Ken's Blog

In the summer of 2011 I saw Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis in the romantic comedy “Friends with Benefits”, in my opinion a superior example of the genre. Unfortunately, the pair was somewhat mismatched, as Kunis was a far more assured presence than Timberlake. Perhaps it would have made more sense if he had performed in that other RomCom of the same summer — “No Strings Attached”.

Yet to give the leading man his due, Justin Timberlake is a man of many hats. Yesterday a friend told me that the former ‘N Sync member had purchased MySpace. I then found out on-line that he had bought it for $35 million, a bargain when you consider that MySpace went for $580 million back in 2005.

If you saw “The Social Network” you may already associate Timberlake with social networking, since he played Sean Parker of Napster in 2010 with far more conviction and panache than he was able to bring to the RomCom genre the following year.

But when my friend told me this news, my first thought was of Timberlake’s recent foray into romantic comedy, and I wondered whether, as the company’s new owner, he could rebrand his acquisition as a site for meeting potential romantic partners on-line.

“Maybe,” I told her “he can call it ‘Friending with Benefits'”.

Yesterday a friend was telling me that she had discovered, to her chagrin, that many young people she knows — people in their early 20s — do not recognize the word “Holodeck”. For those of us who were around when Star Trek the Next Generation was on the air, such cultural ignorance can seem shocking.

After all, the Holodeck was, for an entire generation, a kind of shorthand for “the future”, and in particular of the limitless possibilities of technology. In the fantasy world of STtNG it was a virtual environment that enables its to users experience, with full sensory immersion, any virtual reality at all. What could be a more perfect embodiment of “the future”, with its promise of endless possibility?

I pointed out to my friend that to young people today, such a fantasy is, in a sense, quite retro. The 1980s ideal of virtual reality, exemplified by Jaron Lanier interacting with imaginary worlds through his VPL goggles and cybergloves, was in fact a kind of technological successor to the 1960s fantasy of a drug induced utopia. Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan as channeled by Timothy Leary: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Today the ideal of entering one’s own personal imaginary world has been passed over. Rather, the compelling vision for young people is now of a shared virtual world, a world in which people who are far apart can use technology to join together in a massively shared experience that is not constrained by mere geography or physics.

This concept of people coming together in cyberspace, of some advanced technology permitting geographically separated people to experience a group mind, did indeed exist in the fantasy world of STTNG. But back then it was seen as the very essence of corruption, of horror, of all that could go wrong in a world of technology run amok. It was technology as Destroyer, as bringer of soul-sucking spiritual death and mindless despair.

A difference in perspective which is reflected in word choices. For example, we now call such a concept “Social Networking”. Back then, they called it “The Borg”.

Shortly after noon today — at 12:12pm and 12 seconds to be precise — I took note of the time and engaged in a very human ritual: celebrating the arbitrary.

After all, there is nothing inherently special about today. This day just happens to fall on the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the current century. All of these conventions — the numbering of day, month, and year — are themselves completely arbitrary conventions based on historical happenstance.

The same goes for the fact that we count twenty four hours in a day, and sixty minutes in an hour. The roots of that particular convention can be traced all the way back to ancient Babylonia.

It could be argued that the Babylonian system of counting in base sixty was indeed a very cool thing. After all, sixty is satisfyingly divisible by an impressive array of proper factors — 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15 and 30 — but that doesn’t mean that there is anything inherently interesting about any of these choices, even if they have resulted in a day and time whose digits line up rather pleasingly. I mean, it’s not as though we’ve discovered some sort of cosmic slot machine.

Still, I took a little time today, at just a bit over twelve minutes past the noon hour, to mark the sheer coolness of the moment, however silly it may be.

Which I guess just makes me human. 🙂

Tomorrow evening is the department-wide demo show here. Tonight I am working late at the University on my own projects, and I am aware that all around me, groups of students are hard at work, preparing their projects for the big event.

They have gathered with calm intensity all about the lab, descending like flocks of birds onto every available meeting and conference room, fiddling with code and with Kinects, making final adjustments to their demos.

Discarded coats are flung across empty chairs, and boxes of half-eaten pizza lie scattered upon lab tables, as young men and women stare at their computers with rapt and unwavering focus, speaking to each other in hushed tones as they lean in, gazing first into one laptop screen and then another.

I am sure these students are far too immersed in their process to stop and wonder how all of this might appear to an outside observer.

I, for one, think it is one of the most beautiful sights in all the world.

The other day I tried an experiment. I took the rhythmic phrase “Romeo and Juliet” and created a stream-of-consciousness poem out of it right then and there — more or less trying to write a poem the way Jackson Pollock painted a picture.

Mostly I was drawn to the rhythm of the phrase “Romeo and Juliet” with its seven syllables, accents on the first and fifth — seven eighth notes and a rest in 2/4 time.

The rhythm inspired me to go for a beat vibe, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the result. It’s hard to do justice to an epic tale in just a few verses. Imagine Tolkien trying to squeeze his famous saga down to a few lines: “Frodo was short. He had a ring. Gandalf wore a hat.”

See what I mean? It lacks a certain something.

Yet that rhythmic phrase “Romeo and Juliet” with its wonderfully musical cadence has been rolling insistently around in my head; I can feel it working overtime somewhere in the back of my brain. It may just burst out again one of these days.

I’m sure Edward Tufte spends fully 50% of his time patiently explaining to people that the ingenious graphical map elucidating Napoleon’s march on Russia and its ill-fated aftermath were, in fact, the work of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), not Edward Tufte himself, despite the inexplicable fact that Minard’s map appears as the most common result in a Google image search for “Tufte”.

(click to see larger image)

But does anybody listen? No.

So we end up living in an unfair world in which Tufte becomes widely mis-credited with Minard’s brilliant creation, in spite of the unceasing and commendable self-effacement with which Mr. Tufte himself no doubt tries to explain these facts to anyone who will listen.

Yet if one individual is to be credited with bringing the visual display of quantitative information into modern consciousness, it is surely the writer, director, comedienne and actor Elaine May, who popularized the essential concepts back in 1967, as you can see in the following succinct yet powerful demonstration:

(click to play video)

Romeo and Juliet
Spilled out on the summer street
Full of crazy karmic heat
Out for love and fun

Montague and Capulet
Ripping up the rules, they spent
All the summer full hell bent
Blazing like the Sun

Death rolled up and stole their breath
The streets are mad with lost desire
All scattered ashes from the fire
But nothing’s as it seems

Those clever kids, they cheated Death
For Romeo and Juliet
Will live forever, you can bet,
If only in our dreams

I was trying to explain computer game culture to somebody today. I mean, in particular, the culture of people who make computer games.

When you visit a leading computer game production company, be it Valve Software or Bungie Games, you find a very specific aesthetic at work. One part of it is a gung-ho spirit, very much like the idea behind the 1939 MGM film Babes in Arms, in which the intrepid young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on a show in a barn, pulling it off on a shoe-string through sheer guts and talent, improvising their way to immortality.

Except that it’s all mixed with an aesthetic out of Aliens (or, to be more precise, out of Id Software’s Doom). In the land of game production, the barn has already been overrun and firebombed by alien fiends from another dimension, the world itself now lies in sad smoking ruins, and creative genius thrives in the gutted warehouses, abandoned factories and broken detritus of a lost civilization.

Game studios are carefully dressed up to look like Dresden after the bombing, all burnt out and stripped down to bare concrete and rough steel beams, huge hollowed out cavernous spaces where game designers cluster their little cubicles like lone outposts bravely defending humanity’s last hope against the encroaching zombie horde.

The net effect is an eerie combination of gung-ho post-WWII optimism and surreal post-apocalyptic alienation. “Hey kids, my dad has a barn … let’s put on a show! Except we can’t ask for permission ’cause, um, my dad’s now a flesh eating zombie.”

Who could ask for a more inspiring work environment?

Yesterday, by coincidence, both Dave Brubeck and Oscar Niemeyer passed away. Two men in different fields, living on different continents, one American, the other Brazilian. And yet in my mind they were powerfully connected.

Brubeck was continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible in music. He took his influences from everything and everywhere, and used them to push ideas that were well beyond anything else that was happening at the time.

Perhaps his most famous musical intervention into the culture, among many, was his successful attack upon the ugly squat-shaped tower of the 4/4 time signature, that boring edifice which underlies western classical music, rock and roll, dance, blues, rap, really our entire metrical culture — an insistent thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa rhythm that dulls our senses and our lives, and beats us day after day into submission.

After a visit to the Middle East and India, Brubeck was exposed to other possibilities, leading his quartet to compose Take Five (which uses 5/4 time) and Blue Rondo A La Turk (in 9/8 time). Take Five has become one of the most often played and beloved pieces in the Western musical cannon, in direct defiance of the confining boxy square of 4/4 time.

Similarly, Oscar Neimeyer’s entire career as an architect was a full frontal assault on a similar boring mainstay of architecture — the building as squared off box. All over the world he replaced the tyranny of right angled boxes by domes, curves, spirals, undulating enclosures, soaring winglike structures, and dreams of ecstatic flight made concrete flesh.

It is not surprising that his career temporarily came to a halt when Brazil was taken over by a military dictatorship. Like Woody Guthrie (a man who shared many of Neimeyer’s political ideals), whose guitar bore the inscription “This machine kills fascists”, Neimeyer understood that there are many kinds of boxes, and that the ones most dangerous to freedom are those that the eye cannot even see.

Two brilliant men, two continents, who shared a profound idea — that truth comes in many shapes, and beauty is often found outside of the box.

I heard the world is coming to an end
According to the Mayans, it’s quite soon
    Oh why would they want to end us?
    You’d think that they could lend us
Another several months, at least ’till June

I heard the planet’s going up in smoke
According to the Web, the end is near
    Guess it’s time to heave a sigh
    And to say your last goodbye
For the Web is never wrong, or so I hear

Soon, when this is over and you’re dead
You’ll be sorry you ignored that Mayan curse
    But do not give in to the blues
    For there’s one piece of good news:
I won’t be around to write another verse!

🙂