Ken's Blog

There is something about Mother’s Day that makes it completely unlike other holidays. It has a particular loveliness to it, a personal resonance, that is not quite like anything else. This year I journeyed more than sixteen hours non-stop to see my mom, traversing a significant portion of the globe along the way by a combination of two flights, a train, two car rides, a bus, and a lot of walking, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do so.

There are theories in psychology that suggest that many of the most important aspects of our individuality are formed out of our relationship with out mother — because this is the relationship we form when our mind is at its youngest and most protean. Long before we are old enough to think “rationally”, we try to build a model of what our mother expects. In consequence, each individual’s personality splits, to some extent, into one self that is always putting on show for this all powerful being, and another self that harbors a secret nature, outside of the demands of connecting to another human being. It is the goal of much therapy to help these two selves — so different from each other — to work together in some reasonable way.

By the age of three — according to such theories — one’s mother develops into this strangely dual being. She is all powerful, simultaneously loved and feared, for her ability to approve our essential soundness. Yet she also represents that fact that all people are apart, on some level unknowable to each other. The striving to connect, despite the fear and the knowledge of how great is the gulf between us, becomes, as we grow older, an essential part of the bittersweet beauty of human existence.

Of course we rarely think about these conflicts on a conscious level. We integrate them, make them part of ourselves. Long before we reach adulthood, most of us have taken great steps to master these struggles, or at least to incorporate them usefully into our lives, or relationships, our art.

So on Mother’s day, we honor the connection with this person who has had such a profound effect upon our essential nature, but in a way that is usually simple, and rather sweet. In my case, it was really about showing up. I brought my mom flowers, and she made me dinner, and all was right with the world.

Continuing the theme from yesterday…

At some point technology will be able to accurately digitize an actor’s performance and then play it back, either with faithful reproduction of appearance or with any modification desired. Right now this process is rather expensive, using wonderful technology developed by Paul Debevec and others. Yet Moore’s Law suggests that eventually the process will become inexpensive — less expensive than worrying about lighting and camera placement on set.

In other words, George Clooney will be able to just show up in his street clothes, do the scene against a rough projected digital backdrop (to provide him with context and eye-line cues), and know that niceties such as lighting, make-up, costumes, camera placement and final set dressing will all be done in a computer during post-production. Not only that, but Paul Giamatti will be able to play that same scene, mimicking Clooney’s performance. If he does a good enough job in his acting, you might not be able to tell which was the real Mr. Clooney.

And sooner or later none of this will require millions of dollars of equipment. Anyone with enough money to afford a laptop computer will have all the equipment they need to create what is today considered a high quality Hollywood film. Of course they will still need the talent to provide script, acting, editing and post-production decisions about lighting and camera work, but it no longer becomes a question of money, only of talent.

It might still cost you a lot of money to license George Clooney’s likeness, but if enough people license that likeness, the cost per unit license might become surprisingly small (much like the cost of licensing the sampled sound of a very good Steinway Grand). At that point we’ll start seeing the economics of movies really start to change. In particular, big studios will no longer be able to dictate what movies can get made, any more than they can now dictate what books get written.

Today I participated in a very interesting discussion about “Virtual Humans”. People were talking about the fact that computer graphic representations of people are getting near the point when an actor will be able to don “digital makeup” and nobody will be able to distinguish the synthetic result, rendered on a computer, from an actual image of a physical person, shot with a conventional movie camera.

When that happens, of course it will free actors from the accidents of physical appearance. For example, a brilliant but not “leading man” actor like Paul Giamatti, might be able to take on the kind of role that had previously gone only to Brad Pitt or George Clooney. You get the idea.

By the way, the real technical bottleneck to this scenario becoming a pervasive reality won’t be the proper capture of physical appearance per se, but rather the proper capture of all the tiny facial movements — particularly around the eyes and mouth — that an actor uses to convey emotion. Today’s best technology can already come remarkably close to making “digital make-up” look quite convincing. But once an actor’s face starts to move, things begin to slip. Current technology can get almost all of it, but almost all is not quite enough when you’re talking about capturing the subtleties of emotion.

There is only one time in my life when I went to a movie theatre, saw a film, and had the experience afterward that absolutely nobody wanted to leave the movie theatre afterward. And that is when I saw Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys”. The movie ended, the credits rolled, and people simply didn’t leave. Rather, they gathered in the lobby, and proceeded to have intense conversations about what they had just seen.

It was interesting to observe, and I can’t recall ever seeing quite the same reaction to any other film. Nobody wanted to step out of the lobby and into the street, because that would have signaled the end of the experience. Instead, we stood huddling in groups of four or six, and kept talking about the movie, arguing back and forth about the theme, the ending, what it all might have meant.

You could argue that, by some measure, this is the sign of a very good movie.

The other day I was admiring the array of books on a friend’s bookshelf, and suddenly it occurred to me that bookshelves might be an endangered species. If everyone were to switch over to eBooks, then the bookshelf as we know it might cease to exist.

I don’t believe that people will stop wanting to read old fashioned books. Rather, my worry is that the economic forces that allow the book to be a relatively mass produced item might shift radically, converting the bound paper book from a staple of our economy to an arcane object, a highly expensive toy for the rich.

If this happens, then the bookshelf selection as a form of self-expression will cease to become a meaningful part of our culture. Sure, there will continue to be multimillionaires who keep such things, but the general discourse will gradually move elsewhere.

If this should happen, will there be anything in one’s house that reflects one’s reading taste? Will there be a large display of titles that visitors can peruse, proudly mounted on a living room wall, that lets one’s guests choose what to load onto one of the eBook readers strewn about the house?

If bookshelves should disappear from our homes (presumably replaced by the ever more enormous screens of our flat TVs), I for one would be very sad.

Today I saw a wonderful talk about how the anatomical structure of the dragons in the animated Dreamworks film “How to Train your Dragon”. The talk was given by Stuart Sumida, who is a paleontologist and anatomy specialist. Animation studios turn to him when faced with tough questions like how to design a plausible dragon.

The last question from the audience was about whether there are any animals in real life with both wings and four legs (like the dragon Toothless in the film). Dr. Sumida first pointed out that the answer is certainly yes, in the insect world. But in the world of mammals and their cousins (like birds and pterodactyls) the answer is no. Wings are an adaptation of forelimbs. So birds, bats and pterosaurs all have just two wings and two hindlegs. All winged vertebrates evolved as variations of the same four limbed structure.

At which point it occurred to me, why don’t we see dragons as monstrous, the way we see, say, space aliens? After all, dragons like Toothless breaking one of the fundamental constraints of creatures near to us in the evolutionary graph — that they have four limbs:

Dragons are not the only example of this. We don’t run screaming from pictures of Pegasus, the winged horse from Greek mythology:

Similarly, most people find centaurs to be distinctly attractive. Heroic even:

So what’s going on here? Logic tells me that anything with six limbs growing out of its spinal cord should fall squarely into Freud’s theory of the uncanny. It should freak the hell out of us. And yet we are charmed by distinctly the unatomical bodies of our various mythical six limbed friends.

I find this very mysterious.

Hands clutch close upon the throat of fate.
She gasps in one expired breath, and at last
Utters the curse that will change the course of nations.
There are secrets here indeed, dark tales untold.
They who have been warned should have known.
Perhaps it would have been better if nothing
had ever been revealed, if that first moment
Had never arrived.

And yet, here we are. How can you turn back the tide
Of generations reaching for fulfillment, millions of voices
Demanding to be heard? Perhaps there is not justice,
No power beyond, nothing but the endless sound of awakening.
For what are we but their progeny, their voice willed into being?
If I have ever loved, if any one of us has ever loved, is this not merely
The lightning struck down from a fate beyond our reckoning?

Only one who has seen, has held witness, has heard
In the dying sight of that single moment,
Can speak of the unbearable sorrow of those voices,
That within their darkness enfold the light of revelation.

Shifting away from gently ironic discussions of deliberate political amnesia, today I celebrate something apparently quite the opposite — intercultural connectedness.

This evening I was taken by some wonderful friends to see “The Marriage of Figaro”. It is one of my favorite operas, and this was a lovely production all around. As I sat there in the Stuttgart opera house, letting the sheer joy and intricate brilliance of Mozart’s music wash over me, it occurred to me that here was true cultural cross-pollination at work. I, an American, was in a German opera house, listening to music composed by an Austrian, set to a libretto written in Italian, adapted from a French play. There is something immensely satisfying about so many cultures meshing together to create such a perfect experience.^†

Ironically, “The Marriage of Figaro” is in its way actually an act of deliberate political amnesia. Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto was an adaptation of a highly political play by Beaumarchais which was essentially an incisive indictment of the nobility. The original play was at first banned by King Louis XVI, although it was finally shown, to universal acclaim, after Marie-Antoinette championed it. Little did the arts-loving queen suspect that only a few years later criticism of the nobility in France would become considerably more, ah, incisive.

Mozart and Da Ponte knew that the odds of getting an opera on such a delicate subject approved (and paid for) by Emperor Joseph II of Austria was just about nil. So Da Ponte converted all of the speeches criticizing royalty into arias that complain about fickle lovers. The result certainly stands on its own terms, but Beaumarchais, being french, might very well have cried Mayday. 🙂

† Thanks Guzman!

May day has multiple meanings here in Germany where I am visiting. There is the traditional meaning of the celebration of Spring (whence “around the may pole”). It is also the time of the beer fest, which is a kind of cousin to Ockoberfest, with the key and all-important difference that in this festival everyone drinks too much beer in May, as opposed to drinking too much beer in October — a very important distinction indeed.

In addition, May first is the day they celebrate worker’s rights throughout Europe. We don’t have this kind of thing in the U.S. Where I come from the idea that one should celebrate the solidarity of common working men and women, those ordinary citizens who put in a day’s work for a day’s pay, would be seen as a form of Communism. To view the people who sweat day in and day out to make a country function as heroic figures would, in America, be pretty much tantamount to hoisting a red flag and handing over the keys of the country to Josef Stalin. As Sarah Palin would say, “You betcha.”

In the U.S. we’ve always had a problematic relationship with unions, with collective bargaining, with the whole idea that workers should have the right to organize and look out for each other, and that companies might consequently benefit from a situation in which their employees feel that they are all protected by a uniform code of justice. In America that’s considered Commie talk. But this side of the Atlantic it seems to be perfectly normal. On May day, all the politicians here, of every political stripe, make speeches declaring their fervent and undying belief in the humble Worker. It’s actually rather sweet.

Yet more than any of this, I learned that May day has yet another meaning here in Stuttgart, one that is higher, more exalted, more fervently worshiped and followed than all of these other meanings. It is the thing that can get huge throngs of people out in the streets, to worship something that really matters, to forget their daily troubles and put aside this sacred day for something truly important.

I’m speaking, of course, of the May 1 as the day when the local regional team here in Stuttgart plays its opponent in soccer.

At last the weary travellers, now five in number, came to the end of the long tunnel. They had finally traversed the great wall.

Jenny gasped at what she saw. For stretched out before them under the emerald sky, as far as the eye could see, was a city of gold.

“Somewhere here,” she told her companions, “I will find her”.

Charlie turned to her in wonder. “You mean the one who sleeps?” he asked.

The others looked him. “What do you know?” Jenny asked.

He shook his head. “I get it now. You’re here to fulfill the prophecy. All I know is it’s been a long time since she came, since … since they took her. There, in the castle.” They looked to where he was pointing and saw that there was a single tall golden spire, graceful and gleaming, that rose above the skyline.

“Won’t be easy,” he continued. “At least not according to the prophecy. They say that all the world will change when Amelia awakes.”

Jenny and Josh looked at each other. She repeated the words to herself. “When Amelia awakes.”

End of Volume One

The book will go on haitus, and will return soon.