Ken’s Blog

There is a by now familiar scene in the overall genre of pop magical realism in which our hero, who only we know is secretly a superhero, or an alien, or a vampire, or a slayer of vampires, or maybe is just cyber-enhanced by a neurologically-linked titanium alloy nanowire endoskeleton, finds his or herself at a social gathering, perhaps a cocktail party.

As a rule, this party must be the antithesis of the heroic. Rather than flying through the air to head off a fiery atomic missile mere minutes from downtown Chicago, or stoically enduring a lone vigil in outer space, or perhaps just fighting off a swarm of hideous flesh eating daemons spawned in the very bowels of Hell, our hero must do something truly frightening — make small talk.

And then it happens. Amid the uncomfortable ties and the little black dresses and the unidentifiable canapés, somebody drops a glass. Normally this would result in shattered glass everywhere, but not this time.

In a movement far too rapid to be tracked by the unaided eye, our hero reaches out a hand and snatches said glass deftly in mid-fall. The undamaged crystaline container is thereupon handed nonchalantly to its former possessor, a fetching young person of opposite gender, who inevitably gapes at our hero with astonished admiration, while mentally rearranging her/his plans for the end of the evening.

The problem with this picture is that if you were actually a super being mingling incognito with the cocktail crowd, you would never catch the glass. Of course you could catch the glass, but that would blow your cover.

In a truly enlightened moment of pop culture, our hero would — in elegant slo-mo — start to catch the glass, then think better of it, then deliberately miss the glass, allowing it to shatter uselessly to the floor. This is clearly the only way to avoid detection by that sinister looking bald headed gentleman at the punch bowl who even now is plotting world domination and/or destruction.

I mean, this is obvious, right? And yet you never see this. Now why is that, can somebody please tell me?

In the last few days I did a flurry of computer programming. There was an idea I wanted to try out, so I just threw together a solution as fast as I could — essentially with rubber bands and krazy glue. At some point it started to work, but of course it was all a complete mess under the hood.

Here’s the thing: Programming is a little like rock climbing. You can reach out an arm or a leg to pull yourself up and gain a higher purchase, but you can’t extend all your limbs at once. Translated into programming, this means that you can only afford to make one mess at a time. Then you need to clean up.

So after my flurry of activity, I proceeded to turn the mess I had made into something clean. It still looked the same on the surface, but underneath everything was now tidy, ordered and properly labeled. And perhaps more important, some of the components under the hood have become shiny new tools that I can use for other things.

Which means I can now go ahead and make another mess. 🙂

I had a memory today from when I was eight years old. At the time, my parents owned a big old upright piano. It wasn’t very good, but it had an extremely large sound. Once a week the piano teacher would come to give lessons to my brother and me. She was an old German woman, very strict and always serious. The only music she ever taught was Schumann — the Kinderszenen and Album für die Jugend — which she encouraged us to play as loudly as possible.

In those years, our family would spend July and August in the Catskill Mountains, where my brother and I would often try, with paper cups, to scoop guppies from the creek near our summer cottage. The few we caught were cherished, and at summer’s end these would always ended up in a glass bowl on top of that piano. Sometimes the piano was so loud that a guppy would jump clear out of the bowl, and flop around on top of the piano until we put it back.

Once I found a dead guppy behind the piano, and I felt incredibly sad. I knew even then that guppies do not like Schumann. At least, not the way we played it!

Today is Jim Henson’s birthday, and though the man himself, sadly, is not here with us to enjoy it, his wonderful and influential legacy lives on.

You probably know of Jim Henson only from his work with the Muppets. This all by itself was a groundbreaking advance, one now so familiar that we generally take it for granted. After all, the many innovations that went into Henson’s Muppets — advances such as placing the camera in the moving puppet’s eye plane, having puppeteers “act for the camera” (while looking into a monitor), abandoning the traditional marionette for a far more expressive soft puppet — led to the first true mass success for puppetry, the first time puppetry truly became an integral part of the twentieth century broadcast revolution.

But there was a lot more to Jim Henson than his most well known success. He was one of those restless geniuses who keeps inventing and reinventing, always coming up with new genres and ways of seeing. To take just one example, you were probably not aware of his wonderful surrealist short film Time Piece. In 1966 it was nominated for an Academy Award. I think it should have won.

Someone I’m very close to went this weekend to see the revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of “Einstein on the Beach”, the 1976 formalist opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. I could have seen it too, but found myself not so strongly motivated.

Theatre works built on pure formalism don’t always work for me — especially, as in this case, if the experience lasts longer than four hours. While I respect the concept, my limit for experiencing abstract performance at BAM doesn’t always veer very far to the other side of Pina Bausch.

So this weekend I went to see a very different performance, also more than four hours long — Bruce Springsteen at the Meadowlands. On the continuum between formalist and romantic art, Springsteen is the epitome of the romantic end of the spectrum. The man can work a crowd better than Bill Clinton, and he had the audience in sheer heaven every moment.

When you attend a Springsteen concert, you become caught up in raw primal emotion — all the ecstasy of a Gospel revival with none of the Original Sin. In Springsteen’s world, we are all saints and sinners both. His songs are stories of how those two states of being coexist, and how that heady mixture makes us beautiful.

So there you have it — two people making very different concert choices on the same weekend, both of us highly aware of the difference between appreciating a work of art and loving it. Then again, there are places where our respective tastes coincide splendidly.

For example, in a few months we will be attending a performance together that is, arguably, in the precise center of the dialectic between BAM and The Boss: We are going to see Leonard Cohen.

I went to a talk yesterday given by an eminent mathematician. He spoke on two related topics, one of which I listened to avidly, and the other I ended up completely tuning out.

From the perspective of the speaker the two topics were strongly related to each other. Yet from my perspective they couldn’t have been more different.

The difference was that for the topic I liked, I could form a geometric model in my head of the fundamental argument. Once I saw this geometry, everything became intuitive. I could play with it in my head, test the ideas for myself, and try out variations of his argument.

For the other topic, as far as I could tell, there was no geometric intuition — the arguments seemed purely symbolic. Intellectually, I could see how it might be interesting, but emotionally I felt no connection.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m in the field of computer graphics. 🙂

I’ve been working on a new kind of computer interface, and having a great time doing it. It’s kind of my “shiny new toy”. When I was six years old I felt the same way about a plastic dinosaur. Only now I get to make the dinosaur myself.

At some point a few days ago I reached a kind of impasse, not sure what next to add to my little project. Feeling restless, I went back and started playing with a completely unrelated project, something I’d worked on years before. Immediately I saw problems with the old project, and wanted to fix them.

Then it occurred to me — I could add things to the new project that would let me use it to tweak the old project. Suddenly my current project had renewed purpose and meaning, and it was clear to me what to add to it next.

It seems to me there is an important principle at work here. If you get stuck on something, the most productive solution might be to work on something completely different — something that will get your mind thinking in different ways and get you unstuck.

Sometimes the best way forward is sideways.

Thinking about it more, I guess there really was no way for Mitt Romney to disavow his remarks during that surreptitiously recorded speech to big-pocket donors. Unlike his somewhat stiff demeanor during public appearances, the video shows him looking and sounding calm, centered and relaxed, very much at peace with himself and with the ideas he is expressing.

We are clearly witnessing a man who is conveying sincerely held beliefs, communicating concepts that to him are inner truths. You really can’t back away from a performance like that. All you can do is move forward with it, and hope for the best.

Yet there is something else going on here. The fact that the video exists at all is an indication of a fundamental generational shift — a shift that until now went unnoticed by many in Romney’s generation.

Until perhaps five years ago, you could safely say anything you wanted to your inner core of supporters. The limits of technology imposed a zone of safety around such situations. That zone is gone, and it isn’t coming back. SmartPhones are everywhere, and just about any event can be surreptitiously recorded.

Interestingly, Barack Obama probably understands this shift quite well. Being only 51 (as opposed to Romney’s 65), he is young enough to understand that there is no longer such a thing as a “private dinner speech”.

I’m trying to understand Mitt Romney’s explanation of his remarks to wealthy donors last May, of which a video was leaked the other day, in which he decried the “47%” of the U.S. population who don’t pay federal taxes (his numbers were a bit off, but that’s ok).

I completely get why candidate Romney would be thumping his chest last spring and flattering wealthy conservatives, in his drive to raise money for a presidential run. That kind of behind the scenes posing is part of the game of electoral politics. And I’m not completely comfortable with the leak of the video. Expecting candidates to present the same message to all audiences, even in what are supposed to be closed-door events, seems to me an impossibly high bar.

But once the video went public, I had expected him to back off at least a little from such an extreme statement. Yet Romney did just the opposite — he dug in and said he stands by the message, although he allowed that he had said it “inelegantly”.

As I understand it, the miscreants Mitt Romney warns about include those retirees who, having paid into Social Security for many years, are now living off the fund they already paid into (Social Security benefits as sole retirement income is not subject to federal taxes).

Is he saying that there is something wrong with being old while not being rich? What should these people have done instead? Refused to pay into Social Security as an act of civil disobedience? What, exactly, does Mitt Romney think he’s saying?

I’m trying to understand what the political strategy is here. And for the life of me I can’t.

I’ve been happily watching “Once Upon a Time”, a television series which mixes reality with fairy tales in an artful and clever way.

As Bruno Bettelheim pointed out in his book The Uses of Enchantment, fairy tales are a very serious business indeed. Encountering stories that touch upon death, abandonment and other primal fears in symbolic terms provides children with a safe way to work through these issues.

So it’s not surprising that “Once Upon a Time” explores many such dark themes. In the course of this exploration, the series raises a number of fascinating questions. For example, in a scene that is at once sad, lovely, clever and laugh-out-loud funny, Grumpy (yes that Grumpy) denounces a potion that would erase the pain of a lost love. His exact words: “I don’t want my pain erased. As wretched as it is, I need my pain! It makes me who I am. It makes me Grumpy.”

So here’s a question: If you are feeling the intense — perhaps at times unbearable — pain of having lost someone you love, and you had the choice to simply erase this pain from your heart, as though the love and loss had never happened, what would you do? Would you keep the pain? Or would you choose to remove it, and thereby run the risk of removing a piece of your own identity?