Month: January 2014

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.

This evening, after seeing some theatre in Brooklyn, I entered the subway station at Atlantic Avenue, to catch a train back to Manhattan.

On the platform were a lot more people than I would have expected that time on a Sunday night. This is not a good sign — it generally means trains are delayed and not running as frequently as usual.

There seemed to be a kind of punchy gallows humor among those waiting. I got the feeling some of them had been standing there for quite a while.

Eventually a D train pulled up, but it was clearly labeled as a train to Coney Island (which is further away from Manhattan — the wrong direction). I asked one fellow if he thought it would get me to Manhattan, and he said no, it’s the wrong train.

I looked for a conductor (there’s always one somewhere on the train), but no luck — he or she must have been many cars away. If there was an announcement in the station, none of us heard it.

But the train looked like it was going in the right direction, so I got on. Only one other person nearby seemed to agree with me, a man traveling with his young son. They also got on. We pulled out of the station, our subway car empty but for the three of us, leaving the large crowd standing on the platform.

At the next stop a young woman got on. The stop after that was the first station in Manhattan, whereupon the woman came up to me frantically and said “is this Manhattan?”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

At which point she dashed off the train before the doors closed. Clearly she had believed the signage on the train, and had thought she was heading toward Coney Island.

The train took me to the stop near my apartment, and I got home just fine. But I feel bad for all those people who ended up getting on the wrong train, or not getting on the right train. Late at night, when the trains don’t run very often, subway misconnections can be costly.

I wonder whether there is some sort of lesson in all this.

Just because the Shakespeare sonnets rule
And this is now the start of a new year
I think a little rhyming would be cool
To lend the season more poetic cheer.
Perhaps my recent viewing of the Bard
Has gotten me into the proper mood.
Maybe it just isn’t all that hard,
Or maybe there is something in the food.
By the way, it’s this part of the sonnet
(Lines nine through twelve) where Will would put a twist.
Whatever bee was buzzing in his bonnet
Would make its point. Then lest that point be missed,
      He’d add Elizabethan verbal bling,
      Some little rhyming quip to end the thing.

The snow that blankets all New York tonight
Has crept upon us like a whispered song
Sidewalks vanished under drifts of white
I hear the snow will fall the whole night long
I turn to face the cold Manhattan air
The very world around is rearranged
All around me people stop and stare
And marvel at how much their city’s changed
When morning comes this town will be asleep
Stores all closed, and no place much to go
Whatever is your business, it will keep
Till after all the silence, and the snow
      And in the end, perhaps we have been blessed
      For even New York City needs its rest