H

Four days ago I deliberately avoided the obvious post, as some of you may have observed. I was hoping someone would notice and comment, but alas, nobody has. In any case, June 6 just seemed far too easy a target. The timing was too precise – to the letter, so to speak. But today I make up for my earlier circumspection by adopting a deliberate numerological laxity. Throwing all caution to the winds, I give you the letter H.

And a good day for it too. Today is the tenth day of the sixth month. Being that the average of 10 and 6 is 8, this is a wonderful day to introduce our eighth letter – a letter so important they named a bomb after it. This fine figure of phonetic fun facilitates a fertile font of fabulous facts. First, consider the numbers. H stands for Hydrogen, which is element number one. Yet to write the lower case h you need two strokes, whereas to write the upper case H you need three.

But what is the connection between H and the number four? I don’t know about you, but I have always found it somewhat disturbing that 4H Clubs and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are both equestrian organizations symbolized by the identical combination of number and letter. Mere coincidence?

In Monopoly a Hotel is worth five Houses (both great H words), and in geometry a hexagon has six sides, whereas a heptagon has seven. Which brings us back to eight.

I could go on like this all day, but I won’t. There are more interesting things to talk about. Like the fact that H brackets all of our metaphysical possibilities – it stands both for the place most people are hoping to go when they die, and the place they’d least like to end up. Famous people seem drawn to it as well: Hubert Humphrey, Hal Holbrook and Harry Houdini. Not to mention Halston, Homer, Hadrian, Henry Hudson and Herbert Hoover, to home in on just a handful. Must be something in the H2O.

But wait, there’s more.

For example, did you know that to Johann Sebastian Bach the letter H was the eight note of the musical scale? Actually, in his day “B” was the German name for the note that today we would call “Bb”, whereas “H” was their name for the note we would call “B” (got that?). The cool thing about this is that Bach was therefore able to compose a fugue based on a melody spelling out his own name: B – A – C – H. If you wanted to sound this out on a piano using today’s notations, you’d play Bb – A – C – B.

How many great composers in history have been able to work their own name into a musical theme? Imagine the jealousy of all those long named composers like Tsaichovsky and Shostakovich! Yet I somehow doubt that Bach was the only musical innovator with this idea. For all we know, there might be melodic messages lurking within the music of the Dada movement, or the songs of ABBA, not to mention the indie rock band Bede. Or even handy notes to housekeepers hidden by hipster rock stars, like: “A FAB CAFE HERE, FEED DAD – EDGE”.

Horrors.

G forces

About two years ago I went skydiving. Surprisingly (at least to myself) there was no feeling of fear. For one thing, it was tandem diving – you’re strapped to a guy who has already done this maybe 4000 times before. If you do the math, you realize that the odds of dying on the way down are lower than the odds of dying in the car ride on the way to the airfield.

For another thing, once you’ve gotten into the rickety little plane (which has no door, incidentally – just a big open hole in the side where the jumpers go out), and then have spent twenty minutes slowly climbing up to twelve thousand feet, before watching two of your friends fall out of the plane into the open air below, it’s not as though you really have a choice. You’re going to go out of that plane, so it’s pretty much like it’s already happened. Fear is not really an emotion that comes into play at that point in the game. The emotion is more like “ok, this is really strange.”

The first surprising thing was that you don’t actually jump out of the plane. You sit with your legs dangling out over the world, and then you just kind of lean forward and fall out, head over feet. Easy as falling off a biker, as a lady friend of mine used to say.

The first five seconds are the best. That’s the part where you’re actually accelarating at full G force. Which means you’re effectively in a zero gravity environment. There is no up or down. There are parts that are blue (that would be the sky) and parts that are not blue (that would be the ground), but there is no visceral sense that the former is up or the latter is down. They’re both just tumbling all around you. You’re actually strapped to a guy who knows what he’s doing, but he’s behind you, so you don’t see him.

After five seconds you accelarate to about 130 miles per hour. That’s called “terminal velocity” – a phrase with which I am not entirely comfortable, for obvious reasons. Basically that’s the point where the air itself is keeping you from going faster. All that air rushing up against your body keeps your velocity down to a steady 130 mph – the speed with which you would eventually hit the ground if you didn’t happen to have a chute handy.

I didn’t find this part of the free fall to be entirely pleasant. It was way cold, and I could feel my body being buffeted about by forces that were clearly larger than a human body is meant for. There was a part of my brain that kept trying to explain to the rest of my brain, rather insistently, that I was about to die. Fortunately the rest of my brain refused to listen.

After about forty seconds or so of being a human cannonball, the chute is pulled, there is an upward yank, and suddenly everything just seems to go quiet, as if time itself had stopped. When you’re sitting there under an open chute, with a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. It feels as though you’re frozen in midair. But of course you’re still falling – just a lot more slowly.

This serene gliding continues for another twenty minutes or so, along with the odd (and false) feeling that you’re just suspended at one spot up in the air. It’s only the last twenty seconds or so, when you suddenly see the ground rush up against you before landing, that you realize you’ve been falling the entire time.


***

All in all, I found the entire experience extremely satisfying. Although I kept getting the nagging feeling that it reminded me of something. Which didn’t seem possible, since I’d never been skydiving before. And then I realized what it reminded me of.

Skydiving is kind of like a relationship. You start out enormously high. Then for the first little bit you are completely disoriented, in a really wonderful day. You don’t know what’s up or what’s down, and you don’t really care. This feeling quickly settles into the crazy rushing phase. Everything is way fast, way intense, and you feel thrill and danger all at the same time. Then, at some moment, this is replaced by a feeling of calm. The relationship becomes serene, somehow peaceful, a vantage point from which to see the world. You feel as though you could stay up there forever.

Until suddenly one day you see the ground rushing up toward you, and you realize things were not really as bouyant as they had seemed. Then you’re back on the ground, right where you started, a little winded, maybe just a little disoriented, and kind of sad that it’s over.

But of course you want to go right back up and try the whole thing again.

F is for Future

Future technologies are sometimes easier to focus on than existing ones. For example, over dinner this evening a friend was telling me about a colleague who had done early work on user interfaces that incorporate portable videorecorders. The problem was, the colleague had pursued this research so long ago that there were no portable videorecorders – the technology itself was off still some years in the future. In a situation like that, what’s a scientist to do?

The solution was to design studies in which participants wore a big backpack. All of the stuff it took to emulate a portable video recorder was in that backpack. It was just like the real thing, if you ignored the fact that you were carrying a large backpack on your back.

While my friend was talking, I began to see that not having a real portable videorecorder had helped those scientists gain insights into the technology they were researching. By needing to emulate the device, they were able to keep the device itself in focus. They were forced to think about its properties, rather than merely take those properties for granted.

After all, people are all too good at taking technologies for granted. Air conditioners, washing machines, clocks, pen and paper, these are just a few of many technologies that have completely altered our lives, but that we never think about. In a way, you can say that a technology has become completely successful precisely at the point when we no longer think about it. The flying car may be the subject of hundreds of speculative articles, but the washing machine has transformed countless millions of lives.

And so perhaps we need a little jolt, a way of pinching ourselves, so that we can truly see the technologies we use every day, rather than simply taking them for granted. Maybe we need to pretend they don’t exist yet, like that emulated portable videorecorder my friend was talking about.

Imagine experiments with driving that involved a team of researchers pushing a make believe car around here and there, while a driver sat inside the fake automobile, pressing on the gas and the break, and turning a steering wheel. The team would need to observe the driver, looking at how he or she moved the steering wheel, and then figure out whether to turn left or right, when to accelarate and when to stop.

Or how about experiments that emulate email by having researchers physically carry the text message typed by a correspondent from one room across to another room. That text is then read by the other correspondent, and the typed reply is carried back to the first room. The task of emulation becomes progressively more interesting as more correspondents are added to the experiment.

Similarly, we could emulate internet search via a team of researchers and a library. The team members would need to learn to organize themselves, to fan out and efficiently look for answers in complementary places on the library shelves.

And what about text to speech, or speech to text, automatic translation between languages, even the humble thermostat. These are all amenable to this kind of emulative analysis.

I’m not suggesting that we operate this way in our real lives – that would be silly. But rather that we use this kind of technique – deliberately falling back on “Wizard of Oz” methods, a kind of “F is for Fake” approach, as Orson Welles might have said – even when such approaches are not necessary, in order to force ourselves to examine and to revisit the interface itself, to break down and focus on our interactions with our modern technological tools in a way that does not permit us to take them for granted.

Besides, imagine the following scenario: You sit in a high-tech looking platform and operate a plastic joystick while a team of people carries you around the room, swooping, lifting and banking, hovering and gliding. Finally you get to have that flying car. 🙂

E pluribus unum

E pluribus unum is a Latin phrase written on all U.S. currency, which literally means “one out of many”. Originally it referred to the joining of the thirteen colonies into a single nation, but in modern times the phrase has taken on modern meanings. For example, many of us generally take for granted that this phrase now suggests that our nation is a glorious melting pot, one in which a citizen’s national or ethnic background does not impose an obstacle to the pursuit of dreams of individual success or achievement.

But every once in a while something stops us up short, and we realize that this naive view of America is far from universal. For example, today The New York Times published the following letter to the editor of the Arts and Leisure section (this is a real letter in today’s paper – I’m not making this up):

To the Editor:
    Re “Motherhood Becomes Her, Quite Often” by Felicia Lee [May 24]:
    I am offended that Phylicia Rashad is playing a white woman’s role in “August: Osage County.” It doesn’t make sense that she would have white siblings and children. As brilliant as Ms. Rashad is, the casting is off-kilter.
    I would be equally offended if a white actress was cast as Bess in “Porgy and Bess”, or in any of the black roles in “Raisin in the Sun” or August Wilson’s plays.
    Let’s keep white actresses playing white roles and blacks playing black roles.
          Ronald Fernandez
          Pittsburgh

I’ve been thinking over the logic of this letter since I first read it earlier today. I now realize that I have been sorely misled by the spirit of E pluribus unum into an erroneous belief that talent and hard work actually hold some currency in this society.

Of course I was wrong, as such foolish notions only lead to bad casting on the Stage. I humbly suggest that Mr. Fernandez is being far too timid in his thinking. Once you really start to pay attention, you realize that today’s theatre is rife with inappropriate casting decisions. For example, apparently none of the cast members of Boeing Boeing are french, even though the play clearly takes place in Paris. Mark Rylance (a British actor merely passing for french) should give back that Tony award immediately.

Even worse, not a single one of the actresses cast as Elphaba in the Broadway musical Wicked has been a real witch. Compounding this insult (I’m sorry if you find this shocking), not one of them has actually been green. Apparently, for the last several years the producers of this show have been passing off white actresses in greenface as the real thing. As Mr. Fernandez would no doubt agree, this is almost certainly a violation of the bylaws of Actor’s Equity.

I also understand that a non-ogre has been cast as Shrek, a actress not actually capable of sustained flight is playing the lead in “Mary Poppins”, and that “The Lion King” is simply rife with species-inappropriate casting. Think of all of the lion and warthog actors who are being deprived of an honest living by this execrable practice of casting humans instead of real animals – and don’t even get me started on the hyenas. Do the producers of this show actually believe that audiences won’t see right through those obviously fake costumes? I mean, is it just me, or don’t they all look like humans, transparently trying to pass themselves off as animals? It’s hard to believe that Julie Taymor was rewarded with a Tony for this blatant offense against our jungle neighbors.

Rumor also has it that a number of left handed actors have been cast in parts that clearly call for right-handed players, that many jewish actors are playing christians and vice versa, and that Geoffrey Rush has been cast as the lead of Ionesco’s “Exit the King”, even though the part clearly calls for an actor who is at least three hundred years old. I suspect Mr. Rush is not a day over a hundred and fifty.

And he may very well be even younger.

Worst of all, I just heard that someone who is simply claiming to be Gary Coleman is trodding the boards in “Avenue Q”. Somebody should alert the real Mr. Coleman immediately. Perhaps Mr. Fernandez can give him a call.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure Mr. Fernandez will join me in condemning other bizarre deviations from literal reality that have been ruining the dramaturgic experience for everyone. For example, actors have apparently been appearing on stage not to speak their own thoughts, but rather words that were in fact written by others, often by individuals who died hundreds of years ago (a recent performance of “Hamlet” comes to mind). Talk about betraying an audience’s trust!

Also, I’m sure Mr. Fernandez will agree that it is a complete violation of the dramatic contract for actors to wander around upon a stage pretending that the audience is not there, even though the audience is plainly visible to the entire cast. In the performance I saw of the play Mr. Fernandez cites – “August: Osage County” – actors were walking around some sort of obviously fake scenery, trying to convince us that they were inhabiting an actual house. Even worse, the players pretended that they were related to each other – that some were lovers, some where married, and others were siblings. The shameless cast kept up this ruse long after the audience had clearly realized that the entire enterprise was a sham. To set the record straight: None of the actors in this production are, in fact, from the same family.

I’m sure Mr. Fernandez and all other right thinking Americans will join me in protesting these shameful practices. After we have succeeded in achieving this righteous goal, then perhaps we should all join together and scrape those confusing words off of our Nation’s currency: E pluribus unum.

D I Y

D.I.Y. stands for “Do It Yourself”, a wide ranging craft movement, with a distinctly pioneering spirit, that has captured the imagination of many young people. Walking around Manhattan on this lovely Saturday evening I realized that our little borough has its own peculiar version of D.I.Y. Young people here, out en masse for the evening, create entire worlds.

In the Lower East side I witnessed a kind of downtown jazz sensibility. The young people here are heirs to a sort of countercultural beat identity that probably began long before Allan Ginsberg was born. In contrast, on MacDougal Street I saw a Manhattan abandoned by Manhattanites on Saturday night and given over to the “Bridge and Tunnel crowd” – kids in from New Jersey or Staten Island, for whom the entire isle of Manhattan is one large beer keg.

As I walked West I found myself walking through the now trendy Meat Packing District, where crowds of young people engaged in the collective creation of Fabulousness. Dressed to the nines, these sophisticated young folks glittered and shone, the young women teetering on heels that matched their slinky black dresses, the young men trying to look nonchalantly debonair while awaiting their turn to be admitted (or not) through the velvet rope leading to the latest trendy dance club. On these streets real fashion models mingle with the crowd of mere pretenders, and an air of theatrical artifice hangs over the scene.

In each of these places, you can sense the feverish activity, as all participants in the evening’s theatre, having carefully dressed and prepared, wanders out into their own little collectively constructed universe.

What I like about this dressing up and showing off is that it is far more participatory than, say, going to see a movie. Each participant is expected to dress the part, to carefully calibrate their appearance before joining the show, to collectively lift the entire experience up until it becomes a perfectly realized dream of itself.

All very D.I.Y., in a New York sort of way

C unbound

C was not always the symbol for the speed of light in a vacuum. Einstein, for example, only switched to this notation in 1907, abandoning the use of Maxwell’s symbol “V” (thereby freeing up that symbol for use by Hugo Weaving movies).

The thing I love most about a universal constant like C is the way it sets a perimeter for things, a kind of delimiter for the Universe itself, like bubble wrap over a new portable music player, or the plastic cover around an Italian sofa. With C you know where you stand. You can only travel so fast, and that’s that. No instantanteous buzzing about the Universe – or even the Galaxy for that matter.

Children hate limits, and in many ways all humans are children (or were, at some point). When the Universe tells us we can’t go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, we tend to stamp our feet and feel the urge to rebel.

But of course, being human, we don’t just rebel against the Universe by making wars, or stirring up political confrontations. We rebel by making Star Trek.

We send captain Kirk and his crew, and their various Sci Fi cousins, into space and we give them Warp Drive – the ability to travel at many times the speed of light. To hell with Einstein and to hell with reality.

After all, human literature proceeds from the assumption that a single mind can imagine that which does not exist – Romeo and Juliet, Becky Sharp, Mr. Rochester, Mr. Ed. But there is something peculiarly delightful about imagining that the very limits and bounds of reality itself to not exist.

If C were not C – if the speed of light in a vacuum were somehow different – the very Universe in which we live would not exist. Atoms would not coalesce around their nuclei, our planets would not have formed from the primordeal muck, our galaxy itself would never have come into existence.

And so it takes an act of extreme hubris to suspend the limitations of the speed of light. Gene Roddenberry and his writers on Star Trek, like other authors of space operas, have had just that hubris. You can call it visionary, or you can call it chutzpah, but the decision to allow faster than light travel struck a nerve with the viewing public. The human race feels a need to escape our relativistic cage – at least in our fantasies. Even if it contradicts reality, we yearn to explore the universe around us – to boldly go where noone has gone before.

Perhaps this need to transcend our bounds, to defy what is possible, physically or otherwise, is what makes us human – our species’ very own universal constant.

B to B

B movies exemplify the sorts of cultural artifacts that are cherished not because they are good, but because they are not so good. There is a kind of reverse chic to things that aim low and hit their mark – saccharine songs, exploitation flicks, cheesy romance novels, and all of their bargain basement kin.

It’s easy to love the beautifully crafted A-list item – the Pixar animation, Bergman film, Mozart concerto. But the Salieris of the world also seem to attract their own fan clubs. There is a secret code involved here, a kind of loser pride.

I’m not sure it’s a question of quality at all, or lack thereof. I think it has more to do with peoples’ innate (and somewhat contradictory) need to clump themselves into groups that – somewhat ironically – promote a feeling of individuality and unique identity. There is nothing to be gained from being the only person to listen to some god-awful garage band out of Cleveland. But there is considerable glory in being one amongst a select few – those who recognize within this band some hidden quality undetected by the larger herd.

In some ways, the more challenging the original source material, the more powerful the pull. Ed Wood films are cherished precisely because they are so difficult to appreciate (it’s actually quite difficult to watch “Plan 9 from Outer Space” all the way through without nodding off).

Interestingly, in order to be successful, a deliberately ironic homage to a B movie needs to be excellent. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – a loving A-list tribute to cheap action serials of long ago – was excellent, and it was a wild success. Its successor film “Temple of Doom” was a far lesser work, and was not embraced by audiences.

Similarly, Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” was a masterpiece of inside exploitation genre references, and people still watch it in delighted awe fifteen years after its release. Contrast this with “Grindhouse/Death Proof”, his merely good parody of exploitation films, which never really found a following among audiences.

There’s a duality at work here. We may feel affection for our unironic losers, but woe betide the parodist of such material who produces less than excellent work. Anton Diabelli could write the cheesiest of C-major waltzes, and nobody complained. Whereas Ludwig van Beethoven, in writing his 33 variations on Diabelli’s little waltz, needed to aim far higher.

Needless to say, this was not a problem for Mr. B.

Alphabets

Alphabets occupy a strange place in our consciousness of language. They are the bottom of the syntactic totem pole, lower even than words, let alone phrases, sentences, epistolary novels. Letters are the humble bricks we use to build the great cathedral, so to speak.

And yet they have their own fascination. I was quite young when I first realized that each letter of the alphabet has its own story to tell. I was perhaps seven years old, reading through the old “World Book Encyclopedia”, when I discovered that each alphabetically ordered volume began with the history of its eponymous letter.

For example, the lower case “a” derives from a pictogram of the head of an ox (the ancient Semitic word for ox was “aleph”). Over the course of several thousand years the pictogram was gradually simplified and stylized, like so:



Each letter of the alphabet has a similar but different story to tell. When I was a child, I loved the idea that in each word of the English language there are alternate tales, counter narratives, hidden histories, waiting to burst through the ostensible text.

I still do.

Faces and bodies in motion

I’ve just started to watch “Siren of the Tropics” – the 1927 film debut of Josephine Baker. I was surprised, right at the opening credits, to see that the assistant director is a very young Luis Bunuel. This film came out a full two years before his wonderfully infamous directorial feature “Un Chien Andalou”. Now I am hoping to spot, in this film, influences here and there upon his later work.

I’m currently about ten minutes into the film. Rather than see it all the way through in one sitting, I’m viewing it in pieces – the way one might read a novel a chapter at a time – so that I will have time to think about what I’m seeing as things unfold.

I do this because, for me, a visit to a silent film is like a visit to a foreign country. I need time to adjust my thinking to really appreciate much that the film’s original audiences took for granted – some way to understand what I am watching in approximately the way it was intended to be understood.

After all, watching a silent movie, even a great one, eighty years into the era of talkies is necessarily an exercise in culture shock. Filmmakers and audience shared quite an elaborate visual language in the days before sound, a language that is now gone. In particular, actors employed many techniques to suggest the unheard dialog between inter-title cards. To audiences of the day those techniques seemed natural and unforced.

In a way this convention was an excellent start to cinema, since it forced the writer and director away from mere words and into the real core of what a film offers – human emotion expressed through a camera’s observation of human faces and bodies in motion.

I suspect that in another eighty years many of our current film conventions – practices of acting, directing and cinematography that we don’t even think of as conventions, but rather as examples of naturalistic storytelling – will appear not merely dated and stilted, but downright incomprehensible to curious but puzzled viewers.

At this point in the story, Josephine Baker has not yet shown up on screen. The film is still setting things up, introducing the characters one by one in that oddly formal way that silent films often do. When she does make her entrance, I’m keen to see whether she will come across as more “modern” than the rest of the cast – a cultural visitor from the future – the way Leslie Howard was far more modern than anyone else on screen in “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, or Bob Dylan than anyone else in “Don’t Look Back”.

From what I’ve heard of the legendary Ms. Baker, I suspect I will not be disappointed.

Momentary encounters

When you live in a walking city like New York, you get used to hearing little snatches of accidental conversation – three second slices out of someone else’s life. Sometimes, if you happen to walk by at just the right moment, these little accidental edits of the thoughts of strangers can seem like Zen koans.

I often wonder whether this kind of tiny found-art sound byte – I suppose it would now be called a “tweet from the real world” – is really representative of its author, or whether it conveys a completely misleading impression.

This evening, as I was walking with some friends across town on Waverly Street, we passed by a rather intense looking man in his forties who was growling into his cellphone the phrase “…it was like something out of Robocop…”

I found myself trying to reconstruct what he might have been thinking as he said this. Was he thinking, perhaps, of the character of the Robocop himself, all stalwart steel armor and awkwardly half-remembered true love? Was it the fearsome wierdly bipedal cyborg, that ultimate killing machine run amok? Or perhaps he was referencing the delightful parodies of commercial TV ads and news shows that were sprinkled throughout the film. Somehow I doubted this last interpretation, because the man wouldn’t have been growling about something like that.

In the end, I realized that the mystery would need remain just that – a mystery, a momentary encounter with a stranger’s mind, tantalizing in its possibilities, yet always out of reach.

So different from that encounter I heard some years ago on these same streets. In this case it was a young couple walking side by side, the female half far shorter than the male half (she was perhaps two feet shorter than her companion). The young woman was craning her neck up to look at her mate, her face suffused with a very earnest expression. The only words I could hear her say, before the two of them retreated forever out of earshot, were “…but what do you mean Macrobiotic??…”