Ken’s Blog

Yesterday, like many millions of people, I went to see “The Hobbit”. Visually it was a sumptuous feast. Nearly every shot looked like a finely executed painting. I didn’t like the storytelling as much. Peter Jackson seems to have become, to the principle of “Stretch this scene out as long as possible,” as Quentin Tarantino has become to “Ha ha, made you mad, didn’t I?” and Christopher Nolan to “Worship no other Gods before me!”

OK, that last was a slight exaggeration. No real god would be nearly as self-important as a Christopher Nolan film.

The whole time I was watching the stunning visuals of “The Hobbit” — the chiaroscuro lighting, detailed prosthetic makeup, camera angles, interiors, costumes — it all seemed incredibly familiar. And not because of the recent film trilogy, but because of something earlier.

And then I had it! Some scenes from the current Hobbit film are precise visual echoes of the illustrations from the late nineteen seventies by the brothers Hildebrandt. For example, here, from their 1977 Tolkien calendar, is “The Unexpected Party”:

The lighting and composition form a perfect match to the corresponding scene in the just released movie. If you look at this close-up of the above illustration, you can practically see the actors jump off the page and into the film:

You can also see the Hildebrandts’ style at work in this illustration for “The Sword of Shannara”, also from 1977:

Again, here is a close-up — practically a lesson in what a “Peter Jackson dwarf” should look like:

After scouring the Web for info, I can’t seem to find any official connection between the brothers Hildebrandt and the film^†. But of course Peter Jackson would have grown up with their illustrations in his head.

Now, you might protest: “But isn’t this just what Tolken’s world looks like?” And the answer is no. Until these illustrations came out, the Shire and its environs looked like many things (in illustrations by many artists, including Tolkien himself), but they did not look like this.

As far as I can tell, these two guys, Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, invented what we now think of as “what the inhabitants of Middle Earth look like”. And they did it so successfully that people seem to have forgotten that this was indeed an invention — one that did not exist until forty years after “The Hobbit” was first published in 1937.

†Jackson’s earlier trilogy borrows more heavily from the style of the illustrator John Howe, and the landscapes and cityscapes in all of the films are heavily influenced by the beautiful imagery of Alan Lee.

It’s funny how a big enough piece of news can obscure other news that one would think noteworthy. Imagine, for example, how the devoted followers of Mother Teresa must have felt after she passed away, when all anybody seemed to care about was the death that same week of some young ex-princess from England.

And so today. All around the world people are celebrating, but nobody is celebrating the birth of Sir Isaac Newton (born on December 25, 1642). If the great man had been born on nearly any other day of the year, today would be filled with special commemorations, rituals and ceremonies, in honor of the most influential scientist in the history of the Western world.

But because he was born on this day, nobody thinks of December 25 as “Sir Isaac Newton Day”. Yet imagine if everybody did! Children nestled, all tucked in their beds, would be hoping that Sir Isaac had left a refracting telescope or optical prism in their stocking.

Rosy cheeked carolers would be standing on street corners, singing merrily under a full moon of the universal laws of gravitation. Families would look forward to the traditional yearly meal, where they can discuss infinitesimal calculus and the generalize binomial theorem.

Of course we are a diverse society, and some might argue that a focus on Newtonism could unfairly exclude people with differing cultural orientations. So I’m sure nobody would object, in the name of diversity, if some families chose instead to celebrate December 25 as the birth of Humphrey Bogart or Cab Calloway, Annie Lennox or Quentin Crisp. Or maybe Jesus.

It could be argued that Hollywood stars ascend to the firmament because the culture needs an embodiment of a particular archetype — and the movies are all about embodiment of archetypes.

I’ve written on this topic before: Top Hollywood actors are often the cultural reincarnation of some iconic actor from an earlier era. Which makes sense, for these people are the vessels by which our society expresses timeless psychological themes that weave through the culture.

But yesterday in particular, a friend was telling me that she had just rewatched the great 1933 James Whale film “The Invisible Man”. We discussed Claude Rains’ masterful performance in a difficult role — for almost the entire length of the movie you can hear his voice, but you cannot see his face.

Which works out well, since although Rains is a pleasant enough looking fellow, his speaking voice is one of the great wonders of the cinema. You can probably still hear in your head Rains’ perfect reading, as Captain Louis Renault in “Casablanca”, of the classic line “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

And I suddenly got a twinge of recognition. What current Hollywood actor is not all that much to look at, possesses a magnificent voice and diction, generally plays highly self-assured characters on the side of the devil (always with a mordant sense of humor), has a tendency to be cast in roles where you can hear his voice but not see his face, never gets the girl (you don’t even think he wants the girl), and is easily able to steal scenes away from major stars when he feels like it?

Why, Hugo Weaving of course.

“Palindrome” is not a palindrome, which is very sad indeed,
Because then we’d have “Emordnilap”, but that is not a word.

Acronyms can resonate, offer namesakes, yet mislead.
Could there an acronym for that?   (there is, I’ve heard)

And what could be the basis of hypocatastasis?
You may find it to be nothing more than “Cart before the horse.”

But try to lead that horse to water! My friend, it’s no oasis.
You realize I’m speaking metaphorically, of course.

Why is “onomatopeia” not onomatopoetic?
(I’ve pondered this since early adolescence)

Yet one word in the ether matches meaning and aesthetic:
“Quintessence” — it’s the quintessence of quintessence!

Still floating in the lingering contrails of last night’s Leonard Cohen performance, I went to YouTube to listen once again to “Famous Blue Raincoat”. And I ended up playing it over and over, just for the shifts in Cohen’s voice, in his guitar, and in the way he uses these subtle changes to convey the most exquisite shades of emotion.

It’s a beautiful recording, sort of infinite in its way, with layers upon layers of meaning drifting below the surface.

This song might be the purest distillation of a view of things that could be called “Leonard Cohen Zen”. It’s the idea that our life is precious not merely because it contains moments of beauty, but because we know that these moments will not be ours forever.

He reminds us that we need to pay homage to sadness and loss along with ecstasy, because these remind us that our connection to each other is never easy, and never free. The pain that inevitably shadows our happiness is, in fact, the measure by which we can know the value of what we cherish in each other.

Saw Leonard Cohen last night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. We had third row seats near the center, which means we were quite close to the man himself. The tickets were not cheap, but they were easily worth it.

I would have gone just for the sacred privilege of seeing Mr. Cohen, standing on stage with his acoustic guitar, singing “Famous Blue Raincoat” (for my money the greatest song ever written). But there were also many other classic songs in the line-up, including “So Long Marianne”, “Everybody Knows”, “The Future”, “In My Secret Life”, “I’m Your Man”, “If It Be Your Will”, “Anthem”, “Bird on the Wire”, “Tower of Song”, “Dance Me to the End of Love”, “Chelsea Hotel #2”, and of course “Hallelujah” and “Suzanne”, as well as a nice selection from the new album.

All around me the audience was a sea of ecstatic faces. The concert was nearly four hours long, and it felt like it was all over in a flash.

You may know that Cohen once spent five years in seclusion studying Zen Buddhism (he is an ordained Zen Buddhist monk), and it shows. He somehow manages to be calm, playful, reverent and joyful all at once. This quality seeps into not just his singing but his entire stage presence, and flows out to the audience.

But the strangest thing to me was the completely unexpected emotional effect all this had upon me. Having seen Leonard Cohen in concert before, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had felt elated, or peaceful, or, you know, some kind of New Age-y sort of floating thing. But my reaction wasn’t like that. No, nothing like that at all.

Rather, as I watched this remarkable seventy eight year old man take us through his decades long playbook to revisit songs of emotional wisdom, my mind went to another place entirely.

I thought of people I have known — those I have tried so hard to please, and others who have been kind to me. I thought about the times I have been so desperate to be liked by the former, while taking the latter for granted. And watching this man who has so unerringly followed his own inner voice, I asked myself “what the hell was I doing?”

It’s a bit hard to put into words, but the core insight is this: Leonard Cohen, for all his veneer of graciousness, is fierce — he is a warrior. And he didn’t get that way by caring what anybody else might think, or whom he might need to please. Rather, his body of work is a commitment to asking, about hard emotional questions: “what is real, here before me?”, rather than “what would I like to be real?”

As I absorbed this insight, I felt myself reassessing my own priorities, letting go of people whose good opinions I have vainly coveted — in my mind I could feel myself walking away without a backwards glance — and shifting that energy toward cherishing those who have been truly there for me.

If that’s not a kind of enlightenment, I don’t know what is.

C.P. Snow famously lamented in 1959 that our two intellectual cultures — Science and the Humanities — are not merely disconnected from each other, but worse, that each is looked at with derision by the other — even those aspects of each that represent pinnacles of our civilization. As he points out, to the great majority of scientists Charles Dickens is an esoteric taste, whereas few literary scholars literary scholars could tell you anything at all about the laws of thermodynamics.

In particular, these prejudices have affected how computer programming has been perceived in our society through the decades. Many brilliant people have tried, from Alan Kay to Seymour Papert to Mitch Resnick, Mark Guzdial, Amy Bruckman and many others, to help computer programming cross the bridge from the culture of Science to the other side. And yet it hasn’t quite happened.

Well, let’s qualify that: From the point of view of scientists, progress has been impressive indeed. Culturally, computers have become what space travel was to an earlier generation: The next “final frontier”, humanity’s newest gateway to the universe. Many more kids are programming today, there is a greater interest in computation in general among young people, and the entire culture of programming is seen as far more cool than it was a generation ago.

But as far as I can tell, none of this has penetrated very deeply into the culture of the humanities. The closest we get is “digital humanities”, which seems to be seen by mainstream humanities scholars with the same sort of annoyed suspicion that the “Art World” used to reserve for digital art (somewhere, Clement Greenberg is smiling).

My hunch is that if there is going to be a way out of this, it will require a large-scale culture and activity of computer programming that is not at all associated with “Science”. I’m not saying this will be easy, or even possible, but I’m working on it!

Incidentally, I suspect that how you interpret the title of this post may be strongly influenced by which of C.P. Snow’s two cultures you identify with. 🙂

I am watching “Doctor Who” (the new one) on Netflix, and have gotten to the second season. In this episode, entitled “The Christmas Invasion”, evil aliens have found a way to hypnotize one third of the human race, turning them into mindless automatons. In a wonderfully eerie scene, ordinary people begin streaming out of their homes and offices, and proceed to march en masse under alien control.

Here you can see an early establishing shot of zombified British citizens shuffling past the good doctor’s Tardis:

 
Soon after, we see a similar establishing shot in a typical sleepy English suburb, as mind-controlled folk walk obliviously down the street, whilst their horrified loved ones try in vain to awaken them:

 
A frantic mother tries to get her daughter’s attention, but the possessed young girl continues to march inexorably onward, a strange blue alien light playing about her head:

 
The mother reaches for her daughter, desperate, knowing she may never see her beautiful little girl again:

 
And then it happens: The young extra can’t keep it up any longer. In the fraction of a second before the camera cuts away, she gets a case of the giggles.

 
So there you have it. In one moment we realize that the evil monsters from outer space can never defeat us. We know humanity is safe, not because of some some advanced technology breaking through the fourth dimension, but because of one giggling little girl breaking through the fourth wall.

And that’s why I love television.

Yesterday I went to the Interactive Communications Program (ITP) Winter Show at NYU. There were many great projects, but one in particular caught my attention. Two students — Bona Kim and James Borda — had made a full scale ’80s style arcade game called “The Buddhist”.

The visual iconography was all there for a TRON or PacMan era arcade game, right down to the shapes of the buttons. Except when you played the game, you found that the goal was to enter a contemplative state of mind by letting go of all ego driven goal-directed behavior.

In other words, it is an arcade game, yet it is not an arcade game. Or more precisely, it is a Buddhist Kōan.

This reminded me of a game presented exactly ten years ago, at the ITP 2002 Winter Show, by then-ITP student Ann Poochareon. Her idea was simple: Two players compete with each other by grabbing from a common pool of on-screen words to see who can be the first to successfully complete a Haiku. The game turned out to be extremely popular.

What I find particularly elegant about this idea is that Haiku is in fact traditionally used to juxtapose two contrasting images. As in “The Buddhist”, but perhaps even more so, this game managed to juxtapose competition and contemplation within its very essence.

I can’t remember what the Winter Show was like in 1992, but it would be interesting if it turned out that ITP reaches for enlightenment exactly once every ten years.

My own humble attempts in this direction, quite a few years ago now, were some design experiments for a dance game. Players who successfully match the on-screen dance pattern attain successively higher forms of enlightenment, the ultimate goal being to dance one’s way to Nirvana.

I called it, of course, “Dance Dance Revelation”.

George Carlin had a wonderful comedy routine about how we are all slaves to our stuff. In essence, he said, our accumulation of material confines us; if we want to be truly free, we must ditch the stuff.

But I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. As I look at the accumulation of things I’ve got — books, magazines, record albums, clothes, CDs, papers, puppets, and just plain junk — I realize that this stuff doesn’t exactly belong to me. Rather it belongs to somebody I used to be.

And there, my friends, is the rub. To hold onto these things is to hold onto the illusion that I am still that person — that somewhat lost person from my past — that I sometimes imagine myself to be when I look in the mirror. A young creature of foolish notions and infinite futures, a naive dreamer and follower of fancies.

There are parts of me, of course, that still bear the smooth contours of that unfinished younger soul. There are times when my mind springs back to an earlier time in my life, and the years drop away as if by magic.

But the truth is that this constitutes only a part of me — and not the most important and salient part. We are all an accumulation of lessons learned, of scars won in life’s sundry battles. We contain within us echoes of our younger selves, but we are not them.

If by some happenstance a great calamity were to sweep aside this years long accumulation of the physical detritus of my past, I would not weep for long. For then this burden would be lifted, at least for a time — the burden of these tokens of an earlier self, sneakily encroaching upon the corners of my life.