Ken’s Blog

Mmmm… That is the feeling in my mind,
When I think of you, a spiritual feeling,

When I am lost, to call me back to healing
The nearest thing I have to faith. I find

That when I think upon your lovely face
All sad confusion melts away like rain

Mmmm… this feeling soothes away my pain
The nearest I will ever be to grace.

How strange for me who’s lived without belief
And never had much use for church or god

That none of this should come across as odd
To find in you my anchor and my reef

      You give meaning to my very world around
      Mmmm… I think of you and I am found

There was a time when people believed that a lot of different complex systems could be reduced to very simple descriptions, if only you could come up with the right mathematical key. Through various eras there have been tantalizing suggestions that this might work. In the 1960s and 1970s this concept was epitomized by catastrophe theory, originated by the french mathematician René Thom, which people hoped would be able to predict everything from wars to stock market crashes, by modeling them as simple shapes in higher dimensions.

In the 1980s computer graphics got its own version of this phenomenon in the form of L Systems, short for “Lindenmayer Systems”, named for the person who first came up with them. The basic idea is that you keep making grammatical substitutions to simple strings of symbols, generally replacing short sequences with longer sequences. If you think of each little sequence as a physical shape, like a tree branch, it becomes easy to build really cool fractal shapes that have some of the quality of real plants:

Using this general technique you can build up some really lovely computer graphic forms:

This is very exciting, until you realize that you can only use such a technique to produce variants on a narrow range of forms. I can use L-Systems to produce trees, but not elephants or rocks or mountains. If I want to get mountains, I might use a different set of techniques – generally known as fractal subdivision – originally developed by Benoit Mandelbrot and implemented in various ways by Richard Voss and others (including me, as it happens):

L-Systems can produce many different kinds of plants, but they more or less only produce different kinds of plants, whereas the fractal subdivision techniques only produce all different kinds of mountain terrains. None of these things really do what they at first seem – to create a robust recipe for dehydrated diversity – a few simple equations that can generate the entire Universe.

In a sense, the seeming ability to get something from nothing – to produce the endless variety of forms found in nature using only a few simple formulas – is an illusion, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme. For a while it seems as though you can generate anything using only some simple set of rules, but soon you hit a wall, and then you realize you need more and more rules, and different rules.

Natural complexity seems to defeat all human attempts to oversimplify and tame it. And maybe that’s a good thing.

In the U.S. when we talk about children we throw around the phrase “K – 12”, meaning “Kindergarten through twelfth grade”, the school years that start roughly at the age of five, the average age at which kids enter Kindergarten, through eighteen, the average age at which they graduate high school. It’s a useful and very practical term, but like many useful and practical terms it is also a two edge sword. When you put a label on something, there is a tendency for the label to reduce the thing it is trying to describe, and something essential can get lost in that reduction.

Children in this age range constitute an extremely large segment of our population. To those of us who are now adults, they are basically the next edition of us. Rightly, we want each of those children to have the best possible shot at “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, as our Declaration of Independence phrases it. And so we have put into place an elaborate institutional structure, a kind of educational pipeline, to guide their young minds through into adulthood.

We grownups have all gone through the process, and usually we don’t think much about it, except perhaps in a pro forma way. In our memory of those years we generally tend to block out those parts of the experience that don’t fit the model. But every once in a while, actual memories break through, pushing aside any conveniently pastoral Potemkin recollections.

For example, my real memories of middle school (grades 6-8) – not the ones I generally pretend to have – are of complete terror and chaos. I spent a large chunk of those years in fear of getting beat up. To put it bluntly, from the point of view of a child who was a little younger and a little smaller, the school was a complete jungle. Big kids lorded over little kids, and there was a distinct pecking order, which for boys was determined by physical might. I was one of those pesky little kids who was too smart for his own good, who didn’t always have enough sense to keep my mouth shut, and fairly often I would pay the price.

What strikes me now about this situation is that we, the children, all understood how completely irrelevant were the adults charged with supervising us. It was a bit like those old “Peanuts” cartoons in which the adult voices heard off screen are not even comprehensible. Yes, every once in a while somebody would get hauled into the Assistant Principal’s office, but those actions didn’t seem to correlate to what was actually happening on the ground, so to speak.

For one thing, there was a strict code of honor that was understood by all children – I suspect on an instinctive level. Simply put, you did not rat out other kids to the grown-ups, even if you got beat up. After all, those other kids were your peers – you lived with them every day. And you already knew that the grownups had no idea what was going on, what any of us were really going through.

This reign of terror in my life lasted for about three years or so, roughly from the time kids around me started going through puberty until the year I myself suddenly shot up in height and stopped being a natural target. The same odd activities that had made me stand out and gotten me into trouble in middle school – like spending large chunks of the day reading through the Encyclopedia – were now perfectly acceptable, placing me in a well understood and even respected category within the high school social structure.

I sometimes think that our entire conception of K – 12, our view of the young among us as little plants to systematically nurture into bigger plants – like some sort of human hydroponic assembly line – is deeply flawed, but not because of some failure of educational theory. Rather because the entire institutional structure does not deal first and foremost with the actual people themselves, does not even begin to respect – or even acknowledge – the immense pressures and terrors that they are dealing with every day.

Some years ago I found myself back at my old middle school, for the first time in many years, to see a play that my niece’s class was putting on. During intermission I was hanging out with some of my parents’ friends outside the auditorium. Since they knew I had gone to this same school, they asked me whether being here brought back any memories. “Yes,” I said, as the memories suddenly came flooding back. I pointed to the boy’s restroom down the hall. “I got beat up in there.” Then I pointed in the direction of the science wing. “I also got beat up in that hallway.” One by one I pointed out the various locations where I had been met with violence, each time and place now crystal clear in my mind.

My parents’ friends seemed appalled. “Don’t you have any happy memories?” they asked. I thought about this for a few moments, and then I nodded, glad to have something positive to report. “Yes, one. Inside the auditorium, by the stage door on the left side, just where it connects to the music practice rooms. There was one time, in sixth grade, when I almost got beat up right there.”

I continued, now smiling at the happy memory. “But I didn’t.”

My dad’s middle name is J. I think it might officially be “Jay”, but I have never once seen it written out like that. When I was a child I was fascinated and quite impressed that he had white envelopes printed up with a return address that started “Dr. Seymour J Perlin”. There was always a long row of these envelopes, in the bottom drawer of his old wooden desk. Throughout my childhood I was very pleased by the fact that my father had such a short and mysterious middle name – in my young mind it added to his already considerable mystique.

I was somewhat more ambivalent about my own middle name. To provide some context, my brother is two years older, and therefore was always the leader – the one who had read the books I wasn’t quite ready for, who had the record albums by music groups I had not quite yet heard of, as well as all of the other wondrous qualities conferred upon older siblings. For example, Mark’s favorite color was blue. When I was five or six years old this made me sad, because it meant that wonderful color was already spoken for. At various times I tried out red, or green, and a few others, but none of them ever felt right. What I really wanted was blue. But I had arrived too late on the scene, and blue, alas, was already taken.

The same goes for the number five – Mark’s favorite number. He even put it up on his bedroom door, as a big cutout digit – in blue, if I recall correctly. I pretended to be satisfied with the number three – a clear also-ran, compared with five – but I suspect that I fooled no one.

Mark’s middle name is “William” – obviously a big win all around. One of those noble names they give to English princes, it also suggests William Tell. In my mind I could practically see my brother, a heroic figure larger than life, shooting that apple off somebody’s head, while Rossini’s famous overture played in the background. Of course I had no idea at the time that the “William Tell Overture” was by Rossini – I just knew it as the theme music to the “Lone Ranger” – which made it even cooler.

I, on the other hand, have the middle name “H”. I’m still not sure exactly what my parents were thinking, but there it is, on my official birth documents. It’s not even a letter you can finesse into a full word, like J into Jay. Just a single orphan letter, sitting all alone. Some years ago I got into trouble down in Rio de Janeiro because the government official who was supposed to extend the visa on my passport refused to believe that anybody could have legally entered their lovely country with a single letter for a middle name. He demanded to know my full middle name, so that I would not be declared an illegal undesirable. It took quite a bit of persuading (and possibly a bribe) on the part of my hosts before the man would relent and stamp my obviously suspect visa application.

Although there was a time, when I was around five, that I thought I had an actual middle name. Specifically, I believed my middle name was “Horowitz”. I think of this as my “Horowitz” period – the year during which my brother took to referring to me as “Kenny Horowitz Perlin”. His logic was impeccable: Apparently there was a boy in his second grade class at school named “Mark Horowitz”. Employing the logic of parallels (my brother was very good at logic), he declared that since a “Mark Perlin” had been followed by a “Kenny Perlin”, a “Mark Horowitz” must therefore surely imply a “Kenny Horowitz”.

I, being only five years old, felt in no position to argue.

I did not realize
When first I saw the eyeglass case
Lying there, between rows G and H
That these were to be the last moments
Where trust was understood

If the woman had but turned
When I had asked about the case, perhaps then
The crisis would have been diverted,
The car swerved away, the falling boulder missed
And we never would have known

For if I had but known
I would have savored those few seconds
Inhaled their essence, remembered each one
But why should I have thought that everything
Would in a moment change?

Trust is a delicate thing
Its beauty held aloft on angel’s wings
But trust can be broken by even a word
And once broken, it merely lies there, and defies you
To put back the pieces

These lines are ragged, yes I know
Not the usual thing, something else
Something you might have written, in that other time
That time long ago time, not that long ago, or shall we say
Once upon a time

For had the woman turned
When I asked about the case, perhaps then
The crisis would have been averted,
The car swerved away, the falling boulder missed
And we never would have known

How close we had come
To disaster unforetold, to trust destroyed
Its broken wings fluttering feebly, but alas
The car did not swerve away, the boulder hit its mark
And we are undone

Four days ago I deliberately avoided the obvious post, as some of you may have observed. I was hoping someone would notice and comment, but alas, nobody has. In any case, June 6 just seemed far too easy a target. The timing was too precise – to the letter, so to speak. But today I make up for my earlier circumspection by adopting a deliberate numerological laxity. Throwing all caution to the winds, I give you the letter H.

And a good day for it too. Today is the tenth day of the sixth month. Being that the average of 10 and 6 is 8, this is a wonderful day to introduce our eighth letter – a letter so important they named a bomb after it. This fine figure of phonetic fun facilitates a fertile font of fabulous facts. First, consider the numbers. H stands for Hydrogen, which is element number one. Yet to write the lower case h you need two strokes, whereas to write the upper case H you need three.

But what is the connection between H and the number four? I don’t know about you, but I have always found it somewhat disturbing that 4H Clubs and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are both equestrian organizations symbolized by the identical combination of number and letter. Mere coincidence?

In Monopoly a Hotel is worth five Houses (both great H words), and in geometry a hexagon has six sides, whereas a heptagon has seven. Which brings us back to eight.

I could go on like this all day, but I won’t. There are more interesting things to talk about. Like the fact that H brackets all of our metaphysical possibilities – it stands both for the place most people are hoping to go when they die, and the place they’d least like to end up. Famous people seem drawn to it as well: Hubert Humphrey, Hal Holbrook and Harry Houdini. Not to mention Halston, Homer, Hadrian, Henry Hudson and Herbert Hoover, to home in on just a handful. Must be something in the H₂O.

But wait, there’s more.

For example, did you know that to Johann Sebastian Bach the letter H was the eight note of the musical scale? Actually, in his day “B” was the German name for the note that today we would call “Bb”, whereas “H” was their name for the note we would call “B” (got that?). The cool thing about this is that Bach was therefore able to compose a fugue based on a melody spelling out his own name: B – A – C – H. If you wanted to sound this out on a piano using today’s notations, you’d play Bb – A – C – B.

How many great composers in history have been able to work their own name into a musical theme? Imagine the jealousy of all those long named composers like Tsaichovsky and Shostakovich! Yet I somehow doubt that Bach was the only musical innovator with this idea. For all we know, there might be melodic messages lurking within the music of the Dada movement, or the songs of ABBA, not to mention the indie rock band Bede. Or even handy notes to housekeepers hidden by hipster rock stars, like: “A FAB CAFE HERE, FEED DAD – EDGE”.

Horrors.

About two years ago I went skydiving. Surprisingly (at least to myself) there was no feeling of fear. For one thing, it was tandem diving – you’re strapped to a guy who has already done this maybe 4000 times before. If you do the math, you realize that the odds of dying on the way down are lower than the odds of dying in the car ride on the way to the airfield.

For another thing, once you’ve gotten into the rickety little plane (which has no door, incidentally – just a big open hole in the side where the jumpers go out), and then have spent twenty minutes slowly climbing up to twelve thousand feet, before watching two of your friends fall out of the plane into the open air below, it’s not as though you really have a choice. You’re going to go out of that plane, so it’s pretty much like it’s already happened. Fear is not really an emotion that comes into play at that point in the game. The emotion is more like “ok, this is really strange.”

The first surprising thing was that you don’t actually jump out of the plane. You sit with your legs dangling out over the world, and then you just kind of lean forward and fall out, head over feet. Easy as falling off a biker, as a lady friend of mine used to say.

The first five seconds are the best. That’s the part where you’re actually accelarating at full G force. Which means you’re effectively in a zero gravity environment. There is no up or down. There are parts that are blue (that would be the sky) and parts that are not blue (that would be the ground), but there is no visceral sense that the former is up or the latter is down. They’re both just tumbling all around you. You’re actually strapped to a guy who knows what he’s doing, but he’s behind you, so you don’t see him.

After five seconds you accelarate to about 130 miles per hour. That’s called “terminal velocity” – a phrase with which I am not entirely comfortable, for obvious reasons. Basically that’s the point where the air itself is keeping you from going faster. All that air rushing up against your body keeps your velocity down to a steady 130 mph – the speed with which you would eventually hit the ground if you didn’t happen to have a chute handy.

I didn’t find this part of the free fall to be entirely pleasant. It was way cold, and I could feel my body being buffeted about by forces that were clearly larger than a human body is meant for. There was a part of my brain that kept trying to explain to the rest of my brain, rather insistently, that I was about to die. Fortunately the rest of my brain refused to listen.

After about forty seconds or so of being a human cannonball, the chute is pulled, there is an upward yank, and suddenly everything just seems to go quiet, as if time itself had stopped. When you’re sitting there under an open chute, with a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. It feels as though you’re frozen in midair. But of course you’re still falling – just a lot more slowly.

This serene gliding continues for another twenty minutes or so, along with the odd (and false) feeling that you’re just suspended at one spot up in the air. It’s only the last twenty seconds or so, when you suddenly see the ground rush up against you before landing, that you realize you’ve been falling the entire time.

***

All in all, I found the entire experience extremely satisfying. Although I kept getting the nagging feeling that it reminded me of something. Which didn’t seem possible, since I’d never been skydiving before. And then I realized what it reminded me of.

Skydiving is kind of like a relationship. You start out enormously high. Then for the first little bit you are completely disoriented, in a really wonderful day. You don’t know what’s up or what’s down, and you don’t really care. This feeling quickly settles into the crazy rushing phase. Everything is way fast, way intense, and you feel thrill and danger all at the same time. Then, at some moment, this is replaced by a feeling of calm. The relationship becomes serene, somehow peaceful, a vantage point from which to see the world. You feel as though you could stay up there forever.

Until suddenly one day you see the ground rushing up toward you, and you realize things were not really as bouyant as they had seemed. Then you’re back on the ground, right where you started, a little winded, maybe just a little disoriented, and kind of sad that it’s over.

But of course you want to go right back up and try the whole thing again.

Future technologies are sometimes easier to focus on than existing ones. For example, over dinner this evening a friend was telling me about a colleague who had done early work on user interfaces that incorporate portable videorecorders. The problem was, the colleague had pursued this research so long ago that there were no portable videorecorders – the technology itself was off still some years in the future. In a situation like that, what’s a scientist to do?

The solution was to design studies in which participants wore a big backpack. All of the stuff it took to emulate a portable video recorder was in that backpack. It was just like the real thing, if you ignored the fact that you were carrying a large backpack on your back.

While my friend was talking, I began to see that not having a real portable videorecorder had helped those scientists gain insights into the technology they were researching. By needing to emulate the device, they were able to keep the device itself in focus. They were forced to think about its properties, rather than merely take those properties for granted.

After all, people are all too good at taking technologies for granted. Air conditioners, washing machines, clocks, pen and paper, these are just a few of many technologies that have completely altered our lives, but that we never think about. In a way, you can say that a technology has become completely successful precisely at the point when we no longer think about it. The flying car may be the subject of hundreds of speculative articles, but the washing machine has transformed countless millions of lives.

And so perhaps we need a little jolt, a way of pinching ourselves, so that we can truly see the technologies we use every day, rather than simply taking them for granted. Maybe we need to pretend they don’t exist yet, like that emulated portable videorecorder my friend was talking about.

Imagine experiments with driving that involved a team of researchers pushing a make believe car around here and there, while a driver sat inside the fake automobile, pressing on the gas and the break, and turning a steering wheel. The team would need to observe the driver, looking at how he or she moved the steering wheel, and then figure out whether to turn left or right, when to accelarate and when to stop.

Or how about experiments that emulate email by having researchers physically carry the text message typed by a correspondent from one room across to another room. That text is then read by the other correspondent, and the typed reply is carried back to the first room. The task of emulation becomes progressively more interesting as more correspondents are added to the experiment.

Similarly, we could emulate internet search via a team of researchers and a library. The team members would need to learn to organize themselves, to fan out and efficiently look for answers in complementary places on the library shelves.

And what about text to speech, or speech to text, automatic translation between languages, even the humble thermostat. These are all amenable to this kind of emulative analysis.

I’m not suggesting that we operate this way in our real lives – that would be silly. But rather that we use this kind of technique – deliberately falling back on “Wizard of Oz” methods, a kind of “F is for Fake” approach, as Orson Welles might have said – even when such approaches are not necessary, in order to force ourselves to examine and to revisit the interface itself, to break down and focus on our interactions with our modern technological tools in a way that does not permit us to take them for granted.

Besides, imagine the following scenario: You sit in a high-tech looking platform and operate a plastic joystick while a team of people carries you around the room, swooping, lifting and banking, hovering and gliding. Finally you get to have that flying car. 🙂

E pluribus unum is a Latin phrase written on all U.S. currency, which literally means “one out of many”. Originally it referred to the joining of the thirteen colonies into a single nation, but in modern times the phrase has taken on modern meanings. For example, many of us generally take for granted that this phrase now suggests that our nation is a glorious melting pot, one in which a citizen’s national or ethnic background does not impose an obstacle to the pursuit of dreams of individual success or achievement.

But every once in a while something stops us up short, and we realize that this naive view of America is far from universal. For example, today The New York Times published the following letter to the editor of the Arts and Leisure section (this is a real letter in today’s paper – I’m not making this up):

To the Editor:
    Re “Motherhood Becomes Her, Quite Often” by Felicia Lee [May 24]:
    I am offended that Phylicia Rashad is playing a white woman’s role in “August: Osage County.” It doesn’t make sense that she would have white siblings and children. As brilliant as Ms. Rashad is, the casting is off-kilter.
    I would be equally offended if a white actress was cast as Bess in “Porgy and Bess”, or in any of the black roles in “Raisin in the Sun” or August Wilson’s plays.
    Let’s keep white actresses playing white roles and blacks playing black roles.
          Ronald Fernandez
          Pittsburgh

I’ve been thinking over the logic of this letter since I first read it earlier today. I now realize that I have been sorely misled by the spirit of E pluribus unum into an erroneous belief that talent and hard work actually hold some currency in this society.

Of course I was wrong, as such foolish notions only lead to bad casting on the Stage. I humbly suggest that Mr. Fernandez is being far too timid in his thinking. Once you really start to pay attention, you realize that today’s theatre is rife with inappropriate casting decisions. For example, apparently none of the cast members of Boeing Boeing are french, even though the play clearly takes place in Paris. Mark Rylance (a British actor merely passing for french) should give back that Tony award immediately.

Even worse, not a single one of the actresses cast as Elphaba in the Broadway musical Wicked has been a real witch. Compounding this insult (I’m sorry if you find this shocking), not one of them has actually been green. Apparently, for the last several years the producers of this show have been passing off white actresses in greenface as the real thing. As Mr. Fernandez would no doubt agree, this is almost certainly a violation of the bylaws of Actor’s Equity.

I also understand that a non-ogre has been cast as Shrek, a actress not actually capable of sustained flight is playing the lead in “Mary Poppins”, and that “The Lion King” is simply rife with species-inappropriate casting. Think of all of the lion and warthog actors who are being deprived of an honest living by this execrable practice of casting humans instead of real animals – and don’t even get me started on the hyenas. Do the producers of this show actually believe that audiences won’t see right through those obviously fake costumes? I mean, is it just me, or don’t they all look like humans, transparently trying to pass themselves off as animals? It’s hard to believe that Julie Taymor was rewarded with a Tony for this blatant offense against our jungle neighbors.

Rumor also has it that a number of left handed actors have been cast in parts that clearly call for right-handed players, that many jewish actors are playing christians and vice versa, and that Geoffrey Rush has been cast as the lead of Ionesco’s “Exit the King”, even though the part clearly calls for an actor who is at least three hundred years old. I suspect Mr. Rush is not a day over a hundred and fifty.

And he may very well be even younger.

Worst of all, I just heard that someone who is simply claiming to be Gary Coleman is trodding the boards in “Avenue Q”. Somebody should alert the real Mr. Coleman immediately. Perhaps Mr. Fernandez can give him a call.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure Mr. Fernandez will join me in condemning other bizarre deviations from literal reality that have been ruining the dramaturgic experience for everyone. For example, actors have apparently been appearing on stage not to speak their own thoughts, but rather words that were in fact written by others, often by individuals who died hundreds of years ago (a recent performance of “Hamlet” comes to mind). Talk about betraying an audience’s trust!

Also, I’m sure Mr. Fernandez will agree that it is a complete violation of the dramatic contract for actors to wander around upon a stage pretending that the audience is not there, even though the audience is plainly visible to the entire cast. In the performance I saw of the play Mr. Fernandez cites – “August: Osage County” – actors were walking around some sort of obviously fake scenery, trying to convince us that they were inhabiting an actual house. Even worse, the players pretended that they were related to each other – that some were lovers, some where married, and others were siblings. The shameless cast kept up this ruse long after the audience had clearly realized that the entire enterprise was a sham. To set the record straight: None of the actors in this production are, in fact, from the same family.

I’m sure Mr. Fernandez and all other right thinking Americans will join me in protesting these shameful practices. After we have succeeded in achieving this righteous goal, then perhaps we should all join together and scrape those confusing words off of our Nation’s currency: E pluribus unum.

D.I.Y. stands for “Do It Yourself”, a wide ranging craft movement, with a distinctly pioneering spirit, that has captured the imagination of many young people. Walking around Manhattan on this lovely Saturday evening I realized that our little borough has its own peculiar version of D.I.Y. Young people here, out en masse for the evening, create entire worlds.

In the Lower East side I witnessed a kind of downtown jazz sensibility. The young people here are heirs to a sort of countercultural beat identity that probably began long before Allan Ginsberg was born. In contrast, on MacDougal Street I saw a Manhattan abandoned by Manhattanites on Saturday night and given over to the “Bridge and Tunnel crowd” – kids in from New Jersey or Staten Island, for whom the entire isle of Manhattan is one large beer keg.

As I walked West I found myself walking through the now trendy Meat Packing District, where crowds of young people engaged in the collective creation of Fabulousness. Dressed to the nines, these sophisticated young folks glittered and shone, the young women teetering on heels that matched their slinky black dresses, the young men trying to look nonchalantly debonair while awaiting their turn to be admitted (or not) through the velvet rope leading to the latest trendy dance club. On these streets real fashion models mingle with the crowd of mere pretenders, and an air of theatrical artifice hangs over the scene.

In each of these places, you can sense the feverish activity, as all participants in the evening’s theatre, having carefully dressed and prepared, wanders out into their own little collectively constructed universe.

What I like about this dressing up and showing off is that it is far more participatory than, say, going to see a movie. Each participant is expected to dress the part, to carefully calibrate their appearance before joining the show, to collectively lift the entire experience up until it becomes a perfectly realized dream of itself.

All very D.I.Y., in a New York sort of way