Ken’s Blog

Everybody has a different concept of “The Future”. A few weeks ago I was asked by The New York Times, along with nine other New Yorkers, to predict what our fair city would be like in another hundred years. The resulting article, still available on-line, was called The World of Tomorrow.

Of all the ideas in that article, my hands-down favorite comes from Kate Kaplan, the only non-adult in the bunch (she’s in the seventh grade), who optimistically predicts:

“You’ll no longer have to worry about finding a bathroom; you’ll just carry a small chip with you that can expand into a private portable toilet.”

It’s good to know that at least one person is thinking about the really important things.

I’ve been thinking that one way to measure people’s attitudes toward the future is by seeing what kind of flying car they prefer. The evidence suggests that around fifty years ago lots of people were playing this game, but that it has kind of died out in recent years. Maybe it’s time to bring it back.

Of course all little kids know that the flying car is a key accessory for any self-respecting future family:

But what about bigger kids? I’ve been poking around, and have found a few flying car visions that seem particularly fun. I especially like this one, because it looks like the perfect mid-century suburban dream car, but with the convenient addition of that handy-dandy antigravity drive:

Then there are the contributions of the great Syd Mead, the futurologist illustrator who pretty much invented what people now think the future looks like (all those trapezoids, in everything from Star Trek to Star Wars to Blade Runner, can be traced back to his fevered pen). Here he shows us the flying car as the very epitome of chic and sexy cool:

At the other extreme is the lone inventor longing to perfect his eccentric vision of personal flight. It is said that ago he disappeared into his mad scientist’s workshop, toiling away for years on end while neglecting to eat, sleep or bathe. People wonder what has become of him. Until that one fateful day when he at last emerges, triumphant, vindicated, if maybe a little freaked out by all that bright sunlight:

Then there is that recurring dream of ultimate lifestyle freedom: To embrace technology yet somehow be at one with nature. The car here allows its happy owners to fly right to the door of their woodland dream home. There is even the subliminal suggestion that when you’re done soaring over sun-dappled lakes and forests, you might be able to barbeque right on that humongous grill:

There is a kind of poignant irony to the above picture: We now know that the fuel costs of such a beast would render it about as un-ecological a lifestyle choice as you could imagine.

 

There are so many possible flying cars, each one promising its own vision for the future; a hopeful offering, rendered in technology, to the gods of Utopia.

What does your flying car look like?

Somebody asked me today how I’ve been managing to write a blog entry every day, and I started to answer by describing my favorite moment in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. And then I realized that it was one of those key moments of the sort I was describing yesterday, a moment that encapsulates the essence of the entire story.

It occurs near the beginning, before T.E. Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole in the film) has gone off to don Arab clothes, endure unimaginable hardships, lead a bloody revolution and transform the political landscape of the Middle East.

He’s still a young man back in England, and one of his fellow students is fascinated by a trick Lawrence does with a match. The trick is simple: Lawrence holds the match between his thumb and forefinger and lets it burn down completely. The other student, full of bluff and swagger, insists on trying the trick, and succeeds only in burning his hand and dropping the match. Whereupon the other student asks what the bloody trick is. Lawrence calmly replies: “The trick is not to mind it.”

And that’s pretty much the key to getting anything done, isn’t it? Don’t even engage with the possibility that you might not do it, and it gets done. In the scheme of things, posting to a blog every day is a pretty easy one. 🙂

Something along these lines happened when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. I have a vague memory of intense bleary-eyed effort and catching catnaps under the desk for months at a time. But because, for some mysterious reason, I never entertained the possibility that I might not complete the Ph.D., it all pretty much just happened, without a real feeling of effort.

Have you ever had that sense of utter inevitability, of getting something done by simply refusing to mind it?

There always seems to be one scene in a story when the author conveys the gestalt of everything we’ve been reading or watching, but distilled, purified down to its essence. Sometimes the placement is obvious, as in the climactic scene in A Fish Called Wanda between Michael Palin’s stutterer, Kevin Kline’s clueless bad guy and the eponymous fish. Or the scene in Singing in the Rain where Gene Kelly sings and dances the title song.

Sometimes it’s done with more stealth, tucked away so craftily that we might miss it. One of my favorites (ok, nobody else seems to have noticed this one except me, so maybe I’m crazy) occurs at the moment in Jurassic Park when the main characters are plunging down through the air in a helicopter and the paleontologist Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill, who has already been shown to be utterly in conflict with all things technological, cannot find half of his seatbelt.

To set the stage here, it’s important to remember that there are only female dinosaurs in the park. This was to ensure that the scary ones, like those pesky velociraptors, couldn’t ever mate and take over the world. Even so, Ian Malcolm, the cynical mathematician played in the movie by Jeff Goldblum, has been issuing warnings based on chaos theory (don’t blame me, that’s how Michael Crichton writes) predicting that in spite of all the precautions, something is apt to go horribly wrong.

And indeed, it turns out that because the scientists had started with incomplete dino DNA, they had filled in the genetic gaps with frog DNA. In the end those female raptors, channeling their inner frog, start to reproduce by parthenogenesis. Ah, foolish, foolish scientists. Somewhere Mary Shelley and the ancient Hebrew Golem are smiling.

OK then, back to our scene. Sam Neill is sitting there holding two identical seatbelt ends, one in each hand, glaring at them in perplexed frustration. I know you’re way ahead of me here. Finally he just ties the two ends together. And there you have it: Technology subverted by seatbelt parthenogenesis, and the central theme of the movie (the hubris of man’s technology defeated, as “life finds a way”) reiterated in one elegant moment.

Can anybody think of any analogous moments in a novel, play or movie?

The most essential character in any Jane Austen novel is the voice of the narrator, setting up or commenting upon each scene, dropping hints here and there, letting the reader in on what’s really going on. This places us in a privileged position, and allows us to realize aspects of relationships between characters that the characters themselves do not yet see. Hitchcock and Scorcese do not have access to an omniscient narrator’s spoken voice, but they have the camera, and the editor’s knife, which serve an analogous purpose by sculpting an ever-shifting subjective point of view.

It may be that the most essential change in storytelling from the nineteenth century to the twentieth was the migration of the narrator’s voice from words to images. And how will the narrator’s voice be transformed as our current century progresses? Does it all just end in images, or will something else emerge? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Today I saw Fraulein Maria, Doug Elkin’s wonderful modern dance interpretation of The Sound of Music. It’s very “downtown” where the original wasn’t, hip and irreverent, sexy and knowing, yet it captures much of the essence of why we continue to love TSoM, the sheer over-the-top ecstasy of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s masterpiece.

What I found most striking was what Elkin had his dancers do with “Do-Re-Mi”. Each of the seven notes was given a different dance motif. As the notes were combined, first in simple scales, then in complex melodies, the dancers proceeded to assemble an entire dance vocabulary, an exciting new visual grammar, right before our eyes. Watching this piece brought me back to the feeling of wonder within the original song, that sense I’d had when I was about six years old, watching “Do-Re-Mi” for the first time, that the mysteries of melody itself were being revealed to me. Did you have that feeling when you first saw it? I had completely forgotten that memory until I saw this performance, and suddenly it all came rushing back to me.

It’s so wonderfully synaesthetic to be shown a link between melody as grammar and dance as grammar, in such an entertaining and accessible way. I find myself thinking about other artists who have created these kinds of cross-referencing performances. Basil Twist did it in 1998 with his abstract puppet show of Berlioz’ Symphony Fantastique:

The entire symphony was visualized by long colorful swatches of cloth suspended in a giant water tank, puppeteered in time to Berlioz’ music. What I love about this piece is that it shows that it’s possible to have non-figurative puppetry; puppetry not as character acting, but as pure visual music.

Which leads us back in time to Oskar Fischinger, whose abstract paintings and animations, starting in 1921, explored the possibility of pure visual music:

Eventually James and John Whitney, with works like Lapis, as well as other artist/researchers, began to use computers to explore these possibilities in new ways:

Eventually, animation as visual music grew into a large and well-established genre. Try doing a Google search on “visual music” and you’ll see what I mean.

Arguably Piet Mondrian and other De Stijl artists were exploring similar territory by trying to get to a pure grammar of visual representation with works like Broadway Boogie Woogie:

Each of these artists invites us to think about some visual genre, whether it be dance, puppetry, animation or painting, as a kind of music. When I see such things I feel as though I am being invited in to join the fun, to find new ways to see the music in things.

Can anybody think of other genres where something like this has been done?

Another Friday. Time to continue our epic…

   The heart can bedazzle us
   And this may be perilous
   For the heart is perfidious
   And somewhat insidious
   Those moments that capture us
   Can make us feel rapturous
   Till hopes grow innumerous
   Quite out of the blue

   The place was commodious
   The music melodious
   The night serendipitous
   For adventure precipitous
   As the Gods like to play with us
   And so have their way with us
   So he, feeling humorous,
   Did pick up her cue

I’ve been thinking about a paper by researchers at the University of Zurich, published in the journal Nature, entitled “Oxytocin increases trust in humans.”

Scientists had already demonstrated that the natural chemical oxytocin (it is found, for example, in mother’s milk) plays a key role in the formation of social attachments among non-human mammals. This new study demonstrated that it also works like that among humans.

The researchers placed a volunteer in a room with a computer, and asked him/her to play a trading game with somebody on-line. The way the game was set up, the player could opt for one of two strategies: either “We cooperate and both win” or “I win but you lose”. The first strategy would earn more points, but only if the other player cooperated. Basically, the more you were willing to trust the other player, the more you could win.

The experiment was tried both with and without secretly pumping airborne oxytocin into the room. The researchers reported that subjects were significantly more likely to choose the high-trust strategy when the oxytocin was present.

And here is where it starts to get really interesting. They repeated the experiment, changing only one thing: This time, they told the volunteer that the other player was a computer program. The result? The oxytocin no longer had any effect on player behavior.

This suggests that we have one model in our heads for “human” and a completely different one for “acts like a human but I know it isn’t”. Which has enormous implications for all kinds of evolving media, like computer games, on-line communities, virtual storytelling, The Sims, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Facebook (the list could go on and on), and eventually maybe our kids’ android companions.

We may always feel an emotional chasm, a fundamental lack of true empathy, toward any virtual thing that we know is our artificial creation, no matter how believable it seems, no matter how advanced the technology ever gets.

And that might be a good thing.

People often talk about the differences between playing a game and experiencing a linear narrative (eg: a book or a movie). After all, when you play a game, you are constantly making choices, whereas when you are being told a story, it seems that you just sit back and passively enjoy the show.

Basically, in most stories, you are introduced to a protagonist, with whom on some level you are asked to identify. You may not like the lead character, but you still identify with him/her. Richard III is a great example of this.

The storyteller poses an overarching moral challenge to your main character, gives him/her some pertinent character flaws to make things interesting, and then the hero is seen to experience a sequence of challenges, along the way generally acquiring some increased level of self-awareness, while you vicariously go along for the ride. So far, it all seems pretty passive.

But I would argue that there is actually nothing passive about being told a story, that in fact you are actually being engaged in a particular kind of game. I call this game “hack the character”.

Your enjoyment of the story largely comes from your role as a kind of psychological detective. At every moment of the story you hold some model of the main character in your head. The storyteller’s primary job is to continually drop clues that let you evolve that model in such a way that you might be able to predict what the character will do. If the storyteller does this well, then the challenge will be neither too easy nor too hard. And, in a good story, as the narrative progresses these challenges are gradually made more difficult. And if they aren’t, you get bored.

In other words, you are playing a game.

For example, if your protagonist has invited his colleague Joe over for dinner, and the wife starts acting stiff and awkward around Joe, you might have been given just enough information about the characters to realize, before the hero does, that she’s actually having an affair with Joe. Which sets up the next puzzle, in which you try to predict the exact moment when your hero will discover the truth.

On some level, all readers and moviegoers know that they are being engaged to play this game. For example, the effectiveness of the above challenge is dependent upon our understanding that the story is in fact a sort of game. After all, if this were happening in real life, the wife would most likely be acting stiff just because she doesn’t like Joe, or maybe his politics. But because it’s a story, we know we’re being set up to solve a puzzle, so the rules are different. The moment we pick up the book or begin to watch the movie, we are agreeing to play by the rules of “hack the character”.

In this sense, the greatest storytellers are master gamemakers. Think back on your experience of Shakespeare, Austen, Hemingway, Hitchcock, Woolf, Nabokov, Salinger. Even when they reveal the wheels of the game, spinning away in plain sight, you are still held spellbound, riveted to your seat, turning the page or waiting for the next scene, unable to look away. Because they are that good.

I suspect that when interactive narrative, now still in its infancy, really evolves into a mature medium, that evolution will be fueled by a truer understanding of the “hack the character” game. And I predict that the killer app for interactive storytelling will be the mystery of the human heart.

Looking back on my childhood, I realize that one of the greatest influences on my early years was Marx.

No, not that Marx:

No, not this Marx either:

The Marx I’m talking about is the Marx Plastics Company, makers of little toy plastic dinosaurs.

My brother and I would spend hours in the basement playing with these dinosaurs, making up stories, going on adventures, exploring new undiscovered lands.

All the dinosaurs had their genus name embossed on them somewhere, Tyrannasaurus, Stegasaurus, Triceratops. But my favourite was the biggest dinosaur of them all – the Brontosaurus, a word which translates to “Thunder Lizard”.

When I was older, I found out that scientists had determined that there was actually no such thing as a Brontosaurus. Apparently somebody had stuck the wrong head on a fossil skeleton of an Apatosaurus, and had mistakenly labeled it as a new genus.

And that’s when I realized that the Brontosaurus was even more extinct than the other dinosaurs. Which of course made me love it all the more.

Long before Philip K. Dick cornered the market on this kind of thing, Lewis Carroll raised similar questions when he had the Gryphon hang out with the Mock Turtle (shown here with Alice in an illustration by John Tenniel).

Sure, the Gryphon is nonexistent, being a mythical beast. But the Mock Turtle is even more nonexistent, since “Mock Turtle” is really a reference to “mock turtle soup”, the euphemismistic term for the cheap soup given to poor children in nineteenth century London. The soup was actually made from the discarded brains and organs of slaughtered cows.

I find myself mourning for the poor sad Mock Turtle, whose hold upon reality is so tenuous that he is not even quite a mythical beast (although he arguably had it better than those cows).

Is it wrong of me, some sort of misplaced nostalgia, to mourn for the Brontosaurus and the Mock Turtle? And is it even being nostalgic to look back with fondness on things that never were?

January 7 was the day of the year that George Gershwin completed his Rhapsody in Blue. I had been taking piano lessons since I was seven, but when I learned that piece at the age of fourteen, suddenly playing the piano really mattered. I remember practicing it for hours on end, really trying to understand it, to get it right, to dig under the surface. I had always liked the piano, but after Gershwin, it was true love all the way.

The first book that had that kind of effect on me was The Once and Future King by T.H. White – which made the saga of King Arthur more accessible to modern readers. When I was twelve the kids in our class at school were assigned, on a Friday, the first few pages of it to read by the following Monday. I started reading, and kept reading, and didn’t sleep, and kept on reading, all through that weekend. By Monday morning I had finished it, all 632 pages. I showed up to school that Monday completely bleary eyed and overwhelmed, having just lived through the life and death of King Arthur, the wars, quests, loves, betrayals of a lifetime. And I couldn’t really discuss it with the other kids, because they had all read just those first few pages. They had no idea what was coming.

Has anything like that ever happened to you?