Ken’s Blog

Wandering around in the American Museum of Natural History today, I was struck how many of the intelligent and well-meaning new exhibits, such as the “Hall of Biodiversity”, sail way over the heads of children. Kids will put up with that kind of stuff, because their parents take them there and seem to think it’s all very important. But of course that’s not why the kids came to the museum.

They came to see the dinosaurs.

Yes, yes, they know there are also prehistoric wooly mammals, stuffed wildebeests, skeletons of extinct fish and dioramas that lovingly recreate the appearance of prehistoric grassy plains. There are minerals that glow in the dark, exotic trees and weird turtles and insects. And there’s nothing wrong with any of these things. But none of them are dinosaurs.

As I started to think about the love affair kids have with dinosaurs, I suddenly found myself thinking about another big museum – one directly across Central Park – the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The placement of these two monuments to civilization directly across from each other could not be mere happenstance. These twin pillars of celebration – of our knowledge of the natural world on the one hand, and our human striving to create a world of artistic expression on the other – are two sides of the same coin. They bracket our belief in ourselves as a civilization that seeks to spiral ever upward in some psychic journey through time.

But more than that, as a civilization that strives to make this upward spiral understandable and accessible to its citizenry – beginning with that citizenry’s children. And that is why museums do something to make themselves kid-friendly, to contain exhibits that invite family outings, no matter how arcane and difficult might be some of their other offerings. And as I thought about this, I started thinking about what, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the equivalent of the dinosaurs. What is the artistic cousin of the might thunder lizard?

The answer, of course, is Arms and Armor. This is the name of one long hall at the Met which is an absolute dream to any little kid who is not quite ready to accept the dreary view of reality held by most grownups. Your children might not give a fig about early American interiors, Rodin’s caryatids, Leonardo’s sketches, or anything at all by Joshua Reynolds, but put an authentic suit of armor on a store-dummy knight riding a statue of a horse, and kids are there. Lances, broadswords, sabers, longbows, crossbows, helmets, breastplates, chain mail, and the like – these are a child’s equivalent of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops. Even the horses wear cool armor, lovingly made by medieval craftsmen to match the marshal finery of the battling lords who rode them into battle.

Dinosaurs and knights in armor have several things in common. For one thing, they both happened a long time ago, far away from the day-to-day world of parents and teachers, in a time that may as well come from a dream. In addition, they are both larger than life – fearsome, fearless, concerned with raw power and the primal stuff of survival, inhabiting a world where a well placed swipe from powerful spiked tail or the practiced swing of a broadsword can mean the difference between glory and sudden death.

To a child, this is all very cool.

Thinking about it in pure marketing terms, I guess the ultimate kid-friendly museum would somehow combine these powerful totems of childhood veneration. Perhaps some far-seeing soul will eventually put it all together, and we will get the museum that every child secretly wishes for – dinosaurs in armor! While we’re at it, we could throw in the rest of the great child-friendly subjects – pirates and ancient egypt. Sooner or later it’s bound to happen, a museum devoted entirely to the battle for world domination between armored dinosaurs and ancient egyptian mummy pirates on the high seas.

Or maybe it will be dinosaur pirates versus ancient egyptian knights in armor. I really couldn’t say. I suppose to be safe we might as well put it all together and establish a museum that teaches of the mighty adventures of ancient egyptian pirate dinosaur knights in armor.

I’m sure it would be very popular.

This evening they set off fireworks over the Hudson river – something that is done here every year on this day to celebrate our nation’s independence. Watching the fireworks this evening over the river, I had a flashback to several years ago, when our nation was first in the thick of newly declared war in Iraq. I remembered that there was a period of time when seeing the fireworks made me uneasy. It’s one thing to show a symbolic display of firepower when you are sure what it all signifies. It’s quite another thing to see America represented through marshal symbolism when your nation is in the midst of a war that seems misbegotten.

I noticed this evening that this feeling of uneasiness had gone. I no longer think of our ship of state as being on a path to perpetual war, but rather as sincerely trying to work toward peaceful resolution of various conflicts around the world.

And now, suddently, fireworks have become beautiful again!

I was having a discussion recently with a friend about the representation of metaphysics in pop culture (not to be confused with the representation of pop culture in metaphysics).

During the course of our conversation my mint turned to the 1990 film “Ghost”, probably because I had just seen Sam Raimi’s “Drag me to Hell”. Speaking of the Raimi film, I am now eagerly awaiting the probable sequel: “Drag me from Hell”. Followed of course by the inevitable third leg of the trilogy: “Drag me back to hell again; Army of Darkmen”.

Sorry. Where was I?

RIght. The metaphysics of “Ghost” is positively weird. The basic idea is that the human race is divided into two groups, in some unspecified proportion. The good people find, upon the moment of their demise, that beautiful music starts to play while they walk up a strangely blurry stairway to become one with the Silhouette People – those fortunate souls who have led good and wholesome lives, and will now have the opportunity to spend all eternity as bad special effects, their ectoplasmic selves forever out of focus because somebody ran out money before shooting that scene.

Of course nobody actually ever gets to see this beautiful transfiguration except Demi Moore, and even then only when she has really really short hair.

The bad people have a rather different fate. They are pulled down, screaming, by dark shadowy figures recently escaped from the Nazi-face-melting scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, to spend their souls in eternal torment in what seems to be a part of the New York City sewage disposal system. Although I can’t be sure because the movie is dark in this scene, so it could actually be the New York City subway system, which makes perfect sense if you’ve ever ridden the IRT local during rush hour.

The curious thing is that there is no hint of a middle ground – it’s either the happy blurry Silhouette People or the shadowy Nazi-face-melting subway fiends. Ever since I first saw this film I’ve wondered what happens to people who are right on the edge, their fate teetering in the balance. Maybe they’ve lived a generally good life, but they cheated on a test or two in high school, or lied to their girlfriend once, or found themselves undercharged in a restaurant and didn’t say anything to the waiter.

Is there some critical mass of sins that tip you over the edge into Hell? What if you ran out of coffee one morning, so you were in a really crabby mood, and that’s why you didn’t pick up the wallet somebody dropped on the street that one time, run after them and give it to them just before they got into that taxi?

You would think there would be some sort of board of appeals, maybe an official form you could fill out, with a “didn’t have coffee that morning” checkbox. That would be the civilized way, wouldn’t it?

But apparently that’s not how things work in the “Ghost” universe. Instead the filmmakers opt for something so over-the-top stupid that you can’t actually suspend your disbelief long enough to really enjoy the erotic pottery scene. So I am left wondering, are we supposed to think the movie’s metaphysical premise is as inane as it seems?

Or perhaps the entire enterprise was a clever ploy by director Jerry Zucker and friends to get people annoyed with religion and its underlying assumptions.

Somehow I doubt it.

Today it is the pivot day, the middle of the year
Half the days have now gone by, or have yet to appear
On New Years Eve we all go mad, and stay up through the night
Making resolutions up, until dawn’s early light

But on July the second there are none who celebrate
Who stop to think, or share a drink or even stay up late
The day slips by without a thought, as quiet as a tomb
Even though the second half of all the year may loom

Let us take a moment now to pause and give a glance
To all the things we’d like to do, while still there is a chance
Half the year is gone it’s true, yet we are hardly done
So let us celebrate anew – the half year just begun!

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”.
– John Lennon

I’ve noticed that my daily blog posts cover quite a range of tone, from serious to comic to lyrical to slightly nutty to rather more than slightly nutty. At first I was not sure about the cause of this variety. But recently I think I’ve started to figure it out.

My theory is that each post I write has an intended reader, although I am not always aware at first who that reader is. Not a group of readers, but one particular reader. Not necessarily a person who will actually read the post, nor even necessarily a person who is alive on this planet at the moment, but always some specific individual with whom I have some sort of emotionally generative relationship.

The process feels a bit like one-on-one storytelling. I picture you in my mind, and I talk to you. You might be grown-up or child, male or female, living or dead, someone I talk with every day or someone with whom I ceased all communication years ago. Often you are an old friend, and often you are a specific person I met two days ago, with whom I had a fascinating conversation over dinner.

This makes sense on a teleological level. After all, a blog is in some ways the direct opposite of a diary. A diary is essentially a wall of privacy – a safe means by which to say things to yourself that you would not say to others.

In contrast, a blog is by definition a public document. There are walls here to be sure, but they are more subtle – they are walls built of differential expected knowledge, of privileged prior information. Just as it is possible to make a public speech that is truly understood by only one person within a crowd of ten thousand listeners, blogging has a quality of hiding in plain sight.

The resulting stream of words and ideas might fade in and out of a state of mystery for various readers from day to day. One day a particular reader might recognize an experience we have shared, or a fondly recollected private joke. At other times that same reader might find themselves nonplussed, while another nods knowingly.

After all, writing is an activity that appears to belong to one person, but in actuality belongs to at least two – the writer and the intended reader. The tension between these two – giver and receiver – creates an energy that is felt by all readers.

Today, as usual, I am writing with a specific reader in my mind. Although you might not realize I’m writing for you, and you might not even read this, I’d just like to say hi.

Yesterday I saw a wonderful talk by my good friend Wave who works at Pixar. He was describing their creative and production process, and how everyone at the company is committed to making each film something that they will all be proud of in the years to come. Clearly the process is working!

I learned a lot from the talk, but my favorite moment (apparently the favorite moment of many in the audience) was this choice quote from Pixar character designer Jason Deamer:

“Pain is temporary. Suck is forever.”

In addition to being incredibly funny, this is just about the perfect motivational statement, and it might very well become my new Mantra. I tried to do a Google search today on this phrase, and came up empty. But I did learn that there is a song by Don Diablo called Pain is temporary. Pride is forever. I confess I had not even heard of Don Diablo, so I watched the video of this song, which is clearly popular (over 256000 hits on YouTube). The video showed that the man is very talented, so I went to his Wikipedia page, and that stopped me up short, because it seemed to be unintentionally hilarious. I mean really laugh out loud unintentionally hilarious, filled with the sort of over-the-top shameless self-promotion you might see in a comic character created by Ben Stiller or Sacha Baron Cohen.

Then I checked out the video of his his breakout hit Blow, and suddenly I saw the humor, the deliberate absurdity, behind the apparently deadly serious pose. Which is when I realized that his entire Wikipedia page is a construct. It’s not exactly a piece of shameless self-promotion – rather it is a sketch of a made-up character. Don Diablo (whose real name is Don Pepijn Schipper) is creating a fictional persona named Don Diablo, and is placing just enough hints in his portrayal of that character to invite us in on the joke.

Diablo’s clearly self-scripted Wikipedia entry is an example of postmodern advertising. What is being advertised is not the character, but rather the producer behind the character. He wants us to understand that his real talent is as a producer, a creator of images, and that his acting, singing, songwriting, musical production and post-production, etc., are all merely aspects of this work as a producer. The description is intentionally ridiculous because Diablo the producer is sending up Diablo the character.

So it all comes full circle – Jason Deamer and Don Diablo are both, in their different ways, character sketch artists, creating concepts for what are, in the end, highly sophisticated cartoon versions of reality. Whether it’s a love-sick futuristic robot who listens to old Jerry Herman songs, a little gray rat who makes the world’s greatest ratatouille, or a white Dutch rapper voted Holland’s best dressed man of the year whose web page reports that he does all his musical production in the nude, the goal here is the pointed send-up, the artfully exaggerated illusion that holds up a mirror to society and its absurdities.

And in each case the illusion requires that every detail be placed carefully, no matter how much work is required, so as not to ruin the effect. Which is important, because, like the man says: Pain is temporary, suck is forever.

Yesterday Greenwich Village was transformed into one large joyful parade, and it was a delight to see the sheer exhuberance and joie de vivre of thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers. Strange how an event that was once so sad could be transformed, forty years later, into an occasion for celebration.

Some eighty blocks to the north, we spent yesterday evening at a different sort of traditional New York celebration – watching Shakespeare in the Park – “Twelfth Night” in fact, with Audra Mcdonald as Olivia (amazingly good) and Anne Hathaway as Viola (even better). The moment when Audra plants a big joyful, lusty kiss on Anne’s lips seemed to be a happy shout out to my thousands of friends and neighbors celebrating down in the Village.

Although of course one must acknowledge that some things have changed in four hundred years. In Mr. Shakespeare’s time, it would have been two men kissing.

People have told me that I remember things, A to Z, that most people don’t remember. I know odd things like obscure songs from long before I was born, who wrote them and why, as well as the minor characters in B movies and who played them.

It’s not that I try to remember these things. It’s more that there seems to be something appealing to my mind about the obscure pop cultural oddity – the strange inside jokes about Eisenhower’s family in an old Ethyl Merman film, the quick aside to the audience by Groucho Marx about the latest Eugene O’Neill play, or any reference to performances by the once huge and now pretty much forgotten instrumental star Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians (he also invented the blender that carries his name).

Something about the detritus of times gone by, the very ephemerality of these things, must somehow be beautiful to my psyche, because my psyche can’t seem to get enough.

But my memory is not really A to Z, it’s more Z to A. I do really well with the “long tail” – the stuff nobody else seems to remember – but I’m pretty much a disaster when it comes to the stuff everybody knows.

For example, it was many years before I knew what people were talking about when they referred to “Mickey D’s”. I somehow thought it was an oddball reference to Walt Disney’s animated mascot. Finally one day somebody explained to me that it’s a nickname for McDonalds – the ubiquitous fast food giant. Who knew? Well, apparently everybody but me.

Similarly, I never knew what people were talking about when they said they were going to IHOP. It sounded cool, like maybe some sort of Hopi Indian themed restaurant, and I thought it might be nice to try it out some day. Imagine my surprise when one day somebody clued me in that all those people were actually referring to the International House of Pancakes, another popular American restaurant chain. I had eaten there many times, but had simply never made the connection.

Perhaps one of my strangest misunderstandings was over “It’s All about the Benjamins” – the 2002 inner city action film. I completely got, from the ads, that it was about tough young black dudes trying to make it in an unforgiving world. But in my mind the title conjured up an image of a family – the Benjamins – and I somehow thought that at heart this was a family film. As in: “We may badass inner city black dudes with guns, but in the end it’s family that counts – just keepin’ it real.”

Turns out that the “Benjamin” in the title (originally from a 1996 song turned into a megahit by Puff Daddy in 1998) refers to the image of Benjamin Franklin on $100 bills – a cynical reference to making money any way you can. Boy was I off base.

I still think it would have been interesting to make the other movie – the one I thought it was. All those tough young black guys in the hood, puttin’ down their semiautomatic weapons long enough to give mom and dad a hug.

But what do I know?

(with apologies to William Steig)

U C I M O K 2 U
Y R U N N M E?

4 I M 1, N U R 1
N 1 N 1 R 2, U C

U R A Q T 2 I C
I 1 2 B D 1 4 U

R U D 1 4 U? O G
U N U R W!

🙂

There is an intriguing contradiction in comic book culture between extreme iconoclasm and extreme universality. Take something like the X Men. These folks are of course unlike you and me. We don’t actually have friends or relatives who can read minds, teleport things, change shape at will or grow metallic claws – unless the people we know are seriously good at keeping secrets. And the X Men don’t just have super powers – they generally have particularly zany and over-the-top super powers.

And that’s sort of the point. These people are mutants, misunderstood, mistrusted, dangerous in spite of themselves. The whole situation is one step from being out of control, as though any moment everything could just blow out and turn into a Sam Raimi movie (I mean the good kind, not the ones he just makes for the money).

The details of a fantasy like X Men are nutty, but the underlying feeling is deliberately familiar. The barely disguised subtext of such a tale is the experience of being a teenager – lost, misunderstood, on the verge of raging out of control, abounding in odd and embarassing physical and mental changes, seemingly a new one each day.

Even when you are well past that age, you still carry around those feelings, the potential for imbalance, the scent of blood and crazy romance somewhere in your soul. This edge between our civilized selves and the feral nature lurking just below is part of being human, part of what makes us feel alive.

Such comic books, and their various spin-offs, are not actually obscure iconoclastic works, but rather engines for making money through market share. After all, a franchise such as X Men requires a sizable audience to succeed. Otherwise it will simply cease to find its way to outlets for publication. And so here is an entire genre, huge in its appeal (millions around the world flock to see the X Men films and similar celebrations of alienation from the herd) which is, at its core, about channeling a feeling of being alone, set apart, misunderstood – precisely the reason it appeals to a vast audience.

In a sense this kind of entertainment ends up joining huge numbers of people together through a shared feeling of being unlike anybody else. We are all bond togethe by channeling our inner outsider, as identification with the quirky misunderstood individual within each of us ends up making us alike. It’s like some sort of MacDonald’s lifestyle commercial for Goths.

And then, every once in a while, such a tale breaks off the screen and enters real life. Wolverine, Magneto, Rogue and their kind are strange people indeed, with outsized powers and outsized psychic issues to match. But we know they are not real, and that makes them safe – mere objects of projection.

But Michael Jackson was a real flesh and blood human, who happened to have insanely outsized talent, as well as outsized psychic issues. I don’t think anybody could have predicted the emotional outpouring in the wake of his untimely death. As I walk around New York since yesterday, I hear his music playing everywhere I go – on the streets, in coffee shops, in department stores. I see people walking down the street suddenly break into one of his songs, sometimes seeming to surprise even themselves.

I think that this positive reaction – accepting this man as somebody who was astoundingly talented in spite of being strangely troubled – reflects a recognition that we are all, in our way, X people, and we all struggle with our demons. Every once in a while somebody like Michael Jackson comes along who found a way to channel his demons into something beautiful – at least for a while. We understand this, and we honor it.