Last Friday, I attended XMediaLab (X stands for “Cross”) in Auckland, a combination think-tank and creative workshop with a focus on the design, development and business of digital media ideas across multiple platforms. The talks were exciting, inspiring and filled my head with ideas. So much so that I’ve exported my brain of links and notes for later reference. Perhaps you’ll find them useful as well.

Here’s a summary of what stood out for me along with some possible points of entry:

Parmesh Shahani filled the room with the dynamic energy and pop cosmopolitanism of Mumbai along with tons of examples of emerging creative ecosystems and entry points to the Indian startup economy. I think about his framing questions a lot: “What does it means to be local in a global world? What does it meant to be global in a local world?” He and Vishal Gondal of India Games both extolled India’s virtue of jugaad – the can-do spirit of adaptive improvisational ingenuity which maps well to New Zealand’s “Number 8 Wire.”

“Games will save us all” emerged as a major recurring theme and wish. Zhan Ye illuminated the history and emerging trends and opportunities of the online game market in China and offered lessons for abroad. Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment shared lessons from the ARGs (Alternative Reality Games) she’s produced, including ilovebees for Halo 2 and Year Zero for Nine Inch Nails. I loved her vision of the world as a platform for storytelling and method of writing a linear story then throwing it away and providing evidence that it actually happened. Rajat Paharia taught how to use game mechanics to create zombie armies.

Other themes included how we interact with “whatever wherever screens” (public/tv/personal) using distance and touch gestures. Dale Herigstad designed the interfaces for “Minority Report”, and now he’s designed some interesting new ways to visualize and organize time as well as space. He encourages the rapid sketching of ideas, blowing me away with what he created using Apple’s Keynote.

Getting down to business, it’s all about the hybrid media and business model with multiple revenue streams; no one’s thriving on ad revenue alone. Adrian Sexton addresses hybrid media from a media+entertainment perspective. Richard Cardran explores hybrid business models in depth, and there are lots of good examples in Parmesh Shahani and Zhan Ye’s talks. “Jadedly optimistic” (in his own words) Tim Chang of Norwest Partners gave a nutritionally dense talk on what he sees unfolding in the next few years and spilled some VC secrets.

Vincent Heeringa, the thoughtful director of HB Media which publishes the excellent Idealog, Good, and Inspire, shared how he launches stuff and also his concerns about the future of business, attention and longform writing with great photography in printed form distributed by post. He bravely open sourced his challenges and raised some great questions.

Juliette Powell addressed bravery directly in a moving talk that cut to the heart – investing in people. She highlighted ways to build and develop social and cultural capital and take responsibility for our dreams, even when funding’s hard to find.

Mike McGraw’s building bridges from people stories to product stories with lots of examples of what’s working now.

Even though the title was “commercialising ideas,” I was surprised that so few presentations addressed social and environmental concerns in any context. Parmesh Shahani and Juliette Powell stood out as exceptions, looking at companies that do well and good and creating value through authenticity.

The convergence of tools, media and knowledge available to all of us now is so awesome, harnessing it to create zombie armies hungry for more snack chips chaps my soul. I’d like to see and be commercializing ideas that improve lives and empower citizens rather than just entice consumers. Many of the lab project teams are doing just that, like BrightMind Labs, focused on improving lives of children with mental health issues, and Minimonos, a virtual world of fun for kids with core values of generosity and sustainability.

For what it’s worth (in any currency), this was the first conference where I’ve heard people qualify using US dollars as reference in measuring and comparing business: “it’s still worth something,” “…since we don’t have another standard.”

Overall, a fantastic day of learning from and connecting with some great creative people. If this touches your areas of interest and you have the opportunity to participate in a future XMediaLab, do it.

Full list of speakers linked to notes on their talks:
Susan Bonds, Richard Cardran, Tim Chang, Vishal Gondal, Andrew Hamilton, Vincent Heeringa, Dale Herigstad, Hugh Mason, Mike McGraw, Rajat Paharia, Juliette Powell, Greg Seuss, Adrian Sexton, Parmesh Shahani, Doug Whatley, Zhan Ye

All I knew about Max Gimblett when I learned he was leading a sumi ink workshop in Wellington was that I liked his “Low Tide” installations at the Asian Contemporary Art Fair and Asia Society in New York and his lustrous signature quatrefoils.

I arrived at Capital E for Max Gimblett’s sumi ink painting workshop to see the chairs arranged in a circle that resembled an ensō, which would be our first painting exercise.

Max introduced himself as a mad monk (affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center) whose monk name means “Diamond Brush Awareness”, and stated we were now a group, a Gestalt, and to speak only to the whole group and the centre of the circle, not to each other. Furthermore, he stated he is very intuitive, and any resistance would not be helpful. Of course, that just made me resist like crazy. But it all dissolved the moment we picked up our brushes and began our wild ride.

We began with the ensō [Max's, mine], and made several attempts each. Max paints like Tibetan Buddhist monks debate, animated with kinetic punctuations. He describes it as automatism, “one stroke bone” and “all mind and no mind”. Think very clearly of what you want do before you start, and then let go and free your mind while doing, “a little like making love.”

We expressed koans in ink. What was your face before the face you were born with? Then we dove into Jungian typologies and cognitive processes: thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensing. Which one is the hardest for you to reach? That one’s your shadow. What is your dominant process? (I’m an ENFJ, in case you’re curious.)

Between each exercise we held up our paintings for each other to see and comment upon into the circle. By the end of the hour, we’d produced quite a body of work and harmonized into a group. Afterwards he walked around and discussed our work with us individually; above are some video clips from the conversations. We also discussed the edge vs the centre, an idea Brian Sweeney explores in depth at nzedge.com and one that captivates me as a recent migrant from NY to NZ. His last advice to me was if things weren’t working, to add a little red: “Red always makes things zing.”

Max is currently has exhibitions of new work at Paige Blackie Gallery, “White Stone Clear Water,” in Wellington (19 May – 20 June 2009) and at Gow Langsford Gallery, “Full Fathom Five” in Auckland (5 May – 29 May 2009). His work was included in the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia (recently completed, but interesting presentation online).

• Max Gimblett’s website
• Max Gimblett on YouTube
• Max Gimblett discusses life as he thinks
• Max Gimblett in Art World, February 2009 by John Yau

NB: Good source for Chinese calligraphy brushes and Chinese Traditional Medicine in Wellington: Wellcare Chinese Medicine Shop 215, Left Bank, Cuba Mall, Wellington, 04 382 9451.

Today you can see this photo I took of Robert Thurman standing in front of Mt. Kailash in the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanying a great interview with Robert by David Ian Miller, “Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman on Why the Dalai Lama Matters,” about his new book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters.

In the picture, Robert stands near the Tarboche flagpole at the outset of our kora (circumambulation) around Mt Kailash. Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Bön traditions all revere Mt Kailash as the axis mundi – the center of the world. From it flows 4 major rivers that feed Asia: the Indus, Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Karnali. Thousands of pilgrims arrive each May and June, but this year China has delayed the pilgrimage season and limited the number of participants, restricting all foreign visitors during the Olympic torch relay in that region.

After four days trekking around the mountain and reaching an altitude of 18,600 ft, we arrived back here in time for the Saga Dawa festival, celebrating the birth and enlightenment of Sakyamuni Buddha.

On this occasion, the flag pole, wrapped in prayer flags, is raised by poles, ropes and trucks.

A perfectly upright flagpole signifies a good year for Tibet.

Musicians play throughout the festival. Thermoses of yak butter tea keep throats in singing and horn-blowing condition at dry high-altitudes on the Tibetan plateau.

Then, at the moment the flagpole is raised, thousands of windhorses (colorful squares of paper printed with prayers for happiness) fill the air and fly towards the peak.

Saga Dawa occurs each year on the 15th day of the fourth lunar month. This year, Tibetans will celebrate Saga Dawa on June 18, 2008 — may the pole stand upright and usher in a good year for Tibet!

An excerpt from the SF Chronicle interview:

The news from Tibet has been pretty grim lately, but you remain optimistic that the situation will improve … that the Tibetans will one day be able to live there freely and practice their religion. What gives you hope that will happen?

I base my hope — as the Dalai Lama bases his — on what is realistic. And I believe reality dictates that the Tibetans are the ones who can live sustainably in Tibet. They’re the ones who can restore and maintain the Tibetan plateau, their ancestral home, as they have for thousands of years. And it has to be healthy in order to be of benefit to its neighboring regions. It’s the water tower of Asia — it’s where everybody’s water comes from, India, China, Southeast Asia. It’s also the source of the wind — the jet stream that rises up out of the plateau, affecting the weather all around the planet. So if Tibet is messed up then the world gets messed up. This is why Tibet should matter to everybody.

To learn more:

• Robert Thurman’s latest book Why the Dalai Lama Matters (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells)
• Journey around Mt Kailash (without leaving the comfort of your favorite reading chair) Circling the Sacred Mountain by Tad Wise and Robert Thurman
• Journey around Mt Kailash when China lifts restrictions on travel in Tibet with Geographic Expeditions.
• Upcoming events with Robert Thurman. If you’re new New York, there’s a talk and booksigning Tuesday June 17 at Tibet House and a talk on inner peace at the Tibet Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday June 18.

What a delight to receive this picture from Waveplace showing the new owner of the OLPC laptop I donated last month. Here’s a movie of the kids’ first experiences with laptops. Looks like a beautiful group of students and teachers (and fresh green classrooms). Hope you have fun and enjoy learning with your new computers!

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful program.

Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, Full Catastrophe Living, and Arriving at Your Own Door, opened the conversation with a gorgeous poem from which the title of his latest book came:

The second poem Kabat-Zinn used was by a poet from whom the name of yours truly was inspired. (Thanks Mom and Dad):

During the discussion, he defined meditation as “attention in service of self-understanding and liberation.” He also used “awarenessing” as a verb in places where you might expect to hear “thinking” instead.

Both he and Bokara somehow started to blame technology for accelerating time, to which I respectfully disagree. Oddly enough, my brother gave me a book on just that topic this week, The Mayan Code, which asserts that time acceleration is a manifestation of the acceleration of consciousness. So perhaps it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara who are responsible for this phenomenon through talks like these! Your thoughts (and awarenesses) welcome, of course.

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Speedbird, Urban Computing and its Discontents, and the upcoming The City is Here for You to Use, moderated an excellent panel discussion that included Christian Nold (who we loved at Pop!Tech), Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, and J. Meejin Yoon of MY Studio and Howeler + Yoon Architecture. Here are the notes I took during the talk:

Adam Greenfield’s imagining metropolitan form and experience in the age of ambient informatics. What does it look like after the PC? He’s teaching a course at NYU’s ITP called Urban Computing with Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. They take as an assumption that in the near future, that which will primarily condition choice is not the physical, but a data overlay. What are the qualities of this data-gathering layer?

• embedded in enviornment
• wireless
• imperceptible, small/buried, recedea from consiciousness
• post-GUI
• multiple (tens to hundreds)
• relational
• locative (can locate themselves in space and time)
• situated (specific to places or conditions)

Examples of these technologies:

• GPS and ‘GPS’ – you need to be in sight-lines of 3 satellites for GPS to work. That’s hard to achieve in urban canyons, but ‘GPS’ is an urban substitute that can triangulate location through wifi or mobile phone networks.
• RFID – radio frequency tags like those used in easy pass, transit passes, credit cards, the new U.S. passports
• NFC – Near Field Communication, a short-range wireless communication technology that lets you pay for things with your mobile phone.
  Wifi, Wimax, Wibro bathing cities in open networks
• MEMS – Micro ElectroMechanical Systems like the accelerometers in the iPhone and Nike + iPod.

We now can see tremendous amount of information about cities, patterns of use and visualize them in new ways. Information can be made available locally in a way that it can be acted upon. For example, receiving an alert that says, “Hey! You’re about to enter a high crime/bad air quality area”. The result is a city that responds to the behavior of the people in it in real time.

Christian Nold is interested in embodiment and how we are embodied in the city. He recently had an experiment going through customs where he had to have his fingers scanned, but they were too sweaty for the machine to work from his running to catch a flight. We are encountering all kinds of new systems for dealing with our bodies.

With a promotional image for a lie detector apparatus up on the screen, Nold explained that many of these systems are about control. Our bodies are giving up data to institutions we don’t have control over, and we can’t get the data back. In a lie detector, your words are not trusted; the body’s data is the truth. In Christian Nold’s projects, subjects use a device that is similar in that it uses galvanic skin response (pictured left), but the people control their own data. First the body’s data is measured. Then, by looking at the tracks, the subjects talk about what they were experiencing that caused physical arousal.

When you go from the individual to the aggregate, you start to see some wonderful patterns, which Nold delightfully termed “communal arousal surfaces.” Each city is different.

In Stockport, people were hardly aware that they had a river running through town, since it was covered by a bridge and shopping area that dominates the town. The map also showed that the social heart of the city was still in the old market area.

The San Francisco Emotion Map (see above) featured a lot of people’s memories being embedded in a particular place. Another interesting highlight is murals. People care about and enjoy them, but they don’t show up on any other maps or tourist guides.

His projects are shifting away from art to local town planning and community activism. A recent project included handing out decibel meters to a community concerned with noise from an airport. The government measured acceptable levels of noise, but their information was based on one or two sensors placed on the road intermittently. The situation looks totally different when you base it on real data.

Showing a sensory homunculus (see right), a model of what a man’s body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the brain concerned with its sensory perception, Christian asks us to start thinking in terms of sensory commons rather than public space. Public space no longer exists as interactions become more mediated than ever. How much control do we have? How much agency do we have? (Right now, more than people know.)

Eric Rodenbeck struggled at first to get the display connected and working with his Macbook Pro. This gave Adam an opportunity to point out that these ubiquitous technologies are sold as “seamless” and “perfect.” In the real world, technology breaks constantly, always and reliably. Plan on it. And push back when you see promises of perfection.

Once connected, Eric began explaining that mapping and data visualization is a medium with a wide expressive potential used for all kinds of things, including deception. He used as an example a map of red and blue states in the 2004 U.S. elections. It looks binary and grim with a blue “Baja Canada” and the rest red, showing little hope for a “United” States. But then we look by county, on a color spectrum from Democratic Blue to Republican Red and see that really we’re quite reddish-purple. And when you adjust it to show each county proportional to the population, as in the cartogram above, we see it’s even more mixed and widely democratic.

Roedenbeck’s interested in the idea that data visualization and mapping is the intersection of analysis and spectacle. Spectacle in this case meaning assertive, robust, active, specctacular and exciting. As a medium, data visualization is live, vast and deep. Stamen creates frames and structures that let you drive through data.

Cabspotting.org captures GPS data from Yellow Cab taxis in San Francisco. When looking at the paths, we see their flows defining the streets or arteries of a system that can only be described as a heart. (Pictured above, but watch the time lapse movie for full effect.)

Other projects discussed:

Mapping of development in Plano, TX for Trulia

Crimespotting in Oakland, California illustrates how these are not politically neutral. How public should public information be?

Eric recommends Modest Maps, a free display library for designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects.

J. Meejin Yoon asks “How do you physicalize ideas?” She’s interested in play – working with our own rules and restrictions. In architecture, the term “play” refers to the gap between two materials.

The defensible dress project was inspired by her experience with commuting in Seoul. Sensors detect someone approaching the wearer and trigger quills made from Flexinol wire to define the wearer’s personal space.

Other projects discussed:

White Noise White Light, an interactive light and sound field created for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

LowRezHiFi, a sidewalk and lobby installation in Washington D.C. with an interactive sound field and transparent field of pixels that displays information and registers movement as you pass by it.

Adam kicked off the discussion following the presentations by pointing out how this is becoming a politically charged issue. Recently, NYC council members drafted legislation requiring anyone who has a detector that measures chemical, biological or radioactive agents to get a license from the police department. This would stifle collection of environmental info vital to common good. The challenge is how to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?

Lots of great questions were asked. If you have answers, get in touch!

• How to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?
• Who owns your GPS trace and photo?
• Are we prepared for openness?
• What is the shape of society after these technologies are embedded?
• How can you get lost?
• If you can’t get lost, how can you ever find yourself?
• What happens if you don’t have access? [Real life example: toilets along Highway 1 in Western Finland are unlocked by sending an SMS message to the number given by the Road Administration.]

In Brixton, Christian Nold’s helping develop Abundance, an urban agriculture project to create a resilient community and social cohesion in the face of climate change and other challenges.

Adam Greenfield spoke of reading The Great Good Place, a book about the informal and social third place after home and work, in Starbucks, the chain inspired by it. Everyone in the place was mediated, either plugged into headphones and a music device or staring into a laptop computer. He used to joke of the need for a chain of cafes called Faraday’s, after the Faraday cage, an enclosure painted to block all electrical signals. It’s not a joke anymore. How do you find a way off the network?

The current attitude towards these technologies is “isn’t it a shame that the rich have access and the poor don’t.” Pretty soon, the measure of grandeur and privilege will be to not have to expose yourself to these networks.

Eric explains how Fundrace.org made public information on people’s political donations along with their addresses easily available, causing neighbors to break out into fights. As problematic as any one data source may be, once you start mapping relations between multiple sources, things start to get troubling. For example, mash Fundrace up with capacitors that measure your treads as you walk and can distinguish individuals, and you can imagine doors may for some people and others won’t know they exist.

Where is the line on what’s acceptable? In South Korea and Japan, we see more acceptance and fewer articulated fears (but few good explanations). One pilot in the U.S. asked kids to wear nametags with RFID. PTA called an urgent meeting and physically removed it from the schools. These are not neutral technologies but “technosocial assemblages” that can’t be decoupled.

And what happens if it all goes away? Adam thinks about Marshall McLuhan’s idea from Understanding Media: Every technological invention or extension is also an amputation. The degree we get used to it is precisely the degree to which we lose our native capabilities.

We have some agency and some responsibility:

• Fight to create lostness.
• Design interventions that return serendipity to people.
• Raise media literacy and awareness of what’s at risk.
• Communicate to elected officials.

N.B. The next event in the series takes place in March, and it looks like a fantastic panel of artists working with biotechnology curated by the fabulous Régine Debatty.

More compelling than Scrabulous, Unype is a Facebook social network application that lets people see, chat and Skype with each other in Google Earth. Unype works with the Open Social API, so you can interact with people from Facebook, Ning, Orkut, hi5 and more to come. See Twitter messages and Upcoming event overlays too. You can mark up your favorite places and share recommendations, videos and 3d models.

There’s also a fun geography quiz game where you answer by flying to the correct place. Highly recommended for Miss Teen USA contestants, and such. .

• Unype
• Unype Blog
• Enter Unype directly through Facebook

Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within
November 2, 2007–February 18, 2008
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts.

Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.”

Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.

Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily Davidow

Izu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.”

Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.

While the images may not be spontaneous, Izu pointed out how un-self-conscious, authentic and neutral his subjects seemed. This neutrality is something Izu aspires to himself, as he repeated in several ways the idea that “I always want to be myself, not bigger or smaller.” To Izu, it seems the Bhutanese have found a middle way between the precious modesty of the Japanese and the super-sized egos of America.

Is this lack of self-consciousness due to inner peace, Buddhist ideas of the self, or freedom from the continuous stream of marketing images in America and Japan (where Izu, now a Brooklyn resident, was born)? Bhutan just launched television and Internet service in 1999, and the Bhutanese are consciously creating media that reflects their values and culture rather than relying on foreign imports. Even the movie theaters are filled with steady streams of Bhutanese feature films. I had hoped we’d get more deeply into this in discussion with Flanagan, a professor of psychology, brain sciences and neurobiology at Duke University, as well as the author of The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World and the paper ‘The Bodhissattva’s Brain: The Neuroscience of Wisdom, Virtue, and Happiness,’ but I’ll have to check those out along with his talks online from the Mind and Reality Symposium to learn more about his thoughts on these issues.

Kenro Izu, Druk # 545 Jambay Lhakhang, Bumthang, Bhutan, 2007, Carbon pigment print, 52 x 36 in.

Izu introduced Bhutan’s progress indicator of GNH (Gross National Happiness), declared more important than GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as early as 1986. According to the Bhutanese government’s definition, Gross National Happiness depends upon four main pillars: economic self-reliance, environmental stewardship, cultural preservation and good governance.

Cultural preservation refers to the teachings and practice of Buddhism that infuse every aspect of life and value wisdom and compassion*. It also encompasses aesthetic values of beauty and harmony. (China’s a PC, Bhutan is a Mac.) Izu captures many of the Bhutanese traditions in his portraits: the indigenous ceremonial Tsechu masks and costumes, tulkus (reincarnated rinpoches), meditating monks, and families enjoying each other.

Flanagan brought up Aristotle’s observation that if you ask people what is the greatest good, everyone will agree that it is happiness. But if you ask people to define happiness, everyone offers up a different answer. He also noted that while the people in Izu’s portraits looked happy, they weren’t exuding a feeling of “happy happy joy joy” so much as serenity and equanimity. He framed the discussion asking Izu whether it was a real happiness, and if so, what is that happiness?

Izu offered a more personal definition from his guide in Bhutan, along with a lively photo exemplifying it: “three generations under one roof, tea, rice and healthy, enjoying life.” Both Izu and Flanagan seemed wistful about the depth and strength of these familial relationships in contrast to the dispersed nuclear families of contemporary Japan and America. Asked but not answered: Is that the price of modernity? And is what the Bhutanese have impossible in the modern world?

As I viewed Izu’s exhibition, I couldn’t help thinking about the portraits of Edward S. Curtis, a photographer who used similar methods to document Native American people. Curtis set out to catalog their ceremonies, beliefs, daily life and landscapes in twenty volumes of “The North American Indian” before it was too late. Although the conditions of the Bhutanese people in 2007 are vastly different from those of the Native American people of 1907, there are striking visual parallels between the black and white images depicting the spiritual life of both cultures with their exquisite textiles, shamanistic masks, and ritual objects, taken by admiring outsiders. Will Bhutan lose its culture as it opens itself up to global communications and technology, foreign travelers and investment, and new forms of government or can it hold on to its sacred within?

Of course, awareness of both impermanence and the interconnectedness of all things is central to their Buddhist teachings. The last image Izu presented illustrated that with an image of a young girl in a field of cosmos flowers (Druk #444, 2006). He saw this herbaceous perennial in pink, red and white dancing all over the foot of the Himalayan mountains and figured it must be the national flower of Bhutan. What a surprise to learn the species was introduced only 50 years ago by an Irish doctor who brought antibiotics to Bhutan along with a single bag of cosmos flower seeds to remind him of home. He couldn’t have imagined these lovely blossoms would find such an ideal combination of soil and climate in the Himalayas.

Indeed, who can predict what will take root and flourish between the cross-pollination of cultures? May the seeds of GNH — oh, let’s go for GGH (Gross Global Happiness) — take root and blossom in hospitable growing media as people encounter the concept. Izu’s exhibition is a beautiful place to start.

* The finer points of how to manifest GNH are continually unfolding and will be explored at the Third International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in Bangkok, Thailand November 22-28, 2007. The ongoing discussion can be followed at the Centre for Bhutan Studies.

Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you.

Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.)

Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:

• A pull out “Map of the United States” by Kalman’s beautiful mother, Sara Berman, with instructions to: “Either put it on the wall or put it back in the book. If you put it back in the book, it may one day fall out when someone browses through the book and it will become a thing that falls out of the book.”



• An appendix filled with “things that fall out of books” and a fabulous collection of numbers in the wild. (Kalman would love the Numbers fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)
• Luscious liner page images of mosses of Long Island.
• An index that’s amusing on its own, featuring laughter, love (as a guarantee of sanity), finding self, forgetting, forgiveness, hairdos, dreams (bad, fragment of, good, malaise after bad, no answer to), and even happiness. One thing you won’t find in the index is “inner peace” (p. 245-6), a phrase that seems to trigger its opposite for Kalman. (What is that about?)

Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?”

I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.

• The Principles of Uncertainty book on Amazon
• The Principles of Uncertainty blog on NYT
• NYT’s video highlights of the celebration at the NYPL