Do not wail against the flow

My favorite of all the translated signs I've seen.
Rule #4: Do Not Wail Against the Flow
(All today's photos are from Hong Kong)

I tried to manufacture “poetry” one time by google translating a couple sentences through a few languages and back, hoping for bizarre and accidentally artful articulations. I think I had the best results with English → Chinese → Arabic → Japanese → English, but to my consternation (and nearly admiration) the sentences came out boringly similar to how they started. Or just garbled.

-“I will try again to make a good example” comes back “I will try again a good example.”

-“To my consternation (and nearly admiration) the sentences came out boringly similar to how they started” comes back “Boring of (close to longing) panic I similar resolution, whether it began how to.”

-And "Giant gooey gobs of snot" comes back "Huge nose of viscous tailings." That one's pretty good, actually, but still, not quite poetry. (Unless you’re in college. Then anything passes.)

Not sure what would happen if you tried to translate "GoFukU"
Tower, but Hungry Eyes Restaurant seems like a good idea

When the sentences came back largely unchanged, maybe just simplified to various degrees of error, it felt ominous. If computers can swap among languages, that’s bad news for language teachers like me. But beyond that, it’s bad news for anyone who values human-to-human contact. Like me. Like you.

But I think the programs are assigning the human utterance a syntactic structure, then just shopping that through. While functional, anyone who speaks more than one language knows the delightful and maddening truth that languages are not code for one another, not even on the syntactic level. There is just too much beautiful nuance in language.

So teachers still have jobs, and as far as generating the sort of accidental wisdom and slippery profundity that one finds, like caches of chuckles, as you roam around the world? That takes real humans, speaking real languages. God bless the semi-fluent.

Cute feet? Quiet feet? Better than either.
And what drives someone to write that? I love it!

The move towards machines feels inevitable, but I can trust that humans are always going to have a warm, fleshy leg-up on the devices, so I can relax in the face of our techno-progression. To say it another way, I will not wail against the flow.

Unfair advantages?

Looking at a few blogs while I chewed through my breakfast granola, I passed one that's a series of photosfrom her day. (And if I've gotten confused and you/he is a dude, I apologize, it's happened before.) I've checked out her site in the past and liked it a lot, and this post is beautiful too, but there is something a bit different about this one...

She has it set to play that song from American Beauty, you know the one, that super-pretty but so dangerous to over-use piece, actually titled Any Other Name but you might recognize it as “The Plastic Bag Theme” (which must piss off Thomas Newman immensely).

The photos are very good, some of them are gorgeous and should be hung on the wall, but....with that song...everything is stunning.

Is that cheap? Is that skill? Marketing? Art?

Sometimes I see something and want to photograph it in black & white, but B&W seems like such a cheap way to fling gravitas onto an image. Even though my own photographic talents are admittedly minimal, I still dream of images that stand up for themselves, even in boring old color.

Or in this case, gloves drying on the street in Hong Kong.
It's not a very good picture, but with B&W, it's closer to good.

In color, it's a shoe.

In B&W, it's like...every shoe, man, that ever walked through a day, you know?, that carried the weight of dreams, the hopes of humanity, and the sweat of love, you know, man? This shoe, like, did things.

Looking through my own pictures is usually an exercise in disappointment (but that intersection looked so cool at the time!) but I think if I set up a gallery, lots of B&W, and had that song playing? People would buy them. Then maybe they'd take them home, and in the sterile lack of music they'd look at them and say “Wait, was this the one we picked?”

But there's a better question. If a song like that adds a readiness for reverence, an ease of admiration and propensity for esteem...what if you just lived that way? All the time. Would it cheapen and wear thin? Or would you reach a nirvana of awe and respect for...everything?