Ken’s Blog

A lot of wonderful people have passed away recently, and each death has made the world a poorer place. But Stanley Donen, who passed away this week at the age of 94, has a special place in my heart.

Donen directed On the Town, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, The Pajama Game , Damn Yankees, Charade, Two for the Road, Bedazzled and The Little Prince, among his many films.

From the time I was a small child, a Stanley Donen film was, to me, the epitome of Hollywood magic. Not the new kind of magic we see today, created with digital special effects, but an older kind — the kind they don’t produce any more — made of pure fairy dust and moonbeams.

As a reward for all the joy he gave to this world, I hope that Mr. Donen is now reunited with Gene and Fred. I can picture them together, dancing with grace and style across a ceiling up in Heaven, or splashing happily through a celestial rain puddle, all in glorious Technicolor.

While I was preparing for that class where I created the orange, I spent a little time just noodling around with shader code. I didn’t have any particular goal in mind other than to have fun and see what would come out.

What came out is something that looks like this, except animated (it’s a lot cooler when you see it animated):

The code that creates this fits in just a page of text. You can see both the code and the animation it creates if you click HERE.

If you’re looking at the shader code, the most interesting section is that four line stretch surrounded by blank lines. That’s where all of the swirling cloud texture is created.

If you like programming, feel free to try editing the code and see what happens. If your changes make the whole thing stop running, you can always just refresh the page and try again.

Today in my computer graphics class I decided to just open up a text editor and implement a simple ray tracer in GLSL. The idea was to take the students through the process of writing a ray tracer from the ground up in GPU shader code.

To my surprise, by the time we were done I had implemented an animated orange:

I had not planned on building an orange. Yet somehow, as I followed my creative muse over the course of the lecture, that is what I ended up doing.

After the class was over, I went back and broke up the code I had writtem into successive steps. This way the students could review the journey from a blank screen to a virtual orange.

In case you are also interested in following along on that journey, here is my “building the orange” breakdown.

We can use this case as a kind of litmus test of the relationship between an oppressed subculture and the surrounding dominant culture which (often unknowingly) oppresses and marginalizes that subculture.

In particular, we can examine how the dominant culture regards a work of art in which the subculture is having a conversation with itself. Very often such internal conversations will speak to the nature of the oppression.

When critics in the dominant culture recognize and honor such a work of art — when they understand the nature of the conversation they are witnessing — that is a sign of positive societal evolution.

For example, the dominant American culture was ready, by 1964, to accept Fiddler on the Roof as a valid expression of the Jewish experience of cultural repression. This was a work created by Jews which spoke unapologetically to a Jewish audience about its own experiences of cultural repression. In 1964 it was enthusiastically embraced by the larger culture.

In that case, the dominant culture was ready to receive the message. At an earlier stage of American history, a similar work would have been dismissed or simply ignored by the culture at large. In fact, the Jewish theater was largely ignored by the dominant American culture in the early part of the 20th century.

There are generally four historical stages that a society goes through with regard to any particular oppressed subculture. In various eras this pattern has been repeated for the Irish, Italians, Chinese, Gay, Catholic, Black, Hispanic, Jewish and many other subcultures.

In the first stage, such internal conversations are simply ignored by the dominant subculture — as though they never happened. In the second stage, they are dismissed as needlessly combative and pointless.

In the third stage they are embraced as a bold wake-up call. In the fourth and final stage they become unnecessary, as society evolves to the point where the oppression itself fades away.

With regard to gay identity, we are currently in the third stage. It will be very nice when society evolves more, and we arrive at the final stage.

When But I’m a Cheerleader came out in 1999 critics seemed to miss the point. From today’s perspective, it is obvious that the story was being told by gay filmmakers for a gay audience.

The portrayal of homophobic “conversion therapists” as cartoonish monsters parallels the portrayal of the white people in the recent film Get Out. When we watch Get Out we understand perfectly well that it’s a film by a black filmmaker focusing on black fears about white people.

Yet in 1999 the idea that gay people could be having that particular conversation within their own community was off the critical radar — it simply sailed right by most reviewers.

For example, David Edelstein in Slate said that the film was one sided, lacked dramatic tension, and was “lazy counterpropaganda”. Cynthia Fuchs in NitrateOnline said “no one who is phobic might recognize himself in the film” and “the audience who might benefit most from watching it either won’t see the film or won’t see the point.”

The fact today that these reviews seem slightly absurd is actually a good thing. It shows that our culture has moved forward in the last twenty years.

More tomorrow.

Because I was so blown away by the wonderful work of Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll, I went back and watched her earlier work. In particular, I viewed — for the first time — the 1999 film But I’m a Cheerleader.

I became intrigued by the difference between the reception this film received 20 years ago. Back then the reviews were almost universally negative, whereas today it is lauded as one of the most important films in the gay cinematic canon.

Clearly it is not the movie that has changed. It is we who have changed. But what has happened in the last two decades to cause such a radical reassessment of the very same work?

I think this question raises all sorts of issues that go beyond a single movie. In fact, this question touches on the issue of how a society evolves and becomes more enlightened over time.

More tomorrow.

Euphemisms about the future often describe our relationship to it in active terms. We are “creating the future” or we are “making the future happen.”

But when you really think about it, we are sort of doing the opposite. Simply by existing, every day of our lives we convert another day of the future into a day of the past.

In that sense, there is less and less future all the time. What had once been the future is continually vanishing right before our eyes, only to become the past.

I guess in metaphysical terms this all makes sense. The future is our temporal sustenance, the very food of our continued existence.

In order to live, we eat the future. We just have to hope that our food doesn’t end up running out too soon.

So is the “wall made of giant steel slats” an actual deal with the Devil? Well, I guess this is a case where the devil is in the details.

If Evraz, the company largely owned by Russian oligarch and Trump family friend Roman Abramovich (and possibly the only steel company with the capacity to build such a wall), gets the contract, then there is a smoking gun. But even that wouldn’t mean anybody is guilty of collusion, only that they might be.

Still, it would be quite a thing if the massive wall ends up actually getting built and Evraz ends up supplying the steel. That would end up raising all sorts of questions about exactly what favors are owed by our President.

But there’s no point in getting ahead of ourselves. The chain of connections here could be completely innocent.

Yes, the proposed wall is a slightly loony boondoggle, since there are far more effective ways to ensure border security, with a considerably smaller price tag. Still, our dear President could be guilty of nothing more than desperately trying to keep a badly thought out election campaign promise he made to his base back in 2016.

I guess we will see. In any case, this has all been one helluva thin excuse for a national emergency.

There is an amazing conversational exchange in The Godfather, when Bonasera asks Vito Corleone to do him a favor, and says he is willing to pay. Corleone responds to Bonasera as follows: “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day…”

What Bonasera doesn’t realize is that he has just made a deal with the Devil. The time will come when that favor comes due. And when that happens, there will be no choice of backing out of the deal.

It seems that our country may be witnessing a similar scene playing out on a very large scale. Except in this case, the favor involves the price of steel.

More tomorrow.

This evening I rewatched Annie Hall once again. I had last seen it in 2011, and as always with this film, I gained emotional insights from it that I had completely missed on all previous viewings.

Annie Hall is one of those great works of art that changes and grows as you yourself change and grow. It has the capacity to illuminate life in many different ways, depending upon where you are in your own life when you see it.

One of the many wonderful formal innovations in this film is Woody Allen’s use of subtitles in a scene that takes place soon after Annie and Alvy have first met. As they each lurch their way through an awkward conversation, the subtitles clue us in about what they are both really thinking.

I found myself thinking that it would be wonderful to have an “Emotional Subtitles” option while watching such a movie on-line. The text along the bottom would simply tell us what the characters are actually thinking and feeling.

In a really good film, this text would rarely be the same as the words coming out of their mouths. In fact, a reliable indicator of a bad movie is that people say exactly what they are feeling.

Maybe we could rate films by how thoroughly their Emotional Subtitles would differ from the spoken dialog. In films with a high ES-index, this difference would be large.

Alas, films with a low ES-index often make a lot more money at the box office. Especially if they have fancy special effects. Sigh.