Ken’s Blog

Today I had a fascinating conversation that touched on how art and craftsmanship change as new technology allows an artistic process to evolve from manual techniques to more “instantaneous” and automated alternatives.

For example, when a film is shot on location, happy accidents can arise from the very difficulty of framing your shot in the real world. Perhaps there is an unexpected car or lamppost in the scene that must be shot around, or else incorporated into the frame. This very challenge can lead to new ideas.

If the set were computer simulated, and the lighting designed in post-production (two options that are becoming ever more readily available), such happy accidents might never occur. The argument could be made that convenient “improvements” in process can actually impoverish the outcome.

A counterargument could be made based on the following observation: A novelist experiences no such production hurdles. Yet the author, upon writing part of a scene one morning, might later that day have a random conversation or encounter which provides, the very next day, a new insight into how to complete her scene.

So perhaps we do not need to fear that evolving technologies will debase our art. The happy accidents that lead us to discover our best artistic impulses come not from the complication of dealing with the world around us, but rather from our own complicated human responses to that world.

As a break from work (the more work there is to do, the more I seem to need such breaks) I have been joyfully wandering through YouTube watching old performances, many I’d never seen before, by Sid Caesar, Victor Borge, Vera-Ellen, Ernie Kovacks and other greats from more or less sixty years ago.

It was an astonishingly rich world, and you can become totally pulled into it. Traveling through it is a bit like having your own time machine.

To take just one example, there has never been comedy before or since quite like the Nairobi Trio. In fact, it deserves a link.

This afternoon I was describing to someone a software project I’m working on, which allows parts of a document to be interpreted by a computer, so that interactive animated characters (as moving illustrations in the document) can act out a story in response to that text.

I was explaining that in order to make this practical, those “computer readable” parts of the document will use a special text editor — one that guides the author to write things in a way that computers (which are a bit stupid) can actually understand.

Then a bit later this afternoon a colleague told me that his nephew, a brilliant NYU film student, is interested in the idea of writing screenplays in the form of animations.

I told my colleague that I’m already working on that — since what his nephew wants is more or less a very nice way to describe what I am building.

His nephew and I are going to meet, and hopefully collaborate.

I love when this sort of confluence happens. I take it as a sign that things might be going right.

Happy π day!!

After happily watching the first thirteen episodes of the American remake of “House of Cards”, I have turned my attention to the BBC original.

The contrast serves up a delightful lesson in the difference between the two cultures. Whereas Kevin Spacey’s antihero politician is all about swagger and a thinly disguised display of raw sexual charisma, Ian Richardson’s original is a glorious lesson in understated subterfuge, in the menace that can lurk beneath the smoothest of surfaces.

The original house of cards is not about who slays the most enemies, but rather about how elegantly the kill is done. I confess I am greatly enjoying this highly refined bit of mischief from across the Pond.

While I certainly enjoy a good overcooked drama of political evil, it seems I prefer my Macbeth slightly on the rare side.

Recently I saw, for the first time, Liliana Cavana’s haunting 1974 film “The Night Porter”. I won’t say too much about it here because you really should see it for yourself (but don’t take the kids — it’s definitely a film for grownups).

One thing that struck me about it, something I especially liked, and which seems to have infuriated others through the years, is that it absolutely refuses to spell out its message. Meaning is suggested, hinted at, but remains elusive. Just when you think you understand it, it moves in another direction.

I realize I enjoy this quality of ambiguity in art. Entertainment spells things out, wraps its message in a tidy little package with neatly typed labels for our enjoyment. In the end, everybody knows what has happened.

Yet art can keep us dangling, forcing us to fill in our own meanings and interpretations. And sometimes those interpretations can bring us to profound, if disturbing, places.

I enjoy a nice tidy entertainment as well as the next person, but there is nothing like a wonderfully, provocatively ambiguous work of art.

Today I was in a conversation where somebody said that he was interested in the possibility of interactive movies. He immediately acknowledged that a lot of people in the world of narrative film did not share his enthusiasm. “They want to be the artist,” is the way he put it. That is, they want to have precise control over how an audience experiences the flow of the narrative.

At that moment it occurred to me why we are not seeing more interactivity in movies: Because as soon as you add interactivity to a cinematic experience, it is no longer culturally labeled as a movie. Rather, it is labeled as a game.

For example, the landmark work Façade is an excellent example of what happens when you add interactivity to a visual narrative.

As soon as Façade came out it won all sorts of recognition in the Game world, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Game Festival.

Yet it is completely unknown in the film world — because being interactive, it is seen as a game.

Another way to say this is as follows:

Question: “What do you get when you cross a movie with a game?”

Answer: “A game.”

I wonder how many other such asymmetric hybrids can be found in our culture?

Here’s at least one more:

Question: “What do you get when you cross a car with a computer?”

Answer: “A car.”

This evening I had a delightful dinner with an old friend who is even more of a film aficionado than I. We spent several happy hours analyzing not only the latest releases, but also classic old films starring Edith Evans, or featuring Richard Widmark, or directed by Ida Lupino.

At some point in the conversation it occurred to me that we were speaking a kind of shorthand language, a language that is known only by people who have seen and loved a vast number of films of all genres. Once you are able to draw upon much of the canon, and you also know that your friend will get the reference, you are free to compare, say, a performance or camera shot in a modern Hollywood RomCom with a moment in an old black and white noir or a British war drama.

Yet this time there was something new in our conversation, because the changing medium of distribution is having an effect on the dramatic form itself. Due to the rise of the internet as a primary medium of distribution, for the first time in the U.S. there is an economic incentive for artists and producers to create truly coherent long-form stories.

One current example is “House of Cards” on NetFlix. When you have twenty hours to relate your dramatic arc, to take your characters from start to finish, you can begin to think big. Such a long-form work is not the same as traditional episodic television, where economic constraints force some sort of artificial conclusion each episode. A guaranteed twenty hour running time, commercial free, is a completely different beast.

Of course the BBC has been at this game for some time now. But it’s interesting to see it come to this side of the pond, with our vast audience reach and consequently greater budget ceilings.

In early eleventh century Japan, Murasaki Shikibu introduced a new medium — the full length novel — which quickly spread through the world. We may just be witnessing something similar taking hold in cinema.

We all have multiple identities, different faces that we put on for different occasions.

I ran into this head-on today. I was deep in a conversation with a prospective graduate student, a very interesting and far-ranging conversation I might add, when she mentioned that she reads my blog.

And for a moment I was taken aback. What un-professorlike things have I said in these pages, I wondered. In that moment I realized that when I get to the University, I am always wearing a sort of mask — my “professor” mask. Even if it is a friendly mask, it is still a mask.

In this blog I allow this mask to slip in ways that would not be appropriate in the classroom. Here I speak of life, of love, of the absurdity of it all. I write novels. I indulge in the sin of poetry.

But maybe it is all to the good. Students know that behind the professorial mask there is always an individual of flesh and blood, however cloaked in ceremonial cloth. Perhaps the very presence of that individual, ultimately not that different from themselves, inspires them to learn.

I’m working on some software that teaches programming through a “learn by doing” approach. It gives learners a way to create cool 3D graphical objects on their computer screen by writing simple computer programs.

Recently I added a command-p hot key. When you hit this key, the software automatically turns the graphical object on your computer screen into a file ready to be sent to a 3D printer — so you can bring your creation into the real world.

Today I was speaking with an educator who was interested in knowing whether students could use this software to study history. In such a course students would use programming to manipulate historical events, places and people, as well as the relationships between them. Imagine being able to loop through the battles of a war, or the economic policies of a presidential administration, to retrieve a sequence of events that can tell the story of that era from some unique perspective.

But if hitting command-p for a graphical simulation that you’ve just programmed results in an object being created on a 3D printer, then what should be created if you hit command-p on a historical narrative that you’ve just programmed?

Hmm. Maybe your “printout” should be a Ken Burns style documentary.

Two minnows once met in a little old stream
One minnow asked “Is this all a big dream?”
The other one, thinking a moment, replied
“Please let us not be too quick to decide.
For if ’tis all a dream, then we’re not really here.
And that would not bode very well, so I fear.”

Just then a pickerel floated by slow,
And he said in a voice most impressively low
“Young minnows, I happened to hear you two speak,
Good news! I can give you the answer you seek.”
“Oh tell us, good pickerel!”, so they exclaimed,
“We are eager to hear our existence explained!”

“It is simple,” he smiled, “Yes of course you are real
“Which is why you will make for a nice little meal.
“And what better way to explain nature’s laws?”
Then he swallowed them whole, with a snap of his jaws.
But alas, they were not such a succulent dish,
For he vanished as soon as he ate the two fish.

Oh this world is unkind, and this world is unfair
And those minnows, it turns out, were not really there.
The pickerel really had got it quite wrong
For sometimes we find, in plain sight all along,
In the seeds of our questions, the answers we seek,
And everyone knows little fishes can’t speak.