Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer, died on Saturday in Seattle. She had a fall at her home and hit her head, which is extremely sad, especially when, at age 58, she had so much more to do. (Photo right by Joshua Trujillo for the Seattle PI.) She is an excellent example of someone who was tremendously successful (she won the Hugo twice, and the Nebula twice) in a field where her race, sex and background suggested to most that she “wasn’t supposed to be”.

Actually, I’d prefer to think of her as more than just a science fiction writer. The term (having been corrupted somewhat by various prominent examples) does not do her work justice. In this, I think of her writing as akin to another excellent writer, and favourite of mine, Margaret Atwood. “Speculative Fiction” is a term which they have both used to describe their work, and while it is not a perfect term either, I think that they get to define what it means by their excellent work.

There were several excellent tributes and obituaries for her this week. Here is a link to the one by John Marshall in the Seattle Post Intelligencer (link).

Here’s an extract which really hits home:

The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment. She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted “genius grants” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.

“People may call these ‘genius grants,’ ” Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, “but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I’m no genius.”

Butler’s most popular work is “Kindred,” a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler’s solitary life.

“Kindred” was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South.

Sigh.

There’s also an obituary here by Marcia Davis in the Washington Post (link).
Margalit Fox wrote one for the New York Times, linked here.

Today’s Fresh Air on NPR also has a tribute to her, and plays part of an interview with her recorded from a previous program. (Here is a link.) NPR’s Day to Day also has a tribute, and you can listen to it at this link, where there are other links to related NPR stories.

You can also go to the Octavia E. Butler homepage, with much more information. (link).

She was a trailblazer. We owe her a huge amount of gratitude, and her influence will continue for a very long time.

-cvj

Here’s another reason that I love working at a University with a broad spectrum of activity, in an exciting and diverse city. You get the most wonderful connections between different segments of your life:

After an extraordinarily exhausting week, Friday evening came and I jumped on the Brompton and cycled up Figueroa the 37 blocks to the heart of downtown, where you can find the music centre, and the wonderful Disney Hall. My errand was to somehow obtain tickets for an extremely popular concert. The box office, once I got there, had only a few returned ones, at $120 and $90 each. I could not bring myself to pay that much without exploring other avenues (I’ve several expenditures to worry about) and so I thought I would wait in case anyone turned in orchestra seats (those are more like $35), or to see if the price would drop nearer the concert start, or (my main hope) to see if someone showed up with an extra ticket (maybe a friend could not make it) and would just sell it to me right there near the box office. So I stood there for over an hour, watching the world go by, most of it looking curiously at my bike in half-fold position. It dawned on me at some point that I’d no really reliable way of discovering who might have tickets to sell or not. This became especially clear after a group of people who came well after me and were hanging around managed to get a ticket in this manner. So after a while I began to learn who had “the look” of maybe having a ticket to sell, and with about ten minutes to go before the concert (and after a long conversation about the bike which made me miss at least one more sale) I managed to negotiate an $82 ticket down to $50 (I could have done better, but it seemed fair), folded up and popped my bike off in the coat check area and emerged (appropriately attired) for an evening of a bit of relaxing to some Mozart.

I came because I had three students (Joesph Benson, Kyle Patterson and David Reese) in my Physics 151 tell me that they had to miss some parts of a few Thursday lectures because they had to go and rehearse for a concert. Of course, I asked what concert it was, and it turned out that they (as part of the USC Thornton Choral Artists) would be performing Mozart’s Requiem with the LA Philharmoic at Disney Hall over three nights! Of course I had to find a way to go!

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If you don’t already know about this, click here, and just type names of your favourite musicians into the search engine. Tons of video of various sorts… bits of musicians on lost TV show appearances, amatuer video, etc. Just random video clips that have been submitted by random people. Wonderful resource…..

(It is old news for some, but I heard about it last week on NPR, being well on the other side of hip these days.)

Random finds in my first minutes of visiting:

Thelonius Monk, with Charlie Rouse, Ben Riley and Larry Gales playing “Blue Monk”. Oslo, 1966. (Link here.) I always love watching his tapping foot, and his wonderful fingering choices which are pure genius…. as do several cameramen who’ve filmed his performances. This unfortunately isn’t one of those times when Monk gets up and does a little dance… I love it when he does that!

Bizarrely camp and ridiculously cutesy (but beautifully sung) version of “Rocket Man”, by Kate Bush and her band, on MTV. (Link here.) Just excellent, despite being amusingly 80s in style (but actually early 90s).

[Update: Oh.. and one of my favourite recordings of "So What", with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums) and I'm guessing Wynton Kelly on piano (from the style, the back of his head, and the time, '58 or '59) ....(Link here.)]

[Update: I forgot to mention that I was hoping that I might find a video clip of Strings 98's perfomance of "The Maldacena", by 400 string theorists in unison (to the tune of "The Macarena"), but that seems to be lost forever... see here, and here, for more on that, by the way.]

-cvj

The next Categorically Not! is next Sunday (26th Feb.). You may recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. They’re fantastic, and I strongly encourage you to come to them.

This one is about “Attraction”. I suppose that it is appropriate to do this announcement today, as it’s Valentine’s day. (I remembered this not because anyone sent me a Valentine’s day card (sigh… sniff), but because today almost every street corner I passed in the city has someone standing there with a sea of supposedly cute white bears with pink/red hearts, balloons with hearts, and other weird things with hearts on. What’s wrong with just selling some nice flowers, I wonder?)

Anyway, here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Birds do it; bees do it; so do molecules, magnets and stars. The force of attraction is one of the most complex and mysterious influences in the universe. Why do people fall in love? Why is electromagnetism trillions upon trillions of times stronger than gravity? For that matter, why does peanut butter stick to the roof of your mouth? Poetry, theater, and music all are moved (and move us) by the force of attraction one way or another.

For this month’s Categorically Not! Robert Winter—the first Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA—will tell (and show) how Western music developed “rules” governed by principles of attraction (whether voice leading, harmonic motion, rhythmic design, or overall structure)—and how this “language of attraction” has come to express its core values. An accomplished pianist in several styles, Robert is equally renowned as an author of scholarly works on Beethoven, a multimedia performer, the creator of digital outreach programs for Carnegie Hall, and the force behind music festivals from Malibu to Aspen (where he serves on the faculty of the Aspen Festival).

Getting physical, chemists Robin Garrell and Kendall Houk—whose labs at UCLA investigate how molecules recognize and attract each other, stick or slip, grab or let go—will use a PowerPoint “tag team” approach to describe the physical origins of attractive phenomena—including gravity, magnetism and electrostatics. They’ll draw from their own studies to explain how mussels adhere to ship hulls and also how computational studies allow chemists to “see” molecules reacting—revealing, for example, how pharmaceuticals are attracted to biological receptors.

For drama, Nancy Linehan Charles will explore manifestations of attraction to God, goats and even people as seen through the eyes of poets and playwrights. A two-time winner of the L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Ovation Award for Toys in the Attic, Nancy’s TV appearances include 24, The West Wing, E.R., Joey and recurring roles on Huff and Six Feet Under; she played the bad guy’s wife in Spielberg’s Minority Report, and has adapted four Shakespeare plays for middle schoolers. Nancy’s currently performing in Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind at the Pacific Resident Theatre (until 2/26).

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there!

-cvj

Let me tell you about my first time…

Ah, I see that got your attention. Well, every now and again, it’s just great to do something that is absolutely new to you, and is not at all like something you’ve done before. No matter how old you are, it can be quite a magical experience.

One of the things that contributed to my insanely busy existence toward the end of last year was an unusual project that I was involved in. I was writing a play. It arose out of my often-expressed (on this blog) view that we need more (and better, and more varied) portrayals of science and scientists in the media and the arts, as part of the all-important effort to reduce the public’s fear of (discomfort with) science and scientists, and to thereby aid in the process of achieving a better baseline of science education and critical thinking about science issues, in the general public. I won’t go into it again here. You can read ever so many posts I’ve written about it by looking in the archives (links e.g., here and here.)

I was not working on my own, but collaborating with my friend (and my USC colleague from the school of theatre) the Los Angeles-based playwright Oliver Mayer, who I’ve mentioned in earlier posts (here for example). Well, it was an excellent experience. We had only a few weeks to exchange several drafts back and forth (with the odd meeting in a cafe or two… and remember we have busy day jobs), as we were working to a deadline of the 8th December (I was going to go on Walkabout after that, and also, we were going to enter it into a competition with a deadline around that time….the latter was maybe a long shot, given the notice we had to put something together…. I’ve no idea what happened with that, but that’s not the point).

It was fun and instructive. To me the most important aspect of this was the collaboration itself. I got to learn a lot about how writers and actors work, and how they – and others from the Industry- see science and scientists. This is useful in the quest I mentioned. Oliver, and others (see below) got to learn a bit about science and scientists: the process, the hopes, fears, loves, passions, hates, etc. Things they know about in their usual line of work of course, but not things that are usually well-portrayed in the context of science and scientists (well, not in always representative proportion, anyway). This is also useful for the quest. Not neccessarily for this project, but just in general. The project itself will inform everyone involved in a useful way, in any future projects they undertake. How can it not be a good thing to do?

But when I talk about “my first time”, that’s not what I’m talking about. The writing, as I have said, was an enjoyable and instructive process. But I’ve written a lot of things for the public before, I spent an awful lot of my childhood and also later years playing with scenarios of various sorts involving imaginary characters (haven’t we all?), and I’ve collaborated in this mode (a little) before (e.g., on a screenplay for a TV pilot)…. so no, as wonderful as it was to work with a real professional in that process, for my “first time” I’m actually talking about something else.

I’m talking about bringing real actors in to read the play aloud! It completely tranforms everything! I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to sit there and listen to the scenes you’ve imagined come to life thanks to the skills of people who do this for a living every day. They bring things to it that you did not imagine, and breathe such life into even the most clumsily written phrases (I’m sure those were all mine!). We did one reading about half way through the writing (less, actually, just the first act of three), with two of the characters read by actors (Gary Perez and Marlene Forte (see also here for a profile)) and the third read by yours truly, while Oliver read the stage directions. From then on, it was hard to separate the two characters from the actors who brought them to life. This was in fact very useful in my own writing processes later. Then we did a final reading two nights before I jumped on the plane to nobody-knew-where. For that we got a third actor, Geraint Wyn Davies, to play the last part, and it all came together, with all scenes in place. Wow!- it was such an amazing evening. At some point while Marlene was reading a piece of dialogue I wrote, I just remember it hitting me all of a sudden “Hey, she’s speaking my words….those are my words…I remember thinking those words… and she’s saying them just like I imagined in my head…..wow.”

So there you have it: December 7th 2005, there they are in the main photo near the top. Clockwise starting upper left: Actors: Geraint Wyn Davies, Gary Perez and Marlene Forte, Oliver Mayer.

Some breakout photos:
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The next Categorically Not! is tomorrow! Recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios.

Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Resistance. You can’t leave home without it. Try walking without resistance and you might as well be in a mine field of banana peels. Cars slide right off the road. You can forget lifting weights, or even lifting food to your mouth on a fork. You can’t talk—or blow dry your hair. And it’s not just the physical world: Growing up is all a matter of resistance, as is a good deal of progress in politics, science and art. No matter what realm you’re in, you can’t move forward without pushing back.

For this month’s Categorically Not!, USC physicist Stephan Haas will talk about how resistance reveals the hidden quantum properties of matter behind such mysterious effects as superconductivity—knowledge that could lead to the development of “intelligent” materials. Stephan is also part of the USC early music ensemble, and will perform (on recorder) along with Daniel Zuluaga, who specializes in the lute family of instruments. A music scholar currently preparing an edition of the collected works of Spanish art-song composer José Marín, Daniel will tell us why 17th Century French Baroque music is considered a form of resistance. Political resistance is also an art, of course, and Carol Wells founded Center for the Study of Political Graphics in part to preserve that tradition. An activist and educational archive of human rights and protest posters, the Center has the largest collection of post World War II political posters in the U.S. Carol will speak about posters of resistance, posing the question: “Can Design Stop a War?”

By the way, Stephan is a true virtuoso on the recorder! Just amazing! It will be worth going just to see him play….

As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start. For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.

Hope to see some of you there! (Assuming I make it…..what with timezones, and a new semester to prepare for starting the next day….)

-cvj

If you are familiar with what is, at least to me, the comic genius of Ricky Gervais (The Office; Extras), then I strongly encourage you to listen to the weekly free podcasts he’s doing, with his usual partner, Steve Merchant, and their producer Karl Pilkington.

I’ve listened to the first three now and each time have been laughing out loud – twice on planes, and then yesterday so hard in my car that I had to pull over.

Gervais’ humor is quite British, and my suspicion is that, if you don’t already know him, you’ll either find it ridiculously funny or, well, just ridiculous. An extra reason to like it is the strong reason-versus-nonsense streak that pervades a lot of Gervais’ comedy. In this regard, Pilkington is the perfect partner. The partial discussion of some aspects of evolution in the third episode is a particularly wonderful example.

Each episode will be available for download for four weeks, so you still have almost two weeks to get the first one, before it vanishes.

Well, what can I say? I’ve no idea how to begin. I decided to disappear for half the day (I’ll be working into the night as recompense, in case anyone is keeping track) and go to one of the private press screenings of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. It was held at the Arclight, that wonderful movie theatre I’ve told you about many times before. It was quite an event. I cannot show you any pictures of the gathering people, etc, because they basically forbade any electronic devices whatsoever from the theatre. I’m not kidding. They turned people away who did not listen, thinking that if it did not have a camera it did not matter. They had metal detectors and security wands. They were deadly serious. The staff I spoke to said that they’d never seen anything like that level of security for a movie preview.

What were they trying to protect? I presume it is concerns over piracy. They want this movie to be huge…..HUGE. We were filed into the theatre, and I was anticipating logistical problems. I was on my own, and there was a scramble for seats (the Arclight routinely allows you to reserve your seats for normal showings -they are yours; you paid for them (why don’t all theatres do this?)- and this is one of the reasons why it is probably the best movie theatre anywhere) because this was not a regular showing, and tickets are handed out once they have seen your invitation and checked out that you’re not a spy of some sort. Since I was on my own, how was I going to snag a good seat and then get back out for popcorn and a drink and keep my seat? (This is a three hour movie after all.) No problem. This was a classy organisation: They had tables full of complimentary popcorn and beverages for you to pick up as you went in. I’ve not had that at a preview before, but maybe this is because it was a press screening and not a test showing…. the two are different. The drinks and popcorn were those super-giant sized ones that I never buy because I can’t eat and drink that much junk on my own, but I had no choice. They were nicely decorated with stills from the movie, which was appropriate.

Unbelievably, I got nearly the perfect seat. The movie was not in the Dome, although I suspect that is where they’ll open it for general audiences. It was in one of the hardly less excellent theatres with the super-giant screens, plush seating and wonderful sound. (Actually, all the theatres in the Arclight fit that description.) There was a buzz of excitement, and they did a good job of generating good will with all the free stuff. Now I know that I’m a pawn in their hands by telling you about the movie, since I am contributing to “word of mouth” buzz that can help to…..

“Shut up and tell us about the movie!”, I hear you cry. Ok. How was it?

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For very many years I’ve been a big fan of writer-performer Sandra Tsing Loh. I’m a radio addict, as you may have gathered from other posts, and along wiith NPR’s standard news programmes, and Stardate, her brief monologues “The Loh Down” have been things I have sought out for a long time (and before that, when she used to appear on This American Life). She’s funny, smart, intelligent, sharp, irreverent, funny… and uh, did I mention funny? I love her voice acting in her delivery, tone, timing, etc. So I was already wrappable around her finger quite a fan of her work – and then I learned (a while ago now) that she was a physicist too! Great!…which explains why she occasionally pops physics references into her work, of which I approve (for reasons I’ve spoken of here …too many times). So it seemed a disaster in 2004 when she was fired from KCRW when her technician forgot to bleep out the f-word in one of her monologues, but she got lot of publicity from the event (rightly so) and furthermore, to my delight she was picked up by my preferred local station, KPCC, where she has been ever since. (Stories here and here, for example.) (Podcasts and streams of her KPCC-based monologues here. Google for others.)

Many times while listening to her I’ve actually thought it would be great if she combined her science background with her work, becoming a powerful sort of special-ops soldier in the army to bring science to everyone…..

…Well, her alma mater, Caltech, seems to have thought it too! I just this minute heard her on KPCC in a trailer for a new show of hers (in collaboration with Caltech)…. “The Loh Down on Science”. Wow! I hope it is good….I can’t wait. For those of you who don’t get KPCC, you’ll be able to download podcasts and streams from the programme’s page, or go here.

-cvj

[Update: Oh dear. I just heard the first one. It is way too short! The theme tune, combined with the commercial for Caltech, and the other sponsors is longer than her part. I'm worried that they're going to be afraid to have actual science in there so as not to "scare" the public....Come on guys (the various scriptwriters and editors mentioned on the homepage)! This is a great opportunity...don't squander it. Give Sandra Tsing Loh something to get her teeth into. She'll make it work! Use the MacDonald Observatory's Stardate as your model, read daily by the excellent Sandy Wood. It is short but not too short and just a perfect daily taste of astronomy. Come on....try harder. Please.]

Well, I’ve been painting all day and I’m exhausted. It was not supposed to take this long! There are ten sections to the fence, and how many did I get done, after starting at 8:30am and finishing when the sun set at 4:30pm (ish)? Three. The first took as long as the second two since I only realised that I was not going to be a contender for the Turner Prize for modern art rather late in the day and so dropped my brushstrokes from “daring, yet playful; he’ll confound the critics”, to “let’s just get this stuff on the wood…please!”

So after tedious cleanup of painting things (I hate having to do that), showering (with brutal use of a scouring pad to get the day’s paint off), and preparing for this evening’s delights (editing an article), I thought I would settle down with a glass of wine and blog for a bit and tell you about my evening from last Sunday. It’s another tale from The Industry, and it starts in the Hollywood Hills….

It was in the lovely Hollywood Hills home of….. Actually, I don’t know if I should say, as I don’ t know if it is appropriate to do so. So I won’t as it does not matter. I’ll start again. It was in the lovely Hollywood Hills home of a patron of the Arts, specializing in Theatre, who has produced rather a lot of interesting work in the city. Gathered together for the evening was a very interesting collection of people. (It would have been even more interesting had the Hollywood Christmas parade traffic not nixed a couple of others… It made me 40 minutes late and I only live 20 minutes away….). First and foremost among the present were my friends Oliver Mayer, the playwright and USC School of Theatre professor, and the actress Marlene Forte. Marlene (a profile article is here) was going to do a 15 minute excerpt from a new play by Oliver. There to watch was our host, along with another actor and writer Marco Greco, another actor Gary Perez (and another whose name I can’t recall), and some other friends of the host (who I think have also produced plays and films). (The imdb links don’t contain their extensive theatre work, unfortunately) The last group was the owner of a well known Hollywood nightclub and his assistant. I’ve forgotten their names too. (This is is why I’m not in that business. I’d offend so many people at networking parties by not remembering their names……)

Oh, and I -firmly an outsider- was lurking around. In conversation, people assumed I was in the Industry too (perhaps a playwright too), and I had to tell them that was not the case. (I’m about as much of a playwright as someone who calculates their change from a $20 bill at the grocery store is a mathematician.) Rather pleasantly, I did not get the “I was never good at physics at school” speech when I said what I do, which was good.

So quite a collection of people. Why am I telling you about this? Because it was fascinating to see the creative interaction between these different parties over the matter in hand. Marlene did the extract in full character and costume, and we all sat with drinks in the living room and watched. Then there was discussion afterwards. Not because we were watching a completed work, but because there were several interests in how the piece would be completed. The potential producers were interested in it to see if they wanted to financially back it, and Oliver and Marlene -the primary creative artists in this venture- wanted to show it to these parties. Very interesting was the presence of the nightclub people. Their interest was in new work and new directions. Their venue is equipped to do the usual stuff -bands, dances, etc- but they are looking to start doing (and have already started) a wider variety of shows that will appeal to not just the kids coming for the loud stuff, but people looking for more depth in their entertainment. They are trying to be a new venue on the theatre circuit. So they came along as a potential space in which this piece to be performed. Why was the interaction interesting? Because everyone had their different takes on what they saw, which was interesting, but in addition because the play itself will be affected by this process. Everybody had such good ideas!
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