Ken’s Blog

Recently I have been thinking about the doctrine of “family values”, heavily promoted in parts of the U.S., that elevates the family unit above individual choice. I had always assumed that this doctrine was mainly a way of expressing disapproval of people with certain sexual orientations, or of poor women who get abortions (rich women will always be able to get abortions. The “Right To Life” legislation proposed by those who promote “family values” would, practically speaking, only affect women who have few resources).

But recently my views have been changing as to this doctrine’s real significance, ever since I had a debate over lunch with a conservative friend on the subject of compulsory voting. In some other countries, including Brazil and Iceland, you aren’t given the option not to vote. If you don’t vote, you have to pay a fine.

I argued that this would be good policy for our country. He dismissed the idea out of hand. After all, he argued, aren’t you just adding noise to the system by having people show up at the pollls who don’t give a damn?

After I’d had some time to mull over his answer, I got to thinking about the laws in Illinois and some other parts of this country that bend over backwards to make it more difficult for poor people to vote. And then I realized that (although he didn’t say it, and I’m guessing he never would), he was talking about poor people.

There is a big gap in our nation between the theory and practice of universal suffrage – in theory everybody could vote, but in practice we often make it rather difficult for poor people to vote: They need to take time off from work, without a culture that encourages employers to give time off, and then they need to take the bus to an often far-away voting place. On top of that, there are often onerous requirements for ID, which then can’t be challenged without taking another day off from work, and thereby running the risk of getting fired.

And that’s what made me realized that I when I was talking to my friend about compulsory voting, I had really been thinking mostly about the effect it might have on poor children. Let’s say you’re a poor kid, and your parents have given up – they don’t bother to vote, since they don’t believe that there is any point in their participating in a system that is so slanted against them.

In my view of what this country should and could be, we would reach out to that child, and tell her that every generation provides a new opportunity to get it right, to be a better democracy. Compulsory voting would help with this. In order to get elected, politicians would be forced to pay more attention to the opinions of young people who have grown up poor.

That’s when I started rethinking the effects of “family values”. The very phrase suggests that the natural unit in our society is not the individual but the family. And that distinction ties in with this other issue, the one of universal suffrage.

In some societies, citizens look at children from poor families and are appalled that those children might not get the same health and education advantages as children from better off families. If only for reasons of pure self-interest, one would think it would be logical for a society to do its best to nurture all potential new talent, to find its next Einsteins, Edisons, Marie Curies, wherever they may be. Once you let a child grow up with inadequate education and health care, there’s a really good chance you’ve doomed that child to mediocrity as an adult.

But of course if you are among the better off in society, there is a downside to nurturing the potential of poor children: those children might grow up to compete in the marketplace with your own child. And here is where the doctrine of “family values” seems to take on another aspect: It allows its proponents to pay lip service to upward mobility, while making sure the playing field remains unlevel.

After all, if we define the societal unit as the family, not the individual, and if we’ve given up on the parents, then substandard education and health care for a child in that family is, by definition, not society’s problem. It’s God’s will, the “sins” of the fathers, in the purest Calvinist sense: Children of poor parents are supposed to be poor. After all, since the family is sacred, placing individual potential over the sanctity of the family unit would be, uh, immoral.

My screenwriter friend Andy and I were talking yesterday about story-as-game – the topic that I touched on in my January 9th post Playing “Hack the Character”. Andy mentioned that even when you read a book, you still have that choice about when to turn the page. You can read slowly and linger over the cadence of the words, or you can flip pages rapidly, racing through the story.

I found myself wondering what would be an analogous choice for interactive media. One possibility presents itself: The interactive narrative that gives you just two choices: (i) continue on with the current scene, or (ii) move on to the next scene.

Let’s define “scene” as continuous action: The characters inhabit continuous space and time. Within a scene, characters may leave or enter the action, or may continuously wander from one location to another, but they do it while you watch. A different scene is defined as a discontinous break in time or place.

The general idea is that while you choose to continue watching a scene, you are expressing interest in a particular window into the story world: These characters at this place and time. When you switch scenes, you are choosing to jump to a different window into the evolving plot and character arcs (eg: “Earlier the previous evening” or “Meanwhile, somewhere in New Jersey”).

Of course the content would need to be designed with this mutable quality built in. A scene would need to make sense whether it goes on for one page or twenty. Writing this way would be tricky – but I don’t think impossible.

Also, the choice of how long to let a scene run would influence what comes next. It might not be desirable to repeat information in a later scene that was already revealed in a long earlier scene.

This style of interaction roughly corresponds to looking at a narrative as a fractal that can be viewed at various levels of detail. To let a scene go on longer is to expand the fractal, delving deeper into one place/time in the story world.

A new month, and as it happens, a Friday. This week our epic poem takes an ominous turn:

Moments may sway us, but kisses betray us, 
For fate won't obey us, and oft goes astray

Twas fateful that meeting, two hearts fiercely beating
But alas, joy is fleeting when stolen away

In a turn most appalling the darkness came calling
For a curse was befalling, a thing of their fears

And a figure demonic - it was almost iconic -
In voice monotonic said: "Seventeen years!"

It was all rather vexing, and sorely perplexing,
This grim specter hexing their love most sublime

"What be you?" they wondered, then the night air was sundered
As the dark figure thundered: "The demon - of Time!"

Today I am in Los Angeles.

It always amazes me how different L.A. is from New York. This place is all about beach, ocean, and driving everywhere, whereas New York is about dressing up for the theatre and people walking. Which reminds me of the time I spent a few years back doing research in Brazil, where the lines are drawn differently. Rio de Janeirso is all about beach, ocean and people walking, whereas Sao Paulo is about dressing up for the theatre and driving everywhere. The differences are just as extreme, but along different dimensions, if you see what I mean.

But one thing Rio/Sao Paulo has in common with NY/LA is the intense rivalry between the two respective cities. The Cariocas in Rio were always really nice, but they spent a lot of time telling me how awful the Paulistas were. And sure enough, Paulistas were really nice too, but they always made sure to warn me about those awful Cariocas.

At one point in my stay, my colleague Athomas flew down from New York to join in the research. After spending time in both Rio and Sao Paulo, he agreed with me that people in both cities were really nice. But then one day there was a lunch meeting where everyone was, yet again, complaining about those annoying people in the other city. Fiinally Athomas blurted out: “Oh I get it! It’s just like New York versus Los Angeles. But with one difference.”

Everybody got really quiet. And then somebody asked him what was the difference. Athomas just shrugged and said “Well, L.A. sucks.”

A first blog is like your first chemistry set, with all kinds of cool test tubes and little screw-top jars containing odd looking powders with funny names. Once you’ve set everything up in your parents’ basement, you can mix things any way you like. Put a little of this white powder into water and it turns bright blue, try the same thing with that yellow powder and a crystal starts to grow, right there in the Pyrex beaker!

When I start a blog post I don’t always know exactly what kinds of chemicals I’m mixing together. Two days ago I started talking about Persepolis and by the time I was done the post was fairly exploding with unresolved anger about the World Trade Center bombing. Here I was, thinking I was going to grow a nice crystal or maybe get a puff of smoke from my little mixture, and I ended up blowing up a shelf and half of the basement wall.

I imagine that some of you who’ve been reading this blog were not ready for the blast. When you first got to the site that day, you were probably thinking “hmm, I wonder what Ken’s cooking up in his laboratory today.” But rather than a cool little green flame over the bunsen burner, you ended up getting your eyebrows singed off. Well, sorry about that. I guess that’s how science works. I would just like to say to readers that I sincerely apologize for any and all missing eyebrows, and will promise to replace all singed articles of clothing and any cracked or broken eyeglass frames.

Now back to the lab. There’s this interesting mixture of sulfur and tartaric acid I’ve been meaning to try out…

Last night I had a dream in which a friend of mine did something surprising. So surprising that I awoke in the middle of the night, startled, and was left to lie in bed pondering the meaning of what I had just witnessed. If you have a dream in which a friend of yours does something that you don’t think she is likely to do in your waking life, is that entirely about you, or is it also in some way about your friend?

The question is worth asking because there is, presumably, some level on which the people near to us have insights into us, can see things about us that we ourselves are not ready to accept. That is one of the reasons we value our friends. So it’s not completely out of bounds to think that perhaps my subconscious perceptions, while freely associating, had seen into her subconscious motivations.

On the other hand, there is an element of projection in every relationship. It could be that I had witnessed nothing but an illusion, a shadow cast not by my friend’s true self but by my own internal beliefs and needs.

I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe it will come to me in a dream.

We are so used to the two worlds. One is the world we inhabit every day, where we wake up, brush our teeth, forget someone’s birthday, try to stretch a paycheck. The other world is the one we create through the sum total of our collective fantasies, where Superman flies, Harry earns his wand, and E.T. is the best friend a kid could ever want. Each of these two worlds operates by very specific rules, and there is an imperative, understood by all but the youngest children, to keep them separate.

I remember many years ago watching E.T. for the first time, and thinking about how unsympathetic was Peter Coyote’s character – the man with the keys, representing the shadowy forces of the government, who wants only to kill the alien and dissect it. We the audience felt so superior to that guy – we knew better, for E.T. was our friend.

But that’s because it was all happening in that other world. Suppose an E.T. had landed for real, in this world. We would suddenly need to deal with the possibility that the Alien, the unknown intruder, could do us harm. Wouldn’t we all be siding with that guy with the keys? Different world, different rules.

Last night I saw Persepolis, a sad and beautiful animated tale told from the point of view of a girl who was forced to witness the Iran she knew, an entire culture and way of life, be destroyed before her eyes, crushed out of existence by the twin pressures of war and revolution.

And I found myself thinking that perhaps one of the most disturbing things about war, in addition to the sudden loss of precious lives, real people gone in an instant, is the way it defies our reason by forcing the two worlds together. The unbelievable actually happens, walks right through your front door and sits down at your kitchen table. To me the truly moving thing about Persepolis is the way the main character gradually faces down that catastrophic rupture, seeks out and eventually finds a reality she can hold onto, regains her sanity and her life, despite all that she and her country have been through.

Maybe it’s not coincidence that fear of this collision between the ordinary and the fantastic has become a mainstay of modern horror stories. It used to be that horror stories took place in forbiddingly gothic settings, a blackened heath or an ancient crypt, the old abandoned house at the end of the lane with creaky doors and a certain dark cellar.

But in the last half century the horror story has relocated to the most prosaic of settings. Hence The Birds, Rosemary’s Baby, almost anything by Stephen King, Ringu. That creature from rotting nightmares, come to feed upon our deepest fears, now shows up in the middle of morning breakfast, toast and orange juice on the table, sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window, to the sound of the neighbor’s lawn mower ringing in our ears.

Maybe this trend, the popularity of post-gothic horror, has indeed been a response to modern warfare, to the way the bright shining future promised by science and enlightenment has a disturbing tendency to turn on its masters. Not just the atomic bomb, but so many of modernity’s bastard children. The way the Nazis looked so crisp in their designer uniforms, their methods clean and antiseptic, their engineering impeccable. The horror emerging from the ordinary.

One of the many horrifying aspects of the attack in New York in September of 2001 was that it had that quality whereby the ordinary – our comfortably familiar modern world – collides with the unbelievable. A horror story – something we would expect to see in a matinee with popcorn and the extra large coke – had crossed over, was really happening. And the horror wasn’t built from vampires and mummies, but from jetliners and skyscrapers, people at work in their business suits, an autumn morning in the most up to the minute and cosmopolitan of cities.

Suddenly that thick layer of protection, the safe distance of stories, the thing that lets us love E.T. because he is not real, or Harry Potter because we’re not really Muggles and there’s no such thing as Valdemort, was gone in a moment.

And so our nation went mad.

But not so much those of us who were actually there, who live here in New York. Yes, we grieved, we were psychologically wounded, we walked around for months like somebody had smacked each of us upside the head with a two by four. But at the same time we could smell that peculiar acrid odor hanging in the air every day for months, wafting up from downtown. Most of us knew somebody who had been lost, and there was nothing sensational or jingoistic about coming to grips with those deaths.

For us it seemed less like a monster out of some horror movie blundering off the screen than it must have seemed to the rest of the country. There were just so many small telling details, so much that tied it all back to real life, this street, that coffee shop. It was grim, but it was real.

My aunt was working across the street from the towers that morning. Two years later, after she’d had time to process the events of that day, she told us how she had heard the thud of the bodies as they fell around her. That was personal horror, the actual reality that has nothing to do with fantasy at all, the part they don’t talk about on TV.

New Yorkers could understand why “Ground Zero” became a tourist destination, but we had no interest in going there, taking pictures, trying to be part of it. It just made us sad, and mostly we wanted to stay out of the way of the people working to clear the debris.

And maybe that’s why, when the nation’s anger turned into a war against an oddly chosen enemy, when talk was rife with “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, we didn’t follow along. We didn’t need to try to save E.T. or kill Valdemort or find a war in order to restore our sanity. We didn’t need to rebuild a wall between the ordinary and the unbelievable.

It was, in fact, all too believable.

Sally’s comment on yesterday’s post said:

“If it was a big birthday–like a MILESTONE birthday, you may have just witnessed someone’s personal freak out being performed.

Sounds strange. Was there cake? Was it good?”

Yes, it was indeed a milestone birthday. A very big one. And indeed there was cake, and it was extremely good, although nobody ate it. The absolute highlight of the evening, for me at least, was a performance piece by three of his friends. In “real time” they assembled a giant cake, formed it into the shape of an alligator, slathered on icing and otherwise decorated their masterpiece, then stuck in candles, while a recording was played of Cookie Monster and The Count happily singing “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake.”

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to watch three grown people doing something so insane while that particular music is playing. But I can tell you it was a deliriously joyful thing to behold. And I can also tell you, from first hand experience, that when three of someone’s friends decide to help him to get through a milestone birthday by frantically assembling a giant alligator cake in front of more than a hundred astonished witnesses, all to the tune of a song from Sesame Street, there is a lot of love in the room.

I went to a birthday party last night. The man of the hour threw himself a huge bash and invited his many friends. He rented out a theatre and structured the evening as a variety show, with himself as Master of Ceremonies.

What was most fascinating to me about the occasion was how the birthday boy took to the stage and proceeded to perform, not as himself, but rather as a series of characters: First a late-night comedian, then a freakish quiz show host. He presented one sketch after another, each more outrageous than the one before.

And I found myself wondering whether I was witnessing some sort of cultural feedback loop, in which the emerging digital culture of personal invention is starting to redefine the world of flesh and blood.

Our culture is already moving beyond the make-believe “democracy” of American Idol. Media has become fragmented, decentralized. We are entering a time when the traditional content producers are losing control of the conversation, when each individual has become a potential point of broadcast. Consumers are becoming better at voting with their clicks, and the MySpace-driven rise to fame of a Lily Allen could become the rule rather than the exception.

The long tail is starting to wag the dog.

So I wonder, was I witnessing a glimmer of the future? In the age of YouTube, will more and more people assess their milestones, measure the worth of their lives, by an ability to create a persona, to transmit a virtual self?

Their talk was far-ranging, the rhythm was changing
And rhyme rearranging out there in the night

Their thoughts began drifting, for something was shifting
A curtain was lifting, a song taking flight

And so then she kissed him, and yes she did bind him
The wall was behind him and yes yes they said

This flower of the mountain, like the girls Andalusian
Perhaps an illusion, her lips were so red

Her arms were around him, her body imploring
The boy, now adoring, returned her caress

Say yes mountain flower and the wind somewhere blowing
Their hearts madly going and yes I will Yes.