communicating my thoughts

So I'm a little tips after imbibing half a bottle of wine at an amazingly authentic Chinese food restaurant that nostalgically reminded me of days gone by. It's amazing how different kinds of alcohol elicit different emotions, peeling away various parts of your essence, exposing different parts of your soul to the contemplative machinations of your cerebral cortex. It's like the hand of Michaelangelo, working tirelessly on the unappealingly rough slab of marble that eventually would became the quintessential Renaissance masterpiece David, liberating different notions within your core and allowing you to achieve a perspective on your surroundings that would otherwise have lay dormant inside the fleshy cage of your body. This entry may shortly become the undoubtedly incoherent ramblings of a drunkard that may or may not make sense, so I suggest you light up a J amongst the company of friends, find someone to read the following to you, and discuss ad nausea. Warning: this will not be a hilarious recount of my inebriated adventures or the macabre happenings of my life spiced with obscure pop culture references. Revelations to follow.

So I was catching the F train back to Brooklyn after dinner as the emphatically cadenced verses of the Typical Cats began to carry me home on an ethereal serenade of poetry, perfectly pressed between jazzy beats that seems to prophetically predict the happenings I was about to witness. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a group of 6 or 7 individuals, peppered across the aisle from each other, gesticulating wildly. Upon further investigation, I realized that they were all deaf, and were merely carrying on a typical conversation you or I would have with each other in the only medium they know how, sign language. Now, while this may not seem like a strange sighting in a city that literally has everything, I was fascinated with the ease of their communication and, more importantly, how animated these individuals were as they carried on a lengthy conversation, individuals who had presumably never heard each other speak. It not only made me realize how much we, as aural individuals using speech to understand our fellow man, take for granted in interpreting our surroundings, but also, it got me pondering the hidden mental labyrinth that lies behind fully realizing human communication. There's an old saying that 70% of communication is transmitted through body language and 20% is conveyed through tone, a saying which I believe, gives the content of what we say far too much credit. Whether or not we are aware of it, an unbelievable amount of human interaction, I believe, is subconscious, an inherent understand inherited from our our ancestors, unobscured and unabashedly prevalent through a millennia of evolution. It's amazing how so much of language is intuitive.

Anyone who has studied a foreign language and then traveled to that country can tell you that an unbelievable amount of contextual assumptions need to be made in order to survive in a location beyond your norm. But, it is relatively astounding that an entire system of communication like sign language, a fairly modern construction that, I'm sure, has roots stretching as far back as the prehistoric, is fully able to express the wide range of notions, emotions and cognotions that the human condition is capable of these days. The conveyance of one's inner thoughts simply through what essentially amounts to body language seems to question the notion that there is even an insignificant 10% of what you say that you use "words" for. If sign language interprets bodily gestures with literal meaning, what's to distinguish the literal form the figurative in this kind of situation? When all you can use to communicate is delivered and interpreted through strings of body gesticulations that happen to correlate to words and phrases, or language in this case, the separation between literal conveyance and figurative overtones, at some primal instinct, must be blurred.

This all sort of ties into what a woman I met who worked for the Department of Education in DC said to me as we were proverbially shotting the shit on my way to collect passports as part of my undying commitment to corporate bitch work this summer. We were talking about my semester in China and how easy or hard it was to pick up Chinese, a character and tonal driven language, while living there. I mentioned that after being immersed in the culture for so long, something, at some point, clicked and I began to pick up more and more form contextual clues and situational markers which lead to a greater understanding of my surroundings. We began talking about mental cognition and how internal thought may not even be in your native language, but may, in fact, be in some sort of visual, intuitively cerebral language. I must interject here that she was a graduate of Brown University and was probably somewhere in her late 30s or early 40s, so she had undoubtedly done her fair share of drugs in her younger days, if you couldn't already tell. But it still gave a certain part of my perception of thought a proverbial ear flick and made me reconsider the idea of mental cognition. Now, it's obviously a stretch of the imagination to think about thinking, but try it for a minute and see where your mind takes you. You might be surprised.

As I change my iTunes to the more melodious sounds of John Coltrane's tenor saxiphone, so does the tone of my entry change. Let me pop open a bottle of wine while I regale you with tales of my artistic travels in NYC. Like I mentioned last entry, I went to MOMA a few weeks ago and saw two pieces that helped to shape my definition of what ART truly is. The first was an ongoing exhibit of Richard Serra's massive yet simplistically austere steel sculpture. The piece that most interested me was a meandering structure of steel that had rusted of its own accord, seeming to almost live, die and age as it wanted. The two 15 foot high serpentine walls coiled around each other and undulated, as if almost breathing life into themselves, to create a passageway through which patrons could literally become a part of this prototypical scene of modern art. The back and forth swaying of this piece gave a certain sense of life to the work, while the height and grandeur of the walls offered a sense of isolation and separation from the other patrons of the museum, confining those lucky enough to venture through this strange means of expression. At various points, the structure would open up into what can best be described as a bear, circular room, allow an unexpected conference of the work's inhabitants and a brief respite from the sense of being herded through this creation as you are supposed to see it. It felt like being an insignificant singular blood vessel, wandering through a giant metallic organ. It was incredibly surreal and forced me to think about human interaction with the art around you, considering the notion that art can not only be a part of the world you walk through, but can itself be the world you walk through.

The other exhibit that drew me into its message was a piece on the font Helvetica. I'm sure you all recognize this font, if not specifically as such, then, as the piece educated me, as seen in the world around you, but if you don't know what it looks like, open Word and find out. Apparently, Helvetica is the most ubiquitous font in modern society (to take a page from the exhibit). It spelled out (no pun intended) the history of the creation of the font, as well as showed a video of the different usages, simply in New York City, of the typeface. My first reaction to this was a contemplative reflection on the creation of fonts. I began to wonder how different fonts came about. Who creates them? What do they think about when they start to pen a new manner of penmanship? Where does there inspiration come from? Do they begin with the aesthetics of the script of the meaning they want to convey behind it? Or perhaps are they simply created out of necessity or the desire for change?

As you can see, the whole piece urged me to think about the creation of fonts. More importantly, I began to wonder how they impact the world around us in ways we cannot even imagine. We all have reactions, perhaps unbeknown to ourselves, to the world around us. To me, one of the most important senses we have at our disposal to interpret our surroundings is the visual. Before we can even begin to grasp, literally and figuratively, the world around us, we see it first. We interact on a purely visual level with so many things that we do not, or simply cannot, touch, hear, taste or smell. But we can still see it, and in some instances, that is all we have. Shifting back to language, it amazes me how much the way in which our written language is presented can affect the meaning and perception behind it. HATE vs. hate. So much of advertising research is directed towards what makes a product appealing, what attracts us to it, what subconscious primal factors will draw us towards it, not only as consumers but also as humans or simply as animals. The typeface something is presented in has a lot to do with our visual interaction with the message that product is sending. Beyond that, typeface has an immense amount to do with written communication aside from product placement. Copy and paste this entry into Word and change the font to whatever you like. Now consider how each iteration is presented and what that means to your understanding of what I am saying. Is it more formal or more casual? More grating or more placating?

This entry was supposed to cover a wider array of material than I had anticipated. But the literary bug crawled inside of my brain and took command like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I just couldn't stop. So I'll have to leave stories from my trip to DC, of which there are many, until later (hopefully tonight, mayhaps tomorrow or next week). Have a safe and happy 4th ladies and gentlemen. I'll be thinking of you.

the reason levi's were so popular...