Ken's Blog

After Manooh suggested looking at http://www.papermint.com, I spent some time on the site. It’s a fascinating experiment, and I think it brings into focus a number of the questions I was raising the other day.

You can create characters there, go shopping, meet other people, play various games. Very impressive. And its very impressiveness raises questions about the limitations of such experiences, and whether those limitations are intrinsic.

We as individuals are not the movies we see, the books we read, or the sum total of the entertainment we consume. Each of us – each individual – contains a complex assortment of competing values and desires, and our own particular kind of yearning for transcendence. As Walt Whitman said: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

When we get together in person we have heated discussions about things we care about. Not just aesthetic questions and discussions of books and movies, but also social issues – income disparity, prejudice in all its dizzying array of forms, reproductive issues, the relationship between a society and its recent immigrants.

We try to work through, in our discussions, why we like or have faith in certain people or collective movements, while distrusting others.

An on-line world like Papermint is, by design, a place to get away from such discussions, and therefore to get away from ourselves in all of our messy completeness.

There are text forums that touch on the hard issues, but existing embodied on-line experiences seem to go for the opposite – for fun and fantasy, for the “magic circle” of play, where actions do not require consequences.

Is this simply the way it has to be? Is quasi-physical on-line embodiment necessarily limited to ways of escaping from the difficult issues of real life?

We all have times when we like to be by ourselves, crawl into our own little cave and shut out everything and everyone. That said, there is nothing quite like the delectable feeling of having just the right person there with you.

There doesn’t need to be going on. They can be curled up quietly reading the newspaper over there on the couch while you (for example) are writing your blog. It’s amazing how this sense of sharing space – just a quiet moment – can make everything more lovely, until life itself becomes more sweet.

It’s one of the great blessings of existence – that we can derive so much pleasure simply from the company of each other.

I’ve been thinking about how I look at the world differently since writing about it publicly every day, and of the other parallel cultures that have been wrought by cyber-technology, including “Twitter”, texting, and all the various and sundry social networks. One of the strange things about “Facebook” and its various cousins is that there is no real sense of a shared space, a living room where we can all sit by the fire and feel like we’re hanging out and spending time together. It all still feels very much like mutual shouting-out from across the street.

I realize that we are still in an early stage of all this, where things are sorting themselves out. It’s a bit like those very first years of cinema, at the start of the silent era, before the emergence of anything like the psychological realism and focus on character that we now take for granted on our movie screens.

I can’t help thinking that we are gradually building toward something more.

The pseudo-geographical shared worlds that I know of still all seem bereft of something essential. “Worlds of Warcraft” – like “Everquest” and similar fantasy-novel inspired game worlds – is mostly about directed heroic quests out of Tolkien, without the intense focus on subtle emotions and relationships that made us really care about Bilbo, Frodo, Sam and company.

“Second Life” seems to be mostly about real estate and strange erotic dress-up, and a lot of people protending that they don’t mind the jerky emotionlessness of the experience – the complete lack of the sort of sensuality that we demand of, say, movies or paintings.

“The Grand Theft Auto” series, as well as the “Half Life” worlds, are wonderful things, in all their aggressive splendor, but they are clearly not attempts to build on-line community outside of the shared thrill of shooting and fighting your way through game levels. I mean, would you really want to develop your close personal relationships in a place where your brains could be splattered against the wall at any moment- and where knowing that such possibilities are actually very much the point?

Will Wright and colleagues attempted to put “The Sims” on-line, but that didn’t turn out all too well. Somehow the origins of those characters as animated figures in a virtual doll house kept getting in the away of supporting an illusion that they are really us.

There are literary cyberworlds, but one hungers for a visual component, a space – something with the sort of sensuality and mystery that comes to mind when I think back on the original “Myst”.

It might make sense to first try to describe such a shared on-line world, even before trying to build it. I suspect some of the key components for building such a place are still missing – notably the ability of on-line characters to convey subtle emotions in a way that convinces for any extended period of time – so there’s probably still lots of time to have the conversation now, to prepare for what will undoubtedly be lots of work to do later.

We were having dinner this evening with my brother’s family – including two of my nephews. In their typically high spirited adolescent way, the boys managed to turn the conversation toward bathroom humor.

My sister-in-law, not wanting to stifle their young minds entirely by ending the discussion, but wishing to maintain some propriety in the converstion, pointed out that in Japan there are water closets that can flushed via one of two buttons – labeled number one and number two. Not surprisingly, each button indicates the relative force required. As in “was this a number one, or was this a number two?” All in the spirit of providing a more eco-friendly appliance, less wasteful of water and kinder to our planet.

I was impressed with my sister-in-law’s cleverness. She had deftly turned what might otherwise have been a crude and inappropriate conversation into a thoughtful treatise on helping the environment.

At which point I decided to join in. Although I’m not really sure how much help I provided. I told the assembled family about the time back when I was a counselor at a summer sleep-away camp. In the week before the campers were due to arrive, we counselors would spend time bonding with each other and learning the rules of running a summer camp, while the older and more experienced counselors would impart their wisdom to the younger first-timers.

At one orientation talk, the head counselor patiently explained to us that campers are sometimes uncomfortable about using certain words. So he suggested that when a camper asks permission to leave his bunk bed in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, it mght be best to ask, as gently as possible, “is it a number one, or a number two?”

At which point one of the counselors in the back – more experienced than most – helpfully interjected that in his years on the job he’d heard every possible description. “One kid last year,” he added, “had two threes and a five!”

Not surprisingly, my countless hours hunched over a computer year after year finally caught up with me recently. I ended up developing neck problems and had to start seeing a physical therapist. A P.T. has you do exercises both on-site and at home, rubs your neck and shoulders in all sorts of comfy and pleasant ways, and gives you stern lectures on the importance of good posture.

Sure enough, after about two months of this treatment, my neck problem started to go away. I am convinced that it wasn’t so much the comfy and pleasant rubbing, nor the exercises, whether at home or on-site. It was the stern lectures.

To underline the wonderfulness of good posture, my P.T. pointed out that if you ever look at small children, say around two years old, they have gloriously good posture – they stand and sit in a perfectly relaxed and centered way. It’s only later in life that we all learn to go to hell with ourselves.

Of course the real teacher was the pain. Once you get the concept firmly stuck into your mind that bad posture leads to serious pain, it’s amazing how much easier it is to remember to sit upright, stop crouching down over your computer keyboard, and in general keep your body in a better position.

And at some point during this process – as my body healed, now that it was no longer being mistreated – it occurred to me that “good posture” is a highly generalizable concept. It applies to pretty much anything.

There’s a kind of “posture dialectic”. Anything you can do – have a conversation, do a job, sing a song, help out a friend in need, with a kind of grudging crouch – can be done by just barely getting through the experience, while exerting minimal effort. Or, alternatively, you can keep your back straight, put in that extra effort, and stay centered – in every way. I’ve tried it both ways, and it turns out (sometimes to my surprise) that the good posture way actually takes much less effort.

I hope you understand my position. 🙂

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.” -Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984

I didn’t watch the inauguration. I found I wasn’t interested in the hype. I have been very supportive of our new president – particularly since his speech on race relations last March – but unlike many others, I don’t find myself swept up in the dreaminess. I find I don’t trust adoration in the political sphere – it can lead even very good people to some very bad places.

Today my brother mentioned to me the above quote from Orwell’s “1984”, and it helped me to realize that I have been holding my breath all this time, waiting to see what Obama would do the day after he took office, when it came down not to making the lovely eloquent speeches about the future, but to making the day-to-day decisions of a chief executive.

I am heartened not just that he has moved immediately to order the closing of the prison at Guantanamo, but that he is going about it in a careful and gradual way – over the course of a year – so that there will be time to find where the truth lies in that mess of a situation.

And I realize that my difference in expectations before and after January 20 comes down to what Winston Smith said so eloquently in “1984”. There came a point, after having been disappointed too many times, when I simply stopped expecting straight talk from the Bush Administration.

Obama still holds open the possibility – so delicious to contemplate after having been denied by our leaders these past years – that he might not lead through deceit and misdirection – that he might actually level with us, as equal and thoughtful participants in a republic.

It’s so simple and so fundamental, this freedom we had lost, that may now have been restored: The freedom to have our intelligence respected.

Just one of the many interesting things about living in Manhattan is the way your life casually weaves in and out of the lives of various hyper-famous people who live here. Last Friday evening was the second occasion in recent times that I found myself in the same time and place as Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson – one of our more iconic local celebrity couples. The first time was several years ago while at dinner with my friend Idit in a Japanese restaurant on the Lower East sSde.

Lou Reed has a very unique voice. Even when he’s speaking at low volume, his powerful bass timbre has a way of cutting through the din of even a crowded Manhattan restaurant. It was fun to pinpoint the precise moment when the diners at each table realized that Lou and Laurie were in the house, sharing a quiet meal and a bottle of wine. This being New York, nobody looked at them or talked about them aloud. Instead, the transition in each case was from genuinely not knowing they were there to carefully pretending to not know they were there.

We New Yorkers are very protective of the privacy of our celebrities.

Pretty much the same thing happened this last Friday evening. Sophie and I were seeing the experimental play “London” at the Chelsea Art Museum. The play calls for the audience to follow the actors around on foot as they perform different parts of the drama in various galleries of the museum. Once again, it was fascinating to observe the exact moment when each theatre goer realized that the couple in our midst was Lou and Laurie. In every case that I observed, it took only a fraction of a second for the newly aware individual’s gaze and body language to adjust so as to resolutely avoid appearing aware of their presence.

By the end of the performance it was clear – if you were watching carefully – that pretty much everybody knew. But I don’t think I saw a single person actually look in their direction the entire evening. God, I love New Yorkers.

But it doesn’t always happen like that. Today I was speaking with my good friend Cynthia and she reminded me of the time we were watching “Babe, a Pig in the City” together at the $3 discount movie theatre (the film broke after 20 minutes and they couldn’t get it fixed, so I only ever saw the first 20 minutes of that movie. I guess that’s why it’s a $3 discount movie theatre).

Sitting in the seat next to us was the great independent film director John Sayles. We didn’t realize this until Cynthia accidentally spilled her bag of jumbo sized popcorn and it poured all over him. Mr. Sayles was quite gracious about it, and we ended up having a lovely conversation with him about the state of independent cinema, while we were waiting for the movie to start.

To this day, Cynthia still speaks of that day with a fond starry eyed look and a dreamy smile that borders on school-girl crush – the time she spilled popcorn all over John Sayles.

Today, on Jan 20, 2009, a day long awaited by many, I am reminded of one of my favorite poems, from all the way across the sea and a time long ago. It seems that the British had no better luck with their Georges than we, in recent times, have had with our own.

The poem in question sums up, with eloquent brevity, the view of the English toward the entire unfortunate lineage:

George the First was always reckoned
Vile, but viler George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third?
When from earth the Fourth descended,
God be praised, the Georges ended.

– Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864.

It’s funny how your perspective gets warped when you work at a University and it’s that time of year – the big push before the big publication deadline for the big SIGGRAPH conference.

I came into the lab today already feeling a little punchy from the last few days of working nonstop on our paper submissions – all of which are due tomorrow, January 20. I could see right away that the grad students all had that same slightly dazed look – everyone is trying to get their paper out by 5pm tomorrow.

I ran into one of the grad students in the hall, and rather than ask him how his paper was going, which I was afraid might just make him more tense and nervous, I said “Happy Martin Luther King Day!” He smiled a big broad smile, and replied “And what are you doing to celebrate Martin Luther King Day today?”

Which kind of threw me back in the moment. With total honesty, I said “I’m trying to finish my SIGGRAPH paper.” He asked me why trying to finish a SIGGRAPH paper was celebrating Martin Luther King Day.

And that’s when I suddenly saw the connection. “Because,” I told him, “I have a dream!”

OK, so it may not be the right dream, but it sure helped lighten the mood.

The funny thing about this is that later in the day I was relating this conversation to another grad student, and he told me that he had told his wife earlier in the day that we really had a shot at getting this paper finished on time, in spite of all the work left to do.

Whereupon his wife had shouted out in support “Yes we can!”

Last week I picked up The Onion and started to do the Sudoku puzzle. Within a few seconds I realized there was a problem: The middle square in the second-to-top row had to be a “1”, because of the positions of two of the printed “1”s. But that same square also had to be a “3”, because of the positions of two of the printed “3”s.

The puzzle wasn’t just unsolvable – it was obviously unsolvable, almost at a glance. I had never seen a broken Sudoku before. It’s one of those unexpected first-time experiences, like the first time you ever bit into a juicy red apple and realized that a worm had gotten there first.

I thought to myself “Well after all, The Onion is a parody newspaper. Maybe they thought it would be funny to print a parody Sudoku this week.” But that didn’t seem quite right. This puzzle wasn’t funny, it was just … broken.

For the last week I’ve been wondering how The Onion would handle this crisis, and what might show up in the place where they usually print puzzle answers from the previous week. Would they print an apology to their readers, perhaps a retraction of some sort, a plea from the editors for understanding, and a promise to do better in the future? I’m not suggesting that this is a major world crisis as earth-shaking as, say, an guy pretending to be the Mayor of Paris who emails a letter to The New York Times to trash Caroline Kennedy.

But still, something would have to go there, in place of the puzzle answer, yes?

Well, no. The Onion solved the problem in their inimitable flip-the-bird style. Apparently, as of this week, there is no Sudoku on The Onion puzzle page.

Vanished. As if it had never existed.

 

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Update: My friend Charles just suggested that this may have been the plan all along. Perhaps The Onion deliberately published a broken Sudoku so that nobody would object when the feature was gone the following week. Hmmm, a puzzle of a different kind.