Arts

A Form of Not Being Sure

I bought this print to decorate the wall of my office. I like the art, and the title is “Time’s Arrow,” so how could I resist?

Time’s Arrow by Costa

But I did have a worry: the painting clearly involved text, which I tend to think is an aesthetic mistake — it brings a depressing specificity to what should be an open-ended interpretive process. And here the resolution of the online image was too small for me to make out the words, so what if the text was completely dopey?

Now it has arrived, and here is the main text:

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.

The artist never entirely knows. We guess; we may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

I kind of like it.

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What is Your Equation?

Edge.org has collaborated with the Serpentine Gallery in London on a fun kind of artistic event: a collections of formulas, equations, and algorithms scribbled (or typeset) on pieces of paper and hung from the gallery walls like honest-to-goodness pieces of art. I was one of the people asked to contribute, along with another blogger or two. You can check out the entries online.

Some of the entries are straightforwardly hard-core mathematical, such as the one from J. Doyne Farmer or this from Shing-Tung Yau:

yau1000.jpg

Mathematical truths have a uniquely austere beauty in their own right, but the visual presentation of such results in the form of equations can be striking even if the concepts being expressed aren’t immediately accessible. (Yau is talking about Ricci Flow, a crucial element in the recent proof of the Poincare Conjecture.) Meanwhile, many of the entries take the form of metaphorical pseudo-equations, using the symbols of mathematics to express a fundamentally non-quantitative opinion (Jonathan Haidt, Linda Stone). Some of the entries are dryly LaTeXed up (David Deutsch), some are hastily scribbled (Rudy Rucker), some tell fun little stories (George Dyson), and some are painstakingly elaborate constructions (Brian Eno). Several aren’t equations at all, but take the form of flowcharts or other representations of processes, such as this from Irene Pepperberg:

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My favorites are the ones that look formidably mathematical, but upon closer inspection aren’t any more rigorous than your typical sonnet, like this one by Rem Koolhaas:

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Or the ones that are completely minimalistic, a la James Watson or Lenny Susskind. Note that the more dramatic your result, the more minimal you are allowed to be.

The big challenge, of course, is to choose just one equation. There are a lot of good ones out there.

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An Interactive Day in Harlem

This famous 1958 photo by Art Kane, A Great Day in Harlem, brought together 57 jazz musicians for a group portrait. Luminaries range from Count Basie and Coleman Hawkins to Charles Mingus and Dizzie Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Norbizness points to a helpful web page: harlem.org, which provides a clickable version of the photo! Point to any musician, and it will tell you who they are and provide a brief biography.
A Great Day in Harlem
Years ago I saw a documentary by Jean Bach about the making of the portrait, which included many interviews with the surviving musicians (now available on DVD). My favorite part was seeing Thelonious Monk get ready for the shoot. You see him strategizing about how to stand out among all the other luminaries. First he decides to wear black, to look cool. Then he figures that everyone else will be wearing black, so he’s going to wear white. (As it turns out, everyone else had the same thought, so there’s a lot of white jackets in the photo.) Finally he realizes that the best thing to do will be to grab a spot next to the ladies, where everyone will be looking first. And lo and behold there he is, next to fellow pianists Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland (still going strong as host of NPR’s Piano Jazz). Monk needn’t have worried; he didn’t have any trouble standing out.

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Relative importance

I want to say more about those rumored forces mentioned in JoAnne’s post, but tomorrow (Thurs) I’m giving a presentation on Time’s Arrow, and, ironically, I’m running out of time. The event itself should be great fun. It’s sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council, and will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ll talk about time in Einstein’s universe for half an hour, and then we’ll have responses from philosopher David Albert and artist Antonia Contro. Preposterous Universe readers will remember David from my report on a meeting last December. Antonia, in addition to being a talented artist, is the executive director of Marwen, a non-profit organization devoted to teaching disadvanaged youths about art. The moderator will be former Preposterous guest-blogger (and occasional radio host) Gretchen Helfrich, and I’m sure it will be a blast.

The event is sold out, but at some point it will be televised on the Illinois Channel (“like CSPAN for Illinois”). You can also check out two previous events in the Humanities Council’s celebration of the Einstein year: Peter Galison on Einstein and Poincare, and Janna Levin and Rocky Kolb on cosmology.

Here’s a teaser for my talk. How important is the notion of “time,” anyway? I did the obvious thing — I asked Google. So here is the number of search results returned when you search Google for various important concepts.

  • space:                   422,000,000 pages found
  • money:                 262,000,000 pages found
  • fun:                       173,000,000 pages found
  • love:                     170,000,000 pages found
  • sex:                       76,400,000 pages found
  • peace:                   89,900,000 pages found
  • war:                     179,000,000 pages found
  • harry potter:         20,900,000 pages found
  • time:                   972,000,000 pages found

Good news there about love vs. sex. Not so much about peace vs. war. But the important thing is, “time” kicks the rest of the concepts’ collective butts, with nearly a billion pages found. Yet another reason I should get a raise.

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My favorite aristocrats

Lindsay at Majikthise manages a twofer: saying something interesting and insightful about humor and jazz at the same time.

As you may have heard, The Aristocrats is a documentary featuring 100 retellings of the same joke.

Here are the bare bones: Family asks agent to consider their act, agent says he doesn’t do family acts but agrees to let them demonstrate, [act of unspeakable obscenity, incest is non-negotiable, may also feature scatology, beastiality, emetophilia, etc.], agent says “That’s a hell of an act, what do you call it? Family member answers “The Aristocrats.”

Honestly, the joke isn’t funny. In fact, that’s probably why it’s a perennial favorite with professional comedians. If you can make this joke funny, you could probably get laughs by reading a tax return.

The joke is like a lot of jazz standards. Tunes like Autumn Leaves aren’t that interesting until you’ve heard at least 20 different versions. Once you know that a work is a standard, you can step back from the material itself and concentrate on the artist’s interpretation. The movie features The Aristocrats as told by a mime, a magician, a tumbling act, the editorial staff of The Onion, the animated cast of South Park, and a huge variety of standup comics.

That’s a good way of understanding the enduring popularity of a joke that isn’t inherently very good. The jazz equivalent would be John Coltrane showing off with My Favorite Things — you can hear him thinking, “Hell, I can make even this shlock sound good.” Although I am also partial to Patricia Barber’s cover of Light My Fire.

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Brad and Angelina

Seriously, why did Mr. and Mrs. Smith get such mixed reviews? You have two of the prettiest people in the world, exchanging witty banter and steamy looks (and a substantial number of gunshots) with each other, moving through a visual feast of elegant settings while the surrounding chaos leaves their makeup and fashionable clothing largely undisturbed. What is not to like about this movie?

You will be unsurprised to hear that I have a theory. Like many works of genius, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is misunderstood. The movie makes no pretensions to depth or profundity; it is a genre film, pure and simple. But it skirts the edges of the conventions of its genre — action comedy — in interesting ways.

“Action comedy” is a somewhat novel and unstable classification to begin with. Classic action films may feature a witty line here and there, but they would never be mistaken for comedies. In the post-Raiders of the Lost Ark era, however, the hybrid has become more common, as witnessed in the success of franchises from Lethal Weapon to Men in Black.

But still, there are rules. Within the conventions of an action film, there are two standard ways of creating comedy: to play the action straight but include a substantial dose of humorous situations and dialogue (Lethal Weapon), or to move toward parody or satire (Men in Black). In the former case, it is taken for granted that the adventure scenarios must be traditionally realistic and thrilling; in the latter, allowance is made for a greater degree of slapstick silliness, and realism is happily tossed aside.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith falls into neither of these modes. No serious attempt is made to paint a realistic scenario — two professional assassins who have been married to each other for years without knowing what their spouse did for a living would be difficult to make believable. Mrs. Smith works in gleaming high-tech surroundings, where all of her co-workers would appear to be very attractive and fashionable young women; Mr. Smith, in contrast, works in sleazy surroundings that call to mind private investigators in the Sam Spade mold. We are never told what these organizations are, who their clients might be, nor how they fit into a larger picture. We are supposed to simply recognize the accepted tropes of the genre, and enjoy the fun that the characters themselves are so obviously having.

But the fun is not slapstick or parodic — it is affectionate. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not a satire, calling our attention to the foibles of the genre or of society; it is a caricature, exaggerating notable features for purposes of amusement. The relevant distinction is between “making fun of” and “having fun with.” The point is neither realism nor social criticism; it extends to having a good time and no further. And the talents deployed towards this end are considerable: Jolie is obviously an extremely talented actress, while Pitt is underappreciated as a brilliant comic actor. The cinematography is colorful and evocative, and the dialogue zips along with very few sluggish patches.

The critics, by and large, don’t get it. David Denby, just to pick an example, complains about the absence of motivation when Jolie “appears at some sort of club in a strapless, shiny, black patent-leather rig, flogs some guy in a back room, and then breaks his neck.” Would more backstory have really enriched that scene? It’s like watching Bugs Bunny and complaining that we aren’t told how rabbits learned to talk.

Admittedly, the film is very much of its time. Although it is not a satire, I imagine that it wouldn’t be as enjoyable for audiences not immersed in a set of expectations about action films, comedies, and movie stars. It’s not The Maltese Falcon, but that’s no reason not to enjoy it on its own terms.

Perhaps next time we will discuss how Johnny Depp looks in lipstick.

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