Here’s a checklist of what I need to do to get better at Scrabble:
[x] Learn all 96 2-letter words. (AA, AB, AD, AE, AG, AH…)
[x] Read Stefan Fatsis’s book Word Freak to get an idea of what’s in store.
[_] Learn all 1,000-odd 3-letter words. (AAH, AAL, AAS, ABA, ABO, ABS…)
[_] Move on to even weirder word lists.
[_] All the way up to 7-word lists and beyond.
The black-and-white photos from my trip to Petra in January 2001 are finally sorted, scanned and presented after a fashion. Feel free to use these pictures as an excuse to buy a larger monitor–there is just too much detail in them to justify smaller picture sizes. Evidently, it’s one of the more impressive sights I’ve seen. If I find a map of the site, I’ll add that later.
A.I., directed by Steven Spielberg but storyboarded by Stanley Kubrick, is a subversive movie. As with all great science fiction works, the philosophical questions it raises directly challenge the assumptions of contemporary society, and finds them lacking. Few movies associated with Kubrick seem to evade controversy, and A.I. certainly is experiencing its share of incomprehension. Yet even scathing reviewers admit the following: The acting, cinematography, score, set design and special effects are among the best ever. Then why does A.I. elicit guffaws from a minority in New York audiences (and probably a majority everywhere else)?
In short, any movie where the narrator intones “Two thousand years later” will tax feebler imaginations. Minds that venture no further than the next fashion are bound to be unimpressed with an invitation to contemplate their long-term obsolescence. Yet this is not even new ground for Kubrick: the plot for 2001: A Space Odyssey spans a good million years or so. The resultant New York Times review opined, “The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” And that from a kind review. (The New York Times is gushingly kind towards A.I.) A.I., like 2001, simply crams in too much material for debate by movie buffs and philosophy wonks for it to compete with such plausible summer blockbusters as “Jurassic Park III” and “The Mummy Returns”.
Here are just a few themes:
When you make a fairy tale about the possibility of finding redemption through a narrative (such as a fairy tale), you’re declaring open season in the hunt for self-referential metaphors. In A.I., robots exist to use their artifice to entertain and redeem, much as the protagonists in narratives do today. For both, the aim is to induce a suspension of disbelief—to produce credulity. The similarity of their roles is often deliciously poignant: When Gigolo Joe, the sex robot, seduces a woman, the audience is simultaneously seduced by Jude Law, the actor. When David, the robot boy who aspires to being a “real boy”, pleads for his life at the Flesh Fest, movie audiences are seeing a human actor, Haley Joel Osment, playing a robot that manages to induce empathy in his jury by acting sufficiently human. Of course, Osment is human, but it is only through the artifice of A.I. (the movie) that we become convinced of the reality of the artifice in A.I. (the robot).
(Genially, the New York Times review suggests “the Flesh Fair might be a Dogma 95 pep rally, or a meeting of dyspeptic film critics protesting the movie’s lavish and startling special effects”)
Compared to other robots, David is designed with a superior ability to elicit an emotional response in humans, one based on his capacity to love and yearn for requital. His need for his mother’s love becomes a reason to live, and it’s in this that the humans at the Flesh Fest recognize themselves.
In this recognition lies A.I.‘s subversive message. Future society has no qualms about destroying robots until they prove adorable, which of course is hypocritical. All robots are artifice, as the Flesh Fest evangelist proclaims with irrefutable logic—not only those who fail to meet our arbitrary, socially constructed criteria for eliciting empathy. But such reasoning leads to a slippery slope—humans are constructed too, their assemly instructions stored in genes and improved upon via the evolutionary process. Once humans and robots like David display equal competence in their yearning for love, the only difference between them is the medium that generates their behavior—organic or mechanic.
This is a shockingly materialistic stance for a movie to entertain, and certainly one that the majority of contemporary society would be unwilling to embrace. Yet Kubrick has toyed with the definition of humanity before. In A Clockwork Orange he explores free will as a component of human nature by asking whether taking away aggression as a choice makes us less than human. In 2001, HAL 9000 is never more human than when he turns psychotic or when he admits fear.
It’s also a solidly functionalist stance in the philosophical debate about what constitutes genuine human mental states. David’s successful pleading for his life in the Coliseum is the equivalent to passing a Turing Test for emotions. Underlying functionalism is the notion that any system that can emulate a mind to perfection needs to be at least as complex as the mind being emulated. To put it differently, it is impossible to describe a brain exactly using anything less complex than an entire brain. The only thing that separates David from a human boy is the matter with which the mind is constructed.
The arbitrary nature with which this future society decides which robots stay in its good graces and which do not is a parable for our age: We care for our own children, but let those in the the third world starve. Pet dogs and cats (and cute bears) win our empathy, while cows and pigs do not. It’s a killer argument for vegetarianism, or for eating cats and dogs, but not the current state of affairs. (The future family that adopts David eats vegetarian, at least.)
By positing that our prejudices are arbitrary, A.I. undermines the premise that forged history and upon which the nation state was built. History is the story of preferring one’s own kind over the other, nevermind the negative-sum outcome of this kind of behavior. Two thousand years ago in the Roman empire, only citizens were considered real people; slaves and captives that were not useful were fit for a good flesh fest at the Coliseum. Today, this proud tradition is continued by the Hutu and Tutsi, Croat and Serb, Israeli and Palestinian—each more similar ethnically to their antagonists than to any other group.
This is no coincidence. As Donald Horowitz observes in his landmark Ethnic Groups in Conflict it is usually among groups that most resemble each other that conflict is fiercest. No wonder we’ll find reasons to hate robots. We want to be unique. It’s our human nature. No wonder David destroys his replica. He wants to be unique. It’s his human nature.
Pitting San Francisco’s Haight Street versus New York’s St. Marks Place is a fair contest; after all, the streets serve as twin coastal magnets for rebellious youth, and—given the fickle nature of adolescent tastes—the length of their respective reigns as the preferred catwalks for the weird and wonderful among us has bestowed upon these places a pedigree that no other American street can match.
Only London’s Carnaby Street possesses the same mystique in the popular mind. But are any of these streets’ reputations still merited?
Haight, St. Marks and Carnaby ruled as a triumvirate over hippy consciousness in the 1960’s. But since then their priorities have diverged. St. Marks’s beatniks turned to punk, whereas Haight’s hippies turned to surfing, and it shows. This at least was my impression from last weekend’s jaunt down both streets.
Haight is cleaner, wider, brighter, with more dainty boutiques selling hip skimpy things and bags and shoes. Especially shoes. St. Marks has a GAP store too now, but otherwise its consumer offerings are predominantly stall-based and of a certain sensibility—a perennial best seller is “I fucked Mick Jagger” T-shirts. Haight’s eating and drinking is done inside airy diner-like contraptions with more than one kind of mineral water. St. Marks offers dives and ethnic food and terrace cafes. It’s hard to find a smoker on Haight, while on St. Marks it’s de rigeur.
Dress on Haight is surfer casual. There a hint of dot com preppy affectation, though maybe only because those are the clothes finding their way into second-hand stores now. On St. Marks, dress is approached more studiously: Kids flock together after school to curate their latest punk fashion creations. The other zealots are Japanese tourists, whose relationship to punk ranges from slavish to obsessional. Either way, it’s a visual treat.
Haight Street is solving its homeless problem by denying the vagrants toilet facilities—or so it seems from the signage prominently displayed by every establishment you enter. This approach betrays what is perhaps the biggest difference between the two streets: Haight’s small business owners are eager to put a respectable face on their street, one where its hippy pedigree is served up as nothing more than a viable shopping theme. But while the collective memory of Haight Street fades in the few remaining drugged-out minds of aging hippies, St. Marks remakes itself with every 15 year-old’s first Mohawk proudly paraded across 2nd Avenue.
In the Week in Review section of last Sunday’s New York Times an article quoted a lovely question by a flummoxed European reporter to Bush:
“You say the scientific evidence isn’t strong enough to go forward with Kyoto. So then how do you justify your missile defense plan when there is even less scientific evidence that that will work?”
At the end of Robert Graves’s historical novel Claudius the God, emperor Claudius visits Vitellius, a dying courtier. Claudius ask the man why someone so virtuous as he had not supported the Republican cause during Claudius’s reign. Vitellius’s last words are “Phaemon’s dog was right.”
Claudius explains:
“It appears that Phaemon the philosopher had a little dog whom he had trained to go to the butcher every day and bring back a lump of meat in a basket. This virtuous creature, who would never dare to touch a scrap until Phaemon gave it permission, was one day set upon by a pack of mongrels who snatched the basket from its mouth and began to tear the meat to pieces and bolt it greedily down. Phaemon, watching from an upper window, saw the dog deliberate for a moment just what to do. It was clearly no use trying to rescue the meat from the other dogs: they would kill it for its pains. So it rushed in among them and itself ate as much of the meat as it could get hold of. In fact it ate more than any of the other dogs, because it was both braver and cleverer.”
Phaemon’s dog certainly seems right; and if this is the case we have ourselves a brilliant apologia for collaboration in unjust regimes. Or is the dog’s option of scoring a moral victory by not participating in the eating of the spoils downplayed? Or is it his duty to be killed defending a just cause (his master’s meat) even if there is no chance of succeeding?
But who is Phaemon? I cannot find a reference to him anywhere, which is unusual for Graves, whose novels are usually colored by real historical figures.
Progress is free internet access at LaGuardia while my flight to San Francisco is delayed by 12 hours.
King Herod Agrippa I was a brilliant diplomat and ruler who secured the best possible deal for the Jews (and himself) under the reign of Roman emperor Claudius. But while scholars cast an approving eye on his realpolitiking, Agrippa I gets a bum deal in the Bible.
Agrippa felt he had to appease the more conservative elements in his constituency to ensure their support for his autonomous Jewish vassal state–and this meant persecuting a couple of early Christians. Conveniently, these Christians were also vocal anti-Roman separatists–hence the execution of James, one of the 12 apostles, which proved both popular and prudent.
He died suddenly in 44AD in Ceasarea, during games dedicated to Claudius. The city is now an archeological site, and the hippodrome where the games were held was being excavated in January, when I visited with Benny Mandler.
My Dominican chicken recipe:
1. Make friends with someone who has a Dominican Mother (in my case, Rosa).
2. Have Dominican Mother visit New York and cook too much food so that there is leftover garlicky peppery chicken marinade.
3. Acquire this marinade somehow.
4. Buy boneless chicken breast filets and a red onion.
5. Pour the marinade over the chicken. Call Rosa and find out you’re also supposed to put salt and pepper on the chicken; but be careful: “The salt has to touch the chicken,” she warns. Pouring the salt next to the chicken won’t have the same effect.
6. Cut up the red onion, sautee it in a pan, add chicken filets.
7. Wonder aloud how long you’re supposed to cook the chicken. Poll your guests (Charles Kenny, World Bankist, and Rike Schott, glass blowerin). Agree with Charles that the longer it’s in there, the less likely you will die of salmonella.
8. Serve burnt chicken with salad and “100% real Idaho mashed potatoes” made from a box that contains shredded bits of white cardboard.
Ephrat has a new mailing address in Senegal. It goes as follows:
Ephrat Livni
Peace Corps
BP 5001
Passy, Senegal
(Very) intermittent email contact is also to be had. I mailed her a bunch of New Yorkers last week (the magazines, not the humans) as well as Gore Vidal’s Julian. Only fitting, really, as I’ve just restarted Graves’s Claudius The God, which was a victim of Ephrat’s voracious reading appetite last year.
