Ken’s Blog

C was not always the symbol for the speed of light in a vacuum. Einstein, for example, only switched to this notation in 1907, abandoning the use of Maxwell’s symbol “V” (thereby freeing up that symbol for use by Hugo Weaving movies).

The thing I love most about a universal constant like C is the way it sets a perimeter for things, a kind of delimiter for the Universe itself, like bubble wrap over a new portable music player, or the plastic cover around an Italian sofa. With C you know where you stand. You can only travel so fast, and that’s that. No instantanteous buzzing about the Universe – or even the Galaxy for that matter.

Children hate limits, and in many ways all humans are children (or were, at some point). When the Universe tells us we can’t go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, we tend to stamp our feet and feel the urge to rebel.

But of course, being human, we don’t just rebel against the Universe by making wars, or stirring up political confrontations. We rebel by making Star Trek.

We send captain Kirk and his crew, and their various Sci Fi cousins, into space and we give them Warp Drive – the ability to travel at many times the speed of light. To hell with Einstein and to hell with reality.

After all, human literature proceeds from the assumption that a single mind can imagine that which does not exist – Romeo and Juliet, Becky Sharp, Mr. Rochester, Mr. Ed. But there is something peculiarly delightful about imagining that the very limits and bounds of reality itself to not exist.

If C were not C – if the speed of light in a vacuum were somehow different – the very Universe in which we live would not exist. Atoms would not coalesce around their nuclei, our planets would not have formed from the primordeal muck, our galaxy itself would never have come into existence.

And so it takes an act of extreme hubris to suspend the limitations of the speed of light. Gene Roddenberry and his writers on Star Trek, like other authors of space operas, have had just that hubris. You can call it visionary, or you can call it chutzpah, but the decision to allow faster than light travel struck a nerve with the viewing public. The human race feels a need to escape our relativistic cage – at least in our fantasies. Even if it contradicts reality, we yearn to explore the universe around us – to boldly go where noone has gone before.

Perhaps this need to transcend our bounds, to defy what is possible, physically or otherwise, is what makes us human – our species’ very own universal constant.

B movies exemplify the sorts of cultural artifacts that are cherished not because they are good, but because they are not so good. There is a kind of reverse chic to things that aim low and hit their mark – saccharine songs, exploitation flicks, cheesy romance novels, and all of their bargain basement kin.

It’s easy to love the beautifully crafted A-list item – the Pixar animation, Bergman film, Mozart concerto. But the Salieris of the world also seem to attract their own fan clubs. There is a secret code involved here, a kind of loser pride.

I’m not sure it’s a question of quality at all, or lack thereof. I think it has more to do with peoples’ innate (and somewhat contradictory) need to clump themselves into groups that – somewhat ironically – promote a feeling of individuality and unique identity. There is nothing to be gained from being the only person to listen to some god-awful garage band out of Cleveland. But there is considerable glory in being one amongst a select few – those who recognize within this band some hidden quality undetected by the larger herd.

In some ways, the more challenging the original source material, the more powerful the pull. Ed Wood films are cherished precisely because they are so difficult to appreciate (it’s actually quite difficult to watch “Plan 9 from Outer Space” all the way through without nodding off).

Interestingly, in order to be successful, a deliberately ironic homage to a B movie needs to be excellent. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – a loving A-list tribute to cheap action serials of long ago – was excellent, and it was a wild success. Its successor film “Temple of Doom” was a far lesser work, and was not embraced by audiences.

Similarly, Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” was a masterpiece of inside exploitation genre references, and people still watch it in delighted awe fifteen years after its release. Contrast this with “Grindhouse/Death Proof”, his merely good parody of exploitation films, which never really found a following among audiences.

There’s a duality at work here. We may feel affection for our unironic losers, but woe betide the parodist of such material who produces less than excellent work. Anton Diabelli could write the cheesiest of C-major waltzes, and nobody complained. Whereas Ludwig van Beethoven, in writing his 33 variations on Diabelli’s little waltz, needed to aim far higher.

Needless to say, this was not a problem for Mr. B.

Alphabets occupy a strange place in our consciousness of language. They are the bottom of the syntactic totem pole, lower even than words, let alone phrases, sentences, epistolary novels. Letters are the humble bricks we use to build the great cathedral, so to speak.

And yet they have their own fascination. I was quite young when I first realized that each letter of the alphabet has its own story to tell. I was perhaps seven years old, reading through the old “World Book Encyclopedia”, when I discovered that each alphabetically ordered volume began with the history of its eponymous letter.

For example, the lower case “a” derives from a pictogram of the head of an ox (the ancient Semitic word for ox was “aleph”). Over the course of several thousand years the pictogram was gradually simplified and stylized, like so:

Each letter of the alphabet has a similar but different story to tell. When I was a child, I loved the idea that in each word of the English language there are alternate tales, counter narratives, hidden histories, waiting to burst through the ostensible text.

I still do.

I’ve just started to watch “Siren of the Tropics” – the 1927 film debut of Josephine Baker. I was surprised, right at the opening credits, to see that the assistant director is a very young Luis Bunuel. This film came out a full two years before his wonderfully infamous directorial feature “Un Chien Andalou”. Now I am hoping to spot, in this film, influences here and there upon his later work.

I’m currently about ten minutes into the film. Rather than see it all the way through in one sitting, I’m viewing it in pieces – the way one might read a novel a chapter at a time – so that I will have time to think about what I’m seeing as things unfold.

I do this because, for me, a visit to a silent film is like a visit to a foreign country. I need time to adjust my thinking to really appreciate much that the film’s original audiences took for granted – some way to understand what I am watching in approximately the way it was intended to be understood.

After all, watching a silent movie, even a great one, eighty years into the era of talkies is necessarily an exercise in culture shock. Filmmakers and audience shared quite an elaborate visual language in the days before sound, a language that is now gone. In particular, actors employed many techniques to suggest the unheard dialog between inter-title cards. To audiences of the day those techniques seemed natural and unforced.

In a way this convention was an excellent start to cinema, since it forced the writer and director away from mere words and into the real core of what a film offers – human emotion expressed through a camera’s observation of human faces and bodies in motion.

I suspect that in another eighty years many of our current film conventions – practices of acting, directing and cinematography that we don’t even think of as conventions, but rather as examples of naturalistic storytelling – will appear not merely dated and stilted, but downright incomprehensible to curious but puzzled viewers.

At this point in the story, Josephine Baker has not yet shown up on screen. The film is still setting things up, introducing the characters one by one in that oddly formal way that silent films often do. When she does make her entrance, I’m keen to see whether she will come across as more “modern” than the rest of the cast – a cultural visitor from the future – the way Leslie Howard was far more modern than anyone else on screen in “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, or Bob Dylan than anyone else in “Don’t Look Back”.

From what I’ve heard of the legendary Ms. Baker, I suspect I will not be disappointed.

When you live in a walking city like New York, you get used to hearing little snatches of accidental conversation – three second slices out of someone else’s life. Sometimes, if you happen to walk by at just the right moment, these little accidental edits of the thoughts of strangers can seem like Zen koans.

I often wonder whether this kind of tiny found-art sound byte – I suppose it would now be called a “tweet from the real world” – is really representative of its author, or whether it conveys a completely misleading impression.

This evening, as I was walking with some friends across town on Waverly Street, we passed by a rather intense looking man in his forties who was growling into his cellphone the phrase “…it was like something out of Robocop…”

I found myself trying to reconstruct what he might have been thinking as he said this. Was he thinking, perhaps, of the character of the Robocop himself, all stalwart steel armor and awkwardly half-remembered true love? Was it the fearsome wierdly bipedal cyborg, that ultimate killing machine run amok? Or perhaps he was referencing the delightful parodies of commercial TV ads and news shows that were sprinkled throughout the film. Somehow I doubted this last interpretation, because the man wouldn’t have been growling about something like that.

In the end, I realized that the mystery would need remain just that – a mystery, a momentary encounter with a stranger’s mind, tantalizing in its possibilities, yet always out of reach.

So different from that encounter I heard some years ago on these same streets. In this case it was a young couple walking side by side, the female half far shorter than the male half (she was perhaps two feet shorter than her companion). The young woman was craning her neck up to look at her mate, her face suffused with a very earnest expression. The only words I could hear her say, before the two of them retreated forever out of earshot, were “…but what do you mean Macrobiotic??…”

Fellini’s “Roma” is filled with many magical and poignant scenes. One that particularly resonates with me is the scene in which excavation for a new subway extension has been stopped because workers have discovered an underground chamber containing miraculously preserved Roman wall paintings from twenty centuries earlier.

An expert is called in. She turns on her flashlight and gasps in awe to see the murals in all of their vibrant beauty. A moment later, a gust of wind comes through the newly opened chamber, blowing the ancient paint right off the walls like dust. In seconds, the magnificent artwork, only just now glimpsed, vanishes forever before her horrified eyes.

It has occurred to me that this theme, of a sublime work of art only briefly glimpsed before it is lost forever, recurs in various ways throughout literature. One of my favorite examples is from one of the Isaac Asimov short robot stories, in which the robot servant of a pianist, wishing to please his master, sits down at the piano to play a piece the musician had been struggling with.

The robot ends up playing the piece with enormous subtlety and feeling. When it is finished the musician is weeping from the beauty of the robot’s performance, which was by far the greatest and most moving piano performance that the musician has ever heard. The robot explains that the performance was simply a matter of studying the mapping from emotion to sound that is employed by humans through music, and recreating that mapping.

The musician begs the robot to play another piece, but the robot declines, explaining that it will never again play the piano. Its reasoning? It has computed that the existence of a machine able to play music with such depth of feeling would be harmful to humans, by causing them to doubt the importance of their own musical intuitions and emotions. To protect its human masters, the robot has calculated that it must never again demonstrate such facility with emulating human emotion.

When he is told this news, the musician is devastated. He has just heard the most beautiful musical performance of his life, and he is being told that he can never hear such a performance again. In a sense he is just like the woman in Fellini’s “Roma”. Their very act of observing perfect beauty – a kind of forbidden perfect beauty – leads to its loss.

Perhaps both scenes are so poignant because they are metaphors for life itself. Beauty, art, music, emotional connection – all of the magnificent experiences in life – are at the mercy of a sudden gust of wind, of being blown away like dust. Life, with all its many treasures, contains the seeds of its own destruction, and so its enjoyment must inevitably be bittersweet.

The first time I was ever in Madrid, when I was much younger, I went to the Museo del Prado – which contains a great collection of art from the 12th century to the 19th century. I found the art to be inspiring, passionate, powerful, but most of it didn’t speak to me. At the time I was more interested in modern and non-representational art, so I was probably not the best audience for this amazing collection, at least at that particular time in my life.

As my friend wandered around the galleries, enjoying herself immensely, I found myself looking around for one work that would really inspire me on a visceral level. No luck, until I came upon a small abstract piece – unusual in that museum of representational art – that seemed different from the rest of the work. It was relatively small, with an unadorned frame. There were fascinating motifs of lines and rectangles, the one juxtaposed upon the other in a kind of visual music.

My eye was instantly drawn to this piece, and I found myself following its forms and patterns, trying to decypher its deeper meaning. There was a small explanation in Spanish beside it, but I did not yet speak enough Spanish to be able to translate properly. I decided to call over my friend so that she could tell me who the artist was, and perhaps something about his/her intent.

Just as I was about to call her over, the meaning of this fascinating image suddenly became clear to me, as though I were seeing a kind of double image. It was the sign – presumably posted by law – to show you the locations of the fire exits. Oops.

I went back to rejoin my art-loving friend, looking back over my shoulder ruefully, with somewhat mixed emotions. I opted not to share with her my somewhat awkward experience with art appreciation.

Perhaps I should have.

There are snatches of poetry – not entire poems, but rather phrases out of poems – that seem to have the power to yank us from our daily selves, to recenter us, as we find ourselves contemplating their power. These snippets can turn up anywhere, such as in Arthur O’shaughnessy’s 1874 poem “Ode”, with its famous lines “We are the music makers. And we are the dreamers of dreams”.

Many people only know this as the line quoted by Gene Wilder in the 1972 “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. Taken in isolation, these words have a visceral power that sadly vanishes when the poem is considered in its entirety. But hearing just these lines, rather than the entire poem, one is free to imagine that the rest is just as powerful as this little snippet. It’s kind of like hearing only random phrases of Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”. As long as you don’t hear the actual words in their entirety, you can convince yourself that there is something profound going on.

I have similar feelings toward the opening lines of Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” – written when he was a young volunteer soldier at the front in WWI, shortly before he was killed in battle. The poem itself is no great shakes, but it does start off with the following immortal lines:

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

I’m not even British, and yet reading these lines makes me want to rush over to London to defend country and Queen. This is seriously powerful stuff. It’s a shame that the rest of the poem (you could look it up) doesn’t rise to the same immortal standard.

Once, when I was a child, I picked up an old issue of “Walt Disney Magazine”, while my dad was filling up his Dodge Dart with gas at a neighorhood filling station. This magazine has probably been out of print for years by now. I remember nothing at all from the issue except for the following piece of trivia, which I suspect was written just for fun, apropos of nothing:

“In 1968 alone, eight tons of paper were wasted by the United States Postal Service on perforations for postage stamps.”

I have no reason to doubt this statement. It seems perfectly reasonable to me in every way. But what I admired about it then, and still admire about it now, is its pure triviality. In a world awash with useless facts, there is something almost poetically pure about holding onto this one.

For reasons that I cannot quite explain on any pure rational basis, but which I find deeply satisfying on an emotional level, I have treasured this little factoid for all these years. And so, as a child, I committed it to memory, word for word.

I’m sure that at one time, millions of kids across America read this very same statement in the very same issue of “Walt Disney Magazine”. For all I know, some may remember it still. Others may feel only a vague stirring, some inchoate sense of nostalgia and undefined longing, whenever they lick a postage stamp, without ever quite knowing why. Over time this eccentric little factoid has undoubtedly faded from the collective memory.

But I remember it all exactly – the time and place where I first read it – at a gas station in the back seat of our family car. It has stayed with me all of these years – a pure, useless, and oddly delightful bit of mental detail. Until now that is, when at last I share it with you, and so release it back into the world.

I really wanted to like “Terminator Salvation”. Really. I was sitting in the theatre with two fellow Sci-Fi buffs and I had fond memories of the first two flicks. I had even voluntarily taken a memory wipe to remove all traces of the horribly incompetent third film from my brain (I would tell you where to go to get this valuable operation done, but that seems to be one of the memories they removed during the memory wipe).

For the first half hour of the movie I held on, trying to enjoy it, telling myself that Christian Bale’s monotonic schizoid portrayal had some purpose. I found myself inventing back stories for characters, filling in explanatory scenes in my head to explain motivation and relationships. I kept trying to see the much better movie that it could have been, if only director McG had shown the slightest interest in something other than very fast moving things blowing up.

And then at some point something in my mind snapped, and I realized that I was just waiting it out, that the only saving grace of the experience was the certain knowledge that in less than an hour the movie would be over.

Looking back on it now, I’m still trying to figure out why anybody would put so much money and effort into making a movie that had no real sympathetic characters. The one half-hearted attempt at romance was telegraphed so clunkily that the audience was denied any pleasure of discovery. Bale’s character is so obnoxiously self-important and humorless that you just want to slap him. Perhaps to save my sanity, I kept picturing him giving this performance while wearing a clown nose. I swear it all would have been much better.

And then there’s the whole thriller movie aspect. Theres a syndrome I call the “Iron Man effect” – in honor of that early desert scene in “Iron Man” where Robert Downey Jr. is thrown several hundred feet through the air in a giant bucket of metal armor parts, and lands again with such force that giant metal parts fly off in a million directions. Mr. Downey emerges unscathed, and even manages to toss of a witty remark.

In real life, of course, his soft human body would have been converted by this experience to roughly the consistency of mashed potatoes.

“Terminator Salvation” makes “Iron Man” look like realist drama. In scene after scene we see giant ten ton fast moving behemoths built of cold hard steel facing off one-on-one with mere humans, creatures of mere flesh and bone. And each time, the humans emerge miraculously unscathed. These machines are deadly unstoppable killers, relentless, resourceful, and vastly more powerful than humans. One swipe from their giant hard metal paws would clearly pound a hole through your ribcage wide enough to drive a truck.

And yet nobody in the film ever gets seriously hurt after being hit by one of these things. This is clearly not true to life. It it were, Bale’s character would have been killed off in the first five minutes.

Hey wait a minute. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea…