Janie Fitzgerald in the LimeLight

It happens, now and then, that someone I know and like, keeps coming into my life, but only briefly, and then disappears. But as time goes by the person, who I think the world of, with hard work and talent, becomes a successful working artist. I am just in awe of this, to do this in this changing economy and with the wild technology changes is completely exceptional.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I met a woman named Janie Fitzgerald. I don't remember the first time we met, but it might have been at Limelight. Ah, LimeLight. One of the most glamourous and successful of the music video production companies, with headquarters in London, and an office in LA.

The year must have been 1988 and Brad and I were just starting deGraf/Wahrman and had been invited to present our reel to them. They were casting for a music video, were thinking of using computer animation, which was a completely new and somewhat trendy art form, and somehow we had been recommended to them. So Brad and I showed up and sat in the most amazing waiting room in the world. No adolescent male in his wildest dreams could have imagined the situation. We were surrounded, literally surrounded, by an uncountable number of some of the most beautiful young women in Los Angeles. I would guess that they were all roughly 18-24 in age, dressed to kill, and that there were not less than 20 of them packed into this little room while Brad and I sat and waited for our turn and tried not to notice the potent pheremones that surrounded us. Packed like sardines in a can, literally sitting on a bench squeezed between not less than 10 or 15 of these archetypal objects of teenage lust, candidates no doubt for some insanely exploitative music video, we were completely immune to any distraction from our devotion to 3D animation.

And lording over it all was the receptionist, Janie Fitzgerald, who seemed to think that Brad and I waiting in this room with these actresses was very entertaining.

She seemed familiar somehow. Had I met her at a party recently? Maybe.

The next thing I knew, Janie was working at Homer and Associates, a semi-competitor of ours and owned by our good friend Peter Conn. Now Peter at the time was married to Coco Conn, who was acting social director for the huge computer animation community in Los Angeles which must have numbered at least 50 people, if not more. For those who do not know my sarcastic style, the point is the community was tiny and a few years later there would be a tsunami of people, 2,000 at least, which essentially crushed and destroyed our little community the way an elephant crushes a bug. This was before that tsunami, when we all liked or at least knew each other and would go to parties at Coco Conn's house, or Jeff and Diana Kleiser's house, or at Chris Casady's place with Lynda Weinman, or at Gorky's downtown. (1)

This was in the days when computer animation was considered unproven and risky and before it was accepted by the entertainment industry.  This was back when an experimental computer artist could stand shoulder to shoulder with an animator for a Budweiser commercial and discuss the semiotics of digital production or the failure of the cultural myth.  This was before the fall from grace.   Janie was part of our community. I would see her now and then at these parties and it was always a pleasure.

Janie was working at becoming a professional still photographer. And so after about 5 years with Homer, perhaps 1994 or so, Janie went independent as a photographer, one of the most difficult fields that I know of to succeed in and yet Janie has been successful. She has never had a normal job since she left Homer and has been able to buy a house in Burbank, in other words she is a working professional photographer.

For some reason the Limelight incident, and Janie, was always in my mind. I am not sure why exactly, but she was.

Many, many years later when I was living in New York and had an office at the NYU Media Research Lab, perhaps the year was 2000, one night, perhaps 9 pm or so, I came to the lab and was walking down the hall, when I saw a woman walking towards me who looked amazingly like Janie. Not possible I thought. But yes, the lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world was acting up again, and it was Janie, attending some special event as part of an Apple conference ongoing in Manhattan, I think.

Sill later, I found her on Facebook, and I have found Facebook to be very useful to keep in touch and see the progress of some of my friends.

So there it is, a successful professional photographer, and a really lovely person, working in this down economy and doing what she loves.

Yes, of course, it is obvious. I have had a crush on her since I first saw her at Limelight. In a room literally packed with actresses, starlets and ingenues I only noticed Janie, and it is only Janie that I remember.

But none of that matters.

Janie's personal web site is www.janiefitzgerald.com

Her professional web site is www.axisimages.com

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1. Gorky's completely disappeared when I was in NY in some sort of hideous scandal. But by that time the scene that I knew in computer animation had been destroyed by its success and so it really did not matter.

Did Space Aliens Fix my Scion XB ? Mercury Retrograde and Other Issues

Mercury has just gone Retrograde again and it will stay that way for approximately three weeks.  I know that some of you do not believe that there is a lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world, what Jung called "synchronicity", but he was a fool ! He never listened !   

Anyway, I have a story here which should convince even the most doubtful of you that cosmic energy forces must be at work, even if we do not completely understand them.  (I am joking of course, see note 1)

In a previous post we discussed the mystery of Reverse Mercury Retrograde Syndrome which says that the victim will spend most of the year unable to communicate or get much done but that when Mercury goes Retrograde, he / she will suddenly be able to communicate and get things done, things will start working and so forth.   And in this example, we described a case where cosmic energy forces manipulated me into a meeting with the relatives of a very colorful friend.   

You laugh at this superstitious belief, but just wait.

The following is a true story.

Understanding this story requires that you accept that I am *reverse* mercury retrograde, e.g. in this time period is when things go *right*.   

In the last Mercury Retrograde, I was at UCSD to file my paperwork to get a new passport as UCSD is by far the most convenient place for me to get this piece of official business done.  So I am on this beautiful campus, far away in a corner where some outlying administrative buildings are kept. As I come out of the passport office and approach my car I see a person in a pickup truck examining it. He asks me, am I the person with the Scion XB who needs his windshield replaced?

Well, in fact, I do have a Scion XB and it does have a cracked windshield, which I have not gotten fixed for a year because I simply do not have any money for it (sure I have the money, but one of the features of poverty is that you do not deal with problems that are easily solved because you do not know where the next check is coming from). Yes, I say, but I didn't order a new windshield. He looks at his form, he shows it to me, it is not my name, but it is someone else with a Scion XB who ordered a replacement for his windshield and he works in one of these out-of-the-way admin buildings in an obscure corner of the UCSD campus and had made an appointment for this nice person to order the part from Scion and come by at this time to fix his Scion.

In other words, a nice car repair person just happens to order a part for my car, the exact part I need, and delivers it to UCSD in the exact 2 hour period that I am on the UCSD campus (the second time in my entire life that I have ever been on that campus), at the exact place and moment that I am walking to my car (otherwise I would never have even known about this), but it is not for me.

Could this be just a coincidence or did space aliens arrange for the windshield to be there?

Carl Jung's Astrological Chart which must be relevant to this whole discussion in some mysterious way

I would not know how to even begin to calculate the odds of this happening.   People do not just drive around at random with replacement windshields for my car just in case I happen to need one.

Thats the sort of thing that happens to me when Mercury goes Retrograde: cameras start working mysteriously, a friend offers me a project, people appear out of nowhere with spare parts for my car that somehow they knew that I needed.

When the lattice of causality is on your side, any door can be opened, any windshield replaced, any obstacle overcome.

But when the lattice is against you, well, its best not to think too much about that.

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1.  The funny thing about this, is that in fact it probably *is* just a coincidence.  But what are the odds and how would we calculate them?  What this really means is actually something more interesting but explainable/rational than Mercury Retrograde, something along the lines of:  our lives contain examples of "miracles"  (as defined by extremely small chances of occurring) but they probably occur because we are constantly rolling the dice, we just don't notice it.  This is not a new idea, but it probably needs more discussion than I have done here to make it comprehensible.  I admit it, cosmic energy forces or conspiracy would be the more amusing explanation.

2. In a Facebook discussion with Ken Cope, Ken pointed out that many people do not realize that Mercury does not go backwards, that this is apparent motion which is a result of the elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun.   But what is also interesting (to me at least) is that in the 3rd Century BC, if you observed the sky and did not realize about elliptical orbits, and just reported what you saw, you would describe a dot of light that appears to regularly move in a path in the sky, but then from time to time reverses direction, then resumes its original path.  That part was not superstition, that is what they observed, and you could observe it too, and predict when it would happen.   Astrology may be wrong as an explanation of phenomena, but in general it is based on real observations made as best they could at the time.

The Tragedy of Reverse "Mercury Retrograde"

[Update 03-13-2013 We have ascertained that Mercury was Direct when I was born, but was retrograde when I was conceived.  More research to do.]

[Disclaimer: The author in no way espouses a belief in what is popularly known as "Astrology" in this country nor is it my intent to encourage you to believe in it either.  What we popularly call astrology is in fact a decadent pastiche of many ancient belief systems that were held in high regard throughout the ancient world, each in their various ways, cultures and time periods.  As a field of academic study in what people believed in various times of history, I think Astrology suffers from a non-benign neglect because of a fear of being accused of believing in it.    On the other hand, I do get a lot of amusement when Astrology does seem to predict events as I believe it tells us something about how we perceive coincidence, if it is indeed coincidence, to fit certain categories and beliefs.  It would be disingenuous of me not to admit that there have been some striking coincidences over the years that does give me pause, and which I will narrate in this blog from time to time, but I do not believe that Astrology predicted them.  Rather I think they are obviously related to Atlantean Crystal Wisdom.    For those who are interested, I am a Leo with moon and sun signs in Scorpio.]

In this post I am going to introduce the concept of "Mercury going retrograde", describe some case studies of events that have occurred when Mercury was retrograde, and tell you why I think I am completely fucked due to this eternal and immutable astrological principle.

My first exposure to the concept of "Mercury in Retrograde" occurred in NYC about 1996 or 1997 when the esteemed NY ISP Interport.com lost my email address. A bill had come through unexpectedly and my ill-prepared credit card could not handle it, so a payment bounced and my email stopped working. I paid my bill, called Interport and spent about three weeks with them trying to debug their system: they were totally unable to get my email to work again.  They put many people on the problem, they did a very responsible job as far as I can tell, and they were totally stymied.  About that time, I was in touch with my friend Trilby Schreiber who informed me that "Mercury was starting to come out of retrograde" and that the account would probably start working again in a few days. And it did.

Just for fun, I started tracking Mercury going Retrograde because I thought it was an amusing concept and about a year or two later, a client of mine's phone system started going flooey about the time Mercury went into retrograde. Their voice mail system was hopelessly screwed up and they could not fix it, and weeks went by. I knew everyone in the company well and just for fun I mentioned that Mercury was still retrograde and that it would start going out of retrograde in about a week. They laughed at me! Can you imagine that?  They laughed at me!!! And about a week later, finally, their phone system mysteriously fixed itself and started working.  Mysteriously.  Perhaps they will learn from this experience.

Mercury going retrograde is the phenomenon of Mercury appearing to go backwards due to the elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun. Due to the different speeds and orbits of the planets, it can appear as though a planet changes direction and goes backwards relative to its location to earth, even though in reality it is moving forward as it always does. So Mercury does really appear to go backwards, from our point of view. This happens about 3 times every year and lasts for 3-5 weeks each time.  To know when Mercury is going retrograde in any year, just type "mercury retrograde 2013" (or whatever year it may be) into your favorite search engine.

The astrological impact of this logically follows from the God Mercury (aka Hermes) being the messenger kid for the other Gods in Greek and Roman religion.  "Mercury going retrograde" implies that communications go weird, unreliable and/or prone to distortion.   Communication, negotiation, deals, contracts, and the like are unreliable, and a deal signed during a retrograde Mercury period may in fact turn out to be something other than you expected.    Also, for some reasons, machines like computers start acting perversely.    The Greeks and Romans did not have computers per se, at least not digital ones (1), of course, but they did have a large number of mechanical engines which were in constant use, and there is nothing like a four-story crane at a construction site going weird while raising a couple of (Roman) tons of marble to ruin your day.

But there is an elaboration that I read about that takes this to a higher level.  In this variation, there are people for whom the normal retrograde effect is itself reversed.   When Mercury goes retrograde, communication does not get worse for these people, it gets better.   The downside is that for the rest of the year, when Mercury is going forward as normal, they also experience the reverse effect on communication, etc.  It is like one long horrible "Mercury is Retrograde" for most of the year, broken up by brief periods of constructive normality.   This would be very bad of course for the individual who was so affected.

Who might be susceptible to this variation?  One explanation is that one is born during a retrograde period.  I do not know what other situations or events might cause this.  But I am highly motivated to know, because I have noticed for many years now that for most of the year I am completely paralyzed and isolated, unable to get anything moving.  Then, for some reason, things start working normally, for a brief period of time, but then stop and revert to their previous paralysis.

Just recently, a number of things started working and started showing progress after months of nothing.   A beloved and unique camera, a Contax AX, had been drop-kicked 20 feet along a concrete street and had sensibly stopped working, suddenly just started working again.    A friend indicated that he was working on getting me a project.  I started talking to the chair of next years SIGGRAPH on a variety of important issues.  This may lead nowhere, but it is such a delight to be able to talk to a real human involved at a senior level on these issues.  An old friend asked me to participate in a charitable visualization project.   I came up with a possible, amusing idea for a consulting business, and became more convinced than ever that a kind of software I have considered writing would be quite valuable if written.  This is all very odd and mysterious, I thought.   Why should anything good be happening to me?

Then I had a horrible thought and checked, and yes, it had all started when Mercury became retrograde about two weeks ago.  I think you see the obvious implications. If I am right, then the only time that communications, machines, ideas, deals and so forth can make progress and work for me is when Mercury is retrograde, three short periods of the year.

Mainstream post-enlightenment culture sees no other rational explanation for these events beyond sheer perverse randomness.    It is not about my effort, or my attitude, which is consistently bad, or because of how much energy I put into things because I always put a lot of energy into my work except when I hold my head in despair.   If not reverse Mercury retrograde, what other possible explanation is there beyond mere randomness or the untested power of Atlantean Crystal Wisdom?

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More about Mercury Retrograde

http://www.addictedtoastrology.com/p/mercury-retrograde.html

http://solarisastrology.blogspot.com/2013/02/mercury-retrograde-trickster-of-night.html

http://www.universetoday.com/22135/mercury-retrograde/
http://www.thespiraljournal.com/2012/03/mercury-retrograde-2/

The following is a table of all the times that Mercury went Retrograde in the last century (e.g. 1901 - 2000).  The term "MR" means "Mercury Retrograde" and the term "MD" means "Mercury Direct".

http://www.astropro.com/features/tables/geo/me-sta/me-sta26.html
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1. Actually the Romans did have computers, but they were analog and mechanical ones.  A sundial is a computer, so are many navigation devices etc.  These people were not dummies.

The Museum of Forrest J. Ackerman

[Colleagues have asked, where is a picture of Wendy Wahrman?  When I get a suitable picture of Wendy I will post it]. 

Once upon a time I had met most of the working west coast writers of science fiction, or at least the ones who came to the Westercon, the west coast science fiction convention.  This was no big deal, pretty much anyone who attended Westercon could meet them, they were very approachable.  This included such authors as Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson and Jerry Pournelle, just to name a few. Someone I knew about, but had never met, was Forrest J. Ackerman.

"Forry", as he was known, was quite famous in that world. He was a pioneer and contemporary of Robert Heinlein and people of that generation, and had made a living as a writer, an editor, a publisher and a literary agent all in the area of science fiction.   Science fiction is to literature as puppetry is to theatre, it doesn't get much respect.   And it is very difficult to make a living as a writer of fiction no matter what genre the writer works in.   He published none other than "Famous Monsters" magazine.  He probably wrote the first ever story for Vampirella.

This is Vampirella in her pre-sex goddess form.  No kinky leather jumpsuit at this time.

Forrest was also famous in this world of science fiction for his vast collection of all kinds of memorabilia from the worlds of horror, science fiction, and fantasy.  Such items as Bela Lugosi's cape from Dracula, and the mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon. He collected with the passion and obsession of all great collectors and kept everything in a great old mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

To give you an idea of what we are dealing with here, consider this link, which has a scan of a letter from a 14 year old Forry to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the reply from Mr. Burroughs.     

One day a good friend of mine, a pioneer of the ARPANET who lived in Palo Alto, and a fan of science fiction, asked me to arrange a tour of Forrest's mansion for him.  The idea was that I was a local, and he wasn't, so I should do this.    As it happened, I knew Mr. Ackerman's phone number, because everyone who knew science fiction knew his phone number.  It was (213) MOON FAN.

 So I gathered up my courage and out of the blue one afternoon, I gave him a call.

"Mr. Ackerman," I said, "my name is Michael Wahrman, but you don't know me, but we of course know of you and of your famous collection and a friend and I wanted to know if there was a time when people could come see this collection. Perhaps you might have an open house one day a year or something like that. If you do have a way for people to tour your collection, we would very much like to do so."

I can not begin to write in a way that expresses how Forrest Ackerman used to speak. I want you to imagine in your mind that his lines are being spoken by Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932).

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then he said "What is your name again?"

"Well, my name is Michael Wahrman, but I am pretty sure you have never heard of me".

"How do you spell that", he asked.

"Well, its spelled W-A-H-R-M-A-N, why do you ask?"

After a pause he said, mysteriously,  "You may come by, whenever you wish."

Well, that's odd, I thought.   But I made an appointment and my friend came to town and we went to this fabulous house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills and we were received by Forrest, shown around, and introduced to his lovely wife, the former Wendy Wahrman.   She greeted me with a fabulous Hungarian or perhaps eastern European accent saying "Ah, Wahrman.   An old family name.  From Hungary".

It is almost certain that Wendy and I were related. Its a very unusual name. Associated with a specific intellectual (jewish) elite of Europe. Only a few black sheep with that name came to this country, most of them were killed in the Holocaust, a few went to Israel, so you do not find many Wahrman's on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am looking for a suitable picture for Wendy Wahrman Ackerman, but haven't found one yet.

I will always remember Mr Ackerman, now dead these many years, and his amazing hospitality to a total stranger, and with this fabulous voice, doing a perfect horror movie rendition: "You may come by, whenever you wish".

Wikipedia page for Forrest Ackerman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_J_Ackerman

A link to a first edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, signed by Forry, Christopher Lee, and many others.
http://turhansbeycompany.tumblr.com/post/33611652054/hotmonsters-panicbeats-forrest-j-ackermans

Drums Must Not Stop

The other day after a memorial service for an old friend from Disney, some of the Disney people took me to a local restaurant for dinner.  Somehow this restaurant was the center of the lattice of causality that night, as various friends of ours accidentally stopped in including a mutual friend from the National Security Agency.

The establishment was a mexican restaurant and cowboy western bar and musical venue all in one.  It had some sort of mid-50s cowboy band from the valley and a height-challenged fan and amateur yodeller who performed a spirited rendition of "I wanna be a cowboy girlfriend" complete with extensive yodels.  Its very hard for me to evaluate the quality of such a performance.   But they were certainly loud.

So in the brief period between songs, when you could actually yell something and be heard, I told them my one music industry joke.

A man is in the jungle, accompanied by native guides. Off in the distance, somewhere in the jungle, a drum starts beating. The drum keeps beating, on and on it goes, day and night, over and over again, endlessly.   "What are those drums" he asks? The natives reply "Drums not stop."   The drums keep going on, hour after hour, beating, pounding, endlessly. "What are those drums?" he asks again.  The natives reply "Drums Not Stop! Drums not stop!"  Finally the man says, "I cant take this anymore, when will those drums stop?  Please tell me!"  The natives reply "DRUMS MUST NOT STOP!!!" and the man finally understands, he is in terrible danger.   Suddenly afraid, he asks desperately,  "Why? What will happen when the drums stop?"  The natives reply "BASS SOLO STARTS".

I think you might have to have attended rock concerts in the 60s and 70s to truly appreciate this joke.

Richard "Doc" Baily and the Lattice of Causality

This essay is on the general topic of how we perceive coincidence, and read patterns into them.  Do those patterns actually exist?   I doubt it, but who knows.

For those of you interested in the history of computer animation, this story involves my good friend, now deceased, Richard "Doc" Baily.

This story takes a while to get going, unfortunately.  If you make it through to the end, though, I think you will agree with me that its pretty weird.

I do not believe in such things as Synchronicity, or the apparent coincidences that underly the material world that indicate a formal structure of cause and effect that is not apparent to our normal senses, limited as they are by mere matter and energy. I really wish I did believe in such things, because if I did, then maybe I would believe in telepathy, and if I believed in telepathy, maybe I would believe in life-after-death and if I believed in life-after-death maybe I would believe in happy endings and then maybe I would have some hope.

But I dont.

I wish I did, but I dont.

I suspect that when I experience something that seemingly indicates that cosmic consciousness is guiding our actions, or some other similar mechanism, that what is actually going on is a series of coincidences that are assembled by a hyperactive pattern-seeking device known as the human brain. And that this fabulous pattern seeking and making device is, particularly when under stress, finding patterns when none exists. In a more extreme form, this is one proposed explanation for paranoia, that the brain is putting patterns together and is being a little too energetic in doing so.

But I have a few stories, and this is one of them. What I particularly like about this story is the extremely infinitesimal odds of it occurring, as you will see.

It involves one of my best friends, now deceased, Richard "Doc" Baily, or Dr. Baily as we called him. He was a graduate of Cal Arts, a technical director at Abel's who worked on Tron among other projects, a poet, and a talented early computer animator and abstract filmmaker. Richard was very eccentric and not everyone enjoyed working with him in part because of his flamboyant lifestyle choices. Eventually both he and I were no longer at Abel's but he remained a good friend until he passed away tragically several years ago.  My friend Richard led a troubled life due to some of these lifestyle choices that I referred to. He was in and out of various substance abuse programs and in and out of work. He did not have a good relationship with his family. I tried to be supportive and I genuinely liked him, most of the time. We kept in touch.

About a decade later, in the early 1990s, I am taking a break from my very depressing life and so-called career in Los Angeles and going out west to visit some of the national parks and chill out. My production company is out of business, computer animation is becoming very corporate, and the future is uncertain at best. I run into a friend, Harvie Branscomb, and I accept an invitation to stay in his guest room for a few weeks, about 10 miles downvalley from Aspen, Co. In Aspen, I meet a pleasant local named Jennifer (not sure I have her name right) and as I am preparing to drive slowly back to Los Angeles, she suggests that I stop by Sedona and visit a friend of hers who runs a New Age bookstore and tchotchke shop. I am not planning to go to Sedona, but I tell her I will visit her friend if I get there.

About a week later, I am driving in Arizona and I reach a crossroads where I either turn directly for LA or go the other direction to Sedona. I was not planning to go to Sedona, but at the last minute I take the turn and go there.

Just wait, this will all make sense.

I go to the New Age bookstore and meet Jennifer's friend. She has never met me before, did not know I was coming, but of course she does remember her friend Jennifer who has referred me. She says without much preamble: You must go to the river.  You must go right now.

Why not, I thought. This has been a fun trip acting on impulse, lets go to the river, lets go right now.

The river refers to a creek near some hills that are supposed to be particularly filled with karmic good energy fields. Sortof an epicenter of Sedona, which is itself a center of cosmic energy, I am told. What I find there is more of a pond, a bit muddy, with some kids playing in it, a few 20-something women, a few picnic tables, an old guy fishing. So, why not, I start talking to the young women who are playing in the water and we start chatting.

And where are you from, they ask? I am from LA. And what do you do? Well, its not clear, thinking to myself, right now I am not doing anything, but I guess I do computer animation, I say. Oh, they say, do you know our cousin Richard Baily? Doctor Baily?, I ask. Oh no, they say, he's not a doctor, he's a computer animator!  He's our cousin and we are just coming from a family reunion with his father and he did not show up!

Oh, I thought, thinking about what little I knew about my friend's "relationship" with his family and his parents.

Ok, I said, I am Richard's best friend in LA or one of them. Why don't I buy you all dinner tonight in Sedona and you can tell me all about it. So I did. Oddly enough, I don't remember much about the dinner, but we discussed my friend Richard and his relationship with his family, and I told them some things about Richard in LA, not bad things, mostly good things I think. But I don't remember too much about dinner.

As the years passed, I wondered if this event had actually happened, it seemed too improbable. But when Richard passed away, I ran into the two cousins at the memorial service and they said yes, we had met by the river in Sedona and I had taken them to dinner, just as I had remembered.

So consider the odds here. They are not planning to be in Sedona more than a day. I am not planning to be there at all. I am not planning to go to Aspen. I do not know Jennifer. I do not know the woman who owns the bookstore. But I do show up unexpectedly that afternoon, and she tells me to go to the river, and I do, and I meet the cousins of my best friend who have just come from a family reunion where their famous cousin who is estranged from his family has not shown up.

The odds of this happening are quite tiny, I think. I don't really know what to make of it.   It does seem oddly ordained by fate.   I have other stories of this type, but this one is exemplerary because how I came to be there was so involved and unlikely.

I still don't have any hope, though.

Shakespeare in Doubt (also The Setup & the Payoff)

[One more time, we have two different blog posts inappropriately combined into one.  In the first one we have a discussion of how do we know anything is real, and using the case study of truth and otherwise in "Shakespeare in Love" and the crisis it is has generated.  In the second part, we have a discussion of the comedy writing technique of "setup and payoff" that Shakespeare in Love uses to great effect. Two different posts.  One of these days I have to get my shit together.]

This has been a day from hell for me. I spent several hours trying to write up a post about what was and was not true in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and discovered, through further research, that what I thought I knew here was far more ambiguous or worse. Somehow I had read an article (or more than one) somewhere in some reasonable place and it turns out to be wrong. Of course society is full of such things and belief systems that are incorrect, but it is both annoying and scary to run into one yourself that you were completely unaware of. Of course I can't remember where I read this article or who wrote it. Maybe I just dreamed that I read such an article. Once you start doubting there is no end to the depths that doubt can take you.

To give just one example, I thought I knew very clearly that there was a major scandal involving either the first performance or an early performance of Romeo and Juliet involving a woman playing the role of Juliet because of a last minute disaster involving the boy who had been expected to play the role. It was Elizabethan practice for boys to play the role of women, supposedly this was a way of avoiding licentiousness in the theatre. And since using women on the stage at the time was illegal, the theatre and the play were temporarily shut down. Thus I thought that this incident in the movie was based, loosely, on something that had happened in reality with this play. God only knows what I read or where to think that this was true, but I have known this story wrong as it may be for decades, well before Shakespeare in Love came out but I can find no evidence of any such story on the bold new internet paradigm and if this story had been true or even rumored, it is likely I would find a reference to it without much problem on the internet. But I don't find any such reference. So either I am psychic and somehow channeled from the future this plot point from a movie yet to be made, or I was just wrong.

This is just one example, there are others, and I am now spooked and wish to retreat to safety.

Fortunately, there are a few topics associated with this movie that I can talk about and have some hope that they are true and correct. One of them is how I happened to see this film, the second is to discuss a topic in the writing of comedy which this film demonstrates with great skill referred to as "the setup and the payoff" or words to that effect.

But first, how I happened to see this film.  

Arguably one of the best complements you can give an artist or someone you know is to view their work without realizing who did it. So, for example, say you see the work of a friend without knowing it was your friend, really like the work, and only later discover that your friend did it. Its really nice when that happens, or so I think. Well, Tom Stoppard is not a friend of mine, but obviously I knew of him, but somehow had not realized that he had written (or co-written) Shakespeare in Love.

When Shakespeare in Love came out in 1998, I really did not want to see it. The reasons for this are complicated but it mostly had to do with my contrarian nature responding negatively to the glowing effusions of praise that this film seemed to generate, and because I doubted very much whether someone was going to do an interesting film that I would want to see about Wm. Shakespeare's love life. On top of that, I hated the title. So I planned to miss this one.

But fate had other plans for me and sometime later I was on a plane between NY and LA and this was the movie they were showing. So after the movie started, I broke down and bought a headset and started listening as well as watching. And as I watched I started to wonder who had written this thing. It was being very clever, and I am not used to clever in successful films, I am more likely to think "stupid" than I am to think "clever", generally speaking. But as I watched this movie, I kept thinking: whoever wrote this has done a very good job here, I wonder what happened?

What had happened of course is that I was one of the few people in North America who did not know that this film had been co-written by Tom Stoppard. Oh, I thought, when I found out. That would explain it. Oops.

So now I want to seque to an important non-sequitor, the comedy technique of "setup and payoff." Setup and payoff works like this. You set up in the audience's mind some situation or idea so that they know that something is coming but the main character, generally, does not. Then in the course of time of course something happens that you expected but the characters didn't, and it is often very funny. I realize it does not sound funny at first glance, these things rarely do, but some examples will illustrate this.   First from a different movie that also uses this technique well, and then from Shakespeare in Love.

In the important film, Galaxyquest (1999), we have several completely excellent examples of this technique. The one that jumps right out at you of course is at the basic premise of the movie. A group of former TV actors who had experienced fame once by being on a TV series about a starship going around visiting various alien planets (e.g. Star Trek) get involved with a real group of aliens, the Thermians, who have also seen the show but believe it is real, and try to get our protagonists to save them from a real alien menace. So we know that these are real aliens and real spaceships, but our heroes don't but at various times discover the truth. And the inverse is true, the "good aliens", the Thermians, have to discover that the people they think are space heroes are really television actors who have seen better days. So we have the setup, and then we have a series of payoffs.

I have put on youtube an example payoff from the film.  In this sequence the crew of the TV series think they are trying to join their colleague for some sort of paid fan experience, or job.  They think these geeky looking "Thermians" are just badly adjusted fans of the TV series.
http://youtu.be/3yCFKT633j0

While we are on the subject of Galaxyquest, here is a link to a post by Ken Perlin in which he discusses a way to quantitatively rate a movie which is based on his experience of first seeing Galaxyquest.  His post is not about setup and payoff per se, its about the bigger questions that this movie raises.
http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=163

The supporting actors learn the truth about the Thermians

Getting back to Shakespeare in Love, pretty much anyone who sees a film with a title like that, will know that Wm. Shakespeare did not, in fact, write a comedy with the title "Romeo and Ethyl, the Pirate's Daughter". But everyone does know that Shakespeare wrote a tragedy called "Romeo and Juliet". If they know nothing else about Shakespeare and his plays, they know that much at least. And so we have a perfect setup for a series of gags where Shakespeare is struggling with both the story and the title as it evolves into a tragedy called "Romeo and Juliet". The way Stoppard drags this out is spectacular, and also has elements of the running gag to it. I do not have a copy of the movie here so I can not count how many intermediate forms we have to go through on our way to the final, but its a lot, and every one is a payoff. And of course the audience knows where this is going and feels a sense of relief, or at least I did, when we finally get there. Although a "running gag" is a different technique of writing comedy, this particular example also has a sense of that going on as well. Its essentially setup and payoff combined with a running gag (or so I think).

In a future post I hope to get to the bottom of the real topic of this post, which is why I believed what I did, but I can not write that today, because I do not know the answer.

<ip>

Anne McKenney ( - 2009)

[I just got email from Elizabeth/Beth McKenney and she had some corrections for me.]

I just got the word that Anne McKenney passed away several years ago in 2009. I had been out of touch with the McKenney family and just got back in touch and found out.

Anne was like a second mother to me. I was friends with her five children and spent a huge amount of time in their great three-story house in Richmond, Va. Anne's husband, "Speed" McKenney, was friends with my uncle Harry and the two of them famously built the Virginia power grid out to rural areas in the 1950s (I think).  Beth tells me that no one knows where "Speed"'s nickname came from.

The good news is that I am back in touch with the family again and maybe I will somehow figure out how to get enough money to visit them in Richmond, Va.

In the small world category, Anne was the Aunt, I think, of Glorianna Davenport of MIT.  In other words, according to Elizabeth, Glorianna is Anne's niece.  I always have trouble keeping these relationships straight, I admit.

This is a picture of Anne.  Yes, a bit older, but definitely looking like her and with the same smile that I remember.

This makes three friends that I hear have passed away in the last month. I certainly hope that this trend does not continue.

Thank God that this is not going to happen to us and that we are not going to get any older.

[Addendum: A friend heard how distraught I was that I had not visited Anne when she was still with us (because of poverty of course) and he is determined to visit an elderly friend of his, assuming he is still here, we can only hope.  So maybe some good can come from this.  Learn from my mistakes, you who are reading this.]

Sing-A-Long Sound of Music

One more time I have evidence that I am deeply embedded into the collective unconsciousness of popular culture without realizing it.   I think something is completely obscure and then it turns out that it is no less than the very topic of a mass movement.

A friend has posted on facebook a picture he took at the recent "Sing-A-Long Sound of Music" in which 18,000 people went to the Hollywood Bowl to sing along with Maria and Captain v. Trapp.

Could this just be a coincidence, that I would write my post about The Sound of Music and its relationship to submarine history and that then this event would happen?    Is this more proof of the lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world?

Although I do have other situations that do strongly indicate the apparent presence of the lattice of causality, I doubt very much if any of the participants at the Sing-A-Long were aware of Captain v. Trapp's immense importance to the history of submarines.  But maybe that doesn't matter, it occurs to me, maybe his importance to submarine history influenced their behavior without their conscious knowledge?

[An aside: the Hollywood Bowl claims that their screen is the largest outdoor motion picture screen in the world.   A few years ago I saw a sequence from the Sound of Music at the Academy that was projected in 70MM from the original 70mm negative.   It was completely amazing and much better, read my lips, much better by an order of magnitude than the best digital projection I have seen.   Obviously progress is not about making things better.]

Here is the link to Jim Hillin's picture on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151187914489312&set=a.462289734311.253257.573349311&type=1&comment_id=7932189

And the Hollywood Bowl event:
http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/sing-long-sound-of-music/2011-09-24

Jim Hillin's picture from the event itself:

My original post about Maria, the Captain and the submarine is at:
http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-baron-novititate-and-submarine-in.html