Robodramatix Video Up!

The long-awaited (by me, anyway) edited video of the presentation Heather Knight and I gave at the TEDxCMU conference this year has been posted on YouTube. Thanks, James Pan and the rest of the TEDxCMU crew. Planning is already heavily underway for next year's conference.

When I was a kid, hearing yourself on tape was always embarrassing and off-putting. Now, seeing myself on digital video - jeez. Is my head really that big? Anyway, I know this presentation is a little bit awkward and maybe under-rehearsed, although both Heather and Data are so magnetic (literally, in Data's case) that it hardly seems to matter much, at least to that audience. But the point is that Data becomes more sophisticated each time he performs. I think you can perceive a lot of development since his debut with TED WOMEN in "Silicon-Based Comedy" a few years ago. Of course, he's been working with Matt Gray, a superb acting teacher of robots as well as humans. And I'll claim to have had a hand in this from the point of view of roboturgy - the "Hath Not a Robot Video Cameras?" speech from The Merchant of Virus by W(i)11-i/am Shakesbot, and perhaps the idea that Data may one day become the new prophet of Prometheus.

The point is that the development of Social Robotics is made of these building blocks - interactions between humans and robots that are analyzed by roboticists like Heather to make one further iteration forward towards increasing sophistication and compatibility. I am convinced now that performance theory is going to be of greater importance as the field develops, and weirdos like me are going to have a role to play, pardon the pun. Social intelligence is the reason why human cognition is so much more advanced over the other primates, and it is heavily imbricated with performance and mimesis. Machine intelligence will have to develop similarly; I'm proud and excited to be involved with this.

Anyway, enjoy!

On Illness and Recovery

If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sniffing at the Crotches of Power

Fig. 1. Do you see it? Do you see it?!?

The other night Yours Truly was out enjoying himself with a company of delightful dementigenstia of my acquaintance, pictured here recreating Da Vinci's Il Cenacolo  correcting all of the mistakes in the occult semiotics [Fig. 1].  From left, Louis Brown (holding a credit card rectifying the error in the painting that Bartholemew is not trying to pay for the dinner. Historically, Bartholemew was a notorious check-grabber, and expected everyone else to pony up for the theatre tickets), Mike Dzibiak looking for more vowels for his last name, Wayne Wise (a Professor of Comic Books - it's probably best that we can't see what he's doing with his hands) and Marcel Walker as either Andrew or Judas, depending on how well you know them. In the center is Mark Best, Chair of the Department of Godzilla Studies at Pitt - the less said about his Jesus Complex, the better. The Apostle Thomas is being played by Claude Mauk, Chair of the Languages You've Never Heard Of department at Pitt (you know, like Blonginese, V'larch, and High Pflerman). Then you see Mrs. Doc, me, and Baby Doc there as Matthew, Jude Thaddeus, and Simon, naturally! I mean, who else would we be? Also Maya Best is there as the hostess, not depicted by Da Vinci, who is coming over to tell the party they are disturbing the other customers by all sitting on one side of the table.

Just as in the actual last supper, we all fell to talking about famous celebrities we know. Until I joined Carnegie Mellon, I had a few close calls with the A-List, topped by three events:

3. I stood next to Steven Tyler on 7th Avenue in Seattle waiting for the light to change.
2. I attended an exhibition of Impressionist Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the accidental but prolonged company of Jamie Lee Curtis.
1. I took a piss in a Tribeca restaurant men's room next to Bill Murray [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2.  This image always makes me think of Ghostbusters.

But now I'm in show business, however tangentially, and I've hobnobbed with quite a few well-known folks; Alan Arkin, Elaine May, Ted Danson, John Wells, Stephen Bochco, Felicia Rashad, John Kani, Warwick Davis, Mike Carey and Mike Reiss being on the top of my list of good encounters. The funny thing is that a lot of the fanboy glamour goes away when you are doing it as part of your job. Not all of it, but taking an unexpected piss next to Bill Murray is a lot more titillating than spending three days helping John Wells (who is awesome) negotiate the ins and outs of the school to which he is donating a truckload of money. It's work. It's great getting to know John as a human being, and all that, and to learn from his astonishing example about how to do the work we do as well as he does, but you don't have the giggling consequence-free delight of being a faceless joe. Bottom line, you have to TREAT THEM LIKE HUMAN BEINGS, and that means that you have to ACT LIKE A HUMAN BEING.

But yesterday Jed Harris and I had lunch with the President (Emeritus) of the Pittsburgh City Council, Doug Shields. I'm a fan of the Councilman; voted for him every time he ran since I got here. He backs the causes I believe in, he was a great help to a big project at my son's school, and he came to see our Inspector General twice. After the second appearance he did a postshow talkback with myself, Jed, and Molly McCurdy (dramaturg) and I said "do you think people will be offended by my ridiculous lampooning of city government?" and he said "Lampooning? I thought you had put a hidden bug in the Mayor's Office and just wrote down what you heard." My ego as a writer, dramaturg, and adaptor soared, but my hopes as a citizen plummeted. After all, I put the worst garbage in there I could come up with. Anyway, the Councilman agreed to blurb the back of the book for me, and so when it came out I wanted to give him a few of my author's copies, which I get from CMU Press in lieu of "pay" (love ya, Jerry and Cynthia!). So we had lunch yesterday.

I believe that Doug is on the side of the Wise and the Just, which is probably why he's not Mayor. But every time I speak at length to him I get a better sense of what goes on in government, and at the age of 40 I know I shouldn't be so idealistic that it continues to make me sick to my stomach. It's like the meat and dairy industry - one day you learn how much blood and pus from damaged and infected cow's udders the USDA allows to be legally incorporated into cheese, and you say "I'll never touch animal products of any kind ever again." And a week later you're tucking back into the burgers. Politics is the same way. It's vile and disgusting and warps your mind and showcases the worst aspects of human existence, both on the side of the manipulators and those willing to be manipulated. Plus, no one is interested anymore in listening to me gass on about Marx as a precursor to discussing Brecht or Feminism, or Queer Theory. I should just forget about it and work on robots, but I can't. I keep returning to it like a dog revisiting its own upchuck. Today's sputum has to do with the wholesaling of Pennsylvania's clean air and water to the Marcellus Shale fatcats. I saw a similar process destroy the glorious natural resources of Utah once, and I'm nauseated to think about it happening again here in the woodlands.

Celebrities of any kind, entertainment or political, emit the same smell. It's the smell of your ability to think as an individual rapidly decomposing. The more you sniff it, the more of yourself you lose. Too bad it's so goddam addictive.

Living Without a Uvula;if you call that "living"

Fig. 1. Douchebag.

Coming out of the long, tedious, and frankly painful recovery process, I am now kind of emerging and taking stock of what's changed, apart from being able to sleep without choking. They say there are men of words and men of action - I'm definitely in the former camp. I'm a talker, because if you grow up loving learning (and surrounded by proud ignoramuses) and dark (surrounded by blondes) and fat (surrounded by natural athletes) and funny (surrounded by dull people) you really only have one edge, so you develop it. Being funny got me out of a lot of scrapes when I was a kid - making your persecutors laugh defuses whatever it is in them that wants to beat you up, and might even earn you a couple of friends. And then later, girls seem to appreciate funny and lumpy a lot more than ripped and assholish [Fig. 1]. But it's all about vocal control - pitching, volume, punctuating with noises, doing funny accents, that kind of thing. Cheap tricks compared to real acting, of course, but I found that those skills have served me well in the classroom to keep students engaged. If they're entertained, they're paying attention, at least.

Fig. 2. Oinkiotomy

My surgeon really did a number on my neck, for which I am grateful, but it's taking some getting used to. I kind of had to re-learn how to talk, which didn't take very long, but I am still having trouble with some words, or when I try to talk fast or loud; I trip over my tongue or bounce around in my mouth. I am also, as predicted, utterly unable to correctly pronounce the 'uvular R' in French. Admittedly I don't speak French as much as I used to (say, when I was in France), but I do put on some ridiculous accents in class sometimes. Not sure how to address that - perhaps I will trill my R's in French so people will just think I have a Spanish accent. I also cannot get the deep resonant "p-khhhoooowww!" that one employs when one represents explosions or cannon fire. Zain and I were playing with some pirate action figures and my guy fired his pistol and all I could manage was an airy "poh!" Zain yelled "ha! misfire!" and he proceeded to slash me from brain ter brisket, avast thar. Yardarmed in such manner, later I suffered a further humiliation at bedtime when trying to replicate the snort of a pig and coming up with nothing at all. My dear friend Dr. Mauk, a professor of Linguistics from Pitt, tells me that the uvular R is physiologically the same thing as the explody-noise and the oink, so it makes sense [Fig. 2 and 3].

Fig. 3. Not a douchebag

I'm willing to trade all that, no problem, for the extra twenty years of stroke-free life I've been promised, and the ability to sleep and even to dream again (been having doozies, after two decades of no dreams). Nor am I trying to compare myself with many of my colleagues in scholarship at the Society for Disability Studies, who every day have to deal with a lot more than suddenly not being able to oink. It's just a small reminder of Solomon's law, gam zeh ya'avor; this, too, shall pass. Our health, our voices, our able-ness - easy come, easy go. Carpe diem, y'all. Peace!

Non Culpae ex Esse Lupinotuum? The Werewolf Defense

Woodcarving of the execution of werewolf Peter Stumpfe

Check THIS out. A fellow named Thomas Stroup, from Ohio, was arrested after behaving violently at a campground, on May 31. He told the arresting officers he was scratched by a wolf in Germany, and ever since has blacked out during full moons. He was charged with underage intoxication.

What's interesting about this story is that the plea of "not guilty by reason of being a werewolf" is a very old legal defense with a strong precedent. For centuries people convicted of particularly violent or abhorrent crimes including rape, murder, cannibalism and graverobbing (and combinations thereof) have, at their trials, claimed to be werewolves and had their sentences commuted. It is a kind of "diminished capacity" or "insanity" defense, although it has very specific features, chief among them the subject's modeling explicitly wolflike behavior. Depending on where the trial was held, who was jerking the reins of power at the moment, and which book on the occult the prosecutors happened to be reading, werewolves could be grouped as witches (fully culpable) to be tortured and burned at the stake, or forgiven morally of the crimes committed while a wolf but still considered culpable of willfully becoming a wolf (and so to be executed), or just sentenced to two years in the madhouse as was the case with Jacques Roulet in 1598. In the 16th century, there was suddenly a massive uptick in the number of crimes blamed on werewolves - tens of thousands over a period of about forty years. The early decades of the 17th century, however,  saw a growing number of writers (including James I) who insisted that werewolfism, although certainly a common enough problem, was a psychological one, the product of an unstable mind rather than an unstable body. To this day, clinicians consider lycanthropy or therianthropy to be a valid, serious psychopathological condition.

Fig. 1. Not exactly "full."

Mr. Stroup would indeed have been unlucky to have encountered a wolf in Germany - wolves were hunted to extinction around the 18th and 19th centuries, apparently there are only a few dozen wolves (recent immigrants from Poland) in the whole country, and those in remote areas. Also, on May 31, 2011, the moon was in the waning crescent phase [Fig. 1]. These facts poke some holes in Mr. Stroup's defense, but I note that despite his violent behavior he was charged only with "underage intoxication." That is to say, he is guilty of the crime of choosing to become irrational, not of the crimes he committed while irrational. So, the defense appears to still have some bite to it.

The Benefits of Getting Your Throat Ripped Out

I'm writing this because I've always wanted to put it down on paper but frankly I never had the self-awareness before to really describe it.

Fig. 1. Anthony Hopkins as John Talbot. Go get 'em, Tony!

When you are an insomniac, nighttime is, to steal a phrase from the character John Talbot in the recent remake of The Wolfman, "a wilderness of horrors" [Fig. 1]. You never know what kind of a journey you're going to have, but you know it won't be nice. You dread bedtime. You avoid it, you pace around it like a wolf in a cage. A good night is when you lie awake thinking of all the things you've done wrong, ever. Something hunts you. Your brain runs grainy, poorly-produced films of your failures. You spend your time staring at that frozen clock blinking 3:20 am knowing that now, no matter what happens, tomorrow is going to suck. Maybe you get up and watch tv, but you can't really work because you're tired and raw and scattered. On a good night, if you're me, you prowl the house, the internet, the refrigerator, and get whatever sleep you can on the couch. If you do sleep, it's an abyss, full of nightmares, or a gray, timeless blank that seems to do nothing to assuage the fatigue toxins accumulated in the previous day. Coffee would help clear your head, but then you can forget about sleeping at all. I've gone the other way a lot - brew up some joe, do some jumping jacks, and then you can work or play coherently through the night. But that's not a good idea - you can get away with a day, maybe, but the second day is much worse, and by nighttime you want to crawl out of your skin. After three days, you're in a perpetual fog. Little creatures flash at the peripheries. After five days of not sleeping, you have conversations with people who aren't there, and this is in the daytime. You take little side trips to alternate dimensions, which sounds fun, doesn't it? Whee. The thing that hunts you gets closer [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2. Insomnia - an insider's perspective.

Sleep to me is something that has for the past twenty years come in sporadic, short bursts - little oases in a big desert that slake just enough to make the aridity worse. If you're an insomiac, you know this - you fall asleep for fifteen minutes, then you're awake for two hours, sleep for fifteen minutes, and awaken again disoriented, frustrated, heart pounding, brain yoked in steel wool. The thing hunting you all night manifests in the room, staring from the edge of the bed. After a century, it gives up that soulless stare and gradually resolves itself into a shirt hanging from a hook, or something, which is small comfort. You feel like you're losing your mind. Or, you choke down some zolpidem tartrate (the down-market ambien), and then you feel like the poisoned corpse of Alexander VI, so bloated that the Swiss Guard have to jump on you to stuff you into your coffin. Sleep comes then under pressure, like a big hand holding you down until the alarm goes off. You come out of that groggy and bleary and on edge, and it takes a steady suction of caffeine to get through the waking day.

This experience is not uncommon, I know. But in my case, things continued to get worse over the years. For years, the second I fell asleep, I stopped breathing, so my brain mainlined the adrenaline cascade, and I caromed out of a dreamless sleep bolt upright, scared, angry, ready to fight or run, sometimes thrashing. The air pressure unit I had made things better for a while. If you have a CPAP you know it's no picnic - it's uncomfortable, noisy, it constantly blasts you with random spurts of air in your face, when it's up to speed you have to really work your lungs to exhale, and it perpetually farts and squeaks. Mine was set at 18 psi, out of 20 maximum - I hear that's pretty extreme - everyone else I know has theirs set at 4 or 6. But for me it improved my ability to stay asleep by about 50%, and so it was worth putting up with.

Fig. 3. This won't hurt a bit.

How you live with this, and try to eat right and exercise, and have a career and raise a family? Well you can plow forward with your wind machine telling yourself nothing's seriously wrong and yet complaining about it to anyone who has the misfortune of being stuck in an elevator with you until sooner or later it gets the better of you and some doctor says "it's time to rip out your throat" [Fig. 3]. Which, if you have a sense of humor about it (which I did NOT) is kind of like letting that thing that was hunting you catch up and kill you, and in the process discovering that you actually were the thing that was hunting you. Very Zen.

So the good news is, like most of the things that Zen promises if only you can resolve the ridiculous paradoxes, it worked. Haven't used the CPAP since. I admit it has been hard to fall asleep, because I am pretty uncomfortable from the surgery still, but once I fall asleep I more or less stay asleep -at least, I do not choke or stop breathing, and when I wake up I FEEL like I've slept! I used to drink about six cups of coffee before 1 o'clock - now I drink one or two.  I used to drink four diet cokes in in the afternoon and at dinner, now I drink one. I'm settling into a sleep pattern I can describe as "regular." The effects of the surgery were immediate but, as the scars in my throat solidify and tighten, it's getting even better.

I'm not fully recovered yet from the surgery, but it's kind of a new world. And best of all I'm not going to have to buy those silver bullets - which is a relief, because, have you priced those things lately?

Commencement 2011

Fig 1. Hogwarts Class of 2011

Not going to lie - I was less than a week out of surgery here, barely vertical, felt like there was a party in my head and everyone was being sick at once. But I love commencement. I know it's part of the things that make other professors look cockeyed at me and say "but, not really, right?" But I do. I worked my tuchas off for that ridiculous Grimace (tm) costume [Fig. 1] and by thunder I'm going to wear it, if only once a year. Yes, the royal robes of my Alma Mater do garner a lot of attention; but that's what Hogwarts regalia looks like. This was a particularly fine year for me, though - five graduates, many awards garnered by my students, and Anthea was the CFA Banner Carrier, which meant we walked through the campus together [Fig. 2]. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Also, a young fellow named Richard McIntyre was taking photos for The Thistle. Richard, as it happens, is my neighbor, and also a student in the karate dojo where I teach, and a friend of the family. So this was once of those very pleasant conjunctions of life, not to be missed. Also, Nicholas Mudd's mom Mary Jane gave me a Shofar from Jerusalem [Fig. 3].

Fig 2. Carns lets her freak flag fly

Fig 3. Shofar, so good.

Lewis Black on Hope

"In a country as rich as ours, no one should ever go to bed hungry, and there certainly should be an educational system that allows every child to pursue whatever dream they have,  and no one should have to choose between finances and their health, and for fuck's sake, there ought to be flying cars."

-Stark Raving Black, Filmore Theatre, Detroit, 2009

My student Catherine "Calamari" Rodriguez and her quest for gold

As some of you may know, the School of Drama junior Catherine Rodriguez has been awarded an extremely prestigious "Gold Standard" scholarship, sponsored by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, Bacardi Gold, and the National Basketball Association. The award is for an astonishing $10,000, and Catherine is very deserving of this honor, but she is eligible for a further $30,000 scholarship awarded to four of the scholars, as determined by online public voting on the NBA website.

Voting will take place May 16-30, 2011, at http://www.nba.com/goldstandard/video.html.


If only this award were determined by merit, Catherine would be a shoe-in, but it is a popularity contest, which I suppose is how the corporations make up their back-end on something like this. That said, I think this is a good cause, and I want to urge everyone who receives this letter to spend a couple of seconds casting a ballot for Catherine.

Thanks for your time on this!

Alia Poonawalla: Cor Inquietam

Alia Poonawalla is a student in the BxA program - this is a program that enables a sort of streamlined double major for students who want to do Arts as well as something else. Alia is doing Biology and Drama. I've been privileged to see a lot of her in my classes and to have been one of her advisors. She's a terrific student with a broad global view and a fascinating perspective, and a great person to boot. I just learned she will be giving the valedictory speech at commencement.  Alia, as one restless heart to another, congratulations!

Here's a video of her talking about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6AmZWOcnlc

Ghost Light Collective, Class of 2011

Kendra C.

On Friday, we had our annual Awards Ceremony. I've been part of the communities of a half dozen academic theatre departments, and I've never seen one as tightly knit as the CMU School of Drama, and I think these kinds of ceremonies have a lot to do with that. There is an annual awards ceremony and banquet at Indiana University; that was a lot of fun. We rented out a hall with an open bar and everyone dressed to the nines, as in, tuxedos and evening gowns. We gave out internal school awards, which were mostly for fun, and the playwrights wrote something called The Closing Night Cabaret which is a short play in which characters from the season all get together in a bar and interact (played by the people who played them in the season). It was an opportunity for old-style vaudeville and roasting, and everyone had a great time. I hope they still do that.

Seniors Lauren (left) and Corinna (right). Center is Nicole.

The CMU School of Drama has a few ceremonies during the year, but I think this one is the most moving. First of all, it begins with the "Rite of Passage." Each class rank, you see, has an assigned section of the Chosky Theatre. At the awards ceremony, the students migrate, at the behest of the Chair, to the next rank's seating spot. There follows a ritual calling out, whereby each class addresses its immediate successor by their new title. To wit, the new juniors call out to the erstwhile freshmen, "hello, sophomores!" It's all very Victor Turner and generates real bonds between and within the classes, as well as giving a sense of progression and even eternality to the work they do. The ceremony is a celebration of the hard work they've all done.

Smith Wade-El (grande) and Carns (travel size)

Then the awards come in. These are serious awards, most of them having a genuine and not insignificant cash prize which is funded by gifts from benefactors. There are a lot of them - the ceremony takes more than an hour, I think, to complete. Some are awarded by the faculty, some by the Alumni Clans (West Coast and New York, whose presidents attend the ceremony and present the prizes), and some by representatives of the funders, or the funders themselves. I've never seen anything like it; for me, and I think for the students, these awards underscore several things about their work as CMU students. First, that it is noticed by professional people outside the school, which suggests that the work is significant. Second, that it is part of a long tradition, which suggests that the work has longevity. Third, that there is a strong community of graduates out there with enough of a vested interest to commit to this sort of thing, which suggests that the work is personally meaningful.

Some of my colleagues on the faculty studied at the School themselves, and so for them I'm sure this is all magnified. But for me, well, I enjoy seeing the students reap the rewards of their work and seeing the communal cheer and support for one another. This year, however, things were really different. This year, I have five students graduating, all of whom joined my program as freshmen. Indeed, most of them were also my students in pre-college. That's a five-year relationship. Also, this year, my students demonstrated a strong showing at the awards and are also moving on into really interesting positions in the professional world, beginning their careers. I don't want to get maudlin or anything but I will admit to being somewhat overcome by all this. I am as proud of these students as if they were my own kids, and their successes genuinely fill me with a vicarious joy. The only, only measure of the success of this program that is worth anything at all is if the students move on and do well, and these students have done a phenomenal job. When they came in, we were taking our first baby steps, and now I feel like we are a fully-integrated, welcome chapter of the organization. Not that we don't still have problems to solve, but they are the best kinds of problems.

2007: from right, Megan, Kate, Lauren, Nick, Kendra L., Anthea

Please cast your eyes to stage right to see an image of these guys as I will always remember them - as freshmen, all bright eyed and bushy-tailed and with no idea what was in store for them. Congratulations, guys.

Heard on Slate

“There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old kid’s life, The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.” – John Rogers