Ken’s Blog

I just saw “Lady in the Dark”, the Moss Hart musical (with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin). I’d been wanting to see it for the longest time. The basic premise – a woman who leads an emotionally repressed life, except in her dreams, where her alternate personality bursts out in splendidly over-the-top song and dance numbers – just seemed too wonderfully kooky to miss. Especially when Weill and Gershwin are providing the songs.

Alas, the socio-sexual dynamics of the film are now so outrageously dated that it’s actually difficult to watch. Sort of like trying to watch those old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films where they put on musical numbers in blackface. At some point your jaw just kind of hits the floor.

But there was one line that hasn’t aged at all. A throw-away quip tossed off by one of the supporting characters to explain why she doesn’t believe in psychotherapy:

“It would be awfully hard to convince me that the reason I don’t like artichokes is because my mother buttoned me up wrong when I was two.”

Now there’s a gal who could fit in just fine in any decade!

I been seeing a lot of complaints about George W. Bush’s refusal to take any real responsibility for failures of his administration. But wouldn’t we all be disappointed if our outgoing commander in chief were to suddenly become apologetic and contrite about the mess his administration is leaving us with?

Think it through.

Suppose the man were to show some actual understanding of the sheer awfulness of what has been wrought by a long succession of unfortunate policy decisions over the last eight years: the vast number of civilian war deaths (mostly Iraqi), failures of financial regulation and the consequent economic meltdown, erosion of civil liberties and citizen’s rights, alienation and loss of allies around the world, degradation of the environment, failure to help our own citizens in times of natural disaster, and so much more.

Suppose he suddenly “got” it – and then decided to use these last interviews to admit his mistakes, to make absolution with the American people. How would that make you feel? I suspect it would feel us all feel pretty lousy.

For this would be a clear indication that he understands the failures of the past eight years. Which would imply that he was actually capable, somewhere along the line, of making better decisions, that he really could have done better, and that all of this was, after all, unnecessary.

Now that would be truly depressing.

    I had hardly begun – it began to be hard
    The bard in me tried, but such things try a bard
    For when all is reversed, then reversals are all
    And small thoughts at large, though largely thought small
    When forced to grow still, yet still grow in force
    Of course you may run, and they may run their course
    But I’ve learned to fear most what I’d most feared to learn:
    You can turn from the truth but the truth has its turn.
 

In the waiting room of a doctor’s office today I started reading a recent issue of Newsweek, and quickly remembered why I never read Newsweek. An article about a Chinese official who was fired for being unhelpful to victims of an earthquake in his district ended with the following paragraph:

“He wasn’t the only grassroots cadre punished for responding poorly. By June, 15 Sichuan officials had been fired and 13 others disciplined for “doing nothing” (another 50 who’d performed well were promoted). The swift punishments were a reminder of the Communist Party’s keen survival instincts – and of why it has managed to cling to power in China for nearly six decades.

Somehow I suspect that the reporter, Melinda Liu, did not originally end on this note, but rather that Newsweek’s editors realized that readers might somehow get confused by the facts into thinking the Chinese government was actually doing its job, in a way that was responsive to and respectful of its citizens.

Therefore they needed to end the article with a paragraph to remind otherwise impressionable readers that these Chinese are fiendish, dasterdly enemies, inhuman monsters who are only pretending to run a competent government.

Think for a moment how clever this is. Anything the Chinese government might do that is responsible, compassionate, helpful to or respectful of its own people can be used as a weapon of propaganda against it, a way of implying that this is merely a rogue government full of cackling fiends who are most likely rubbing their evil hands together in glee at how they’ve fooled everyone once again by actually being, um, er, competent.

Contrast this with us – the good guys, the actual representative democracy on the block. As our outgoing administration has reminded us, the proper way to show a people that they are free, that this is indeed their country, is by responding to natural disaster with utter incompetence and disdain, by appointing useless political hacks to key high level positions, by letting months go by without responding to disaster in a way that might indicate that your own citizens are entitled to respect, or even to basic services.

I’m not asking all that much here. When it comes to helping our own people, couldn’t we at least do as well as the bad guys?

“Anyone who claims that “24” has promoted torture should also acknowledge that with Dennis Haysbert it cast an African-American president seven years ago. If we’re going to take the blame for Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, I think we should at least get the credit for Obama. It’s the other side of the same coin.” – Howard Gordon, an executive producer of Fox Entertainment’s “24” (as reported in today’s NY Times)

WASHINGTON – Government officials have confirmed the first open and public exchange with an extraterrestrial entity. Sidney Greenblatt, special agent for the FBI’s exo-atmospheric investigations unit, has told this reporter that the visitors are real, they are here, and – after years of stealth observation of our planet from airborne saucer shaped vehicles – they are ready to go public.

“My counterpart in the alien Grobdarian government,” said Mr. Greenblatt, “is a nice fellow named Xlethku Znagflerp. Once you get past the odd fishlike smell and swaying eyestalks, he’s really rather charming.” Agent Greenblatt reports that the Grobdarians were quite excited to see their race represented on the popular TV show “24”, which has apparently become hugely popular back on their home world in Proxima Centauri.

“Mr. Znagflerp told us that Grobdarian viewers were quite pleased to see jack Bauer face off against alien creatures so remarkably like themselves in appearance,” relayed Mr. Greenblatt. “They realize that ’24’ has an unerring ability to predict the future – from our acceptance of the use of torture during interrogation of suspected terrorists to our election of the first U.S. president from a former slave race. Such prophetic ability is highly valued among their people.”

Mr. Greenblatt went on to explain that Grobdarians are by nature a peaceable race, which is why they were initially surprised to be portrayed on the show – in an episode cleverly titled “Illegal Aliens” – as bloodthirsty creatures bent upon the total annihilation of the human species. But they were swayed by the show’s great sense of realism and fine special effects, as well as Keifer Sutherland’s brilliant and nuanced performance, and have now enthusiastically embraced Jack Bauer as an honored enemy.

As this article goes to press, the Grobdarians, eager to play their part in this exciting drama, are hard at work perfecting a weapon that will reduce all carbon-based lifeforms on the planet earth to starch, a popular dessert food among their young. Mr. Znagflerp reports, according to agent Greenblatt, that the Grobdarians’ one regret is that the imminant cessation of all life on our planet will cause the cancellation of their favorite TV show.

And then they will no longer be able to tune in to “24” to find out what’s going to happen next.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” – Winston Churchill, 1947

I was talking with a friend today about the tragedy of countries where a benevolent monarch or dictator – someone good and kind and truly caring of the people – is succeeded by some corrupt idiot who causes untold suffering. I found myself conjecturing that in such situations one of the benefits of family succession from parent to child is that a monarch’s own child is more likely to remain true to the ideals of the original ruler. This might tend to help maintain stability and decent rule for a few generations. But of course – as history consistently shows – sooner or later the wrong descendent ascends to the throne, and then the situation quickly goes to hell.

And so I found myself thinking about Churchill’s famous dictum – something he said, by the way, after he had been voted out of power, and before he had been voted back in again. Our nation has just been through a terrible time – a disastrous war, an erosion of civil liberties, natural disaster met by government incompetence, lack of federal oversight leading to financial meltdown, the list goes on and on.

And yet when push came to shove, we still had the power to throw the bums out – to give somebody else a chance to try another way, for better or worse. This remains our greatest strength, and the greatest legacy bequeathed by the founders of this nation.

With all of the problems we face, it is worth taking at least a moment to give thanks that we have managed to hold on to a system of government that empowers its citizens to give themselves another chance.

When I was a child Mr. Rogers – the host of the wonderful kid’s TV show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” – was the coolest guy in the world.

I remember, when I was just out of college, I had a huge crush on a cute girl named Cara. One day, during one of our many long walks together (which led to nothing, because my crush went only one way), she told me that when she was a little girl she not only watched Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood every day, but she really believed that Mr. Rogers was her boyfriend. I confess a certain schadenfreude in the knowledge that as Cara grew up she would realize that her crush went only went one way. 😉

The really wonderful thing about Fred Rogers is that he really was exactly the way he seemed on TV. He would talk to grown-ups with just the same tone of earnest and serious respect that he used when talking to the young viewers of his show. I remember once seeing him on a talk show (I think it was with David Letterman, but I’m not sure now) and he was exactly the same with this guy in the other chair, while talking in a very learned way about such serious issues as child education, as he had been all those years when talking about King Friday and his puppet friends. Personally, I found this to be incredibly heartening.

My friend Paul used to live in Pittsburgh, back when Fred Rogers still lived in his house just off the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. One day Paul was getting into an elevator with his son Thomas, who was seven years old at the time. The door opened and Fred Rogers walked in, and then it was the three of them.

Paul realized that he had only a limited amount of time – until the elevator doors opened again – to impress his young son with the fact that they were in an elevator with Mr. Rogers. So Paul turned to Mr. Rogers and said, in as casual a voice as he could muster “Nice day, isn’t it?”

According to Paul, Fred Rogers immediately assessed the situation, realized what was going on, and intuited what was being asked of him. Turning to Paul and his young son, he replied “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood.” Then the elevator door opened, and he was gone.

Whereupon Thomas looked up at his dad, eyes wide open with astonishment, and said “Wow, you’re friends with Mr. Rogers?”

That is just so cool.

I was talking with some friends this evening about Google Earth, and we were swapping stories about places around the planet we had “visited”. There is a great temptation to look for the most remote corners of the earth – the city furthest north, the most obscure island, or the most tenacious outpost of civilization in the midst of a vast desert wasteland.

At one point somebody talked about zooming in on the specific street of somebody you know – and I found myself thinking how odd it is that somebody might be out there in celestial cyberspace looking down on me at this very moment. And then I had an even odder thought.

Suppose that every time somebody who is flying around on Google Earth decides to zoom in on where you happen to be, your cellphone would buzz. You would become aware, in a physical way, that somebody is watching. And wouldn’t it be cool if you could then look at your cell phone and see who it is. For all we know, somebody might be writing an application to do this even as we speak.

So be careful – the next time you look in on me on Google Earth, I just might give you a call.

Today I met a fellow traveller – someone who “makes art with math”, as my friend Athomas once put it. I was visiting Microsoft with a group of fellow university folks, and met this guy Frank, who is a Microsoft developer. He started showing me the stuff he’d been working on, like writing a computer program to allow kids to explore the stars in the Universe, and I showed him some of the stuff that I’ve been working on.

I could tell almost the exact moment when eveyone else in the room realized that the two of us had drifted away from the general conversation into our own space, the point when we both started to feel free to use words, phrases and concepts with each other that we know not to use when talking to others.

What’s interesting is that neither of us – or people like us – consider ourselves to be mathematicians, but math is essential to our art. We reluctantly acknowledge that we are artists, but don’t think of ourselves as part of what most people would think of as the “Art world”. We are procedural artists, who like to make things of aesthetic beauty using techniques that arise out of concepts of intellectual beauty. In a way we are fellow travellers, who recognize each other immediately and with a sense of relief, a sense of recognition of somebody else who understands why this is exciting, and why we go about creating things the way that we do.

As we said goodbye, after taking a joyful guided tour of each others’ work, we jokingly agreed that it was nice, at last, to meet somebody else who was normal. In this case, of course, “normal” was a winking code word for something very simple and emphatic, something that everyone experiences at various points in their life: “I recognize you – you are like me.”

I’m typing this while taking a cross-country flight. Three thousand miles in one straight shot.

These periodica plane flights are strange experiences, not really like anything else. They start out (at least in this country) with the bizarre police-state stress test that has now become standard operating procedure. I don’t know anybody who actually believes that this whole taking off shoes and removing belts and laptops thing is more than theatre. Anybody who might actually be interested in causing us harm would have figured out by now how to do it without shoes, belts and water bottles.

Ridiculous as this pageant may be, humor is not an option. If you are foolish enough to say something that could be construed as funny, the rules say that they are supposed to send two muscular individuals in uniforms to put you in handcuffs and an orange jump suit and take you away for rendering.

Perhaps the government is doing this as a kind of stealth public service – a new kind of path to enlightenment. You see, by now we have all learned how to find within ourselves a state of zen-like calm in the face of this whole xray/security show, some inner space of deep stillness within which we can meditate and become uplifted, while removing footwear.

I wonder, now that we are exiting the Bush era, whether they are going to cut back on this Orange Alert performance art and focus on actual threats from terrorists – like the alarming number of commercial shipping containers that slip into our country each day without proper examination.

So far I get the feeling that the incoming government is less invested in figuring out clever ways to make sure we stay scared enough to follow orders unquestioningly.

Or at least I’ll continue to believe that until somebody in the Obama administration warns its critics that people should watch what they say. Remember that one? Just one of so many fond memories of the outgoing administration.

But I digress..

Once you manage to get past the government sponsored wierdness, flight really isn’t that bad. In a way the physical strangeness of it – being strapped into a little seat in a glorified tin can for six hours – is positive. I find (assuming I’ve remembered to bring little snacks and have filled my trusty bottle of water – after passing security, needless to say), that I tune out of everything around me while in flight.

Personally I find that there is something wonderful about having an entire six hours where I can make things on the computer without even the possibility of being on the internet. It’s sort of a mini-vacation from cyberspace.

There’s nothing really like it. Except, of course, for the occasional conversation with a gorgeous TV actress in the next seat…