September « 2011 « Isegoria

Blockbusters on a Budget

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

The key to filming a low-budget movie, Bill Martell says, is first writing a low-budget screenplay:

One key to a “big budget” film which can be shot cheap is to come up with BIG ACTION which doesn’t have to be done for real. “ID4″ blew up the White House… Done in miniature.

It’s also important to keep your actors and effects separate! Two reasons for this:

1) To combine real actors and miniatures or computer effects is expensive and time consuming.

2) Real actors make CGI and miniatures look fake. They give us a point of comparison. This is why Stan Winston built LIFE SIZE dinosaurs for the petting-touching-standing next to scenes in “The Lost World”. We aren’t doing ANYTHING for real!

This DOES limit your palate. You have to find a story where the big action takes place ‘outside’ and the actors work ‘inside’. “DIE HARD” type movies work well for this. But so would “ALIEN” and “ALIENS”, “CRIMSON TIDE , “EXECUTIVE DECISION”, any Star Trek film, and Hawks version of “THE THING”.

Other tricks involve using centralized locations and confined cameos:

By having a large portion of the film take place at a central location, that location can be pre-lit to save time setting up shots. Most low budget films have a primary location where half of the film takes place, then several secondary locations. This reduces down time for crew moves and allows a production to maximize the number of pages shot per day. A low budget film averages at least five pages a day, compared to the page or two a studio film can roll between packing and unpacking the trucks.
[...]
Let’s say you can afford to hire Robert Vaughn for one day. You want to maximize his screen time, so you confine him to a location. Instead of spending valuable star time moving the crew from location A to location B, you make sure EVERY SINGLE SCENE Robert Vaughn is in takes place at Location A.

Let’s say he’s the Chief Of Police. You stick him in an office, light it, and shoot every single scene between the Renegade Cop and the Chief Of Police: Chewed out, one last chance, badge and gun taken away, arrested by other cops, finally convincing the Chief to let him finish the case. These scenes are weaved through out the film, making it seem like Robert Vaughn was in the whole thing.

Now take that idea, and multiply it by 6 different locations and 6 different confined cameos, and you have an ALL STAR CAST which seems to be in the entire film. Karen Black as the witness. Martin Landau as the Senator who may be involved. Michael York as the suspect. Teri Polo as the widow of Renegade Cop’s partner. Stan Shaw as the Renegade Cop’s mentor, who owns a bar. You get the idea.

Each actor works ONE day at ONE location to maximize his/her screen time.

This explains why he wrote a number of screenplays taking place on submarines, and thus why his blog is called Sex on a Submarine — sort of:

So I get these script notes. You always get notes from actors, directors, producers, producer’s girlfriend’s, producer’s dog walkers, etc. Endless notes. Most notes aren’t about improving the script, they’re about changing it.

My favorite note was from a producer at MGM — they were interested in this contemporary gritty armed robbery script of mine, kind of like HEAT, and he asked, “Why can’t they be cowboys?”

“Do you mean, have the script take place in the 1800s?”

“No. Still takes place today, but the robbers wear hats and chaps and spurs and ride horses!”

Thankfully that project crashed and burned, but there is still a Village People version somewhere on my hard drive. Most script notes are crazy things like that, and that’s why when you see some dreadful film and wonder why they bought that script; well, they didn’t really buy that script — they bought a completely great script that was the one in a million… then changed it into that dreadful script. And then spent $106 million to make it. You’ll probably be hearing more about that in later blog entries.

So I get these notes from HBO… they want me to put a sex scene in the script. Now, you might expect to get a note to add a sex scene from some direct to video producer or maybe Roger Corman’s development person… but this is HBO!

So I ask, “The script takes place on a submarine with a crew of 110 men, what kind of sex scene did they have in mind?”

And they shoot back, “Well, not a Gay sex scene!” That was back then, today they would want a Gay sex scene (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

So I asked, “Um, where is the woman for the non-Gay sex scene coming from?”

And they give me the standard answer, “Hey, you’re the writer — be creative!” Which just means they have no idea how there can be a sex scene in the script, either… but now it is my problem. Tag, you’re it!

As usual, I argue a little, but you can never win. The golden rule. He who has the gold rules. When you sell a screenplay it is no longer yours, and they can make even the stupidest changes and you are powerless to do anything… and usually your contract includes 2 rewrites and a polish, so you are the one ruining your own script. You have to. It’s all part of the screenwriter’s job.

Despite my logical arguments, HBO insists that I add a sex scene. With a woman.

Well, my script didn’t only have 110 men on the submarine, it also had a handful of terrorists who had taken over the sub, and one was already a woman. So, I write up a sex scene — and it’s still really stupid. We have these terrorists who are outnumbered but have a clever plan to take over the submarine, and right in the middle of this scene, the female terrorist sets down her gun and disrobes to get some lovin’ from a crew member who never asks who she is or what she is doing on the submarine. It is the dumbest scene I have ever written (the cowboys made more sense).

Okay, I’m a pro… I make sure that the scene before the stupid sex scene and after the stupid sex scene cut together perfectly, so that when HBO sees how stupid the sex scene is, the editor can cut the film together without it. Snip-snip and that scene is gone! The film won’t be stupid anymore.

But when CRASH DIVE airs on HBO on March 28 1996, the sex scene is intact.

Posted in Business, Media | 1 Comment »

The Birth of the Ever Victorious Army

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Lexington Green shares this passage from E. Alexander Powell’s Gentleman Rovers (1913), on Cities Taken by Contract:

Through an English friend in the Chinese service, Ward obtained an introduction to Wu, the Taotoi of Shanghai, and to a millionaire merchant and mandarin named Tah Kee. The plan he proposed was as simple as it was daring. He offered to recruit a foreign legion, with which he would defend Shanghai, and at the same time attack such of the Taiping strongholds as were within striking distance, stipulating that for every city captured he was to receive seventy-five thousand dollars in gold, that his men were to have the first day’s looting, and that each place taken should immediately be garrisoned by imperial troops, leaving his own force free for further operations. Wu on behalf of the government, and Tah Kee as the representative of the Shanghai merchants, promptly agreed to this proposal, and signed the contract.

They had, indeed, everything to gain and nothing to lose. It was also arranged that Tah Kee should at the outset furnish the arms, ammunition, clothing, and commissary supplies necessary to equip the legion. These preliminaries once settled, Ward wasted no time in recruiting his force, for every day was bringing the Taipings nearer. A number of brave and experienced officers, for the most part soldiers of fortune like himself, hastened to offer him their services, General Edward Forester, an American, being appointed second in command. The rank and file of the legion was recruited from the scum and offscourings of the East, Malay pirates, Burmese dacoits, Tartar brigands, and desperadoes, adventurers, and fugitives from justice from every corner of the farther East being attracted by the high rate of pay, which in view of the hazardous nature of the service, was fixed at one hundred dollars a month for enlisted men, and proportionately more for officers. The non-commissioned officers, who were counted upon to stiffen the ranks of the Orientals, were for the most part veterans of continental armies, and could be relied upon to fight as long as stock and barrel held together. The officers carried swords and Colt’s revolvers, the latter proving terribly effective in the hand-to-hand fighting which Ward made the rule; while the men were armed with Sharp’s repeating carbines and the vicious Malay kris. Everything considered, I doubt if a more formidable aggregation of ruffians ever took the field.

Ward placed his men under a discipline which made that of the German army appear like a kindergarten; taught them the tactics he had learned under Garibaldi, Walker, and Juarez; and finally, when they were as keen as razors and as tough as rawhide, he entered them in battle on a most astonished foe.

From Andrew Wilson’s The Ever Victorious Army, he shares this passage about the death of the Emperor, who had suffered both the Taiping rebellion as well as foreign invasion, culminating in the destruction of the Summer Palace:

About this time some events occurred at Peking which had a not unimportant bearing on the future of China and of Tai-pingdom. On the 21st August the Emperor Hien-fung died at the Jehol, his hunting-seat in Tartary, in the 26th year of his age and the 11th of his reign. Unequal to the difficulties of a transition period, he had, like many other rulers similarly placed, sought consolation in sensual indulgences, and had allowed himself to be led by unworthy favourites. At last, as the decree announcing his death stated, “his malady attacked him with increasing violence, bringing him to the last extremity, and on the 17th day of the moon he sped upwards upon the dragon to be a guest on high. We tore the earth and cried to heaven, yet reached we not to him with our hands or voices.”

When the mortal shell of this frail and unfortunate monarch was laid in its ”cedar palace,” his spirit ascending on the dragon would have many strange things to tell to the older Emperors of his line. He would have to speak of trouble, rebellion, and change through all the years of his reign, over all the vast plains of the Celestial Empire, from the guttural voiced tribes of Mongolia and the blue-capped Mohammedans of Shensi, down to the innumerable pirates of Kwangtung; he might complain that, east and west, north and south, his people had been disobedient and rebellious; the administration of his empire had been set at defiance, and his sacred decrees had been imperfectly carried out by weak and corrupt viceroys, much more intent upon their own aggrandisement than upon the welfare of the people. Year after year great bands of marauding rebels had moved across the once happy Flowery Land, marking their progress in the darkness of night by the glare of burning villages, or shadowing it in the day by the rolling smoke of consuming towns. A maniac usurper had not only sought to ascend the dragon throne, but had nearly done so, and had claimed divine honours; while invading armies of the outside barbarian had humiliated the empire, had visited the once inviolate city of Peking, and had burned the palace of the Son of Heaven.

Shannon Love adds that places like China were full of brave and skilled warriors, but they lacked leadership.

David Foster notes that the British had a culture of improvising to meet their duty to hurt their enemies, while most cultures settled for following orders.

Posted in War | No Comments »

After A Magnetic Pulse to the Brain, Study Subjects Cannot Tell a Lie

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

After a magnetic pulse to the brain, study subjects cannot tell a lie — or, more accurately, after transcranial magnetic and electric stimulation to the right side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, subjects were less likely to lie, and after stimulation to the left they were more likely to lie:

In this study, volunteers submitted to TMS to stimulate their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in decision-making, complex thought and deception. Like most of the brain, it has a right and a left side, which are both responsible for different tasks. The volunteers were shown a series of colored discs, and told they could tell the truth or lie about their colors. Half were stimulated on the left, half on the right.

The eight people who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, the researchers said. The ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth. The experiment was repeated while a different brain region was stimulated, and that region, the parietal lobe, had no effect.

(Hat tip to our Slovenian Guest.)

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Importance of Culture

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Roger Scruton reiterates the importance of culture:

I first visited Greece 50 years ago, hitchhiking with a school friend from England, in search of the glorious world of Homer, Plato, and Thucydides. Of course, we didn’t find that world. But we found something almost as remarkable, which was a place where the church and the priesthood dominated rural life, where villages were self-contained communities, where local saints enjoyed their festivals and where the old dances were still danced in the village squares, men in groups, and women in groups, dressed in the costumes that survived from Ottoman days, and rehearsing the old drama of the sexes with marriage as its eternal dénouement. It was a country that had yet to enter the modern world. Its rhythms were those of the village, where debts and duties were local, and where sun, sleep, and surrender managed the day. It was inconceivable to a young Anglo-Saxon visitor that such a country could be judged in the same terms as Germany or France, or that it could play a comparable role in an economy that included all three countries as equal partners.

At one point, running out of money, I joined the queue at a hospital in Athens, where you could give blood and be paid in drachmas. The presiding doctor leaped up to welcome the tall red-haired youth, and turned away the two small men who preceded me, judging their blood to be useless. The names of my unsuccessful rivals were Heracles and Dionysus. It was the only sign offered to me during that first visit that these people were descended from the Greeks to whom our civilization is owed.

I have no desire to return to Greece, dreading what the tourists and the property speculators have done to it. But I know that, whatever the changes, it is inconceivable that Greece should have developed in the same way and with the same rhythm as France or Germany. Of course the country has been modernized. Roads have been built and towns expanded. The tourist trade has wiped out the gentle manners of the villagers. Sexual intercourse has begun — somewhat later than 1963, which is when Philip Larkin famously dated it, but nevertheless with the same devastating effect on marriage and the family. No doubt the old modes of the folk songs have been forgotten, and no doubt the multinational brands have slapped their logos on shop fronts across the land. But for sure the culture of local obligation has remained. For sure people still regard leisure as more important than work, and debts as less important, the further away the creditor lies in the network of human relations. If you don’t know this from visiting Greece, you could learn it easily enough from reading Kazantzakis, Ritzos, Seferis, or any other of the writers in that great moment of literary flourishing which succeeded the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. You could even get it from Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Anybody with his eyes open and his heart in place would know that Greece is the product of a distinctive culture, and that this culture, however it develops, will always take the country in a direction and at a speed of its own.

Yet the architects of the euro did not know this. If they had known it, they would have known also that the effect of imposing a single currency on Greece and Germany would be to encourage Greece to transfer its debts to Germany, on the understanding that the further away the creditor the less the obligation to repay. They would have known that if the Greek political class can use sovereign debt to pay family, friends, and dependents, and to buy the votes needed to stay in office, that that is what the political class will do. They would have recognized that laws, obligations, and sovereignty don’t have quite the same meaning in the Mediterranean as they do on the Baltic, and that in a society used to kleptocratic government the fairest way out of an economic crisis is by devaluation — in other words, by stealing equally from everybody.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

Wood Tape

Monday, September 26th, 2011

I enjoyed Scott Nesin’s tale of the wood tape.

My wife calls me at work, and we have the usual end-of-the-day chat. Then:

“Oh, by the way, Guy wants you to take him to the hardware store, he wants to get some tape.”

“What kind of tape?”

“He says he wants ‘wood tape’.”

“Wood tape?”

“Wood tape.”

“Uhhh, ok. When?”

“Sometime this weekend. He is really looking forward to going.”

Guy is my four-year-old son. No problem, I just need a fraction of an excuse to visit a hardware store.

I won’t spoil it for you.

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

The Logic of Failure

Monday, September 26th, 2011

A few years ago I read and enjoyed David Foster’s review of Dietrich Doerner’s The Logic of Failure, which explores how people make decisions — particularly how they make bad decisions when faced with complex systems. Now Foster points to another review, by The Social Pathologist, who cites this passage from the book:

We divided the Greenvale participants into three groups: a control group, a strategy group, and a tactics group. The strategy and tactics groups received instruction in some fairly complicated procedures for dealing with complex systems. The strategy group was introduced to concepts like “system”, “positive feedback,” “negative feedback,” and “critical variable” and to the benefits of formulating goals, determining and, if necessary, changing priorities, and so forth. The tactics group was taught a particular procedure for decision making, namely, “Zangemeister efficiency analysis.”

After the experiment, conducted over several weeks, the participants were asked to evaluate the training they had received; figure 39 shows the results. The members of the strategy and tactics groups all agreed that the training had been “moderately” helpful to them. The members of the control group, who had received training in some nebulous, ill defined “creative thinking,” felt that their training had been of very little use to them. The differences in the evaluations are statistically significant. If we look at the participants’ actual performance as well as at their evaluations of the help they thought they got from their training, however, we find that the three groups did not differ at all in their performance.

Why did the participants who had been “treated” with certain procedures think this essentially useless training had been somewhat helpful? The training gave them what I would call “verbal intelligence” in the field of solving complex problems. Equipped with lots of shiny new concepts, they were able to talk about their thinking, their actions, and the problems they were facing. This gain in eloquence left no mark at all on their performance, however. Other investigators report a similar gap between verbal intelligence and performance intelligence and distinguish between “explicit” and “implicit” knowledge.’ The ability to talk about something does not necessarily reflect an ability to deal with it in reality.

The Social Pathologist draws some conclusions:

If we think about this last experiment for a minute, its findings are profoundly disturbing. It would appear that theoretical problem solving knowledge does not necessarily translate to practical problem solving knowledge. Buisness school graduates do necessarily make good businessmen. Perhaps one of the reasons why Western economies are faltering at the moment is because there are thousands of graduates from business schools occupying positions in senior management who can “talk the talk” but cannot “walk the walk”.

Dorner’s book also has implications for political theory: Take for example democracy. It would appear that the average man is suited to understanding simple and immediate problems and such would vote intelligently on such issues, but what about complex issues with long term consequences? Democratic government, given human cognitive limitations, is surely to fail over the long term since the bulk of men are not able to grasp the long term consequences of even moderately simple decision. Democracy (even tyranny) is ultimately corrupted by its own stupidity.

David builds on this:

The ability to work with abstractions fluently and effectively is important — part of this ability should be understanding the limits of abstractions. In business, for example, there are many companies paying too much attention to computerized “business intelligence systems” mining vast databases of customer behavior, and far too little attention to taking advantage of the tacit knowledge possessed by their front-line employees.

Higher education should result in increased ability to deal well with abstractions — too often, it leads instead to the reification of abstractions, to treating them as more real than reality. I’ve met executive for whom the assumed position of a business on the BCG growth-share matrix (cows, dogs, stars question marks) was much realer than that actual characteristics of the actual business.

Posted in Business, Education | 2 Comments »

CEOs in Comics

Monday, September 26th, 2011

If you look at CEOs in comics, the heroes tend to have inherited their businesses, Julian Sanchez notes, while the villains have built theirs up from nothing:

While the pattern in comics inverts the meritocratic ideal that seems to rule in most modern American fiction, it fits quite naturally with a pre-capitalist aristocratic ethos, which persisted at least through the early 20th century in the form of Old Money’s contempt for the nouveau riche. Jane Jacobs, in her book Systems of Survival, contrasted this aristocratic view, which she dubbed the “Guardian” moral complex, with “bourgeois” or “mercantile” ethics.

In this worldview, while wealth and the leisure time it affords may be necessary preconditions of cultivating certain noble qualities (whether that’s appreciation of classical art and literature, or the martial, deductive, and scientific skills of a masked crimefighter), the grubby business of acquiring money is inherently corrupting. The ideal noble needs to have wealth, while being too refined to be much concerned with becoming wealthy.

It’s permissible for Stark and Kord to be largely responsible for the success of their companies because their contribution is essentially a side effect of their exercise of their intellectual virtues. Along similar lines, while the Fantastic Four have plainly become enormously wealthy from the income stream generated by Reed Richards’ many patents, I don’t recall many scenes in which we see Richards stepping out of the lab to apply his intelligence directly to their commercialization: His inventions are presumably sold or licensed to others who concern themselves with transforming Richards’ genius into cash.

A similar pattern holds for literally noble or aristocratic power in comics. Princess Diana (Wonder Woman) and T’Challa (Black Panther) are hereditary royalty. Doctor Doom and Magneto are members of despised and oppressed minority groups (Doom is Roma; Magneto a Jewish mutant) who actively seize leadership of Latveria and Genosha, respectively. Democratic power doesn’t fare too much better: Lex Luthor was briefly president of the United States.

The logic of this, as I apprehend it, is that the hero must wield enormous power in order to effectively perform the superheroic function, but cannot seem to seek it too eagerly, even for admirable ends — perhaps particularly when we consider that they typically make use of their great economic power by translating it into a superhuman capacity for physical violence. Spider-Man is always reminding us that “with great power comes great responsibility” — but the responsibility is the noblesse oblige of one who has (often reluctantly) found that power thrust upon him.

Bruce Wayne is perhaps the most obvious exception to this general pattern. While for Spider-Man, unasked-for power comes with the burden of responsibility, it is the burden of an obsessive sense of responsibility that comes first for Wayne, driving a protracted quest for hard-won mental and physical power. While every superhero has an iconic “origin story,” Batman is unusual among costumed crimefighters in that his long and laborious efforts to acquire his skills and powers are themselves a major part of the narrative. In Wayne’s case, this deliberate striving after power is at least partially purged of its ordinary villainous connotations because it is itself depicted as an unwanted compulsion, thrust upon him unasked (like a radioactive spider bite) by the ghosts of his murdered parents. It is not, I think, an accident that this most calculating, ruthless, and unsentimental of the major superheroes is also the one super-CEO most commonly depicted as being exceptionally skilled qua businessman. He is allowed this quality in part because, in sharp contrast to Tony Stark, he is not depicted as deriving much genuine enjoyment from the luxurious playboy lifestyle he uses as a smokescreen to cover his compulsive crimefighting.

Protagonists in ordinary popular fiction, like most of us most of the time, are allowed to seek their own happiness — and we’re allowed to share that happiness, through our identification with them — in line with ordinary bourgeois morality. But what makes superheroes “super” (and not merely heroic) is precisely their extraordinary capability to exercise coercive power and dominate others. In their case, bourgeois norms have to yield to the Guardian ethos — which, when their power is partly economic in origin, requires turning pop fiction’s ordinary meritocratic ideals on their head, at least in that limited domain.

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy | 1 Comment »

The Story of a Soldier’s Life

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Lexington Green declared The Story of a Soldier’s Life (1903), by Field Marshal The Rt. Hon. Sir Garnet Joseph Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley, KP, GCB, OM, GCMG, VD, PC, the best book he read in 2010:

Wolseley was the most distinguished British soldier in the later decades of Victoria’s reign. He is a clear, vigorous, honest writer. He is an acute observer, and he makes strong and blunt judgments. He describes the effect of wounds with clinical accuracy. His career beggars belief. In the book he describes fighting against bandits in Burmah, the long hard fight in the Crimea, a shipwreck on the way to China, turned around to fight in India during the Sepoy Rebellion, on to China during the Second Opium War and the destruction of the Summer Palace, observing the Tai Ping army, over to North America to observe the Confederate Army and meet General Lee, up into Canada, through pristine wilderness, to put down Riel’s rebellion, some time at the War Office, then organizing and leading the campaign against one of the many “races of virile savages” on the edges of British power, the Ashantee. Wolseley never got to a volume three, which would have included helping to finish off the Zulus and conquering the Sudan. There are books it is hard to put down. This one was so exciting that I could barely remain seated while I read it. To read it is to live for a while in a very different world, with a hard-edged moral code, with a man who speaks English very clearly, but who thinks and says things that we would not think or say today.

He describes Wolsely’s views on race:

The idea that “racism” is a unitary phenomenon is seriously wrong. To select a paired set of example. Hitler was a racist. So, in a way, was Garnet Wolseley, a Victorian officer whose memoirs I recently read. But they were “racist” in totally different ways. Hitler was an ideological fanatic, impervious to evidence, hating a “Jew” that mostly existed in his imagination. Wolseley was an extremely practical man who had limited resources with which to conquer and hold vast territories and populations under the potitical control of his government. Hitler made up a fantasy world based on racial myths. Wolseley observed that certain groups had certain characteristics, as a general matter, and he took those facts into account just like terrain, weather, and weaponry and other practical considerations. He did not have the luxury of living in a make-believe world where everyone was exactly the same, or where one group was generically superior. Hitler told himself a self-congratulatory and flattering story about his own group, which led him to make incredibly impractical decisions. Wolseley looked just as hard at his own group, the English, and saw its strengths and weaknesses. He admired and extolled the former, but admitted and tried to work around the latter. He treated these facts about his own people with the same cold practicality that he treated all practical questions. To celebrate “culture” when it suits us or pleases us or flatters us, but to deny its reality and force when it does not, is ultimately dishonest. We need to understand people in the past as they understood themselves, not merely as chess pieces in our current struggles.

Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday was the best book he read the year before. I still haven’t made time to read either. Sigh.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Anarcho-Monarchism in the Shire

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

J.R.R. Tolkien and Salvador Dalí both found themselves drawn simultaneously towards anarchism and monarchism, David B. Hart notes:

In the case of Dalí it was probably a meaningless remark, since almost everything he ever said was, [...] but Tolkien was, in his choleric way, giving voice to his deepest convictions regarding the ideal form of human society — albeit fleeting voice. The text of his sole anarcho-monarchist manifesto, such as it is, comes from a letter he wrote to his son Christopher in 1943 (forgive me for quoting at such length):

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people….

And anyway, he continues, “the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men”:

Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. At least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that — after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world — is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way…. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

Hart adds his own thoughts on democracy and kings:

If one were to devise a political system from scratch, knowing something of history and a great deal about human nature, the sort of person that one would chiefly want, if possible, to exclude from power would be the sort of person who most desires it, and who is most willing to make a great effort to acquire it. By all means, drag a reluctant Cincinnatus from his fields when the Volscians are at the gates, but then permit him to retreat again to his arable exile when the crisis has passed; for God’s sake, though, never surrender the fasces to anyone who eagerly reaches out his hand to take them.

Yet our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world — the world that cannot be — ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

One can at least sympathize, then, with Tolkien’s view of monarchy. There is, after all, something degrading about deferring to a politician, or going through the silly charade of pretending that “public service” is a particularly honorable occupation, or being forced to choose which band of brigands, mediocrities, wealthy lawyers, and (God spare us) idealists will control our destinies for the next few years.

But a king — a king without any real power, that is — is such an ennoblingly arbitrary, such a tender and organically human institution. It is easy to give our loyalty to someone whose only claim on it is an accident of heredity, because then it is a free gesture of spontaneous affection that requires no element of self-deception, and that does not involve the humiliation of having to ask to be ruled.

The ideal king would be rather like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the whole game. There is something positively sacramental about its strategic impotence. And there is something blessedly gallant about giving one’s wholehearted allegiance to some poor inbred ditherer whose chief passions are Dresden china and the history of fly-fishing, but who nonetheless, quite ex opere operato, is also the bearer of the dignity of the nation, the anointed embodiment of the genius gentis — a kind of totem or, better, mascot.

As for Tolkien’s anarchism, I think it obvious he meant it in the classical sense: not the total absence of law and governance, but the absence of a political archetes — that is, of the leadership principle as such. In Tolkien’s case, it might be better to speak of a “radical subsidiarism,” in which authority and responsibility for the public weal are so devolved to the local and communal that every significant public decision becomes a matter of common interest and common consent. Of course, such a social vision could be dismissed as mere agrarian and village primitivism; but that would not have bothered Tolkien, what with his proto-ecologist view of modernity.

Stuart Koehl looks to Middle Earth for an expression of Tolkien’s political thinking — and disagrees with the anarchist label, because he defines the term differently:

I wouldn’t say Tolkien was an anarcho-monarchist. He did once say the best form of government was an extremely inefficient absolute monarchy, which, in effect, is what the Hobbits erected in the Shire: their loyalty was nominally towards the High King in the North, but as that office had remained vacant for centuries, they went around organizing their own business while pretending as though there still was a king.

Hobbit government is the farthest thing from anarchy. Hobbits follow The Rules, minimal though these might be. They are largely common sense, hallowed by custom, and enforced by social suasion. There is a local military commander, the Thain (obviously from the Anglo-Saxon thegn, a minor noble who commanded the fyrd in a particular place), and a titular functionary (the Mayor), and a small police force, the Sheriffs (again, the old Anglo-Saxon shire-reeves), who, by Tolkien’s admission, spend most of their time rounding up errant cattle and turning back scruffy-looking interlopers from the outside.

If anything, the Shire is something of a libertarian paradise, where people follow the Golden Rules of “mind your own business” and “keep your hands to yourself”, though, of course, there is a social class hierarchy in which certain families have hereditary status (“respectability”) equivalent to that of the country gentry in late 19th century England. All this is taken for granted, because everybody accepts and follows The Rules.

Anarchy, of course, is an obliteration of The Rules, and the civility of the Shire would collapse instantly if anyone were seriously to question their validity. Once the consensus of The Rules collapses, order can only be restored through force — external, tyrannical force, such as that imposed by Lotho Sackville-Baggins and Sharkey (Saruman), or the internal, regenerative force of the Hobbits themselves, once the Shire is raised by Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin. Like Cincinnatus, they take up arms only to defend the status quo ante (demonstrating in the process that the ancient institutions of the Thain and the fyrd do work), then put them down and return to their plows (both real and metaphorical).

It’s interesting to note, though, that to some extent the Hobbits of the Shire are free riders. Their rustic, libertarian paradise exists only because it is guarded by the Rangers of the North, who are, of course, the Dunedain of Arnor, whose Chieftain is also the Heir of Elendil, the rightful King of Arnor to whom the Hobbits have, all these centuries, been giving their nominal allegience. Not knowing this, however, the Hobbits fear, distrust and disdain the Rangers, who are not at all “respectable”.

Nonetheless, Aragorn, when restored to the throne as King Elessar, makes no attempt to altar the governance of the Shire, but rather legitimizes them by making the Shire self-governing and prohibiting Big People from entering its borders without prior leave. Even he does not violate his own law, but stops at the gate on the Great Road whenever he visits with the Mayor (Sam), the Thain (Pippin) and the Master of Buckland (Merry). It’s an interesting example of Tolkien’s realism and ambivalence about the ideal society he created that he recognizes it cannot stand against the “real” world without the protection of forces that are its antithesis to a large extent.

(I’ve been meaning to cite this piece for a while, but Kalim Kassam and Foseti brought it back to mind.)

Posted in Media, Policy | 1 Comment »

Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Researchers are now reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies:

Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations and can form the basis for brain decoding devices. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow, so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.

The left clip is a segment of the movie that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this movie from brain activity measured using fMRI. The reconstruction was obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately.