Ken's Blog

This wasn’t all that great an independence day
It’s not too hard I guess to see just why
But then I do believe that I can safely say
I’m having quite a nice fifth of July

As this pandemic continues, the concept of long distance friendship is gradually rearranging itself. The usual rhythm of such friendships is that you communicate with each other by phone or on-line until the next time you see each other in person.

But now there is no clearly defined sense of when we will all see each other in person. After all, for the most part there is currently no long distance travel.

So our remote communication with our good friends in other parts of the world has become the entire discourse. Phone calls, emails, Zoom chats, these are no longer the side dish but the main meal itself.

I wonder whether this will in some way alter the nature of long distance friendships. In the long run, will it pull us away from each other, or draw us even closer together?

Carl Reiner, who passed away a few days ago at 98, was one of the towering comedic talents of our age. I am grateful to him for many original creations, including The 2000 Year Old Man, the best part of Steve Martin’s film career and, of course, Rob Reiner (in collaboration with Estelle Reiner).

But more than anything I appreciate his waking up my consciousness about meta-level art at an early age. Like everyone, I loved The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Everybody loved Rob and Laura Petrie. The nation’s weekly visits to their world was a high water mark for TV comedy that in many ways has never been matched.

I can still recall my gradual awareness of the importance of Alan Brady, the raging narcissistic boss on the show. That character was played by Carl Reiner, the actual creator of the show.

In a sense, he was the real Rob Petrie, since the entire series was based on the real-life experience of Carl Reiner as a comedy writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the previous decade.

As a child, I was fascinated by this dichotomy. I would wait for the occasional appearances of Alan Brady. Whenever he appeared, part of me wanted to shout at the TV screen “That’s the real guy!”

We are now in an age where meta-level art is simply taken for granted. Everything in pop culture is self-referential, and twists back on itself.

None of this might seem so radical if you came of age in these more self-referential times. But for me, Alan Brady was a revelation.

One of the odd things about computer graphics is that nothing has an absolute scale. You can create objects, animated people, cities, but there is something abstract about your creations.

Yes, you can see them on a computer screen, but everything scales to fit the size of whatever screen you are looking at. Depending on whether you are viewing on a SmartPhone or a 75″ diagonal monitor, the simulated object can vary from very tiny to very large.

About a decade ago I started printing out my computer graphic creations on 3D printers. For the first time, my creations had an absolute size out here in the real world.

It was very gratifying to hold a printed CG object in my hand and feel its weight. I felt connected to my creations in a way I had never before felt connected.

I am experiencing something similar with computer graphics in virtual reality. When I can walk around a virtual object, then that object attains a true relationship to my physical being.

That is so much more satisfying than looking at these objects on a monitor or phone screen. I also find that it provides valuable insights that boost to my creativity.

And that makes me very happy.

Sometimes your life turns a corner. Maybe it’s because something really lucky happened, or really unlucky. Or maybe it’s because you had the seeds of a great idea that will one day bear wondrous fruit.

Usually we don’t know about these things in the moment. The cascading process of cause and effect is generally a long chain with many links.

All we know is that sometime in the future, we will probably have the hindsight and clarity to identify those days when our life turned a corner. And we will marvel that we had no idea, in the moment, that something so big was afoot.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get just a hint — just one little hint — that we were living through an extraordinary day? If you could click on an option that said “yes, tell me whenever this is one of those days,” would you do it>>

I for one would welcome that tap on the shoulder from the gods. Your mileage may vary.

Months are odd things. Some months it seems as though nothing at all has happened. Others are very eventful.

For me, this has been that second kind of month. So many things have changed in the last thirty days that May now seems like a distant memory.

It would be nice if July were to turn out to be peaceful and uneventful. I think I can safely say that we are all long past due for a peaceful and uneventful month.

So that’s what I’m hoping for. But I wouldn’t put any money on it.

I only met Elly Stone once. It was outside an off Broadway theater about ten or fifteen years ago.

She was there with a friend of a friend. When I learned who she was, I was very excited.

Her response was astonishment that I would know about her, since she had not been famous anymore for many years. I explained that Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris had been one of my formative influences.

The original Broadway production was before my time, but when I was a teenager I was involved in an amateur production of it, and that was my first introduction to Jacques Brel. I had never expected to meet any of the original cast.

For years afterward, I would obsessively listen to the original cast album. My two favorite numbers were Carousel and Marieke, both sung by Elly Stone, and I can definitely say that those two songs had an enormous influence on my concept of what can be accomplished within a song.

She and I had a very nice chat that evening, and then everyone went in to see the play — I completely forget now what it was. I never saw her again.

Elly Stone passed away the other day at the age of 93. When I read that sad news, I found myself hearing her within my head, singing those incredible songs, her powerful yet vulnerable voice still full of infinite sadness and defiance.

I would like to think that wherever she is, Elly Stone is now singing duets with Jacques Brel.

Somebody in my personal life did something really awful and uncalled for to someone else in my personal life. I will spare you the details.

I was trying to say something comforting to the aggrieved party. I could see they were struggling.

What I ended up saying was this:

You can’t change people. But you can be mad at them.

That seemed to help.

As the months go by, and even our daily habits change, it is clear that things are not going to go back to the way they were. A lot of people are making predictions about what things will be like a year from now or two years or five.

It would be interesting to compile all those predictions and put them together. Collectively they form a sort of time capsule of our state of anxiety.

Maybe one day we will all be able to look back on these predictions, from a place of safety and relief, and find them amusing.

We could all use some amusement right now.

There will come a point in the coming years when people will simply be able to beam their virtual selves into each other’s company, with a full sense of eye gaze, proprioception and other cues to physical presence, in a reasonable approximation of being in the same physical place. At that point, many interesting things will begin to become possible.

One of those things will be the ability for people who cannot walk to convey the impression that they can walk. Being in a wheelchair may not be as much of a social barrier in this future world has it is today.

Being able to get beyond such physical limitations is an important goal for society in general. After all, shouldn’t people relate to each other based on the quality of their character, rather than mere physical characteristics? I think that this may lead to a better world, if we can manage to get there.