Ken's Blog

Today I met a fellow traveller – someone who “makes art with math”, as my friend Athomas once put it. I was visiting Microsoft with a group of fellow university folks, and met this guy Frank, who is a Microsoft developer. He started showing me the stuff he’d been working on, like writing a computer program to allow kids to explore the stars in the Universe, and I showed him some of the stuff that I’ve been working on.

I could tell almost the exact moment when eveyone else in the room realized that the two of us had drifted away from the general conversation into our own space, the point when we both started to feel free to use words, phrases and concepts with each other that we know not to use when talking to others.

What’s interesting is that neither of us – or people like us – consider ourselves to be mathematicians, but math is essential to our art. We reluctantly acknowledge that we are artists, but don’t think of ourselves as part of what most people would think of as the “Art world”. We are procedural artists, who like to make things of aesthetic beauty using techniques that arise out of concepts of intellectual beauty. In a way we are fellow travellers, who recognize each other immediately and with a sense of relief, a sense of recognition of somebody else who understands why this is exciting, and why we go about creating things the way that we do.

As we said goodbye, after taking a joyful guided tour of each others’ work, we jokingly agreed that it was nice, at last, to meet somebody else who was normal. In this case, of course, “normal” was a winking code word for something very simple and emphatic, something that everyone experiences at various points in their life: “I recognize you – you are like me.”

I’m typing this while taking a cross-country flight. Three thousand miles in one straight shot.

These periodica plane flights are strange experiences, not really like anything else. They start out (at least in this country) with the bizarre police-state stress test that has now become standard operating procedure. I don’t know anybody who actually believes that this whole taking off shoes and removing belts and laptops thing is more than theatre. Anybody who might actually be interested in causing us harm would have figured out by now how to do it without shoes, belts and water bottles.

Ridiculous as this pageant may be, humor is not an option. If you are foolish enough to say something that could be construed as funny, the rules say that they are supposed to send two muscular individuals in uniforms to put you in handcuffs and an orange jump suit and take you away for rendering.

Perhaps the government is doing this as a kind of stealth public service – a new kind of path to enlightenment. You see, by now we have all learned how to find within ourselves a state of zen-like calm in the face of this whole xray/security show, some inner space of deep stillness within which we can meditate and become uplifted, while removing footwear.

I wonder, now that we are exiting the Bush era, whether they are going to cut back on this Orange Alert performance art and focus on actual threats from terrorists – like the alarming number of commercial shipping containers that slip into our country each day without proper examination.

So far I get the feeling that the incoming government is less invested in figuring out clever ways to make sure we stay scared enough to follow orders unquestioningly.

Or at least I’ll continue to believe that until somebody in the Obama administration warns its critics that people should watch what they say. Remember that one? Just one of so many fond memories of the outgoing administration.

But I digress..

Once you manage to get past the government sponsored wierdness, flight really isn’t that bad. In a way the physical strangeness of it – being strapped into a little seat in a glorified tin can for six hours – is positive. I find (assuming I’ve remembered to bring little snacks and have filled my trusty bottle of water – after passing security, needless to say), that I tune out of everything around me while in flight.

Personally I find that there is something wonderful about having an entire six hours where I can make things on the computer without even the possibility of being on the internet. It’s sort of a mini-vacation from cyberspace.

There’s nothing really like it. Except, of course, for the occasional conversation with a gorgeous TV actress in the next seat…

BROOKLYN – It was the equivalent of finding a perfect old matzoh pudding or an unexpected marzipan hidden away in your aunt Esther’s attic.

Relatives of Dr. Harold Carowitz found an extremely rare 1937 Bialy Type 57S “Atlantic Avenue” — a Holy Grail for bagel collectors — as they were going through his belongings after his death.

The dusty roll, untouched since 1960, didn’t look like much in the cold storage in back of the Carowitz kosher bakery in Teaneck, near Newark in northern New Jersey.

But only 17 were ever made, and when it’s cleaned up and auctioned in the Paris bakery on Mott Street next month, experts believe it will fetch at least 3 million dollars, and possibly much more.

Bialys once represented the height of baking achievement. The onion-topped nosh was so ahead of its time it could hold up to 130 calories per bite, when most other bagels topped out about 50 calories.

This particular bialy is even more valuable because it was originally owned by Earl Howinsky, a prominent kother foods enthusiast and owner of dry cleaning establishments, and because its original onion topping is intact, so it can be restored without relying on store-bought ingredients.

“It has all the finest attributes any connoisseur collector could ever seek, in one of the ultimate deli breads from the golden era of the 1930s,” said James Nylofsky, head of the bagel department at the Paris international kosher bakery on Mott Street, which will auction the prized roll Feb. 7.

Nylofsky and a small number of bialy enthusiasts knew of Carowitz’s proudest possession, but not the eight relatives who inherited Carowitz’s bakery.

The deceased, who died at age 89, was described by relatives as an eccentric hoarder who never threw anything out. He also left behind a rare rye bread kaiser roll, which was sold, and a sesame seed challah loaf that was scrapped because it was in such poor condition.

The Bialy marque is famed for its taste and chewy texture and was a frequent baking contest winner in the 1920s and 1930s. The 57S Atlantic Avenue was one of the most successful bialys, each one made by hand with unique details.

The company founded in 1909 by Ettore Bialystok collapsed in the 1940s after a long string of baking contest victories.

The rights to the legendary Bialy name were purchased in 1998 by Entenmann’s, which has built the Bialy Vey iz mir, one of the world’s tastiest and easiest to slice bagel foods.

(With apologies to Gregory Katz)

Last night we went to see the wonderful Swedish independent film “Let the Right One In”. I don’t know how to talk about this film properly to anyone who has not yet seen it, so….

(1) If you haven’t seen this film, please stop reading right now, go out immediately and watch it, and then feel free to proceed on to the rest of this post.

(2) If you have already seen the film, by all means keep reading.

 

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OK, I assume that if you’ve gotten this far you’ve seen the film, and that I won’t be spoiling it for you.

What struck me about this film is that it has the form of one tale and the content of a completely different one. On the surface it’s a tender coming-of-age romance, the story of a tentative adolescent relationship growing, like a delicate rose-petal, in the midst of a vampire movie. The sort of sweet and delicate romance between twelve year olds that we’ve seen before in “My Life as a Dog”, “A Little Romance” and similar films.

But if you really think about what you’ve seen, it’s not that at all. In fact it’s nothing like that. What’s actually going on is that an inhuman monster – powerful, ancient and bloodthirsty – is in need of a new human slave, its previous slave having reached the end of his useful lifespan. This monster sets about seducing a confused young boy, playing on the boy’s loneliness, nascent sexuality and innocent need for connection, into becoming its next slave. He should be good for another fifty years or so – then the monster will get another one.

This is not a new concept in vampire stories. “The Hunger” showed a similar master/slave dynamic between the two vampires, and of course this was also the defining relationship between Dracula and Renfield.

What’s intriguing about “Let the Right One In” is that this is all shown entirely from the point of view of the innocent twelve year old boy who is being drawn in by the monster to a life of slavery. We the audience find ourselves idealizing the monster just as he does – we are taken through the boy’s process of falling in love – even when (as it must) the monster reveals its true horrifying nature.

Objectively we are given all of the information we need to understand what is really happening here. We are shown, in painful detail, the tragic fate of the monster’s previous servant, and we are shown the monster’s complete lack of compunction about killing one innocent victim after another.

And yet at the end, when the boy has walked away from everyone he loves to enter into a lifetime of servitude to a ruthless and bloodthirsty vampire, the audience feels as though it has reached the happy ending of a romance. This in spite of the fact that the penultimate scene contains the single most bloodthirsty depiction of horror and atrocity against children that many of us will ever see on-screen. The film is so effective in controlling our point of view that by the time it sees these children brutally murdered, the audience is actually rooting for their death.

The film plays various tricks to keep us inside the boy’s head. For example, all of the adults around him are portrayed as ridiculous and/or self-absorbed fools. There is not a single adult he can turn to help counter the illusory reality that the monster is weaving around him.

And of course the title of the film is a brilliant reversal. Because this is a vampire film, we assume that the title is referring to the need to invite in only the right vampire – since a vampire cannot enter your home without being invited. But in fact it’s the other way around – the vampire has clearly been searching a long time for the right servant to replace the one it is about to discard. In the end, we see that it is the boy – merely the latest in a series of human servants the vampire will keep around for as long as they are useful – who is being let in.

It’s amazing what you can do when you know how to play around with genre expectations.

When you look at Sontag’s progression, when describing a writer’s development, of nut → moron → stylist → critic (ie: passionate impetus → spewing forth → aesthetic shaping → deeper thought and purpose), it becomes clear that a mature writer will not experience a simple progression so much as a cycle:

As one becomes more clear in one’s thoughts and purpose, internal passions will change and evolve to reflect this. For example, an author might have started writing in response to the pain of a failed love affair, but the things she writes will open doors to new passions long after that love affair has receded to a distant – and even somewhat nostalgic – memory.

But the intellectual doors that writing can open, both in the writer’s mind and in her interactions with the world around her, will fire new passions, new questions and enthusiasms. And this is especially true of the mature writer, who has reached Sontag’s “critic” stage. Because such a writer is tackling real issues, she will find herself in a place that is rich with new doorways and passages, new questions to ponder and new nuts to crack.

The exhilaration of this process of endless enrichment that is one of the greatest rewards of writing.

What fascinates me about Sontag’s theory of the writer as nut/moron/stylist/critic is that it really is a theory of how creativity works in general: Which aesthetic/expressive “muscles” need to be developed, and in what order. I love that she starts out with the “nut”. For any artist to be sufficiently motivated to reach others, there needs to be some initial governing passion. What I especially like about Sontag’s way of describing this is her intimation that this initial passion, while necessary, need not remain – a different nut can be swapped in, as the artist develops through the stylist and eventually to the critic stage: What first got you into writing, or painting, or dance, or composing music, might not be what keeps you there.

Just from this observation alone we can start to see ways of distinguishing between the arcs of careers in different corners of the arts. For example, there are very few Rock and Roll song writers who can create as relevant and passionate a song at age forty or fifty as they could when they were twenty three. The particular nut, or obsédé, that pulls you into rock and roll are tied up with youthful obsessions – sex, alienation, new love, rebellion, rejection of the status quo, together with an ability to see the strange world of adult life with the freshness of a newcomer.

People who in their teens discover a talent for expressing the emotions around such things can skyrocket quite quickly to stardom. But by the time they reach their late twenties, many of these things are no longer relevant to them. A writer of prose can more readily trade in a youthful nut for a different one, but that isn’t so easy to do in rock and roll – the audience for this genre isn’t very focused on issues of child rearing, career change or the onset of mid-life crisis.

More tomorrow.

The journals of Susan Sontag have just been published. Here is one journal entry by late Susan Sontag. This was written when she was all of twenty eight years old:

The writer must be four people:

1) the nut, the obsédé

2) the moron

3) the stylist

4) the critic

1) supplies the material

2) lets it come out

3) is taste

4) is intelligence

a great writer has all 4 — but you can still be a good writer with only 1) and 2); they’re most important.

The more I think about Sontag’s NMSC (numostic?) model of writing, the more sense it makes. In fact I would say that the fundamental principles she outlines here apply to many forms of creative expression. Tomorrow I’m going to expand on this theme.

The circus comes around every year. That is its wonder, and its majesty.

 

Happy New Year everyone.

Clarissa and Emily had already walked quite a ways, hand in hand. After a while the scenes of devastation around them, appearing through the swirling mist, became like a sort of dream. From time to time there would be a subtle shift in the landscape, like a trick of the light. What Emily first took to be a mountain would turn out to be a bank of clouds, and then the clouds would be gone. The suffering faces peering so intently out at them were the worst – they seemed to be everywhere – but they were hard to bring into focus. Every time Emily would try to look at one directly, it would turn into a knot of wood, or a leaf, or something else. It was as though the faces didn’t want to be seen in their suffering – they just wanted you to know they were there.

Emily wanted to ask Clarissa where they were going, but she knew better. All she needed now was the constant touch of Clarissa’s warm firm hand, a reality that never wavered. The mist was beginning to grow thinner, and the landscape was changing far less often. Now they were on a long dirt road, and to the right and left appeared to be waving fields of wheat, stretching away as far as the eye could see. Even though the landscape was flat all around, there was something wrong with the horizon up ahead, like it was shaped wrong. Emily looked up questioningly, but Clarissa merely smiled a reassuring smile.

At last they came to it – the Great Precipice. Of course Emily had heard of it, in whispered stories and the occasional snatch of song, but she hadn’t really believed in it. The world can’t just stop, not just like that. In its way it was rather beautiful, the vast scale of it, on the other side of a razor-straight line at their feet where the road and the wheat fields abruptly ended – where everything ended.

“Now, my dear,” Clarissa spoke aloud for the first time since their journey had begun, “you mustn’t be alarmed. One expects to feel a certain sense of vertigo when encounting things of infinite proportion. Try to remember that we are merely at a door, and one door is very much like like any other. Some doors lead from the kitchen to the parlor, others from hallway to drawing room, whereas still others lead from one frame of existence to another. This doorway happens to be one of the latter kind. My dear, you must try to remember that a door is, in the end, merely a door.”

This speech, as intended, did much to reassure Emily. “I can deal with a door,” she thought to herself, “I’ve been opening doors all my life – including a few that were never supposed to be opened.” She smiled up at Clarissa, ready for whatever came next.

“Ok, I get it,” she said, “It’s a door. But where’s the doorknob?” Clarissa laughed in response, and waved a hand over the abyss. A shimmering white circle appeared at their feet, and even before they jumped, Emily could already smell a familiar scent – something between lilac and cinnamon, but not quite like either.

She smiled and took a deep breath, as she held on tight to Clarissa’s hand. This was going to be a fun year.

I had an odd experience recently. I was invited to a dinner at a nice restaurant, part of an awards event, with a number of fellow scientists – scientists from a variety of fields. It was the sort of thing where everybody puts on a jacket and tie or the equivalent.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the evening until the moment when somebody heard me quietly conferring with the waiter about what vegan options there were. At that point one of my tablemates picked up on the fact that I was ordering vegan, and the next thing I knew it was the topic of conversation.

At first the questions were friendly, although it sort of weirded me out that what I eat would become such a focus of discussion. When asked why I was eating vegan, I explained that I would just as soon not cause suffering if I could avoid it. Soon the conversation became markedly less friendly, although the tone was always polite. There was a lot of focus on scallops. “Why don’t you eat scallops?” “Do you think scallops would mind?” And I remember thinking how strange it was that somebody would want me to eat scallops, just to make them feel better about what I eat.

At some point I realized that my simply being there, an outed vegan, was creating a kind of dissonance at the table, and it probably wouldn’t matter what I said. Eventually I managed to steer the topic of conversation to something else. But I was left with an odd feeling by the aggressiveness of it all. I hadn’t questioned anybody else’s eating choices. I was just sitting there minding my own business and trying to have dinner, and suddenly people I didn’t even know were trying to talk me into changing my ethical beliefs.

I feld a bit like a well meaning Frankenstein monster who had foolishly wandered out of the castle and into town, prompting the villagers to dutifully pick up their torches and give chase. Except that these particular villagers were fellow scientists.

Thinking about it afterward I was struck by some particular questions raised by the experience. If I had given one of a number of culturally acceptable non-answers, nobody would have thought to question anything I might say. For example, I could simply have said: “Of the eight sacred Sutras of the Patanjali, the first is Yama, which teaches to do no harm to one’s fellow creatures.” This would have identified me as a Buddhist, which would have protected me.

In other words, if you say you are doing something for religious reasons, unless you’re going around killing people or trying to have sex with their underage children, then you get a free pass. “Oh, you’re a Buddhist,” would be a typical response, whereupon everybody would nod thoughtfully and respectfully, while wondering whether they can still score tickets to the Dalai Lama’s talk next month.

And yet if I had said that, I wouldn’t have been giving a more substantive explanation – I would just have been adding that I’m a member of a recognized group. And so it occurs to me that we are putting ourselves in a kind of danger when we build our ethics from individually thought-through conviction. Identifying yourself with a large and powerful spiritual tribe, such as “Christian” or “Buddhist” or “Southern Baptist” confers upon you a measure of protection from angry villagers with torches.

The situation is somewhat analogous to the way large corporations like IBM, Microsoft and Apple accumulate patent portfolios. Because they have each built these extensive Intellectual Property shields around themselves, they don’t need to worry about getting sued by each other. But if you, dear reader, try to go up against any of these giants as an individual inventor with nothing but one clever patent to your name, they can shut you down like a book.

What I’m talking about here is not one specific ethical choice, but rather any ethical choice that has led you to wander away from received wisdom after you’ve worked some things through in your head. If you don’t have an army to back you up, you’re not always going to have an easy time of it.

But I don’t care, I prefer doing things this way. And I’m not about to let a few pesky torches keep me out of yonder village.