Ken's Blog

The bell rang for dinner quite promptly at eight
And all the guests knew they were not to be late
The first dish was light, just a bit aromatic
Not quite jejune but nothing emphatic
But then arrived something that rallied the group
A steaming hot serving of fresh fennel soup
In a purple tureen, ornamented and glazed
Elated and thrilled, the delighted guests gazed
Voluminous vapors ascended and mingled
Rapturous fragrances quivered and tingled
Circling thrice ’round the jovial hall
Sweetly caressing each cranny and wall

Next came the salad, in succulent shades
Of lilacs and teals and pink marmalades
Dishes were filled with things subtely scented
Not an aroma went unrepresented
Cumquats and cabbages, squashes, potatoes
Crabapple candies with turkish tomatoes
Candied yams, cantaloupes, canapéd beets
Peliculed peppers and pomerade sweets
Artichokes, celery, endive and leek
Oversized olives (both Spanish and Greek)
Rhubarbs and radishes, parsnips on plates
Blueberries, brussel sprouts, tamarind dates

      When the meal was done they sat stunned and inert
      And nobody had any room for dessert

He was having dinner with his parents. Someone in their family was thinking of buying a house, and his mom, who had offered to chip in to help with the down payment, was asking if he could chip in as well. He said yes, of course. Family is family, after all. But then he thought to ask: “Would I ever get the money back?”

“Well,” she said, “I could write up a guarantee, so you’d be sure get the money eventually.” It took him a moment to understand what she was really saying – that he would get his money back when his mother was dead. “Well,” he said, trying to think of something light to say, in spite of the darker turn the conversation had taken, “by then I’ll probably be rich, so I won’t need the money.”

Then he had an inspiration. “Mom, I’ll make you a deal: It could take me a really long time to get that rich. If you will do me the favor of giving me a few decades to make my fortune before you pass on, then I won’t ask for any money back.”

She laughed, and they both agreed that it was a good deal all around.

Today I went with my brother to see David Byrne’s art-work Playing the Building, in which he wires up the old Battery Maritime Building in downtown Manhattan to an antique electric organ, so that visitors can create sounds throughout the cavernous space by playing notes on the keyboard.

David Byrne’s organ within its musical web

Of course I liked the idea – turning an entire building into a musical instrument – but the execution left me cold. It felt as though he didn’t mean it. The keys were hooked up to essentially random pitches, so you couldn’t really play anything creative or aesthetically communicative. I felt as though I were seeing the illusion of audience participation, without any belief on the part of David Byrne that a true collaboration with the audience is possible – or even desirable.

The idea of turning ambient architectural space into giant immersive musical instruments has been explored by others. One of my favourite practitioners of this wonderful and arcane art is the LEMUR group (League of Musical Urban Robots). Their work often involves placing robotically actuated instruments about a room, on walls and ceilings, so that concerts come at you from all directions in orchestrated robotic cocaphony.

Two remotely actuated LEMUR drums on the ceiling

These various experiments are intriguing, and yet it’s hard not to feel cheated. Neither Byrne’s work nor LEMUR’s truly empowers the observer/participant. All day today I could not shake the feeling, a kind of nagging memory in an obscure part of my brain, that I had once glimpsed the promised land: A living space that you yourself could play, a true participatory musical architecture. The very walls could come alive under your touch, and through music you would become one with the architectural space around you.

And then, all at once, I had it. A memory dating from my childhood, when I first saw Grumpy play the pipe organ in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. If you’ve ever seen this film you’ll know what I’m talking about. The pipe organ did not merely produce sounds. It came alive, its pipes dancing and singing under the control of Grumpy’s magical hands.

Grumpy’s pipe organ

I remembered that when I saw that, I wanted to become one with that pipe organ, that house, just the way Grumpy was. For me it was a vision of the way architecture is supposed to be – a living extension of your inner self, responsive to your touch, the very environment around you reflecting the beauty you feel within your soul.

Is that asking too much?

Over brunch today I was discussing with my friends Kaelan and Judith the old science fiction concept of waking up to find that you might be the last person on earth – and the question of what to do should you find yourself in this awkward predicament. Do you go off in search of other potential survivors? Free all the animals trapped in the zoo? All of these seem like reasonable points of action.

But my thoughts immediately went to the problem of avoiding going mad. Somehow this seemed to be the largest problem. Over the course of the day, my mind kept going back to this point, and I tried to tease out why that had been my first reaction. And that got me thinking about what really goes on between people – not within us as individuals, but between us as social beings.

We humans are so deeply social in our emotional make-up that we often don’t even notice how powerful is our instinct to connect. If you put two or more people in a room together, we immediately start talking to each other. What do we talk about? The truth is, it doesn’t really matter – the important point is the talking. Yes, we tell ourselves that whatever we are discussing is quite important – the annoying new boss, why our candidate is going to win, who is sleeping with whom – but this is merely the tail wagging the dog. The truth is that we are talking to that other person primarily because we are driven by a powerful instinctive drive to start talking and to keep talking. Since this drive doesn’t make any rational sense (being an instinct), we come up with all sorts of excuses for why we are doing it.

And so it occurs to me that, just perhaps, the moment we start this conversation we begin to create another being in the room – another intelligent entity. This intelligent entity has drives and desires, likes and dislikes, personality quirks and a hunger to exist, to grow. It has no physical manifestation, but is rather a product of the strange alchemy that happens between two human brains that have begun to communicate. Yet it is real, and when it dies (if, say, we have a permanent falling-out with a friend) we keenly feel its loss.

And so be be alone – utterly alone, as in the scenario I discussed with Kaelan and Judith – would be to suffer a grievous wound, traumatic damage to something that is organically part of us. And I think that was the source of my first worry about going mad: It is not clear to me that, over the long run, a human personality could truly survive such a severe trauma, life without our little flock of relationships.

A more positive way to look at it is that these relationships, these sentient beings of mutual thought and connection which flit and dance between two people, are deserving of study as entities on their own. What are they like, this second order species? Do relationships seek out other relationships? Do they, in some sense, mate? We have all had the odd experience of liking two people individually but feeling uncomfortable toward their relationship – or the reverse. Is there any way to test this sense of a third entity in the room?

Tonight Sophie and I saw Arias with a Twist, and I can safely say that it was a highlight in a year of great New York theatre. The basic set-up is simple: Joey Arias is a legendary Drag performer and, in recent years, first rate interpreter of Billie Holliday songs. Basil Twist is perhaps the leading avant garde puppeteer working in New York – and one of the great figures in the world of non-figurative puppetry. For this show, the two joined forces.

The result was beautiful, sexy, grotesque, hysterically funny, surprising, bawdy and lyrical, and sometimes all of those things at the same moment. And for the first time I realized (I suppose it’s obvious in retrospect) the connection between Drag performance and puppetry. In both cases, reality is replaced by deliberate artifice. The result is simultaneously disturbing and endearing, bawdy and lyrical, with an odd mixture of apparently amateurish clowning and intricately executed professional precision.

Both forms enter the uncanny valley and work their magic by forcing the audience to feel at home there. The very discomfort we feel at knowing we are seeing something patently fake – in fact emphatically fake – creates a kind of charmed circle: The underlying weirdness of it all simply becomes a given, which frees both audience and performer.

And in this space where grotesquery is forgiven, embraced, even loved, artifice becomes a kind of nakedness, an admission of vulnerability. The audience recognizes this vulnerability, and this recognition creates a bond of trust which allows the performance to go deep, to take us to dangerous emotional places that we would normally hesitate to visit (there is a similar sort of head-fake at work in Judd Apatow comedies).

A familiar exemplar of this principle at work in puppetry is Kermit The Frog. He is patently unreal – a bag of green felt with immobile plastic eyes and an obviously faked voice. So when he appears to be insecure, sad, confused, filled with vague and wistful longings, our heart goes out with him. His unreality makes our empathy safe – we are not dealing with a realistic human being, who might turn on us and challenge our right to the intimacy of caring, but rather a creature of pure idea who exists only for receiving our empathy.

Similarly, Joey Arias is, quite obviously – under all that make-up – a large, powerful man who is far from young, the very opposite of the conventional feminine ideal. The very grotesqueness of the pretense, and the utter conviction he brings to it, lifts his Drag persona into a creature of pure idea. The person we see before us exists only to embody the concept that sheer determination and will power can overcome reality itself.

And that is why his renditions of Billie Holliday songs work so well. We recognize the tragedy, the longing, the heartbreak. In the case of Arias it is the character’s heartbreak at being a creature of existential tragedy: A desire to be the pure feminine ideal, to be loved as that ideal, from a singer who is trapped within the beefy, coarse, unfeminine person of a middle aged man.

The addition of Basil Twist’s wondrous and witty puppetry makes it all work even better. It feels as though Arias’ female character is summoning up these unreal visions through the sheer force of her formidable will. We are literally transported into her make-believe world of insane conviction, in a way that constantly reminds us that it is indeed a make-believe world – and this makes it safe for us to enter.

The show has been extended until December 31. If you are going to be in New York, are interested in the possibilities of theatre, and want to see an example of pure magic at work, I suggest you go on-line and get tickets.

I ran into my former student Troy today, and he mentioned the ending to Carl Sagan’s novel Contact in which the main character discovers that at some point the digits of pi, when written out in base 11 and arranged in a square of the right size, form a perfect circle of ones and zeros. And this is taken as a sign from God.

Troy mentioned this because he recalls having felt a sense of awe at this idea. I told him that I vividly remember this plot point (which does not show up on the film), from the time I first read Contact. Troy told me that I am the first other person he’s encountered who remembers the God-in-a-circle ending – and he has talked about this to many people.

But here’s the interesting thing: I recall it as the moment I stopped feeling good about Carl Sagan. Up until then he had been a hero of mine – the guy who got people interested in science, the intellect behind Cosmos, the bridge builder who was able to shine a light on the rarified world of cutting edge research, and show its beauty to the general populace.

But when I read about a God who encodes a circle in the digits of pi, as a kind of shout-out to whatever intelligent race might be listening, my blood ran cold. I think that I can safely say that, on an intellectual level, it was the single most disgusting and repugnant thing I have ever read. Bear with me here…

What Sagan is positing is that a supreme being, creator not merely of the universe but of all possible universes – we know this because the message is encoded in pi, which has the same meaning in all universes – is resorting to a gimmick, a cheap and irrelevant trick, to get our attention.

It’s as though the supreme creator, author of all that is and could ever be, had scrawled the words “Hi mom!” onto the firmament, or maybe held its hands up in Plato’s shadow to make cool shapes like barking dogs and bouncing bunny rabbits.

If there were an intelligent being responsible for the universe, and for the beauty of mathematics, for the sheer loveliness that is logic and symmetry and universal truth, that being would not be resorting to cheap vaudeville tricks to signal its existence.

What it felt like to me, reading the novel’s lame conclusion, was that Sagan had sketched out evidence for God’s existence by arranging for Him to show up on stage in a porkpie hat, pull His pants down and fart.

Would you want to live in such a universe?

If you ask most people “Why is it hot in the summer and cold in the winter?” you get the same nonsensical response: “Because the sun is closer in the summer and further away in the winter.” I know this because I’ve tried asking the question of different people in various different contexts. Some people seem vaguely disturbed while they are answering, because they sort of remember that way back in high school they’d learned it was something else. But they usually can’t really remember what that other explanation was, except that maybe it involved math.

The reason the response is nonsensical (as opposed to simply wrong) is that these same people generally know that places in the southern hemisphere, like Brazil and Australia, have winter during our summer, and summer during our winter. So whatever the answer is, it can’t be about the distance from the earth to the sun. And yet, that’s the answer I hear most often.

What is going on here? I can’t help shaking a sneaking suspicion that something larger is at work. My theory is that we humans, even those highly rational ones who solve problems in their daily lives and are rightly considered highly capable, reserve true rational thought for only a narrow range of problems – a kind of intellectual foveal region. Outside of this narrow region, we resort to a much more primitive kind of peripheral thinking. I suspect that this sort of intellectual economizing probably helps us get through life without overtaxing our brains.

Unfortunately, it may be likely that we humans have a very poor ability to distinguish between these two types of thought. As an obvious example, I have yet to experience a conversation involving candidates for higher office in which somebody did not, at some point, flip over from measured analysis to the kinds of reflexive demonizing that seem to dominate presidential politics in this country. In my experience liberals and conservatives are equally prone to falling into this pattern.

I sometimes wonder where the trigger is that flips our minds from focused and rational engagement to fuzzy non-rational engagement and back again. My theory is that the answer lies in the ways we generally distinguish between ourselves as individuals versus ourselves as part of a large group. We find it easier to rise to the level of true thoughtful engagement when we are involved as individuals, and more difficult when we see ourselves as merely a member of a group.

For example, for most of us, if our child were in physical danger we’d probably find ourseves engaged in some very serious and down-to-earth problem solving to get that child out of harm’s way. Yet when it comes to questions in the general world around us that don’t engage us as an individual, we let things get all fuzzy, even when it comes to questions we think are important, and we resort to the repetition of simple explanations that we’ve heard somewhere.

This also seems to explain the phenomenon of scientific thought: A scientist is someone who has committed – as an individual – to rational engagement with the world. The scientist (when operating as a scientist) seeks rational answers as a matter of self-identity, and so is never speaking as an indistinguishable member of a group. And of course, as we’ve all seen, outside of their particular subject areas scientists can be as fuzzy minded as anybody else.

Every presidential compaign since the era of television campaigning (ie: the Kennedy versus Nixon contest of 1960) has gone to the more charismatic of the two leading candidates. One could argue that the American voter ultimately does not decide on the basis of political affiliation, foreign policy, economic strategy, or any of the ostensible “serious” issues on the table.

No, what the contests between Kennedy/Nixon, Johnson/Goldwater, Nixon/Humphrey, Nixon/McGovern, Carter/Ford, Reagan/Carter, Reagan/Mondale, Bush/Dukakis, Clinton/Bush, Clinton/Dole, Bush/Gore and Bush/Kerry all had in common is this: The one who projected the most charisma during that campaign cycle was the one who got to spend the next four years in the White House.

Of course this may all be mere coincidence…

We usually think of human bodies as being left/right symmetric, and that architecture reflects that symmetry. A house plan can be reversed left-to-right, and the resulting mirrored house will still be perfectly functional, and not seem out of the ordinary.

But recently, when travelling through Europe, I came upon an exception to this rule. All of the spiral staircases in midieval Europe go up in the same direction. I suspect that you would not be able to find a spiral staircase from the middle ages that spirals up to the left – they all spiral up to the right.

I’m not talking here about modern spiral staircases, such as you find in fashionable lofts and bookstores. No, I’m talking about the real deal – the spiral staircases built into the round towers that guard the castles of the kings and feudal lords of old.

The reason is quite simple: human bodies are, after all, asymmetric, in a crucial way. Almost everyone is right handed. And this means that a warrior will fight better while holding his sword in his right hand. An attacker running up a spiral staircase needs to hold his sword in his left hand, because his right hand will be blocked by the large central column of the staircase. Meanwhile, the castle’s defender is able to wield his opposing sword in his right hand. This confers a considerable advantage upon the defender.

Theoretically it would be possible to build a spiral staircase that goes up the other way, but I suspect such a castle would be overrun rather handily by hostile invaders.

Can anybody think of other instances where assymmetry in the human form has resulted in assymmetry in our architecture?

I happen to be a fan of Tom Wilkinson. The name doesn’t really register to most people. They might think they’ve heard of him somewhere, but they’re not exactly sure where. And yet, it is almost certain that he has deeply affected their movie-going experience through the years. Tom Wilkinson is the kind of actor who makes any movie he is in much better, yet people don’t notice him – he operates by stealth, working on you without you quite realizing how.

He first registered in my consciousness when I saw him as Tom Fowler in In the Bedroom, back in 2001. He was so convincing as a man from New England that I was completely taken by surprise to learn that he is actually British. What could have been an eye-rolling melodrama became, through his subtle treatment of the lead, a deeply effecting study of a good man pushed by extreme events to betray his principles.

And he has a way of making other actors look good. If you’ve seen Batman Begins, you most likely remember Killian Murphy’s Scarecrow as a genuinely disturbing and frightening villian. I would argue that what you are probably actually remembering is the moment when Wilkinson, as the arrogant crime boss Carmine Falcone, is suddenly transformed by the Scarecrow into a hapless psychotic, thrown into an imaginary world of unbounded terror. It is Wilkinson who makes this scene – personally I thought it was the only truly transcendent moment in the entire film.

Going back to the theme of a man betraying his principles, think about Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One remembers this as a romance starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, but in fact the story is, at its core, a tragedy centered on the character of Wilkinson’s Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, a man trapped by his own faustian manipulations of fate and memory.

Thinking about what Kaufman has written here, I am reminded of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, an absurdist comedy in which the minor courtiers, little more than a footnote in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are put center stage: The events in Hamlet’s great tragic tale are glimpsed from their oddly limited off-kilter point of view.

Kaufman is up to something similar in Eternal Sunshine, but to more serious purpose. From the somewhat limited viewpoints of Carrey and Winslet’s characters of Joel and Clementine, we witness an immense tragedy, caused by Wilkinson’s doomed Mierzwiak. On paper, the character reads as an unredeemable monster. And yet Wilkinson underplays the part with enormous subtlety and sadness and grace. In the hands of a lesser actor, this character would have been a cardboard villian. But Wilkinson, by playing the role so perfectly, makes you feel the man’s pain, the way he has become trapped by the insane world created by his own misplaced genius.

Nobody thinks of this as a film starring Tom Wilkinson, and yet his performance transforms it, gives it the extra levels of depth it needs to achieve greatness. Kaufman and director Michel Gondry both took home Oscars for this film, and I am sure they both realized what a debt they owe to Tom Wilkinson, its secret weapon.