Syd Mead and Third Tuesday

A Better Blade Runner and the Designer Behind its World

Before I got started on redesigning this blog, I did get to spend an evening hearing stories from a real designer. Last Wednesday evening’s talk by Syd Mead was a mind-blower.

Before his talk, however, the SIG-CHI Chapter of Vancouver, who were hosting the evening’s event, made some announcements, and then… well, the best description of it might be a ‘happening’.

Here’s a video that someone took of it:

(For those who can’t see the video, essentially, the lights went off and 2 lightweight balls of stretched fabric enclosing multi-coloured lights were tossed over the audience. They were about 7 or 8 feet in diameter, and changed hue every few seconds or so. The crowd happily bounced the balls around the hall, reminding me of those beach balls that get bounced around over the crowds at political conventions. Accompanying the bouncing balls, which were called ‘Zygotes’, courtesy of Tangible Interaction Design was a sort of processed audio, from sensors responding to impacts as the balls bounced off the crowd or the walls and ceiling.

The main event followed: Syd Mead. Mead is the designer of a half a dozen films, including the science fiction classics Tron and Blade Runner. He spoke about his work, using a Quicktime movie to show several decades of illustrations of futuristic cars, buildings, cities and other artifacts of the future that were inside his head and now, perhaps, inside our own as well. There is a DVD of his work as a ‘Visual Futurist’, containing much of the material from his lecture, as well as interviews with others about him and his work. Here’s the trailer, from his web site (check out the high definition version there, it’s well worth seeing at a larger size):

He’s not only a brilliant designer, but he was a good speaker as well, commenting on his work and influences. He showed probably 50-75 examples of his work over the past 50 years or so in various games, cartoons, movies, cars, and industrial design projects. I was surprised to hear that the two artists who influenced him the most were the Baroque painter Caravaggio and 19th/early 20th century illustrator, Maxfield Parrish. As one person interviewed in the trailer put it, Syd Mead is essentially an ‘18th Century Man moved to the 20th and 21st Century’. Many others spoke of the ‘reality’ of his vision, that it had gone through much of the evolution and testing related to a product, building, or technology, but entirely in his own mind.

After the talk we saw a screening of the Final Cut (or so it’s now known) of ‘Blade Runner’, a film that . That screening, in and of itself was fascinating as well. The version has none of the film noir, Raymond Chandler-style voice over by Harrison Ford, and there are quite a few scenes either lengthened, added or in one particularly critical case, omitted (I won’t spoil it if you don’t already know). As I was watching it, I kept marveling at the consistency and richness of the visual environment. The only giveaways that Mead’s vision (like Kubrick’s) of the future wasn’t 100% correct was the appearance of the Pan Am logo on a few electronic billboards. Boy, nobody saw that airline as going away, and its logo still looks fine in all of the visualizations of our future.

Third Tuesday

Last night was the monthly meeting of Third Tuesday, a combination presentation and mixer, focusing on (but not entirely limited to) marketing, web 2.0 and the new ’social media’ that takes place, whenever possible, on the third Tuesday of the month. Last month, Writer and Social Media Evangelist/Consultant, Monica Hamburg introduced many who attended (myself included) to the concept of crowdsourcing. This month, Local Vancouver Technologist, Writer, Raconteur and Miscellanist (that’s how his web site puts it) Darren Barefoot gave an excellent ‘case study’ that explained how his marketing company, Capulet Communications got the attention of the web’s movers and shakers through an online demo of his client’s product. Most surprising detail of the campaign? To invite key people to the online demo (actually, a faux company’s Intranet Wiki), they sent invitations to about 35 of them via snail mail. That’s right, email has produced so much noise and clutter (read: SPAM) that the best way to get to some people is the old fashioned way. It reminded me of an Isaac Asimov short story where a bunch of military scientists realize that the best way to compute some missile trajectories is through some lost ancient techniques, known as ‘multiplication’ and ‘long division’ performed by a soldier with (*gasp!*) a pencil and paper… There was no mention of telegrams or signaling fires, so I’m going to assume that those ‘Employee kits’ sent via Courier were as far back in technology as he was willing to go.

I met up many friends and acquaintances, and am glad to see that the summer season (and mostly sunny skies) has not meant that everyone is heading for the beach, only to reconnect up in the fall. At least, not yet.

Things to Do When You are Between Jobs

It’s been a little over a week before my last day at IBM. I was frankly blown away by the good-bye that I got from coworkers that Friday. We all went out to a Thai feast in Burnaby (and by Thai feast, I mean it just kept coming and coming until we started giggling as each dish was brought to the table; Pad Thai? Sure, Crispy Fish with sauce? Why not!? More Stir-Fried Vegetables? Of course!)

I packed up my desk (I had spent over a week moving books and toys from it to home in half a dozen trips). It was a strange time, with my time alloted to the project over, and work still needing to be done the project I’ve been working on. I hope that I haven’t left too much hanging; Some of it was dependent on details of features that had not been defined yet, but where I had to leave wireframes (which are essentially diagrams of how screens should look and what should be on them and where) partially finished, I tried to make it clear how they could be completed. I said many good-byes to friends and colleagues, and drove home from Burnaby, a little dazed (hey, it was probably all that food at lunch).

On Saturday, we decided to play tourist all over again. We went to the open house of CityTV and took a station tour, meeting most of the crew of Breakfast Television (which I must confess, we’re not regular viewers of, but it was fun, nevertheless). I won a CityTV Umbrella, and we got some Cold Stone Creamery Ice Cream at the end of the tour. I like the station; It’s small and has a lot of personality, and they run Jeopardy each evening (and also carry Reaper, which is a lot of fun and another series filmed here).

Saturday Night, I went to the ticket office at the Orpheum just before the Symphony Concert, and got a last-minute seat for the concert (only $15!). I heard the VSO play one of my favourite pieces, Prokofiev’s Third Symphony. I love it because it’s mostly loud and fast, and almost never lets up. In particular, the third movement is some of the wildest and most vivid music that Prokofiev ever wrote, and much of the drama of the piece is due to the fact that it’s taken from his opera ‘The Flaming Angel’, which chronicles a young nun’s psychotic breakdown and pursuit of a man she believes is an angel, complete with an on-stage exorcism and chase through the streets. Not your usual opera fare, and certainly not your usual Symphony. The orchestra did a fine job, but I suspect that it was too racy for the crowd, who didn’t give it as much of a standing ovation as they did for the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto in the first half. Ah, when will they stop doing this?! Once again, people, when every performance gets a standing ovation, it ceases to mean anything!

The rest of the weekend was a bit quieter, but things picked up again today, with a job interview. I’m not going to write more about that until things settle down either way. Pam also has a lead on a contract, so it’s probable that the free time between engagements for both of us is probably going to come to an end soon.

Tomorrow evening is a special SIGCHI event: the film designer Syd Mead (who was responsible for the revolutionary sets and scenery of Blade Runner) will be in town speaking, followed by a screening of the final cut of the movie.

Remembering Leonard Rosenman, Film and Concert Composer

James Dean was already dead before I was born, but nevertheless, I couldn’t help but marvel at his performances in the movies Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. In fact, I admit it: I’m a big James Dean fan, even if there are only 3 movies. I vividly remember seeing those movies when I was a teenager at a repertory cinema (now there’s something that has gone away, a victim of DVD rentals and plasma screens), with Cynthia Nikitin, a friend who I still keep in touch with and is hopefully going to be visiting us here in Vancouver later this spring.

Dean’s movies, especially East of Eden, made a great impact on me. The emotions and moods that made up Cal’s world didn’t seem all that far from my own adolescent thoughts and feelings. I also remember that I immediately loved the soundtrack, which was as rich and complicated as the film’s plot, direction and acting, filled with angst and conflict. In that incredible scene where Cal’s father rejects his gift (money to pay him back what he’d lost in his refrigerated vegetable debacle — it’s no good because it was an ill-gotten gain from the war economy), I remember how Elia Kazan’s camera shifted to a strange tilt (mirroring the off-centre relationship between Cal and his father). I also remembered the brutal, stabbing music accompanying the trip that Cal takes his brother Aron to see his mother (now a Madame at a brothel in Salinas instead of being dead, as he had been told), an act of desperation and lashing out at his father and brother. It’s strong, angular, and very dissonant music, sounding far more like the works of Arnold Schoenberg than Hollywood.

There’s a reason that East of Eden’s music is closer to The Second Viennese School than Sunset Boulevard: the composer of the score was Dean’s piano teacher, New York roommate and friend Leonard Rosenman. Rosenman died yesterday at the age of 83.

When Dean got his first acting break, he introduced Elia Kazan to Rosenman, and that’s how Rosenman got his first break as a film composer. He had actually already studied with Schoenberg, and also with the Italian composer, Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood on a fellowship (a place I attended as well). He had all the credentials of a New York Intellectual 1950s composer, and if things had gone the usual way, he would have probably become a professor at some college, teaching Music Theory and Composition, and writing an oeuvre of chamber music with the occasional orchestral commission, if he was lucky. (This is a career that for me as well, is the road not taken). That all changed after the film work. Rosenman despaired that his East Coast colleagues felt he had ’sold out’ and wouldn’t even look at his serious pieces (much less perform them) after he left New York and the New Music scene. He eventually got some performances, but the move to LA meant that he had to channel his craft into film. By doing so, I think that Rosenman stands as one of the few bridges between Expressionist concert music (Schoenberg, et al), and cinema in the 1950s and 60s.

Both Schoenberg and Dallapiccola were serial composers, and it’s still difficult to say assess just what kind of an affect they had on music, even though it’s been a century (!) since Schoenberg wrote the first of his works that abandoned tonality. If Schoenberg’s techniques, or at least the sound world he gave birth to, were to hit the mainstream, East of Eden is one of those films where one of his pupils actually got through to the masses. The Expressionist aesthetic of that movie’s soundtrack is as close as Schoenberg’s sound as you ever hear in film from that era. It’s not just East of Eden, either. Rosenman also wrote the score to Fantastic Voyage in 1966, and that score is a dead ringer for Schoenberg’s ‘Five Pieces for Orchestra’ of 1909. It still strikes me as amazing that the science fiction movie music accompanying miniaturized scuba divers and a nuclear submarine repairing the body of a scientist really had its roots in music written for the concert hall some 57 years earlier!

In some ways, Jerry Goldsmith (who also died recently in 2004) represented the bridge between Stravinsky and perhaps Bartok and cinema, but Rosenman is, I think, truly the heir to Schoenberg.

Rosenman had a long an fruitful career in Hollywood. Unfortunately, In recent years he’d succumbed to frontotemporal dementia. I hope that some of his concert and film music gets played. I discovered that the iTunes store indeed had a wonderful recording (far better than the original soundtrack orchestra) by San Francisco composer John Adams conducting the London Sinfonietta in the music from East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. It’s definitely worth getting.

A Movie to Look Forward To

There are many movies that I look forward catching this coming season. I can’t wait to see the screen version of The Golden Compass, after having loved the book of the same name by Phillip Pullman. The other book that is now a film is I Am Legend and it also looks interesting. Get Smart, a TV comedy series that I loved as a kid, looks wonderfully silly with Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart. Today I found out about one that I hadn’t expected at all, and probably because it’s a musical.

I’m not usually a fan of musicals. The gee-whiz corn-fed wholesomeness of Oklahoma, Carousel or South Pacific is just not my cup of tea. I can do without the Disney tourist attractions like The Lion King, and Beauty and Beast, and can’t stand anything by the sugary yet tasteless Andrew Lloyd Webber. There are probably only about 3 musicals I really do like: Bernstein’s West Side Story (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and is Pam’s favourite music of all time), Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George and also his Sweeny Todd.

I pretty much go for anything Tim Burton does. To me, he is the morbid genius who puts the cough in Kafkaesque, so it’s his adaptation of Sweeny Todd that I’m surprised to finding myself anticipating. If it weren’t enough that it’s a Tim Burton production, the cast includes Johnny Depp, Helena Bohnam Carter, Alan Rickman and Sacha Baron Cohen. With a cast like that, I can’t imagine it being anything less than fascinating. I thought Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas (and yes, I know that he didn’t actually direct that, but was a producer) successfully linked an Edward Gorey sensibility to a score by Danny Elfman that sounded at times like Kurt Weill’s The Three Penny Opera, so this latest project, which covers some of the same territory and tone, sounds really promising. It will certainly be in my movie-going plans in December, when it’s due out. Cannibalism, Self-Destructive Obsessions with Revenge, and Grungy 19th Century London are all good Christmas Season fare.

The PNE and Labour Day Weekend

Last weekend, we paid another visit to the PNE, which is the ‘State Fair’ that is held yearly at the fairgrounds at the corner of East Hastings and Boundary Road. It was our third time, so we knew mostly what we wanted to see and do. The new addition of the Peking Acrobats were a great new attraction; you can’t but be impressed by some of their feats of strength and balance, like the woman who did a perfect handstand on top of 7 chairs stacked on top of each other, with the bottom chair perched on 4 Coke bottles. This year we arrived just as a calf had been born, and got to see the mother cow licking the newborn. We didn’t stay long enough to see it take its first steps, but I’m told they always do within an hour or two. I always like taking pictures of the animals, even if the most exotic thing you typically see is a Llama or Alpaca (and you can spy those along many roads in BC). We did see a Sow nursing a litter of piglets, but fortunately none of them squealed. That needle-sharp piercing cry is my first memory, from the West Virginia State Fair when I was perhaps 3 or 4 year’s old, and it has remained a sound that bothers me to this day. We also saw the impressive Sand Sculpture contest and the Card Stacking champion, and even a ‘Human Fountain’ powered by a bicycle pedal pump.

It was nice to have an extra weekend day, which is how this particular holiday often works out to be. On Saturday, Pam and I took a trip down to Crescent Beach in Surrey, and then the town of White Rock, and had a look at this charming and colourful seaside village. If this is where people are buying up real estate like mad for retirement, I can see the attraction. We had a tasty lunch (steamed mussels and salad for me, a Salmon burger and salad for Pam) and walked up and down the boardwalk, taking in the sun and sea. We went out to the pier and back, and generally just hung around people and place-watching. Pam posed for a photo by the ‘White Rock’ (a Glacial deposit) that is now painted white (but is is very big, to be sure). It was nice not to be on a schedule for a change.

Later, we drove to Point Roberts, which we had also heard of but not seen until now. I have to say that it was a little depressing. Maybe even a little creepy. Point Roberts, for those who are not familiar, is a strange result of the Tsawwassen peninsula of British Columbia extending south, beyond the 49th parallel, creating a small, isolated piece of the USA that you can only reach from Canada. According to the Britishcolumbia.com Website:

Point Roberts is located on the extreme southern tip of the peninsula that defines Boundary Bay’s western shoreline. Visitors must cross the Canada-US border on Point Roberts Road in Tsawwassen to enter or leave the tiny enclave. Except for a steep hill south of Maple Beach, exploring Point Roberts makes for a mostly level, 2-hour tour by bike. The roads blend into one another in a simple rectangular grid and are easy to follow. Whatcom County, Washington, of which Point Roberts is a part, maintains Lighthouse Park, a delightful and often overlooked park at the extreme southwestern point of the mainland. From this windswept point, cyclists are rewarded with some of the best views on the entire Fraser Estuary: Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca as well as the Strait of Georgia open up on three sides.

I don’t know about delightful and overlooked, but we did venture into Lighthouse Park, and found it pretty grim and desolate, with tumbledown wood buildings from the 1970s and a truly awful public toilet. There were a few people there, but it was a big contrast compared with the sunny, populated world of White Rock. The views (a least to the south) were nice, although it had begun to get a bit overcast by the time we got there.


Sunday and today have been far less adventurous. We relaxed and did some errands yesterday, before I made a Risotto with our beloved local Chanterelles, which are at their peak, as well as some amazing Japanese mushrooms from Granville Island including a big (expensive), aromatic Matsutake mushroom, which is like a truffle in its complexity and rarity. Also made a Pumpkin cake, which we brought to Matt and Oana’s ‘movie night’ , where we had some of Matt’s excellent fish chowder and saw Stalag 17, an old Billy Wilder WWII classic that actually came out after the war was over in 1953.