Category: misc

black and blue

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

I began writing this in the morning of July 7, disheartened by the killing of Philando Castile, struggling to make sense of this ongoing slaughter of black lives. I have a lot of respect for law enforcement as well, and I wondered how we will rebalance the scales of justice to make a better world. I sat down to write that Black vs Blue is a literal tradeoff of lives, not just a one-sided injustice, and it will only get worse if both sides cannot explicitly acknowledge this. Then I paused my writing, checked the news, and saw that it’s already gotten worse. I won’t change anything I’ve written so far, and I’ll call out where I paused and restarted …

#BlackLivesMatter is the apotheosis of hashtags, arguably the mark of separation between the Internet as merely united information and the Internet as truly united culture. Uniting the world doesn’t happen with the ties that bind – those ties were always there, if we had the eyes and heart to see and feel them. Unity comes with a force implacable enough to sink us if we can’t acknowledge what’s been there all along.

In dusty eons past, the world’s knowledge was stored on fragile dried plant pulp, stacked up in schools, libraries, churches and palaces, separated by uncrossable oceans, vast and hostile distances. Fast-forward a few centuries and everything is instantly connected, world knowledge is united, human progress progresses in a coordinated manner that, if not moving in lockstep yet, fairly resembles loosely bound rafts strapped together on a common ocean. At the bleeding edge of the modern evolution of common knowledge, participants in the exchange of information must form a common culture, at least to the extent they are forced to deal with the vast gulf that yet remains between us all despite swimming in the same waters. #BlackLivesMatter is the iceberg that must be reckoned with, ignore it at the peril of having our boats wrecked by the rocky mass underwater. It is a call for the absorption of information at first, but more deeply it is a call to grapple with history, with the experiences of another, with the immediate reaction and grief, the defensiveness and guilt, the raw emotions of others all paddling in different directions to pull our own rafts out of the way of the iceberg, futilely ignoring the unbreakable ropes that bind us together.

… I am hoping that high-falutin’, fantastically florid introduction has gotten rid of the idiots, before I get to the point, if there is one. Because I’m not engaging with the #AllLivesMatter or #WhiteLivesMatter crowd. As entertaining as it can be to methodically unpack the ignorance, fear, guilt and willful blindness of those reactionary hashtags, they are nothing more than the impotent flags flown atop the largest rafts whose inhabitants see the iceberg and ignore it, not seeing that the ropes between the rafts are indeed unbreakable, and no hull or armor will protect their own raft from the sharp rocks beneath the water. #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter are false flags to be ignored. #BlackLivesMatter is the iceberg.

But #BlueLivesMatter is not so easily dismissed, although its standard bearers can seem similar to the false flag brigade, in being across such a great divide of cultural understanding that the good instinct to dismiss false flags casts its shadow over this hashtag as well. And a call to value police lives seems absurd as we watch, over and over again, the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile … at this point the despair of listing so many names is swamped by the certainty that we need wait only weeks to add another to the list. The volume of clear police crime and misbehavior may lead one to believe that #BlueLivesMatter only defends individual and institutional racism, corruption, appalling training and criminal collusion.

Hashtags, like people, aren’t monolithic. Different people mean different things when they post, tweet, instashare, snapblog, or whatever we do to cry our digital tears in the electronic ether. But in the best interpretation of #BlueLivesMatter, it really does spring from a concern for life, and there are the utmost consequences for the lives that will be affected when #Black meets #Blue. For #BlackLivesMatter to be given its full due, #BlueLivesMatter will have to make the ultimate sacrifice in some instances.

The question here is how to share the burden of mistakes. On my best days, I can imagine a world without racism (or at least, without the level of racism that directly or indirectly leads to death), as idealistic and distant as that world may be. But I can’t imagine a world without mistakes, which are so fundamental to the human condition, and necessary to human progress, that we ought to fear a world without mistakes more than one with racism.

So in a world with mistakes, where we also have deadly weapons and criminals, unless we want criminals to be able to kill with impunity, we must have police or accept vigilantes. And if you have police in this world, some of them must be armed, and some of them will make mistakes. (I suppose we can imagine a world without deadly weapons, or one without criminals, but if all we do is imagine a world without problems, there isn’t much to discuss.) So the police will make mistakes involving deadly weapons, and someone will die as a result. Who should it be, an innocent suspect, or an innocent police officer or bystander?

#BlueLivesMatter says that the innocent suspect must die. This sounds horrible, but it isn’t hard to envision math that makes this seem rational. Say there are 1000 life-or-death suspect vs police confrontations per year. Say that 10% of those confrontations will end in a mistake, so we count up the number of lives at stake as something like:

  • 100 suspects
  • 300 police officers
  • 500 bystanders

Again, we are assuming that all of these actions will be a police mistake, but we’re not yet deciding where the burden of mistakes lies. Let’s say that the mistake in every instance is that the police show up and start shooting – they shoot all of the suspects (100), 10% of the bystanders (50), and 5% of the cops (15). That’s 165 dead, all of them innocent.

Now let’s say that instead, the mistake is that the cops never shoot. They’re unarmed, or even if they are armed, they never unholster. But again, this is a fatal mistake. In this type of mistake, the suspects are not innocent, so all of the cops and bystanders die. That’s 800 innocent dead.

Obviously, this is not the actual data – the point here isn’t to examine the data, but to question the concept. If #BlueLivesMatter is saying that they’d rather see innocent suspects die than innocent police and bystanders, that is not an argument that can be dismissed conceptually. It is at least worthy of discussion. An informed discussion would require actually examining the data. It is wrong to say that #BlueLivesMatter is a conceptually nonsensical response to #BlackLivesMatter, as we can say about #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter. #BlueLivesMatter has conceptual integrity, but lacks data.

Coming out of the conceptual world and back to reality: much of the data that would be needed is never collected, and probably can’t be reliably collected. How exactly do you count lives saved? How exactly do you count mistakes made by police inaction? In addition, the sad reality is that many elements of police culture are devoted to hiding what little data we might have. And then the truly despairing reality is that in the vast majority of innocent suspects who are killed, the victim is black, and some of those killings are less properly characterized as mistakes than as manifestations of direct and institutional racism.

Nevertheless, conceptual integrity matters. #BlackLivesMatter demands that …

This is where I paused. Check news. Eleven officers shot, four confirmed dead. What the fuck was I doing in the conceptual world? What the fuck is happening in the real world? Where the fuck is all this heading?

#BlackLivesMatter demands that we reduce the slaughter of innocent black lives, without explicitly recognizing the treacherous mass of iceberg beneath the surface. In a somewhat more perfect world, one without racism but still with crime and guns and deadly mistakes, to reduce the killing of one set of innocents will increase the killing of another another set. We don’t know if the tradeoff is 1-for-1, 10-for-1, or 1-for-10; we’ve never seen the data and may not be able to get it. But if police officers are trained to be slower on the draw, to err on the side of caution, that means that they must be trained such that more police officers will die. Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe 1000 innocent black lives will be saved in return for 1 police officer’s death. But what do you say to that one police officer’s family?

It’s easy to object, “Well how about we just get rid of racism in the police force first, and then go from there? No one here is asking cops to die, dummy!”

Get rid of racism in the police force? Do you have a formula for that? How about we get rid of racism in the classroom, in the workplace, in the legislature, in the entire world while we’re at it? We don’t know how to do this within a group of kindergarten kids, how are we going to do this for the more than 1 million police officers in the United States? Why do police officers bear the responsibility for curing racism more than any other group, how can we ask them to sacrifice even one of their own?

This is not to say that we can do nothing. Of course we can. Of course there is better training, better hiring, better testing, better evaluation, better management. And when there is still racism, there can be better recognition, better correction, better enforcement and true and swift punishment. Nevertheless the package of all of those things is going to mean, in addition to less racism and sundry other benefits: more caution. Saving innocent black lives is about changing the balance of mistakes. It is about erring on the side of caution so that fewer innocent black lives are ended – and it therefore also means that some more innocent blue lives must end.

This is a mortal conflict. It is black lives against blue lives, there must be a tradeoff. I don’t know where the tradeoff is, and although we don’t have sufficient data, I feel we will need to act without all of the data in order to prevent greater carnage. Because if advocates, thought leaders, legislators, and well-meaning citizens on both sides don’t admit this is a mortal trade-off, and make the hard decisions to force those trade-offs, then the formula will continue to get worse. More lives will be lost on every side.

More innocent black men will die. In response, there will be more outrage. We no longer live in a world where this outrage can be suppressed by a combination of obfuscation, brutality and social pressure. It will only grow until there is outright war in the streets. And here is where we are now. Two innocent black men dead this week. Four innocent blue lives ended in Dallas today. This isn’t slowing down, it isn’t blowing over, it isn’t getting better.

That’s all I can manage right now, an uncharacteristically unedited dump of thoughts. #Black vs #Blue is an ever-growing river of red. 

trump card

~ ginsu ~ 5 Comments

Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States. And technology is to blame. If you disagree with either of those statements, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Why is Trump about to win the Republican nomination? Do you blame ignorance, stupidity, racism, sheer anger? Do you blame the cynicism and greed of the Republican party over the last 30 years? All of these answers are rooted in an ungenerous assumption about the many millions of voters who have voted for Trump and will continue to do so. You would be saying that these people are fools, ignoramuses, racists. I think that is wrong substantively, but I know for sure that is wrong for you as a person. Always choose to be generous and empathetic in your assumptions about people, so long as that serves you just as well as your lesser instincts toward mean-spirited judgment.

The generous and empathetic view here accepts that the political system of this country is incontrovertibly broken for the majority of people. And since this country is ostensibly a democracy, that majority is understandably willing to vote for the person that most loudly claims that they will revolutionize the existing system. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, taken together, represent the vast majority of this country’s voters.

Trump won his party’s nomination (and Bernie will not) because Trump received billions and billions of dollars worth of free advertising. In a democracy, getting the message out to the people is the fundamental lubricant of the polity, which is why for nearly all of our nation’s history, the media have been regarded as the Fourth Estate, an equal peer to our functioning government alongside the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

But in the last twenty years, intensified in the last decade, the media have undergone a tremendous upheaval, all wrought by technology. And here is where we, all of us in technology, have been so proud of how we shaped the future, so unbearably, insufferably proud. We were proud to destroy Old Media, to disintermediate the gatekeepers, to revel in the creative destruction. Pride goeth before the fall.

What we didn’t realize, didn’t take seriously, is the real value of media as an institution in a properly functioning democracy, the Fourth Estate that keeps the others honest. We destroyed the gatekeepers without any foresight that we were replacing them with monsters much more insidious: the tyranny of the click, the plutocracy of the pageview, merciless metrics. Technology has become a dominant force in our culture over the last twenty years, and we as technologists were wholly unprepared for the responsibility.

If you think Hillary Clinton is going to win the general election, you have an optimism that is wholly unsupported by the slow-motion train wreck that has unfolded before our eyes these last few months. What could possibly support that optimism? Would you deny the obvious truth that this is a representative democracy, and that the majority of voters have stated their preference for overthrowing the current system? Hillary is a creature of the system, she cannot win over those voters.

The only hope is that the will of the majority will become disengaged from this election. They will not do so in the face of the billions and billions and more billions of free advertising that the media will continue to lavish upon Trump because they are no longer gatekeeping bastions of the Fourth Estate, but slaves to the clicks and advertising dollars that the technology revolution have left to them as the only form of viability that they have left. Believing that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency is like believing the New York Times is still The Paper of Record.

Bury your head in the sand if you must. I’m making plans for 2020.

dear prudence

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

When I joined Google in December 2010, my friends didn’t think I’d last six months. I’d been working in startups for over a decade, and my experience and predilections had given me an enormous appetite for chaos, joyful appreciation of uncertainty, and incorrigible disdain for authority. Joining the world’s largest Internet company didn’t seem like a long-term move.

I lasted five years. It’s still a bit of a wonder to me how I stayed so long, but the attractions are undeniable. Google is routinely ranked as the best place to work, and it’s all true: market-leading products, smart colleagues, admirable leaders, outstanding perks and outsized pay. The list of reasons to work at Google is long and enviable.

Usually “great culture” is on that list, but it’s not on mine because no culture is great for every person. Only insane zealots would seek to impose a monoculture on the world, and to claim there’s just one way to have a great workplace culture is similarly indefensible. If chaos makes you hungry, if uncertainty brings you joy, if authority makes you want to punch up – you probably don’t want to work in a culture of extremely refined processes, luxurious reaction times, and deference to position. None of these are bad qualities in the abstract; it’s not inherently disadvantageous to be wild or deliberate, only the context makes it so. The context can vary from company to company, and even within companies.

I was in the right context, even at Google, for the first couple of years. Then I spent three years learning valuable things that nevertheless weren’t skills I wanted to have. Despite all the benefits, I feared becoming dependent on the enormous generosity of the leviathan, reduced to a remora suctioned to a whale for so long that it forgets how to swim. Unfortunately, I’m constitutionally incapable of adopting the prudence required to enjoy stability and luxury. I don’t think I’m irrational, I just value the parts of my personality that strain against these bounds. Prudence is expensive, unbearably dear, when it comes at the cost of your hunger, your joy, even the double-edged sword of your pride.

So finally, I’m out of the longest and most comfortable work relationship I’ve ever had, finally a fish without a host in the ocean, flapping the atrophy out of my fins. The water is deep and wide, filled with fearsome predators and cold currents, and the friendly coves are as yet hidden to me, but still it feels like home.

dan the man

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

The last time I saw Dan Fredinburg, he was heads-down in a tray of food at the cafeteria. I tapped him on the back as I passed by and mumbled some routine hello. A reflexive “Hey we should catch up” caught in my throat when I saw his haggard stare and the robotic shoveling of food into his mouth. He wasn’t really there, and that was very unlike Dan, who was usually so present, so effervescent with pleasure at seeing people and connecting with them in the moment.

I thought I understood: he was about to leave on his second attempt to summit Everest. The first attempt had ended in the most lives lost in a climbing accident on the mountain, when sixteen sherpas died in an avalanche that befell a commercial expedition in April 2014. Dan was acutely aware of the difference in risks for sherpas and expedition customers, and I think he’d been haunted by his contribution to the burden carried by the men who had died trying to help him achieve a dream. I saw the difference in his training this time around, when I’d occasionally spot him in the gym – he moved the heavy weights with a serious sense of purpose, dedicated to raising himself to an even higher level of fitness, without the jokey repartee that we had shared during his training the previous year. This time the journey was about more than just getting to the top because it’s there, more than making the world’s highest StreetView.

Dan died in an avalanche on Everest last Saturday, triggered by the powerful earthquake that now has a death toll of over 4000 people. The cynical will ask why anyone should remark on just one death among these thousands, just the death of a rich, powerful, famous playboy.

Dan wasn’t rich in money. Of course anyone with a good job in Silicon Valley may have wealth in comparison to much of the less fortunate world, but Dan wasn’t a jackpot entrepreneur flaunting his success with expensive hobbies. Instead he was rich in spirit, a wealth far beyond the norm even though it’s accessible to all. He was rich in vision, seeing a way to make his job into his passion, pursuing personal enrichment that’s not about money at all.

Dan wasn’t powerful in the org chart. A talent like Dan could never be a mere cog in a giant machine, but he wasn’t an executive commanding thousands of peons to do his bidding. Instead he was powerful in his presence, in his sheer joy at living, in the force of his will to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

Dan wasn’t famous in the media. He happened to date an actress, but he never saw people as what they did for a living; he responded only to who they are inside. The memory of Dan will live like a star in all who knew him, surviving well beyond the transitory and dull illumination of the names and faces of the merely famous.

Pablo Neruda often told an anecdote about a hole in the fence of his childhood backyard. It was just a hole in a fence, a tiny view into the landscape beyond, until one day there suddenly appeared a boy’s hand. When he got closer to the fence the hand had disappeared, but in its place was a gift of a marvelous little toy, and this toy touched his heart so much that he left his own in return. The chance view, the momentary and partial encounter with another emerging spirit, the exchange of common but magical gifts – the great poet marks this as the beginning of his understanding that there is a bond between strangers that is greater in its way than the bond between intimates.

I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all humanity is somehow together… This is the great lesson I learned in my childhood, in the backyard of a lonely house. Maybe it was nothing but a game two boys played who didn’t know each other and wanted to pass to the other some good things of life. Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.

People say “I’m sorry for your loss” when they hear that someone you know has died. It was really something to know Dan, but I’m not among his closest friends, family and loved ones, so I cannot truly grieve as they do, I have not lost as they have. For me, Dan was a gift spotted through a small hole in the fence that separates us from each other as we wander through our own life paths. I came close enough to see the joy he made of life, and to understand that we are united by something deep and indestructible inside of all of us. I’m grateful for the gift, lucky to have it, and determined to give it to all who pass by and see that these fences are truly no barrier at all.

the flitcraft parable

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

The “Flitcraft Parable” is in Chapter 7 of The Maltese Falcon, titled “G in the Air” with unsettling personal aptness. In condensed form:

Flitcraft lived a comfortable life of routine. Married with two kids, financially secure, without secrets or unruly inner demons. One day he disappeared, without warning, without trace, like a fist when you open your hand. His wife hired a private detective to find him, and find him he did. Confronted in the detective’s hotel room, Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt, as he felt his disappearance was utterly reasonable. His only bother was knowing that he couldn’t make that reasonableness clear to the detective, so he tried to explain.

Walking to lunch on the day he disappeared, a giant construction beam accidentally fell right beside him. He was uninjured, but after he recovered from the initial shock, he knew that the falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally not the clean, orderly, sane, responsible affair he’d been living. Good citizenship, stable family, fortunate business – none of these things changed the fact that people lived only while while blind chance spared them.

He left that day with only the clothes on his back. After a couple of years of wandering, he settled in another suburb not far from the one he had left. He married another woman who didn’t look much like his first wife, but they were more alike than they were different. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, it seemed reasonable enough to him. He wasn’t even aware that he’d settled back into the same groove that he had left. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

Since my last post, I left the dessicated shell of my marriage, leaving the house and most of my possessions, reassembling my life without the structure and goals that had been the foundation of my adult life. Among the many material things I left behind, I regretted nothing except that I did not bring the book that had been my reference for the Gatsby project. I had pored over each page of that book, carefully underlining the one phrase or sentence that would form the kernel of each post in the project, which was just under halfway done. I asked for the book’s return, to no avail. I thought I couldn’t start again without that exact book; but the edition was not a common one, and even if I could get it, of course it wouldn’t have my underlined markings, the toil of years.

For a long while I was furious that I could not get my book back, and that no one seemed to care how much it mattered to me. I stopped writing, because the Gatsby project had become my favorite warmup to writing, and my reliable fallback when words would not flow on other efforts. I was blocked – emotionally, creatively, spiritually blocked.

Finally I picked up another edition. Although I knew the pages wouldn’t match, that the project wouldn’t be the seamless tapestry I’d once imagined, I was ready to embrace the wisdom that you can start any new path you want, so long as you don’t require that it proceed on a straight line from the one you’ve been on. New edition in hand, I loaded the Gatsby project from the first page, freshly underlining the sentences I’d already posted about, expecting to run into the page that didn’t match. It didn’t come in the first chapter, or the second … or any that I’d done. I reached the final page of the project to date, and each sentence that I had selected in the old book landed neatly on the same page of the new book.

He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

I’m ready to write again.

classless techies

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

Is there a class war brewing in San Francisco, where the underclass rise up against the oppressive masters of technology, those sinister “techies” who would create a world without the unsightly poor?

The notion is flatly ridiculous – which is irrelevant to whether it will actually take root in the minds of ironically-named progressive advocates. The ridiculousness is not in the descriptive or predictive power (i.e. whether class conflict is here or will happen), but in the conceptual assumptions about what technology is and who comprise its class. Why have a class war against a class whose triumph would achieve all of your goals?

What is the end state of the triumph of technology? Consider the question in the context of the ultimate vision of, say, capitalism or socialism, democracy or theocracy, or any -ism or -acy you care to caricature: In a capitalist dream, only money matters; in a socialist one, the government provides for us all; we are all equal in a democracy and a perfect deity makes our lives perfect in a theocracy. So what does the world look like if all the wild dreams of technology come true?

It is a world where energy is endless, food is bountiful, transportation is instant, humanity is connected, information is universally accessible, life longevity is unprecedented – and all of these things are so inexpensive that it’s easier to call them “free.” Technology in its greatest ambition aims to make class irrelevant. Not nonexistent, but irrelevant – there may still be luxury, there might still be money, but the meaning of these things is entirely different when the poorest person on earth lives for a hundred years in full health. The poets and philosophers tell us that money isn’t everything, but action on that insight is available to only a very few who reach enlightenment. Technology’s implicit ideal is that everyone will have no concern higher than pondering the meaning of life.

So how can you have a class war against a class that aims to end class? Hating techies may be like hating lawyers – the stated goals of the profession are inarguably noble, its highest practitioners are indispensable to a just society, but the system is complex, widely misunderstood, rife with perverse outcomes, and plagued by bottom-feeders. The would-be techies who make trivial applications with inconsequential goals, who despoil the conversation with their attention-seeking rants – these are the ambulance chasers of the tech world. They are classless in a more literal sense.

burning questions

~ ginsu ~ 6 Comments

Since coming back from my first trip to Burning Man, I’ve been turning over some questions in my mind. Well, not some questions, just one question, or rather multiple angles on a single question, trying to get to the heart of the matter like an artist’s chisel biting through stone to find the sculpture within. The question I started with was, What do you do with the problem of Burning Man?

And what’s the problem of Burning Man? That you have to come back, is the facile answer. Re-entry into “default world” is a problem. You spend a week in the desert without a lot of structure or societal expectations, immersed in humanity with good will and open spirits. There is some kind of magic in the desert, there is every kind of magic in the desert. And then you have to return “home” and face a world with a lot of structure and without a lot of humanity. This is such a problem that a common reaction is to reverse the concept of home, so that a return to the desert every year results in a resounding call of “Welcome home!”

Home is where the heart is, so I can understand why people would call a place home if it’s where their hearts are most alive. But your heart is always with you – if it’s not, you’re not alive, and I mean this figuratively although it’s literally true – so if you’re not at home wherever you are, this is literally (and now I mean figuratively) a mortal problem.

I would restate the Problem of Burning Man as a problem of dust. In the desert, the dust is everywhere, it covers everything, seeps into every crevice, covers you, envelops you, surrounds you and blinds you. The dust is everywhere and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the experience you’re having, the openness of your heart and largeness of your spirit, the humanity around you and within you.

And in the real world, you don’t see the dust. But the humanity that you now know exists is completely buried under vast layers of societal structure, expectations, obligations, fears and neuroses. These are layers of dust that matter more than anything else, for they prevent you from reaching the things that truly should matter most of all. In the desert, the dust is everywhere, highly visible and yet it doesn’t matter, while in the real world, the dust is everywhere, invisible and seems like the only thing that does matter.

So the Problem of Burning Man is not that you have to go home, or that you have to figure out what’s worth calling “home,” but that wherever you go, the humanity that you discovered in the desert is actually there as well, but covered in dust that you can’t see and so can’t ignore.

What do you do with this Problem? Some people opt out of the life they were living, quit their jobs, leave their lovers, hit the road. Some devote their lives to digging through the dust, joining non-profits, humanitarian missions, trying to dig through the vast invisible desert to find the humanity underneath. Some descend into cynicism and escapism, hating the world they live in while waiting only for a return to the desert.

For me, I’ve enjoyed carving out this problem with my dull chisel and a few blows of a heavy hammer. I’ll probably continue to work on it, wielding increasingly sharper tools and refined motions. Once it’s carved into a delicate figurine, I’ll have to decide whether to toss it into a dark closet, or put it up on the shelf, or carry it around in my pocket, or swallow it whole and make it forever a part of me.

the good gatsby

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

I had fervently hoped that Baz Luhrmann’s signature brand of loopy romanticism was exactly the antidote for staid, sullen efforts to bring literary classics to the screen like the plodding 1974 Redford version. He delivered enough to make a movie good enough to be worth watching, at least for completist Gatsby fans, but far from Great enough to be worthy of the title.

Surprisingly, Luhrmann makes the most fundamental error of all page-to-screen translation: overuse of narration. Words make a novel great, so it’s understandable that directors want to capture those words onscreen. But each artistic medium can only be great in its own form – narration and words flashed across a screen are unnecessary concessions to the inability of the visual medium to fire the imagination as great writing can. Pounding the screen with Courier font only screams, “this movie doesn’t know how to convey the depth of immortal prose!”

It’s really too bad, because the movie does deliver great visuals when the director didn’t feel overwhelmed by the classic novel. The filmmakers clearly did their homework and were in love with the gorgeous writing of the book. The irony is that Fitzgerald’s cinematic descriptions translate perfectly to the screen, in scene after scene after scene. The expansive Buchanan lawn “jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens,” the breeze in a room that “blew curtains in one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling,” the limousine “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes” – these are not famous passages, and the film brings the unspoken words to life beautifully. But when burdened by great prose, we hear Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway intoning about boats and currents and the past, with that silly Courier font and no memorable visuals at all.

The two scenes that worked the best were critical ones in the novel, where the film did manage to let go of the crutch of narration. The reunion of Daisy and Gatsby in Nick’s cottage was wonderful from the cutting of the lawn, through the overstuffed house of flowers and pathetic tea cakes, leading to a rain-drenched Gatsby and frightened Daisy finally reconnecting in wonder. Every moment of that was pitch perfect down to the clock that didn’t break though everyone acted as if it did. And the scene where Myrtle runs into the street, thinking that Tom is driving the yellow car, was perfect in its operatic brutality. Although purists might hate it, I loved the use of modern music in the film – a good example of Luhrmann trusting his own emotional tuning fork rather that giving stultifying respect to the source material.

Leonardo DiCaprio was an excellent Gatsby, never perfectly comfortable in his sheen of refinement, his insecurity and obsession poking out through the surface in increasingly desperate displays. I thought Daisy Buchanan was an unplayable role, but Carey Mulligan has the talent to make the most of it, her voice freighted with emotion and eyes conveying the love, fear and weakness of the classic Fitzgerald girl. Isla Fisher brought the sensuous vitality of Myrtle Wilson to life in her few scenes. Joel Edgerton was a passable but unexceptional Tom Buchanan. Elizabeth Debicki was disappointing as Jordan Baker, without the athletic bearing and liar’s charm that should define the famous sportswoman. I’m never fully convinced by Tobey Maguire, and he didn’t break that streak here as Nick Carraway. Nevertheless, I wish the film had tried to develop the relationship between Jordan and Nick more fully – it’s a small but important sideline in the book that reminds us that Nick is more than a literary device.

As far as devices go, the framing of the narration by Nick in a sanatorium was well designed. Although it’s not in the book, it’s a clever connection to the Fitzgeralds – both Scott and Zelda spent time in them – and is used well to turn Nick into the author and not just the narrator of the story. It’s just too bad that the filmmakers thought the device was necessary, that they held the words so holy that they couldn’t rely solely on their own bountiful skills in cinema.

my goodness

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

The other day I met with my “periodic friend” – my term for a friend that you meet only once in a long while, but those meetings instantly become deeply personal conversations. This is different from the longtime friend who has been separated by circumstances of geography, family or career – many of us have the childhood or old school friend whom we rarely see, but who always provides a joyful reunion at every occasional reconnection. The periodic friend is much rarer – in a sense, the friendship depends on the periodic nature of the contact. You might not even enjoy more regular social engagement with this friend. Friendship is about recognizing your kinship with another, finding yourself in someone else. So a periodic friendship provides a unique opportunity to visit with yourself after long intervals of being apart – sort of like living out the “7-Up” documentary series, where the filmmaker chronicles the lives of the same set of people in portraits composed every seven years.

My periodic friend and I tend to fall into comically introspective conversation at every meeting. One thing that binds us is the anguished belief that there is something broken, dark and irreparable within us, some character flaw, an absence of humanity that no worldly bounty can fix. Yes, it’s dramatic and self-involved in an embarrassing, adolescent fashion. But it’s perversely fun to talk about.

My friend brought up the Platonic proposition of the ring of invisibility. This ancient concept was dramatized most popularly in The Lord of the Rings. The question goes something like, “What is the first thing you would do if you acquired a ring that made you invisible when you wore it?” Think on this for a moment but answer as quickly as you can.

He could barely express the question before I gave my honest response: I’d go visit a women’s locker room. Hey, I grew up in the ’80s, when Porky’s was a major movie franchise. My friend had a different, though equally amoral response. The point of the question, as in all interesting questions, was really in the follow-on question: “Do you think there is anyone who would honestly give a response that wasn’t bad?”

Even the most saintly figure wouldn’t answer anything like “I would go secretly leave a needed gift for a desperate stranger.” Just wouldn’t happen. Pretty much everybody would give an answer involving transgression of some moral code. So the question of the ring is an argument that people are, at their base, bad or amoral creatures. Human nature is bad, fundamentally self-interested and greedy.

We talked about this for a while, but ultimately I said “If absolutely everybody would behave the same way under certain conditions, then that can’t be the test of badness.” Even as I said it, I felt the raft of implication carried by those words, and at the same time felt astonished by the conviction I felt in saying it. I was expressing a core belief that I didn’t really know that I held. My friend said “Whoa, you could write a book unpacking what’s behind that sentence.” Well, maybe not a book, but I’d like to try to understand what I meant – sometimes I write to find out what I think.

A straightforward interpretation is the logical truism that a test is not a test if there is only one outcome. But that’s not all that I meant. It’s closer to restate the proposition as “What is universal to humanity cannot be bad.” But that is what I found astonishing, as this is pretty close to saying “All humans are inherently good.” And I have a hard time saying that about all people, not least because I’d have a hard time saying that about myself.

People are pretty shitty sometimes – I guess most people are shitty some of the time, and some people are shitty most of the time, and no one has never been shitty any time. Given this generally misanthropic view, I am surprised when I’m described as magnanimous, which has happened from time to time. A magnanimous person is supposed to believe the best of people, and my views of people are, well, mostly shitty. But now I realize that I actually do believe that everyone can be good, no matter what they’ve done. Unfortunately, this ersatz optimism only makes me continually disappointed to be let down by people, including myself. True misanthropes must be happy most of the time, as their beliefs are validated by constant evidence of human failing. Optimists about human nature can only be miserable at the pervasive failure of people to live up to their own best conception. But we can hang on to one thread of hope, missing from that catalogue of shittiness above: No one is shitty all of the time, which means that everyone can be good.

the conflict question

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

Recent events remind me of one of my favorite hiring tales. I used to ask prospective hires an annoying interview question, one of those open-ended travelogues that journeyed through odd pathways and byways but always ended up in the same cramped room, where two colleagues were locked in irreconcilable conflict, and the proposal of only one could proceed. Depending on the mindset and tenacity of the candidate, this question could take 3 minutes or closer to 30.

Once I was the last interviewer in an extended, multi-day interview slate. Around twenty people had already interviewed the candidate – this was for a small, tightly-knit company, and in such circumstances it’s not unusual (though it may be inadvisable) for nearly all of the company to interview new members of the tribe. So by the time she came to me, she’d already been run a bit ragged.

I proceeded to launch into what I called The Conflict Question. Due to some combination of my mood, her mindset, the weather and wicked chance, this version unfurled into an inquisition taking the better part of an hour. I felt like I learned a lot about her, and was happy to recommend a hire.

I barely made it back to my desk when one of the company stalwarts stormed up to me and dragged me to an empty conference room. Although I held a senior position, I hadn’t been with the company very long, and this guy held considerably greater history and moral authority (quite correctly and deservedly, in my view).

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he hissed.

“What?”

“We have a critical hire to fill here, we found this amazing candidate. She’s been interviewing for days and everybody loves her. Every single person gave her rave reviews. She gets to you, the very last interview – more of a formality than anything – and now she doesn’t want to work here. She says if assholes like you are in senior management, this can’t be the kind of place she’d like to work!”

“What?! Uh ….” My mind raced through the interview, playing it back and forth in my head like the Zapruder film. What did I do? What did I say? Admittedly the interview did get a little strained, spending the bulk of time on a question whose very essence is about conflict. Not infrequently, the course of the question presses conflict so extensively that it can be said to generate real conflict as well. I didn’t think I’d crossed any kind of line, but then again if I had it wouldn’t be the first (or the last) time I’d done so without realizing it.

I asked frantic questions about what she said about the interview and whether there was any chance of saving the hire. My colleague furiously insisted she was only reacting appropriately to my unforgivable boorishness. His red-faced anger thrashed me like an invisible whip … and then I saw that this was the strangest thing of all. I’d always admired his grace under pressure – I had watched him work with grim calm through disastrous crises and deplorable failures. He was, as far as I knew then, an obdurate, utterly reliable, improbably emotionless rock of a man.

“Whoa, whoa, waitaminute,” I said. “Are you fucking her? Or trying to?”

The passion drained from his face. It wasn’t the passion of anger, as I thought, but passion itself. He took a moment to gather himself, drew in a deep breath, and finally hung his head as he answered, simply and plainly: “Yes. Yes I am.”

“Ok. Now get the fuck out of my office,” I said, which was a weird thing to say as we were standing in a conference room and I had no office. “Now wait – just so you know – I’ll fix this, I’ll go make nice with her and we’ll bring her on. But I don’t think my interview was wrong, and I don’t think what I found is wrong: she doesn’t like conflict, especially when she thinks she should be walking into a friendly situation. I might be an asshole, but her job might sometimes require making assholes do good work, so that’s something you’ll have to deal with – as her boyfriend, perhaps, but not in any role that could possibly be supervisory. So thanks for letting me know.”

We hired her. She was great. She wasn’t so bad at handling conflict (and assholes), but I’m pretty sure she didn’t like it. And she certainly was never put into a conflict of interest with her romantic relationship, because everyone was transparent from the start. Their relationship with each other has long outlasted any of ours with the company, and is certain to outlast the company itself. At the end, there was nothing left of real or imagined conflict, nothing but a funny story.

It’s all so easy when the truth is out at the beginning.