Ten-year-old Dylan recently showed me how to manipulate photos in PhotoShop. The above image in its original form appears at my photo blog Seaglass (click here to visit).
I've been playing with these photos on airplanes, when reading can be hard on the eyes. Here's another one: Liquid Browns. Again, the original of the photo is posted at Seaglass.
Yesterday, one my friends asked me "What is seaglass?" She explained that in her country there isn't any word she is aware of, but I think she may have been wrong, because I found this 海ガラス, which seems to translate back quite well. Maybe the cultural difference is that in America, we collect the stuff, turn it into jewelry, and even mass produce it in various forms, including as bags of marbles.
Vancouver, being so wonderfully and accessibly multi-cultural, reminded me of the best part of my own country -- its diverse melting pot of immigrant cultures, always blending into new combinations of ethnicities and colors. On our northern border, a similar experiment in cultural evolution is taking place. All over North America, new people from distant places are joining our society, bringing an energy for innovation that fuels economic growth and political change, linguistic pollination and mixed racial identities.
If there is to be a future for this world, its look and feel can be glimpsed in the streets of Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Honolulu, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Papaete -- all cities I have visited and all nodes on the emerging network of Pacific Basin centers for trade, investment, and tourism. Of course there are many more key ports I've not yet seen -- Seoul, Saigon and parts of South America.
As I gazed out over Vancouver from my hotel balcony the other night, I felt like I could easily have been in any of these other cities, with the same Pacific breeze cooling my face from every angle and every corner of a vast new world still struggling to be born...
No comments:
Post a Comment