My beast of burden 😴

Spot the difference: the Death of Stewie or The Death of Marat?

I just received my copy of @alexbstoddard’s first book “INSEX.” I often did double takes on the astounding images, which in my experience, is a sign of great art. Even Stewie approved 👍

As of macOS Ventura 13.1… if you select a Shared Album in the sidebar of Photos and hit the delete key, the album will disappear. As if you suddenly deleted it 🙀

I accidentally did this on Dec 11. It was a scary enough experience, that I felt compelled to email Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior VP of Software Engineering. Craig sometimes replies to customer emails, so I figured it was worth a shot. I sent a follow-up email a few hours later:

Update and good news: since my dad owned that Shared Album, the album wasn't deleted. Instead, when I pressed the delete key, I actually removed myself from the album 🤦‍♂️ It's still terrible UX, but at least no data was lost. 

Less than a day later, Craig himself (!) actually emailed me back with this very kind reply, which I really appreciate. It turned a briefly traumatizing customer experience into a lovely story for me to share.

Eli Wiesel, KBE

In April 2012, Elie Wiesel visited Chapman University to take part in an extensive Q & A session. From my vantage point in the auditorium, it seemed that half of the questions, mostly asked by students, centered on morality in fictional scenarios. For example, In a fire, is it better if someone rescues more people, or rescues just the children?

Wiesel answered the same way, each time: “I don’t know. I don’t know the full story, so I can’t say.”

This clearly flustered the students asking these questions. (At one point, one of them exclaimed, “Really?!”) Wiesel didn’t come across as obstinate; rather, his answers came from a place of humility, nurtured over the course of a lifetime.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

An excerpt from the 1995 documentary Krzysztof Kieslowski: I am so-so…, taken after the interviewer, Krzysztof Wierzbicki, asks director Kryzstof Kieslowski how society should solve contemporary cultural issues. (They are both sitting next to a fireplace.)

“If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be sitting by some stupid fireplace, but in a president’s chair, telling everyone what to do to make it better. But I don’t know. Knowing isn’t my profession.”

Roger Deakins, CBE, ASC, BSC

In September 2015, cinematographer Roger Deakins participated in a Q & A session at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, after a screening of Sicario, which he shot with director Denis Villeneuve. I have listed some of Deakins’ answers below.

"How did you make the final car sequence in Prisoners so pretty?

We actually shot that scene on the last day of shooting, and kind of figured it out at the last minute. Much of the crew had already left set, I believe. But when you're in the middle of shooting, you do the best you can with the tools you have. [Shrugs]

In response to a requisite audience question about whether Deakins prefers to shoot with film or digital formats.

Well, I'm not really a technical person. I like images.

"Do you have any advice for aspiring cinematographers?"

The only thing I can really say is, find your own sensibility. You get hired for your eyes.

"Do you get frustrated when someone watches one of the big, beautiful films you've shot on an iPhone or iPad?"

Well, I once caught [Sicario director] Denis Villeneuve watching Citizen Kane on his iPhone, when we were on set. But I'm just happy if someone watches our movies." [Pauses and shrugs]

I don't know.

It was Christmas Day, which fell on a Wednesday in 2013. And Grandma Paula—82 years old and drifting toward the end of an agonizingly long battle with lung cancer—was only now catching up on the The Times' Sunday edition. I sat next to her at the kitchen table, keeping her company while futzing around on my phone. It must have been the late afternoon, as sunlight filtered through the partially closed blinds and bathed the kitchen in sepia.

I glanced at Grandma, then at the front page of The Times, angled toward me as she powered through the meat of the paper. A headline about the newly elected Pope Francis occupied much of that page.

Now, my Great-Grandma Becker, Grandma Paula's mother, hated the Catholic Church. She felt that they were complicit with the Nazis, who murdered most of her family/my family in Poland. And Great-Grandma Becker made sure to pass that … passion on to her daughter.

"So," I said, breaking the long silence between us. "What do think of the new pope?"

"Not much!" Grandma said.

She chuckled softly, smiled at me, and went on reading her favorite newspaper.

1: Mindy

On a recent morning, I attempted to drive my trusty old Prius, Mindy, and by instinct, toggled the gear selector into [D] (as in “Drive Mode”). It was at this moment that Mindy decided to go sentient, filling the cabin with an incessant, deafening tone, accompanied by a surfeit of red warning lights & rather ominous instructions.

After pulling into a nearby driveway, and averting a mild panic attack, I wondered what terrible, terrible thing could have befallen Mindy. “Park”? “Batteries”? “Transaxle"? Those words could mean: an imminent car-wide failure, or that I had somehow trashed the transmission, or worse yet, that the battery pack had failed.

As that display had instructed, going into [P] made all the noise & lights go away. I tried [D], once more; Mindy screamed. A couple minutes later, I took a closer look at one of the warning lights—the “door open” one.

Turns out, the driver’s-side door was ever-so-slightly open. Once I closed it, [D] worked as expected, without any further intrusions from Mindy.

2: Air France Flight 447

This incident reminded me of a Vanity Fair feature, written by William Langewiesche, on Air France Flight 447. Investigators had little idea why the Airbus A330 crashed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 2009—until search teams recovered the black boxes from the ocean floor in 2011. Investigators were then able to piece together the events that caused the plane to dive from 36,000 feet to the ocean’s surface in under four minutes.

Langewiesche’s reporting on the A330’s automated flying & warning systems grabbed my attention when I originally read the article last year. That plane’s seemingly minor design issues mirror those of Mindy. For example, the black boxes revealed that crew members were overwhelmed by confusing & intrusive automated warnings:

In the cockpit, the situation was off the scale of test flights. After [Captain] Dubois arrived [from his break], the stall warning temporarily stopped, essentially because the angle of attack was so extreme that the system rejected the data as invalid. This led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time [First Officer & Pilot Flying] Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up, assuming he was hearing the stall warning at all.

[Emphasis mine.]

Another design quirck, which only added to the confusion once the inexperienced pilots’ Crew Resource Management (CRM) protocols broke down:

[T]he pilot and co-pilot’s side-sticks are not linked and do not move in unison. This means that when the Pilot Flying deflects his stick, the other stick remains stationary, in the neutral position. If both pilots deflect their sticks at the same time, a DUAL INPUT warning sounds, and the airplane responds by splitting the difference. To keep this from causing a problem in the case of a side-stick jam, each stick has a priority button that cuts out the other one and allows for full control.

The arrangement relies on clear communication and good teamwork to function as intended. Indeed, it represents an extreme case of empowering the co-pilot and accepting CRM into a design. More immediately, the lack of linkage did not allow [Backup Pilot] Robert to feel [First Officer] Bonin’s flailing.

[Emphases mine.]

Robert actually thought he was in control of the plane for those final minutes, but Bonin had flipped the “priority button” switch on his own side-stick. In the midst of the commotion on the flight deck, Robert couldn't really tell that he wasn't in control.

3: The Point

Mindy & the A330’s automated systems technically worked as designed. If Mindy’s driver’s-side door is ajar, the vehicle automatically goes into [N], presumably so a driver won't fall out of the car when it's on the freeway. And the display gives correct information: the battery system isn’t capable of being charged when it’s in [N]. But Mindy's blaring warning tone & opaque instructions didn’t translate to a remedial action that I could take.

These particular systems exhibit Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), described by Tim Urban, in his eye-opening article, The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence, as:

[Computers that] only take in stagnant information and process it. To be human-level intelligent, a computer would have to understand things like the difference between subtle facial expressions, the distinction between being pleased, relieved, content, satisfied, and glad, and why Braveheart was great but The Patriot was terrible.

How do ANIs' problem-solving capabilities compare to those in humans?

Hard things—like calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation—are mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things—like vision, motion, movement, and perception—are insanely hard for it. Or, as computer scientist Donald Knuth puts it, “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking,’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking.'

We are in a transitionary period, where computers are currently capable of doing only grunt work extremely well; people are still required to make sense out of all that information & act on it. Mindy and the A330’s systems worked as originally designed, but the engineers who created them failed to take into account how people, in real-world situations, might interact with them.

Systems that are designed, from the start, with people in mind offer actual remedies & choices that can save lives. At a minimum, there shouldn’t be a need for panicked Prius owners to flee to the internet because of a startling warning.

N.B. #1: A couple years ago, I wrote a nerdy article for Yahoo about the history of and technical challenges surrounding frame rates. Unfortunately, Yahoo removed its Featured Contributor website, so the articles I wrote for them no longer exist. This is a fragmented attempt to reconstruct and expand on my original piece.

David S. Cohen, writing for Variety last December on director Peter Jackson's approach to the aesthetics of the second installment of The Hobbit Trilogy:

"It was interesting to try to interpret what people’s reaction was,” Jackson says. He concluded the problem was that the image looked like HD video, and was simply sharper than people are used to in cinema.

“So what I did is work that in reverse,” says Jackson. “When I did the color timing this year, the color grading, I spent a lot of time experimenting with ways we could soften the image and make it look a bit more filmic. Not more like 35 mm film necessarily, but just to take the HD quality away from it, which I think I did reasonably successfully.”

Jackson’s tweaks sound like a post-mortem stopgap, as if he’s trying to amend a poorly executed paint job. The first film has a simple, but fatal, flaw: it doesn't have a point-of-view. The filmmakers lose track of whose story to tell—it should be Bilbo Baggins’, obviously—and every aspect of the production, from the acting to the cinematography to the production design to the sound design, suffers from this lack of focus.

But this matter can’t be closed with that terse a verdict. By shooting The Hobbit at 48 frames per second (FPS), Jackson and his collaborators made a worthy attempt at weaning audiences off movies that remain needlessly beholden to a recording / filming / projection standard of 24 FPS.

An excerpt, from research I did for that now-lost article from 2012:

For over 80 years, films have been shot and projected at 24 FPS. Studios didn’t establish this standard because it was perfect; they just needed film to run at a regular speed for playing back sound…

The cinema “look” we are familiar with was just a compromise from the late 1920s, after a sound engineer averaged out how fast theaters were projecting films. Many theaters at the time played their movies back faster than was intended, to get audiences in and out of their seats faster.

If you've made it this far, you owe it to yourself to watch this fantastic presentation on the current state of frame rates by Bruce Jacobs, Mark Schubin, Douglas Trumbull, and Larry Thorpe, who are, collectively, formidably erudite.

Off the bat, Mark Schubin offers this money quote:

There is absolutely nothing special about 24 frames per second. There is no particular psychological reason for it, no mathematical reason for it.

The Man has been giving my classmates and me a tour of his company’s state-of-the-art facilities these past several hours. Unlike many peons working in Hollywood, he’s dressed sharply, in a fine suit and dress shoes. The company recently completed an impressive restoration of a 50-year-old epic, so I believe the Man’s sartorial instincts are justified.

But he’s been unintentionally rubbing my professor and classmates the wrong way with certain off-the-cuff remarks. For instance, his company’s post-production capabilities allow producers to “fix the frame" if they see something they don’t like. Things come to a head when the Man flippantly says that he and his company have never come across a project shot in 30 FPS.

My professor speaks up: “I’m a fan of 30 frames per second. It’s a shame it never really caught on.”

The Man remains silent for several, pregnant seconds. He sticks a hand in his jacket pocket.

“Really.”

“Yes.” My professor sticks to his guns. “I always felt 24 frames per second had too much strobing. It just has too many compromises.”

There's a truth to what my professor says. And there's a reason why Douglas Trumbull spent the 1970s and '80s developing Showscan. The ASC Manual devotes scores of pages to charts that illustrate how fast a camera operator should pan if he's using different focal lengths, because it's easy for objects to look like they're strobing, particularly on larger screens. Another excerpt from my research:

There tends to be a lot of flickering at 24 FPS, which becomes particularly noticeable the larger and brighter a screen becomes. If a character moves a bit during an IMAX screening, for instance, she’ll move the equivalent of several feet on-screen. That displacement can be jarring and exhausting for audiences to endure.

Consider It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The filmmakers, knowing that their film would be projected on larger screens, chose to shoot at 30 FPS. They understood that audiences would inexplicably feel more exhausted if they had to endure a three-hour movie projected at 24 FPS, because they would unconsciously attempt to fill in the on-screen displacement, those gaps between frames and movements.

Solutions / Paradigms / the Future

In The Hobbit, was anyone else bothered by the way characters moved when they were in smaller spaces, like the hobbits’ homes in the Shire? Something about the higher frame rate made them look awfully twitchy, like trapped hummingbirds flitting about in a flask.

In order for movies with higher frame rates to catch on, filmmakers and actors need to develop a new aesthetic, a new approach to their craft.

Here are a few changes that would help audiences to be more accepting of movies shot with higher frame rates, under the current paradigm:

• Production designers and art directors may have to build larger-than-normal sets.
• Camera operators and dolly grips may have to slow down their movements, so audiences don’t perceive their work as being subjected to a VHS-style fast-forward.
• Actors may have to modulate their timing and blocking, to avoid the trapped hummingbird effect.

Higher frame rates have the potential to create new paradigms that enable filmmakers to expand audience’s expectations for what’s possible with recorded media. But this potent tool must be thoroughly considered from the very start of a project (i.e., while writing a script)—not two movies into a multi-billion-dollar trilogy.

N.B. #2: This post’s title was inspired not by Back to the Future, but by the 1979 Wings album, Back to the Egg.[1] My former housemate Judah hung an LP of Back to the Egg on the wall of his bedroom because it made for a decent poster. So even though I’ve never listened to the album, I nonetheless have fond memories associated with visiting Judah’s room and seeing that bizarre photo.

Let's delve into a new and superfluous bit of technology: the Pono Player.

Yes, it looks like a Toblerone. And something about the design harks back to the Game Boy Advance SP. The oversized "Plus" (aka, "volume increase") button looks so much like the Game Boy's D-Pad, I absentmindedly kept clicking different parts of the button, expecting my inputs to affect on-screen navigation.

But not to worry, the Pono Player has a touch screen—albeit an awful, pixelated, sluggish one that looks worse than an iPod Photo's. On the plus side, the garish, Pikachu-yellow-colored silicon case feels surprisingly comfortable in hand. I imagine this is the type of material John Siracusa pines for in iPhones, which have a tendency to slide off armchairs because of their aluminum chassis.

My good friend Max preordered a Pono Player during the surprisingly successful Kickstarter campaign. Other Max is bullish on the device’s potential to increase people’s awareness of high-resolution audio. And if it makes my friend happy, then I’m happy for him.

But he also wanted to prove to me that it could and should also make me happy. What songs do you want to listen to, Other Max texts me the night before we’re to meet up. I suggest he have songs off Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Peter Gabriel’s So handy, because I’ve grown up listening to both albums.

It’s futile to impart my impressions of the device’s sound quality because there were too many variables in my “test.” The 24-bit version of So seemed to hold up better in busier sections, compared to the CD version I’m used to, while the drums on Rumours sounded muddy and flat. But I was listening to songs on Other Max’s noise-canceling Bose headphones, instead of my usual set-up: a pair of Sony headphones plugged into a MacBook Pro’s 1/8" audio port.

What role does the Pono Player actually serve? When describing the digital music explosion of the 2000s, audiophiles tend to take a fall of mankind approach. They feel that the vast majority of people were duped into buying low-fidelity songs that sacrificed quality for the convenience of portability.

And while there’s truth to that—particularly in the early days of DRM-ed, 128 kbps MP3s and AACs—people have a tough time distinguishing between lossless and lossy audio. (I highly recommend checking out Marco Arment’s thoughts on the real-life effectiveness of high-resolution audio.)

Neil Young, the founder of Pono, promises to take things a step further. His player is capable of playing back 24-bit audio files, not just 16-bit files that most consumer DACs are limited to playing. In the current market, 24-bit-capable DACs cost over $1,000, while the Pono Player costs a mere $400.

But again, IRL, people normally can’t tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio files, no less 24-bit and 16-bit ones. By design, the Pono Player encourages listeners to use it on the go, a use-case where differences in encoding quality are largely irrelevant because of extraneous background noise and activity.

I’m far more worried about the recording and mastering of music itself than the quality of the digital package containing that music. I didn’t know why contemporary recordings sounded bad until I read Greg Milner’s fantastic book, Perfecting Sound Forever. Milner’s sobering chapters on the ongoing loudness war—which has resulted in songs that are literally painful to listen to—show how important it is for consumers to be discerning and proactive about the quality of music.

Does the Pono Player do anything to aid the good guys (i.e., audiophiles and music-lovers) in this war? It’s a conversation starter, for sure, but ultimately, it’s an expensive niche product.

Erin Sherbert, writing for SF Weekly on Wed, Aug 27:

The Medical Examiner’s Office this morning said it was 22-year-old David Getman who was hit and killed by a Muni bus earlier this week. 

According to police, Getman, a Berkeley resident, was walking along Lyon Street near Geary Boulevard early Monday morning when he was struck by a 38 Gear bus…

This is incredibly sad news, which I just belatedly found out about. David and I met in the fall of 2010, through our work at The Daily Californian. (He had just begun his studies at UC Berkeley; I was a senior.) Even in the early stages of his professional writing career, David had a tremendous, one-in-a-million voice. Take the lede from his review of a Ryan McGinley photography exhibit:

Stripped of clothing and inhibitions, Ryan McGinley’s nymph-like models bound through nature: They climb trees, roll down sand dunes and splash in waterfalls. It makes for an atmosphere at once sensuous and innocent, like his photographs were shot in the Garden of Eden, if Eve hadn’t taken a bite out of that apple and Adam was bi-curious.

That voice—conversational and slyly droll—was something I always looked forward to reading throughout his stint at The Daily Cal.

I’m not going to lie, I had a crush on the guy. He looked like David Byrne, only taller, lankier, more Jewish, and more adorkable. I was disappointed when David turned me down, but he did so in a kind and direct way that’s rare in the gay dating scene (and even rarer among 18-year-olds).

Regrettably, we didn’t stay in touch after I graduated from Berkeley in 2011. I thought we might be able to catch up in person one day, since I lived under the illusion that people in their twenties are practically invincible.

It doesn’t help that the articles about David’s death lack details. What was he doing in San Francisco around 1 a.m. on a Monday? Isn’t there more information about the Muni bus and driver? These unanswered questions almost compel me to start a Serial-like investigation.

But in the end, David and I were just acquaintances.

It would be an understatement to say I’m a fan of Stanley Kubrick. A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove and The Killing are among my favorite films. And Kubrick is directly responsible for sparking my passion for cinematography.

I found the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition at LACMA a letdown. But I'm worried the exhibition may have done more harm than good to casual visitors. Although it closed last month, the exhibition will travel to other museums over the next several years. I’m going to focus on three specific issues, in the hopes of sparking a discussion on how best to approach a program about Stanley Kubrick.

The Layout

The exhibition is most successful at the beginning. Visitors enter a pitch-black space, illuminated only by a pair of projected scenes from Kubrick’s films. In the dark, I could make out fellow visitors sitting on benches or leaning against the back wall, taking in the images. After a few moments, I noticed an opening ahead, between the two screens, leading to a large, white-washed room.

Museum-goers are familiar with this type of transitionary space. It functions much like the air gaps on modern airplanes, which physically separate the cockpit’s and passengers’ electronic systems, to reduce the risk of interference. In the Kubrick exhibit, this space serves two essential purposes: 1) To bring visitors into a movie-going-like state of receptiveness; and 2) to create a barrier against the outside world within a relatively small floor plan. It also reminded me a bit of an actual cinema — or, more tangentially, outer space.

But up ahead, in that white-washed room, lies a disastrous design flaw. Upon reaching the Dr. Strangelove junction, my friend Patrick and I faced a conundrum. On the left, the exhibit wound backward and seemed to reach a dead end. On the right, we spotted a sunlight-filled hallway with people milling about. Drawn by the light and movement, we naturally headed to the second hallway.

But there was nothing there but posters for Kubrick’s unfinished Aryan Papers project. Patrick and I stood stupidly in the middle of the stream of people for several long seconds before realizing:  Yep, this is the exit. As it turns out, we should have taken a left down that narrower, more circuitous hallway.

This design flaw is the equivalent of a theater’s house lights coming on. It completely destroyed the movie-going-like illusion set up by the opening Air Gap. And it made me begin to question the rest of the exhibition.

The Details

Remember that white-washed room I mentioned earlier? On one side, visitors find a wall coated with posters from various Kubrick films. In the middle, visitors can ogle at a glass-covered case, filled with lenses used on Kubrick’s sets. The posters and lenses make it apparent that the curators intend for this exhibition to be all about Kubrick’s work. To put this philosophy another way, Let the artist’s work speak for the artist himself. (There isn't anything inherently wrong with this approach, but I'll talk about the downsides later.)

The exhibition’s superficial quality comes to a head in the Barry Lyndon section. The curators summarize the film’s groundbreaking cinematography in a single sentence (I’m paraphrasing here): "Kubrick used lenses that created a more painterly feel."

I have no idea what this means. Maybe they’re referring to the specially adapted, NASA-made lens that Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott used. That lens could open up to a then unheard of F-Stop of 0.7. This means that, even though Alcott was able to light interior sets with only practical lights, there was essentially no depth of field. If an actor moved, the shot would be out of focus. This method of shooting was just as risky and revolutionary as Gordon Willis’s eye socket-shadow-inducing toplight in The Godfather.

But how does such a lens produce a painterly feel? Perhaps by relying on practical lights that can be seen in the frame, rather than large lamps hung on pipes? Or perhaps because a lens with such a wide aperture is theoretically more likely to flare, resulting in a lower-contrast image. Which maybe some art historians consider a more painterly aesthetic?

The film’s painterly quality doesn’t really have anything to do with the lenses. It has much more to do with the ending compositions of many of the film’s shots, which adhere to real life paintings that Kubrick and Alcott extensively researched and referenced.

The curators’ decision to omit — or, more disturbingly, their ignorance of — any of these details is mind-boggling, especially considering that that special lens is actually in the lens display case near the exhibition’s beginning. This omission is a disservice to visitors, who wouldn’t otherwise know the risks Kubrick and his team took in making Barry Lyndon.

The Sex

In a recent review, Anthony Lane described the strange costumes and rituals in Eyes Wide Shut as “the asexual’s idea of what sex is meant to look like.” This synopsis seems spot on. To many viewers, sitting through Eyes Wide Shut can be an insufferable experience. Until they realize that Kubrick is telling the story from the perspective of Tom Cruise’s character, who, as an asexual person, can’t comprehend what sex means. (Patrick told me, “‘Let’s fuck’ may be the best closing line in any director’s filmography.”)

I have no idea if Kubrick was asexual or a sociopath. But — it could explain why his films are, well, the way they are. It would explain why HAL 9000, a supercomputer, shows far more emotion than any human. Or why, in The Killing, Marie Windsor’s femme fatale-to-end-all-femme fatales is so capable of manipulating Elisha Cook, Jr.’s milquetoast-to-end-all-milquetoasts. Or why Kubrick seemed drawn to sociopathic characters like Barry Lyndon, or Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

But this is all speculation. Remember that white-washed room? And letting a filmmaker’s work speak for itself? This approach doesn’t work with Kubrick. I suspect visitors would have much better appreciated the Eyes Wide Shut section if the exhibition had talked more about the director's personal life. How did he get along with people? Did he have any family or children?

In the Lolita section, I looked in the margins of a draft of the script, and spotted a fascinating Kubrick-written annotation: "I should love to get hold of a real French girl."

I'm very curious what he meant by that, but I doubt we'll ever know. The only objects in the Eyes Wide Shut section are those “asexual” costumes and a nebulous description on the significance of the color red in Kubrick's films.

So, what is the exhibition’s intended audience? For diehard Kubrick fans, it’s neat to see the actual props, but the superficiality of the exhibition leaves them hanging. I worry casual visitors will feel they’ve learned all they need to know about the filmmaker. After all, they visited a museum exhibit titled STANLEY KUBRICK. It’s a tragedy they won’t know what they’re missing.