Because the future has just started
At what point does technology rearrange our reality so that we are not located at our geographic location, for most practical purposes?
Some would argue that it will come about at the point when virtual reality is indistinguishable from the real thing
Others might argue that it happens the first time we pick up a good book and start reading.
Today is the anniversary of the premiere of the first ever “talkie” — The Jazz Singer. About three decades into the existence of cinema, that event ushered in a fundamental shift in the art of motion pictures.
When we think of movies now, we don’t generally think about silent movies, because people haven’t been making them for nearly a century. Yet until that day, a movie was a silent movie. There was no other kind of movie.
Before that premiere, telling stories with moving images but without sound was a well developed and mature art form, a visual language for conveying and receiving entertainment that audiences at the time knew well. It is a language that is now largely forgotten.
Silent movies now look strangely alien and unnatural. But that’s not the way they looked to audiences a century ago. Back then they were just movies.
I wonder what other languages of art are destined to become discarded and eventually forgotten by millions of people, because technology will one day usher in something different.
Sometimes things happen that make you realize something about yourself. I told some people this morning that I am apparently way behind the times. Or at the very least, late to the party.
The reason I know this is that at some point yesterday mid-afternoon somebody told me that Facebook was down. I had had no idea.
And then there are the days that are the most special, the ones that are different from all the other days.
Those you keep to yourself.
Today has been for me largely a day of rest. I decided to take a day off, after an intense week of non-stop work and activity.
Ironically, I suspect this is the most productive decision I have made all week.
I mentioned the names Nick and Nora at dinner this evening. The other people at the table had no idea what I was talking about. So I explained Nick and Nora Charles, The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s novel.
I explained the fact that the characters played by William Powell and Myrna Loy were the most romantic couple in cinema history. I even touched on the surprising movie debut of Jimmy Stewart.
I am surprised that people don’t know the classics of cinematic history. It is so fundamental to who we are as a culture, and to how we got here.
So many things began on October 1. Here is an abbreviated list (I am leaving out a lot of things):
Yosemite National Park, Stanford University, the Ford Model T, the first Soviet Five Year Plan, the George Washington Bridge, the first U.S. superhighway, NASA, the Free Speech Movement, the Concorde’s first supersonic flight, the CT scanner, the compact disc, and the first legal recognition of gay partnerships.
Oh, and also the People’s Republic of China and Disney World.
Not bad for a calendar day.
We can see the Sun set every day, and yet we still perceive a sunset as something wondrous and beautiful.
If this doesn’t convince you that life is filled with grandeur and mystery, then nothing will.
Some years ago I was having drinks with a colleague, an artist, in an outdoor cafe at La Defense, near Paris. My colleague was very excited, because it was the first time that he had ever been there, and the Grand Arch reminded him of his own work which employed hypercubes.
He waxed rhapsodically about the architecture for quite some time. Then at one point he excused himself to go use the restroom. When he came back he had an excited glow in his eyes.
He told me that when he got there, he realized that even the restrooms employed a futuristic hypermodern architecture. For example, he marveled at the unusual and daring shape of the urinals.
Then, he said, he turned around and saw a perfectly ordinary looking urinal. That was when, he told me, he realized his mistake. That other thing wasn’t a urinal.
Oops.
“But,” he added, “it should have been.”
We all know, on a gut level, what is real and what is fiction. For example, we know that Albert Einstein was a real person, but Hamlet was fictional.
What are there levels of fiction? For example, is Hamlet more real than a character that we only hear about in a play but who is never on stage?
Could we create a hierarchy of fictional realities, through some reasonably objective criteria? If so, what would those criteria be?