How Tech Kills Conversation
About two weeks ago, my 6 month old computer, an Apple MacBook Pro M3Pro, died. I wrote a longer post about it, but let it go too long before posting. I expected (because I was told so) that it would be in the shop for three weeks, and I was mostly posting about the experience of being separated from the technology that forms the underpinning not just of my work, but of my creative output; and what that means.
The computer came back! and much earlier than expected, making the post obsolete. Rather than rewriting it, I’ve decided that an amalgam of the things on my mind, leading off with that, in brief form, is what I’ll post.
The setup in that post was that suddenly finding myself with nothing I could do, I went out for lunch with my new friend here. He’s a Canadian, who’s only about 15 years older than me. But of course that makes him 81.
My father in his final years (which is the age I am now) had many older companions, and I used to wonder what the attraction was. But I may be learning. David (I won’t give his full name) is also a Montrealer, and like me his time there ended decades ago.
As a result, we unexpectedly – this is a person I met in the Phnom Penh cafe I often work in, with no introduction – have what turns out to be a wide range of shared knowledge and recollection, as well as weird social overlaps.
Here’s one: he was a good friend of the father of my first serious girlfriend. He visited their house for dinner. The father is very likely the doctor that delivered me. It’s a strange topic to find yourself talking about, in the swelter of tropical Phnom Penh.
Technology is powerful, but also a pathology. We regret the magazine, record and bookshops that have all died, taking with them cultural possibilities that we rarely notice the absence of, when we consume the simulacra of culture, usually streaming, always online, that tech provides. We were seduced by tech; we hired the hitman for the murder.
Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm change seems to apply to how we ended up losing those, and so many other points where culture, community and commerce intersected. His idea was that a new theory in science (that’s what he wrote about, how new theories get traction), wins not because it solves all the problems of the old system (think Copernicus vs Ptolemy), but that it solves a small set of crucial problems that had exhausted the efforts of traditionalists.
The difference is, that culture isn’t science. And sometime what seems to be a problem, isn’t. It no longer seems like a problem that to get a record, I had to put on my winter boots and coat, and shuffle down the slushy mess that was St Catherine Street to get to A&M Records, or take the bus to Phantasmagoria. In fact, that seems now like a utopia. But I, like everyone else, was seduced by Napster, which delivered random, low-quality haphazard samples of a suddenly vaster musical domain, and I stopped buying records from stores I loved. And now here we are, East of Eden.
And what’s the punchline, if that’s the setup? The long, leisurely lunch is what, enforced by the torrents of unexpected, early-season rain that trapped David and me at what is probably the nicest restaurant in Phnom Penh, if by nice you mean charming, comfortable, competent, creative, and beautiful, and not (just) expensive.
The conversation rambled through orchestra conductors, Chinese politics, Thomas Mann and Mishima, Asian ceramics, the nature of juvenile prodigies and Oliver Sacks, and the morality of development work; corruption in Canada in the eighties and how the Jewish Holocaust now seems to be just one of the Holocausts, and how that changes the view of Israel, and so the relationship between protest and knowledge.
These conversations require a background in the cultural life that existed before tech. I mean magazine stalls and travel agents, grand movie houses and live music in small rooms, used bookstores and garage sales. By the Rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept. Or so it seems to me. Never mind, my computer is fixed now. [Update, no it’s not, back in the shop for another day anyway].
And I proved all this, conclusively, in my draft post, which I will not show you.
Lousy People on Film
Another topic in my parade of partly formed thoughts. I’ve seen three films in the past few months that, on seeing the last, ‘clicked’ thematically. In order of my seeing them:
La Maman et la Putain is a film by a director I didn’t know called Jean Eustache. It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was Doinel in the 400 Blows, and here is plausibly that character, but later in life. This is despite the fact that of course 400B is by Truffaut, who made later-in-life Doinel films with Léaud, and the Eustache film is said to be autobiographical.
About Dry Grasses is a film by a Turkish director who I also didn’t know, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It stars a strong actor whose importance in the cinema of Türkiye I can’t say I know much about.
Mishima – a Life in Four Chapters is probably the best known of this bunch, by Paul Schrader. This is a director who is probably known to everyone, not only for his film direction, but his great scripts, notably for Taxi Driver, which from what I know embedded him in the circus around Martin Scorsese ever after. Mishima is, I noticed, the product of the Zoetrope Studios era, so not only Scorsese, but also Coppola had a hand in the production (although it wasn’t shot in the actual Zoetrope Studio).
The three films are linked by having appalling protagonists. And when I say protagonist, I don’t mean hero. The Eustache work is sooo French, in the same milieu as Breathless (Godard is supposed to have given Eustache a start, and even gave him leftover film to shoot with, though maybe not for this production). You can easily imagine that Jean Seberg is selling papers just down below the windows of the rancid flat that Alexandre, the leading man, so to speak, shacks up in, with his long suffering girlfriend. He’s a prig, insecure, has an overinflated ego, and is prone to loooong exposition on stupid theories that the girlfriend suffers through, and then sometimes they have sex.
The ‘hero’ of Dry Grasses is an art teacher, stuck in a Turkish backwater village school, and loathing every minute of it. The film mostly takes place in perpetual winter, of the kind that Canadians like me know well and hate, and so it’s understandable to me that he would have the toxic personality he does. Samet, the teacher, is so dismissive of the depths he’s descended to, compared to his previous smashing life in Istanbul, that he seems to take it for granted that everyone else, including those who will live out their lives in the village, would find nothing to disagree with him on when it comes to his ongoing no-stars Yelp review of their town.
Yukio Mishima is of course the central figure of the Schrader film, and since he is not a fictional character, but merely creates them, he is handled differently. Mishima is a much more complex film structurally than the other two, both of which have pretty straightforward linear narratives; while Mishima jumps frenetically in time, and between realms of docudrama and literary recreation, Maman/Putain and Grasses, if anything, are enslaved to the arrow of time.
This gives Schrader a chance to showcase the characteristics of historical figure Mishima that will be most acceptable to us: discipline, humour, a polymath approach, courage, and supreme talent, good looks.
But it also lets him lead us in incremental steps to the culminating twenty or so minutes, when Mishima’s final hours are played out, and the totally unhinged nature of the man, is revealed. If you don’t know the story, spoiler alerts ahead.
It seems a little over-the-top to compare two self-absorbed, tedious and unlovable men in works of fiction to an actual fascist militarist. But there you are. That’s the magic of film.
All three films, in one way or another, cause us to put up with men who are dreadful. In the chronologically most recent, Samet gets his comeuppance of a sort, from Nuray, another teacher, in a different school, who seems both a million miles ahead of Samet in her thinking, her ability to adapt, and her combination of acceptance and grit. She finds the town she’s in limiting, of course, but is under no illusions that moving to Istanbul, for Samet, won’t find him burdened with the same grumpy, passive-aggressive, self-justifying whinginess. She seems to see that, in the limits of the crappy district where they are, something is available to be learned that will be lost and unavailable when they both have left.
In the earliest, the Léaud film, most of the plot, such as it is, hinges on Alexandre’s casually solipsistic pursuit of women other than his did-I-mention long-suffering girlfriend. It begins with a stalker-like interaction on the street, with a previous girlfriend who has left him in the dust, to be with another.
Rather than face the fact that he’s been used up and spat out (we don’t know him yet, and can’t tell why), he constructs elaborate dull campus-socialist arguments against the choice she’s made, assailing the fundamental bourgeoise nature of her character, and generally tries to construct an edifice of self-justification and fastidious mirror-avoidance. Much like Nuray, she’s non-plussed by it all, and him.
Ceylan has made a film that presents to us a fairly ghastly prospect of contemporary Turkish life for the rural and the remote, with Béla Tarr overtones. This is far from the glamorousness of Istanbul that CNN presents every twenty minutes in Turkish Tourism Board ads. It’s closer to Saskatchewan, really.
Here’s what I’m talking about, and to be honest, whenever this ad comes on, I stop everything and crank the sound. I’d watch anything with that soundtrack, and I want an extended mix that goes on for an hour:
But Ceylan is our contemporary: there is something about the way he structures the debate between Samet and Nuray, that despite their houses looking like a MosFilm production of Crime and Punishment made under Brezhnev, provides an implicitly modern critique of Samet, whose other (definitely a spoiler here) actions at the school involve a pretty, young and vulnerable schoolgirl who is also no pushover. He has an obsessive focus on her that he makes little attempt to conceal, even from the class. Seeing this play out, and without resorting to thundering moral noises off camera, Ceylan provides no cover for Samet, while at the same time expecting us to make our own judgements.
Mishima is an odd thing, a cross-cultural work made nominally by an American, that it seems Japanese people would never have gotten around to making, and we are better for it. It has a script by Schrader’s sister-in-law, who is evidently Japanese, and the blessing of the Mishima Literary Estate, allaying contemporary anxieties about cultural appropriateness (although, surely, some will object).
Balance this with the furious reaction it garnered, even before it was shot, from rather nasty right-wing groups who idolized Mishima as a figure of resistance to the new Japan, and as defender of the Emperor, exerting pressure and threats of violence that caused at least one potential lead actor to back out before Ken Ogata, who is terrific, took the role. It’s hard to inappropriately appropriate what the other culture is trying to bury in the backyard.
Whatever nerves it presses for us, it also pressed for others in its day. It’s easy to see why the fascists in Japan hated it (it seems to still be too dangerous to screen there). Mishima: the articulate, seriously engaged aesthete whose not out, gay ultra macho persona was impossible to disentangle from his militaristic cosplay, fetishizing uniform and sword, blood and fatality, with all its phallic possibilities. Through his continuous success as the massive cultural figure he was in Japan and abroad, he seems to have built a hothouse for his most extreme ideas, focused on a return to Imperial government, and the pre-war mindset.
Mishima was too sickly to join to fight in the Second World War. This spawned an obsession with physical fitness and, ultimately, as the on-screen Mishima ventilates a lot, the replacement of art by the aesthetics of the body. The humiliation of war’s end, produced a cult of violent and extremists cranks, who oddly seized on a man who was a literary darling as the embodiment of their aspirations, via not-so-submerged messages, surfaced in the three literary recreations of his books within the film.
If libertarianism marks the boundary line beyond which America's own current fascist impulses have burst out into the sunshine in the Trump era, then Ayn Rand is maybe their equivalent. But Mishima was a brilliant writer, and Rand, not so much.
In the culminating scene of Mishima, the lead is about to test the power of his words to stir the soldiers at the military base where he has kidnapped and is holding hostage the commander. He expects the burning truth of his erratic ideas, put into words, to lead to an immediate uprising by the battalion, to overthrow hated modernity around them. In other words, a Trump rally.
But instead, Mishima is drowned out, jeered at, and himself humiliated.
In La Maman et la Putain – a long film, by the way, at about 3 hours, something it shares with Dry Grasses – Alexandre gets to the point where his new girl-on-the-side and his [as I said] long-suffering main squeeze (who conveniently for the perpetually skint Alex, has her own apartment), have fallen into a ménage a trois (I said it was French), whose underlying hostility and discomfort only he seems to not notice.
The new girl in the bed is a strangely sexless, moon-faced blonde Polish nurse, contrasting to the as I think I said, long-suffering but also brunette Gallic girlfriend. The nurse’s own obstinate indifference to Alexandre’s endless declarations on every subject speaks of a kind of internal stability that her scruffy, underachieving paramour lacks. She’s a kind of Anna Karina figure (I told you Godard was his mentor), but without the adorable dancing, and Karina was sexy.
The high artifice of Mishima, the modernity of Ceylan, resides partly in the fact that both films resort, at critical points, to strategies to shatter the illusion of realism or representation, giving us some distance, and a certain comfort, spending hours with these nasty creations.
With Jean Eustache’s film there’s no such air let in from a world we trust. We’re all used to the retrograde attitudes of our charming French cousins, particularly in their film output of the first 4 decades after the Second World War. So is Eustache somehow in the camp, at least partly, of his creation?
Léaud, his lead, is a phenomenon in French film, starting with the obvious atomic bomb of Quatre-cent Coups. There really had been no performance by a kid that so devastatingly consumed the audience, until Spirit of the Beehive showed up. Both of these, at different stages of childhood, let film for the first time, convincingly portray the internal, suffocating, inescapable nature of childhood. And Léaud, in a way, became a bit like one of the 21 Up documentary kids, or maybe Miley Cyrus, but weedy and French.
And though it’s by a different director, undeniably Alexandre is Doinel. Does Eustache project himself into this character to the point of being uncritical? Will Alexandre be the only one of these three horrible men, who gets away with it, whose judgement doesn’t come from within the film, expressing the consciousness of the world around him, within the fictional world, as Samet and Mishima are so judged?
This is necessary for it to succeed a film, but at the three hour and fifteen minutes into it, it hasn’t happened. And then it does.
It’s one of those amazing scenes, the more so in the company of the other two films, if only in my Criterion Channel private cinema. The judgement does come, from within the group of three, on the disordered bed on the floor.
My final thought, and perhaps the point: so much of the retrospective judgement of films of the past, that render them allegedly “unwatchable” because of their embedded transgressions need to be seen in light of what Eustache did with this, his best-known and most notorious work. The past was not naive, less wise, less acute, less sensitive than us.
The words of the woman that finally takes Alexandre to task is all that it needs to be. We can’t add anything. In fact, what she says seems more measured, more real, more necessary, than the Lifetime Channel histrionics that would be put in her mouth today.
But in some fictional possibility, we know she might not have said anything. But even in that hypothetical reflected world, every word that she did in fact say, would still be true.
It’s hard to not feel that we have trained ourselves, like an AI trained to recognize dogs but not know what a dog is, to reject and disqualify artworks in a reductive way. But artworks contain wonderful things, different from the things we seize on first, like the endless peculiarities in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. These are things that come from worlds that are gone, like the world of newsstands and greasy spoons, and have been replaced by our simplified and anemic culture. The past doesn’t need our help, we need its help.
Project Work
The completion of the main phases of the AVM course application and content has left me with a few projects that have languished, but now are ready to see work continue.
Of course, when you leave a project for months perhaps, it doesn’t stop developing. Instead a gap grows between what exists, and where your thoughts have gone in the interim.
One project I’ve posted about in the past has been unseriously called “The Catamaran For The Modern Man”, or variations on that. It’s a project that I’m very drawn to: the idea is to repurpose inexpensive, readily available day-sailor hulls of sailboats under 7 meters, into hulls for a catamaran.
The process involves determining a split line to sever the forward and aft sections at exactly the point on the surface of the hull that is parallel to the keel centreline.
This gives you a stem half, and a stern half, between which you should be able to insert a constant-section extension, like a limousine conversion.
In the previous work I’ve done (I’ll post a video below) I was working with a good but not great tool, called Plasticity. Plasticity is a Nurbs modeller - which means that it deals with continuously curved surfaces across multiple areas in a mathematical, non-finite way.
It had its limits, and while I was not working on the project, the software developer upgraded it with a much more sophisticated Nurbs implementation, known as xNurbs, previously known as Now, it is great.
The modeling of the target hull, which is in my case a Catalina 19, is key. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be as good as can be gotten. The original hull model I built was at the limit of what the previous version could do. The new version makes for an infinitely modifiable hull shape, meaning that as more information comes in, such as actual 3D scans of existing hulls, that can be fitted to the hull as drawn.
In any case, the accuracy of the cut lines is higher, which gives me a much clearer understanding of what that limousine insert section would be like. You can see those lines in the peculiar shape at the end of the bilge.
The video above is a quick animation of one cabin built in the port hull extension section. It’s purely speculative, an exercise in finding out if the roughly 5m long, 2.5m beam and 2m high cross section would have the room to create a living space that would be tolerable, and hopefully nice, even great.
In the animation above, you see first the inside half of the cabin rotating in perspective, then the port hull outside half, and then a return to the inside half with the outside half dissolving on, then a move upwards to get a sense of the layout in plan.
Catamarans have two hulls, of course. In the construction scenario that I’m designing, the builder starts with one hull, segments it, then generates the centre cabin, completely separate from the stem and stern. The main issue is to make sure that the section of the bilge (the bottom of the hull) that links the front and back halves matches precisely to the section produced by the cut. But in the scenario shown, the only dimension that actually matters to fit out the cabin is the beam, setting the position of the vertical side walls.
With the first hull segmented, the builder can focus on equipping the cabin with the furniture and services required to allow it soon become inhabitable. So the first cabin contains everything: sleeping, lounging, work desk. galley, eating area and head. There’s also storage, and a companionway up to the bridge between the hulls.
As the video shows it, the builder will actually build the cabin with the left and right halves separated. That way, they are working in an easy to manage environment that presents no problems in moving materials around, cleaning up debris and dust, down to equipping the knock-down furnishings. Because the area of the cabin is nearly completely rectilinear, with vertical sides and bulkhead, it’s much easier to fit components into the space, and CNC can be used for everything.
This extends right down to the level of services in the cabins, such as wiring, plumbing, ventilation, black and grey water, and so on. By working in the shallow space shown, all the normal operations are simplified. Wiring paths can be designed, and wiring looms, closer to what is used in automobiles and aircraft, can be created, encapsulated in conduit, and the conduit attached to the cabin components in rational ways.
This turns the cabin into a temporary living space, while construction is ongoing. This ends up being more room than the typical “van life” dwellings. And as the second cabin comes into being, some of the furniture can be transferred to that area, allowing more space, and for the first cabin to be reorganized in a predictable, low-waste process.
This is all guesswork, but the design process is fun, interesting, and challenging. As is typical of such craft, the aft sections from the original hulls becomes devoted to propulsion and services. Like this section, it can be worked on separately, and even separated from the cabin it mates to. In one scenario, this remains true ever after the craft is launched.
That’s done by the dual watertight bulkheads of carbon fiber honeycomb core which are shown. Fittings running from the cabin to either the fore or aft sections lead to these services such as water supply, fuel supply where needed, access to batteries and generation capacity, and so on.
In a construction scenario, these services exit and enter the cabins via the designated penetrations, but on the other side they can be connected to whatever services will temporarily serve to supply or manage what’s being moved around, whether fluids, electrons or gasses. Once the fore and aft are integrated, they’ll contain the actual systems, but in the meantime, testing and validation can happen.
This I realize, is an idea from object-oriented “black box” programming, where the programmer writes a block of code that is only accessed via designated inputs and outputs: it’s internal workings are unknown to the other blocks that use it, and can change, as long as the essential functionality across the interfaces remains consistent.
It’s all very interesting. Where am I going with this, really? Hard to say. I’d love to make this a project in real life, but for now it’s kind of exercise in thinking planning and design. It’s implicitly.a critique of the actual situation of real estate, housing, and the view of accommodation as a primary investment first, and a home dead last. The purpose of this is not to “liberate” the propertyless, but to demonstrate the possibilities in approaching the problem from a different angle. To a great degree, this can be achieved even without building it physically.
Here’s the earlier video that I promised, which I’ve posted before. This is still valid, showing the segmentation and construction process. What it doesn’t show is the cabin accommodations, nor the chassis that will connect the hulls, and then built upon that, the superstructure that will provide a total of about 45sq m of living space.
That’s to come… so is more work on the Apsara Dancer model. I reviewed that today, and it’s in good shape. It basically needs the hands to be animated, the body, head and neck to move more; but the rest of it is in acceptable shape. Here’s the last video of the complete animation, based on the motion editing I did:
I have a project in mind with this that involves 3D resin printing individual frames, and seeing if I can create some revenue opportunities for craftspeople here, painting and decorating them, and selling them as one-of-a-kind (based on the frame they are) offerings in hotels, tourist centers, cultural centers, the airport, etc. It’s more of a vanity project, but the idea of generating income at the nexus between technologies like 3D sintering, culturally significant activities like the Apsara dance, and indigenous crafts leading to augmented income – hopefully at a profit, but also in a fair trade model, seems like a way to approach how the tourist and cultural trade become more economically inclusive, and not just benefits for arts organizations with healthy funding but low inclusion. This is something you see everywhere in S.E. Asia, and no doubt beyond.
More coming.