News You Can Bruise for 2013 July

Mon Jul 01 2013 09:06 June Film Roundup: I guess the theme of June was mixing fact and fiction? I dunno why I feel the need to come up with a theme for all the random movies I watched in a month. This thing is long enough as it is. Here you go:

• Computer Chess (2013): A painstakingly forged docudrama about a computer chess tournament in the early 1980s, shot on period cameras, featuring old computers and super realistic dialogue. It's really amazing... and then... writer/director Andrew Bujalski throws it all away! He piles on fantastic elements that start out pretty good and then swerve into creepypasta territory.

  It didn't help that I sat with an audience of chess enthusiasts who'd come not to see a quirky, nearly-plotless indie movie, but rather to hear Joel Benjamin and Murray Campbell talk about their work on Deep Blue. See, the World Science Festival didn't mention the name of the movie they'd be showing, because it technically hadn't had its New York premiere yet. I knew the score: I'd heard of Computer Chess, this mystery movie was obviously Computer Chess, and I was really looking forward to seeing it. But most of the people coming in didn't know, and this movie left them... nonplussed.

  And I'm on their side, honestly. This should be a great movie, verily, the kind of movie I would make. Not the kind of movie that would make the chess fans stand up and cheer necessarily, but there's a decent through-line in there about the ethics of computer programming, and a nice conceit about two mutually unintelligible groups of people circling each other curiously when they rent the same conference center over a weekend. But it's... it's too Sundance. In fact, it's so Sundance that it's winning prizes at Sundance, so it doesn't need any help from me.

  I'm sure this has only niche appeal, but Computer Chess features an actor who looks kinda like Roy Fielding, playing a character similar to John Goodman's character in Barton Fink. That was a sweet spot for me.

  Uh, I'll talk about the panel discussion as long as I'm here. There was some interesting stuff. Murray Campbell was a veteran of many computer chess tournaments like the one shown in the movie, and confirmed that everything except the fantastic elements was extremely accurate. He also mentioned that into the 1990s, people had preconceived ideas about "how computers play chess", and when computers like Deep Blue started having a grasp of strategy (and were preprogrammed with responses to various openings), human players started freaking out, accusing IBM of Mechanical Turk hijinks, etc.

• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989): Watched on DVD as a palate-cleanser from Star Trek Into Darkness. Man, it's a terrible movie. No two parts of the plot fit together. It's got about forty-five minutes of filler that could be avoided if the Enterprise just had working transporters. But I remembered three things about the movie that I really liked, and all three of them still stand up:
  1. I've always thought Sybok was a pretty decent Trek villain, and after rewatching I think he's actually the second-best Trek movie villain. What's his devious plan? To find enlightenment! What's his evil power? He's freakishly good at empathizing with people! You gotta admit that's pure Trek.
  2. Not pure Trek, but very welcome, was the portrayal of Nimbus III. Not the Mos Eisley part, but the "dead-end diplomatic posting" part. You rarely see environments in Trek that are not horrible or hostile, per se, just run down and a lousy place to be.
  3. The famous "What does God want with a starship?" scene is one of my favorite Trek moments, and the only good thing to come out of letting Shatner write this movie. Shatner knows Kirk: the bluffer, the smiling con man. You can't kid a kidder, and when "God" tries, Kirk not only refuses to take the bait, he trolls "God" into letting the mask slip, turning McCoy and Sybok against him. It's awesome.

  This is just another reason why I don't give ratings to the movies I see. The Final Frontier is an awful movie and Into Darkness is a mediocre movie, but there's nothing in Into Darkness to match those three things from Final Frontier.

• The Conversation (1974): A great Gene Hackman portrayal of a super-nerd, before nerds became irrevocably associated with computers. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford experiments with playing a heavy, and it doesn't go well. Definitely worthwhile, but the rest of the movie can't help being overwhelmed by the awesome 1970s surveillance trade show. More relevant than ever?
• The Odd Couple (1968): When I was a teenager, Jack Lemmon was the decrepit face of dull establishment Hollywood comedy. I felt the same way about Steve Martin, and was really astonished and somewhat angry when I saw a super-old SNL stand-up act and learned that the guy from Father of the Bride was secretly an alt-comedy genius! Who knew?

  Over the years I a) mellowed out about this and b) saw the wonderful movies that had put Lemmon on the gravy train to begin with--The Great Race, The Apartment, Some Like it Hot, The Fortune Cookie. I grew up a little and learned to forgive. But for some reason, in my mind The Odd Couple was the turning point, the top of the slippery slope that had Grumpier Old Men at the bottom.

  Well, now I've seen The Odd Couple, and... sort of? I'd say The Fortune Cookie is the top of this particular slippery slope: a great movie that moves Lemmon away from zany capers and exploits his abrasive chemistry with Walter Matthau for dark, cynical character-driven comedy. The Odd Couple is a little way down the slope: it's funny, it's character-driven, it's dark, but it's not cynical at all. Everybody just needs a hug. In other words, it's not a Billy Wilder film. But hey, nobody's perfect.

  PS: If you're going to put any faith in my reviews (which I don't recommend) you should know that I get extra visual enjoyment out of any movie set in New York during the 1960s and 1970s: The Odd Couple, Marathon Man, etc. So even a film like Taxi Driver which I hated, I'll go away thinking "at least there was some classic New York griminess."

• True Stories (1986): David Byrne's version of UHF. If you think parody is the truest form of humor, as I did when I was a Jack Lemmon-hating teenager, you'll like UHF a lot and think that True Stories is meandering and pointless. But if you prefer satire, as I do today, then True Stories is where it's at. John Goodman shines as Roy Fielding. (Just kidding. But there is a fun early aw-shucks Goodman role.)
• The Great Magician (2011): I get a Jimmy Stewart vibe from Tony Leung. He projects the same blend of awkward handsomeness and potentially sinister decency. He's the best thing about this movie, which mixes real and made-up history in a way I personally found very confusing. Admittedly I don't know much about early twentieth century Chinese history, but Tai Chi Zero did this without confusing me, so I know it's possible.

  More problematically, The Great Magician mixes real-looking stage magic, in-world stage magic that was clearly done with camera tricks and CGI, and real honest-to-goodness in-world magic (also done with CGI). That's even more confusing. The end result is I don't understand what happens in this movie; whether or not I should be rooting for the warlord character; or what political point, if any, the movie is making.

• Journey to Italy (1954): Museum website called it "one of the most influential movies ever made, a work that many critics now believe ushered in the modern era in filmmaking." So I guess this movie's to blame for all those other movies about women who put up with douchebag husbands. Good points: spectacular ruins porn and Italian landscapes; hilarious rambling tour guides.
• The Goonies (1985): I thought I'd seen this movie twice, but now I remember my first "viewing" was actually the James Kahn novelization, which I read in grade school. The novelization wasn't bad! I'd say it's better than the movie, but I haven't read it in twenty years, and the movie's not as good as I remember, so why not the book, too?

  Perhaps I approached this viewing with the wrong attitude. The Goonies is not supposed to depict a believable sequence of events. It's a dramatization of kids' adventure fantasies and the lies they tell each other. You gotta go in with that attitude. Maybe I did! Let's say I did. But it didn't last, because the first thirty minutes of The Goonies does its best to dispel that attitude, showing a relatively realistic setup that gets the kids to the restaurant. Once they're at the restaurant, the coming-of-age movie collides with the crime movie, and all bets are off.

  Maybe other people don't even notice this. Maybe I only notice it because I'm working on a novel that features drastic tonal shifts and misfit kids in terrible peril and people chasing other people, and am becoming very familiar with the attendant problems.

  Things where I remember the book being better than the movie: it has a much tighter POV on Mikey (I think it might even be first-person), and it's a lot more explicit about the class warfare going on between the Goonies and the country-club folk. Underappreciated thing about the movie: Ma Fratelli's string of pearls. The only bit of white on her black outfit, and the only bit of femme in a very butch role. Things where the Konami NES game Goonies II is better than book or movie: music and weaponry. (Speaking of which, the PC in that game is clearly Data, not Mikey.)

  I feel like I should add an Update that after thinking about this review for a few days I decided I was too hard on The Goonies, it's just a goofy fun kids movie, but then I thought, why should thinking more about a movie get me to lower my standards? So I dunno. It's okay. People should definitely watch it. Unlike...

• Meatballs (1979): Geez, this is the kind of movie Comedy Central used to show all the time in the 90s. You know what, all those terrible "comedies" actually had me convinced that it's nearly impossible to make a comedy movie that's funny. You know what else, I still believe that! What the hell is this? Bill Murray doing his Bugs Bunny act not to spread chaos, but to boost a depressed kid's self-esteem? Give me a break! Thank goodness there's a fat guy and a nerd in this movie, because otherwise the entire cast would look exactly the same! Are Murray's corny PA announcements supposed to make me laugh? Because... well, they did, actually. Those were good.

  Maybe this movie looks a lot better through a thick layer of nostalgia, but I never went to summer camp and it looks like an awful place to be, so screw it. I did like Murray's character's refreshing approach to the inter-camp athletic rivalry: viz., screw it.

  Two Meatballs/Goonies connections I thought were odd. 1. Both movies seem to be named after a term claimed by the slobs in a slobs-vs.-snobs movie rivalry. (I'm not sure about this for Meatballs, but otherwise I have no idea why the movie is called that.) 2. In both movies, the fat guy is also the Jewish guy. Why? Was that a big stereotype back then? Neither movie makes a big deal about this, and Fink from Meatballs is clearly not observant, but it's definitely there.

• Upstream Color (2013): Finally! We saw it on Netflix, which was probably better because we got to pause the movie occasionally and talk it over. Where Primer tests your ability to piece together a plotline from a sequence of nearly indistinguishable events, Upstream Color tests your more basic ability to turn a sequence of film shots into a sequence of events. Only the artiest shots make it into this film, the plot is advanced as tangentially as possible, and every shot ends five frames before you think it will.

  Fortunately, with the movie-watching work we've put in over the past year, we were up to the challenge. If you can read the text you'll find a nice X-Files-esque horror movie that uses arthouse techniques to mask its low budget (the other two possibilities: make the movie an in-world document so that low production values are excusable, a la Blair Witch, or just roll with it and do really cheap gore effects).

• No (2012): An incredible movie that combines heart and cynicism in a way worthy of Billy Wilder. (I keep bringing him up; I guess he's officially my favorite director.) This movie takes its place among two of my favorites—Good Bye Lenin! and University of Laughs—which also deal with the intersection of creativity and totalitarianism.

  No mixes fact and fiction to an almost unheard-of (but not confusing) extent. In Forrest Gump it's clear when footage has been modified, but in No I don't think any footage has been modified. It's just that the footage and the movie are indistinguishable. It's all filmed on period cameras, a la Computer Chess.

  During the movie you see this real TV commercial, and you also see a fictionalized recreation of the filming of that commercial. The movie builds a whole behind-the-scenes world around that commercial, creating the kind of person who would have thought it was a good way to fight against a dictatorship, and fought for their creative vision, and won.

  Naturally this leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the real people displaced by this fictional viewpoint character. While doing post-movie research I found this no-table article:

  “The film is a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality,” Genaro Arriagada, director of the No campaign, said in a telephone interview from Chile. “The idea that, after 15 years of dictatorship in a politically sophisticated country with strong union and student movements, solid political parties and an active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do,’ that is a caricature.”

  English-language reports of this inter-Chilean argument made it sound like the disputed issue is the effectiveness of the television campaign versus other things like voter registration drives. But if machine translation of this interview with Arriagada can be believed, his problem is less with the idea that the television campaign was important, and more with the idea that an "advertising guy" came up with it.

  This is a political process that has a very important dimension. For starters, the slogan is defined much earlier, in a technical committee. The pitch is determined by political and peaceful reconciliation tone, not to fear, not violence. From that meeting, also there are two elements, such as the rainbow and the slogan of "Joy is coming". That is a political decision. It was a pretty aggressive bet, but there was no major problem with the world I had to approve it. And then designate two political representatives, who were in charge of directing the band: Juan Gabriel Valdes and Patricio Silva. From them the computer is configured. Here the orientation were entitled to politicians and execution to those who know it, that is to advertisers.

  I also found what appears to be a transcript of a roundtable, "¿Por Que Gano El No?". The roundtable presented some poll results which give a lot of influence to the television campaign (again, machine translation):

  In rural areas over 90% of people said that band saw almost every day. Interviewers who were to land that rural people have, where in many homes no TV, walked from one house to another to get together at night and see this strip television, and more, serving the following question: Where did you learn the meaning of "No"? Answer: 80% for television.

  "Band" and "strip television" are "franja" and "franja televisiva" in the original: i.e. TV and radio time set aside for political campaigns, e.g. the 15-minute blocks dramatized (and shown) in No. Here's an entire block for the "No" campaign, and here's one of the sinister, even dorkier "Si" blocks.

July is gonna be a huge month at the museum, as their theme for the month is "The American Epic". Movies that might show up in next month's review include Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, Do The Right Thing, Reds, The Right Stuff, Nashville, There Will Be Blood, and The Night of the Hunter. I'm tired already!

Tue Jul 09 2013 09:44 Mashteroids: As my birthday present to you, I present Mashteroids, Queneau assemblies of the IAU citations for minor planets. This showed up briefly on NYCB two years ago, but I've expanded the dataset, improved the sentence tokenization, and created a platform for future Queneaux.

A few samples:

You also got an RSS feed.

(4) Thu Jul 11 2013 10:02 Billy Collins, Stand-Up Comic (Bonus: How To Write Poetry): For reasons that need not concern us, I recently gave some advice on writing poetry. I don't know anything about poetry, but I was able to derive the most basic advice from first principles: "read a whole bunch of poetry before you try to write some." Adam Parrish knows more about poetry and offered some poetry-specific advice: "get over yourself".

I think a lot of incipient poets get caught in the idea that poetry is somehow about free self expression, and that the best poetry is that which most freely expresses the self—which, of course, isn't true. Poetry is a genre that you have to be literate in and a toolbox that you have to learn how to use.

If reading a bunch of poetry is too much work for you, you should at least take the time to reverse-engineer the findings of this paper by Michael Coleman (also via Adam), which uses machine learning to model the differences between poems written by members of the Academy of American Poets, and poems written by the general public. It gives some clues as to how the genre works and what's in the toolbox. e.g.:

The negative association with the PYMCP variable ‘Rhy’—a proxy for the extent to which words elicit other words that rhyme with the stimulus word—indicates that professional poets use words that are somewhat unusual but not necessarily complex. Professional poems have fewer words denoting affect but more words denoting number. Professional poems also refer less to the present and to time in general than amateur poems.

Run your stuff through Poetry Assessor until you start getting good scores. Now you're a poet! Well, sort of. The machine-learning algorithm can reliably tag crappy poems as crap, but it mainly looks at vocabulary and I don't think it knows about scansion at all. I ran the first paragraph of Bleak House—three ponderous Victorian sentences—through Poetry Assessor and it got a 1.8, making it a decent twentieth-century American poem. (And it's a very good paragraph, but you see the problem.)

I formulated my "read a lot of poetry" advice because that was also the techinque I used to figure out if I had any more specific advice to give. (I don't.) While reading a lot of poetry, I got really into the work of former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Collins has written a number of what I would call "NPR poems", poems that you could imagine him reading aloud on NPR, some of which he probably did read aloud on NPR. He's on NPR a lot. And at first glance the NPR poems have more in common with stand-up comedy than traditional or contemporary poetry.

I think it's best to think of the narrator of a Billy Collins poem as a fictional poet named "Billy Collins", a man whose bouts of incompetence and perpetual lack of inspiration are exploited by the real-world Billy Collins. Stand-up comics do the same thing. I became very interested in how Collins is able to use this persona to do serious poetic work through poems that aren't serious at all—again, something analogous to what a good stand-up comic does.

Some examples. I'm gonna start with Cheerios and Litany, two poems I don't really like. These poems are about as confrontational as Billy Collins gets, but it's not because of their subject matter: it's because they're poetry hacks.

"Cheerios" has a Poetry Assessor score of 0.8--barely professional quality. In "Cheerios" the incompetent poet "Billy Collins" keeps trying to launch a flight of poetic fancy using the overwrought abstract language associated with amateur poetry: "stooped and threadbare back", "more noble and enduring are the hills". But he can never get it off the ground because the engine keeps stalling on concrete imagery--the objective correlatives associated with professional poetry. The problem with that is the concrete imagery consists of nothing but different breakfast foods ("waited for my eggs and toast", "that dude's older than Cheerios", "illuminated my orange juice"). So it's deliberately bad amateur poetry interrupted by deliberately bad professional poetry. Just saying it's a bad poem isn't enough. It's bad in a very interesting, bathetic way.

On the other hand, "Litany" has the incredibly high Poetry Assessor score of 4.4. (The maximum score given in the Coleman paper corresponds to a PA score of 5.2.) What's his secret? Collins spends the entire poem blasting out objective correlatives at high speed. Some of them are taken directly from other poems ("the crystal goblet and the wine"), some of them are allusions ("the plums on the counter", "the burning wheel of the sun"), some are original ("the boat asleep in its boathouse"). But as he shoots those images out, he classifies them, like he's working on an assembly line, or brainstorming the poem he will eventually write. "Litany" is the opposite of "Cheerios". Collins is hacking the part of your brain that evaluates poetry, pushing all your buttons with free-floating imagery. It's a bad poem because you don't know enough about the people in the poem to understand what the imagery means.

Some other NPR poems, arranged roughly in ascending order of seriousness:

• Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House
• Child Development
• Nostalgia
• No Time
• Marginalia
• Candle Hat
• Print

Pay special attention to "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House" and "Nostalgia", two hilarious poems that are literally highbrow stand-up comedy. "Gun" is Seinfeld-esque, employing the tricks of modern poetry to take an exasperating everyday situation and blow it up into series of escalating fantastic images. (In case you were wondering, its Poetry Assessor score is 2.2, squarely on the "professional" side.) "Nostalgia" (1.3) is more of a Steve Martin kind of comedy, presenting logically flawed arguments and the dumb things people say when they're arguing on autopilot.

"Nostalgia" escalates not to a punchline--a funny kind of absurdity--but to a reductio ad absurdum, a logical absurdity. That makes it a good transition to two Collins poems that, although they deal with ephemeral topics, are more serious and less jokey. They both deal with words, the relationship between words and reality, and the fact that we're always putting words into boxes that themselves have no relationship with reality:

• First Reader
• American Sonnet

"First Reader" (2.9) is my favorite Collins poem. I feel like "American Sonnet" is the most professionally composed of his poems, and Poetry Assessor agrees, giving it the highest score (3.2) of any of the poems I tested. (Apart from "Litany", which is a poetry hack.) I tried writing down some analysis but these two are easy poems to appreciate, so I'll spare you. I want to close with two poems that I'm not crazy about as a whole, but which do a really interesting thing in the last stanza: they anthropomorphize individual words.

• Paperwork
• Thesaurus

"Paperwork" shows fictional poet "Billy Collins" not being able to write a poem, dreaming in the end of gaining inspiration from an "ancient noun who lives alone in a forest." "Thesaurus" is all about anthropomorphizing words, but it's not until the end that the words leave "the warehouse of Roget" and take on independent lives, "wandering the world where they sometimes fall/in love with a completely different word."

Anthropomorphizing words is how Collins deals with the fact that poetry is a lonely business: writing things down all day, making sure to use exactly the right word all the time. Who else needs to be that careful about individual words? Stand-up comics, that's who. A punchline and a poem both rely on an unexpected word at exactly the right time. That word, when it comes along, is your best friend.

PS: Minor error in the Coleman paper which confused me when I was trying to convert between the paper's scores and Poetry Assessor scores.

For example, Robert Hass has two poems in the corpus, The Image and Our Lady of the Snows, which score in the high to very high range of .72 and .94, respectively.

Those numbers should be reversed. "The Image" has a score of .94 (PA: 5.2), and "Our Lady of the Snows" has .72 (PA: 1.1)

Wed Jul 17 2013 12:34 Reunion: I got a misdirected flyer in the mail inviting Leon Richardson to a high school reunion. Class of 1983. I was not yet in kindergarten in 1983, so I thought I might go and drop hints about the youth serum I'd invented.

On the other hand, the invitation is addressed to "Richardson Leon, or current resident". So I can go as myself. Anyone can show up to this high school reunion! They don't care!

In fact they're probably hoping a few current residents will show up to boost the numbers. The flyer seems acutely aware that high school reunions are increasingly an anachronism in this world of "Facebook, Twitter, and Smartphones", and is really desperate to prove the worth of in-person reunions.

It also informs me that "The bio-sheet deadline is Friday, August 30, 2013." Interestingly enough, that's also what a supervillain recently told the United Nations.

Sat Jul 20 2013 21:55 Apo11o ll: To celebrate the anniversary of the first moon landing, I packaged up a project I came up with a while back: Apo11o ll, a generative piece that performs Queneau assembly on the Apollo 11 transcripts (from The Apollo 11 Flight Journal and The Apollo 11 Surface Journal).

Duke: Rog. [Long pause.]

Armstrong: That's one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.

McCandless: Roger, 11. I have a T13 update for you. AOS Tananarive at 37:04, Simplex Alpha. Readback. If you want to go that way, crank it up, and then you can drive it around and look where you want. Over. 11, this is Houston. And we copy the V_I.

Aldrin: Does it look to you like the [garble] the right way? Yes, they were working out - this elaborate scheme.

Collins: Unless you'd rather sleep up top, Buzz; I like - you guys ought to get a good night's sleep, going in that damn LM - How about - which would you prefer? I say the leak check is complete, and I'm proceeding with opening the hatch dump valve.

Aldrin: That enough?

McCandless: Apollo 11, this is Houston at 1 minute. Over.

First Mashteroids and now this? How am I doing all this Queneau space-magic? The answer is simple: Olipy, my library for artistic text generation (focusing on Queneau assembly, because it's the best). Check it out of Github and you'll have everything you need to create home versions of many of my works. It's like my own personal Boîte-en-valise! Want to create something new? Just grab some data and feed it to an Assembler class.

Mon Jul 29 2013 16:41 Loaded Dice 2013 Update: I fetched the BoardGameGeek data again, a yearly tradition, and put up another Loaded Dice update.

A few highlights:

• The number of games released each year is holding steady at about 3200.
• Rating inflation continues since last year, but it seems to be slowing down.
• Games that were highly underrated in 2011 were overrated in 2012, as BGG users overcompensated for their former low ratings. Games that were highly overrated in 2012 were still overrated in 2013--these were highly hyped games and the hype is still dying down.

If you go to the main page, you can download an amazing 17-megabyte JSON dump of BGG data I've compiled. It includes descriptions and genres for every game in the dataset, and three data samples that convey historical rating data over three years. At this point I feel like I'm adding enough on top of what the BGG API can give you (the historical rating data) that I can make the data dump available without apology.