Our lack of understanding of ourselves as well as our fantasies of perfectibility are all rooted in this long-dispatched idea of entitlement, when, assuredly, there is nothing on this earth to rightly feel entitled about. In the United States of America, the constitution starts with a bill made of ten supposedly inalienable rights that have been alienated more than once and amended seventeen times since their pompous declaration. France has seven such rights, sweden only three and somehow, they tell us, these have been delivered by a god to its people. Surely, every religion has its commandments that eventually find their way into socio-political life but isn’t it strange that god would have handed down different amounts of rights to different people based on geography?

Can we even question the fact that there might be no such thing as a natural born right? Weren’t these privileges made up so that we could live together in supposed harmony? That is what Rousseau’s The Social Contract is telling us, yet another time, that there are things that are handed down (keyword) to lil’ ole us from a merciful deity who evidently picks chosen people based on a standard that only seems clear to him. My grandpa used to tell me: “You can only count on yourself, and even-so, not too much.” I always took that to mean not to believe those who would tell us what our rights may be, or what we should be entitled to, that we are the beginning and the end of our own life experience, the only ones responsible for who we are and what we do. Moreover, in most countries, these given rights are invariably about equalizing the human race, making sure that all have the same chances anywhere, everywhere, whether you are small, big, ugly, white, black, a girl, a boy, whatever the circumstances of your birth may be, so that “fairness” may prevail. But since when has life been fair in anyway to anyone, especially considering how biased our assessment of “fairness” has so far been? We are not dealt a similar deck of cards, are we? Never have been. That these rights that we invent and impose on ourselves and each other try to balance the inequalities of birth is surely commendable but not exactly enforceable. Let me simply submit, for your express approval, every single year’s MLK day editorials that invariably begin with a subtly different version of “great strides have been made but there is still so much to do to make Dr. King’s dream come true…”

Constant revision of our actions is the key. I have never met anybody who says, “I hope that I am worthy of democracy” or “I hope that I am worthy of the chances that come my way,” which is a shame. Perhaps we imagine those to be questions only available to former Cuban political prisoners lucky enough to escape and take advantage of what they never could back on the terrorized island but we should probably all wonder about these instead of taking them for granted. We, the allegedly free, do not work for our freedom, most of us have too much in our lives because we are used to plenitude, to never having to think about anything but entertainment. We make big problems out of circumstantial ones because we feel a guilt-ridden need to balance all the fun stuff with perceived tragedy in order to have a life we deem meaningful and in compliance with society’s religion’s ideals of morality. Does john one:eight not tell us that “if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us?” Or so we think. When a tragic natural disaster happens, we do not know how to respond, so we wear ribbons, we put on telethons and the people in need rely upon the kindness of strangers who should have never been strangers in the first place. Certainly we are extremely lucky and fortunate to have been born in countries and societies that, even though appearances can sometimes be deceiving, favor freedom over tyranny but we must put a brake on perpetual self-congratulation and think about a world in which reaction, however plentiful and kind, may not be the best solution. We always say within the realm of our little agency that “better customer service is not just better apologies” and I feel that it is how we behave in the world. So surprised we are when catastrophe, whether man or nature-born, occurs, and so quick are we to favorably profit from our own inclination to show kindness by padding ourselves on our back fat…

This behavior tends to create, at large, a society of assisted people, who believe they are entitled to the principles of freedom, love and truth which so many have died to protect. What have you done? What have I done? Little, to be sure. We should not take any of those principles for granted but rather grow within them, a routine increasingly outmoded because we live in extraordinarily plentiful times. As cliché as this is, I am still amazed every time I troll the internet, by the plethora of choice that appears at the click of a button. My mind invariably flashes back to the supermarket scene in Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, the third in his Vietnam trilogy, where the Vietnamese girl whom the soldier brings back to America is pushing her empty cart looking left and looking right, in slow motion, at the towers of products stacked up to the ceiling, as if this overstuffed store were a wonder of the world. Not that we should feel any shame about all that we have, we have earned our horn of plenty by spilling blood on the zigzagged roads to civilization in order to merit such wealth but the unintended consequence of such affluence came fast and hard: complacency.

hey, here’s an idea, let us, in the name of the dearly departed, fight for these supposed rights and earn them, shall we?

alright then, let’s get off our asses and have a productive week!

played without unnecessary commentary, a first for me…

while i unpack my very moist luggage and look at all the footage from my short time away, i wanted to show you a small taste of the amazon of the amazon forest, where danger lurks at every corner and where it is said that every minute, you can die 100 different ways… and yes, that’s me on today’s theaptCOVER, more than worried at 4:45 in the morning while already on a hike to see the sunset.

as you can see, i am not sure how we got out of there alive. full movie by friday, i promise. have a wonderful week!

dating back to june 2010, i have been quite obsessed with the idea of geographically busting through the limits of my perspective on the physical world. as lucky as i have been thus far in my ability to see places, people and things heretofore unseen, i have still felt, daily, the burden of my submissiveness to the “comforts of home.” we are creatures of habit, all of us, and rarely willfully deviate from a situation that has fewer cons than pros. the problem is that such complacency perpetually offers the same reward, again and again, until the cycle is broken, a hard case to make for when such reward was first presumably deserved, but most importantly experienced, the triumph over whatever need was certain and all-consuming. but when we realize that every subsequent reward is but a pale facsimile of the previous one, especially when the consequence of the same work, we fool ourselves (at least i fooled myself, i don’t want to drag you into this) into believing that the prize is just as sweet as the first time, a lie for heroin, a lie for self-satisfaction. so, it is by taking baby steps that i plan to slowly move from mere contentment and attempt to drive to serene(ci)ty. i will ask for directions.

first stop: the cristalino jungle lodge in the amazon rainforest. i am leaving today for the next week. on the program, much of what you see in the video above, much of which we have all seen when flipping through channels late at night while unable to sleep and cursing at the guy in the over-pocketed safari jacket smugly pointing out that “the fauna in this part of the world (YOU’ll never go to) is simply EXTRAORDINARY!” well, FUCK YOU safari jacket guy, i’m coming to get you! no wifi, no cell signal and only 2 hours of electricity a day, at meal times, so as to never consume more that what can be produced through natural means. seems like the perfect place to start to get my entitled ass out of gear.

i will of course file a full photographic and hopefully cinematic report if my extra batteries and storage do not let me down as i get eaten whole by a giant boa constrictor. i won’t lie to you people, a realistic survival rate for a fancy boy like myself in these parts, even for a week, is at around 50/50 so i’ll make sure to bury my sd cards at the bottom of that tree with an X on it, ok? ok. cheers everyone!

seeing what arthur c. clarke can do, nostradamus would probably want to go back to soothsayer school… the man doesn’t just describe the future, he describes my future, living as i am in the countryside today thanks to the internet, something he knew would happen in 1974!

some designers are just content to, well, design. but tom dixon looks at his work differently, in that is it not merely part of his life, it is his life. and not in a protestant ethic, work hard / play hard kind of way, rather in a “let me imbue all that i do with all that i am” way, the only way to do it, really. props.