Ken’s Blog

There are lines.

We don’t always know where they are. We usually don’t even realize they are there. But every once in a while they get damaged, and then we realize that they are the very lines that we use to trace the boundaries of ourselves, and the contours of each other. We often don’t notice when these lines begin to bend. But the moment they are broken, we suddenly see them with stark clarity.

Some years ago a good friend of mine, a very kind and gracious woman, suggested that we have a book club. I thought it was a splendid idea. She suggested we hold it in my apartment. Since my apartment is much bigger than hers, the suggestion made a lot of sense to me. I was looking forward to an opportunity to invite some interesting people over, and to having conversations about some of the great literary works. Or even, occasionally, not so great literary works, just to mix things up a little.

I’m pretty easy going with the whole visitor thing. I have only one rule in my apartment: People need to take off their shoes. I’m pretty sure it’s a legacy from the time when I’d had a girlfriend with a Japanese background. We started the tradition when she moved in, and I continued it after she moved out. I like the idea of the formal separation of inside and outside space.

The first meetings of the book club were interesting. I remember some very intense conversations over Moby Dick. It’s a big and messy book, which swings around in a lot of directions. If you haven’t read it, I can tell you that it’s far more than just a tale of poor obessed Ahab. We had great debates about just what Melville was up to.

As time went on, the cast of characters of the club changed – new people came in, old people dropped out. My apartment became a kind of ritual gathering place, a backdrop that people took for granted. They would come in, take their shoes off, array themselves about the couch and chairs, and take turns holding forth on whatever book we’d all just read the week before. In most peoples’ minds the apartment was, I think, simply the place where they went for the book club. In the evolving culture of the group, the notion that somebody actually lived there seemed to grow abstract.

None of which bothered me, at least on a conscious level. I liked and trusted my friend, the one who had started the book club, and so I sort of mentally tuned out the occasional rough or quirky characters who would show up in the mix from time to time. This went on for quite a few months, and I think I just integrated the weirdness of it all into my life. It became something I stopped thinking about consciously, like a strange street sculpture or boarded-up old storefront that you walk past every day without really seeing anymore.

Then one day a man came to the meeting who had never before attended. When somebody told him he was supposed to take off his boots (it wasn’t me – interestingly, it was never me after the first few meetings), he just looked at them like they were crazy. “That’s ridiculous,” he said in an insulted tone, and went to take his seat in the living room.

At that moment something in me woke up – suddenly, forcefully. That was the last day the book club ever met in my apartment. I told my friend that I was dropping out of the club. I think I told her that I simply had no time, had become too busy, something gracefully vague and suitably delicate.

I have no idea whether she continued the book club elsewhere. I never asked her.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta take a break and post something completely silly. Sorry folks, but sometimes you just gotta… 🙂

Speaking of digital characters, I guess you could say that the role of Thing in The Addams Family represents the first example of an entirely digital character on television. And that was way back in 1964! I mean, it’s not his fault that we’ve changed the definition of “digital” in the last forty four years.

And I guess you could also say, by the same token, that the Golem in ancient Jewish folklore was the first character who ever got clay feet.

Eve was the first woman who ever had an Adam’s apple.

Whereas Adam was the first man who ever raised Cain.

Cain himself was the first character who ever did something not because he was able to, but because he wasn’t Abel.

Meanwhile, in another pantheon, Samson was the first performer ever to bring down the house.

And Narcissus was the first character who was really into self-reflection.

Midas was the first character who turned out to be a real ass (although Bottom and Pinocchio both eventually continued this proud tradition).

But Echo has them all beat: she was the first character ever to go to pieces just because of a critical Pan.

Hmm, I may have just created a new (and entirely unnecessary, I hasten to add) genre of bad jokes. Can anybody think of any more of these?

In a computer game or on-line virtual world, an “Avatar” is a representation of you. For example, Mario and Lara Croft are avatars, because they are supposed to be you in the game world – on a psychological level the idea is that they are doing what you would do if you were a mustachioed plumber or a superhero chick in each game’s respective fantasy world.

This is in contrast to a “Non-player character”, which simulates other people in the fantasy world. Like all those nice people you run over with your car (or who get out of the way just in time) in Grand Theft Auto. Or the undead fiends who run at you and try to eat you before you blow them away in Doom and its many progeny. Those are all NPC’s. You don’t control them because they are not representations of you.

Avatars – representions in a game of oneself – are powerful, but I’ve always found them to be a bit problematic. There is something uncanny about them. Yes, I understand that is supposed to be “me” in the computer, but it’s also a thing that’s clearly not alive – in some ways it’s more like the little car or thimble that you march around a Monopoly board than like a representation of self.

I got into a conversation today about what would be the perfect avatar. I mean in an ideal virtual world in which there were no technology limitations. Let’s say it’s fifty years in the future – the year 2058 – and you are playing a computer game. By then games will have moved way beyond the technical hurdles of today, such as realistic simulation of human movement, or accurate speech recognition. In this future game world, what should your game avatar be like?

I would argue that the ideal is what you’d get if you had an actual trained actor – a real human being – there in your computer. The actor could have super powers, if that’s what the game called for, but the important thing is that he/she would be able take stage directions flawlessly.

For example, if I’m racing through the city of Metropolis, in the middle of chasing after Bizarro Superman, and then I realize that it’s getting late, and that I have to get to the bank vault before it closes to retrieve my stash of purple Kryptonite, I would probably want my avatar to look at his watch with concern, and convincingly portray somebody who is genuinely worried that he might not make it to the bank on time.

Today’s avatars do nothing like this. They will do what you tell them to, but they never convincingly express an impression of humanity, a sense that “this is me in this game world, feeling all of the feelings I would feel at this point”.

I’m not suggesting that we will get to the point where avatars will become indistinguishable from real people. What I’m saying is that as a design target, as something to shoot for while we continue to develop these curious virtual creatures, the figure we should keep in mind to guide us is a real person – a trained actor – trying their best to follow our narrative direction while expressing the appropriate emotions.

When I am able to buy into my avatar’s performance – his performance as me – the way I now suspend my disbelief while watching a great actor in a movie, then I think games will start to engage us and to move us in new and far more powerful ways.

Democracy works in many ways, some of them sillier than others. Today my friend Cynthia sent me the following link to a musical comedy written and performed by Jack Black, John C. Reilly and friends, a little bit of protest theatre called:

Prop 8: The Musical

 

Whatever your views on this issue, you might appreciate the sheer nuttiness of the venture. Rather than march in the streets, hurl accusations, shout angry slogans or call for boycotts of their cultural opposites, these people have chosen to put on funny costumes, find a willing orchestra, and do a little song and dance.

Imagine if the world worked this day. If rather than brutally mowing down innocent civilians with semi-automatic weapons in the streets of Mumbai, Muslim terrorists had to form a kickline and sing their protests along the street, while dodging motorcycle rickshaws. Or if American soldiers in Iraq and their Shia insurgent enemy were required to reenact the Sharks/Jets song-and-dance from “West Side Story”.

Call me crazy, but I think Jack Black and his friends might just be on to something here.

Has anybody noticed the similarity between Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Russell Crowe’s Maximus in “Gladiator”? In a sense they are selling the same soap: You’ve got a brooding, tragic guy, who is clearly a man’s man. Men respect him, women draw to him like flies. He’s a guy who understands that he has responsibilities, a code of honor he must live by. But at heart he’s really good at one thing: Killing people. Not just killing people, but killing lots and lots of people. He kills efficiently, balletically, forehand, backhand, left and right. He could probably kill just fine with his eyes closed. It’s what he does.

But so far we’re describing lots of action heroes. What sets these two apart, what makes them brothers under the skin, is that both Craig’s and Crowe’s action heroes are very sorrowful that they have to kill all those people. A lot of time is spent in both movies on loving closeups of the hero’s face, brooding, looking inward, searching his tormented soul, a soul which is tough on the outside but tender as a little fluffy bunny on the inside. Because he feels really sad that he needs to spend the rest of the time wielding a big weapon, like a Ninja from hell, causing buckets of blood to spurt from the freshly dismembered bodies of his opponents. Really, really sad.

I think we’re supposed to see the poetry within the wistful, ruefully contemplative eyes of these two men. We’re supposed to feel their pain. And it’s important that we do. Because if we can all get together and feel their pain, then we will realize that deep down they are not killers of countless people, on a scale so large that it borders on the obscene. No, we can forget about the body count, the holes through bleeding torsos, the body parts flying off in all directions, that hired guard unlucky enough to work for the wrong side who ends up blinded, convulsing, screaming in agony and maimed for life because in one scene he happened to be in our hero’s way.

Instead we remember that melancholy look in the hero’s eyes, his poetically regretful gaze, his soft inward sigh at the burden he must carry. And we realize that it’s ok, that we don’t need to worry about all of those casually severed body parts and brutally hacked off limbs.

Because this is the good guy.

I got into a conversation yesterday about amoebae, in which I confessed to having always been fascinated by these little critters. For one thing, an amoeba multiplies by dividing, which appeals to the punster mathematician in me. For another, all members of an amoeba species have the same genetic makeup. After all, when two amoebae split, they each retain the original DNA.

And this last point leads to another wonderful paradoxical question: Is a species of amoebae a collection of some of the world’s tiniest animals, or is it actually a single geographically distributed individual, which would make it one of the world’s largest individual creatures on earth?

I was inspired by these musings to try to make an animated amoeba. Nothing like the real one, which is all gnarly with weird little textured spots, but rather a sort of cartoon version, an impression of an amoeba to match the not very accurate image of an amoeba that I’ve carried around in my head since I was about seven years old.

In my typical fashion, I made my amoeba friend last night as a Java applet. If you have a Java-enabled Web browser, you can play with it for yourself. It just kind of hangs out in its space, until you drag your mouse near it, and then it tries to chase your mouse cursor.

I have a sort of “amoeba-cam” trained on it, a camera that is always centered on the amoeba. Otherwise it might just ooze right out of the applet frame and devastate the countryside.

You can play with my new little friend here.

He sediment a topiary
Tried alluviated, vary
Islip agent, Cyprus flu
No friend me – benighted too
Nicked the center, pressed aboard
Canned to go and in accord
Wended frame deliberant
All as many ready spent
Novel sand, or so we go
Frighted may as maybe so
Try to home despairing how
Crisp the sniper, catch the cow
    None descend as freight is why
    Bar as later said, now die

 

Or at least, that was my impression of Charlie Kaufman’s fun new movie. I hope this makes everything clear.

Speaking of being surprised … not all that long ago I was at a National Science Foundation workshop with about fifty educators – mostly educators from various universities around the U.S. In one of the talks the speaker asked who among us uses the Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, about fifty hands went up. As we all know, everyone uses the Wikipedia.

But then the speaker asked who has edited an article in the Wikipedia. I put my hand up, not really thinking about it. And then after a moment I realized that only two of us in the room had our hands up. She and I looked at each other – we, apparently, were unusual.

So what’s up with this? Why is it that in a room of highly educated people – people who teach our college and graduate students – almost none have ever edited an article on Wikipedia, a resource that they themselves use every day? I would have asked them directly, but I couldn’t figure out a suitably non-confrontational way to frame the question.

It seems to me like the most natural thing in the world: If I happen to see an error I fix it, just to make it a little better for the next reader. It’s very easy to do, and it seems like the right way to treat a common resource.

Do I just have a fundamentally different view of the Wikipedia than most people?

In his comment on my Nov 28 post, Ross made the following sensible suggestion:

I boil it down to one question: can you list three cogent pros/cons for each candidate? If the answer is “no”, then you’ve fed for too long at the trough of Hannity or Olbermann. If the answer is “yes”, then let’s talk.

After reading this, I discussed it with somebody I know who tends to be quite levelheaded, a brilliant man whose opinions I generally respect quite a lot. He seemed to agree with Ross’s suggestion, until I said “for example, it would be interesting to try to come up with three cogent reasons why John McCain might have been a good candidate to vote for.” In about ten seconds, my conversant went into what can only be described as a controlled rage, incensed at the very suggestion that there could be a “cogent argument” for McCain, and clearly quite annoyed at me for proposing such a thing.

I tried to tell him that if you’re going to sway people who are on the fence on an issue, you need to understand what parts of the opposing arguments they are buying into, at least well enough to counter those arguments. But he was no longer listening. Within about thirty seconds he had angrily fled the room.

I was surprised, to say the least. I am sticking to my guns on this one – I might strongly disagree with the opinions of one hundred million of my fellow citizens, but I’m not willing to simply – or dismissively – label them all as deluded idiots. Some of these people are thoughtful, intelligent individuals, however much I may disagree with theim. I think I need to understand how they reached their conclusions, even if only to understand my own conclusions with greater clarity and perspective.

Are there really so few of us who are willing to reach across the aisle?

This being Thanksgiving weekend, tradition dictated that we take my nephews to a truly silly action movie. The film du jour is the new Bond flick – “Quantum of Solice”. It’s mostly an excuse to see a gun-wielding Daniel Craig, as well as an army of stunt doubles computer graphic stand-ins, run, jump, leap from burning building to speeding boat to flying plane to swinging girder to whatever fast-moving object looks really cool in the shot. Nothing else in the movie really matters, but then, nothing else in the movie is really supposed to matter. Yes, of course various bad guys and beautiful women get killed and slept with (actually, only the women get slept with – the bad guys just get killed), but that’s all just a kind of background window dressing for the real action: watching James Bond do all these amazing feats of running, leaping, etc., while somehow managing to not drop his gun.

It all worked splendidly for my nephews, and for me as well, except for one place in the movie. There was a scene where James and his beautiful yet mysterious lady of the moment are falling out of an airplane, one parachute pack between them. There’s a tense moment when they try to reach each other while plunging through the air, and then – just in time – they come together, the chute opens, and they land without getting smashed like bugs.

The problem for me is that, unlike just about everybody in the targeted audience, I’ve actually been skydiving. So unfortunately I know first-hand that if you’re not around ten thousand feet up in the air when you pull the chord to open the chute, you’re going to get squashed like a bug anyway. In the movie they were about twelve feet in the air when the chute opened. The odd thing about this for me was the realization that if I had not actually ever been skydiving, this entire sequence would have worked perfectly for me. I wouldn’t have given this flagrant violation of the known laws of physics a second thought. “It’s James Bond,” I probably would have told myself. “Of course he can land safely in a parachute that has just opened a mere twelve feet off the ground.”

And of course that realization calls into question all the other parts of the fantasy – the jumping in and out of speeding boats, the falling onto cars from the top of a building, the getting blown out of a fiery bad-guy hotel just as it’s about to explode. Maybe even James Bond couldn’t do such things, I start to wonder, and I start to feel the entire edifice of my willing suspension of disbelief beginning to crumble.

And then I remember the most important thing that makes it all ok: It’s only a movie.