Ken’s Blog

I went to dinner this evening with some colleagues in Dublin, and was reminded once again just how wonderful it is to hang out with the Irish.

Whatever the topic — Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Austen, Shakespeare or Beckett — we could all speak freely, quote lines from particular works, compare one author to the other, and know that everybody would know exactly what was being talked about.

I’m not sure there is any other culture in the English speaking world where I could just relax into that basic assumption that “yes, we’ve all read the great authors, we remember them, and we’ve thought about their ideas quite a bit”. This is something you can just take for granted in Ireland — without any of it being a big deal.

I love America. I love its energy, its boldness, and its continual sense of possibility. But for whatever reason, many American friends and colleagues whom I admire just don’t seem to know any of this stuff.

Maybe the downside of a culture of bold reinvention is a relative lack of interest in what has come before.

Flying to Dublin.
New York and I barely had
Time to say hello.

In the several years after the Apple Newton came out, the general consensus was that it had been a failure. Looking back with the hindsight of several decades, we can now see just how groundbreaking the Newton project was. Many features of modern PDAs (including the term “PDA” itself) began with Apple’s daring experiment.

By any standards, the iPhone and its later cousin the iPad have been wild successes. It is tempting to oversimplify, and think of the story as a failure followed by a success.

But I think the truth is more interesting. The iPhone and iPad are very much the beneficiaries of Bill Buxton’s “Long Nose of Innovation”. The fact that Apple had jumped feet-first into the mobile computer platform so early, going wide with a technology dangerously ahead of its time, had the effect of sensitizing Apple to the issues of what kind of PDA can be successfully brought to market, and what cannot.

In many ways, the iPhone and iPad can trace their lineage all the way back to the gestation of the Newton. There is a kind of axis that runs straight through the decades, from 1987 — when the Newton project first began — to 2014 and beyond.

It would be interesting to try to guess what are today’s Newtons — overambitious products so far ahead of their time that they won’t be truly successful for another quarter century.

My mind is still reeling from having seen Linklater’s new masterpiece “Boyhood”, a work of such startling depth and deceptively simple beauty. There are individual moments that I just cannot get out of my head.

The scenes I remember most vividly were not big and flashy at all. They were simple conversations in which people found themselves suddenly able to break through and find a way to show their love for each other. These scenes always came as a surprise — just as they do in real life. The night we saw the film at the IFC, the entire audience was rapt from beginning to end.

I imagine that audiences must have had a similar experience in 1938, seeing Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town” for the first time. That was another experimental work which took its audience on a journey through twelve years of “ordinary” lives, only to arrive at the same powerful conclusion — that there is nothing ordinary about life.

I am reminded of the conversation in “Our Town” between Emily and the Stage Manager, after she has found herself emotionally overwhelmed by the simple act of revisiting a single day of her childhood:

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” she asks. “Every, every minute?”

“No.” He replies, “The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.”

Suppose you could take a drug that would temporarily remove your tendency to see things from a human perspective. While you were under the influence, you would perceive everything without any human bias.

Other people would just look like the strange fleshy things they are, with odd protuberances waving about. Faces would not have any particular significance.

You would probably notice that in human-made environments, nearly all surfaces are at right angles to each other, in an extremely unnatural and stylized way.

I’m not sure what other things you would observe, because it’s hard to take off my own mental “human goggles”.

Now here’s another question: After coming back from such an experience, would you have a new perspective on the world around you, and the people in it?

I’ve been holding off on writing about Robin Williams because I needed time to process. As it happens, this morning I had a conversation about him with my Mom, and she pointed out something that I had been thinking, but hadn’t wanted to admit to myself.

She observed that one of the reasons Williams was so gosh-darn funny was that so much his humor was a reflection of deep pain and hostility. And the greater the underlying demon, the larger was the resultant laugh.

It wasn’t always thus. In his early days, as that good looking young man on Mork and Mindy, the humor was relatively benign. But by the mid 1980’s, when his one man shows first started being rebroadcast on HBO, things had turned decidedly darker.

For the last thirty years, Williams has been largely in the business of connecting us to our uncontrollable id — the deep primitive part of us that we cannot turn off, that relentless engine of anger and pain and lust which lies within every human breast.

We generally go a good job of repressing that part of ourselves, so that we can function in the day to day world. But every once in a while a shaman arises — somebody who can give us access to that deeper and more problematic level of the human condition. Robin Williams was such a shaman.

I think we loved him so much precisely because he took our powerful collective id unto himself, then showed it to us in all its terrible immediacy and said “See, our demons are not so scary. In fact, if you drag them out into the light of day, they’re kind of funny.”

The man was dealing with important stuff. And important stuff is always dangerous — sometimes too dangerous. Eventually, perhaps, it was too much for him.

Some will say it was only comedy, but they are missing the point. What Robin Williams did for us was real, and it was important. We were right to feel so much love for him — and to be grateful for his gift.

I’m a very excited that Peter Capaldi is the new doctor. I had become a little worried that Dr Who would become too dominated by young people. Given that Time Lords are supposed to be centuries old, it’s good to see one who might actually be old enough to remember 1983.

Of course, behind every older actor, there is a younger actor lurking inside. It will be fun to see the good doctor channeling that part of himself, and to see audiences forget his age as he starts to bring out his inner youngster.

Some actors are able to effortlessly transcend age and time. After all, Burt Lancaster was already seventy six years old when he played another memorable fantasy doctor in Field of Dreams — and he nearly stole the movie.

A new doctor always creates new possibilities. Perhaps there will be stories where a love interest is half mermaid, or at least has webbed toes. Anything is possible, when there hasn’t been this sort of infusion of class into a BBC production since The Forsyth Saga.

American audiences might take some convincing, since Mr. Capaldi is still an unknown quantity on this side of the pond. But I think it will be easier in the U.K., where he is already a local hero.

I am working through an idea for a research project. If it works out, it’s going to involve brilliant grad students, custom electronics, motion control equipment, real-time sensors, interesting software, perhaps some serious applications to both healthcare and computer gaming, and maybe a spin-off company to help bring it all to the world in an economically self-sustaining way.

But things never start there. 🙂

So today I spent some time with cardboard and scissors, scotch tape and coffee stirrers, and assorted other junk lying around the lab, starting to put together an early proof-of-concept prototype. Depending on how that works out, I may take things to the next stage.

Even if it doesn’t, I sure had a fun time!

Today I saw the marionette show in Central Park. Two members of our party were little children, and they were really the target audience.

As adults, watching a puppet show aimed at children was a wonderfully eye opening experience, because we were actually watching two shows.

On the one hand, we were seeing the same show that the kids were seeing, a tale of silly clowns, beautiful ballerinas, impish monkeys, mustachioed strongmen and flying cows. The plot was often ridiculous, but never ever boring.

On the other hand, we were constantly aware of the presence of the puppeteers, just out of our sight. We admired the hook that comes down from the “sky” and artfully engages a piece of scenery, the strings that hold up the lovely ballerina as she twirls so gracefully on a balance beam, the ingenious mechanical wings of a flying bird.

This is all quite difference from the experience of seeing a good play or film, where I fairly quickly forget the artificiality of it all, and willingly suspend my disbelief to become immersed in the story and characters.

But in a puppet show, keeping all the strings visible is part of the point. One is constantly reminded of how it is done, and that awareness is part of the show.

I am reminded of the highest exemplar of this art,Japanese Bunraku puppetry, in which the puppeteers remain visible at all times. We in the audience honor their brilliance by politely ignoring them.

But we never forget that they are there, giving their creations the magical gift of life.

Saw “Guardians of the Galaxy” this evening — a big goofy puppy dog of a superhero film. It’s the kind of movie that comes right up and happily licks your face. A totally enjoyable experience, if you remember to leave any trace of seriousness at the door.

The highlight of the pre-film previews was the promo for the next installment of “The Hobbit”. Not because it was good, but because it was bad in such a peculiar way.

Those of you who live in the real world might recall that Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” was a charming little children’s story, filled with goofy adventures and sly offhanded humor.

Peter Jackson, from what I can see, does not live anywhere near that world.

His new Hobbit movie seems to be even more grandiose and portentous than the first one (that was the one where Sherlock Holmes, playing a dragon, nearly ate Watson). Tonight’s preview had lots of slow motion, shots of serious looking actors in gleaming profile, and leisurely pans across rows upon rows of archers grimly facing the Apocalypse. All very very important.

During the self-serious immensity of it all, my mind started to wander, and I found myself wondering whether you could do this with any source material.

Could we, for example, split “Peter Rabbit” into a three part epic, with all human virtues and vices represented metaphorically by the larger-than-life travails of Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail?

Or what about “The Cat in the Hat”, done in the style of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, with the cruel fate of the well-meaning fish standing in for the darkness of the human soul and the terrible injustice that implicates us all?

All of which would need to be told as an epic saga, in gorgeous 70mm, with each installment clocking in at about a hundred and forty minutes. Of course the characters of “Thing One” and “Thing Two” would need to be cut from the screenplay. After all, would you include Tom Bombadil in a movie about the Fellowship of the Ring?

But what I’m really holding out for is the forthcoming epic miniseries — in ten successive two hour installments, shot and presented in glorious stereoscopic iMax, with music composed by John Williams and conducted by the London Symphony Orchestra with accompanying vocals by the Vienna Boy’s Choir.

I’m speaking, of course, about “Captain Underpants: The Peter Jackson version.”