Ken's Blog

Continuing on our topic of classic musicals, I have been thinking about the one I just rewatched the other day. I am going to assume you are familiar with Guys and Dolls.

If you aren’t, you should go right now and watch it on Netflix. I guarantee a sublime experience.

The central romantic tension of G&D is between Sky Masterson, a high rolling gambler — a man who will bet on anything — and Sarah Brown, a devout missionary who is vainly trying to convert sinners in a city filled with sin. It would appear to be the very definition of “opposites attract”. How, the audience is encouraged to wonder, could a devoted Believer and a sinful Atheist ever end up together?

In this fictional world of relatively benign gangsters — based on the short stories of Damon Runyan — all men are always referred to as guys, and all women are referred to as dolls. Even Sarah Brown — who is as far removed from the ethos of gangsters as one can get — is referred to as a “mission doll”.

Yet Sky’s central song, in some ways the linchpin of the story, is Luck, be a Lady Tonight. The song takes the form of a conversation with “Lady Luck”. He is pleading with her to allow him to win the dice roll that will allow him to get into the good graces of Sarah, with whom he has fallen in love.

In a world where absolutely all women are “dolls”, it is significant that Luck itself is referred to as a “lady”. I think this a clue that Sky is actually pleading with his own deity for divine intervention.

I believe that Frank Loesser’s lyrics were carefully chosen to clue us in here. Sky worships and believes in his Lady Luck every bit as devoutly as Sarah worships and believes in her Christian God.

When you consider this, the metaphysics of Guys and Dolls makes a lot more sense. In the end we have a true marriage of two true believers. Both partners believe in a divinely ordered universe. They just have different names for it.

I always wondered how Nellie Forbush from South Pacific would respond to Sky Masterson from Guys and Dolls. Or would Henry Hill from The Music Man be intrigued by Anna Leonowens from The King and I?

If Anna started to sing “Getting to Know you”, would Henry realize that he just has to get to know her? Or would the chemistry be all wrong?

What if we started from the premise that we can mix and match characters from different classic Broadway musicals? Could such a pastiche produce something interesting?

I am open to suggestions!

And then, of course, after yesterday’s post, the inevitable sequel: Today is the first day of a brand new month!!!

So many new opportunities, possibilities, horizons to explore and doorways to try. The first day of a month feels a bit like a blank canvas, upon which you can begin to paint the future.

And tomorrow will be my very first lecture of my computer graphics class. This semester, no surprise, will be taught entirely on-line.

I wonder whether we will learn new ways of teaching and learning over the next few months, and turn adversity into opportunity. I am eager to try!

I organize all of my computer files by month. At the start of every month I copy over whatever folders I had been working on the previous month, and keep going from there.

This means that I leave a sort of trail behind. Every monthly folder is a snapshot of where I was at the end of that particular month. I’ve been doing this for years.

I realize that there are tools that automate this process, but I’ve gotten used to doing it this way, and I guess I’m old fashioned. Maybe it’s the cyber equivalent of somebody who insists on making their own pasta, when there are perfectly good varieties available at nearby supermarkets.

One consequence of this practice is that the last day of the month takes on particular significance for me. It’s a time to take stock, to reflect upon what I have accomplished — and what I have failed to accomplish.

Today is another such day. It is an illuminating — and often a humbling — experience, coming face to face with both the possibilities and the limitations of what can be accomplished in any given month. I highly recommend it.

I used to struggle to remember which was which — Thor Heyerdahl and Dag Hammarskjöld. One was a great globe-hopping Norwegian adventurer. The other was a great globe-hopping Swedish diplomat.

The problem, I think, was the rhythm. As a kind of verbal music, the two names sounded nearly identical to me.

The names of other famous people also share this same rhythm, including the actor George Hamilton, the animator Jan Pinkava, and the futurist Hans Moravec. I am sure you can think of lots of others as well.

The rhythm of names is a subject that many people find endlessly to be endlessly generative. Lin-Manuel Miranda, to cite one example, constructed an entire rap musical around the rhythm of the words “Alexander Hamilton”.

Not that he was the first to do so. Back in 1952, my favorite songwriter of them all, Frank Loesser, found enough music in the name “Hans Christian Andersen” to build an entire songbook.

Now that I think of it, I probably got on this subject because last night I rewatched Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls”, an absolute masterpiece. I had forgotten how Frank Sinatra’s character casually slips into Yiddish during one of my favorite songs.

You should catch it while it is still on Netflix. It is an immensely enjoyable way to spend an evening.

A piano teacher I know told me, with amusement, about a recent conversation with a student. The student in question, a young girl, explained at the start of their 1pm lesson that she needed to cancel the lesson.

The reason given? “There is a birthday party at 4pm today.”

It occurred to me that this is a defining difference between how girls and boys plan their day.

A girl will say, promptly at 1pm, “There is a birthday party at 4pm.”

A boy will say, promptly at 7pm: There was a birthday party at 4pm???”

While we are on the subject of quotes, I saw a great one this morning in the comments section of an article in the New York Times. The article was covering the Republican National Convention, and in particular, our president’s rather divisive speech accepting his party’s nomination.

The particular quote in question can actually be traced to the great (sadly deceased) columnist Molly Ivins. Ivins had been covering the 1992 Republican National Convention. That’s the election where the Republicans ended up losing to an ascendant Bill Clinton.

Pat Buchanan made a highly incendiary speech at the convention naming the a whole slew of now familiar bogeymen, including women in power, liberals, blacks, immigrants and homosexuals. He essentially labeled them all as enemies of America.

Today’s comment by a reader quoted Molly Ivins response to that speech, but in the context of the speech last night by our current commander in chief.

Ivin’s response? “It probably sounded better in the original German.”

I’ve been enjoying this year’s on-line Siggraph. The only parts that are reliably live are the panels and Q&A sessions. Most other things are prerecorded.

Today I watched a fascinating panel about the history of the New York Institute of Technology computer graphics lab. I knew these people back in the day, and it was an absolute delight to hear them collectively tell one of the most important origin stories in the field of computer graphics.

My favorite moment was when Ed Catmull quoted Alex Schure. Sure had founded and bankrolled the lab. He hired Ed to run it, and gave him fairly free rein to hire many of the people we now think of as great pioneers in the field.

Schure didn’t seem to know much about computer graphics, but to his great credit, he managed to keep all that great research financially afloat in those early years.

At one point, as a sort of aside, Ed shared this quote from Alex Shure. It’s a great quote. The proof of that is that I’m still scratching my head trying to figure exactly what it means:

“Our goal is to speed up time, eventually eliminate it.”
— Alex Shure

Like many of my colleagues, I am spending this week watching the Siggraph conference on-line, and participating actively in some parts of it. Experiencing this conference virtually has given me a new perspective on its value.

It is important to realize that Siggraph is not mainly a place where people show commercial products. Rather, it is a place where people show bits and pieces of the future.

So it is perfectly reasonable for researchers to show what one part of the future might look like, in anticipation of other parts that have not yet been invented. This creates an interesting sort of conversation.

Somebody today in 2020 is essentially starting a conversation with a person in the future. That conversation centers around some capability that the world may not see for years to come.

The conversation starts by saying “Hey, I’ve got one piece of this now. Can anybody in the future come up with the other pieces we will need?”

It takes a certain kind of faith to engage in conversation with future people. The ability to have that kind of faith in the future is part of what is beautiful about science.

I participated as a speaker at two Q&A sessions today at the (this year virtual) SIGGRAPH conference. Each was half an hour long, and each brought together a group of people who had given technical talks that were thematically related.

In one case, the moderator started out by having everyone summarize their research. This turned out to use up the entire 30 minutes, so there was no time for questions. It all sort of felt like a waste of time.

In the other case, the moderator asked great questions that got us all speaking to the same themes from different points of view. It was completely awesome.

So it seems that even when conferences go virtual, some things are the same. It mostly comes down to having a good moderator.