Ken's Blog

Today a friend showed me a bit of the computer game “Pitch Black”. Although I had never played this game, I was surprised by how familiar it looked. Soon I realized that this was because the visual look of the game – the interiors, architecture, lighting, camera, even the shape of the doors and passageways, possessed the same dingy dystopian post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi motif that pervades Valve’s “Half Life”, Id Software’s “Quake” and similar games.

If you don’t play these games, they all look eerily alike. And yet if you do play them regularly, I suspect that this particular surface gloss is absolutely necessary – de rigeur. It’s what clues you in that you are in a first person shooter, and lets you know what to expect.

On a different scale, this is similar to the way we Americans initially perceive Bollywood films. For most of us, because we are not immersed in them, do not speak their visual language, they all seem the same to us. And yet the people for whom these films are made see none of that. The texture itself – the particulars of the costumes, the musical style, the dance moves – these are as invisible to the film’s intended audience as a four/four beat is to the fans at a rock concert.

These first pungent encounters with the strange texture of an unfamiliar medium are part of the fun of living in a multicultural world. As we gradually enter an age of global digital media, I wonder whether we will experience this feeling less and less – as genres from far-flung corners of the world eventually become everyday and familiar, or more and more, as the number of newly available genres begins to multiply and propagate.

Are we entering an age of a common media language, the way the bulk of popular music in our culture began to converge to rock and roll half a century ago, and the way most written communication now seems to be morphing from long form prose through Blogs toward 140 character tweets? Or are we fragmenting into a new Tower of Babel?

Darned if I know.

Several years ago I was at one our extended family’s periodic gatherings. We were reminiscing about family members now long gone, and eventually the subject got around to my dad’s mom. Everybody had a different memory of her, and it seemed that most of the memories were quite different from mine.

My memories of grandma Helen, dating mostly from when I was between three and five years old, were mostly one of a delightful companion. She had one of those old apartments in the Bronx where all of the furniture is from another time, where everything looks and smells like something out of World War II or earlier. She was clearly always delighted to have me come and visit, during those times when my parents dropped me off for her to watch for the day, while they went off on some errand or another.

There were all kinds of wonderful things to play with in grandma’s apartment – old boxes with buttons and odd ornaments, framed paintings stacked up in the closet, old telephones, photos of mysterious people in little hinged cameo cases, a genuine miniature painted commemorative San Francisco trolley. Endless things and places for an intrepid little boy to explore. And through it all, grandma would bring me treats – one time it would be rugallah from the local bakery, another time it would be yummy Mallomars.

The rest of the family apparently did not share my remembered enthusiasm. Those who had been older than five when she was around recalled a very difficult and combative woman, obstinate and contrary, who consistently made life difficult for everyone around her. It’s as though we were talking about different people entirely.

And yet she clearly had a hold on everyone in the family. When I happened to mention that she had once given me a piece of advice, the entire group instantly became hushed. What I said, to be precise, was that grandma Helen had once told me there was just one thing I should always remember to do – advice that I had unfailingly followed ever since.

After what seemed like a very long and awed silence, one of my aunts finally asked what it was that grandma Helen had told me all those years ago. Everyone leaned in to hear what I had to say on the subject.

Feeling somewhat puzzled at all the fuss, yet rather proud to be the keeper of arcane family knowledge, I explained: “She told me that a young man should always remember, every day, to wash his face.”

Today I got a tour of Nike – in Beaverton, Oregon (near Portland). It’s quite the place. They have lakes and sports clubs and restaurants for their employees, Japanese gardens for contemplation, tennis courts, running tracks and swimming pools for exercise, as well as a regulation sized soccer field right in the middle of the artfully constructed rolling hills of this vast wooded campus. In the seemingly unending outdoor parking lot, we parked right next to a spot that is permanently reserved for Michael Jordan (he wasn’t there). Being in the Nike campus is a little like being in a dream world. You can tell that the employees all feel very well taken care of – I suspect the company has extremely high job retention.

There is also a huge company store where employees (and some of us visitors) can buy anything Nike offers at far below retail prices. Walking around this giant emporium, I was not surprised to notice that the enormous array of items on sale – shoes and socks and footballs (both American and European) and jackets and golf clubs and boxers and sweatshirts and tennis rackets and just about anything else sports-related that you can imagine – had exactly one thing in common: They all displayed the famous Nike swoosh symbol. Now, it’s important to understand that Nike doesn’t actually make most of this stuff (although in one of the more secretive buildings on campus they do some impressive technical development) – they have people in China to actually make the shoes. So what exactly is going on here?

I think the answer lies precisely in this sense one gets, while walking around this campus, of being in the midst of a lovely dream. What Nike offers their customers is indeed a dream – the dream of being like Tiger Woods, or Mia Hamm, or Lance Armstrong. It’s a good dream, one that gets kids to exercise, to learn self-mastery, to try to be the best they can be And of course it’s also a business, a phenomenally successful business. Every time you buy something at a Nike store your body becomes a highly visible sales platform for the Nike brand. There is an endless spiral of positive reinforcement between the brand, the customers who wear it, and the sports stars who are handsomely paid to lend their illustrious names and faces to the entire endeavor.

It’s not about making clothes – an activity that is outsourced to other parts of the world where labor costs are far lower. Rather, it’s about making money by giving people a way to define themselves, to strive to become a more ideal version of themselves, through identification with their cultural heroes.

There are worse ways to make a living.

Today was a beautiful day in Seattle, where I am visiting all too briefly. The more often I visit here from NY, the more I become aware that I am – albeit in a subtle way – a visitor from a somewhat alien culture. I start to see myself through the eyes of my friends and colleagues. They and I have much in common, and yet we differ in so many ways, subtle yet systematic, that bind me to my fellow New Yorkers.

There is a love of the outdoors here, a premium on natural dress and a kind of “green” way of being, which belies the fact that people drive big cars to get anywhere.

Everything here must go into the correct recycle bin, apparently on pain of death (although I would not dare to test this theory, for fear of an untimely demise), and there is a kind of laid back attitude that is distinctly un-Manhattan.

It’s not that either way of being is right or wrong, and it’s fun to slip into another way of being for a few days. I’ve enjoy my time here, and I adore Seattle, to see my casual friends with their wonderful brown hiking boots, their easy and slow style of talking, their unhurried way of strolling and driving about their vast wooded world.

But I must confess that some part of me is already looking back to being home again, to that cramped fast-moving world of people piled upon people, of a million different cultures all zooming past each other at lightning speed, of everyone wearing black and feeling fabulous to be part of something so fast moving and outrageous and crazy as New York.

Whenever I set down to write something here I am aware that there is a kind of zooming process at work, a subject lens that moves in and out. Sometimes this lens pulls out to take in the Universe, metaphysical questions and the like, while at other times it hovers around some middle scale – discussions of politics or social conflicts. At still other times – as in yesterday’s post – my lens zooms all the way in to discuss something highly personal.

But I’ve noticed a funny thing. The posts that are the most tightly focused, personal and idiosyncratic in scope, are often the ones that receive the greatest response from readers. There seems to be a kind of strange loop at work here, a meeting of polar opposites of scale. The most highly personal issues, the expression of thoughts that I grapple with alone in my heart, often seem to be, paradoxically, the most universal and highly resonant.

Perhaps this is what binds us together most tightly as humans, the quality that allows us to understand and empathize with each other in our respective separate (and often lonely) selves. The more personal things get, and the more deeply we burrow into our own individual hearts, the more universally we forge the really important connections with each other.

A strange loop indeed.

Today, on a beautiful evening boat cruise on a lake, under a flawless night sky, I was aware of the presence of someone I’ve been successfully avoiding for years. There are some people (fortunately only a few) who come into your life and proceed to sow a path of utter destruction, dismantling your dearest friendships, your professional relationships, the trust between you and others, wreaking untold havok in that place deep within yourself that anchors you, that tells you you are safe.

To encounter such a person some years later, in an unexpected place, is a shock. I found myself carefully monitoring the situation, some part of me going into emergency survival mode. I did not wish any sort of confrontation, or even encounter. My goal was to get through the evening as though this Grendel were not there.

To a large degree I succeeded. The presence of a few good friends helped considerably. At the end of the evening the boat docked and I maneuvered silently past my nemesis, realizing that I had survived, that the circumstances that had allowed this person to cause such horror in my life no longer pertained, that I was relatively safe.

Of course we are never completely safe. We each, from time to time, meet our nemesis, someone capable of tearing down the things we most care about. But we move on, watchful, wary, until one day we encounter them again, perhaps under a night sky on a lake, and we observe, with a kind of watchful relief, that their dark power seems at last to be gone.

Today I walked up a mountain. Not a very big mountain – only about three thousand feed high – but still, a mountain just the same. It was with friends, people I really like and see not nearly often enough, and the climb itself, both upwards and downwards, was the context for delightful conversation on a myriad of topics.

It’s marvelous the way a walk up a mountain, somewhat strenuous and sustained exercise, can provide a context for the most delightful conversations. Far more inspiring than merely sitting around for several hours. It’s as though our bodies, moving through space and time, engaged in a form of hard-won progress through the world, spurs our minds to journey as well.

Perhaps in ancient times, when our ancestors were nomadic by necessity, roaming the world as a way of life, conversation arose as a way for a tribe to bond in its journeys. We still maintain these pleasurable instincts even when not moving. And yet there is something about walking and talking, about the sheer pleasure of sustained conversation during sustained activity, that speaks to some deep ancestral call within.

Several years after its cultural moment, I’m finally watching “Cloverfield”. It’s enormous fun, because of its paradoxical premise. Normally when you watch a movie you are so completely immersed in the artificiality of it that you forget the artificiality entirely. The characters – who are obviously movie stars merely playing actual people – are so transparently synthetic that you tend to ignore the unreality of it all. You end up rooting for Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant to win in love precisely because you had already made a deal when you sat down to watch the movie that you would politely ignore the fact that they are really movie stars playing a role. And it’s that contract which makes the whole enterprise function so seamlessly.

“Cloverfield” is quite a different beast. On some level it’s an answer piece to “The Blair Witch Project”, but it comes with none of that earlier film’s ambiguity of provenance. If you saw BWP when it first came out in theatres, you could perhaps convince yourself that it might be real – found footage from a series of actual events.

But “Cloverfield”, while maintaining the same gritty feeling of cinema verite´, tells you at every moment, which each shot, that it is a highly artificial construct, a window into a world that not only never happened, but could not have happened.

For me the effect while watching it was that my consciousness of what was happening was neatly cleaved into two. On one level I was watching a gritty, gripping tale of terrible things happening to people who were oddly affecting in their detailed imperfection (like real people). On the other hand, I was acutely aware at all times, every single moment of the film, that I was watching something as artificlal and laboriously constructed as a Japanese Noh play.

This might very well be a new genre – one attuned to the PoMo sensibilities of users of Facebook and Twitter. When everything is in quotes, the entire audience ends up being invited to become a kind of critic of postmodern cinema.

I wouldn’t want all films to follow in this path, but once in a while there is something very cool and fun about having such an experience of double vision.

I was walking down Broadway this afternoon in Greenwich Village, watching all of the fascinating people, each in their own little world, their own personal movie within this astonishing and densely packed backdrop. I passed by a young couple kissing passionately in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to anyone but each other, then an old man walking slowly, lost in his thoughts, followed by two woman sharing an obviously very funny joke. I felt very pleased just to be here, immersed in this endless panoramic display of lives barely glimpsed. Yes, on the one hand the city is a huge swirling mass of humanity. But on the other hand, each individual within this mass is utterly unique.

Just as I was having this thought, I saw a young woman, probably in her early twenties, standing on the sidewalk and holding in her right hand a cellphone, which she was talking into with great animation. As I got closer I noticed that she was staring right into the window of a liquor store, all the while chatting away amiably. I wondered what she saw through the window, and whether she was describing it to a friend. Then I noticed that a young man was inside the store, at the window, looking in her direction and smiling. In fact, I realized, the two of them were looking right at each other through the glass.

The entire scene seemed rather mysterious. I could tell by the way the young man was dressed that he probably worked in the store. OK, that made sense – he couldn’t leave the store because he was working. But why was he just looking at her through the plate glass while she talked on the phone, and who was she talking to? Then I remembered that some people have “hands free” cellphone headsets – and that would make particular sense for someone working in a store. The young man was probably wearing an unobtrusive headset, and she was most likely talking to him.

By now I had passed the couple by, and the little tableau was already behind me, but I was still trying to puzzle it out. Why would a young woman hold a conversation with her young man over a cellphone while staring at him through a plate glass window, when she could just as easily go in the store and talk to him directly?

Unable to contain my curiosity, I turned to look back, and that’s when I saw the telling little detail that I had missed before – the one detail that explained everything. This is, after all, New York, and there are certain rules, and sometimes those rules require resorting to cellphone conversations through thick plate glass windows. For clearly the young man, being in the middle of work, could not leave the store in the middle of his shift. And yet his young woman friend could not enter the store to talk with him directly, for a simple reason.

In her left hand was a cigarette.

I get loads and loads of attempted spam comments on this blog. They come in a steady tide of junk, seemingly from all sort of IP addresses and made-up user names. Of course they get filtered out before you see them, but I can see them when I look in my spam folder. One sad consequence of this situation is that from time to time a reader comments for the first time and I just don’t see it, because their comment has been drowned in a sea of overwhelming spam. I don’t mind the spam itself so much, but I do mind missing the comments of actual fellow humans with something to say.

Another consequence of the flood of spam is that I have no idea how many people are reading this blog. I do get a sense that there must be quite a few, because I keep running into folks around the world who tell me they are readers the first time we meet, and others who tell me that their mom or their aunt reads it regularly. After a while you get a sense of a lot of random connections, some large ungainly graph of human connections of which this blog is a part.

But because of the flood of fake spam “readers” I don’t know how to interpret any available log statistics to figure out the number of actual humans out there. I sometimes wonder whether it would matter to me, in terms of what I choose to write, or how I choose to write, whether the number of readers each day should turn out to average ten or ten thousand. On some important level it shouldn’t matter. If you start writing for an “audience” then the result is at best entertainment, and the entire enterprise is likely to devolve into a pointless game of maintaining high readership numbers.

I rather like this state of affairs, this sense of broadcasting from a lonely cabin in space, with just the occasional reminder that there may be some sort of crowd massed on the other side of my cabin door, waiting for the next interplanetary transmission. This way I can focus all my energies where they should be focused – unto a place that is unknown, and indeed unknowable, to spammers – the place that contains you, the unique and very real person who is reading this right now.