Author: admin

I was walking along 8th Street in Manhattan with my nephew when we came up on a large black and white poster — a blow up of an old photo of 8th Street from long ago.

On the right near corner was a Nedicks, and on the left was a Whelan’s Drugs. Those who know their NYC history will realize that this was the view of 8th Street looking East from 6th Avenue. The Nedick’s was where a Barnes & Nobles stood until recently, and Whelan’s was on the site of the recently closed Gray’s Papaya.

Seeing the old cars and the horse drawn delivery wagon in the foreground, I wondered aloud when the photo was taken. Surely, I said, there must be a clue somewhere in the picture.

Fortunately, half a block to the East was the movie theatre that eventually became the beloved 8th Street Playhouse. On the marquis was advertised Ann Harding in “Nine Girls”. I jotted that down.

Later I looked it up on Google. The name of the film pegged the photo to 1944 (when the movie theater was still known as the Film Guild Cinema). I then ended up spending quite a lot of time on-line, learning about Ann Harding’s fascinating career and times. It was like entering a time machine.

Nobody I’ve spoken to remembers her, except for one woman I’m guessing is around eighty years old, whom I met the other day at the Outer Critics’ Circle Awards. She remembers Ann Harding fondly from her childhood.

Maybe, seventy years from now, somebody will see a forgotten name on a marquee in an old photo from 2014. And perhaps they too will enter a time machine.

      “And the things you can’t remember
      Tell the things you can’t forget that
      History puts a saint in every dream.”

Of course there is no such thing as the “Best album ever”. We all have our unique musical tastes. One person might enjoy Schoenberg’s Piano Sonatas, whereas another treasures the collected works of Vanilla Ice.

Yet for me there is one album that towers above all others, on the simple scale of how much I enjoy it. And that is Tom Waits’ 1985 masterpiece “Rain Dogs”.

      “And when she’s on a roll she pulls a razor
      From her boot and a thousand
      Pigeons fall around her feet.”

Oh, this album is definitely not for everyone. I could see how some people might find it downright unlistenable, hearing only a rough beer hall emulation of early Kurt Weill. But for me nearly every one of those nineteen songs is a master class, a piece of pure musical bliss that leads me through the rain soaked streets of a mythic down and out New Orleans re-invented as an epic bar crawl.

The album is, in a way, an inspired musical enactment of Henry Miller at his best, with maybe a dash of William Burroughs thrown in for good measure. Its power is so great that Jim Jarmusch has spent the last thirty or so years of his professional life essentially riffing on it.

      “So put a candle in the window
      And a kiss upon his lips
      Till the dish outside the window fills with rain
      Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart
      And pay the fiddler off till i come back again.”

Today the New York Times ran an article about the backlash after a young actress, in response to a reporter’s question, said she wasn’t a feminist. “No,” was her reply, “Because I love men, and I think the idea of ‘raise women to power, take the men away from the power’ is never going to work out because you need balance.”

The article went on to describe various reactions to this statement, the most common one being that the actress was starting from an incorrect definition of feminism.

For example, Andi Zeisler said “I don’t care if people don’t identify as feminist,” but took issue with misinformation and the perpetuation of the idea that feminism is “this zero-sum game that if it elevates women, then it denigrates men. That’s just wrong and has never been what feminism is about. That’s the Fox News version of feminism.”

But what really struck me about the article was that everyone in it — the reporter and every person she talked to — was female. It apparently never occurred to her to speak with a single man.

Like many other men I know, I am a feminist. Not only do I support equal pay for equal work, but I put effort into helping to remove gender barriers for young people who might want to work in computer science.

Implying that you need to be a woman to be a feminist is just wrong. It’s a lot like saying that you need to be black to support civil rights.

Think about how creepy and bizarre that last statement sounds. Such lazy thinking clearly separates and weakens us, and works against our efforts to work together in common cause.

Yesterday I read in the New York Times about Tabtor, a math tutoring app with an unusual pricing model: The first two weeks are free, but the app costs $50 for every month thereafter.

This steep price helps to support the app’s most distinguishing feature: Up in the Cloud, your child’s work going through these math problems is being monitored by a human tutor. Unlike a computer, this person offers notes and encouraging voice memos, assigns new worksheets, and checks in via weekly video conference calls.

To my surprise, the writer of the article, whose own kids use the app, didn’t make the obvious literary connection, which I suspect will be evident to many readers of this blog.

Tabtor is, of course, a concrete step toward perhaps the most tantalizing idea in Neal Stephenson’s prophetic 1998 science fiction novel “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”.

A central plot point of that novel revolves around a young girl named Nell, who gets her hands on a futuristic cyber-textbook that helps her grow intellectually to the point where she eventually becomes the smartest person in the world.

The key to the Primer’s effectiveness for Nell is the fact that a human, a woman named Miranda, is up in the Cloud, acting out its simulations. Although the two never meet in person, Miranda takes a personal interest in Nell, and her nurturing presence ends up greatly amplifying the educational effectiveness of the Primer.

In a sense, this plot-line is a disquisition on the Turing test: Stephenson is clearly saying that no matter how advanced A.I. becomes at simulating human knowledge, the presence of another actual human will always make a decisive difference.

And now it seems, people are finally trying out his theory in the real world!

I know that any semester now, some of my students are going to show up wearing Google Glass, or whatever will be the next generation version of that sort of thing. And when that happens, it will be interesting to see how everybody reacts.

For one thing, everything I say or do as a lecturer will become a matter of public record — and potentially a viral YouTube video if I screw up badly enough — unless I or somebody else makes a rule against people recording and then posting whatever they happen to be looking at.

The University might get nervous about all those “citizen recordings” of class lectures, because it could mess up a hypothetical revenue model from on-line courseware. That may sound crass, but there is an argument to be made that these class lectures are actually school property.

Oh well, with any luck this won’t be a problem for a while. All of those Glass users in class will be checking their emails on the higher res Android phones on their desks. So they won’t be looking at me anyway. 🙂

At night the dreams arise in fitful sleep
Emerging from some long forgotten fright,
Wanton creatures scavenging the deep
Disturb the quiet requiem of night.
They scutter from the hunter drawing near
Blindly thrash around upon the bed
As spiders turn to dust and disappear,
I know that this is all inside my head.
Then through the dark gray labyrinth a face
Seen perhaps just dimly far afield
The moment comes in solitary grace
When all these shadows fade and start to yield
      To sunlight playing on a mountain lake,
      The world becomes your smile — I’m awake.

I just heard a recording of a great radio interview with the legendary Joe Harris. Among other things, Harris was the co-creator and storyboard artist for “Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales”. Seeing that animation as a kid is what first got me interested in using animation for teaching.

Among his many accomplishments, Joe Harris also created what is probably the single most famous tag line in American advertising: “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!”

This idea was seminal and brilliant for several reasons. For one thing, the line doesn’t say anything about the product itself — a concept pretty much unheard of at the time. In a radical departure from the norm of its day, the ad wasn’t even trying to sell Trix breakfast cereal to parents. It was selling directly to the kids.

The other ingenious aspect of this ad campaign is that the rabbit keeps trying to eat the Trix, time and time again. But never succeeds. Ever.

Harris said in the interview that people would often come up to him and ask “Why can’t you give the rabbit a break?” And the answer was that this was precisely the point. Once the rabbit gets the Trix, the drama is all gone. There is no longer any reason for you to pay attention.

By continually withholding the breakfast cereal from the cartoon rabbit, a tension is created in the audience. Maybe the rabbit will get the Trix next week. Or tomorrow. Or any minute now.

That dramatic tension creates interest. Suddenly the rabbit’s quest seems a lot more important.

The Trix campaign is narrative literature redux. It is, in a very pure sense, a beautiful illustration of why narrative literature works at all.

There was a time, before the information age, when all goods where inherently scarce. Material products consume natural resources, require one or more perhaps costly steps of manufacture, and then need to be physically shipped to retail outlets or customers.

In recent years, a new class of products has emerged: The purely informational product. Songs, games and movies no longer require a physical substrate on a per item basis, but rather can be sent directly to the consumer through a common electronic pipe.

The inherent per-unit cost for such a product is so low as to be essentially zero.

In order to maintain a viable economy, this development has required the introduction of artificial scarcity: Even though the cost per copy is now essentially zero, creators still need to protect the investment they have made in the creation of such products.

Therefore a system of system of licensing has been developed, either as a payment per downloaded product, or in the form of a maintenance fee for monthly service.

One day, perhaps, the Singularity will arrive, after which we will all be able to upload our minds to the Cloud. Physical brains and bodies will no longer be necessary.

When that day comes, there will be no practical technical limitation on how many copies there are of each of us. There could be five of me in the Cloud, and twenty of you.

But it is likely that such unrestricted copying would violate my sense of myself as my own “intellectual property” — my feeling that the investment I made into being me, over the course of my life, has a unique value. And you will probably feel the same way about your own self.

I suspect that this will lead to restrictions on copying of someone’s mind within the Cloud.

The principle will be the same as it is for today’s economy of downloadable information products: Although the cost of replicating a human mind may become essentially free, the owners of those minds will likely insist upon a system of artificial scarcity, to protect their investment.

As I got out of the subway this evening and crossed Sixth Avenue on my way home, I saw a young woman attempting, with no success whatsoever, to hail a taxi. It was clear, from her body language and her general sense of frustration, that she had been standing there trying to get a cab for a long time.

After I crossed the avenue, I heard a man’s voice behind me, shouting “Miss!”

As someone who has lived in Manhattan for years, I didn’t need to look around to know what was going on. There was only one reason the man would be trying to get her attention.

I was closer to the young woman, who clearly hadn’t heard the guy calling to her. “Hello!” I shouted in her direction, and she turned to look at me, confused. I pointed to the other side of Sixth Avenue. “There’s a cab. Somebody is just getting out.”

Suddenly the young woman became focused, and quickly crossed over to the taxi. Just as she got in she turned around and waved a thank you. I gave her a thumbs up, and continued on my way home. The system had worked.

I love being back in New York City.

This evening as I walked down the street I saw a young man talking to a young woman who was walking toward him. And she said something in response.

But then something strange happened. The young woman kept walking right by the young man, continuing to talk, while the man turned away from the woman and also continued to talk.

It was only then that I realized that each was speaking on the phone, via a wireless headset. They weren’t talking to each other at all. I don’t think they were even aware of each others’ existence.

In the new PolySocial Reality, this is all perfectly normal. I am the strange one — the one who insists on thinking that people may somehow be connected, simply because they happen to be facing each other in the physical world when they speak.

I was thinking of writing a play about the absurdity of all this — perhaps involving a man and woman who carry on an entire conversation before the audience realizes that both are actually speaking on their cell phones to other people. But I think we may already be at the stage where an audience would fail to see the point — because they wouldn’t find such a situation to be at all absurd.