Ken's Blog

I had somehow missed “Boogie Nights” when it first came out in 1997. I knew it had won Bert Reynolds an Academy Award, in a comeback performance that stunned everybody. But somehow I never got around to seeing it, and eventually it dropped off my radar.

That is, until recently, when I rented the DVD, curious to learn more about P.T. Anderson’s early work.

It’s a great movie, and Reynolds was astonishing, easily deserving of his Oscar. But it was the depth of the cast that really stunned me — a succession of great actors, many still yet to become well known.

One by one they showed up on screen — Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle and Joanna Gleason. Mark Wahlberg as the hot-headed young lead knocked it out of the ballpark, William H. Macy in a tragic performance that ripped out my heart, and Alfred Molina who in one electrifying scene managed to be sexy, ridiculous and utterly terrifying, all at the same time.

Even Heather Graham was good.

I remember sitting there, overwhelmed by the sheer bravura talent I was seeing on screen, and thinking “There is no way this movie could be any better.”

Then Philip Seymour Hoffman showed up. And suddenly it was much, much better.

Yesterday there was a guy standing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art singing Jewish music. But in an interesting mix. One selection was the Kol Nidre, a deeply serious religious prayer sung only during the High Holidays. Several others were from the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick musical “Fiddler on the Roof”.

Listening to all this, the phrase that formed in my mind was “Judaism for tourists”.

And that got me thinking again about Pete Seeger. As it happens I’m reading David Van Ronk’s excellent autobiography “The Mayor of “MacDougal Street”, in which he points out that the modern folk revival was a study in make-believe.

Actual folk music is generally hundreds of years old, found in traditional tunes and words that are passed down from generation to generation in regions like Appalachia. It’s not trying to be authentic. It is authentic.

Starting around eighty years ago, a few people in America, like Woody Guthrie, followed soon thereafter by The Weavers (including Pete Seeger) and others, wrote and performed songs that often had progressive political messages, in a style that imitated traditional folk music. They would even dress like working folks, to give their performances an air of authenticity.

By the 1960s, as the American Civil Rights movement heated up, the banner was picked up by a new generation of musicians like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan to channel political protest. It was all synthetic, from the blue jeans to the fake southern twangs. And it worked like a charm.

I’m wearing blue jeans as I type this, and I’m aware that the hipness of this style among today’s intellectuals and bourgeoisie goes all the way back to the “authentically inauthentic” social activism of Woody Guthrie and Will Geer in the 1930s.

It’s odd how this works. People appreciate the authenticity of Emo and Freak Folk, which copies from Grunge, which copied from Springsteen, who copied from Dylan, who copied from Van Ronk and Guthrie, who were copying from old Appalachian music.

Our society seems to be full of such ersatz authenticity, like the “authentic” feel of Levi’s jeans, rustic furniture from Woodland Creek, Tim McGraw’s cowboy hat, the twang of Bruce Springsteen’s guitar, or the rips in Neil Young’s jeans. It’s all a copy, but it copies from something that was original. Or maybe something that copied from something that copied from something that was original.

That’s how we know it’s real.

One of my students was saying the other day that his grandmother reads his tweets. “But she doesn’t tweet back,” he continued, “she only answers by email,” he said, explaining that while his grandmother is willing to read a twitter feed, she insists on responding with a more old fashioned medium.

I told my student that one day, fifty years from now, he might have grandkids of his own. One of them might talk about how she sends messages to her grandfather through whatever is the latest form of communication (maybe something involving brainwaves and neural implants).

“But old granddad,” she might say, “just keeps responding the old fashioned way, with Twitter.”

Athomas raised a good point the other day about games from Naughty Dog studios, such as “The Last of Us” and the “Uncharted” series. Those games are indeed highly cinematic immersive worlds, with true character arcs and fairly linear narrative structures.

And yet they remain decisively on one side of a vast divide. The two sides of this divide could be labeled “things you watch” and “things you play”. For all its visual beauty and relatively rich characters, a Naughty Dog game still succeeds or fails on what it allows you — the consumer of the experience — to do. You shoot at enemies, solve puzzles, figure out how to get from one place to another.

It is true that along the way you are also having elements of a cinematic and narrative experience, and that is indeed innovative and exciting. Yet ultimately your satisfaction comes from using your skill and your wits to solve problems and surmount obstacles. You are engaged in the act of playing a game.

Contrast this with an immersive theatre piece like “Sleep No More”. Nothing you do in “Sleep No More” can possibly affect the outcome. You are free to roam anywhere within the ongoing theatrical world, but that world will always play out in exactly the same way.

I’ve been to “Sleep No More” twice so far (I plan to go more times) and my experience was quite different each time. Yet the only difference was my point of view. The narrative world itself (a radical interpretation of Macbeth) was exactly the same both times, and each time the experience was quite thrilling.

In a way the sort of Movies 2.0 that I’ve been talking about is a bit like the experience of seeing different performances of the same play. When I recently saw two different performances, one a few weeks after the other, of Julie Taymor’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, I had two quite dissimilar experiences, for several reasons.

For one thing, at each performance I was seated in a very different place (stage-side versus front-center balcony). For another, the actors’ performances resonated very differently with the two different audiences. Also, of course, on my second viewing I could sit back and analyze what Taymor was up to, so I actually had a lot more fun at that performance.

I used to be convinced that there is something “in between” game and linear narrative. Now I’m not so sure. While I acknowledge that such hybrids are technically possible, and I am in awe of the brilliance of creative experiments like Versu, I’m not convinced that I will ever find, in the valley between the two lofty peaks of “Game” and “Story”, a truly compelling experience.

It took me a day or so to process the passing of Pete Seeger. Somehow I had convinced myself that he would live forever. I know that sounds absurd, but Pete Seeger was the kind of guy who inspired thoughts like that.

I first saw him in concert when I was in college. The thing you need to understand about the man, if you never had the opportunity to see him in person, is his purity. Everything he said or did seemed to come from a deep wellspring of conviction, a sense that we were all put on this earth to help each other.

The best part was that he never carried even a whiff of entitlement. His songs were always an invitation between equals, as if to say: “Come join me, let’s you and me roll up our sleeves and get to work, making the world a better place.”

While writing this post, my mind started drifting back to my favorite song from that incredible concert all those years ago. It’s a moment in time I’ve thought about often, Pete’s perfect rendition of a deeply intelligent and powerfully feminist song written by his sister Peggy.

I wasn’t sure of the exact title, but after a little searching on YouTube I managed to find it. And it was every bit as good I had remembered.

Here he is folks, Pete Seeger, a true hero who helped make the world a better place, singing I’M GONNA BE AN ENGINEER.

So here’s a puzzler:

Quite often I’ll find out that a technique I’ve been using for years, one I had originally developed because I needed a solution to some problem, has subsequently been independently rediscovered and published by someone else. And now this technique has an official name.

Fair enough. The people publishing the technique are doing a service to the community that I never did: Going through the trouble of officially explaining how the technique works, and perhaps doing user studies to empirically test the technique. And it’s certainly not as if they stole it. Techniques get independently reinvented all the time.

But here’s the puzzling part: Do I need to readjust my thinking, and rename the technique within my own code, to reflect that fact that it now has an official name? Do I need to do this even if I was using the technique for years before someone else independently reinvented it?

I do think that if I publish a paper that relies on the technique, then I should use the newer term of art, and reference the other inventor’s publication. After all, that’s how the edifice of peer reviewed science works.

But what about in my own code? I can think of at least one good argument on both sides:

On one side, maybe I should keep it as is, because it would be untruthful to rename something I had already developed long before, just to reflect events that took place only later. That would be rewriting history.

On the other side, maybe I should change it out of courtesy to other people who will build on my code later, since now there is a “standard” way to refer to this technique.

I’m not sure there is an easy answer to this one.

Certain events, such as the Academy Awards or the World Cup games, attract an almost insane amount of focus from the world. Even randomly weird and relatively meaningless events can captivate the attention of millions, like a suggestive dance between Miley Cyrus and a large foam rubber finger.

Yet every day significant things happen which will have a long term impact on all of our lives and yet somehow pass below our collective radar, lost in all the noise. Such influential events can take many forms: A law enacted, a disease cured, a more lethal handgun perfected.

If there were some way to spot such game-changing events early on, surely that would be a good thing.

If we look back over the years, the wisdom of hindsight can sometimes allow us see such long term impacts with greater clarity. For example, it didn’t seem to occur to anybody in the 1950s that the massive expansion of roadways out of New York City by Robert Moses would result in entire industries moving out of the city, leading to the city’s economic collapse by the 1970s.

Perhaps it would be interesting to chart, going back in time, what sorts of events had a particularly high “long term impact” versus “initial attention” ratio. That might make it easier learn what to look for while such events are occurring, rather than discovering their import only years later.

Continuing the thought from yesterday, we don’t need to wait 100 years to see a sensory evolution of the protagonist driven linear narrative.

Technologies are already emerging that allow movies to be seen from many different angles. For example, Total Cinema 360 develops software for shooting a movie using the same “see in all directions” camera that Google uses for Google Street View. Viewers can then put on an Oculus Rift and look around to see the movie in any direction.

Some computer games are a bit like movies with a user controllable camera. But games are usually more about making choices to affect the outcome than about conveying a traditional linear narrative. Probably because of this focus, the “acting” by non-player characters generally leaves much to be desired.

But game-related technology can be used another way. Suppose we just want to make a movie that can be wandered through — observed from any location and angle. Even today we can use motion capture and 3D graphical modeling, animation and rendering to create all the digital assets that would be needed to make such an immersive movie. Using emerging technologies like the newest version of the Microsoft Kinect, motion capture doesn’t even need to be prohibitively expensive.

But this is where we get to something that is not quite a movie as we know it: If the viewer can wander around the room and see things from any angle (as in immersive theatre pieces like “Tamara”, “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” and “Sleep No More”) then many of the traditional means of subliminal signaling used by filmmakers would no longer work.

The creators of such “immersive film worlds” cannot use many of the traditional filmmaker’s techniques for creating subjective experiences: The interplay between establishing shots, two-shots and close-ups, the choice of lens power and depth of focus, placing key and fill lights for a particular shot, and so forth.

New and different techniques will need to be developed, which do not rely on camera placement. Over time these new techniques will mature and evolve, and then we will truly have a new medium — Movies 2.0.

The progression from novel to movie is not really paralleled by anything in interactive media. To say that “Just as we moved from words to images, as the novel gave way to the film, now we are moving to interactivity as the film gives way to the computer game” doesn’t quite sit right.

It’s not that I think of games as a lesser medium. Quite the contrary. Computer games are glorious and exciting in their vast possibility, and they are still in their infancy. No, that’s not it.

It’s more that the progression from page to screen is within the long tradition of protagonist driven linear narrative, and I don’t think that’s going to be replaced. Linear narrative seems to emerge from how our minds work, and it is how we have always told our stories of emotional truth.

And it’s not just novels and films that work this way. The theatre can be thought of as a kind of hybrid of novel and film. It privileges words the way a novel does, yet like cinema it also privileges the visceral quality of physical human presence.

So I am wondering what will be the future of the protagonist driven linear narrative — a form that has existed in human history for as far back as we can see, and that shows no signs of going away. What will it be like in, say, a century from now?

Will it be some form of immersive holodeck, in which we find ourselves seemingly co-present with the characters of a compelling story — seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, touching what they touch?

Or will it be something even beyond that — a direct transposition of their most subtle and fleeting thoughts and emotions onto our own brain, as though these thoughts and feelings were our own, emerging from within the core of our being?

It’s interesting to think back, from a distance of thirty years, on the once iconic quote from 1984 that I posted yesterday (I changed only one word). Obviously the people who wrote those words were deliberately echoing George Orwell, and riffing on the significance of the year 1984.

But those were more innocent times. The Web was still a good decade away, and few could have predicted that a clever ad for a personal computer — sold as a symbol of personal choice and an icon of freedom from the hegemony of Corporate America — would actually prefigure a very different future.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, we are all reassessing that dream. In this country, conservatives tend to mistrust power in the hands of government, and liberals tend to mistrust power in the hands of corporations. But now we all have common cause — there is plenty of mistrust to go around. Somebody has our data, and we’re trying to figure out just how scary that is.

The idea that more technology is better is indeed, as that ad from thirty years ago put it, a garden of pure ideology. Alas, we don’t always get to decide what grows in the garden.