Ken's Blog

I was having a conversation today with some friends who, like me, are (1) big fans of Christopher Nolan’s early film “Memento”, not such big fans of his later larger scale work, notably “Inception”. It occurred to us that it would be great to have a backwards retrospective of selected Nolan films, starting with “Inception” and building up to “Memento”. If you’ve seen “Memento”, this makes perfect sense.

I wonder whether one could do similar meta-themed cinematic auteur surveys. A festival of Tarantino films would start in the middle of his oeuvre, and also end in the middle. A retrospective of Alain Resnais would splice together scenes taken at random from all his films. For Max Ophüls the films would need to go around in a circle, with the last film leading into the first.

A Charlie Kaufman retrospective would need to be in the form of a film about the Charlie Kaufman retrospective. For Stan Brakhage, we would get a lot of projectors and show all his films on the same screen at the same time. A Sam Peckinpah retrospective would continue until the entire audience lay dead in a pool of blood.

We would honor the career of George Lucas by screening three film masterpieces, waiting several decades, and then screening three awful films.

And of course the Jean-Luc Goddard retrospective would need to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Yesterday I was waiting for a train, when a young man strolled past on the very edge of the platform, the part marked in bright yellow so people will know that walking there is dangerous.

There was an older couple standing next to me on the platform — I’d say they were both in their mid-to-late seventies. Turned to her husband, the wife said “I don’t want to see you walking on the edge like that. It’s not safe.”

Although the husband was trying to hide it, I could tell he was unhappy about being lectured by his wife. I couldn’t resist breaking in. “Some people,” I said to her, “like to live dangerously.”

They both smiled at me, and the wife said “If danger he wants, he should ride a zip line.”

Then the husband got a big grin on his face. Turning to his wife he said, “I don’t want to see you riding zip lines. It’s not safe.”

What’s up with that middle thing?

Case in point: There is an epic film trilogy, set in an alternate world where Good battles Evil. The trilogy follows the story of a callow young fellow who has been growing up in a small rural backwater. Under the tutelage of a mysterious and powerful, yet kindly old mentor with great powers, he ends up being thrust into the very center of the epic battle. You’ve probably seen it.

In the second of the three films, a strange gnomish figure appears. He is short and unsettlingly alien in appearance, and is incredibly ancient. He moves with an odd ungainly grace and speaks very strangely, with a noticably garbled syntax. This character is brought to life on the screen by the latest in Hollywood special effects puppetry. We soon come to realize that this strange little being is at the very center of the struggle between good and evil.

I’m speaking, of course, of Yoda. I mean Gollum. I mean Yoda. I mean Gollum (insert famous scene from Chinatown here).

Here’s another example: A laid back singer/songwriter writes and sings a song during the hippie era about a mysterious and elusive woman named Suzanne who has clearly touched him deeply. The first and third verses are about the emotional effect she has had on him. But that second verse is different — he doesn’t mention Suzanne at all. Instead, in he takes a detour and sings about Jesus. And somehow it all works.

I’m speaking about Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne. I mean James Taylor’s Fire and Rain. I mean Suzanne. I mean Fire and Rain (cut to Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway).

This idea of a surprising, yet crucial, new character appearing suddenly in the second part of a three part narrative seems to be a recurring trope in popular culture, and maybe there should be a name for it. I’ll go with Kevin Klein as Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, who almost certainly would have called it “that middle thing”.

The first time I traveled to Brazil I was determined to learn the language, so I struggled with the words and phrases until I managed to make myself understood. It helped that Brazilians are enormously kind, and were generally delighted that I was trying to communicate. The first phrase I learned well was “Eu não falo português” (I do not speak Portuguese). My accent was passable enough that people would start laughing. “Sim,” they would argue, trying to be encouraging, “Sim fala!”

During that first trip I ran into a guy from Germany who was traveling around Brazil. He had a little portable electronic phrasebook, which he would use to communicate. “Why do you bother trying to learn a whole language?” he asked me. “All I need is this little device, and I can get around just fine.” I sensed a vast and unbridgeable gulf between us. As far as I was concerned, if you’re going to be in a place for a while, at least try to learn to speak the language.

Yesterday someone suggested to me that Google Translate, which is getting better and better, might replace learning other languages. Perhaps one day, when we are all seeing the world through our augmented reality contact lenses, and running nth generation versions of Siri and Google Translate, my belief that you’re supposed to at least try to learn other languages will come to seem hopelessly quaint.

Of course it won’t be as good as the real thing, but we all know that sometimes convenience trumps quality. After a while, we might just come to think of foreigners as people who speak our own language in a kind of Google-accented pidgin.

That would be sad on so many levels.

Yesterday’s post was about acquiring knowledge and thereby losing innocence. Somewhat coincidentally, today it is exactly forty eight years, to the day, since John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Sometimes you can draw a bright red vertical line through a culture’s timeline, with a clearly labeled “before” and “after”. Obviously the 11th of September, 2001 was one such bright line for our culture. The 7th of December, 1941 was another.

It seems to me that what these three dates all have in common, in spite of their differences, is that they were all moments when our culture suddenly, dramatically, lost a sense of safety, of innocence. These experience were, on a national scale, roughly equivalent to an individual’s change in viewpoint after the first time they are betrayed by a close friend, or the first time they have been violently assaulted.

Before such a thing has happened to you, you can have the intellectual understanding that you are not really safe, but it’s all abstract. Afterward, of course, you know a terrible truth: If it happened once, it could happen again.

A friend of mine, after reading my post yesterday, asked me whether, given the choice, I would always choose knowledge. I blithely answered yes. But days like today, November 22, remind me of the terrible price we can pay for a loss of innocence.

I was having a conversation today that touched on the concept of “Pandora’s box” — the ancient Greek myth about the first woman, who through simple curiosity opened a container (actually a “pithos“, or jar, not a box) that unleashed evil into the world.

Of course there is a parallel here with Eve partaking of the apple from the tree of knowledge. I find the Greek version more compelling, since the act of opening a jar to see what is inside is such a perfect metaphor for our quest for knowledge.

Pandora was facing a dilemma. If she left the pithos unopened, then all of the human potential that arises from our wonderfully curious minds would have been left unexplored. Yet if she opened it (a metaphor for leaving childhood behind if there ever was one), the world could never again be innocent.

In my mind this story paints Pandora as a very positive figure, although Greek and Christian philosophy often paint Pandora and Eve in a negative light. For what defines us, as humans, if not our quest for knowledge? If the gods punish us for this quest, it is because the gods are jealous.

Should Pandora have left the jar unopened? If you embrace enlightenment, curiosity, science and the quest to honestly try to understand the world around you, then you come to the conclusion that her only choice was to embrace the tragedy, and to open the damned thing.

There are a few pieces of popular music that break out of the strait-jacket of 4/4 time, or its somewhat less popular cousin 3/4 time. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” comes to mind of course, the jazz classic that alternates between 5/4 and 4/4 time signatures.

I recently realized that the 1981 hit Golden Brown by The Stranglers has an intro in 13/4 time. I can’t think of anything else in pop music with a 13/4 time signature.

In particular, the song’s instrumental intro is formed from sequences of four measures that have 3,3,3,4 beats, respectively, for a total of thirteen beats.

Very strange, yet it all works. When you’re just listening to the intro it feels oddly exotic, but completely right. I suspect that there might be some perceptual number theory working under the surface: Three groups of three-beat measures, and then every fourth measure having four beats. Perhaps the logic of this is so compelling that it trumps our cultural expectations.

And I love the fact that when you say the words “Golden Brown” out loud, the rhythm you hear is exactly the same as when you say “13/4”.

It is wonderful when artists do something that according to conventional rules should not work — and then it does.

I was talking yesterday with somebody I know who is very spiritual. She asked how I was doing, and I told her that my life right now is focused on a big grant proposal (due in about a week), followed by a major talk/presentation (a few weeks after that), followed by a publication deadline (about a month after the talk). They are all on the same general topic, so it feels like one continuous journey. A very challenging journey.

As I was describing this to her, I automatically switched over to language appropriate to talking with someone who thinks about spiritual things. After describing the specifics, I said “so I have three mountains to climb, one after the other”, which I guess made it sound like a spiritual journey.

And as I said the words, I realized that it is a spiritual journey. Working continuously toward something you believe in, over a sustained period of time, requires a level of mental awareness and physical preparedness that cannot be achieved by intellectual effort alone. On some level you really do need to transform yourself into a proper vessel for the change you want to make.

As we got off the phone, she said to me, in a wonderfully warm and supportive way, “Good luck climbing your three mountains.”

Every once in a while, in a futuristic science fiction movie or TV show, I notice that the office of the captain or the head scientist or some other important personage has a fancy bookshelf with real books.

I understand why this is there. It serves as a visual short-hand to audiences, conveying high social status based on learning and erudition. Yet in most such shows the Sci Fi world portrayed has moved beyond books, generally to some sort of system of touch surfaces or floating holographic projection screens.

I understand the concept — the owner of these books expresses his/her high status through the display of an archaic and undoubtedly highly expensive technology of old, much as the CEO of a large corporation in Tokyo might decorate his office with a rare Samurai sword.

Yet in real life we do not decorate our offices with archaic information technology. Except in very rare cases there are no ancient Athenian scrolls or Egyptian papyri on display in high-status offices.

Information technology does not seem to age as gracefully as weaponry, when it comes to using symbols to express high social status. So I wonder — hundreds of years in the future, will there really be rows of old books displayed in offices as signifiers of power and intellectual importance? Or would such a thing merely come across to visitors as quaint, and more than a little odd?

I neuroscientist friend explained to me yesterday that in recent years scientists have come to understand the principle of “Local translational control” — namely that all the proteins and other substances needed for proper functioning at the cellular level are generated locally, wherever they are needed. Cells are highly versatile factories, capable of switching from one specialized manufacturing mode to an entirely different one, depending on circumstance. All the recipes needed are right there in the 3,000,000,000 base pairs of every copy of DNA, ready to be triggered. He told me that many people find this concept difficult to understand.

Yet it occurred to me that this is exactly how things work in our daily lives, something we take for granted. The human brain is a powerhouse of protean capability, yet most of the time almost all of those capabilities remain dormant. It is only when triggered by our environment that our vast array of capabilities come into play. When we encounter a pencil sharpener, our brain can guide us to sharpen pencils. When we encounter another person, we become a conversationist. When we pick up a hammer or a screwdriver, we become a carpenter.

It is this tremendous redundancy — the localization of vast potential power into the brains and bodies of every one of millions of individuals, that allows society to function in a way that we take for granted. The “ordinary” is built from an enormous wealth of distributed potential capability.

That same principle of enormous wealth of redundant capability, available everywhere and drawn upon whenever and wherever needed, is exactly what is going on in our bodies at the cellular level.