About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Today I got off to a slow start. My fourth day in New York, and I’d already worn myself out. So I took the morning off, reading and relaxing. I ventured out for lunch, stopping by a Korean place I’d seen the night before in the East Village. I liked it – I got the stone bowl bi bim bop, which is one of my favorites.
After that, I headed uptown to the Whitney Museum. I got on the 6 train, which was the straight shot subway ride. Alas, there was a power outage or something uptown, so that line was shut down for a while, so I took another line up towards Carnegie Hall, and then had to suffer the horrors of having to walk through Central Park to the Whitney. That’s sarcasm, by the way – walking through Central Park is one of my favorite parts of visiting New York. I was comparing it to Golden Gate Park in my head, and realized the thing that made Central Park seem more impressive to me. In Golden Gate Park, there are numerous places where you can be walking through the woods, and there’s very little intrusion of city life. In Central Park, the city is always there, asserting itself by the skyscrapers rising in the distance above the trees. It’s intimidating in a “You can never escape” sort of way, but also makes the park seem like a powerful gesture of defiance. And being the anti-authoritarian I am, I like gestures of defiance.
Anyway, I eventually wound my way to the Whitney. I’d read someplace online about an exhibition by Tim Hawkinson there that sounded intriguing, and my interest was only whetted when one of Dan’s friends yesterday had raved about it. I’ll let this review describe it, but I liked it. His sense of whimsy is infective, and his creations of electromechanical contraptions out of found junk is inspiring to a geek like me. I particularly liked his “Secret Sync” set of sculptures, where he built a set of clocks out of seemingly ordinary objects, like a Coke can where the can rotates such that the opening is the hour hand, and the pull tab is the minute hand, or a hairbrush with two almost-invisible hairs marking the time.
The rest of the museum wasn’t as inspiring, alas. The other major exhibition was by Cy Twombly, whose work I just don’t appreciate. It just looks like scribbling to me. I’m sure he had a big message, but it’s not satisfying.
As far as the permanent collection, I liked the Calder collection, because Calder is just neat. They had a videotape of the Calder Circus, a set of wire figurines that he’d made and used to put on shows towards the beginning of his career, with trapeze artists flipping from one swing to the next. I also liked a work I saw by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, called “Oriental” or some such (seen at right). I’m not quite sure why; I think I liked the way it evoked shapes without quite making them explicit.
Afterwards, I walked back along Madison Avenue downtown. Madison Avenue is ridiculous. Every single high end designer I’ve heard of, and many I haven’t, had big stores along there. I’m blanking on the names now, other than Prada, but it was highly impressive. A one stop shopping expedition for the fashion-conscious. Except that I’m not willing to spend that kind of money on clothes, so I just walked on by.
I wandered over to the Times Square area to try to get rush tickets to Shockheaded Peter. Like Patti Lupone a couple days ago, Shockheaded Peter had been in San Francisco and I’d missed it. But tickets are expensive. I knew rush tickets went on sale at 6pm, and I got to the theater at about 6:10. All gone. They explained to the woman in front of me that people had camped out since 3pm to get the tickets. I’ll either have to pay up, or wait a long time. I’ll have to think about it.
I decided to head back to my place to figure out what to do next. I tried getting to the most direct subway line at Times Square, and got caught in a massive crowd of people. It was awful. They had closed one of the walkways, so you had to walk through a crowded platform to get to the other line, and people were crowding onto the platform from both ends, so it was pretty much a disaster. A few cops showed up and eventually stood at the top of the stairs to the platform, blocking anybody from entering so that those of us trapped on the platform could escape. I took another way home.
I thought about getting tickets to the newest Neil Labute play, in the East Village, but I was pretty much dead on my feet at that point, so I just headed back and took the evening off. I have to pace myself if I’m going to make it through three weeks of this vacation.
My friends at Squid:Labs are doing an installation at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum for an exhibition on “Extreme Textiles”. Their exhibit is called “Rope and Sound”, and it’s essentially a three-dimensional harp with three steel pillars each holding each other up with rope strung between them. The rope is Squid:Labs’ electronic rope, so the ropes are going to be hooked up to a computer which will then play sounds or music as the ropes are plucked. Should be really neat when it all comes together.
Anyway, installation was happening this week, and they needed some help with the physical labor of actually assembling the thing. And when they found out I was going to be there on vacation, they asked me if I’d be willing to lend a hand. I said sure, figuring that it’s not often one gets to help with a museum installation. And it was fun – we polished up the steel pillars, and then manhandled them into place on a scaffolding, which was needed because the sculpture is not self-supporting until a bunch of the ropes are tightened. Once in place, we started threading the ropes, which was a kind of a fun puzzle as we tracked down which ropes went where. A break for lunch, and then back for a few hours of tying knots and starting to tension the ropes, until the thing was stable. We removed the scaffolding, and voila. You can see a terrible picture taken with the Sidekick of it at this stage. I think I’ll be using my camera rather than my Sidekick from now on. Dan was going to spend the rest of the week finishing the connections, and then working out the software for connecting sound to movement. I’m hoping to stop by on Friday to see the (hopefully) finished piece.
Afterwards, we went back to where they were staying near the lower tip of Manhattan, went out to dinner at one of the Indian restaurants along 6th St near 1st Ave, and then I called it a night.
Monday morning, I had a brief crisis, when I woke up and found that the screen on my Sidekick had failed. It turns out that a Sidekick without a screen is completely useless. I used my host’s computer to find a nearby T-mobile store, and found out that my options were to (1) get a loaner phone and wait two weeks for a replacement, or (2) buy a new Sidekick II. Since I’d been thinking of getting a Sidekick II anyway, I decided to just spring for it. The transition was surprisingly painless – pop the SIM out of the old phone, pop it into the new phone, and all my information was there. Yay!
I read in TimeOut magazine that Patti Lupone was going to be doing her show, Lady with a Torch, at Carnegie Hall that evening, and that obstructed-view rush tickets were available at the box office for $10 starting at noon. I’ve adored Patti ever since singing behind her in Sweeney Todd, where she was just fabulous. I’d read about her new show last year when she was working on it in San Francisco, but when I found it was $100 or something outrageous, I decided to pass. However, for $10, I said sure.
From there, I decided to go to MOMA since I was in the area and since MOMA was pretty much at the top of my list of museums to see with the new redesign. On my way over, I stopped for lunch at a place called Joe’s Shanghai, which had these cool soup dumplings, which look like regular pork dumplings until you bite into them and they essentially explode because there’s soup inside. Took me a couple tries to figure out how to eat one without making a mess. They also had yummy scallion pies.
MOMA was fabulous. I love the new building. The collection was huge, but not as awe-inspiring as I’d imagined, partially because I’ve been spoiled by being a member of SFMOMA, which has regular rotating exhibitions of interesting modern work. For instance, I’d seen the epic scale photography of Andreas Gursky at SFMOMA, but was reminded of it by seeing it again at MOMA. Same for many of the great modern artists from Warhol to Pollock.
But the building was great. It’s got a central atrium that goes all the way up to a skylight over the sixth floor. Many of the galleries have windows peeking out at the atrium, so you can get glimpses of the rest of the museum. It reminds me of the Chinese Tea Garden I saw in Sydney, with its sense of discovery, the way that views were framed to provide interesting perspectives on the space, with unexpected connections between the different floors. I ended up taking a bunch of pictures from different perspectives, because it fascinated me so much.
After that, I came back to my place to relax for a bit before heading out to see Patti. I decided to get dressed up in my sportcoat and tie; I figured that, unlike San Francisco, East Coast concert-goers would have a sense of decorum. Alas, I was proven wrong. Barely a tie in sight, with a few audience members showing up in T-shirt and jeans.
I took the red-eye flight out of San Francisco. Normally, it’s not too big a deal for me because I can sleep on planes, but for some reason, I had a hard time sleeping this time around. Probably because I gloated to a coworker that I could sleep on planes. I did sleep for most of the flight, but mostly in 45 minute chunks or so. And, of course, the flight was only 4.5 hours, so I probably only got about 4 hours of sleep all told.
But I arrived, got my checked bag, and then navigated the subway system to the East Village. And, even better, the scheme that the guy I’m subletting from had cooked up to get me the keys worked out fine, which was the thing I was most worried about. So I’m crashing at this place near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. It’s a tiny place, but, hey, it’s bigger and yet cheaper than a hotel room.
The first thing I did was crash for another three hours of sleep, dragging myself out of bed at 12:30 to at least make an attempt to get myself onto New York time. I grabbed lunch at Rai Rai Ken, a ramen house that I’d read about in the New York Times travel section, and then went looking for the East Village Safari. I was, alas, unable to locate them, and so I was on my own for the afternoon.
First order of business: actually get a NYC map and/or guidebook. I’d meant to before I left, but had run out of time. I knew there was this awesomely huge used bookstore somewhere near where I was, but I couldn’t remember where. So I walked into a Barnes and Noble, picked up a guidebook, found the address of the Strand bookstore, and then went there to buy a guidebook. While poking around their New York guidebook section, I happened to see a New York >Access guide, which is edited by Richard Saul Wurman. I really liked Wurman’s book, Information Architects, so I was curious what the guidebook was like. It seemed to have a decent breakdown of the city, and good maps, and it was only $5 used, so I got it. Whee!
From there, I wandered up to Union Square and hung out there in the sun reading the guidebook, while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do this afternoon. I didn’t have any brilliant thoughts, so I figured I’d just wander through Greenwich Village and Soho, because that’s always fun. I don’t think I’d ever been in Soho during the day before – it’s fabulous. I loved browsing at moss, even though everything there was outrageously out of my price range. I was particularly amused by the “Internal Rolex” bracelet that I saw, designed by Leon Gilliam Ransmeier, which is a Rolex replica, wrapped in leather so that it is totally useless as a timepiece, and is merely a watch-shaped bracelet.
The other store I liked was Room and Board, which had a bunch of interesting furniture. They looked like an intermediate level between Ikea and Design Within Reach, which is where I aspire to be. I didn’t see much that would really work at my place, except for the Gallery leaning shelves, which I liked a lot. If I were ready to drop $1000 on bookshelves, I’d lean towards those, because I think they’d look good at my place.
And then I was tired of walking, so I saw a cafe that advertised Wifi access and bought a mocha. Alas, my computer can’t find a wireless network in range, so I don’t know what’s going on. But I figured I’d at least type up my notes so far. For kicks. Of course, this isn’t the deep thinking that I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not sure when I’ll get to that. I think my current plan is to hit a museum or other touristy thing in the morning/early afternoon, spend a couple hours each afternoon writing, and then head out to dinner with a friend, or to a club or show or something. Yeah. Something like that. We’ll see how it goes.
(later) After leaving the cafe, I wandered a bit more in SoHo, and saw a big building with a bunch of mannequins inside in a hella cool layout. With no clue what it was, I went inside, because I was curious. Turned out that it was the Prada flagship store, designed by Rem Koolhaas. Very neat layout. I didn’t even look at the clothes, though, because, well, that would be ridiculous.
And then I was exhausted, and returned to my room via the subway. At the airport, I got the one week unlimited ride for the subway for situations such as this, where it wasn’t _that_ far to walk (maybe a mile and a half), and it would have been hard to justify paying $2 to avoid that walk. But with an unlimited card, I could take the subway without guilt, and be less cranky when I got back. And the subway stop was near a bagel place, so now I’ve got bagels for breakfast.
I’ll venture out in a bit for dinner and maybe see if I can find a decent bar or club in the area. But I figured I’d get this posted just to see how this works – I haven’t found a Wifi access point yet, so I’m going to try posting this via a USB connection to my host’s computer (and yes, I tried just taking his internet cable and plugging in, but it didn’t want to talk to me, probably something to do with not being registered with his ISP. Whee!
[Bonus post that I wrote at the airport last night]
I liked this quote from Emotional Design:
“Cooperation relies on trust. For a team to work effectively each individual needs to be able to count on team members to behave as expected. Establishing trust is complex, but it involves, among other things, implicit and explicit promises, then clear attempts to deliver, and, moreover, evidence. When someone fails to deliver as expected, whether or not trust is violated depends upon the situation and upon where the blame falls.” (p.140)
This would seem to be the team equivalent of cognitive subroutines. I can imagine that analogous negotiation and trust-building is happening within the swirl of our subconscious as we navigate through the world. Stereotypes that seem to work well get reinforced, and encoded into cognitive subroutines. Assumptions that prove to be wrong are trusted less the next time, with more restrictions placed on their activation conditions.
It’s interesting to me because it provides an obvious extension of the cognitive subroutines theory to interpersonal interactions, at least in a team sense. I’ve talked about team building before (and actually say something very similar to Norman’s quote), and part of what I think makes a good team is that we can offload tasks onto other people; as I put it in that post, “my teammates trust me to deal with fixing the bugs; once it’s reported to me, they forget about it and move on.” A team can achieve more than the sum of its parts because each can farm out processing to others who are in a better position to handle a given situation.
It’s the cognitive equivalent of labor specialization. If I’m good at software, and my coworker isn’t, then it makes sense for them to ask me to perform a software task that they need to do, because I’ll do it in far less time than them. In return, my coworker who is better in lab may run an experiment for me. Both of us stick to what we’re good at, and we can leverage our expertise to make everybody more productive and efficient.
The other analogy that I like is that if we treat the brain as a set of cognitive subroutines that can call each other, then there’s no reason not to think of other people as subroutines that we can also call upon. When we first start working with another person, we don’t quite know what their API is or what their capabilities are, but as we learn to trust and respect them, we can learn to call upon them with little more overhead than we do a subroutine in our own head. It’s kind of a bizarre concept, but it’s the first step in the steps towards a Global Brain if it works.
I was reading Emotional Design by Don Norman the other day, and he was contemplating ways in which we could leverage emotional machines to improve the learning process. This got me kick-started again on thinking about applications of the cognitive subroutines theory that I’ve been playing with. As a side note, I think I’m finally emerging from the dearth of ideas I was suffering for a week or so. Apologies for the banality of posts during that time.
So the question of the day is: How do we leverage cognitive subroutines for the sake of learning? What does this theory tell us about how to teach people something new?
I covered this a little bit in the footnotes of that first post. To teach somebody a new physical action, it requires breaking it down into easily digestable chunks. Each chunk is practiced individually until it’s ingrained in the subconscious and can be performed autonomously. In other words, we build and train a cognitive subroutine that can then be activated with a single conscious command like “hit the ball” instead of having to call each of the individual steps like “take three steps, bring the arms back, jump, bring the right arm back cocked, snap the arm forward while rotating the body, and follow through”. Watching toddlers figure out how to walk is also in this category. At first, they have to use all of their concentration to figure out how to take a step, but within a short period of time, they just think “I wanna go that way” and run off.
For physical activities the analogy to cognitive subroutines is pretty straightforward, and was what I was thinking of when I first came up with this idea. How does it map to other, less concrete activities? Let’s take the example of math. We start out in math learning very simple building blocks, like addition and subtraction. We move from there to algebra where we build in an abstraction barrier. As we learn more advanced techniques from calculus to differential equations, we add more and more tools to our toolbox, each of which builds on the one before. Trying to teach somebody differential equations without them understanding calculus cold would be a waste of time. So in a relatively linear example like math, the analogy to cognitive subroutines is also straightforward.
What about a field like history? Here it becomes more difficult. It’s unclear what the building blocks are, how the different subfields of history interrelate, and what techniques are necessary at each level. Here we start to get a better picture of where the cognitive subroutines analogy may start to fail. It applies when there are techniques to be learned, preferably in a layered way where each technique depends on learning the one below it, much in the way that subroutines are built up and layered. Trying to fit more broad-based disciplines such as history into that framework is going to be a stretch.
Perhaps history might be a better example of the context-dependent cognitive subroutines, where we have a few standard techniques/theories that get activated by the right set of inputs. So we have our pet theory of socioeconomic development and see ways to apply it to a variety of different situations (I’m totally making this up, of course, since I’m realizing that I don’t actually know what a historian does). Actually, this makes a lot of sense. In fact, I’m doing it right now; I came up with a theory (cognitive subroutines), and am now trying to apply this theory everywhere to see how it fits. By trying it in a bunch of places, I’m getting a better sense of what the proper input conditions for the theory are, and can see how to refine it further.
So for history, the important thing to teach may not be individual theories, but the meta-theory of coming up with good theories in the first place. In other words, critical thinking skills. As mentioned in my new directions post, I think such skills are broadly applicable, from politics to history to evaluating advertising. With such meta-skills, there would be an infrastructure in place for building up appropriate cognitive subroutines, and for understanding the limitations of the cognitive subroutines we already have.
One last thought on the subject of cognitive subroutines and how they apply to learning. What does the theory have to say about memorization-based subjects? From medical school to history taught poorly, there are many subjects which are memorization-based. I don’t think there’s really anything to be gained here. Memorization, like cognitive subroutines, is all about repetition, but I don’t think that the cognitive subroutine theory gives us any new insight into how we can improve somebody’s memorization skills.
I also tend to think that memorization will become less and less useful moving forward, as I noted in my information carnivore post. Why memorize when you can Google? However, developing the cognitive filtering subroutines necessary to handle the flood of information available is going to be tricky. That was the point of that information carnivore metaphor, but it’s interesting that it comes back up again in this context.
Anyway. There’s some fertile ground here for thought, again trying to think of ways in which this theory can be less descriptive, and more prescriptive. I’ll have to spend some time trying to flesh things out.
I go back and forth on my feelings about Donald Norman. I think that his observation of The Design of Everyday Things was a really important insight in understanding how omnipresent the role of design is. I liked his idea of information appliances in The Invisible Computer. But I’ve always been left a little bit annoyed at how simplistic his analysis tends to be. Alas, Emotional Design continues in that vein.
Interestingly, Emotional Design ties into Blink and Sources of Power. In the prologue, Norman is trying to establish that “emotion is a necessary part of life” and then states “The affective system makes judgments and quickly helps you determine which things in the environment are dangerous or safe, good or bad.” Sounds an awful lot like thin-slicing to me. His ideas also share characteristics of Bloom’s inner-judges in Global Brain, as Norman refers to research showing that “positive emotions are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought” and anxiety tends to narrow thought processes, much like the Bloom’s inner-judges help reward creative behavior with positive emotion and vice versa.
So there’s not much that’s new to me in Emotional Design. I did like his partition of thought and design into the visceral (pre-conscious initial reactions), behavioral (learned structures corresponding to our experiences (which I think is essentially the same idea as cognitive subroutines)), and reflective (conscious thought, generalizations and recursion). He spends some time delving into how the three levels interact in design; for a good chef’s knife, it’s satisfying on the visceral level (“Ooh, shiny!”), behavioral level (it performs consistently and precisely), and reflective level (appreciating how its form follows its function). More importantly, he addresses situations where the three levels are in conflict, where something is viscerally attractive, but reflectively repugnant, like junk food, or viscerally repugnant and reflectively attractive, like most of modern art.
The rest of the book kind of meanders around discussing various aspects of this three-level approach to design, and then takes a bizarre turn into making the case for machine emotions. I think he’s trying to make the point that machines need to have the ability to learn autonomously and be able to express their inner state more effectively. In other words, we know that we get cranky when we get hungry. He suggests that machines should become cranky when they’re low on power, so that those interacting with them, whether machine or human, could know what’s going on internally. I think this is stupid – a power gauge is a much easier thing to read. I also think that the ability for a machine to learn reflectively, in the manner of the cognitive subroutines that I am suggesting as a model for our brains, is a far more difficult problem than Norman suspects.
There’s not a lot here. I finished the book yesterday, and it’s already pretty much completely faded from my consciousness. I’m glad I got it from the library, because I would have felt gypped if I’d bought it. It is encouraging in one sense – I think I have enough ideas from my blog in various forms to write a far more interesting and thought-provoking book. Now I just need to buckle down.
Clay Shirky had an interesting idea in an article over at Many-to-Many, where he divides the world between radial and Cartesian thinkers. Here’s how he makes the distinction:
Radial people assume that any technological change starts from where we are now – reality is at the center of the map, and every possible change is viewed as a vector, a change from reality with both a direction and a distance. Radial people want to know, of any change, how big a change is it from current practice, in what direction, and at what cost.
Cartesian people assume that any technological change lands you somewhere – reality is just one point of many on the map, and is not especially privileged over other states you could be in. Cartesian people want to know, for any change, where you end up, and what the characteristics of the new landscape are. They are less interested in the cost of getting there.
It’s a handy distinction. The radial thinker says “Okay, this is where we are, let’s see where we can go from here.” The Cartesian thinker says “Over there is where we need to be. I don’t care where we are, but let’s go that way.” It’s the practicalist vs. the idealist, the engineer vs. the scientist. Incremental improvement vs. paradigm shifts. Shirky applies the distinction to help dissolve some of the differing perspectives on Wikipedia, and clarifies why he thinks the two sides are talking past each other.
The interesting thing was what happened when I tried to figure out which kind of thinker I was. My first reaction was, “Oh, yeah, I’m totally a radial thinker”, thinking about my tendencies at work where I figure out the minimum change I can make to get something working right now. That’s partially out of efficiency (aka laziness), and partially a result of having seen far too many Cartesian thinkers get bogged down trying to do a total redesign in a world of changing requirements. So when presented with a feature request, I tend to take stock of what I have already implemented, and think about the easiest way to kludge it to add the feature, rather than spend (waste) time thinking about what future features might be added, thinking about how I should design to handle the most general case, etc. From this viewpoint, it seemed obvious that I was a radial thinker.
Then I thought about it some more, and realized that in my personal life, I’m far more of a Cartesian thinker. I have a vision of an ideal, but it’s far from what I currently have, and making a few minor changes will make very little headway in terms of moving me towards that ideal, so I don’t bother doing anything at all. We can see this in my lack of progress towards finding a new host for this blog, or towards becoming a social software programmer, or even in little things like how long it took me to buy a bed.
So now I’m both a radical and a Cartesian thinker. That doesn’t make sense. Except that I think it does, in light of my theory of context-activated cognitive subroutines. In one context, I think one way. In another, I think the other. When I poke and prod further, I can think of reasons why I have different opinions in different contexts; I’m a radial thinker at work because I’ve seen too many efforts fail at trying to achieve the ideal general case, whereas my approach of rapid prototyping and incremental improvement has done well for me so far. I’m a Cartesian thinker in my personal life because I tend not to compare myself to others, and instead compare myself to my potential, to a putative ideal version of myself. Different contexts, different identities.
And I can break it down even further. In my life at work as a programmer, I’m a radial thinker, as previously noted. In my dealings with management, though, I’m still an unrepentant idealist. I know there are reasons for timesheet software or process and micro-management, but I can see where I think we should be, and get really frustrated that we seem stuck in an entirely different part of the phase space. Such frustration is a Cartesian reaction, because Cartesian thinking (in Shirky’s definition) doesn’t accept reality as the starting point, but only as a possible destination. So even my work identity is fractured along these lines. Lots of grist for the cognitive subroutine theory in this seemingly simple observation of different thinking patterns.
I’ll close with some thoughts on the radial vs. Cartesian dichotomy that Shirky suggests. In the long run, I think the radial thinkers will have the advantage, for all the reasons that Shirky has mentioned previously with regard to Wikipedia. Cartesian thinkers spend a lot of time discussing how things should be, and complaining that the world doesn’t match the ideal they have in their head –
danah’s response illustrates this attitude where she says essentially that the radial thinkers’ improvements are horizontal moves that don’t address the underlying problems she was with Wikipedia (or Brittanica for that matter). Radial thinkers don’t spend their time exploring the entire possible phase space of what might be possible; they start with the way things are, and get to work changing it. It’s using one’s effort efficiently. In my work life, some of my most frustrating coworkers have been incredibly intelligent PhDs who want to spend several months perfecting a mathematical model or nailing down every possible contributing factor to an analysis, instead of saying “Okay, it’s good enough, let’s see what we can do.” Again, it’s the engineer vs. scientist viewpoint. There’s a place for the academics, and for the dreamers, to help imagine new ideals, and guide the incremental changes of the radial thinkers. But in the end, the radial thinkers are going to be the ones building tools and getting stuff done.
As I mentioned in my post on Firefly, I also got the DVD set of Wonderfalls in the same Amazon order. And I’ve watched that whole series now as well. My original review actually stands up pretty well even after watching the rest of the unaired episodes, in terms of describing the overall feel of the show.
I do think it was a pity that the show got cancelled. There were several excellent episodes that were never aired. Fortunately, the creators had a feeling they were going to be cancelled (they actually started their “Save our Show!” campaign before the pilot even aired according to one of the featurettes), so the thirteen episodes produced tell a relatively coherent story that has a happy ending.
I’m not sure whether the show’s premise would have held up long term, though. The talking animals schtick is very cute, but the need for the “muses” to be deliberately unclear (e.g. “Save him from her!”) to create wackiness and confusion gets more annoyingly obvious throughout the episodes. Of course, when the plot demands it, the muses can also be very clear (e.g. “Take a picture!” or “Lick the light switch!”). So they essentially end up as writer bailouts, letting the writer extricate themselves from situations at will. Or for writers to create ridiculous situations; the entire Heidi storyline, which dragged on for four episodes, was manufactured by the muses for no apparent reason. However, it let us see a lot of Heidi, played by Jewel Staite, who played the cute mechanic on Firefly, so that wasn’t so bad.
One thing I noticed while watching the series is that the show totally depended on the wonderfully expressive Caroline Dhavernas. Her annoyance and exasperation with the muses shines through, even as she grudgingly does their bidding. It was even more apparent when I watched a couple of the episodes with the commentary tracks turned on, and even without the dialogue, you could track what was going on just by watching her face. In fact, all of the actors are excellent. I happened across a site that has shooting scripts, and while the scripts are fun to read on their own, they definitely reach a new level of humor with the reading by the actors, either in their comic timing, or their facial expressions, or even just waiting a beat before delivering their lines. The co-creators lauded their actors on the commentary tracks, and I think the praise is well-deserved.
Anyway, yeah. I recommend the series, if you like screwball type comedy with an overlay of existential angst and confusion. Several of the episodes are really funny – I was watching an episode last night and just laughing out loud at some of the dialogue and absurd situations. Plus, it’s relatively cheap – $28 at Amazon for all thirteen episodes plus some featurettes – that’s $2.22 per episode! Thumbs up.
P.S. Parents are still in town, brain is still dead. No interesting thoughts. I’m hoping to get recharged next week when I head to New York. I’ve got a ton of backlogged ideas to work on, but just can’t quite get started on them.
Picked this up in my big library trip of a couple weeks ago. Again, recommended by a friend. Plus, I’ve been curious about Palahniuk since seeing Fight Club. I really like his stylized writing in a lot of ways, and it’s easy to see the resemblance to the style of Fight Club. I didn’t really connect to any of the characters, though, so I didn’t get into it as much as I do some other fiction. For me, fiction is all about identifying with characters, I think. The early years of Buffy, when the Scooby gang were all high school outsiders? Total identification. Gilmore Girls with Lorelai’s mother issues? Yup. Miles Vorkosigan’s brand of demented genius. Ender’s loneliness and supernatural observation skills. Pretty much all of the fiction I like has a central character that I identify with strongly. So when I don’t connect to the characters, I tend to feel eh about a book, no matter how beautiful or creative the writing. I’m just not enough of a literature geek yet, I guess.
