Author: admin

In her mind, Jenny had all kinds of ideas what to expect on the other side of the door. But nothing had prepared her for the sight that now greeted her. For inside the tower was an entire world. “Come and look!” she said.

One by one the others entered through the doorway, and stood spellbound, gazing in wonder upon the sight. There were green mountains, dappled with sunlight, with rivers flowing lazily down their slopes, and majestic trees rising into the sky. It was as though they had left the world of the city entirely, and had entered a different universe altogether.

“How is this possible?” Josh asked.

“In an enchanted world, all things are possible,” explained Mr. Symarian. “The physical extent of this place is bounded only by our own minds. I believe it was Albert Einstein who once observed that “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one….”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Sid interrupted.

Mr. Symarian began to shoot Sid a look of withering annoyance, but then turned to follow the gaze of the little demon, who was staring at Charlie in open-mouthed astonishment.

Jenny too was gazing at Charlie with wide eyes. For as soon as they had entered the tower walls, the spell upon Charlie had fallen away, and he now stood before them in his true form. “Charlie,” she said breathlessly, “You are so … beautiful!”

Last night I went with some friends to see the magnificent fireworks over the Hudson River in New York City in celebration of Independence Day. There was a huge crowd of people, every one of whom had walked over to the extreme West Side of Manhattan. As the time of the free show approached, the crowd gradually grew in number until it formed a cheerful packed throng looking out over the river, joyful in expectation.

When the fireworks at last began, they were magnificent, spectacular, at some points merely beautiful and at other moments truly transcendent. The effects ran the gamut from a haunting ghostly weeping willow in the sky to a trick rocket that exploded into a huge, perfectly formed smiley face, like a Hallmark card from God.

The one odd note — to me at least — came with the realization that once the fireworks began I found myself surrounded by thousands upon thousands of upraised smart phones, all pointed at the sky, their owners staring intently into little screens that glowed in the dark like so many strangely rectangular fireflies.

Here we were, at an event whose sole purpose was to be immense, overwhelming, a physical expression of celebration in the open air, framed majestically by the vast overhead dome of night sky, and these people were all missing it. Instead of looking at the show itself, each of these people’s eyes were glued to a tiny screen, perhaps two by three inches, with a little washed out low resolution version of the awesome experience that was happening — really happening — all about them.

What was going on here? I found myself trying to figure this out. Perhaps each of these people loved some special person in another part of the world with such a depth of passion that they were willing to forego the wondrous experience of their own senses — this magnificent display of pyrotechnical wonder arrayed before them — just to send a crappy low res video of the event to their far away loved one.

But somehow I doubt that’s what was going on.

Or perhaps they were all acting out of a sense of personal civic responsibility. Perhaps, they thought, if they didn’t capture this moment, with their own tiny little cell phone cameras, then the memory of these fireworks would be lost to the world forever, and future generations would be denied knowledge of all that had transpired this night.

But somehow I doubt that one too.

So what the hell was going on here? What were all these people thinking? Have we really gotten to the point where people have become so dependent on their tiny cell phone screens that they can’t even see something as immediate and breathtaking as fireworks without them? Have we really lost all sense of wonder?

Somehow it was understood that Josh, as the path finder, would be the one to pick up the jar. The others watched as he unscrewed the lid and reached inside. He looked curiously at the perfectly ordinary looking brass doorknob he held in his hand. Walking over to Jenny, he handed it to her. “I think you should be the one to do this.”

Jenny took the doorknob from Josh and walked over to the doorway, trying to act like she knew what she was doing. She was aware that everyone was watching her. Feeling slightly silly, she put the doorknob into position, in roughly the place she imagined a real one would go.

For a long moment nothing happened. Then, almost imperceptibly, she felt the knob shift slightly in her hand, and from somewhere inside the door she could hear, or perhaps feel, a strange low hum. Experimentally, she tried taking her hand away from the doorknob. Instead of falling to the floor, the knob stayed in place, apparently stuck to the door. She turned to the others with a silly grin on her face. “There, did it.”

“Not yet, kid,” said Sid. “You still gotta open the door.”

“Oh, right,” she said, and tried rotating the doorknob to the left. It turned freely in her hand, and with a satisfying click, the door swung open.

Somebody was telling me today about an artist who takes photographs and then digitally manipulates them to create abstract art. Quite ironic — using reality itself as the basis for non-representational art.

I realized in that moment that the art I create is exactly the opposite. I never start with direct capture of real-world information. Rather, I look at a texture, or a geometric form, or a kind of human movement, and then I build up a simulacrum from scratch — creating “art from math”, as it were.

I consider this process a success if the result evokes in the viewer the sense that they are seeing a glimpse into reality itself, whether a marble vase, a flickering flame, or the graceful movement of a dancer’s arm.

Essentially, my work insists that all analysis of “what do we see when we look at the world” must happen inside my own head — not within computer software. I realize that this is an extreme view, which puts my work into opposition with those who try to create textures by piecing together bits of real-world texture, or human movement by stitching together motion captured sequences.

By doing the analysis myself, I force myself to develop a real understanding of how we see. I suspect that it is the quest for this understanding in itself — as much as the resulting simulated marble vase or interactive animated dancer — that drives my work.

“You are quite correct,” Mr. Symarian said. “But it is not that simple. This is undoubtedly an expression of some unconscious conflict. In your — er, our — world such a conflict merely leads to neurosis, or worse. In a magical world the same conflict will tend to manifest itself physically, as a riddle embedded into the world itself.”

“Hell,” Sid said, “if we’ve figured one thing out, it’s that this whole damned place is some kind of manifestation of the kid’s grandma. Including that big scary dog.” As he said this last part, he looked around nervously.

“Which means,” said Josh, “that to solve this riddle we probably need to understand something about Jenny’s grandmother.”

“Wait,” Jenny said. “This is familiar. I remember my mom telling me grandma Amelia loved silly riddles. One of her favorites was about a door.”

Suddenly Charlie started laughing. “Hey kids, I think I’ve got it. But it’s really stupid.”

They all looked at him. “C’mon, you know it,” he said, grinning from ear to pointy ear, “when is a door not a door?”

Josh and Jenny answered at the same time. “When it’s ajar!”

The travelers all turned to look at the pile of abandoned junk in the corner of the alley. But this time they knew to look at the jars. And inside one of those jars was something that looked very much like a doorknob.

Back when MIDI first came out in 1982, it must have seemed like the greatest thing in the world. Finally musicians could hook up their instruments and computers to a common standard — the machines could finally talk to each other, communicating musical expression freely.

Depending, unfortunately, on what is meant by “freely”. MIDI came out of a tradition of controlling music through keyboards. Pressing or releasing a piano key is a discrete event, and the MIDI protocol is very good at capturing such discrete events.

But other instruments, such as the violin, work in a way that is far more subtle and difficult to describe. A violinist can make literally hundreds of subtle changes per second to the sound that emerges from her instrument — and the best violinists do. There is no provision in MIDI for accurately capturing this kind of continuously shaded nuance. Similarly, a MIDI encoding cannot begin to preserve those aspects of a cello performance by, say, Yo-Yo Ma that truly matter.

I think of “the tragedy of MIDI” as emblematic of the great devil’s bargain that lies at the heart of our continual embrace of new technologies for expression. Society will just about always adopt a new technology if it results in a more efficient means of distribution (thereby increasing the net potential wealth associated with a creative act). The phonograph record and its many progeny replace the parlor piano, and movies push aside live theatre, just as the computer data tablet edges out the pencil.

Yet in almost every case, the older technology permits some subtle nuance of expression that the more efficient newer technology does not. This is to be expected, since new technologies for transmitting artistic expression don’t win out because they are “better” in any objective sense, but rather because they are more scalable — one person can hear you play the piano in your parlor, but millions of people can listen to your recording.

Younger generations often have no idea what has been lost, so of course they don’t feel as though they are missing anything. Intellectually I can understand my mother’s rapture in explaining her girlhood days listening to the radio (where heroes were impossibly handsome, and monsters scarier than anything you could ever see on a movie screen), but emotionally I cannot “get it” — the world she describes no longer exists.

I still marvel at how much more powerful and expressive is a simple #2 pencil for drawing than any combination of data tablet and software yet invented. Yet the computer contains complementary advantages — the line you draw is instantly captured, reproducable, mutable, perfectly undoable — that the world cannot resist. Economic and scalability benefits trump pure expressiveness.

If there is any consolation in all of this, it is that the newer and more efficient, yet so often less expressive, modes of creation don’t seem to actually kill off the older ones. Rather the older modes end up surviving, in their lower wattage but often more expressive way. We can have attend live theatre, play a piano in the parlor, go to hear Yo-Yo Ma play the cello in concert. We can still hear radio broadcasts (although we can never return to the magical world of radio my mother knew as a child)

And when I really want to draw a picture to express a visual idea that is particularly delicate or fleeting, I ignore my computer altogether and reach for my #2 pencil.

It had been a harrowing time. The beast had seemed to come quite near several times, but at the last moment Josh had always known which way to turn. After many bends and twists in their path, the travelers now found themselves at the tower itself, but in a decrepit little dead-end alley, littered with junk. The place looked abandoned, with old bottles and jars and pieces of bric-a-brac piled into a corner.

There was nothing at all auspicious about their location, except the door. Or at least, it was sort of a door. There was clearly the outline of a door, arched at the top, and the door itself was made of a distinctly different stone than the tower wall. Yet there was no handle, no visible hinge, nothing that could tell them how to operate the doorway.

“Well,” Jenny said.

“You can say that again sister,” Sid joined in.

“Tales of this place speak of a riddle that one must solve before one may enter the tower,” said Mr. Symarian.

“You mean like what’s her name — the one with the big statue,” Charlie said.

“Lady Liberty?” Josh asked, looking confused.

“I think Charlie’s talking about the Sphynx,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Charlie nodded.

“Yes,” Mr. Symarian continued, “precisely. But what is the riddle? What we are facing is clearly a door, yet one without egress.”

“Egrets?” Sid said, looking alarmed. “Nobody said there’d be egrets. I hate birds.”

“Egress,” the teacher explained. “From the latin egressus. `A place or means of coming out.’ I should have thought it was a common enough word.”

“Big intellectual,” Sid sniffed. “While we’re standin’ here talking about statues or egrets or whatever, that beast is getting closer every minute. And in case you didn’t notice, this here’s a dead end.”

Josh looked pale. “Um, Sid, could you try not to use the word ‘dead’?”

But Jenny was looking at the doorway thoughtfully. “I think,” she said, “we’re going to need to figure out that riddle.”

Today is the hundredth birthday of Frank Loesser. The man himself is long gone, having died back in 1969, but his influence towers, and our culture is infused with his brilliance and originality, even for those who have no idea who he was.

There were many geniuses who wrote the songs we associate with classic Broadway, from the teams of Lerner and Loewe to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Kander and Ebb, to those who managed to do it all by themselves, writing both music and words, such as Cole Porter.

Loesser was in the latter category. He wrote over 700 songs in his all too brief life. He wrote the words, and he wrote the music. And oh, such sublime combinations of words and music. From “Guys and Dolls” to “The Most Happy Fella” to “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, the man completely redefined the American musical.

I remember the very first time I ever heard “Fugue for Tinhorns” — the opening number of “Guys and Dolls”. Really just a couple of mobsters talking, discussing how they placed bets on the races, and yet at the same time an expression of the most beautiful and sublime musical harmony. I’d had no idea that such a thing was possible — the everyday music of conversation transposed into deliriously irresistable song.

The great thing about Frank Loesser was the way he could draw you in to a true feeling of intimacy. Not the grand passion between lovers, but the small talk, the little things said to one another, the quiet intimate moments when real connections are forged.

A new generation has discovered “Baby it’s cold outside” — a song Loesser performed at parties with his first wife, years before anybody ever recorded it. Emo hipsters now associate it with the version by Zooey Deschanel, but its lineage goes all the way back to 1944 — 36 years before Ms. Deschanel was born.

I often wonder which creators will stand the test of time, and whose songs the human race will be singing centuries from now. I suspect that the songs of Frank Loesser will continue to be sung, long after I and anyone reading this today are long gone.

There is perhaps no more noble way to be immortal.

The city was old.

Some said it was as old as the stones themselves. Some said it had always existed, a thing beyond time. And now time itself held no meaning. There was only the endless night, the pale green light that never changed, and the mist that never left.

Outside the palace walls, the mist now rose and swirled. He had observed long ago that its movements reflected his mood, and there were times when he had looked out through the palace windows at the swirling shapes, vainly hoping to learn the secrets of his own mind.

But now the mist went unnoticed. His footsteps echoed as he walked through the bare halls, as he crossed the empty tapestried rooms. Where once were parties, voices, echoes of music and laughter, these walls now echoed only with his footsteps, for there was no other sound.

He paused just outside the bedchamber, and thought about the city — his city. He knew that rumors of the city swirled about like mist. Such foolishness, such empty patterns in the air. He, alone among all, knew the true nature the city, for it was his nature as well.

He stared into the mirror, at the ageless face that stared back. Can this be my true face, he wondered, or is this merely another illusion? For what is a face that never changes, but a mask?

I learned a lesson from the discussion after my post of two days ago. When reasonable people disagree — generally because of a disagreement about first principles — words matter. What makes this especially difficult is that the same words can have substantially different meanings to different listeners.

Getting these word choices right can make the difference between saying “this is my view of the world” and saying “your view of the world is wrong”. We would all agree that these are two very different statements. Yet it is all too easy to slip from the one into the other, when you are trying to speak across a fundamental divide of first principles.

For example, in my post, I used the phrase “fellow sentient creatures”. To me this sounds virtually identical to the phrase “sentient creatures”. Yet to someone who feels no tribal kinship with any being that is not human, the inclusion of the word “fellow” becomes an argument from conclusion, which in this case — as Dagmar pointed out — effectively came across as an (unintended) accusation.

It is perfectly non-controversial to say “this is a sentient creature, and I feel no kinship with it”. It is quite something else to say “this is a fellow sentient creature, and I feel no kinship with it.” The latter statement would be absurd — so my use of the phrase was de facto a provocation, although I didn’t realize this until Dagmar pointed it out.

This kind of thing comes up in other discussions that take place across fundamental divides of first principles. For example, to someone opposed to abortion on principle, the statement “a fetus, when born, will become a person”, might sound very close in meaning to the statement “a fetus is a person”.

Yet to someone with a different worldview, these two statements are completely different. The former is non-controversial. The latter is heard by many people as an accusation that they approve of murder.

So here you have it — to have a discussion between people who differ on first principles, each participant must somehow learn to hear what words sound like to somebody who may have a completely different worldview.

This seems to me to be a rather difficult skill to acquire – yet one that would be very valuable to have in a civil society. Perhaps it is a skill that we should teach our children in school.