Author: admin

A friend and I were talking about Shakespeare. I’m a fan, he’s not. He was wondering aloud whether the hyper around the Bard could ever be tested objectively. “Maybe,” he said, “people only like Shakespeare because they know it’s Shakespeare. I wonder whether they’d still like the plays if they’d never heard of him.”

I pointed out that Shakespeare had a number of contemporaries who wrote on many of the same themes, in the same iambic pentameter, with all the same conventions. And yet we don’t watch many of their plays. Just as we don’t listen to all that much music by J.S. Bach’s contemporaries. Maybe, I posited, Shakespeare was just so good that his work transcends its own time.

“Too bad,” my friend said, “that there’s no way to test that hypothesis.”

“Christopher Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare,” I told him. “Do you think you would know whether you’re watching a play by Shakespeare or by Marlowe?”

“No,” he replied, “I don’t think I’ve seen enough Shakespeare that I would know which was which.”

“I’m guessing,” I said, “that most people would be in the same boat as you. So I think you’d have a sample to work with.”

My friend perked right up. “Yes,” he said, “I think we could get enough people to do a proper blind comparison.”

I was glad to hear that we had a plan. I wonder how it will turn out. Maybe next we can try the same thing with Mozart and Salieri.

An article in today’s New York Times reported a research result that has been circling recently: Researchers believe they have figured out why we sleep. In scientific circles this has long been a puzzlement, given that for much of our recent evolutionary history, sleep would seem to be the worst of all possible Darwinian survival traits. After all, when you’re passed out and snoring on the veldt, you’re pretty much prime snackage for the nearest saber toothed tiger.

So what evolutionary advantage is conferred by those mysterious eight or so hours of thanatomorphism? The latest empirical evidence indicates that sleep is the occasion for flushing out the dead cells and accreted chemical poisons that we generate in the course of a day’s thinking. Night time, my friends, seems to be the right time for Mother Nature to dump our mental chamber pot.

But what if they have it all wrong? I mean, the major impetus for this research is the burning mystery of why we sleep at all, and why such odd behavior didn’t make us all die out thirty five centuries ago in equatorial Africa.

Let’s turn it around. What is the singular trait of human beings? It is our oddly cerebral way of dealing with the world. Other species have all sorts of intelligence, but we seem to be the only ones who survive by making elaborate and logistically intricate plans.

But as we now know, intelligence comes in many forms, and most of it is not quite at the conscious level. Haven’t you ever been stuck on a crossword puzzle, and then you woke up the next morning and simply knew the answers?

Maybe when we dream, we’re a lot smarter than we are when we are awake. Maybe Slumberland is where we actually solve the problems that need solving in order for us to survive. Perhaps the major survival function of our conscious selves is to take credit for solutions we’ve already worked out in our sleep, and for which our conscious mind then basks in undeserved applause.

“But I usually can’t remember my dreams!” you object. Of course you can’t. That symphony you wrote last night when you were dead asleep, that triple integral you solved, that sublime spiritual awakening to the vast and perfectly connected oneness of the Universe, you can’t remember these things because you’re not smart enough. Your waking brain simply doesn’t have the capacity.

Don’t worry about it. Go and get some sleep.

Have you ever noticed the emotional power of song lyrics that don’t quite make sense if you just read the words?

A certain level of crypticness seems to actually make some songs more emotionally effective, in a way that would never be true for prose. There is much obscurity in the lyrics of many amazingly powerful songs, like Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”, Cat Power’s “Lived in Bars”, Tom Waits’ “Time”, or almost any song from Dylan’s golden period. And then of course there’s “Stairway to Heaven”.

For many of the songs we love, a simple recitation of the words might elicit a confused shrug. Yet in combination with that particular music, the result can be overwhelmingly moving. So what exactly is going on here?

Perhaps the very obscurity of these lyrics, when combined with the emotional sense-making of the music, acts as a trigger for our own mind to add the missing pieces. By keeping explicit meaning hidden, the songwriter creates a kind of grandly protean canvas upon which each of us can project our own inner emotional landscape.

Of course, that’s just one theory.

There comes a point in every project when the project starts to assume its true form. Until then you are mostly going on instinct, feeling your way along as you push up hill, because the thing isn’t quite right yet.

But then at some point things turn a corner. The unfortunate decisions you’d made at first start to fall away. Some of those were the decisions that got you thinking about the project in the first place, before you quite knew where it was headed. Now they’re just holding things back.

Right about now I’m at such a turning point. The first weeks of the project I’m working on were mostly spent building tools, trying things out, demoing to friends and colleagues and listening to their criticisms.

One thing that’s great about those demos is that you often hear the same criticisms from different people — people who don’t even know each other. And usually they are about features that you’d fallen in love with.

How easily we are blinded by love for our own creations. That is why we often need other people to point out when they are just in the way. As Faulkner wisely said, “Kill your darlings.”

This evening I attended a talk by one of my favorite writers, George Saunders. In the course of a wide ranging conversation with the audience, he mentioned something a writer gets to do that we can’t normally do in real life: See things from inside somebody else’s head.

In particular, the writer can give us a privileged view of the minds of people we would not at all like in real life. In fact, we might go out of our way to them. But when we encounter such a prickly soul as a literary character, we find ourselves inside his head, and therefore cannot help but understand how he feels. And so we like him.

To do the same thing as an actor requires an analogous kind of skill. Think about the actors and actresses who have made you like a character you would have found repulsive in real life. These actors give us a window into the human soul that the average leading man or leading lady could never provide.

These days I am working intensely on a software project. When I get into this mode, I have a particular, and somewhat eccentric, way of working.

Rather than use a software version control program (like a normal person would), every day I copy the entire software base, all the lines of code, into a new folder. So I end up with a trail of folders, each somewhat different from the last, and each named for the date I was working on it.

This is not nearly as flexible as version control software. For example, if I get stuck, I can’t simply “roll back” to what I was doing an hour before. And yet I find it very satisfying. Recently I’ve started to understand why.

A day is a very natural marker of progress. In the morning the Sun goes up, in the evening it goes down, and that day will never come again. For example, when you take a cross-country journey, you tend to think of the places you visited on any given day. In a sense, that city belongs to that day. If one day you found yourself in some fascinating city, then that day becomes important in your memory.

And I’ve come to realize that by giving each day its own little narrative, I am somehow putting the days into a kind of competition with each other. On Wednesday I added this cool feature. Then on Friday I fixed that nasty bug.

I realize it’s not very logical, but it works. By asking each day to bring me something new or exciting, I think I’m getting a lot more done.

I went to a 3D movie recently where the person operating the project was clearly unfamiliar with the technology. This was apparent in several ways. For one thing, for the first ten minutes of the movie, there was no polarizing filter over the projector.

When this happens, you always see two images whether or not you are wearing the 3D glasses. In fact, until the projectionist puts the filter on, there is no point in putting on the glasses. You might as well enjoy the much brighter view you get by watching the movie without the glasses.

Because I am a basically positive person, I would like to think that at least some of the very high ticket price (3D movies are expensive!) will go to remedial training for this hapless projectionist.

After about ten minutes, someone in the projection booth finally put the filter on the projector. So I put on my 3D glasses, and then everything started to look really funny. Near things looked far away, and far things looked near. The filter was on backwards!

Since I know a little bit about 3D movie technology, I know that the two images are each polarized at 45^o — the left image slants to the right, and the right image slants to the left.

So I figured that if the glasses were turned upside down, its two filters would each slant the other way, and everything would look ok. I tried it, wearing the glasses upside down, and suddenly the 3D movie looked just fine. I’m sure I looked silly wearing upside down 3D glasses, but fortunately movie theaters are dark.

I told the friend I came with to flip her glasses upside down. Then we told our neighbors in all directions, and suggested they spread the word. Eventually this inverted fashion spread throughout much of the theater, and many of us watched the movie with our 3D glasses turned upside down.

After about half an hour, somebody in the projection booth figured out that there was a problem. They took out the filter, flipped it around, and put it into the projection path the right way. So I turned my 3D glasses right side up and kept watching.

But here’s the weird thing: Most of the people around me never turned their 3D glasses right side up again. They just continued to watch the rest of the movie the wrong way.

What on earth were they thinking?

I was having a conversation today with a colleague about a particular tension in technical advancement of the arts. In particular, we were discussing distribution of two different kinds of talent.

There are people who are incredibly good at inventing, and other people who are incredibly good at performing. But rare is the person who can do both with world class skill.

For example, the person who invents a new kind of movie camera is probably not going to have the skill of a Spielberg, and the inventor of a better guitar is not likely to be able to play like Segovia.

The result is a kind of lag in innovation: A new tool first needs to fall into the hands of the best practitioners. Only then can the experience of those practitioners inform further innovation.

Occasionally the same individual is able to evolve something technically while also bringing best practices to the medium. For example, Bach was inventing new musical forms even as he was using them to compose work of incomparable genius.

But Bach was the rare exception. Alas, for the most part there seems to be a law of conservation of talent at work.

The largest remaining impediment to truly wireless information technology is the need to recharge. We already know how to send information wirelessly, and we’re getting better at it all the time. But sending power through the air remains problematic.

There have been major advances in recent years. Collimated beams of microwave or infrared laser light can do a pretty decent job in the right conditions, and the field of wireless power transmission is by now well understood.

Unfortunately, bad things can happen when people get in the way of a power beam. But it occurs to me that soon this may not be a problem.

We tend to think of people as fairly fast moving. The typical human can run across a room very quickly, and turn their gaze to stare into an unfortunately placed laser beam in literally the blink of an eye. So placing people and high powered energy beams in the same room would seem to be a bad idea.

But “fast” is relative. A blink of an eye is rarely faster than 1/10th of a second, and typically takes three or four times longer. No matter how fast the fastest human can move, thanks to Moore’s Law we can now easily track where people are in a room, and actively re-aim energy beams so that no human could ever “cross the streams” (to quote Dr. Egon Spengler).

I have no idea whether people are working seriously in this direction. But it’s clear, if you think about it a bit, that no “science fiction” level of technology is required.

We already have the technological capability to provide perfectly safe ubiquitous wireless power transmission. All that is needed is a little engineering.

I really love Julie Taymor, and I really love William Shakespeare, so my recent experience seeing her creative interpretation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, one of the Bard’s greatest comedies, had me torn. I wrote about that experience here a few weeks ago, but still it has been nagging at me.

I mean, I found the production at Theater for a New Audience breathtakingly beautiful and visually stunning, but dramatically it felt like a complete failure. Something was rotten in Athens.

This despite a breathtaking performance Kathryn Hunter as Puck, channeling her inner Linda Hunt. As well as very good performances by Max Casella as Bottom, channeling his inner Joe Pesci, and by David Harewood as Oberon, channeling his inner Burt Lancaster.

So I did what any sensible person would do. I went back to the theatre and saw it again. And this time I think I’ve figured it out.

Part of the genius of Shakespeare’s comedies is that they always flirt with tragedy. There is inevitably a moment where the audience is on tenderhooks, where everything can go horribly wrong.

If you watch a truly great production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, such as the film version from 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Hall, you immediately see that this moment occurs in Act III, Scene II, when all four young lovers come together in the Wood.

There is true heartbreak in this scene, and that heartbreak is expressed in transcendent poetry. By the time Hermia, thinking she has lost everything, says “I am amazed, and know not what to say,” the audience should be overwrought.

In the 1968 film version, with the four young lovers played by Helen Mirren, David Warner, Diana Rigg and Michael Jayston, it all works beautifully. For all the other great wonders in the play, this is the scene that stays most powerfully in my mind.

But Julie Taymor had a little problem. The part of Lysander, one of the young lovers, is played by Jake Horowitz. Jake Horowitz is the son of Jeffrey Horowitz, the founding artistic director of Theater for a New Audience. Horowitz fils is fresh out of high school, and is really really bad at doing Shakespeare.

It is painfully obvious that the kid is only in this role because his dad runs the theatre.

In a way, it’s just one more in a long line of foolish creative decisions by doting dads, like John Huston casting his daughter Anjelika in “A Walk with Love and Death” long before she had the chops for it, or Francis Ford Coppola putting a young Sofia Coppola into a pivotal role in “The Godfather, Part III” that essentially made her a laughingstock.

Maybe this is a kind of tough love. After all, Anjelika and Sofia have done very well for themselves in the intervening years. Perhaps a devastating acting failure in dad’s high profile production is good for the soul. And now it’s poor young Jake’s turn.

Taymor is smart enough to know that with Horowitz in a key role, the scene would never work as written. So she plays it as farce, turning the one crucially serious scene in the play into something out of a Porky’s movie (I’m not exaggerating).

I could go on, but why bother? This is a worthwhile show to see because it is Julie Taymor, and she makes pure visual magic. But with the exception of a few fine actors apparently working on their own initiative, it has little to do with Shakespeare.

Although if it weren’t for that tragedy of casting, I’d like to think Taymor might have at least tried to aim higher.