Ken's Blog

Walking around Manhattan earlier this evening, watching people hanging out and enjoying a Friday night on the town, I was struck by a particular paradox of human existence: On the one hand we are all so completely connected with each other – we quite literally give meaning to each others’ existence. All of the people I saw out on the street were focused upon each other, watching each others’ facial expressions and body language, not just communicating but performing the act of being themselves – or the version of themselves that they were bringing to this particular social situation.

So yes, we are all deeply connected, that is clearly true, and yet the paradox is that this connection matters precisely because we are each so separate. Nobody can reach inside the mind of another. Outside of science fiction, there is no actual mind-reading. And if you think about it, the very fact that the fantasy of mind-reading is so prevalent in science fiction – given that the real thing does not in fact exist – suggests that we are deeply and emotionally engaged in this paradox of connection and separateness.

There is one person on this planet with whom I have regular extended conversations which can last for hours – we quite literally never run out of things to talk about. Movies, novels, songs, weddings we’ve been to, when and how relationships in our lives went wrong, which friends we can trust and which we cannot, or the best way to cook broccoli. It doesn’t seem to matter – whenever Sophie and I are together, our endless conversation continues, full of life, sometimes darting here and then there, but constantly moving, and always fascinating. And after all these years, this conversation we have is always thrilling to me, as we continually discover new topics to explore and old ones to revisit.

I find myself wondering whether it is the fact that we each start out trapped in our own minds that makes this connection so thrilling. Imagine, just for a moment, some alternate universe in which true mind-reading indeed existed. Sophie and I would have no need to explore the coastline of each other’s thoughts – and there would be no surprises. In such a world, the thrill of connection, at least as we now know it, would be gone. All of those hours and years of conversation would be as pointless as sitting in a room alone for years and talking to yourself.

I would argue that this is the glorious paradox which gives pleasure to our existence: Each of us, so very separate and unable to see directly inside the mind of another, must work to bridge that gulf – through conversation, art, poetry, even conflict. We need to struggle, to exert effort, to achieve that connection which makes life worth living.

And as soon as we make that effort, the moment we communicate to each other that our bond with them is worth struggling for, that is the moment when we create the very meaning that we are seeking.

“All children, except one, grow up … and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” – James M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Nobody thinks of themselves as evil. Except of course for Dr. Evil – the fiendishly brilliant and touchingly insecure nemesis of that man of international mystery, Austin Powers. But you could even argue that Dr. Evil doesn’t want to be “Evil” (he said, making quote marks in the air with his hands), but rather to be loved. And the only way he knows how to be loved is to have a brand name, an identity, a tag.

And who’s to say that his is a bad strategy? When you think back now on the Austin Powers films, who does your heart go out to? Surely not the eponymous hero. His desire to be loved is too diguised, too baroque. But Dr. Evil is pure naked emotional need. He will have our approval and our respect, even if he needs to destroy the entire planet to get it! Who amongst us does not recognize this need? To put it more plainly: Who amongst us has never been two and a half years old?

The strange (and, I admit, secretly entertaining) thing about the current presidential race is how both sides – not the candidates, who are never permitted to say this outright, but their supporters – categorize their opponents as evil. Or, should I say, Evil.

It is so incomprehensible to those on the right that anyone could embrace the philosophy espoused by the left – and vice versa – that each side looks at the other with gaping astonishment, wondering why on earth these people are spending all that effort and money to betray their country.

If you are a McCain supporter, you scratch your head and wonder whether people really want to lose the war in Iraq, just when victory is in our grasp, why people are so eager to turn their backs on the Alaska oil reserves, or whether liberal mothers actually want to murder their unborn children.

If you are an Obama supporter, you look at what the Republicans are saying, and you find yourself struck speechless. Secretly you wonder if they can actually mean such things, or whether it’s all some sort of elaborate act.

Obviously neither side is evil, and neither side hates America. We’re talking here about millions of people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who love their children, work for a living, care for elderly parents, contribute to community funds, and wish for tomorrow to dawn upon a better world.

And yet, here they are – both sides – glaring at each other, teeth bared, wondering how these others, these Pod People, managed to steal the souls of half the populace, and replace them with an evil thing of uncertain menace.

Seeing this spectacle, I am left wondering whether this is just the nature of human existence. Perhaps the middle is unstable. Perhaps human nature demands that we choose sides, that the reasonable citizen who tries to comprehend both narratives, like the character of Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit, will be torn apart by the angry clawing hands of the adversarial hordes on either side.

And in the end nobody will understand what happened here, whatever the outcome, except for Dr. Evil and Peter Pan.

I was talking with a new acquaintance this evening who told me that she used to work on the production team of a certain New York film director who is well known for his neurotic tendencies. She described how the producer and key members of the team were out-of-control sufferers from Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder. Working for them was mainly about making sure the food was lined up properly on the tray, that the salt was placed under the bed at night to ensure good luck, or – for one particular person – that any building was exited by exactly the same route through which it had been entered.

She told me that she had found the experience to be quite unpleasant, since these people did not seem to have the bandwidth to treat their assistants with decency – all of their energy was directed toward their particular OCD rituals.

My acquaintance wondered aloud whether this ability to exercise unbridled power was actually detrimental to the people who had it. Perhaps, she said, they would not have become so Obsessive/Compulsive if they had not been given free reign to indulge their OCD. She also wondered how people who have so little room for kindness could place themselves into such a vulnerable position as to rely on people who would eventually come to detest them. Then she said something curious, which kind of turned it around: “Always be nice to the waitress, because she has the power.”

This was a strangely resonant conversation for me because just last night I had finally seen Martin Scorcese’s superb film The Aviator – a 2004 biopic about the strange and tragic life of Howard Hughes. The film makes the case that Hughes’ power – the driving force that propelled him to become the world’s wealthiest man – was another side of the same OCD that ultimately destroyed him. It was his drive to perfection, a compulsive drive that ultimately consumed him and tore apart his psyche, which allowed him to apply his genius so effectively in so many areas.

By the way, if you ever rent the DVD, there is a brilliant and completely unexpected moment at 01:37 which (in typically sublime Scorcese fashion) visually sums up and explains the entire tragic connection between Hughes’ genius and his ultimate doom. It’s a moment unlike any other in the film, and it is also the only moment when Scorcese explicitly allows us inside the mind of Howard Hughes, and lets us see just how difficult it must have been for him to move among the world of ordinary mortals.

After having watched Scorcese’s vision of how much internal struggle could be required for Howard Hughes – the wealthiest man in the world – simply to eat a meal or open a door – activities most of us take for granted – I was struck by my acquaintance’s “waitress” comment. What is this power that the waitress supposedly has (even if she doesn’t want it)?

Trying to understand, I made the connection that a kind of learned helplessness can be a signifier of status in our society, and perhaps in all societies. We could eat far more cheaply (and often better) at home, and yet we go through the ritual of paying rather high prices to have strangers cook for us and serve us food. In a way, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, the restaurant experience plays out a fantasy of upper-class entitlement: The high price we are charged pays for the rental of make-believe servants. While we are sitting at that table, we are in temporary metaphorical possession of fellow human beings. Within that proscribed space, these people exist to serve us.

So now I wonder, could this potentially be bad for us, this learned helplessness in restaurants and other places – if we allow ourselves to rely upon being served? Could we become slaves to a need to be waited upon – Eloi tended to by unwitting Morlocks – to the extent that we give up our ability act for ourselves?

I don’t think there is anything wrong with the kind of play-acting that we do when we go to restaurants. This is just a train of thought, probably brought on by a random downer of a conversation right after having watched The Aviator. But maybe it’s a good idea, every once in a while, to cook a meal at home.

I have been interviewed on TV, as have a number of people I know, and when you’ve been through that experience you realize something very odd: No matter what you say, the story usually comes out the way the folks who interviewed you already wanted it to – before they’d ever talked to you. In other words, they were only interviewing to find a sound bite in support of the story they were already planning to tell. That’s just the way things work.

And here’s the odd thing about it: I don’t think there is any attempt to deceive. Rather, I think what we are seeing is a symptom of the fact that the very structure of mass media is based upon self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t get people to watch news by telling them things that they know to be wrong. Even if the things they know to be wrong are actually right.

Mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks can only sustain a relationship with millions of citizens by speaking to the conventional truths that culturally bind those citizens together – even if those “truths” are falsehoods. And as Bill Maher discovered in 2001, you cannot even say something that is obviously true, if people are not ready to hear that truth.

I was reminded of this recently when I was describing to a friend something I was told years ago by my brother, who does cutting-edge research in computational DNA analysis. OK, bear with me here…

Everybody knows that there are various races in the U.S., right? Let’s see … there are caucasians, asians, africans, etc., and subgroups within those, like Latinos, Swedes, Chinese, and so forth. Everything you hear in the news reinforces the categorization of people by “race”. People even get into strange quasi-religious discussions about these things, such as this one: “Since Barack Obama’s father was actually born in Kenya, Obama wasn’t descended from slaves. So is it proper to call him an African American?” After a while this might all start to sound like a debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Yet there’s a glimmer of understanding hidden under the feet of those dancing angels. People having such discussions seem to understand, on a subliminal level, that the fundamental issue on the table is not biology or genetics – but rather cultural heritage. “African American” is often used as a shorthand reference for: “A group of people whose forebears were enslaved by another group of people, which caused a big mess that we are all still working out.” Which is why the label of “African American” on someone with Obama’s particular cultural background can sound slightly odd.

Consider this: The poor and undereducated children of Irish or German immigrants used to be seen as distinct racial types in this country. But now, some generations later, their descendents are no longer seen in racial terms – they are simply educated and sometimes affluent Americans whose forebears were Irish or German immigrants. Many younger Americans today have no awareness that Irish or German Americans were ever thought of in “racial” terms – an evolution that would have seemed amazing to the Americans of five generations ago. Whatever their false beliefs about “race”, people do sometimes understand on a deeper level that the real issue is culture and its clashes, not biology.

Which gets back to what my brother told me all those years ago. He was relating a scientific fact that is well understood by people who work in his field, but that never gets reported in the popular media. It goes like this: Choose two men at random from Sweden. They will probably both be tall, have blonde hair, fair skin, and various other “ethnically identifiable” features. Now pick a man at random in Kenya. He will of course look quite different from the first two men.

But here’s the interesting part: Look at the three billion or so base pairs of the DNA sequence within each of these three men, and ask the following two questions:

1. How many base pairs are different between the first two men?
2. How many base pairs are different between the first man and the third man, due to systematic differences between men in Sweden and men in Kenya?

It turns out that the first number (DNA differences between individual men in Sweden) is twelve times as large as the second number (systematic DNA differences between men in Sweden and men in Kenya).

In other words, for almost any practical purpose, what we call “race” is a myth, in the sense that genetic differences between you and any other individual in your own ethnic group completely dwarf any systematic difference between you and a person from another ethnic group.

And this is not so mysterious when you trace back the history of our species (this has actually been done, by tracking the rate of random mutation in the sequence of the male Y chromosome, which is not subject to sexual recombination). Some sixty thousand years ago there was a “pinch” in human population – down to maybe a few hundred individuals in Africa. About forty five thousand years ago the first humans made it to asia.

Since then there just hasn’t been much time for the species to diversify much – only a few thousand generations. Most of the diversity that can now be seen in genetic markers – what we sometimes refer to as “race” – is associated with highly superficial characteristics that mainly correlate with adaptations to weather, such as the loss of skin melanin in groups that migrated away from tropical climes (which we now associate with “white” people), or eye folds to protect against cold weather (which we now associate with “asian” people).

All of which basically means that talk about “racial differences” – so confidently bandied about in all of our civic discussions – is based on a myth. The substantial differences between us are cultural. And if we wish to deal with those cultural differences effectively, it might be useful for people to know this.

But you’re not going to see any of this in a newspaper or on TV, because, sadly, this is a case where the truth clashes with the “truth”.

Many of us have seen Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town, in which a girl, now deceased, is given the option to repeat any one day of her life. Of course the “gotcha” is that the experience of reliving an ordinary day proves to be emotionally unbearable. From her rather unusual perspective, each moment of that day – which seems so banal to everyone else living it – is filled with overwhelming pathos.

Looking back on particularly wonderful moments in my life, days that I have ended up remembering for years afterward, I don’t think I generally realized how extraordinary those moments were while they were happening. Sometimes a quiet conversation, a simple moment of connection, has, over time, become one of my most cherished memories. This can be particularly true in cases where I later ended up losing my connection with that person.

We are used to experiencing treasured works of art more than once. We might hear a favourite song hundreds of times and never grow tired of it. We can experience some books or films over and over again, and they only grow better each time (I don’t believe I could ever grow tired of certain films, including Casablanca and Annie Hall, and I see something new and surprising every time I watch them).

Today I saw several of my favourite sculptures at the Metropolitan Musum of Art, and I felt a complete thrill at the sight, even though I have seen each of those same sculptures many times before. And I remember having felt that same thrill, that same feeling of my heart leaping up at the beauty of these sculptures, when I saw them years ago. This particular feeling is something that always seems to connect me with who I have been at different times in my life.

But perhaps Thorton Wilder was right. Perhaps reality itself is too precious, too intense for such reenactments. An important conversation, a meal that you’ve shared, that first quiet chat with somebody who has become precious in your life – that one afternoon you spent wandering around an old church in France, just talking, with a cherished and now lost friend from India. Even if we could somehow go back and experience such things again, should we?

If you’ve spent a perfect day, would you do it again?

One day, not right away but eventually, the trend toward personal information devices – the future editions of the IPhone – will start to move inward. As technology improves it will become fashionable, and then de rigeur, to implant the various components directly within ourselves – including earpieces in the ears, speaker in the mouth, touch sensors in the fingertips and displays in the eyes. I know it seems weird now, but in several decades it will all be perfectly normal, like going from New York to Beijing in a matter of hours, strolling down the street while talking to someone half way around the world, and watching people walk on the moon.

I’m reminded of these changes to come when I plug in my laptop computer. We now take for granted wireless communication everywhere – cell networks, WiFi, and whatever comes next. But we still have to plug in for power, which continues to limit our information mobility. And it occurs to me that this will change.

In the future, the batteries that power the equivalent of your laptop or IPhone will be the food you eat. Your information technology will share your metabolism. This won’t be a burden because power requirements per unit of computation, storage and transmission will be a small fraction of they are now – just as those costs are now a small fraction of what they were several decades ago.

So the question comes up – will we merge our economy of food production and consumption with our economy of information technology? Will we start to build backup systems into ourselves to make sure the system doesn’t go down?

I mean, you wouldn’t want to lose valuable files because you couldn’t find a decent place to get a sandwich, would you?

 
 
 
 

Once in a long while
You just have a perfect day
I had one today

 
 
 
 

The U.S. presidential campaign is turning into a Jiu Jitsu match, in which each side turns its opponent’s attacks back upon themselves. For example, in recent weeks the McCain campaign has been attempting to turn one of Obama’s own greatest strengths against him, by characterizing him as a “celebrity” – an interesting attempt to convert Obama’s very charisma into a liability.

A weakness of this strategy is that McCain supporters are not stupid. They may disagree with Obama’s proposed policies, but they know that he is not Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, and they know full well (even if they are loathe to admit it) that they are being talked down to by the McCain campaign.

And sure enough, the Obama camp devised a counter-Jiu Jitsu of its own. Realizing the weakness of the McCain campaign’s rhetoric – by promoting an unsupportable myth the McCain camp had exposed its own soft pink underbelly – Obama lay low and bided his time, allowing the McCain folks plenty of opportunities to repeat the comment ad nauseum, letting his opponents believe that they were scoring a victory each time they uttered the word “celebrity”.

Which set the stage perfectly for Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Rather than soaring rhetoric, instead of ringing pronouncements about The Audacity of Hope, Obama showed the nation his real strength – his ability to speak to specific issues, to clearly frame the differences between his positions and the positions of his opponent, and to use those differences to tear apart his opponent’s case on the merits. After all – for anybody who’s been paying attention – this is a skill Obama has been continually developing since his days running the Harvard Law Review two decades ago.

All of which ends up making the major recent talking point of the McCain campaign look rather silly. On the other hand, the McCain camp immediately followed with some new Jiu Jitsu of its own – it arranged for its candidate to select a woman as his running mate. And not just any woman! Governor Palin is adamantly against women’s reproductive rights and has no experience whatsoever with either national or international policy.

I just read the following comment about her, from a Republican delegate: “She hunts. She fishes. She is an environmentalist.” Trying to unravel that thought makes my head hurt – as though Madonna had actually said “McCain is like Hitler, because some of his best friends are Jews.”

Come to think of it, picking Palin is not as much a threat to Obama as it is a threat to women – the gender equivalent of appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. If Hillary Clinton had made it to the White House – whether you agree with her policies or not – we would most likely have had a seasoned and capable chief executive, with a clear view of national and international policy. Her tenure in the Oval Office would have cleared a path for future female U.S. presidents.

But if, for whatever reason, McCain cannot serve out his term and Palin should become president, her complete lack of experience at the national or international level and her strong stand against women’s rights will ensure that it might be another century before either party will be able to rally women voters to support a woman for president.

Hmm. Maybe the McCain folks are better at this Jiu Jitsu stuff than I’d thought…

Went all out and saw two movies in movie theatres today. First Mamma Mia (ie: the girl movie) and then Hell Boy II: The Golden Army (that would be the boy movie). I have to say that the girls won this round hands down.

Mama Mia is just about perfect. Yes it’s over the top, cranked up to eleven and more in your face than Robin Williams (if such a thing is possible). But it knows exactly what it wants to do, not a shot or even a moment is wasted, and absolutely all of it is in service of deepening the characters. There is not a single gag or line or visual that betrays or confuses the clear central line of the plot and its underlying motivations – and that’s a rather hard act to pull off in a major Hollywood feature film.

And Meryl Streep… Well, what can I say. I’m starting to think that this woman can do absolutely anything. She throws herself into the character of Donna Sheridan (a character that most actors would have played in a winking way) with utter and profound conviction – every bit as much conviction as she brought to Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada.

In this case she brings to compelling life a woman who has successfully managed to avoid any real decisions or purposeful life changes in the last twenty years. And therefore when Streep sings and dances her way through Dancing Queen like a crazy seventeen year old, you really believe this is a woman who can instantly channel the giddy teenager she used to be (“…young and sweet, only seventeen…”), without the transition seeming even slightly odd or awkward. Rather, the number works – her performance and the direction work in tandem here – as an anthem to the redemptive power of romance and ABBA songs. And it is this precise quality in her character that makes the surprise ending seem natural – even inevitable.

In contrast, the boy movie was a major letdown. Having seen the first Hellboy I assumed that I would be treated to another character oriented film, filled with surprising relationships and unique personalities. Instead, we get a massive watering down of Ron Perlman’s once ecstatically convincing portrayal of a fearsome demon from Hell ruled by his inner child, as played by Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen (with a hint of Cat Balou). It wasn’t Perlman’s performance that was at fault here – it was that the writing and direction didn’t give him enough to work with this time out. And that was just the beginning.

Seth McFarlane’s voice character for Krauss is far too broad to work in this context, sounding like an idea for a Monty Python sketch. Meanwhile the relationship between Hellboy and Liz starts nowhere and continues to go nowhere (doesn’t Guillermo del Toro know anything about the need for mystery and mutual discovery when portraying a romantic couple???). And Doug Jones’ character of Abe Sapien – essentially a broadly sketched comic sidekick – should not be in a relationship with a deeply serious tragic princess, since they inhabit mutually incompatible character universes.

But the worst thing is that every few minutes the film stops dead – and I mean deceased, buried, pushing up daisies – while the filmmakers insert yet another gratuitous computer graphic effects scene that has little or nothing to do with the story or characters, but rather proclaims: “Isn’t it cool how we managed to spend all that studio money!” And the effects didn’t always work – many of them took me right out of the world of the film. Effects are supposed to serve the story, not compete with it.

On the other hand, the stylized “storybook” myth at the film’s start (reminiscent of John Hubley’s magnificent opening animation for Watership Down) and the scene of Hellboy and Abe Sapien gradually getting falling-down drunk together while belting out Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You are worth the price of admission.

But that’s where things came full circle for me: The Barry Manilow sing-along was precisely the moment when Hellboy II found the courage to channel its inner Mamma Mia.

 

What do these lines of verse:

      The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
      In a beautiful pea-green boat,
      They took some honey, and plenty of money,
      Wrapped up in a five pound note.

have in common with these:

      Oh, beautiful for spacious skies
      For amber waves of grain,
      For purple mountains’ majesty
      Above the fruited plains.

or with these:

      There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
      And she’s buying a stairway to heaven
      And when she gets there she knows if the stores are closed
      With a word she can get what she came for

or these:

      Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
      A tale of a fateful trip
      That started from this tropic port,
      Aboard this tiny Ship.

They all use the four+three meter: lines containing four beats alternate with lines containing three beats. Technically this is heptameter – a line with seven beats – also known as the “ballad line” (it shows up in a lot of ballads), with a short pause after the fourth beat to break up the line into two parts.

The wonderful thing about four+three meter is that it really has the same timing as four+four meter – so it’s easy to follow the rhythm – except that the eighth beat is a silent “stealth” beat, a place for you to catch your breath before going on to the next verse.

Contrast this with lyrics that are deliberately designed to be difficult to recite:

      I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
      I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
      I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
      From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

That’s the opening verse of The Very Model of a Modern Major General, the great patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. It goes on like that too, for verse after merciless verse, the inexorable rhythm requiring the singer to soldier bravely onward without a pause for breath. This is high art indeed! To properly sing the part of the Major General (not just to muddle through it, but to really nail it) requires a combination of natural talent and many hours of serious training.

In contrast, Edward Lear, Katherine lee Bates, Robert Plant and Sherwood Schwartz (the respective authors of the first four examples above – wouldn’t you want to be invited to that dinner party?) were clearly taking the position, by writing in the four+three meter, that theirs was a populist art: The underlying message is that this is a song or poem for everyone, an invitation to please join in.

I happen to love the four+three meter, and I sometimes use it for composing verse just because it’s so darned fun. One of the wonderful things about it is that you can combine the music of any four+three song with the lyrics of any other. A perfect illustration is the following ingenious music/lyric mash-up, written in 1978 by Roger Clark and Dick Bright:

Stairway to Gilligan