, aspired to merge all of North America into a single country and replace all politicians with engineers. Without getting into the pros and cons of this, generally, Technocracy values the opinions and viewpoints of technical experts, turning them into the aristocracy while minimizing opinions and viewpoints of the general public–so it's not terribly surprising that some of these ideas have found popularity among today's technology brothers. History is wild.
In more Canada news, seems like there's rumblings that the US is trying to expel Canada from the Five Eyes which has in turn caused some people to instead suggest that the UK should expel the US. Again, ignoring the who's and what's about all this, one needs look no further than any number of dystopian near future sci-fi films and books to understand that cracks developing in the foundation of Five Eyes is probably a net positive for most people, though there's always the risk that what comes next is worse. But does anyone have any idea what comes next? I don't think so, and that's probably by design. More on that in another letter when I have some time to expand on it.
Again, I don't know how things look from inside the US, but from the outside it's looking like Musk is running everything, with next to no oversight, with no one even sure if he has the authority or permission to do anything that he's doing, but without pushback he's just plowing ahead, and Trump is just blindly approving anything that gets handed to him without any real idea what it is or why. I could be wrong of course, that's just how it looks. I said before I think it's going to get worse before it gets worse, and that still feels like an accurate assessment. And again, here in Canada people are sounding all kinds of alarms, boycotting US products and cautiously urging each other to buy crypto as a hedge against the Canadian dollar tanking, and to stock up on guns & ammo just in case the downstairs neighbors get any ideas, so whatever happens next is going to be interesting at least.
I spent a lot of time on recent flights writing, and have some things finished or finishing that I'm pretty proud of so I'll be publishing some of that soon, as well as bit of a station identification thing because one thing I realized in Paris is a lot of people in my daily circle don't know much about what I was up to 20 or 30 years ago which informs what I'm doing now in many ways, and that could be helpful to revisit - as well as my thinking about where to focus attention and energy online due to the aforementioned tire fire, so depending on where I'm at this week maybe I'll throw more at you. As always, thanks for being along for the ride - where ever it ends up taking us.
-s
