I just installed Magic Lantern on my Canon 60D; an incredible firmware hack that adds a ton of video tools for Canon DSLR’s to those uninitiated. I tested out the intervalometer feature the other evening and caught a cool sequence of the San Francisco Bay during sunset. Here’s looking forward to continuing to explore these tools.

In addition to the video that I made about Chinatown and Japantown, I also wrote a journal that detailed my experiences and observations. I’ll be turning in both tomorrow morning for my Urban Sociology final project, concluding my coursework for my Bachelors Degree in Advertising at the Academy of Art University. Whew.

Read my journal below for a guided journey through both neighborhoods as a flâneur, a french term referring to someone who takes leisurely strolls through their neighborhoods to observe and participate in the vibrant street life of a city. I wrote it as I’m finishing up Jack Kerouac’s, “On the Road” and was inspired to incorporate a beat-like meter to the prose. Here’s looking forward to getting some more time this summer to keep writing and sharpening the written word.

East vs. East

by Gavin Shelton

I stepped off of the airport curb and onto tarmac covered in the dew that comes with cold summer fog. It had been about five years since I had last seen the golden hills of San Francisco reach up to the blue California sky and in a moment I remembered what it’s like to have the beauty of a place take the wind out of you. A few moments later I crammed myself into the backseat of a dingy yellow taxi that streaked north towards the hilly skyline. Cab drivers in this city are like they are in most cities: ethnic immigrants who have left their homes and families in pursuit of a better life. I sat and wondered if they ever found it here in a city full of transients from all over the world, all seeming to be wandering themselves.

Before long the thistly spikes of the San Francisco skyline drew into focus: the Transamerica building, Coit tower, the financial district, the radio tower on Twin Peaks. I asked the driver to let me out at the corner of Sutter and Grant beneath the arches of Chinatown. The past few months of bland conversations back home had filled me with wanderlust and pulled me to San Francisco to investigate the Asian neighborhoods of the city by the Bay. I paid my fare and stood on the corner as the fog blew through the canyons of concrete, and as I made my way past the tacky souvenir shops of Grant Street I felt myself filled with sympathetic introspection. Tried to imagine how it must feel to make a living selling misrepresentations of your home culture in the form of plastic toys and cheap t-shirts. I watched the Chinese shop owners sell their wares to the hordes of tourists that flock to the oriental facades of their buildings and tried to imagine myself in their shoes, wished that I spoke their language so that I could ask what life is really like back home. I spent the rest of the day walking the streets of San Francisco as a flâneur, an idle walker but active participant of the street life in a city. With a fresh pair of eyes I wanted to observe the streets in this new city before getting used to the hustle. The ideas of Georg Simmel rang in my mind and I knew that the glittering mosaic of diverse culture would seem blasé in time and ordinary enough to go unnoticed. I wanted to go out and observe while I was still green, still fresh, still wide-eyed!

Up and down the hills I strolled along the ethnic enclaves found in the huge tenement buildings of single room occupancies. I read on my flight that these SRO’s as they’re properly called have a storied past dating back to the mid 1800s during the gold rush days when gold prospectors and sailors would take up residency along the “Barbary Coast;” the infamous area of town of which Chinatown borders (History of SRO’s). One thinks about the Wild West and lawlessness of San Francisco during those days and wonders if it planted a seed all those years ago that’s influenced the social contracts or guidelines for publically acceptable behavior in Chinatown today. Old men still amble down the streets and spit on the ground in front of strangers with menacing eyes. Linger too long at a fruit stand and elderly Chinese woman have no qualms aggressively shoving you aside to grab their produce of choice.

I wandered through the maze of dingy alleys and littered side streets to Portsmouth Square, what locals call the heart of Chinatown at the corner of Washington and Kearny Streets. I can’t be certain of the safety of these streets, as there’s no clear delineation between public and private space. Sociologist Jane Jacobs argues against letting these spaces “ooze” together and while there are a healthy number of “eyes” on these streets, people, apartments, and ramshackle shops all seem to be mixed up in the same buildings that overlook the sidewalks. I sat down on one of the many benches that line the sides of the square and looked out on the innumerable groups of elderly Chinese men and women huddled around sheets of cardboard playing a sort of card game. Excluding the young children playing near the adjacent playground the median age of the park dwellers seems to be in the 70’s. Vagrants also use the park, stretched out on the vacant benches for a midday nap but the elderly Chinese seem unperturbed as the ferocity of their card games seems enough to keep them occupied. After some time I got up and walked along the northern edge of the park and came upon a bronze plaque set in stone. On it reads, “On this spot the American Flag was first raised in San Francisco by Commander John B. Montgomery of the USS Portsmouth, July 9 1849”. I gazed around at the sloping oriental facades and imaged what it must have looked like upon its founding. It was here that the first public school building was erected in 1847, and also where Sam Brannan displayed shining handfuls of gold in 1849 thereby igniting the legendary gold rush (Portsmouth Square). Looking up from the plaque I envisioned throngs of Chinese laborers arriving on boats to the shores of the new world, settling down and constructing ethnic walls to survive in a foreign culture.

History tells that the first Chinese to settle in San Francisco faced severe exclusion from the rest of the city due to their ethnic origin and cultural differences. This marginalization led to structural inequality, or bias that oppressed some groups of Chinese. This could have played a role in the establishment of the Chinese Six Companies in the mid 1800s; an organization that unified and structured the entire Chinese community in the United States following a massive influx of Chinese immigrants to California by 1854 (The Chinese Six Companies). After controversial legislation was passed that levied taxes and rules that discriminated against Chinese immigrants they went on to establish districts that aligned with specific regions of China to lobby for immigrants rights. This however had devolved into xenophobic factions called “tongs,” or organizations made up of regionally segregated immigrants that built a shadow economy, or black market comprised of illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution. The history caked onto the sides of dark alleyways that I walked through soon began to feel stifling and I jumped a bus across town.

After leaving downtown I crossed the main artery of Van Ness and continued west towards the ocean. The bus crested a hilltop and glided towards the solemn Japanese Pagoda as I arrived in Japantown. I realize that most Caucasian outsiders have a hard time distinguishing the differences between the cultures of Asia but here it’s so easy to observe. I stepped off the bus at the corners of Post and Buchanan and into a neighborhood so starkly different from the fervent electricity of Chinatown. Quiet streets and a kind of civic discipline seem to underwrite the social contract of the neighborhood. The Japanese immigrants that manage the neighborhood all seem to agree to keep their streets orderly and controlled; a stark difference from the unbridled energy of Chinatown. I sauntered over to the base of the Pagoda and up to a plaque that paying homage to the Japanese immigrants that initially settled this ethnic enclave. I read about how the neighborhood came into existence after the 1906 earthquake, pushing Japanese immigrants out of Chinatown and into the Western Addition (Japantown). I looked at the cleanliness and control and began to wonder how it might be tied to the history of Japanese exclusion in the United States since their arrival. After migrating from Chinatown to the Western Addition, the Japanese American community faced federal discrimination during World War 2. After the United State’s entrance into the war against the Axis powers all Japanese Americans were immediately classified as enemy aliens. Fearing violent outbreaks and enemy espionage an executive order was issued to move all Americans of Japanese decent to wartime enclaves where they could be supervised by military officials (Internment). I wondered if the collective memories of concentration camps and heavily regimented routines influenced the somber quietness and perfectly manicured streets. The street life here is Pavlovian almost; people move about quietly and in an orderly fashion. Crosswalks are always observed. Street life never seems to get unusually audible. I walked passed the street signs inscribed with English and Japanese characters towards Fillmore Street, where I ducked in to a cafe to reflect.

In my mind I saw both neighborhoods side by side. I saw the excited energy of the Chinese street market next to the quiet elegance of Japantown’s underground mall. I wondered whether the social psychologies shaped or were shaped by the people that lived here. How the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of two distinct groups of immigrants shaped the streets in land far from their home cultures. Surely there must be deviance in both Japan and China; crime and civic misconduct is prevalent in every country in the world. I wondered what sociological forces molded these groups of people after arriving in San Francisco such that one neighborhood now seems messy and chaotic where the other seems manicured and orderly. Is this how their home countries appear, one messy and frantic while the other is calm and serene? Or was it after establishing a foothold that these communities began their own cultural evolution, mutating customs through social transmission that now after over a century these cultures look so different?

Like a scientist tracing the origins of particular chromosomes I began to consider the symbolic interactions of both neighborhoods through various locations, language, and actions. Compare the significance of Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square; the birthplace of San Francisco and for years the focal point of city life. Such a location steeped in such historical significance might act to perpetuate the energy of the first settlers in the West and symbolically fuel the electricity of Chinatown. The square remains packed full of Chinese speaking immigrants rowdily socializing, electrified to be in the heart of the city. Japantown’s austere peace park is organized around the somber Pagoda, a giant structure in the neighborhoods Peace Plaza donated from San Francisco’s sister city, Osaka, Japan in 1968 as a gesture of goodwill after the violent struggles of WW2 (Peace Plaza). Residents here seem to quietly go about their daily routines saying little as if they still fear another massive internment. Both neighborhoods seem starkly different in the social contracts of its inhabitants and their unique uses of public space. But they both share imagability in the minds of both visitors and residents of San Francisco, able to command vivid mental images of Asian design and cultural traditions that seem exotic in the West.

My intense reflection was broken by Jazz spilling out onto Fillmore Street and I quickly paid and set out towards the music. I walked north, away from both Chinatown and Japantown. As the sun began to creep towards Pacific I looked at the sky painted with vibrant pinks, oranges, and purples and felt connected to all of the immigrants here, all of us looking up at the foggy sky horizon and being filled with a gratitude to be wandering amongst people from all over the world.

Bibliography:

• “History of SROs in San Francisco.” History of SROs in San Francisco. The Central City SRO Collaborative. Web. 16 May 2012. <http://www.ccsro.org/pages/history.htm>
• “Portsmouth Square in San Francisco Chinatown.” Chinatown San Francisco. Web. 16 May 2012. <http://www.sanfranciscochinatown.com/attractions/portsmouthsquare.html>.
• Hansen, Lawrence Douglas Taylor. “The Chinese Six Companies of San Francisco” Highbeam Research. Journal of the Southwest, 18 Mar. 2006. Web. <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-149023036.html>.
•  “Japantown San Francisco: History.” Japantown San Francisco: History. Japan Center Garage Corp. Web. 06 May 2012. <http://www.sfjapantown.org/About/history.cfm>.
•  “Japanese Internment.” Japanese Internment. United States History. Web. 5 May 2012. <http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1679.html>.
• “Japantown Peace Plaza.” Japantown Peace Plaza. Japan Center Garage Corp., 6 May 2012. Web. 17 May 2012. <http://www.californiajapantowns.org/sf/peaceplaza.html>.

Glossary:

Sympathetic introspection: a study of human conduct in which the investigator imagines himself or herself engaged in that conduct

Flâneur: French term meaning “stroller”, “loafter”; a detached observer but active participant of urban life

Ethnic enclaves: A community that embodies cultural distinctions from a larger surrounding area

Social contracts: Mutual aggrements made by members of a society when defining appropriate social behavior

Vagrants: A person without a home who wanders and lives on the street

Exclusion: Social alienation from a group

Structural inequality: When the structure of organizations or institutions is built to favor one group of people over the other

Shadow economy: The exchange of goods, money, and services through illegal methods

Social psychologies: A method of examining how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings

Deviance: Behavior that does not conform to the mainstream social norms

I am days away.

Days away from reaching the end of a long road that has led me to find myself. On Friday I’ll have my last class at the Academy of Art University thereby concluding my training as a strategic thinker and creative planner within the advertising department. I’ve been super fortunate to get to work with some amazing people inside and outside of school and in the past year have sharpened my skill set into something that I hope will guide me into a great career where I can keep learning, thinking, and creating.

While working at Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners last summer I happened upon a smaller team of people who were busy at work creating videos while thinking about people; two of my favorite pastimes. Since working with them and aspiring to their departments I’ve often been asked, “what is a cultural strategist?” I hope that in my future role I’ll help clarify that question in my responsibility for interviewing people, documenting culture, and creating stories that revolve around subcultures and their ways of life; their beliefs, concerns, and behaviors. I want to act within a company as a kind of demographic sociologist and representative, working with internal teams to insure work is relevant, authentic, and humanistic.

I’ve been trained as a strategist at an art school, which has given me the tools to approach problems a little differently (check out Cameron Maddux’s petcha kutcha on “The Art of Planning”). In the “real world” of advertising I’ve seen lots of time and effort spent on strategy materials that are somewhat dry and flat so I’d like to take a stab at blending my aesthetic training with my skills in writing and thinking to make my strategic deliverables more inspiring and more beautiful. I want to create work that people want to spend time with.

So I’ll continue to hone my skills in visual storytelling when I’m back home in Charleston for the summer and finally have some time to relax and focus. Stay tuned as I continue to find smaller subcultures and bring them to light with visuals and words as best I know how. Below is my most recent video; one that explores some of the differences between San Francisco’s Chinatown and Japantown.

How does that sound?

For my Urban Sociology class I continued my exploration into bike culture here in the Bay Area that culminated in this article:

The Culture of Bicycle Mechanics by Gavin Shelton

        Tens of thousands of bike wheels spin up and down the hills of San Francisco every week. The brutally steep topography of Marin County looks down over the Golden Gate Bridge and onto a city whose streets are densely packed with the most diverse bicycle culture in the United States. Observe the shiny designer bikes in the Marina District and compare them to the ad hoc contraptions of rubber and metal that roll through the Mission. Although the bikes are plentiful there’s no universal cohesion to the community of cosmopolitan riders in this city. San Francisco bicycle enthusiasts self-segregate into various tribes that look at each other with greasy disdain and polished pretension. 

        I wheeled my bicycle through the doors of a small shop in my neighborhood and into what could have been a 1920’s speak-easy. The patrons in short-brimmed cycling hats sized me up with sideways glances. Mechanics stood behind the desk in soiled aprons polishing their wares with narrowed eyes. I leaned my bike against the register, looked around, and realized there must be two types of people that come into this shop: people that ride to live, and people that live to ride. Sasha was the first mechanic to wheel over to me; the grease-covered nicks and cuts on his hands told me that pure passion turned the pedals of his bike, rather than adherence to a diet or trendy fitness campaign. I explained to him that I was a rider myself; I had been for years, and I was conducting some qualitative research on the beliefs and attitudes of the professionals that keep the bikes of San Francisco moving. “Come back in an hour with some beers,” he said, and we could chat. An hour later and with beers in hand, we started to talk shop.

        I asked him how do different types of riders identify with one another in a city that’s home to so many different types of bicyclists? While cyclists of different types and stripes may avoid each other on the road based on the bikes that they ride or the clothes that they wear, things change when they step into a bike shop. Their socially ascribed labels as deviants begin to peel away and common bonds are foraged. A bike shop acts as the subculture’s crankset, the community hub that makes sure everyone keeps moving. A patron of the shop serves as the gear of the culture. Each different kind of cyclist displays a particular fashion sense, riding style, and road etiquette that tightens the tension and resistance to cultural norms, or established standards of behavior maintained by society. The bicycle mechanic then links these two together and acts as the chain to keep riders and shops smoothly connected by spreading knowledge, technical service, and personal insight to the bike community at large. It soon became clear that the bike community is like a big extended family with its own misfits and outcasts that are nonetheless chained together by common love of the two-wheeled machine.

        A common spoke that seems to spin in the minds of all that saddle up on bikes is how they’re improving their community, environment, and urban landscape. Herbert Spencer might laud bike mechanics and the riders that they serve as the ultimate functionalists; the low civic impact of a bicycle meets the individual needs of a cities populous while being foundational to the social functions and structural progression of the city. Bike mechanics relate to the larger social issues of urban sprawl and dependence on fossil fuels by riding their bikes and concurrently combat a nationwide obesity epidemic. Bike mechanics better their community by promoting self-powered transportation, enthusiastically making it as accessible as they can.

        Whether you’ve put in 10 miles to 1000 miles, everyone who rides invariably passes through a shop to pick up spare parts or get maintenance done. Mechanics traffic in the wheel sets of their community and they bind together the various types of bicyclists in their community. As we sat in the shop and finished the beers their newfound inhibition combined with greasy experience as they acted as informants and recounted me with anecdotal stories about customers bringing in bikes with various problems. They said it’s painful every time they’re on their own bike and ride up alongside someone with a squeaky chain, stopping them to pull out some lube and silence the racket. Through the condition and maintenance of one’s ride, “You can tell a lot about a cyclist by asking one question about their bike; if there’s some small detail about their bike that a mechanic might notice, you can ask them about it and if they give you a blank stare you know that somebody else put that together. But all of a sudden sometimes you’ll see a spark in their eye and they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! I love that too!’ so you’ll both geek out and you know that you’ve found a kindred soul.” I caught my own reflection in the mirror and noticed that the enthusiasm written over my face said that we might roll together some day.

        We finished the beers and swept up the shop together after sharing our passions for bikes over two ours. Grimy handshakes were exchanged and I walked out having formed a kinship with regular guys who worked on and bled for their community; members of a big urban family with its own misfits and outcasts that are nonetheless chained together by common love of the two-wheeled machine.

Civic progress is showing its teeth in the Mission District of San Francisco.

For the past few weeks I’ve been gnashing my chain through the gears of my bike as I pedal down to the Bicycle Kitchen in the Mission District. I’m working on exploring the idiosyncrasies of the subculture of bicycle mechanics to better understand the nuances of West Coast bike culture. The Bicycle Kitchen is a co-op that provides the people of San Francisco with the resources to learn about bicycle maintenance and construction. They keep a huge collection of spare donated parts on hand for patrons to rummage through and last week I rode down to their garage with my buddy Chris to get my hands dirty.

While I was down there I shot a short video to give a small taste of what they’re all about. After principal photography and a rough edit I sent the footage back to the east coast where my buddy Sean Emmel quickly scored the video with original music. It’s my first “brand essence” style video and also the first time Sean and I have combined our film and music skills (after playing music together for years). I’d love to keep sharpening my visual storytelling skills and use video to explore unique subcultures and destinations.

Criticism? Advice? Thougths?

I’m starting to try and pair genres of music with different elements in nature. Here’s another video I shot this time on my phone that I thought fit really well with Thomas Newman’s theme from, “American Beauty”. 

Here’s a little video I shot called “Survivors Guilt” (music by Jonny Greenwood).

I’ve wanted to write an article about attention for a long time but I’ve been distracted.

I’ve been thinking about something that I want to call an “attention economy”, existing in some kind of futuristic society where we sit and exchange bits of consideration as units of value in a free market. This idea must have come to me when someone demanded that I pay them more attention. I thought, “Pay more attention? I can’t go spending my attention on everything that asks for it”. We all have various capacities for maintaining attention and I’ve started thinking about where it all gets invested.

First realize that your attention is valuable, as it has monetary value. Advertisers pay millions of dollars trying to harvest and cultivate the attention of consumers so they can make emotional impressions on behalf of their clients. Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he holds the keys to an environment that people spend years of attention every day. I learned from Cameron Maddux that, “Time is the new currency” but like when gold used to back up every dollar spent in the US it’s attention that gives time any value. 

Too often we get frustrated by missed deadlines or goals unmet and are left feeling inadequate or incapable. Instead, start to think about where you spend your attention and what kind of returns you’re getting for your investment. Approach your attention from an economic perspective and create a budget. Audit how much focused attention you have per day and consider creating categories for where to spend your focused time. I found that one of the upsides to catching strep throat a few days ago is that I’m getting to spend time building my film skills. I’ve been watching documentaries and reading about how documentaries are made, making an investment of my attention that I hope to pay dividends in new skills someday.   

Everything in your life requires some of your limited attention and it’s often difficult to identify what’s not paying off anymore. An exercise I’m going to experiment with is keeping a log of how much time gets spent on the activities during breakfast and dinner during my day and seeing how much time is being spent on things that move me towards my goals. I’ve got a suspician that this stands to be a useful tool to help anyone move towards what they aspire to.

How does that sound?

It’s all about how you look at things.

I’ve been reading and thinking about how people work through hard events and emotional trials lately. This past year has dealt me quite a hand as I’ve experienced the physical loss of both grandparents and one cousin along with a few different close friends being diagnosed with cancer. I’ve realized recently how easy it is to become consumed with the events in our own lives and how likely we are to get dragged down. But I’ve realized that we’ve become conditioned to think like this.

Ever since we evolved into more complex creatures our survival was invested in the function of our reptilian brains. Nestled at the deepest level of our neurological landscape this area of our brain’s circuitry helped us identify problems that threatened our survival. Flight-or-flight responses, aggression, mating behavior, and the functions of our vital organs are constantly receiving these urgent messages from deep in this area of our minds. As such, we’re constantly looking for problems to fix and things that we want to change as dictated by this shadowy presence. It’s like the Wizard of Oz; a small guy hiding behind a curtain projecting huge images of himself to direct the show with unlimited authority. Because of our conditioning to constantly realize what’s wrong so we can fix it, it’s often easy to forget what’s right.

When we compound every observation of the things around us that need changing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, depressed, and discouraged. Outside of our basic instincts, we’re exposed to media everyday that encourages us to compare ourselves to others via the things we buy and the things we do. Researches like Dr. Gwenn O’Keeffe, have caught on to this by studying the skewed view that social media imparts on teens, and how it implies to them that everyone is living an incredible life that makes theirs pale in comparison. How many times have you logged on Facebook and seen photos from parties or status updates of your friends’ antics and heaved a heavy sigh? Is it possible that a side effect of our constant connectedness is the loss of touch with the positive things in our own lives?

So in the spirit of gratitude and happiness I’ve created a way to personal recognize and remember all of the small things that I’m grateful for and that make me happy. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu is famously quoted as saying, “Thejourney of a thousand milesbegins with a single step”. In the spirit of modern day technology I’m going to start a single tweet to realize and record small moments of happiness so that I have the ability to go back and look at life’s little victories when things look more bleak. I’ve started the new Twitter handle @ThankSmall (as a nod to Bill Bernbach’s legendary ad) and invite anyone to follow me and share the small things in life that they’re thankful for.

How does that sound?

I made this at work today while thinking about how precarious it is to communicate. The whole system is incredible when you think about trading guttural sounds for emotional responses. We all get misunderstood sometimes due to a breakdown in this feeling-to-idea-to-sound-to-comprehension chain.

What if Arnold Schwarzenegger dying words revolved around his love of classical music? We’ll never know.