Over the past week I’ve been attending a number of sessions at the London International Animation Festival. The LIAF has been around since 2003, but this is its first year in the Barbican Centre, where it comes at the tail end of a summer celebrating the art of animation.

July at the Barbican saw a retrospective of Studio Ghibli’s films, which I was shocked to discover never made it to British shores until 2001. Being a kid who remembers precisely two films from his toddlerhood, one being the Cantonese dub of My Neighbour Totoro (the other was The Land Before Time), it continues to astonish me that the childhoods of my peers were Miyazaki-free until Spirited Away. Also running at the Barbican Art Gallery until 11 September is Watch Me Move: The Animation Show, a gallery exhibition spanning 150 years of global animation history that I’ll have to write about another time. My readers in Canada will be happy to note that the exhibition’s next destination is the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, where Watch Me Move will run from 8 October through Christmas Eve.

All digressions aside, I really must commend the LIAF’s outstanding curation. In the out-of-competition programmes alone I’ve found some classics I had hitherto missed like the Russian masterwork Hedgehog in the Fog, which grounded a session dedicated to cut-out animation past and present, and discovered some new and instant favourites. Two that stood out for me, both selections from last year’s SIGGRAPH conference: Mobile by Verena Fels, a crowd-pleasing shuffle of animals on wires reminiscent of Pixar’s For the Birds; and The Wonder Hospital by Shimbe (Beomsik Shim), a surreal descent into what I’d best describe as a funhouse of cosmetic surgery.

The piece that I want to draw attention to here, however, is Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett Diaries). It was presented as the fulcrum of a session dedicated to the oeuvres of its director, Theodore Ushev, and its subject, the 1960s Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. Ushev himself was in attendance as one of the LIAF’s featured guests this year and told the audience of the many coincidences behind his latest project. Here’s one: when Ushev moved from Bulgaria to Montreal, where he has been based since 1999, he stayed in the same building that housed Lipsett for most of his life—until the latter committed suicide in 1986, aged 49.

Now that the National Film Board has digitized most of its treasures, you can see Lipsett’s films for yourself. His breakout work, Very Nice Very Nice, attracted the notice of Stanley Kubrick, who asked him to cut the trailer for Dr Strangelove. (Lipsett declined.) As an aficionado of the history of science and technology and the future as imagined by the past, my personal favourite is A Trip Down Memory Lane. Subtitled as “additional material for a time-capsule”, it features newsreel footage of everything from airships to chemistry experiments to wartime munitions, which were already nostalgic miscellanea in 1964, when the film was made. It’s an early work of retro-futurism, if you will.

As you can tell, Lipsett’s signature style involved the rapid-fire juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images, often extracted from other documentary material, and his speciality was sound collage. The effect is one of funnelling our perception of the visuals through contrasting audio, although in truth, Lipsett typically began with the soundtrack first and set the images second. The technique is comparable to what William S Burroughs was doing textually with cut-up books like Nova Express, only Lipsett got there first. (I’m certain Marshall McLuhan must have written about Lipsett—how couldn’t he?—but not having my McLuhan volumes handy I’m not in a position to check.)

Lipsett Diaries is not a biography of its subject, but is closer to a work of historical fiction, diving into the recesses of a mind we only know by the trail of creations it left behind. It incorporates many of Lipsett’s own techniques and splices imagery from his films, although everything is rendered in Ushev’s painstakingly hand-painted frames. In terms of process, Ushev and Lipsett were very well matched. “For me to animate something, I have to hear it first,” Ushev explained at the session’s close. An illustrator and graphic designer by training who came to animation relatively recently, he confessed that he did not have a natural facility for timing, and preferred to assemble his work to the rhythm of existing sounds. “If the text is not recorded,” he said, “I cannot do the film.”

The voice-over narration comes not from Lipsett’s actual diaries, which have never been found, but is a reconstruction of what he might have been thinking as he hurtled through successive phases of his troubled life. It was written by Chris Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival and well-known chronicler of Canadian animation history, about whom I’ll have more to say in a moment. First, here’s a brief video where Ushev and Robinson talk about the film in the very corridors of the NFB that Lipsett used to scrape for clippings.

At its heart, Lipsett Diaries stands as an intensely moving effort by one Canadian animator to revive the profile of a once-prominent predecessor who has since fallen into obscurity. If this sentence doesn’t ring a bell, it should. It also describes one of the first films that gripped my attention when I started to take a serious interest in contemporary independent animation: Chris Landreth’s Ryan.

Ryan, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2005, was Landreth’s depiction of his encounter with Ryan Larkin, a former animator who was once of some renown thanks to his film Walking, and who was rediscovered at the turn of the millennium as a panhandler on the streets of Montreal. After Landreth’s film sparked a renewal of interest in Larkin’s work, it looked as though he would recover from his long spell of homelessness and substance abuse and return to animation once more. Sadly, this was not to be: Larkin died in 2007.

At the end of the LIAF screening I asked Theodore Ushev about whether Ryan had any influence on the conception of Lipsett Diaries. There was a very direct connection, he answered. For one thing, Arthur Lipsett and Ryan Larkin were contemporaries and rivals at the NFB of the 1960s—both of them Oscar nominees at the vanguards of experimental forms, both of them turfed in the 1970s. Their acolytes set them in opposition to one other: they would say, for instance, that Larkin was a monster and Lipsett was the true genius. “You were for Lipsett or for Larkin,” said Ushev, referring to their competing legacies.

Even more relevant is the involvement of Chris Robinson. Robinson, after all, was the one who rediscovered Larkin on the tip that a homeless man who claimed to be an animator was panhandling on the Main. It was Robinson who brought Larkin back to the attention of the animation community in a profile he wrote for Animation World Magazine in November 2000, and who ultimately introduced him to Chris Landreth.

Indeed, I recall how the most indelible piece I read about Larkin upon his death was the extremely ambivalent remembrance Robinson penned for The Ottawa Citizen and Cartoon Brew, where he lamented the undue sanctification Larkin received in the wake of Ryan‘s success. An excerpt:

After [OIAF 2000], an animation co-op in Calgary was all set to invite him to get back into animation. But Ryan refused. He said he was worried about losing his welfare cheque. In truth, Ryan was scared that he didn’t have anything to say anymore and frankly, the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he didn’t want to be saved. He’d lived this flaneur existence for so long, he couldn’t turn back. Initially I respected this, but I quickly soured towards him because I could see that he had a routine. He convinced many people before and after me into thinking they could save him when all he really wanted was some smokes, beer and chicken wings.

Ryan returned to Ottawa in 2004 to accompany the screening of Ryan. It would be a homecoming of sorts. I even arranged to have Ryan’s film Walking shown in the cinema (Ryan hadn’t seen the film in 35mm in thirty years). My excitement faded fast though. Ryan had changed. His drinking had reached the point of no return. Ryan needed constant supervision. We kept feeding him with beers and smokes to keep him happy, anything to stop him from flipping out. Of course, by late afternoon, he’d be a mess anyway. As much as I enjoyed watching Ryan piss on the streets in broad daylight, I wanted to grab him and slap some sense into him, tell him to stop being a child and take some responsibility for his life.

It was too late though. The winds of success blew Ryan into mythological status. Young animators made pilgrimages to Montreal to pay tribute to their hero, the flawed genius.

What I didn’t know until I dug up that article again today was that Theodore Ushev drew the accompanying illustration. In fact, prior to Lipsett Diaries, Ushev collaborated with Robinson as an illustrator for his Larkin biography, Ballad of a Thin Man; you can view Ushev’s artwork for the book on his website. To see Ryan as a direct precursor of the Lipsett film was more accurate than I knew.

Two years ago, when the NFB celebrated its 70th birthday, The Walrus published an article questioning the film board’s future vitality. It’s a flawed piece, and another Walrus contributor correctly noted that the NFB remains a pervasive fixture of Canadian culture even if people don’t know it by name, but never mind all that. I wish to attend to one particular passage:

The Memories of Angels, like another recent NFB film, the Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, looks back at NFB history. Memories is a reconfigured collection of shots from films by such masters as Denys Arcand, Arthur Lipsett, Michel Brault, and Claude Jutra. Ryan is an exploration into the work and life of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ryan Larkin, a former wunderkind who was found, a quarter century after his work had essentially stopped, homeless and broken. These films’ success begs an obvious question: is the NFB an institution that has nowhere to go but to look back to the glory days of its golden age?

Not surprisingly, the NFB’s new commissioner, Tom Perlmutter, takes umbrage at the suggestion. Ushering me into his office at the NFB’s Montreal headquarters, he makes the distinction between empty nostalgia and creative renewal. “It’s interesting, to me; that’s precisely the way not to be a slave to the past. Those films are an homage, and they’re both entirely original in their own ways. The editing in The Memories of Angels is amazing—it’s a tribute both to the city and to the history of filmmaking. It’s not simply a recycling, but rather a reimagining of those images.”

Like Perlmutter, I view artistic reflection on the past as a sign not of stagnation, but of maturity. Some of the most pivotal works in any medium are the ones that recapitulate their genre’s history and trace a lineage back to their forebears. Look at Billy Wilder’s resurrection of Gloria Swanson from DeMille’s silent Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard; Maurice Ravel’s post-WWI reconstruction of the Straussian Viennese waltz in La valse; Charles Mingus’s tributes to the big-band orchestration of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington in Mingus Ah Um; Cervantes twice over with his grand parody of the Spanish chivalric romance in Don Quixote, which goes on to swallow itself when Part II of the novel makes history out of Part I.

The interwoven network of Canadian animation is well past coincidence, particularly in Montreal’s history-steeped community. Films like Ryan and Lipsett Diaries are not so much acts of reverence as they are cases of artists exploring the uncharted crannies of their own studios. This, I think, is how culture motivates the definition of an identity, a distinctive local stamp. What we may see in retrospect as gestalt movements are, in reality, a scatter of new visions finding their place in the halls of their ancestral inspirations.

When I was very young, I heard a legend about a Chinese muralist who painted the most vivid and lifelike dragons but refused to fill in their eyes, lest the dragons come alive and fly away. I tried to track it down four or five years ago for a fragment I was writing at the time, but on that occasion I never found it. Today it occurred to me to make another attempt, and for reasons of n-grammatic potentia that shall remain mysterious, Google was far more helpful this time around.

As with any old story, mutations abound, but the preponderance of them involve the painter Zhang Seng-You (張僧繇) from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). Depending on who’s telling the story, Zhang Seng-You is asked to fill in the eyes by a bystander, the abbot who commissioned the monastery mural, or the Emperor himself (who, in this case, must have been Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty). The ending is always the same: the painter finishes the eyes and the dragons bolt away from the mural in a flash of lightning and thunder.

The wonderful thing about fables is the discordance of what they say—typically a blunt moral lesson, delivered as the payload of a cruise-missile punch line like a Feghoot minus the funny—versus what they do, which is leave innumerable gaps for diverse interpretations to take root and flourish. Stories are not reducible to definite lessons. Fiction is a space for debate, and a fable is an open meadow for all and sundry to frolic. (“I don’t believe in stories with morals,” says the man with the childish fantasy of teaching Lolita in schools.)

So what can we make of the tale of the painted dragons?

Is it a statement of sumi-e aesthetics?

This story embodies the philosophy of Oriental sumi-e. The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of impressionistic art that captures the unseen.

Or is it about attention to detail? Here’s one reading of the story and the proverb it spawned:

The idiom 画龙点睛 “draw a dragon, put in pupils” could be translated “finishing touch” in English. In Chinese it describes a key or emphatic phrase to a speech or in writing to drive home a point, giving the work more power.

And here’s another:

Based on this fairy tale [...] the last touch in a masterpiece is the most important part of a drawing, or any other important business.

Here’s a take on the story as it pertains to the tradition of dotting the eyes of dragon boats. It differs from the others in attributing the dragon murals to the fourth-century painter Gu Kai-Zhi (顧愷之), who left them unfinished until Zhang Seng-You was asked to complete them a century later:

[Gu Kai-Zhi] had a strange habit of leaving the eyeballs out for several years after the rest of the painting was finished. When he was asked why, he said, “The most life-like strokes of a subtle portrait come from the eyes.” He was actually implying that even a single stroke should not be done casually.

Nowhere have I read an interpretation that captures the essence of what I always thought the story to mean. Only the last one above comes close to grasping the part of the tale I find most resonant: the artist’s reluctance to finish the eyes until ordered to do so by somebody else.

In English, there’s a motto that art is never finished, only abandoned. It’s attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—who wouldn’t have said it in English, of course—but good luck sourcing it. One imagines that Leonardo, who filled in the most iconic eyes in the history of western art, derived the expression himself from a nugget of wisdom that arrived in the Italian Peninsula by way of Marco Polo’s expeditions to the Orient. But the insight resonates with anxieties of creativity everywhere, no matter which culture you’re in, and I lean towards believing it cropped up in many places independently.

What is perfectionism, really, but the avoidance of declaring something finished? Leaving out the pupils of the dragons, the way I see it, captures like no other parable the reluctance to put the lid on something magnificent. Once you’re done—once you’ve published—you’ve released your monster into the wild where it no longer bows to your command. The desire to create something magnificent conflicts with the compulsion to retain control over every detail. If the dragon flies away, it’s no longer within your power to polish the scales.

This is the perfectionist’s paradox: what if the creative apotheosis is only attainable through the loss of control? Here we’re not too far from the thematic stomping grounds of the most visceral film of 2010:

In the age of digital media we’ve grown accustomed to perpetual self-editing. It’s easy to deceive ourselves into believing that with instantaneous editorial revision at our fingertips, we now have the freedom to publish first and ask questions later. For many, this is true, and it’s why they propel the Internet’s flux of content at a pace that is nothing short of torrential. But in the other direction, there flows a strange inhibitor. Many now fear that substantial blog content is drying up, squashed in the middlebrow sandwich between personal intimations in social networks and the impersonal platform of paid journalism (where long-form is already on life support).

We’ve discussed some of these matters before, but I think they are worth revisiting. The dwindling of journals like this one has nothing to do with the terror of public scrutiny. What the decline really comes from, I believe, is an anxiety of impermanence. Good content—the transcendent stuff that rises above the encroaching tides of what Philip K. Dick called kipple—has a reputation for sticking around. This is a reputation the Internet does not share. It’s not just because online content is liable to be edited or outright wiped: it’s also because the connectivity of hypertext inherently carries a poison pill of long-term decay. Links break with time, and their container vessels get dragged into the undertow regardless of their independent eloquence.

I have before me a draft box overstuffed with nearly painted dragons. Many of them will never take flight. They will die in captivity.

Don’t even ask about my offline albatross.

There was an essay in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about writers who abandoned their novels—beginning, as it should, with Michael Chabon’s Fountain City, which consumed a good five years of his life before he left it for Wonder Boys. And it’s worth remembering that the novelists in the essay—American titans like Chabon, Updike, and Harper Lee—had all already knocked something out of the park. Spare a thought for the failures-to-be who haven’t even made it that far; the roster must be endless.

If you think about it, it’s miraculous that anything of lasting power ever sees the light of day. I wonder sometimes if this is achievable without coercion, or if you really do require an external agent to flick the creative-inhibition switch to off. It takes a special force of will to abandon one’s baby on the river.

So whether it’s helpful or not, it’s worth remembering that even the best things in life aren’t finished. Like the serpents on the temple walls, they just get released.

Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

Elsewhere:

• J.K. Rowling, writing in the capacity of a former single mother living on welfare, isn’t buying what David Cameron is selling. In a somewhat frivolous response, Toby Young leaps on the Tory nostalgia of the Harry Potter books, pointing to Hogwarts’ Etonian idyll while somehow neglecting to mention the conspicuously nuclear families; but anyone who paid attention to Rowling’s finer points (which doesn’t include Mr Young, I’m afraid) knows full well her politics aren’t what he thinks they are.

• Film editor Todd Miro savages Hollywood colour grading for taking us into a nightmare world of orange and teal.

• Roger Ebert articulates his controversial belief that video games can never be art—not for the first time, though it’s nice to finally see him elaborate on it in one place. I’m of the opinion that the entire semantic quagmire is easily evaded if we adopt an instrumental definition of art. Regardless of whether video games are even theoretically comparable to the great works of other media, our only way of getting at qualitative findings about creativity and beauty in game design is to borrow from the language of art, so we may as well consider them as such.

• While on the subject of aesthetics: over at Gödel’s Lost Letter, R.J. Lipton’s fantastic computing science blog, are some germinal sketches of how one might study great mathematical proofs as great art.

• The International Spy Museum briefs us on Josephine Baker, the actress-heroine of the French Resistance.

• Paul Wells visits the Canadian forces in Kandahar and reports on the shift in the tone and strategy of their counterinsurgency efforts. This is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read on the present state of the war in Afghanistan and I can’t recommend it enough.

• Strange Maps documents two wonderful specimens of literary cartography: back covers of mystery paperbacks, and a poster for a Shakespeare conference in France depicting a town that looks like the Bard.

• In a review of Mass Effect II, Jonathan McCalmont calls out video games for their uncritical acceptance of racial essentialism.

• A 1969 letter from Buzz Aldrin to a radio enthusiast offers some insight into the Apollo 11 spacecraft’s low-budget insulation.

• Jonah Lehrer draws on studies about primates and social hierarchy to express some concerns about the compulsion to count one’s Twitter followers and Facebook friends. (People do that? I don’t, but I sure like to comb through my website stats.)

• Finally, courtesy of Daniel Mendelsohn, a review of Avatar that says most of what I wanted to say about Avatar—and for good measure, puts it all in the context of James Cameron’s entire career.

• Patricia Cohen takes a look at the preservation of writers’ rough notes and scrap paper in a digital age, in which we discover that even Salman Rushdie is none too magniloquent to scrawl, “I am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed at this size and spacing.”

• Also in The New York Times: a special feature on politics and the modern science museum. I’m not convinced that the agendas underlying science exhibits were any less varied or complex a century ago, but as a look at where things stand today the article is well worth perusing.

• The National Arts Centre in Ottawa is commemorating the great Oscar Peterson with a statue to be unveiled 30 June. Please make a contribution.

• And while on the subject of jazz, Peter Hum criticizes the notion that musicians should contrive to make the genre culturally relevant—whatever that means. My preference, as always, is for art that strives for timeless resonance over fashionable gratification. That some things feel like one, and other things feel like the other, is not well understood and worthy of investigation.

While reading up on the Bikini atomic experiments for my post on Three Tales, I came upon a most interesting find: a contemporaneous broadcast about the tests by America’s greatest radio voice and one of my personal heroes, Orson Welles. It was the second episode of Welles’ short-lived 1946 series of political radio commentaries, and runs fifteen minutes in length. Listen.

Around this time last year I spent an inordinate portion of my time rediscovering the early radio work of Orson Welles, which I so fondly remembered from my childhood—The Shadow, Suspense, The Mercury Theatre on the Air and so on—so I had come across this series before. (“The Affidavit of Isaac Woodward”, Welles’ unforgettable diatribe about the vicious assault of a black American soldier who had returned from decorated service in the war, is required listening for anyone interested in the oratory of civil rights.) Somehow I’d missed the episode on the hydrogen bomb. No matter; I’ve listened to it now. And here’s something else I’ve learned: painted on the first H-bomb to see a practical test was the likeness of Rita Hayworth.

Welles had this to say about the glamorous actress who was then his wife:

Not long ago I watched quite another sort of young lady paint her lips with something called, over the counter, the Atom Lipstick—the case of the cosmetic being fashioned according to the popular conceptions of the original war-engine. I’m sure you all need to be told that Miss Hayworth is not one to use such a thing or to hold it as anything less than a very hideous conceit.

Her face is not on the atom bomb, then, by her own choosing, but by election of the flyers who will drop the bomb and work clearly for business according to their tastes. As regards selection I find their taste beyond reproach, but the bomb-dropping itself had better be worthy of the accompanying photograph.

Is this, Faustus claimed of Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Well, I want a better toast, a better boast, for Rebecca. I want my daughter to be able to tell her daughter that Grandmother’s picture was on the last atom bomb ever to explode.

As we all know, the world didn’t heed his words, and the shadow of nuclear annihilation is now an ordinary background to our lives. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Last month I attended a performance of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s “documentary digital video opera” Three Tales at the ADC Theatre, the first production in Britain since the UK premiere in 2002. I’m still not sure what to make of it.

On the surface it looks straightforward enough. The 65-minute composition for voice, acoustic instruments, and video divides neatly into three segments on subjects from the public face of twentieth-century technology—the Hindenburg disaster, the atomic bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. We hear the familiar Reich technique of displacing and superimposing copies of repeated motifs slightly out of phase, which catches the ear well enough in recordings but in live performance has the air of a magic trick. As in Reich’s seminal string quartet Different Trains, many of the melodic ideas are derived from the pitches and articulation of human speech—but not, in Three Tales, the rhythms; here, the speech recordings are subtended to click into the frame of a regular pulse. The video speed, too, is synchronized to musical time and not “mimetic” time or real-time, if you get my meaning.

We see some captivating archival images in the first two movements, chiefly the ones that draw attention to the logistics of large-scale technology, like the construction of the Hindenburg (set to variations on the Nibelung motif from Wagner’s Ring) or the dislocation of indigenous people and livestock in preparation for the Bikini tests (with thunderous sforzandi from Genesis to spice things up). What I can’t quite fit into the picture is the Dolly movement, a contrapuntal collage of video interviews with prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky, and Rodney Brooks. Korot tells us the work, as it was conceived, is more accurately called “Two Tales and a Talk”. Here’s how Reich described it:

Each of the three acts not only looks and sounds like it’s historical period, each is formally organized quite differently to comment on that period. [...] [Dolly] is non-stop with certain kinds of material recurring in no clearly discernible pattern. Musically one might say Dolly was a kind of free rondo. The forms of each act reflect the historical period they describe.

But what does the piece say about technology? It sets up a debate instead of taking a firm position, adopting the ambivalence that is often so necessary for art to say anything at all. Commentators have remarked on the obvious irony of critiquing technology in a technologically enabled medium, but I think it would be facile to stop there: as in most of his earlier works, Reich’s crucial gesture is to forsake electronic synthesizers and recreate the effects of audio manipulation in acoustic human performance. It is an incursion of man on the domain of machine, not the other way round.

Yet the Dolly movement remains an uneasy fit. Consider a crude reading of the work:

1. Hindenburg—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! That didn’t turn out very well.
2. Bikini—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! That didn’t turn out very well.
3. Dolly—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! I wonder if it will turn out well?

I believe what we have here is a case of arson, murder, and jaywalking. Dolly now feels like a quaint late-nineties relic as revolutionary as Deep Blue—that is to say, not at all, in the grand scheme of humanity’s future. Cloning isn’t dragging us to the Singularity anytime soon, and conjuring images of Ray Kurzweil musing about robots replacing us all is a bit of a logical stretch.

Perhaps, as someone too irreligious to get his pants in a twist about the classic Promethean fears of man indulging in acts of creation proper to God, the message of Three Tales is lost on me. Or maybe the point is that the message is lost on everyone else.

• I was already aware of Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi as a superb animation educator via the meticulous frame-by-frame studies at his blog, but Letters of Note has a real treat: a letter from Kricfalusi to a 14-year-old aspiring cartoonist.

• Rohan Maitzen makes a passionate argument that the value of a literary education is in the study of literature, not just the ancillary job skills that English departments cite to defend their own worth. (Continued here and here.)

• Jeff Foust surveys the debate over the scientific value of human spaceflight and what it means for NASA policymaking now.

• Sarah Eve Kelly, whose Anne Boleyn novel got picked up by an agent and is currently being shopped around, tells writers inundated with industry advice to shove it aside and get cracking on a draft.

• In the Columbia Journalism Review, Miles Corwin gives us a look at the young Gabriel García Márquez as journalist.

• The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog muses on the conservatism of the Muppets.

• Finally, in anticipation of whatever Apple is announcing this week, Beat-era poet Gary Snyder shares a poem about his Mac.

There is a lot of rubbish being written about Avatar, and I freely admit to letting my own contribution stew in my draft box while I correct its pungent odour with the appropriate spice. But for the time being, I want to draw attention to one particular response to the film. Jonah Lehrer writes about the neuroscientific basis for cinematic immersion, and concludes:

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. (Other research has also emphasized the ability of stories to blur the difference between fiction and reality.) This doesn’t mean that every movie needs to be an action packed spectacle, just as Greenberg was wrong to suggest that every painting should imitate Pollock. But I think it helps reveal why Avatar is such a success. At its core, movies are about dissolution: we forget about ourselves and become one with the giant projected characters on the screen. In other words, they become our temporary avatars, so that we’re inseparable from their story. (This is one of the reasons why the Avatar plot is so effective: it’s really a metaphor for the act of movie-watching.)

When I think of films that act as “a metaphor for the act of movie-watching”, the director that instantly comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock. And it so happens that the Hitchcock film most commonly read in this way also has a protagonist laid up in a wheelchair.

Psychoanalytic criticism has long thrived as a route into Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not least because he was familiar with psychoanalysis and popularized it in his 1945 film Spellbound, but also because his characters were marked with disorders, obsessions, and pathological instabilities of personal identity. You can see it in his choice of literary adaptations, chiefly Rebecca, where the second Mrs de Winter (Joan Fontaine) is consumed by the lingering household presence of the first; and in later films like Vertigo, where Madeleine (Kim Novak) “becomes” her suicidal great-grandmother through gazing at a painting in the museum (or so it would seem). It is Rear Window, however, that openly sets up its hero, L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) as a passive voyeur behind a fourth wall that encloses an exterior apartment complex, where he sees fragments of his own life and relationship reflected back at him.

None of these interpretations are terribly hard to arrive at by yourself, but if you really want to get fancy, step back one level further and look for films where people watch Hitchcock. (We’re all familiar with the typical shot of a character sitting in a cinema, backlit by the beams of the projector, but pay attention to their faces and how they react to the film embedded en abyme.) The most recent example off the top of my head is Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, where Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) gazes at Joan Fontaine in Suspicion as if looking into a mirror.

Of more interest from a sci-fi perspective—which will hopefully lead us back to Avatar—is how Terry Gilliam cues the final act of Twelve Monkeys with a scene from Vertigo, right when Madeleine Stowe takes after Kim Novak in turning her character blonde. A decade and a half after its release, Twelve Monkeys holds up today as one of the finest original pieces of sci-fi cinema (with all respect to its inspiration, La jetée), and it seems oddly prescient today in the face of James Cameron’s more conventional showpiece about a guy dumped into a tank to infiltrate and warn a society in which he is ultimately subsumed.

How, then, does Avatar differ from all these films? If the dissolution of identity is so key to its appeal, as Lehrer suggests, then why is it such an anomalous mainstream success?

The easy answer is that the kind of cortical stimulation Lehrer talks about comes equally from the overwhelming visuals of Cameron’s film, especially if you experience it in 3D. But that dodges the very questions of story and theme that Lehrer wants to raise. The thematic answer, as I see it, is that Avatar plays it safe: completely unlike the films of Hitchcock, Lee, and Gilliam, it never dares to convey the madness of a dissolved identity or bother its audience to consider the schizophrenia of immersing itself in film. On Pandora, a world where USB ponytails plug into any living thing, bodily escape is free of risk. The film doesn’t spit us out and force us to look at ourselves; it does the opposite instead, encouraging us to enjoy what Lehrer calls “a pretty nice cognitive vacation.”

What interests me about Lehrer’s article, though, is not his assessment of Avatar as a film but his neurological approach. I have long wondered about the attraction, almost the fashionability if you will, of cognitive science in the criticism of the arts. In literature, materialist explanations based on quantifiable observations about how audiences react to what they read were the natural-born children of evolutionary psychology and reader-response theory. (For a better look at this, read the OnFiction blog.) But I expect that cinema is where cognitive science will pervade scholarship in the twenty-first century as psychoanalysis did in the twentieth.

In the history of thought, there is a substantial continuity between the two. Maps of brain activity now occupy the place of psychoanalytic concepts like transference, repression, or the gaze, but the premise of psychological criticism remains unchanged. And while neuroscientists will be quick to remind me that their quantifiable, testable claims are a far cry from all that Oedipal fluff, it is not at all clear to me that the epistemological status of criticism—the task of applying the theory to our understanding of how film works—is made to be any different. The question of whether cinema produces certain audience reactions would appear to have more validity, but how it does so is the same framing question as before, and for reader-response theory that may always be out of reach. This does not mean cognitivist claims are invalid, only too reductionistic to be complete.

Last June, the film scholar David Bordwell wrote a stupendous review of the cognitive turn in film studies: what it is, where it comes from, and where people are taking it. I would not hesitate to call it essential reading for anyone interested in science and arts criticism. On psychoanalysis, Bordwell writes:

[Cognitive film studies] is naturalistic. The explanations it mounts try to fit in with current understanding of human capacities as analyzed by the social sciences. That entails that psychoanalysis, another mentalistic theory of human action, has not on the whole proven a source of reliable explanations. Some cognitively inclined researchers would add that psychoanalytic inquiry has been fruitful for pointing to areas of behavior that answer to naturalistic investigation.

Lehrer’s piece on Avatar fits squarely in the cognitivist mould. But the tradition of psychoanalytic criticism is not to be ignored; to do so would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In order to appraise Lehrer’s informal hypothesis—that Avatar draws its power from being a film about the experience of watching film—any experimental study of whether this is the case must account for the other films that are said to function in the same way. An explanatory account of cinema should ideally tell us about what led us to arrive at interpretive accounts.

Lastly, should cognitive studies produce a limited theory of film, as I suspect it must, we should remain open to the possibility that material disciplines apart from studies of the mind will clue us in to the structure and interpretation of fiction. Neuropsychology’s centrality as the site of consilience is something of a fashion, and one that we owe to the place of evolutionary ideas in the popular consciousness, over and above the public awareness of other sciences. I look forward to seeing whatever comes next.

Never mind the censorship and bowdlerization that goes on among distributors to make every film suitable for the consumption of the airborne public. (I remember how the airline edition of Almost Famous—one of the finest works of American cinema in the past decade, by the way—eliminated the entire airplane sequence that is the critical moment of the film.) My real objection is to the pervasive butchering of films to fit a 4:3 aspect ratio. If a film is made in widescreen, I see it in widescreen. The pan-and-scan cropping that eliminates up to 45% of every frame is both generally criminal and personally distracting.

People who don’t know or care about cinema will never complain, which is why airlines can foist these travesties on us unpunished. I am fully aware that I am in an extreme minority of filmgoers—the informed minority—that appreciates the composition of images as essential to the cinematic experience. I know it is as uncommon as listening to melody and harmony in music. I am also willing to concede that when it was standard for airplanes to have small 4:3 television screens to serve several rows of passengers at once, widescreen presentation would have rendered the images too small.

There is no longer any excuse.

For a number of years now, Air Canada has installed personal entertainment systems for every seat. The clunky white hourglass cursors on the touchscreen interface tell you they run Windows, which should by itself condemn their choice of software development contractors. But that is beside the point, which is that Air Canada’s personal entertainment systems have widescreen monitors. Yet they continue to order widescreen films in the full-frame format. They are far from the only airline overhauling its entertainment devices to adapt to a digital world, and I am certain they are far from the only airline committing this offense.

Is this a failure on the airlines’ side, or the distributors’ side? I am guessing it’s the latter—that distributors produce a uniform airline edition that carriers around the world can order. But why do they continue to insist on slicing their films to pieces?

Is ordering films in the original aspect ratio more costly? No. But there is a substantial overhead cost to the production and distribution of these abominations in the first place. With the advent of digital formats that support anamorphic widescreen (i.e. the “black bars” adjust depending on your screen, and are not part of the image data as they are in letterboxing), the increasing awareness of original aspect ratios, and the widespread adoption of high-definition TVs, and there is no longer any reason for pan-and-scan to exist. The damage it has done to the public awareness of cinematic arts is considerable as it is, and digital formats ought to have redressed most of its harms. The DVD format went a long way toward doing this before ignorant customers pushed rental chains like Blockbuster to demand the production of pan-and-scan DVDs.

As an airline passenger, I am content to use my entertainment device for the only thing it does well—flight information and maps—but that doesn’t mean we should not push for change.