Ken’s Blog

The topic of dating came up in conversation this evening. Specifically, when can you say, officially, that you are dating? To make things interesting, the friends around the table engaged in this debate ranged from fourteen years old to somewhere in their fifties. Clearly our collective group had a broad and representative perspective on the issue.

I floated the theory that you can truly be said to be dating only when the following sequence has occurred: (i) You kiss (by “kiss”, I mean a real kiss – you know what I mean – not a social kiss). (ii) You become sober. (iii) Once in this newly sober state, you kiss again.

Step three marks the moment that begins your official entry into datingdom. My friends around the table generally agreed that this is as good a metric as any. I realize that we could all be wrong on this point.

But I defy anybody to do better.

The Gods of Eden came to town
They only came to look around
When all was done, they somehow found
The time to take us in

The Gods of Eden swept aside
The protests of the child bride
“Oh come,” they said “and lose your pride,
There’s no denying sin.”

I held you once upon this shore
I said there’s room for so much more
You laughed and showed me to the door
Oh where’s your laughter now?

The Gods of Eden blew this town
For something evil’s going down
Well, who am I to wear their crown
And would you show me how?

I know you’ve named them in your sleep
You’re in too far, you’re in too deep
Of all the secrets you would keep
Was I the last to know?

The Gods of Eden never leave
They never cry, they never grieve
But they have told me, by your leave
That it was time to go

Oh yes, they’ve told me, by your leave
That it is time to go

This evening we went to see a lovely recent french film “L’Heure d’ete” (the title translates to english as “Summer Hours”). I was struck, as I have been before, by how enormously different is the experience of seeing a typical french film from the experience of watching a typical Hollywood movie.

Hollywood films are structured like a pop song. There’s your three verses, your chorus, your bridge, maybe a driving back beat to propel things forward, and and a big crescendo to finish things off. Before you know it the movie is over and you’re back out of the theatre. All very efficient.

French films are a different animal entirely. Stuff happens, but not in a linear progression. Rather, it’s as though you are watching the random events of life – characters having a coffee, opening a book and looking through it, light up a cigarette or wandering into an unexpected conversation. It all seems rather non-linear, leisurely in a way.

It doesn’t make any sense, until you begin to understand that if Hollywood films specialize in a kind of heroic realism, a French flick is closer to impressionism. It doesn’t so much matter what happens, as it does how the characters feel about it. The more seemingly aimless and kanoodling the plot events up there on the screen, the greater the opportunity for characters to respond to those events in surprising and revealing ways.

The French take the principle of “Plot reveals character” to an extreme limit. The little awkward pause, the off-the-cuff remark, the telltale gesture, these are the real tools of the French auteur.

Yes, this form of filmmaking places a burden upon the audience. You can’t just ride along on the surf of relentless plot. You need to catch a hesitation or an awkward embrace, or a locking of eyes between two characters in an early scene (especially if the gesture contradicts the dialog) and use these cues to reconstruct the character arc.

And that’s really the point, isn’t it? It’s not what the characters do that we really care about, it’s who they are. Americans sometimes complain that “nothing happens” in a French film. On the contrary, the screen in a french film is often practically exploding with one revelation after another. You just have to look for it.

After months of construction work, they’ve finally reopened Washington Square Park, which happens to be a few steps from where I live. There had been much trepidation on the part of the community. Would they ruin a good thing? Would the go all corporate on us? Would they convert our belovedly rag-tag “people’s park” into something official and off-putting?

I’m happy to say the City has managed to make the park lovelier and more elegant, without making it at all off-putting. It’s a bit like seeing somebody you know after they’ve gotten a makeover. It’s still them – same goofy jokes, same oddball interests, only sort of glammed up and presentable.

Folks still gather in Washington Square Park to play guitar, hang out together, read their books and just enjoy the day. There are even picnic tables now – a very nice touch. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the weather has been outrageously lovely. We’ve been having the kind of weather that is so perfect, one half suspects that t’s all a trick of evil aliens to lull our citizenry into a collective calm, while they prepare to beam our beloved city to some far off slave planet.

Ok, maybe I’m the only one who suspects that.

Anyway. Watching folks sit around looking at the gushing fountain, or sitting on the newly replanted lawn under the trees, I am impressed and delighted by how immediately entitled everybody feels. The moment the park reopened, the community moved in en masse, rediscovering everything from the dog run to the children’s playground. Everyone has been enjoying our newly polished treasure to the fullest, knowing just how to get the most out of it.

Looking over this delightful scene, I realize that Washington Square Park is Greenwich Village’s answer to the ocean shore. The feeling here is rather like an afternoon at the beach, communing with the surf and sand. Except that it’s just a few short steps away from where people work or live.

When I walk through our little park now, I feel a new-found appreciation for the ability of people to simply kick back and enjoy a lovely day at the beach – even if that beach is a diminutive park in the heart of a great metropolis. This capacity for enjoying a day is certainly one of humanity’s more attractive qualities.

This evening we saw the terrifyingly funny Yasmina Reza play “God of Carnage”. The cast was Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden. A cast doesn’t get any better than that, and all four were quite possibly at their career best.

The play is breathtakingly funny because it is willing to follow so-called “civilized” people (two self-possessed middle class couples who start out the evening believing they are going to resolve their differences through reasonable discussion) down and down and still further down into the raw depths of long stewing hatreds and resentments.

The effect is completely bracing and exhilarating – and almost unbearably funny – somewhat like seeing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” as a laugh-out-loud comedy. Even as I was convulsing with laughter together with everyone around me, part of my mind was spinning away, wondering just why this kind of thing is so incredibly funny when it’s done right (unfortunately it is rarely done right).

My best guess is that these people – through the permissive magic of theatre – are simply expressing the same simmering rages and feral emotions that lie within the heart of each member of the audience. In real life, we are rarely permitted anywhere near the point of expressing the black fires within our respective souls. And on those cases where we do let out our inner furious three year old, the consequences are generally disastrous.

So it comes as an enormous relief to see this kind of catharsis playing out right before us – with perfectly calibrated pitch, thanks to top-notch writing, acting and direction. The people on stage are merely expressing exactly what we all feel from time to time. But rather than suck it up, they end up releasing all that rage and bile. The shock of recognizing these emotions, the sheer cathartic release of it, strikes us as wildly funny.

How strange that our very fears of alienation, of loss of intimacy, fears of personal annihilation, can be the source of so much fun. What is it about humans that allows us to derive great pleasure from contemplating the pain of our own existence?

I went to see a storytelling show this evening. Each storyteller gets ten minutes to go up on stage and tell a story from their own life. They’re not allowed to look at notes. There were six storytellers, which made for lots of variety. Four of the stories were complete failures – for various reasons. One was rather fun, but a bit of a mess. And one was just sublime. For me the entire event turned into a lesson on what makes for good storytelling.

The first thing I learned was that you can’t announce to the audience what it is supposed to feel. The first storyteller made this mistake, and you could just feel the air going out of the room. If you tell people who the good/bad guys are, or who they are supposed to sympathize with, you’d better be doing it ironically. Otherwise the general response will be “Who are you to tell me what to feel? Why aren’t you showing me?”

Another thing I learned is that self-promotion is a total disaster. One of the storytellers was rather blatantly using the occasion to promote her career and her other “real” show. I think much of the audience was simply puzzled that anybody would have the audacity to get up on stage just to be patronizing and self-serving.

Wisely, they saved the best storyteller for last. You could tell from the first breath that you were in the hands of a master – someone who knew how to play an audience like a fine violin. His key rhetorical device was to create a deliberate difference between what he told you, as the narrative voice, and what he was really telling you, as the story’s author. Gradually the audience came to understand that this supremely reasonable man standing before them was an extremely unreliable narrator, just loaded with hidden agenda.

Gradually the difference widened between what the man was saying and what the audience realized was really going on in his story. Every time this gap grew larger, the tension increased, until we were all on the edge of our seats, letting out little explosions of nervous laughter along the way, as the story built to its outrageous climax.

It was quite a beautiful thing to behold. The audience knew it was being manipulated, but it didn’t care. We were all three years old again, watching somebody lift a water balloon higher and higher in the air, knowing that sooner or later it was going to drop. Everybody was holding their breath, waiting to see how high up this particular water balloon would go before the inevitable plunge and awesomely messy splash.

Finally came the delirious climax, and people were practically falling out of their seats with laughter. The valuable lesson I learned is that people are perfectly happy to be manipulated – in fact they are expecting it. But you have to do it properly – through a true revelation of the contradictions of character – or they’ll never forgive you.

I have often found that in times of personal stress, when there is something very sad or emotionally difficult in my life, I throw myself into work, and in those times I achieve spurts of enormous productivity. But I generally can’t sustain the pace. The constant weight of what is happening outside the work continues to pull on me, and eventually the fun to be had from escaping into the work starts to diminish.

In contrast, there are times when I’m feeling ecstatic. A relationship might be working out, or I’ve heard good news about somebody I love. In these times I am filled with energy. Ironically, I often deal with this excess energy in the same way – creatively. I throw myself into my work, charging up whatever hill happens to be nearest. In this case, the energy can continue to flow through me and into the work for much longer periods of time.

I find it strange that I deal with Thanatos and Eros in such similar ways. They are quite opposite feelings, and yet my psychic struggle to seek higher ground operates in similar ways under both circumstances. Yet, I wonder, is there a fundamental difference between the fruits of these very different energies?

For example, only I know the chronological back story behind the many little Java applets on my NYU home page. I made some of them in times of great sadness, and others during the slightly manic good times. I am not entirely certain that even I would be able to tell which is which, although I could find out in a moment, just by checking the date when each was created.

I wonder whether a person who did not know me would be able to tell the difference.

Saw the new “Star Trek” film yesterday. Those of you who have seen it know it’s a delightful movie – a real rip roaring ride. The new film also contains a huge number of brilliantly clever thematic shout outs to the original series, none of which get in the way of the story.

The film contains so many knowing homages to the original, ranging from extremely subtle (the older Spock making a winking dig at the absurd conventions of parallel universe stories) to laugh out loud overt, such as the particular way that Scotty ends up saving the day in five seconds of insanely inspired engineering – one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a movie in a long time.

But I think my favorite inside reference was the casting of Ben Cross, of all people, to play the Jewish patriarch. Yes, I know, he’s supposed to be a Vulcan, but anybody who remembers the dynamic between Mark Lenard and Leonard Nimoy in the original series knows exactly what Roddenberry was up to back in 1966. The back story here is clearly about the complexities of love between a devout Jew and a woman not of the faith – shades of “The Jazz Singer”.

Who better to take over for Mark Lenard than the man who iconically played a proud Jew who married a non-Jewish woman and then, with her by his side, took on the whole world? Watching Cross channel Sarek, I could almost hear the theme song of “Chariots of Fire” blend into Al Jolson singing “Kol Nidre”.

Which sets up one of the best of the film’s many surprising plot twists. In a lovely departure from the original series, this dynamic is continued into the next generation, in the romantic heart of Spock himself.

Today I was passing TKTS, the place on Broadway where they sell half price same-day tickets. As usual, the line for musicals stretched around the block, while the line to see straight plays was pretty much empty.

Out of curiosity I looked at the electronic board where they post what performances are available for half priced tix. Out of the dozen or so shows listed, three of them were marked with the letter “P”. A helpful note at the bottom of the board explained that “P indicates shows that are not musicals”.

It took a moment for the significance of this statement to register in my brain. Gradually I realized that they were trying not to use the “P” word itself, presumably because its very utterance might scare off the valuable tourists who had come to the city to spend their money for an evening of dancing ogres or singing cats or whatever.

For a moment I was offended. And then I realized the logic. Imagine the poor unsuspecting tourist, hoping for an evening of mindless revivals of big-hair bands from the eighties, or winsome cartoon mermaids come to life, who accidentally wanders into a theatre only to find, um, well, theatre.

Seeing “Waiting for Godot” or “Exit the King” or “Death of a Salesman” could totally screw with this hapless tourist’s brain. Unwanted ideas and cultural connections might start to be made, as long unused synapses inadvertently begin to fire.

Once you’ve been exposed to this kind of stuff – tasted the poison, so to speak – you can’t really go back again. The next evening you turn on the TV to settle in for a cozy night of “American Idol” or “Desperate Housewives”, and suddenly it all just seems like mindless crap.

You find yourself avoiding your television. You begin to lurk in sections of bookstores you wouldn’t have been caught dead in a week earlier. You pick up a collection of stories by John O’Hara or a Saul Bellow novel. You start to work your way through “Gravity’s Rainbow”. Old friends start to avoid you, a vague look of fear in their uncomprehending eyes.

Now that I understand the logic of avoiding the dread “P” word, I think we should extend this concept. We can employ the letter “A” to safely denote pictures that aren’t secretly trying to sell you either a car or clothing, and the letter “L” for books that cannot be read within three sittings on the toilet.

The letter “C” would warn you if you are about to pick up any book with a publication date earlier than the date stamped on the milk carton in your refrigerator. And of course we must not forget the “T” word, warning that the customer might actually be required to – well, you know.

Today I read an interview with Christopher Guest, who was talking about how he makes all of those delightful improvised films like “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show”. He explained that the key is to work with people who understand how to improvise. In a Christopher Guest film, there is no rehearsal. The actors first read the plot outline and character sketches, which Mr. Guest and Eugene Levy have prepared beforehand. Then they just start filming, right out of the gate. In the interview, he likened the process to a Jazz ensemble. When you play with a band long enough, you intuitively pick up on the rhythm. You know what chords and riffs to reach for, and when to go for the solo.

Coincidentally, I had my own little jazz moment a few days ago. I was scheduled to give a talk at a small conference, and I didn’t want to give the same old talk, so I thought I’d try to shake things up a bit. Sitting in the back seat of a car on my way to the conference, I started pulling images from the internet that went with the general theme of what I wanted to talk about. When I had gathered enough images, I arranged them in what seemed like a nice order.

The whole process took maybe twenty minutes. The car got to the conference just as my talk was scheduled to start. I got up on stage and started speaking, with a slideshow of those newly found images as my visuals.

It turned out to be one of my more successful presentations. Afterward people seemed to think I had worked really hard to polish my talk. In fact, I suspect that it was lack of polish in the preparation that made it all work. I was actually forced to think while I was up there on stage, and I ended up making connections in a fresh way, rather than just repeating variations on things I’d already said at some other conference.

After reading the interview with Christopher Guest, I now wonder whether it might be a fun to try putting together this kind of “Jazz talk” as a group activity. Give people a general theme, and, say, twenty minutes to pull some images off the web and put them in some sort of order. Then each presenter needs to get up and give a talk, using those images as their visuals.

Better yet, switch it around: Have one person assemble the images, and a different person give the talk. The general hope is that the presenter will be surprised into saying something new, something even they hadn’t thought of before, as they find themselves talking their way through this novel visual landscape.

I suppose each presenter should get a few minutes to look over the sequence of images beforehand, so they can build a general story in their head before they get up to talk. We’d need to play around with it a bit, to find the sweet spot.

Anyway, it’s worth a try.