Ken’s Blog

I was discussing our new president with a friend recently. We found we were both quite pleased with how much he has been managing to get done under very tough circumstances. My friend had some worries though. The more the president achieves, the more he is attacked by the opposition. The worry was that Obama would eventually find himself overly distracted by side-show attacks from a Republican opposition eager to see him fail.

My friend told me that he was reminded of a nature program he had seen on TV. A pride of lions was going after a lone elephant. Of course the elephant was far bigger than any of the lions. Individually it could have easily beaten any one of them in combat.

But the lions’ strategy was to continually pick away at the elephant – a bite here, a swipe of a claw there – until eventually the strength of their victim was worn down, and then they pounced and finished off the job.

I told my friend I thought it was a valid worry, but the situation in Washington is somewhat different. “How so?” he asked. I said, “This seems more a case of a lion being attacked by a pack of little elephants.”

I’ve noticed that there is only one particular song that is played absolutely everywhere I go in the world. I’ve heard it in Tokyo, Mumbai, Stockholm, Berlin, Dublin, Paris and Taipei. Today in a restaurant in New Orleans I heard it yet again. I wonder whether anyone has been officially tracking this – it seems to be, in this sense, by far the most universally popular song in the world. And I wonder whether there is some reason that could be articulated, to explain the immense universal appeal of this one tune.

I’m not going to name the song right now, because I’m curious to see whether anybody can “name that tune”.

I am in New Orleans, back for the first time since 2000. Since before, well, you know.

All I have seen so far is the central area along Canal St. Everything looks shiny and new. In some cases almost eerily new. I am aware, looking at this bustling tourist strip, alive with storefronts and throngs of visitors, that I am seeing something that is a faithful recreation of itself, like a brilliant job of reconstructive surgery undertaken after a terrible accident.

I was told today that outlying areas are not doing nearly so well. The population has dropped to perhaps half of what it once was, and in some places much of the infrastructure for daily living – for simple things like going to the store to get groceries – has not yet come back.

Strangely enough, one of the first conversations I had here today was with a friend who has been working on a “game for the future” – a game predicated on the player navigating through possible futures. Each time the player makes a choice, the set of possible futures changes, to reflect the consequences of that choice. It’s remarkable to have such a conversation less than a day after having talked about “games of the future” on this blog. Maybe it’s just the future having some fun with us.

I was intrigued by Marc’s comment on my post the other day about a game that would let you see into the future (or at least into the future of the game world). His underlying question was very reasonable – what kind of a game would that be?

It seems to me that the essence of any game is to provide a good succession of challenges. Ideally those challenges should be progressive – the game teaches its player a certain way of thinking and problem solving, and subsequent levels of the game build upon what the player has learned on earlier levels.

Any interesting challenge implies some sort of economy – I might have a certain number of fire missiles and health points to fight the marauding zombie invaders, or a certain amount of time to figure out where to shoot to create the space-connecting holes in Portal. In any “game of the future”, the economy would necessarily be about information. Yes, I can see into the future, but it’s going to cost me. And seeing farther into the future is going to cost me more.

It’s easy to design a computer game world in which the game itself contains a magic oracle that possesses knowledge as to what monster will come through the next door, which vial leading to the sacred chamber contains the potion of death, and which contains the power of healing, etc. The question is how to deploy such oracles in a way that makes for an interesting game.

I don’t think there is a single game here, but rather a genre of games that build upon the same essential deal: As a player I get the power of second sight into things that have not yet happened, but I need to pay for that power. Perhaps I’ll need to pay with health points, perhaps by giving up one of my magic scrolls. It doesn’t really matter – the important thing is that I need to learn how to choose, how to manage an economy of precognition.

Of course in a well designed game this economy is designed carefully. The player is taught to recognize certain patterns, to become sensitive to the ways that events are most likely to unfold. The seasoned player becomes good at predicting the future, and thereby becomes able to take on more subtle and sophisticated challenges.

What we’re talking about here is really meta-design: How to think about the patterns of design for such a game. And that is itself a kind of game. One that seems like fun. Anybody want to play?

Finally got around, just last night, to seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 Indie masterpiece “Near Dark”. I don’t use the word masterpiece lightly. In only her second feature film, the writer/director managed to create a lesson par excellence on how it’s done.

Yes, it’s a vampire film, but that’s a little like saying that Bill Gates is a businessman. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. It’s also a dead-on study of southern rural disaffection, a start-to-finish thrilling action adventure film, a perfect ensemble character study, a novel take on Romeo and Juliet, as well as being a truly innovative update of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Every single shot counts, every camera angle and edit cut adds to the character, story and suspense, and – unlike almost most films – each and every character is truly interesting, rounded, complex and surprising. In fact, the dramatic arc of one of the so-called “minor” characters is so surprising, with such a startling yet insightful late-story psychological twist, that you may find yourself thinking about him for years to come.

The whole thing is done on a very low budget, with the simplest of visual elements used to pull you powerfully into an entire unique world. “Near Dark” may just be as near perfect a little film as I’ve ever seen. I recommend you go out and watch it. And when you’ve done that, go right ahead and watch it again. If you’ve ever thought you might want to make your own movie one day, and are looking for inspiration, this is the one to watch.

Suppose we could all see into the future. I don’t mean that just one of us gets some magical insight, like Harry Potter after swigging a vial of felix felicis or Nicholas Cage in that unspeakably awful 2007 movie adaptation of an intriguing story by Philip K Dick.

No, I mean what if everyone could see all of the threads of possibility extending from the current moment in time until, say, twenty minutes forward. We would all be free to choose from amongst these various possible futures. Of course the possibilities would continually change, since everybody else would also be choosing – changing lanes through the traffic of parallel universes, as it were – thereby dynamically changing our own options.

Presumably the incidence of sudden avoidable deaths would drop dramatically, as would really stupid conversation-stopping comments at parties, inadvertently off-putting pick-up lines in bars, and futile last-minute dashes to airline gates.

Sky divers would no longer start a jump in blithe unawareness of that faulty parachute. Suicide bombers and Los Vegas casinos would both pretty much be out of business. People would generally leave the office and hop on the elevator at just the right time to catch that taxi. Bad movies would sell nary a ticket on opening night.

But those are the obvious things. The subtleties would be far more interesting. The heart-to-heart talk with your girlfriend that could have ended badly, the dear friend you haven’t see in twenty years who just got on the next subway car, the moment when a kind word to a distressed friend would make all the difference. The texture of life would be entirely different – changing even the very way we think about existence, ethical values, relationships.

It’s a shame we cannot experience anything like this.

Except that we can. One could design a sort of computer game to simulate this precise scenario on a smaller scale. In this game everyone would be able to see ahead into the future a limited distance, and everyone would have a chance to modify their choices based on the multiple twisting paths of possibility that lie ahead. I wonder how it would feel to play such a game, to conjure with the very stuff of predestination and free will. It might be fun, but on the other hand it might just completely freak people out – there’s really no way to know.

Unless, of course, you could see into the future.

I mentioned Fred Waring in a post the other day. Today, as it happens, is the twenty fifth anniversary of the great man’s death on July 29, 1984. Seems like a good time to talk about one of human nature’s more delightful anomalies – those rare people who are extraordinarily good – say, good enough to be justly famous -at more than one thing. Mr. Waring was a prime example. He was for many years one of the most famous band leaders in America. In fact, at one point he was considered the most influential man in radio. He was also the backer and successful promoter of a little device invented in the 1930s by Fred Osius – a novel kind of food blender that came to be known as the Waring Blendor – at one time the most popular blender in the country.

Another double threat was Hedi Lamarr. Not only was she a successful Hollywood actress and one of the most astonishingly beautiful women in recorded history, she was also co-inventor (together with George Antheil, the avant guarde composer of the Ballet Mechanique and other key modernist works – a double threat too, come to think of it) of the spread spectrum technique to prevent radar jamming – fundamentally the same technique which today allows you to talk on your cell phone without interference from all the other people who are simultaneously talking on their cell phones.

Not that being an inventor in addition to your day job automatically gets you in the club. I have nothing but admiration for Abraham Lincoln as one of the great statesmen in our nation’s history, but his one and only recorded invention – a device to lift boats over shoals he patented in 1849 – isn’t the kind of thing that people get famous for. The gadget was never actually even built, which doesn’t help his case. On the other hand, Lincoln was the only U.S. president to ever receive a U.S. patent, which gives him some sort of bragging rights anyway.

Judy Holliday is a nice example. Not only was she an Academy Award winning actress, she was also the Hollywood performer with the highest ever recorded IQ. This in itself would not be that interesting, except for the fact that she used her prodigious intelligence to talk circles around the House Unamerican Activities Committee – something nobody else managed to do. She snowed them so thoroughly that she managed to get off scot free, without being blacklisted and without naming any names, in spite of the fact that her own name had been on the masthead of more than one Communist newspaper. You can read the transcript of her testimony here – it’s a real hoot.

I can’t really count Brian May, much as I would like to. Being the guitarist for the mega-rock group Queen definitely counts as “good enough to be justly famous”, but getting a Ph.D. in astrophysics, sadly, does not. Although the man is, as far as I know, the only astrophysicist rock star, and that’s pretty cool.

Double threats are rare, but there are even fewer people who are triple threats. The only one I can think of off-hand is Lenny Lipton. On the one hand he wrote the classic 1972 how-to book “Independent Film Making” – which to this day is considered indispensable by film students everywhere. On the other hand, he has been one of the great innovators in the technology of stereoscopic 3D filmmaking – holding 25 patents on innovations in stereoscopic techniques, in addition to being one of the instrumental forces in the current revival of that genre. On the third hand he wrote the lyrics to a little song called “Puff the Magic Dragon”.

I think he wins the prize.

I was surprised to read in a late breaking bulletin this morning of the arrest of candidate for the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor. Apparently she had been seen trying to force open the front door of her downtown New York City apartment building. It later came out that the door was temporarily jammed, but meanwhile the sight of this latina woman fiddling with an apparently locked door had apparently aroused the suspicion of a neighbor who lived on the same fashionable Greenwich Village street.

It is not entirely clear what transpired next. According to NYC police officer James Shepard, when he entered Sotomayor’s home and asked to see her identification, the judge “began acting weirdly”. As Shepard later told the sympathetic hosts of a right-wing radio talk show, Sotomayor started dancing the salsa around the apartment and loudly singing the song “America” from “West Side Story”, in spanish. Then, according to officer Shepard, the 54 year old woman brandished a switch blade and said to him “You gonna get out now or I gotta cut you?”

It was at this point, according to officer Shepard, that he invited Sotomayor to step outside so that the two of them could continue their conversation out in the street – apparently a standard request that the police make when they have just tried to arrest somebody for breaking into their own home. But at this point something unexpected happened – David Axelrod, top advisor to president Barack Obama, showed up at the door, apparently for a scheduled meeting with Judge Sotomayor.

According to officer Shepard, Axelrod – who is Jewish, although the police officer hastened to add that the man’s ethnicity was irrelevant – took one look at the police officer and began cursing in what sounded like Hebrew, although officer Shepard reported that it might also have been a dialect of ancient Aramaic, like in that movie.

Mr. Axelrod then somehow produced a live chicken, which he proceeded to twirl over his head while pointing at the dumbfounded police officer and muttering what sounded like Kabbalistic incantations. It was at this point, according to officer Shepard, that he made the decision to arrest both of them on charges of disturbing the peace. Charges of bribery were later added for Mr. Axelrod when, as officer Shepard explained it, the well-known political consultant pulled him aside and offered to sell him major-brand electronics equipment “at below wholesale prices”.

The New York City police later decided to release both suspects. In a press conference from the White House blue room, president Obama called the officer’s response “stupid”, but then relented and invited the three of them to the White House to talk it over.

The President was quoted as saying “This has all apparently been a misunderstanding, nothing that can’t be resolved amicably over a cuba libre and, um, some Manischewitz.”

I was quite pleased when a good friend told me today how fascinated she was by my blog posts of the last two days – first my description of a Jazz-era novel celebrating carnal relations between a woman and a sewing machine, and then my learned disquisition on the entire subgenre of illicit love between humans and their household appliances, as well as the subsequent political suppression of this literary form on suspicion of being part of a vast communist conspiracy.

It took a moment for me to realize that my friend was taking these two posts at face value. When I wrote them it had never occurred to me that people would think this was a real book or a real literary movement. I must say I was quite pleased to hear that were at least somewhat convincing. If anything, I had worried that the entire premise was so patently ridiculous that nobody would see the humor in it.

Back when I was in high school there was a rule that said that if you wrote a book review, it had to be about an actual book that really existed. You couldn’t just make something up out of whole cloth. Although I do recall that in the twelfth grade, Bill Bauer earned my undying respect and admiration for turning in a report, together with extensive footnotes and properly formatted references, whose subject was an entirely made up book. The teacher gave Bill an A for this report, and singled it out in class as exemplary work. None of us felt any particular need to inform the teacher that Bill had made the entire thing up out of his head. We were far too lost in admiration of our classmate’s bold and brilliant feat to even think of ratting him out.

Now that I’m all grown up and don’t need to worry about grades, it occurs to me that I can write about any book – those already born and those as yet unborn, as the Mormons would say. Well, actually, the Mormons go even further and also talk about the rights of “the formerly living”. But when they do that they are not actually referring to books. Rather, they are referring to lists of names of dead Jews (they seem to particularly seek out Jew names for some reason) so they can baptize the lot of them post-death, in order to send as many souls to heaven as possible, possibly so as to ensure their own welcome there.

You think I’m making that last part up, but I’m not. The phrase “formerly living” actually shows up prominently on signage in the Mormon Church’s museum in Salt Lake City. If you visit there, don’t stand around reading the signage for too long, or else people dressed in weirdly midcentury clothing are likely to save your soul while you’re not looking, and you may find yourself dressing up in outfits left over from the Eisenhower era and selling pencils in the Utah airport.

But I digress….

It seems to me that once you open book review subjects up to books that *might* exist, but just don’t happen to exist in this particular parallel universe, then the space of possibilities grows exponentially. Besides, there’s always the possibility that if you pen a good enough description of a book, somebody will one day come along and actually write the damned thing.

Don’t laugh. After Kurt Vonnegut dropped enough mentions throughout his novels of the fictional author Kilgore Trout, Trout went ahead and actually wrote a book – Venus on the Half-Shell OK, it was actually Philip José Farmer only pretending to be Kilgore Trout, but it was still pretty cool.

Don’t you think?

Curious about the novel discussed in yesterday’s post, I did a little digging. You can’t find out much about it on Google (or on Bing for that matter), but a visit to the old stacks of the New York Public Library reveals some surprising things. It seems there was an entire literary movement in the early part of the twentieth century that featured illicit affairs between humans and their (then newfangled) electrical appliances.

A robust underground publishing industry sprang up to fill this need, in magazines with names like “Bakelite!”, containing shocking stories with plots ranging from dalliances between fair damsels and their alarm clocks to secret midnight trysts between ardent young men and their waffle irons. There was a certain sameness to these tales, an underlying dramatic arc that was rigidly adhered to. This is not surprising – structural predictability is common to all genres of erotica down through the ages. Invariably the human half, who is inevitably portrayed as young, attractive, with excellent prospects, first notices the appliance under somewhat hazy circumstances. There is generally an early scene of “plugging in” (my research indicates that this was the preferred term of art), a phrase which refers to the first moment that the appliance is seen to operate – at which point the young man or woman is instantly smitten.

The dearth of opportunities for conversation between human and appliance seems to be central to the allure of these romances. Apparently the enigmatic nature of the electromechanical Other is crucial to its appeal. Not surprisingly, there is little or no representation in the genre of dalliances between human and telephone, or radio, or any other household appliance that might incorporate a human voice. The possibility of true communication would negate the essential mystery.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 seems to have put an end to this odd form of literary expression, and for a time it was forgotten entirely. But shortly after World War II a new generation of scholars rediscovered the form. You may recall that the period immediately following W.W.II was a time of renewed interest in all things Freudian – fascination with the unconscious mind and its desires was finding expression in genres as diverse as feature films and comic books.

During this period a number of doctoral dissertations appeared, each positing a theory for the brief but spectacular popularity of Appliance Erotica, as it came to be called. Some of these theses are interesting in their own right, notably “Running Hot and Cold: The Water Tap as an Agent of Seduction” (Harvard Press, 1950), “The Auto, the Erotic and the Autoerotic: Mythopoesis of the Household Station Wagon” (Yale University Press, 1948), “The Brave Little Toaster: Kitchen Implement as Transgressive Seducer in American Fiction” (Princeton, 1951). This last thesis was eventually adapted into a well received animated film by the Walt Disney Company, although in a form so changed as to be essentially unrecognizable.

This show of interest in academic circles was, alas, short-lived. By 1952 the rise to power of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee made it politically untenable to pursue such areas of intellectual inquiry – even tenured faculty were not immune to scrutiny.

The government made it clear that household appliances were sacrosanct, a part of the wholesome American dream. Key members of Congress felt that any attempt to unduly eroticize an appliance must surely be symptomatic of a larger pattern of communist infiltration. It was during the widely seen “Waring Testimony” of January 1953, when Fred Waring himself – beloved bandleader and radio star, and inventor of the eponymous food processor – famously declared “I unplug my blender at night.”

Around this time the federal government began a stealth propaganda campaign to fight the pernicious threat of appliance love, thought by many to be a plot by the Kremlin to corrupt America’s youth. Young people were exhorted to “keep it clean with your machine.” In advertisements around this time, the iconography of the kitchen and its electrical appliances began to project a peculiarly – even perversely – wholesome image.

Soon the love of appliances lost its erotic frisson. Functional objects ceased to hold sexual allure, reverting back to the mere machines they were. Eventually everyone realized that the entire movement had been a form of collective madness, an aberrant loss of judgement on the part of otherwise sane and intelligent people. Americans would never again make complete idiots of themselves by foolishly looking upon a mere man-made object – a thing of buttons and electrical parts – with unbridled and wanton desire.

Except, of course, for the iPhone.