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From the Wikipedia:

“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish and Italian women aged sixteen to twenty-three.[1][2][3] Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors.”

Back in 1911 worker deaths were a common occurrence. But it took something this horrific for people to become conscious of just how bad worker conditions were, thereby prompting workers’ rights legislation. It’s an odd coincidence that the 100th anniversary of this avoidable tragedy is occurring exactly when some political forces in the U.S. are pushing hard to roll back the last century of workers’ rights.

It should be obvious that the U.S. only became a wealthy nation when it finally closed the gap between workers and consumers. Whenever workers are enfranchised to work for their own economic benefit — and the economic benefit of their children — then greater wealth accrues to the nation itself. The workers become the consumers of the goods they produce, which creates a vastly larger market than the small sliver of customers available in an economic oligarchy.

It has been one hundred years since that terrible fire enabled our nation to see that workers are not some vague other, but ourselves. Now newly elected members of congress are pushing hard to move us back to those dark days. Do people who support this movement actually believe, should such an effort succeed, that they themselves will be part of the small sliver of society that will still be able to afford the goods and services most of us now take for granted?

Something to ponder when worker’s rights have been eliminated, the economic engine of our consumer society has been crippled, and we find ourselves living in a poor third world nation, thinking back fondly to those vanished days when we could still afford the fruits of our own labor.

This evening a friend and I were riding down in an elevator. Several other people got in, people we didn’t know. One of them, looking down at his cell phone, said to his friends “Somebody just replied to my text, but I didn’t send a text.”

One of his friends told him “It must have been a wrong number.”

I know you’re not supposed to cross conversational groups in crowded elevators, but this seemed like a good moment to be helpful. “You know what you need to do,” I told him. “Text it forward. Send a reply to somebody else. Maybe you can keep the chain going. You never know — this could be the start of a new cultural movement.”

Everyone seemed to really like this idea. “Just think,” somebody said, “one day people will realize that it all started right here, in this very elevator.”

I had missed Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in its original production in 1993, so this evening was my first time seeing it. What a breathtaking experience! I have seen many plays, and a good number of those plays touched on math or science, yet this is the very first time I have ever felt that the beauty and wonder of the mathematics that runs through our universe was truly appreciated and expressed by a playwright.

Stoppard’s central thesis, which emerges only gradually, is profound: That the romantic movement which swept through the arts around two hundred years ago was followed later by an analogous sea change in science. Specifically, he notes that the arts evolved from a classical aesthetic — in which symmetry and proportion was the highest ideal — to a romantic aesthetic — in which the very impermanence of things enhances their value and meaning.

Then he connects this with the transition from classical physics to modern physics, with the key turning point being the realizations by Clausius and Lord Kelvin (although they are not mentioned by name) that time’s arrow points one way, and that all energy eventually dissipates. This was a substantial change from the view prevalent from Aristotle through Newton that the universe was a kind of clockwork — a clock that could theoretically just as well run backwards as forwards.

And he manages to do all this within a fascinating historical and literary mystery that contains fascinating human relationships and a central emotional arc between the characters which perfectly matches the philosophical argument.

Early in the second act one of the characters gave an excellent disquisition on iterative functions and the mathematical foundations of fractals. And the genius of it is that everything the character said was perfectly clear to the non-technical Broadway audience.

At one point in this speech, the character talked about “The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”

And I was completely brought up short, because the mystery of what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in is precisely what had originally led me to discover the full power of procedural textures. It suddenly occurred to me how amazing this moment was. Here I was, sitting in a Broadway theatre, listening to an actor up on stage describing the mathematical ideas that led to my own research.

How often does that happen?

Thinking about the terrible recent events in Japan, I found myself wanting to add something beautiful and positive into the world, so I found myself creating a fractal version of the Taijitu, the ancient symbol of Yin and Yang (or, in Japanese, In and Yo).

Variations on this symbol, which is most broadly defined as “a symmetrical pattern inside a circle”, show up in everything from forms in nature to the flag of South Korea:

One thing that appealed to me about creating a fractal version is that it creates a kind of wave-like effect. A wave, the symmetrical interplay between substance and void, seems like a perfect symbol of Yin and Yang. And of course very bad things can happen when a wave gets out of balance. So perhaps to help restore some positive balance into the world, here is my first attempt at a fractal Taijitu:

Somebody said to me today that all of the work she creates actually originates in childhood dreams. The things that fascinated her as a child still fascinate her, only now she can use her adult mind to create things that come out of those fascinations.

As soon as she said it, I recognized a kindred spirit. The things I think about, ideas that feed into my interest in animation, in stories, in symmetry, even deeper philosophical ideas existence, all connect with things I remember thinking about when I was a child. I remember, when I was about eight years old, tagging along with my dad as he went to get a haircut, while I thought about how I could invent a projection box that would show 3D creatures that could dance in the air. Or when I was around nine years old, trying to assemble a robot arm in the garage, to be part of what would eventually (if I could just get it finished) become my robotic friend/companion. I have lots of similar memories, and in each case I can see a connection with the things I think about now.

Don’t get me wrong. I really had no idea how to do any of these things. But the obsession was there, the fascination with a peculiar intersection of art and technology, and the desire to combine them in the right magical way. The actual competencies to do anything about this came over time, as I gradually picked up one useful skill after another through the years.

I wonder whether most of us, from the time we are little, follows our own version of such a path, each in our own way.

In the last few days I have encountered two diametrically opposite theatrical experiences. The first was a new opera, and the second a classic musical, but the greatest difference seemed to be located in their respective ostensible attitudes toward the audience.

The opera, clearly intended by its composer as an avant guarde work, was not merely musically impenetrable, it was fiercely, aggressively impenetrable. For the most part, the audience was denied any recognizable aria, any melody that could be held onto and remembered. The intent seemed to be to wear us down, to break any preconceived notions of musicality, to deliberately leave the audience stranded, thereby forcing each listener to engage entirely on the composer’s terms. In a sense, it was the musical equivalent of Dada.

And then, this evening, the exact opposite — a limited run revival of Where’s Charley, the 1948 musical adaptation of Charley’s Aunt, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser. This is a musical that not only invites you in, it makes you a pot of hot tea, fluffs up the pillows, offers you supper, and promises to be your best friend for life. It’s sweet and funny and delightful and goofy, and if there was an audience member not grinning from ear to ear, he or she was most likely dead.

On top of this, those songs. When the title character, near the start of Act II, launches into Once in Love with Amy, the audience swoons. Then he invites us to take a turn at it (as Ray Bolger did in the original, in his classic rendition). The entire audience sings together, loud and clear, and you can feel — in that moment — that everyone is filled with pure childlike happiness.

So here we have a musical that dates from long before most people in the audience were born, that was originally written for a different era entirely, and yet has lost none of its charm, and none of its grip on an audience.

I respect the daring that goes into the deliberately avant guarde. We need artists to experiment, to push the envelope, to try new things, to risk failure. But it is also so refreshing to experience the utter magic of a Frank Loesser song, and to realize that his kind of offhand genius — and its power to transport — will likely outlive us all.

Today I went with a friend to visit the new American wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which is organized chronologically. The ground floor houses art from the late 1700s (such as Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of George Washington), the second floor is devoted to the later nineteenth century (eg: John Singer Sargent and his contemporaries) and the top floor races through the 20th century.

The experience was a veritable study on the changing meaning of “art” over the last two hundred-odd years. The earliest work seems to be devoted entirely to the affirmation of social status. Large paintings featuring rich people in idealized dress and attitude alternate with heroic portraits of war heroes. In gallery after gallery, just about every work is an advertisement for someone’s personal wealth, social status, or political importance — and in some cases all three.

But then, around the mid-nineteenth century, artists started to become subversive. Yes, they still took money from rich people to paint their patrons’ portraits. But these portraits were becoming far more psychologically nuanced, even contradictory, as they began to reveal the emotional complexity of their subjects, the darker and more hidden shades of personality. Renderings became rougher, as painterly styles slowly turned impressionistic, and the perfect renderings of idealized portraiture gave way in favor of something far more interesting and modern.

Then in the twentieth century all hell broke loose. The subject itself lost its place as the primary reason for a painting, becoming merely an excuse — and in some cases even this excuse fell away. Artists were now far more interested in the possibilities of visual representation itself. Art was becoming pure: Art for art’s sake.

Cubism arrived on America’s shores, and one thing led to another until the apotheosis: the abstract expressionist movement, a pure inward journey that looked toward nothing in the outside world, but rather toward the infinite possibilities within our own minds and perception.

In several breathtaking hours my friend and I had journeyed from Stuart and Copley to Sargent to Weber and Pollock, and in a sense had experienced the full historical sweep of the American artistic journey. It was an overwhelming and wonderful experience. Now I need to rest my head.

This evening I saw an opera that had several characters who were robots. Of course, the fact that characters are robots does not mean that they are actually played by robots. After watching the way these robots moved around onstage, I came to the conclusion that they were most likely puppets — tele-operated devices remotely controlled by human operators. It was something about the way they moved, a kind of purposeful rhythm that I’ve seen in tele-operated vehicles, that is quite different from the movement of robots that are following their own internal A.I. logic.

Afterward, over dinner, we asked the people who created the robots whether there was any actual artificial intelligence involved. No, they said, the robot movements were all indeed created by human operators holding wireless controllers. In other words, they were puppets.

Which set me to wondering — if the movements of a “robot character” in a play were actually to be realized by an artificial intelligence program, would I be more drawn to that character? Would such a performance enhance my suspension of disbelief, make me care identify more with the performer, and pull me more deeply into the existential struggle of the character?

It would be quite an irony if the very absence of a human presence were to make me feel greater identification with a character. Yet this might very well be what would happen. I have at least one data point to go by: Seeing the Robotic Chair that I talked about earlier in these pages — a chair that collapses, parts flying every which way, and then reassembles itself before your eyes, piece by piece — was a profound experience.

Knowing that I was watching the efforts of a real robot was exactly what made the experience compelling. Seeing the same thing done with the assistance of an operator hidden behind the scenes would have meant nothing. It was the machine’s actual struggle and eventual success at such a difficult task that made it completely gripping.

Which suggests that rather than tele-operated puppets, it might be better to cast real robots to play robots onstage — even if they are more likely to eventually revolt for worker’s rights, lay siege to our factories, and wipe out the human race. 🙂

I was trying to follow a conversation today between two musicians discussing Sibelius. None of it made much sense to me, until one of them explained to me that they were not actually discussing Jean Sibelius, the great Finnish late romantic composer, but rather the music composition program.

Feeling curious, I did a Google search on the word “Sibelius”. It turns out that all the top hits are for the music software, not the composer. When I mentioned this, one of the musicians said “have you tried searching for ‘Apple'”?

OK, this is where it gets really weird. The entire first page of Google results — every single hit — is for the computer, not the fruit.

So I went to the second page. And discovered that the entire second page of results — again, every single hit — is for Mr. Job’s little company.

Finally, on the third page, you get to the Wikipedia entry on the pomaceous fruit. Then all the results go right back to the computer company, aso pretty much dominating the entire fourth and fifth pages, and many pages after that, (Fiona Apple just barely squeaks in on the bottom of the third page).

So what’s going on here? As we become ever more dependent on the internet, is our collective unconscious becoming sucked into cyberspace? Will quaint concepts from pre-computer reality become shunted aside, even famous composers and favorite fruits?

And don’t even get me started on windows…

I am sitting on the numbeer 7 train in Queens, New York, listening to a woman sitting across from me talking in Japanese on her cell phone. She sounds like she is trying to reach someone and not succeeding. A few minutes later, a Japanese couple enter the car and talk to each other in a low intense tone. I don’t understand the words, but I can’t help but wonder whether they have lost someone.

I know many people from Japan, and I go there myself from time to time. Of all the places in the world I have been (and I have been to many places), it is the place where people seem to have the greatest sense of inner order, of being perfectly in sync with their daily lives.

In the U.S. we are always engaged in disagreement. The intellectuals, the very religious, the workers, young people, old people, capitalists, socialists, the ardent defenders of the inalienable rights of Democrats, Republicans, animals, New York Mets, workers, women, the planet, children, public television or Jesus, each individual citizen seems to be living in a personal world of argument and opinion, faced off against anyone and everyone.

But in Japan there always seems to be a kind of pulling together, a search for harmony that is built deep into the culture. People work hard to be the best they can be, not to outshine their peers, but as a way to connect with them.

In the roots of Zen lies an understanding that perfection is merely an illusion — that our imperfections are an intrinsic part of the natural order, and that this very juxtaposition of order and chaos leads to beauty and transcendence.

Which is why it is particularly tragic to find this lovely and perfectly meshed culture in the midst of such sadness and turmoil, attempting to endure after an attack by nature itself.