Karl Sims Opening at the Museum of Mathematics, NYC, 11/7/2024

Karl Sims had an art opening at the Museum of Mathematics in New York City on 11/7/2024.  

Also there was Pattie Maes, Ken Perlin, Trilby Schreiber, Tom Brigham and Jill Fraser.

Advice for Youth Regarding the Academy Awards

When experienced and senior people such as myself deign to teach callow youth about the "industry", what is our motivation and what is it we should expect?   Our motivation is, generally speaking, to help our students by generously giving them the benefit of our experience.  What we should expect in return is their complete obedience and undying gratitude.

One of the courses that I taught for NYU at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies provided an opportunity for me to relate a few simple suggestions that I thought would be helpful to them when/if they came to the West coast to try their fortune in the glamourous motion picture industry.  As time has passed I continue to believe that these suggestions are as valid today as when I taught those classes.

My suggestions, based on personal experience, are as follows.

First, its important to start practicing your acceptance speech for your Academy Award now and well in advance of actually needing it.   The simplest way to do this is to stand in front of a mirror and practice your speech.  A few minutes a day, every day, is recommended. Be sure to use a touch of humor, be gracious and never forget the virtue of being brief.   Everyone is nervous the first few times they receive this award and you will be no exception.   Also, remember that the "Oscar" is heavy, being made from depleted uranium, so you might want to work on your upper body a few weeks before the great day.

Second, its important as well as gracious to acknowledge your fans as you are getting out of your limo in front of the theatre. Your fans have been waiting there for hours if not days just for a chance to get a glimpse of you. Their lives are pointless and you can cheer them up, so why not?

Always be dignified as this ingenue is demonstrating here

Third, its important to be magnanimous in your speech. Always thank the little people who contributed to your award, even though you know, and the important people know, that they had nothing to do with it. All the good ideas came from you and you alone.

Fourth, if you are not being awarded this year by some mistake or oversight, you can still get some visibility on air if you follow this little trick and have a little luck.  The news pool usually has their camera used to interview stars placed so that the television audience can see who is arriving at the awards on the red carpet in the background.  If you are careful, you can evaluate who they are interviewing and make a judgment about whether or not they will be on air as you walk into the awards.  The technique is to stall until you think the time is right and then walk in and past that area, turn around and walk back, then turn around again and finally walk in.  This way you get three exposures, not one, and your fans will be grateful.

Fifth, do not be concerned about getting a date for the Academy Awards.  No one has ever experienced any problems getting a date for the ceremony.  You can be the most unpopular person in the world and men or women will line up to go to the Awards and tell all their friends about it later (who will be suitably impressed and jealous).

Finally,  I had a few thoughts on the topic of career planning which I shared and which I believe are even more valid today.   Do not go to Hollywood and offer to be an assistant, or work for free, or start at the bottom.  That is all crap.  Jeffrey Katzenberg was 19 years old and started by being assistant to the head of Paramount and look what happened to him.  Be warned,  Hollywood has plenty of people willing to start at the bottom.  What Hollywood does not have enough of is people who have the courage to come in and be the producers, directors, writers and actors who take charge and show them how its done.   There is a shortage in all these areas.   When you go to Hollywood, don't be modest but speak truth to power and tell them how they have fucked up and how things should be done now that you have arrived.

They love that kind of chutzpah.  For them, it means that you have the self-confidence to be a top player.

I promise you that they will appreciate your honesty and it will be the start of a brilliant career.

Stanley Kubrick and the Hotel in NY

I believe that as we live our pathetic lives in our corrupt society, that we are all of us under a moral obligation to enliven and otherwise entertain each other, so that we do not all collapse into a puddle of stress and unhappiness. Sadly not everyone holds to this moral principle.

Also sadly, some of the attempted entertainment items, jokes, gags, whatever, are better than others. “I have a million jokes as good as that one” always sounds like a threat to me. Nevertheless, every once in a while things come together and work out to everyone's benefit. The point of this post is to review the structure of such a gag first used in 1997 that those who are interested in continuing in this great tradition may do so. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, this gag would have to be updated to modern times or it would take an entirely new, and darker, feeling.

There are several ideas incorporated in this gag and so lets review them here. 1. It works to build up the mythology of the designated target in front of his or her coworkers in entertaining ways, 2. It uses as a primary mechanism certain behaviors that have been noticed in a class of worker in our society in order to achieve our goals without being physically present, 3. It seeks to achieve its goals by exploiting a weakness, in this case, the unfortunate willingness to hold in high esteem members of the motion picture industry and to think that there is anything glamourous or exciting in that industry, 4. The gag uses modesty and indirection as a technique for achieving its goals, in this case one is not impersonating a famous person, one is impersonating an anonymous and lowly assistant to the famous person, 5. It goes further by suggesting that the target is in fact the important person, whereas the off screen celebrity is actually just nobody of any special interest.

The occasion for this event was the imminent arrival of a friend from the West Coast to NYC. I knew that my friend, from ILM, would arrive on a certain day and somehow knew what hotel he was staying at. He must have told me which hotel it was, but I have no memory of that. I knew that it was possible at most hotels to leave a message in advance of arrival of the guest if they had a reservation, and furthermore, that there was a good chance that the front desk would read any such message to the arriving guest. I also knew that it was procedure for such people to arrive in groups from the airport, so that it was likely that my friend and target would arrive and check in with his co-workers all around him.

There was always the risk that the front desk would not read any message aloud, but hand it to my friend on paper. It could go either way, this is a flaw in the approach. In this case, the events turned out the way I desired but it could have been different. Had my friend received the note on paper, it would still have been entertaining, but not as much.

Given this intelligence of the imminent arrival of the target, I waited until the day before arrival and called the hotel, asking to leave a message for a guest who had not yet arrived but whose arrival was expected. The front desk was happy to do so after looking up the guests' name, Josh Pines of Industrial Light and Magic, on their arrivals list.

Then I told the front desk, in the nicest and most innocent voice I could manage, that this was Mr. Kubrick's office calling, and if Josh had any free time during his trip to NY could he give Stanley a call at home whose number was 212 888 8888. There are several tricks to this message worth pointing out. I. the person who is leaving the message am nobody, I am just representing Mr. Kubrick's office. I assume that everyone knows who Kubrick is, and would know that Stanley refers to the top guy, and that Josh might not have Stanley's home number, so I give it. In reality, of course this number is my home number, something I figured Josh would realize after a moment's thought. Also, note that it is an affectation of the motion picture industry that everyone at the top is referred to in an aw-shucks manner and by their first name. If this had been Jeffrey Katzenberg, I would call him Jeffrey, etc. The implication of course was that it was Josh who was the busy one, and it was Stanley who would rearrange his schedule to fit in Josh whenever he might be available.

So, the trap having been set, all I could do is wait and see what happened. As it turned out, in this case, everything went our way.

A group from ILM arrived at the hotel and while they waited for each member to check into the hotel, the front desk read out to Josh in a loud voice that “A Mr. Kubrick's office had called, and could Josh call Stanley at home at the following number”. This got a suitable response from Mr. Pines colleagues, although Josh immediately saw through the ruse, and said it was “just” Michael Wahrman. Nevertheless, when Josh went up to his room, his electronic key did not work. Puzzled he went down to the front desk and discovered that he had been upgraded to a better room by the hotel.

[Josh tells me that he never referred to "just" Michael Wahrman, but in fact informed Ellen Poon, a member of that party, after the fact and outside the lobby, who was behind the  gag.  He also reports that the people most impressed with the gag were behind the counter, which does not surprise me at all, and in fact is part of the reason I hoped that they would read the message out loud.  In other words, they would read it out loud and make a slightly bigger scene of it all because the workers at the hotel thought it was exciting, not because Josh's colleagues did.  Anyway, Josh does report that he got a better room and it was very nice.  That of course was an unexpected result].

If we were to try and repeat this gag exactly today, we would want to designate a different celebrity director, as Mr. Kubrick is no longer with us, which is a shame.

In fact, the person most amused by this stunt was and still is myself.  I was really delighted and still am.   Probably would not work a second time (at least not at the same hotel).

In this manner, we endeavor to entertain our friends and try to alleviate the endless boredom and misery of their everyday lives. If only some of them would reciprocate, that my life would also be enlivened. But I wait in vain for that happy day.

Arrival in NY, NYU, Brigham, Speer and the Virgin Mary

Revised 11/11/2013

Dearest Marie

I have arrived safely in New York City, a city I have heard so much about but not really visited since earlier in the century.   These notes will record some of my impressions and now that I have given into Satan and bought a digital camera, some pictures as well eventually.

Your idea of buying a cheap notebook worked great, mostly.   Windows 8 can be tamed it turns out, Microsoft is its own worst enemy.  The keyboard can be used but the mousepad is so big on the palm rest that if you indeed use it as a rest you mess with the touchpad and your mouse goes to hell and gone.

I checked into NYU and Perlin arranged for me to have a badge!  I did not have the heart to tell him that I still had my old one from 2000.   They want me to return it when done, fat chance.  The 12th floor looks very very similar to the way I remembered it.    I feel bad bothering people when I need something.   Ken has an interesting vision and we will see where it all goes.  I know from experience that in academia, things are complicated and may not be what they seem.   Danger everywhere!

I did notice that Chris Bregler when he did motion capture did not use the basic ballerina / stripper approach of so many of his peers, but went straight for an Olympic diving champion.  I applaud his taste in exploiting women and plan to complement him on this the next time I see him

I found Tom Brigham, and he is doing better than I expected.  His subterranean basement appears at first to be a junk room, but when you go further in you see there is order in the madness.  He thinks this is camoflage, but I think its just bad marketing.  He has to convince people he is not a flake, and presenting his office/workshop as a pile of junk to the casual observer is the wrong approach.

Speer took me around on Saturday and we got in Chelsea, the MET and some music.  The man is a dynamo of energy, the prototypical uber-new-yorker.   If I had stayed with him on Sunday instead of doing who knows what I would have seen the apparaitions of the virgin mary as photographed by the fabulous Veronica Leueken.  The Church does not believe these are true visions of the Virgin, then what are they?

These are her predictions as recorded in her ecstatic visions.  See link below.  Note that in 1977 under Revolutions she predicts the 3 W as a sign of the end times.   3W could mean 3 wars, or could it mean she predicted the WWW (world wide web) as a sign of the coming collapse of civilization?

http://www.roses.org/prophecy/seqevnt.htm

But now I must get out of Arlene's shelter for the poor here on Broome street and face the cold hard world and go to NYU and play with all the great stuff that Perlin has collected.

PS The MET was wonderful but the Rome exhibit was very underwhelming.

I miss you greatly and look forward to returning to our little Rancho in Siberia.


                                                     Your devoted Dimitri.