In Michael Tolkin's brilliant, underseen film The Rapture, directory-assistance operator and bored swinger Mimi Rogers gradually becomes aware, via hushed whispers and mysterious tattooes, of a group of people, from all walks of life, who are quietly preparing for an imminent world-changing event. The movie ultimately goes on to tackle, with arresting bluntness and courage, the very foundation of theology, but for the first half hour or so it plays more like a conspiracy thriller, deriving suspense from the notion that most of humanity exists in a state of blissful ignorance. There are other films, in other genres, that do likewise—They Live and The Matrix, for example, are both predicated on a similar paradigm shift—but The Rapture differs in that it emphasizes What Is To Be rather than What Actually Is. And so the epiphany, when it arrives, doesn't (indeed, cannot) inspire a frenzy of activity involving shackle-breaking and whatnot. It's simply a matter of waiting. The only difference is: now you're aware. And the idea that most other people remain unaware is kind of bizarre. But at the same, you feel like a lunatic trying to explain it to anyone.
About six weeks ago, I accidentally stumbled onto a secret roughly as momentous as the ones cited above, except that it's real. Of course, it's not actually a secret. People have been talking about it for roughly 20 years now. Books have been published. There are whole organizations devoted to this idea. But most people, at least to judge from my own tiny, statistically insignificant survey of fairly well-read New Yorkers, have never heard of it. They have no idea. I had no idea, until mid-August. Since then, it's consumed more of my waking hours than anything except film and poker, my twin sources of income. "To truly understand it," writes one of the idea's architects, "inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life." I found that to be true even before I read that sentence, and the new book containing it. And I'm not sure that I truly understand it yet, frankly.
It sounds like I found God, doesn't it? And I suppose that, in my own uncompromisingly secular way, I have.
What it is, is this: The world as we currently understand it is going to end in our lifetime. (And I Feel Fine.)
Here's a thought experiment, just very quickly before I finally get to the point. Picture the world of, oh, 150 years ago. A world before the airplane, before the telephone, before the automobile, before television, before cinema, before the computer, before the Internet—pretty much before almost everything that we currently use and do and depend upon. I think there might have been milk. And pants. Anybody see Polanski's new version of Oliver Twist? Picture that world. Then compare it to today's world. Kind of a before and after sort of deal. Create a mental diptych that emphasizes the vast, overwhelming, museum-enabling difference between what life was like then and what life is like now.
Got it? Okay, now dump the Oliver Twist picture, shove the 2005 picture over to the left, and make the right side of the diptych your own conception of a future that's as alien and inconceivable to us as the contemporary world would have been to Dickens. What that will look like will vary from person to person, but the thing is that it shouldn't resemble, say, Blade Runner, i.e. basically today's world with a few superficial modifications (taller buildings, funkier flying machines, androids). You need to imagine something radically different. On the one hand: Writing a letter to someone halfway around the world, posting it, waiting weeks for it to arrive and then that many weeks again for the postman to deliver the reply; on the other hand: A quick e-mail exchange with someone equally distant, in which the same information (let's say you're exchanging the textual equivalent of two novels) takes place in about ten seconds. Try to imagine the future equivalent of that gigantic leap forward. Then apply it to, oh, every walk of life.
Got that? Of course you don't. It's inconceivable. That's the whole point. You can probably come up with a few sci-fi chestnuts, like teleportation or Tom Cruise shunting image-data around with little wrist-flicks, but really we're talking about a world that's beyond our comprehension. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne had prodigious imaginations, and made some tentative predictions that sort of panned out, but neither one of them could have come up with the Internet, or genetic engineering. There was simply no context for those innovations at that time. As per Clarke's third law, the technology was sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.
Okay, so now you've got a diptych with today on the left panel and some murky blur on the right panel. Here's what I just found out. The right panel? It's not 150 years away. It's maybe 30 years away. Maybe less. If you have a small child, the world that child lives in as an adult will be as foreign to you as the world of today was to Dickens. Probably much more foreign. And you'll still be around to see it. In fact, you may be around for a lot longer than you think.
What I stumbled onto was the concept of the technological singularity. That link will lead you to a wealth of information, but it boils down to this: Our ability to process information is growing at an exponential rate, such that we are now only two or three decades away from creating an artificial intelligence more advanced than the human brain. What will happen then? We have no idea. Hence the term "singularity," which in astronomy denotes the point at which conventional models of space-time break down (as at the edge of a black hole). All we know for certain is that the first stage of human evolution will end. Let me note again: This is likely to happen in our lifetime. I don't have the time or the brainpower to get into the evidence here, but if you choose to explore further on your own, you'll find that it's pretty convincing.
In an odd coincidence, Mike Leigh's Naked was just recently released on DVD. (Aside: Holy crap is this movie awesome.) I was watching the famed "666" sequence the other night, and was startled to hear Johnny more or less describe the Singularity, though he never uses that word. No doubt Thewlis was reading some of the books I've only just discovered.
JOHNNY: Do you think that the amoeba ever dreamed that it would evolve into the frog?* 'Course it didn't. And when that first frog shimmied out of the water and employed its vocal cords in order to attract a mate or to retard a predator, do you think that that frog ever imagined that that incipient croak would evolve into all the languages of the world, into all the literature of the world? 'Course it fucking didn't. And just as that froggy could never possibly have conceived of Shakespeare, so we can never possibly imagine our destiny.
BRIAN: I know what my destiny is.
JOHNNY: Yeah, but what you're experiencing, as far as I can gather, with all these manifestations of regression and precognition and transmigratory astral fucking chatterings, is just the equivalent of that first primeval grunt. Because evolution isn't over. Man isn't the be-all and fucking end-all. Look, if you take the whole of time represented by one year, we're only in the first few moments of the first of January. There's a long way to go. Only now we're not gonna sprout extra limbs and wings and fins, because evolution itself is evolving. And whereas you, through some process of extrasensory recall, might imagine that you were some, I dunno, some 17th-century little Dutch girl living in a windmill in old Amsterdam, one day you'll realize that you've had not just one or two past or future existences but that you were and are everybody and everything that has ever been or will ever be.
BRIAN: Hang on a minute. You just contradicted yourself.
JOHNNY: Oh, and how do you make that out?
BRIAN: Downstairs you were predicting the end of the world. Now you're talking about the future. How do you explain that, eh?
JOHNNY: Easy. When it comes, the Apocalypse itself will be part of the process of that leap of evolution.
BRIAN: Yeah. Well. Whatever happens, mankind will not cease to exist.
JOHNNY: It must. By the very definition of "apocalyse," mankind must cease to exist, at least in a material form.
BRIAN: What do you mean, "in a material form"?
JOHNNY: Well, he'll evolve.
BRIAN: What into?
JOHNNY: Into something that transcends matter. Into a species of pure thought. Are you with me?
BRIAN: Yeah. Like a ghost.
JOHNNY: No, not like a fucking ghost, you big girl's blouse! Into something that's, like, well beyond our comprehension. Into a universal consciousness. Into God. Who is, by the same principle that time is.
In the context of the film, this whole semi-monologue plays like the ravings of a very smart lunatic. Take out all the "fucking"s, though, and it's basically a condensed version of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which was published less than two weeks ago as I write this. (I'm about halfway through it.) Granted, Kurzweil doesn't foresee universal consciousness until about the end of the century; nonetheless, the key word in his book's title is Near. He makes a persuasive case that events we intuitively think would have to happen centuries in the future are in fact going to take place extremely soon. In particular, he believes that people who are currently under about 40 are not going to die—that at our current exponential rate of technological progress, we will soon have the ability to more or less "back up" the individual human brain, the same way we currently make backup copies of files we know we don't want to lose should the machine that they reside in (read: the human body) break down.
When you're first exposed to this idea, it sounds incredible. But it isn't. It's essentially a mathematical argument, and if you examine the data closely, it makes perfect sense. You can get a sense of what's possible, however counterintuitive it may be, by considering the rate of progress of other media—for example, music storage. (This is my own example, unless Kurzweil addresses it later in the book; to judge from the index, I don't think he does.) When I first started buying music, in 1981, an album was available primarily on a vinyl platter that could hold a maximum of about 50 minutes on both sides. The long-playing record, or LP, had been the primary storage medium roughly since my parents had been born; the vinyl platter, of course, dated all the way back to Edison. Along the way a few alternatives were invented—the laughable 8-track cartridge (hey kids, I actually owned those suckers); the somewhat more successful cassette tape, which could hold up to two hours of music if the tape were stretched so thin that it was almost certain to break pretty quickly—but the state of the art remained fundamentally static until the advent of a digital storage medium in the mid-1980s. The compact disc, with its greater durability and random-access capability, quickly made vinyl and tape all but obsolete. But the CD still only held about 80 minutes of music (allegedly because Philips and Sony felt that the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth should fit on a single disc; snopes questions this, however). Over a period of 20 years—I was an early adopter, bought my first player in 1985**, back when most stores devoted only one small aisle to the medium—I accumulated close to 1200 album-length CDs. Today, I have literally all of that music (minus a handful of "bonus tracks" I didn't ever want to hear again), nearly 1200 albums, stored on a device that fits comfortably in my front pocket. And that device (a 60GB iPod) is only about half full. And one year after it was introduced, it's already virtually obsolete. (I have no doubt that within a few years a device even smaller than this will have a storage capacity of well over 60GB.)
So here's the timeline, greatly simplified:
1877: Phonograph
1948: LP
1982: CD
2001: iPod (5GB)
2002: iPod (20GB)
2003: iPod (30GB)
2004: iPod (60GB)
I didn't include the tape-based technologies, which turned out to be blind alleys and never succeeded in supplanting vinyl. I also omitted the early battle between platters and cylinders, and some other niceties. But you can clearly see the exponential growth curve: 71 years from the "eureka!" discovery to a commercially viable long-playing format; 34 years from analog to digital; 19 years from discrete to file-based, and now storage capacity is doubling more or less annually (with prices remaining more or less constant). In less than a decade, the current iPod is going to look quaint. And what's happened with music storage is happening, at a similar rate of speed but over a much longer timescale, to the evolution of mankind (which, to the diehard materialist, is nothing more than an incredibly complex information-storage system): 4 billion years from the origin of life to multicellular organisms; 1 billion years from the Cambrian explosion to primates; 10 million years from quadrupeds to bipeds; 100,000 years from modern man to agriculture; 1000 years from civilization to the Industrial Revolution; about 120 years from practical electricity to the mapping of the human genome. The next major milestone is coming very soon, and it will make our present way of life look quaint.
Kurzweil and others embrace the idea of the Singularity, claiming that superhuman intelligence will solve all of mankind's problems. Others are considerably warier, since the dystopian flipside is the very scenario envisioned in The Matrix, The Terminator, etc.: Sentient computers enslave and/or annihilate mankind, and we're powerless to stop them. There's also the philosophical question of whether merging with technology would somehow destroy or diminish what we think of as our humanity. If you believe in the soul, I suppose this is a legitimate concern; since I'm quite comfortable with the idea that consciousness resides solely in the human brain, and that the human brain (or any other brain) is basically just a very sophisticated computer (though not as sophisticated as the ones we're on the brink of inventing), that doesn't worry me overmuch. The threats to our species from hostile AI or runaway nanotechnology are much more credible.
But the debate about whether the Singularity is desirable can wait. What freaks me out is this: It's coming. This is not some remote sci-fi future that we can let our descendants fret about. It's going to happen to us. Our world is going to radically change. Life as we currently understand it is going to end, to be replaced by we know not what, beyond dim speculation.
This should be a bigger deal than it seems to be, it seems to me.
* The amoeba didn't actually evolve into the frog, any more than human beings evolved from chimpanzees, but never mind. Poetically it makes sense.
** It was a Sony, I forget the model number, but let me say this for the good people at Sony: They build a reliable fucking product. I finally tossed that machine last year, when I moved to Park Slope—in fact I basically tossed my entire stereo system, for reasons I'm about to address in the main text—but it still worked perfectly, having only been serviced once in 19 years.
11 August 2005
Goddamn their confusion.
.
On the one hand, I can't pretend to be completely unbiased about Pretty Persuasion, a very black comedy that opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. I have slept on the fold-out couch of its screenwriter and co-producer, Skander Halim, and he, by turn, has taken one look at my couch, which does not fold out and which comfortably seats maybe 1.5 normal-sized people, and immediately announced, "There's no way in hell I can sleep on that." (I gave him the bed, which was kind of a Pyrrhic victory for him given that the mattress was delivered the next morning.) In Rotterdam two years ago, we split the cost of a rather expensive hotel room when an idiot colleague, who shall remain nameless until someone inevitably outs him in the comments, neglected to inform us that his own hotel room, which the three of us were supposed to share, was roughly the size of a Greyhound lavatory. What I'm trying to say is that there's a history of awkward temporary accommodation here that precludes 100% objectivity in my appraisal of this particular motion picture. Also Skander is a good friend of mine.
On the other hand, honesty tends to trump loyalty for me in situations like these, and I suspect that my 57 rating for Pretty Persuasion (up from a 52 the first time I saw it, at its Sundance premiere; in the letter grade schema that's basically a middling B-) is pretty close to what I would have allotted had Skander and I never met. It's not as if I'm overlooking the film's numerous flaws as part of some fraternal rah-rah campaign. In Variety's classic "crix pix" parlance, I am Mixed. I can't recommend Pretty Persuasion to you without reservations, even though I was quite willing to see it a second time just to savor the dialogue's numerous cherry bombs (not all of which were in the script) and a host of sharp, funny performances. But I can tell you, with a clear conscience, that it's a good deal more interesting, ambitious and impassioned than many of the reviews suggest.
If anything, the movie is way too ambitious. Skander was about 21 years old when he wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and Pretty Persuasion feels very much like the product of an angry 21-year-old liberal (and Canadian) determined to cram everything that's wrong with America into a single bitter draught of satirical hemlock—to provoke peals of guilty laughter that wind up stuck in the throat. Which is to say that it's both admirably corrosive and (at times) disappointingly sophomoric, taking scattershot aim at a host of eminently worthy targets. It's a movie that has the courage and the dudgeon to introduce us to its protagonist, Kimberly Joyce, a privileged and frighteningly intelligent teen played with blistering eloquence by Evan Rachel Wood, and then immediately have Kimberly matter-of-factly tell her new Muslim friend that while she respects all races, "I'm really glad I was born white." (This charming sentiment is followed by an exhaustive, in-order-of-preference rundown of desirable ethnicities, with bonus points awarded to black women who possess Caucasian features.) Equally biting and timely is the film's exploration of the sexual double standard, by which young girls are simultaneously rewarded and punished for carnal enthusiasm. Unfortunately, some of the satire's force is diluted by cheap shots and crude exaggerations. To my mind, the most injurious scene is the one that formed the basis of Skander's short film "Family Dinner" (which I didn't much like; his second short, "Guest Room," is terrific, though), which attempts to "explain" Kimberly's burgeoning psychosis by depicting her father, mother, stepmother and putative boyfriend as grotesque, rapacious caricatures. Much of this material is less funny or acute than simply shrill, and the stuff with the absent mother (who's so not-there that she thinks Kimberly is five or six years older than she actually is) verges on bathetic. All of it falls under the general heading of Trying Too Hard to Do Too Much.
Still, better to overreach than to underwhelm. For all its flaws, Pretty Persuasion is obviously—obviously!—a movie with a very serious and heartfelt agenda, which makes it rather bewildering that so many reviews have dismissed it as insincere and gratuitously outrageous. "Cynical, eager-to-shock Sundance indie...wears its notion of incorrectness with a smirk," harrumphs EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum...though I must say I almost prefer that to Owen Gleiberman making it sound like a salad dressing in the ads ("brimming with zesty shock value!"). "Shock for shock's sake," shrugs some chick I've never heard of. Are these people kidding? Can they really not perceive that every tasteless joke masks an undercurrent of pain and anger? A third-stringer for the Village Voice even has the temerity to claim that the film is "predicated on a streak of misogyny," a charge supported by a single line of dialogue spoken by a clueless character for whom we have zero sympathy. (That's like citing dialogue by one of the husbands in The Stepford Wives as evidence of Ira Levin's misogyny.) Yeah, maybe I'm partisan, but that doesn't make these folks any less dimwitted.
Being heartfelt doesn't make a movie good. Frickin' Seabiscuit was heartfelt. And I'm not making any great claims for Pretty Persuasion, which joins such highly touted efforts as Murderball, The Squid and the Whale, Last Days, Millions, Good Night. And, Good Luck and The World among a long list of Really Intriguing Films That Didn't Altogether Work for Me. (Other movies that I've given a 57 over the last few years: Lost in Translation, Gangs of New York, Tarnation.) But opportunistic it ain't. And if you'll allow me just a brief shake of the pom-poms, I do think it's well worth seeing—on its own terms, as an intermittently hilarious and remarkably daring comedy, and as the first volley from a promising new talent. Look for his directorial debut, The Smallest Couch of All Time Ever, sometime next year.
On the one hand, I can't pretend to be completely unbiased about Pretty Persuasion, a very black comedy that opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. I have slept on the fold-out couch of its screenwriter and co-producer, Skander Halim, and he, by turn, has taken one look at my couch, which does not fold out and which comfortably seats maybe 1.5 normal-sized people, and immediately announced, "There's no way in hell I can sleep on that." (I gave him the bed, which was kind of a Pyrrhic victory for him given that the mattress was delivered the next morning.) In Rotterdam two years ago, we split the cost of a rather expensive hotel room when an idiot colleague, who shall remain nameless until someone inevitably outs him in the comments, neglected to inform us that his own hotel room, which the three of us were supposed to share, was roughly the size of a Greyhound lavatory. What I'm trying to say is that there's a history of awkward temporary accommodation here that precludes 100% objectivity in my appraisal of this particular motion picture. Also Skander is a good friend of mine.
On the other hand, honesty tends to trump loyalty for me in situations like these, and I suspect that my 57 rating for Pretty Persuasion (up from a 52 the first time I saw it, at its Sundance premiere; in the letter grade schema that's basically a middling B-) is pretty close to what I would have allotted had Skander and I never met. It's not as if I'm overlooking the film's numerous flaws as part of some fraternal rah-rah campaign. In Variety's classic "crix pix" parlance, I am Mixed. I can't recommend Pretty Persuasion to you without reservations, even though I was quite willing to see it a second time just to savor the dialogue's numerous cherry bombs (not all of which were in the script) and a host of sharp, funny performances. But I can tell you, with a clear conscience, that it's a good deal more interesting, ambitious and impassioned than many of the reviews suggest.
If anything, the movie is way too ambitious. Skander was about 21 years old when he wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and Pretty Persuasion feels very much like the product of an angry 21-year-old liberal (and Canadian) determined to cram everything that's wrong with America into a single bitter draught of satirical hemlock—to provoke peals of guilty laughter that wind up stuck in the throat. Which is to say that it's both admirably corrosive and (at times) disappointingly sophomoric, taking scattershot aim at a host of eminently worthy targets. It's a movie that has the courage and the dudgeon to introduce us to its protagonist, Kimberly Joyce, a privileged and frighteningly intelligent teen played with blistering eloquence by Evan Rachel Wood, and then immediately have Kimberly matter-of-factly tell her new Muslim friend that while she respects all races, "I'm really glad I was born white." (This charming sentiment is followed by an exhaustive, in-order-of-preference rundown of desirable ethnicities, with bonus points awarded to black women who possess Caucasian features.) Equally biting and timely is the film's exploration of the sexual double standard, by which young girls are simultaneously rewarded and punished for carnal enthusiasm. Unfortunately, some of the satire's force is diluted by cheap shots and crude exaggerations. To my mind, the most injurious scene is the one that formed the basis of Skander's short film "Family Dinner" (which I didn't much like; his second short, "Guest Room," is terrific, though), which attempts to "explain" Kimberly's burgeoning psychosis by depicting her father, mother, stepmother and putative boyfriend as grotesque, rapacious caricatures. Much of this material is less funny or acute than simply shrill, and the stuff with the absent mother (who's so not-there that she thinks Kimberly is five or six years older than she actually is) verges on bathetic. All of it falls under the general heading of Trying Too Hard to Do Too Much.
Still, better to overreach than to underwhelm. For all its flaws, Pretty Persuasion is obviously—obviously!—a movie with a very serious and heartfelt agenda, which makes it rather bewildering that so many reviews have dismissed it as insincere and gratuitously outrageous. "Cynical, eager-to-shock Sundance indie...wears its notion of incorrectness with a smirk," harrumphs EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum...though I must say I almost prefer that to Owen Gleiberman making it sound like a salad dressing in the ads ("brimming with zesty shock value!"). "Shock for shock's sake," shrugs some chick I've never heard of. Are these people kidding? Can they really not perceive that every tasteless joke masks an undercurrent of pain and anger? A third-stringer for the Village Voice even has the temerity to claim that the film is "predicated on a streak of misogyny," a charge supported by a single line of dialogue spoken by a clueless character for whom we have zero sympathy. (That's like citing dialogue by one of the husbands in The Stepford Wives as evidence of Ira Levin's misogyny.) Yeah, maybe I'm partisan, but that doesn't make these folks any less dimwitted.
Being heartfelt doesn't make a movie good. Frickin' Seabiscuit was heartfelt. And I'm not making any great claims for Pretty Persuasion, which joins such highly touted efforts as Murderball, The Squid and the Whale, Last Days, Millions, Good Night. And, Good Luck and The World among a long list of Really Intriguing Films That Didn't Altogether Work for Me. (Other movies that I've given a 57 over the last few years: Lost in Translation, Gangs of New York, Tarnation.) But opportunistic it ain't. And if you'll allow me just a brief shake of the pom-poms, I do think it's well worth seeing—on its own terms, as an intermittently hilarious and remarkably daring comedy, and as the first volley from a promising new talent. Look for his directorial debut, The Smallest Couch of All Time Ever, sometime next year.
16 June 2005
Book meme.
.
I've been tagged by Victor for this thing, so here we go.
1. Total number of books I've owned.
Quite a lot, very few of which are still with me. I was the quintessential childhood bookworm—there are probably still people in San Jose's Almaden Valley, where I grew up, who remember me as the weird little kid who used to ride his skateboard around the neighborhood while reading, which was how I obeyed my stepfather's frequent demand that I go outside and get some damn exercise. (Peripheral vision is a marvelous thing.) Given how much I read then, it's kind of sad how little I read now; somewhere along the line, movies crept in and just kind of took over. Partially, I think, it's because cinema history seemed so much less daunting—if you're diligent, you can actually see pretty much every truly noteworthy film that's ever been made, whereas multiple lifetimes would be required to make even a small dent in the 80th percentile of world literature.
Anyway, most of my books were sold, five or ten at a time, during my infamous "lost years" (circa 1987–1991), when I was utterly incapable of holding a McJob for more than three weeks or so and would periodically need to scrounge up food money. I also got rid of a bunch when I moved permanently from California to New York in the mid-'90s, and then a bunch more just last year when I moved from Bushwick to a smaller apartment in Park Slope. Right now the total looks to be around 300 or so. But I'd guess I've owned closer to 3000.
2. Last book I bought.
Man, I'm glad I opted not to pick up Matt Matros' The Making of a Poker Player yesterday, when I was standing at the 7th Ave. B&N, slackjawed at the sight of an entire section—floor to ceiling, every shelf—devoted to poker books. That would have been embarrassing.
I don't keep receipts or anything, so I can't be sure, but I think my most recent purchase was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which I grabbed from a street vendor near my apartment right before Cannes. I'd read it before—Tim Ereneta's copy, I believe, during the Seldom Dreaming shoot in the summer of '93—but the cover jumped out at me as I was walking home from the grocery store and I just thought "I should own this, plus it's been over ten years and I can bring it on the plane," which I did. $10 cheap for the first HarperPerennial edition (1994). Possibly the most entertaining work of deconstruction ever.
3. Last book I read.
Start to finish, I believe that would also be Understanding Comics. Most of the reading I've done lately has been in magazines and on the Internet. But I'm still slowly working my way through Daniel C. Dennett's Freedom Evolves, a fairly dense treatise on free will and determinism that's my bizarre notion of bedtime reading. (I can't fall asleep without reading for at least a few minutes unless I'm on the verge of passing out.)
4. Five books that mean a lot to me.
• The Phantom Tollbooth—Norton Juster
"There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always." Any pre-teen who reads that sentence and is capable of putting the book down needs to be sterilized immediately. I vividly remember reading this aloud to my uncle Casey as a boy. Though that wasn't as much fun as reading it aloud to Mary a few years ago.
• The Castle—Franz Kafka
Probably my favorite canonical novel, which is pretty remarkable given that it's unfinished and that I tend to be a stickler for gestalt. Kafka's prosaic absurdism resonates with me like nothing else, and for me this is both funnier and less self-consciously allegorical than The Trial.
• The Blind Watchmaker—Richard Dawkins
Reading this allowed me to stop pussyfooting around with agnosticism and take intellectual pride in my conviction that there is no organizing intelligence responsible for life, the universe and everything. (Still happy you picked me, Victor?) Most remarkable for his convincing if counterintuitive argument that any theory of life's origin that seems remotely plausible to the human mind is almost certainly incorrect (because of our inability to truly fathom the length of time involved).
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again—David Foster Wallace
It's tempting to go with Infinite Jest instead, if only because the Eschaton Debacle (pp. 321–342, plus assorted endnotes) is the single greatest literary passage I've ever read—a freakishly brilliant combination of geopolitics, philosophy and adolescent vaudeville. ("It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!") But it's DFW's observational essays, particularly the titular one in this collection (the first of his books that I read), that have had the most profound (some would argue deleterious) influence on my own prose style.
• Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players—David Sklansky & Mason Malmuth
Because now I know for sure that I'll never have to work a real job again.
And I know I'm supposed to tag five other people now, but that's a little too chain-letter for my taste. It's easy enough to guess who I'd pick—I don't have that many friends who blog—so they can take up the baton or not, as they choose.
I've been tagged by Victor for this thing, so here we go.
1. Total number of books I've owned.
Quite a lot, very few of which are still with me. I was the quintessential childhood bookworm—there are probably still people in San Jose's Almaden Valley, where I grew up, who remember me as the weird little kid who used to ride his skateboard around the neighborhood while reading, which was how I obeyed my stepfather's frequent demand that I go outside and get some damn exercise. (Peripheral vision is a marvelous thing.) Given how much I read then, it's kind of sad how little I read now; somewhere along the line, movies crept in and just kind of took over. Partially, I think, it's because cinema history seemed so much less daunting—if you're diligent, you can actually see pretty much every truly noteworthy film that's ever been made, whereas multiple lifetimes would be required to make even a small dent in the 80th percentile of world literature.
Anyway, most of my books were sold, five or ten at a time, during my infamous "lost years" (circa 1987–1991), when I was utterly incapable of holding a McJob for more than three weeks or so and would periodically need to scrounge up food money. I also got rid of a bunch when I moved permanently from California to New York in the mid-'90s, and then a bunch more just last year when I moved from Bushwick to a smaller apartment in Park Slope. Right now the total looks to be around 300 or so. But I'd guess I've owned closer to 3000.
2. Last book I bought.
Man, I'm glad I opted not to pick up Matt Matros' The Making of a Poker Player yesterday, when I was standing at the 7th Ave. B&N, slackjawed at the sight of an entire section—floor to ceiling, every shelf—devoted to poker books. That would have been embarrassing.
I don't keep receipts or anything, so I can't be sure, but I think my most recent purchase was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which I grabbed from a street vendor near my apartment right before Cannes. I'd read it before—Tim Ereneta's copy, I believe, during the Seldom Dreaming shoot in the summer of '93—but the cover jumped out at me as I was walking home from the grocery store and I just thought "I should own this, plus it's been over ten years and I can bring it on the plane," which I did. $10 cheap for the first HarperPerennial edition (1994). Possibly the most entertaining work of deconstruction ever.
3. Last book I read.
Start to finish, I believe that would also be Understanding Comics. Most of the reading I've done lately has been in magazines and on the Internet. But I'm still slowly working my way through Daniel C. Dennett's Freedom Evolves, a fairly dense treatise on free will and determinism that's my bizarre notion of bedtime reading. (I can't fall asleep without reading for at least a few minutes unless I'm on the verge of passing out.)
4. Five books that mean a lot to me.
• The Phantom Tollbooth—Norton Juster
"There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always." Any pre-teen who reads that sentence and is capable of putting the book down needs to be sterilized immediately. I vividly remember reading this aloud to my uncle Casey as a boy. Though that wasn't as much fun as reading it aloud to Mary a few years ago.
• The Castle—Franz Kafka
Probably my favorite canonical novel, which is pretty remarkable given that it's unfinished and that I tend to be a stickler for gestalt. Kafka's prosaic absurdism resonates with me like nothing else, and for me this is both funnier and less self-consciously allegorical than The Trial.
• The Blind Watchmaker—Richard Dawkins
Reading this allowed me to stop pussyfooting around with agnosticism and take intellectual pride in my conviction that there is no organizing intelligence responsible for life, the universe and everything. (Still happy you picked me, Victor?) Most remarkable for his convincing if counterintuitive argument that any theory of life's origin that seems remotely plausible to the human mind is almost certainly incorrect (because of our inability to truly fathom the length of time involved).
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again—David Foster Wallace
It's tempting to go with Infinite Jest instead, if only because the Eschaton Debacle (pp. 321–342, plus assorted endnotes) is the single greatest literary passage I've ever read—a freakishly brilliant combination of geopolitics, philosophy and adolescent vaudeville. ("It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!") But it's DFW's observational essays, particularly the titular one in this collection (the first of his books that I read), that have had the most profound (some would argue deleterious) influence on my own prose style.
• Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players—David Sklansky & Mason Malmuth
Because now I know for sure that I'll never have to work a real job again.
And I know I'm supposed to tag five other people now, but that's a little too chain-letter for my taste. It's easy enough to guess who I'd pick—I don't have that many friends who blog—so they can take up the baton or not, as they choose.
05 June 2005
Attention smarter people.
.
Interesting little piece in this week's Sunday Times Mag, by Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt, about some capuchin monkeys that have been taught the concept of money. Oddly, the article never once uses the word "abstract," even though what's exciting about this experiment is that money is an abstraction and the ability to grasp and utilize abstractions is precisely what separates human beings from all other life forms on this planet. But most of all I'm befuddled by this here passage:
Am I missing something here? I spent like 20 minutes poring over these three paragraphs over dinner tonight, convinced that I must be overlooking some sneaky mathematical legerdemain of the kind exemplified by the Monty Hall Problem. But the subtlety, should it in fact exist, continues to elude me. So tell me, wonks: What's irrational about the decision arrived at by both monkey and man? In the first scenario, it makes perfect sense to "gamble," since you can only win—you're guaranteed one grape and have a 50% chance of getting another. In the second scenario, you already have the two grapes, and "gambling" can only halve your supply. There is no reason not to gamble in Scenario #1, and zero incentive to gamble in Scenario #2. And yet apparently "economics textbook[s]" maintain that the rational approach would be to treat them as equivalent. I'm open to correction, but my sense right now is that a poker table full of economists would offer a whole lot of dead money.
Speaking of which: Fuck. I was there at the time, found out how long you can keep your hands on your head before your arms start to get really tired. (About 25 minutes.) I've found another, much smaller club a bit further south, and am still NOT making a bundle; it's a blow all the same, though, as I'd developed a real camaraderie with many of the dealers and the other regulars. Let's get the game legalized, please. It is a contest of skill, involving merely an element of chance. (See also: every other competitive endeavor you can think of.)
Interesting little piece in this week's Sunday Times Mag, by Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt, about some capuchin monkeys that have been taught the concept of money. Oddly, the article never once uses the word "abstract," even though what's exciting about this experiment is that money is an abstraction and the ability to grasp and utilize abstractions is precisely what separates human beings from all other life forms on this planet. But most of all I'm befuddled by this here passage:
Chen next introduced a pair of gambling games and set out to determine which one the monkeys preferred. In the first game, the capuchin was given one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either retained the original grape or won a bonus grape. In the second game, the capuchin started out owning the bonus grape and, once again dependent on a coin flip, either kept the two grapes or lost one. These two games are in fact the same gamble, with identical odds, but one is framed as a potential win and the other as a potential loss.
How did the capuchins react? They far preferred to take a gamble on the potential gain than the potential loss. This is not what an economics textbook would predict. The laws of economics state that these two gambles, because they represent such small stakes, should be treated equally.
So, does Chen's gambling experiment simply reveal the cognitive limitations of his small-brained subjects? Perhaps not. In similar experiments, it turns out that humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate. Documenting this phenomenon, known as loss aversion, is what helped the psychologist Daniel Kahneman win a Nobel Prize in economics.
Am I missing something here? I spent like 20 minutes poring over these three paragraphs over dinner tonight, convinced that I must be overlooking some sneaky mathematical legerdemain of the kind exemplified by the Monty Hall Problem. But the subtlety, should it in fact exist, continues to elude me. So tell me, wonks: What's irrational about the decision arrived at by both monkey and man? In the first scenario, it makes perfect sense to "gamble," since you can only win—you're guaranteed one grape and have a 50% chance of getting another. In the second scenario, you already have the two grapes, and "gambling" can only halve your supply. There is no reason not to gamble in Scenario #1, and zero incentive to gamble in Scenario #2. And yet apparently "economics textbook[s]" maintain that the rational approach would be to treat them as equivalent. I'm open to correction, but my sense right now is that a poker table full of economists would offer a whole lot of dead money.
Speaking of which: Fuck. I was there at the time, found out how long you can keep your hands on your head before your arms start to get really tired. (About 25 minutes.) I've found another, much smaller club a bit further south, and am still NOT making a bundle; it's a blow all the same, though, as I'd developed a real camaraderie with many of the dealers and the other regulars. Let's get the game legalized, please. It is a contest of skill, involving merely an element of chance. (See also: every other competitive endeavor you can think of.)
11 May 2005
Cannes
(For comments, see my blog over at nerve.com).
Wed 11
Lemming (Dominik Moll, France): 56
Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico/France): W/O
The Bow (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea): 38
Kilometre Zero (Hiner Saleem, France): 31
Thu 12
Match Point (Woody Allen, UK): 67
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan): 74
Bashing (Masahiro Kobayashi, Japan): 25
Be With Me (Eric Khoo, Singapore): W/O
Fri 13
Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan, Canada/UK): 49
Time Has Come (Alain Guiraudie, France): 44
Nordeste (Juan Solanas, France/Spain/Belgium/Argentina): 55
Election (Johnnie To, Hong Kong): 32
Sat 14
Hidden (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy): 69
Factotum (Bent Hamer, USA/Norway): 50
Down in the Valley (David Jacobson, USA): 77
Once You're Born (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy/France/UK): 47
Sun 15
La Moustache (Emmanuel Carrère, France): 61
The King (James Marsh, USA): W/O
Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, France/Mexico/Belgium/Germany): 17
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, Canada): 58?
Mon 16
Manderlay (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/UK/France): 43
Delwende (S. Pierre Yameogo, Burkina Faso/France/Switzerland): W/O
The Child (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France): 71
Time to Leave (François Ozon, France): 42
Tue 17
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, USA): 53
Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachthani? (Aoyama Shinji, Japan): 38
Zim and Co (Pierre Jolivet, France): 49
Shanghai Dreams (Wang Xiaoshuai, China): 47
Wed 18
To Paint or Make Love (Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu, France): 65
One Night (Niki Karimi, Iran): W/O
Johanna (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary/Germany): W/O
Free Zone (Amos Gitai, Israel/France/Spain/Belgium): 48
Thu 19
Don't Come Knocking (Wim Wenders, Germany): 40
Sleeper (Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria/Germany): W/O
Tale of Cinema (Hong Sangsoo, South Korea/France): 64
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, USA): 52
Fri 20
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan): 54*
Chromophobia (Martha Fiennes, UK): W/O
Princess Raccoon (Seijun Suzuki, Japan): 68
* (but actually 1966: 80; 1911: 40; 2005: 40)
SCREEN INTERNATIONAL POLL (Competition films only; average out of four stars)
(NOTE: They've stopped handing out the dailies as of today [20 May], so no further updates unless someone can find the grid on the website, which I cannot.)
Hidden: 3.3
Broken Flowers: 3.2
The Child: 3.2
A History of Violence: 2.8
Manderlay: 2.7
Last Days: 2.4
Lemming: 2.2
Where the Truth Lies: 2.1
Election: 2.0
Shanghai Dreams: 2.0
Battle in Heaven: 1.6
Frank Miller's Sin City: 1.6
Kilometre Zero: 1.6
Bashing: 1.5
Once You're Born: 1.5
To Paint or Make Love: 1.3
LE FILM FRANCAIS POLL (also out of four stars, but a radically different scale; do not compare directly to poll above)
Broken Flowers: 3.13
Match Point: 3.07
Kirikou, le fetiche egare: 3.00 (exactly one *** rating)
The Child: 2.87
Les artistes du theatre brule: 2.80
Avenge but One of My Two Eyes: 2.75
Last Days: 2.73
Hidden: 2.67
Don't Come Knocking: 2.57
Three Times: 2.55
Manderlay: 2.38
The Power of Nightmares: 2.33
A History of Violence: 2.20
Where the Truth Lies: 2.14
Star Wars: Episode III: 2.11
Shanghai Dreams: 2.09
Tale of Cinema: 2.09
Darshan: 2.00 (one ** rating)
Lemming: 1.93
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: 1.90
Free Zone: 1.87
Cindy, the Doll Is Mine [short]: 1.75
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 1.75
Midnight Movies: 1.75
Battle in Heaven: 1.73
To Paint or Make Love: 1.73
C'est pas tout a fait la vie...: 1.71
Joyeux Noel: 1.67
Bashing: 1.62
Election: 1.21
Frank Miller's Sin City: 1.13
Kilometre Zero: 1.00
Princess Raccoon: 1.00 (just one * rating)
Once You're Born: 0.64
Chromophobia: 0.00 (one frowny face)
Wed 11
Lemming (Dominik Moll, France): 56
Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico/France): W/O
The Bow (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea): 38
Kilometre Zero (Hiner Saleem, France): 31
Thu 12
Match Point (Woody Allen, UK): 67
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan): 74
Bashing (Masahiro Kobayashi, Japan): 25
Be With Me (Eric Khoo, Singapore): W/O
Fri 13
Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan, Canada/UK): 49
Time Has Come (Alain Guiraudie, France): 44
Nordeste (Juan Solanas, France/Spain/Belgium/Argentina): 55
Election (Johnnie To, Hong Kong): 32
Sat 14
Hidden (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy): 69
Factotum (Bent Hamer, USA/Norway): 50
Down in the Valley (David Jacobson, USA): 77
Once You're Born (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy/France/UK): 47
Sun 15
La Moustache (Emmanuel Carrère, France): 61
The King (James Marsh, USA): W/O
Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, France/Mexico/Belgium/Germany): 17
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, Canada): 58?
Mon 16
Manderlay (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/UK/France): 43
Delwende (S. Pierre Yameogo, Burkina Faso/France/Switzerland): W/O
The Child (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France): 71
Time to Leave (François Ozon, France): 42
Tue 17
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, USA): 53
Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachthani? (Aoyama Shinji, Japan): 38
Zim and Co (Pierre Jolivet, France): 49
Shanghai Dreams (Wang Xiaoshuai, China): 47
Wed 18
To Paint or Make Love (Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu, France): 65
One Night (Niki Karimi, Iran): W/O
Johanna (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary/Germany): W/O
Free Zone (Amos Gitai, Israel/France/Spain/Belgium): 48
Thu 19
Don't Come Knocking (Wim Wenders, Germany): 40
Sleeper (Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria/Germany): W/O
Tale of Cinema (Hong Sangsoo, South Korea/France): 64
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, USA): 52
Fri 20
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan): 54*
Chromophobia (Martha Fiennes, UK): W/O
Princess Raccoon (Seijun Suzuki, Japan): 68
* (but actually 1966: 80; 1911: 40; 2005: 40)
SCREEN INTERNATIONAL POLL (Competition films only; average out of four stars)
(NOTE: They've stopped handing out the dailies as of today [20 May], so no further updates unless someone can find the grid on the website, which I cannot.)
Hidden: 3.3
Broken Flowers: 3.2
The Child: 3.2
A History of Violence: 2.8
Manderlay: 2.7
Last Days: 2.4
Lemming: 2.2
Where the Truth Lies: 2.1
Election: 2.0
Shanghai Dreams: 2.0
Battle in Heaven: 1.6
Frank Miller's Sin City: 1.6
Kilometre Zero: 1.6
Bashing: 1.5
Once You're Born: 1.5
To Paint or Make Love: 1.3
LE FILM FRANCAIS POLL (also out of four stars, but a radically different scale; do not compare directly to poll above)
Broken Flowers: 3.13
Match Point: 3.07
Kirikou, le fetiche egare: 3.00 (exactly one *** rating)
The Child: 2.87
Les artistes du theatre brule: 2.80
Avenge but One of My Two Eyes: 2.75
Last Days: 2.73
Hidden: 2.67
Don't Come Knocking: 2.57
Three Times: 2.55
Manderlay: 2.38
The Power of Nightmares: 2.33
A History of Violence: 2.20
Where the Truth Lies: 2.14
Star Wars: Episode III: 2.11
Shanghai Dreams: 2.09
Tale of Cinema: 2.09
Darshan: 2.00 (one ** rating)
Lemming: 1.93
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: 1.90
Free Zone: 1.87
Cindy, the Doll Is Mine [short]: 1.75
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 1.75
Midnight Movies: 1.75
Battle in Heaven: 1.73
To Paint or Make Love: 1.73
C'est pas tout a fait la vie...: 1.71
Joyeux Noel: 1.67
Bashing: 1.62
Election: 1.21
Frank Miller's Sin City: 1.13
Kilometre Zero: 1.00
Princess Raccoon: 1.00 (just one * rating)
Once You're Born: 0.64
Chromophobia: 0.00 (one frowny face)
11 April 2005
Brush with inebriated greatness.
.
One of the many reasons I love poker is its fundamentally egalitarian nature. So far as I know, the World Series of Poker is the only championship event with no qualifying restrictions whatsoever—so long as you can scrape together ten grand, you can take a shot at the title. (More than 5000 hopefuls are expected to do so this year.) And while no-limit Hold'em is unquestionably a game of skill (and hence should be legal regardless of a particular jurisdiction's gambling statutes—California has the right idea, distinguishing between cardrooms and casinos), the short-term chance element gives amateurs a credible shot at duking it out with professionals. You can't likely score a single basket one-on-one against Michael Jordan, or survive even 20 moves against Garry Kasparov, but if you happen to be dealt AA when Daniel Negreanu looks down to find KK, you're gonna win some money.
No doubt you already see where this is heading.
Late Friday night—or technically quite early Saturday morning—Phil Hellmuth, Jr. showed up at the nonexistent New York underground poker club I most certainly do not frequent. For those who don't know much about poker yet are determined to read this entry anyway, Hellmuth is one of the giants of the game, a former world champion (1989) who has won more WSoP titles than anybody else in history (nine, tied with Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson). He's also the most notorious "personality" on the circuit, so supremely self-confident that he frequently shows up an hour or more late for major tournaments, unconcerned that he's being blinded off, and yet so immature that he launches into whiny harangues every time somebody sucks out on him. When Entertainment Weekly did its inevitable poker-is-hot story last year, Hellmuth was the focus, along with Annie Duke. Every recreational player in America knows who he is, and the room actually fell silent for about 20 seconds when he walked in the door. (At 6'6", decked out in his own brand-name merchandise, he's hard to miss.)
It was roughly 4:30 a.m. Hellmuth was in town for some event or other, had just come from some club he couldn't remember the name of, was pretty clearly drunk, was looking to have a little fun. He sat down at my $1-2 no-limit table with the maximum buy-in, $500. I would very much like to pretend that this was not remotely intimidating. In theory, it shouldn't have been, since the stakes were fairly low and Hellmuth was just goofing around. On the other hand, there's nothing more potentially dangerous than a player who truly couldn't care less about the money he has in play. Especially when you know for a fact that he's much, much better than you are.
"I'm gonna raise every hand pre-flop blind," Hellmuth announced right off the bat. And he did. In fact, he never looked at his hole cards unless/until somebody either bet into him or raised him. This may seem like a suicidal strategy, but for Hellmuth it has several advantages. First, because he's Former World Champion Phil Hellmuth, Jr., amateurs are nervous about playing against him; even though he was raising blind, people tended to fold unless they had a fairly strong hand. He actually took down several (admittedly quite small) pots preflop, without ever seeing his hand—nobody gave him any action. Second, deliberately playing like an idiot induces genuine idiots to make mistakes—Hellmuth doubled up the one time he woke up with a real hand (KK), because another player mistakenly read his abrupt all-in reraise as a move and called him with KQ off. Third, Hellmuth doesn't need to look at his cards. He knows what you're holding, and that's usually enough.
I know that players of Hellmuth's caliber are capable of making uncanny, seemingly impossible reads—that's what makes them world-class—but it was still amazing to see it in action. About five hands after Hellmuth sat down, I was dealt KK in early position when he was in the big blind. Normally, cowboys are an automatic raising hand, especially in EP; because Hellmuth was auto-raising blind, however, I opted to limp rather than force him to look at his cards and actually play, or more likely fold. The player under the gun had straddled, so it was $4 to go. I tossed in four white chips. I would be willing to swear that I did not handle them in some odd, revealing way, nor do I believe that I wore some sinister expression. And I'd limped in twice before, so I wasn't an obvious rock. And yet when the action got back to Hellmuth in the big blind (after several other people limped in), instead of raising, he stared hard at me for several seconds and then slowly rapped the table. The flop came Queen-high, and Hellmuth immediately pointed to me and said, "I check to the dude who snuck in with cowboys." How in the fuck. I honestly don't know. For a few minutes I started to fear that I was singularly transparent, but he was doing it to everybody. Another time, he raised to $50 pre-flop and everybody folded to the button, who hesitated as if wanting to call. "Forget it, King-Jack suited isn't worth it heads-up," Hellmuth said, whereupon the other player shook his head in wonder and mucked his suited KJ face-up.
Ultimately, I wound up going against him three times, and won every time. I even somehow found the courage to bet $50 into him when the river made the straight I'd been drawing to but also put a possible flush on the board. (He called, I showed, he nodded and mucked.) But I can't take any particular pride in these victories. He wasn't really trying. And the experience was pretty humbling overall. I do quite well—in fact, let me note for the benefit of the IRS that I am NOT now making more money from poker than from my actual job—but that's because I get paid off regularly by fish. The difference between what Phil Hellmuth does and what I do is like the difference between Seurat and paint-by-numbers.
One of the many reasons I love poker is its fundamentally egalitarian nature. So far as I know, the World Series of Poker is the only championship event with no qualifying restrictions whatsoever—so long as you can scrape together ten grand, you can take a shot at the title. (More than 5000 hopefuls are expected to do so this year.) And while no-limit Hold'em is unquestionably a game of skill (and hence should be legal regardless of a particular jurisdiction's gambling statutes—California has the right idea, distinguishing between cardrooms and casinos), the short-term chance element gives amateurs a credible shot at duking it out with professionals. You can't likely score a single basket one-on-one against Michael Jordan, or survive even 20 moves against Garry Kasparov, but if you happen to be dealt AA when Daniel Negreanu looks down to find KK, you're gonna win some money.
No doubt you already see where this is heading.
Late Friday night—or technically quite early Saturday morning—Phil Hellmuth, Jr. showed up at the nonexistent New York underground poker club I most certainly do not frequent. For those who don't know much about poker yet are determined to read this entry anyway, Hellmuth is one of the giants of the game, a former world champion (1989) who has won more WSoP titles than anybody else in history (nine, tied with Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson). He's also the most notorious "personality" on the circuit, so supremely self-confident that he frequently shows up an hour or more late for major tournaments, unconcerned that he's being blinded off, and yet so immature that he launches into whiny harangues every time somebody sucks out on him. When Entertainment Weekly did its inevitable poker-is-hot story last year, Hellmuth was the focus, along with Annie Duke. Every recreational player in America knows who he is, and the room actually fell silent for about 20 seconds when he walked in the door. (At 6'6", decked out in his own brand-name merchandise, he's hard to miss.)
It was roughly 4:30 a.m. Hellmuth was in town for some event or other, had just come from some club he couldn't remember the name of, was pretty clearly drunk, was looking to have a little fun. He sat down at my $1-2 no-limit table with the maximum buy-in, $500. I would very much like to pretend that this was not remotely intimidating. In theory, it shouldn't have been, since the stakes were fairly low and Hellmuth was just goofing around. On the other hand, there's nothing more potentially dangerous than a player who truly couldn't care less about the money he has in play. Especially when you know for a fact that he's much, much better than you are.
"I'm gonna raise every hand pre-flop blind," Hellmuth announced right off the bat. And he did. In fact, he never looked at his hole cards unless/until somebody either bet into him or raised him. This may seem like a suicidal strategy, but for Hellmuth it has several advantages. First, because he's Former World Champion Phil Hellmuth, Jr., amateurs are nervous about playing against him; even though he was raising blind, people tended to fold unless they had a fairly strong hand. He actually took down several (admittedly quite small) pots preflop, without ever seeing his hand—nobody gave him any action. Second, deliberately playing like an idiot induces genuine idiots to make mistakes—Hellmuth doubled up the one time he woke up with a real hand (KK), because another player mistakenly read his abrupt all-in reraise as a move and called him with KQ off. Third, Hellmuth doesn't need to look at his cards. He knows what you're holding, and that's usually enough.
I know that players of Hellmuth's caliber are capable of making uncanny, seemingly impossible reads—that's what makes them world-class—but it was still amazing to see it in action. About five hands after Hellmuth sat down, I was dealt KK in early position when he was in the big blind. Normally, cowboys are an automatic raising hand, especially in EP; because Hellmuth was auto-raising blind, however, I opted to limp rather than force him to look at his cards and actually play, or more likely fold. The player under the gun had straddled, so it was $4 to go. I tossed in four white chips. I would be willing to swear that I did not handle them in some odd, revealing way, nor do I believe that I wore some sinister expression. And I'd limped in twice before, so I wasn't an obvious rock. And yet when the action got back to Hellmuth in the big blind (after several other people limped in), instead of raising, he stared hard at me for several seconds and then slowly rapped the table. The flop came Queen-high, and Hellmuth immediately pointed to me and said, "I check to the dude who snuck in with cowboys." How in the fuck. I honestly don't know. For a few minutes I started to fear that I was singularly transparent, but he was doing it to everybody. Another time, he raised to $50 pre-flop and everybody folded to the button, who hesitated as if wanting to call. "Forget it, King-Jack suited isn't worth it heads-up," Hellmuth said, whereupon the other player shook his head in wonder and mucked his suited KJ face-up.
Ultimately, I wound up going against him three times, and won every time. I even somehow found the courage to bet $50 into him when the river made the straight I'd been drawing to but also put a possible flush on the board. (He called, I showed, he nodded and mucked.) But I can't take any particular pride in these victories. He wasn't really trying. And the experience was pretty humbling overall. I do quite well—in fact, let me note for the benefit of the IRS that I am NOT now making more money from poker than from my actual job—but that's because I get paid off regularly by fish. The difference between what Phil Hellmuth does and what I do is like the difference between Seurat and paint-by-numbers.
01 April 2005
Free enterprise revisited.
.
NOTE: The date notwithstanding, the following is a true story, not an April Fool's joke.
On my way to the Q train this afternoon, I stop at the corner bodega to pick up a bottle of water and a copy of the Times. Total cost: $2.00. I pay with two dollar bills. Heading down the steps into the subway station, I put my right hand in my jacket pocket and am alarmed to realize my wallet is missing from its customary abode. Quick pro forma check of other pockets turns up nothing, so I dash back to the store, assuming I must have left it on the counter like a total idiot. But the bodega dude assures me I did not leave my wallet on the counter like a total idiot. "Possibly you left it at home*," he suggests, but I know that can't be so since I never carry money anywhere but my wallet.** And I'm pretty sure this guy didn't take it, since he and I share the friendly familiarity that neighborhood residents establish with local merchants. But a grand total of maybe 30 seconds had elapsed between purchase and revelation, and I'd traveled approximately a dozen yards. So if I didn't leave it on the counter, I somehow lost it in that short distance.
Now, the only other person in the vicinity at this time is a very cheerful fellow alternating between solicitations for spare change and flattery of random passersby (assuming there's a distinction to be made between the two). He's close enough to overhear my conversation with the bodega dude about my missing wallet, and if I somehow dropped my wallet between the store and the subway entrance he'd almost certainly have seen it. But he's ignoring me pretty strenuously. Which I guess I can't fault him for that, since according to him every single woman walking down Flatbush must be a model, right? That fine you have got to be a model. Lemme get one little smile from Miss America. Etc.
The bodega dude, mildly sympathetic but incapable of much more than shrugs and palms-up "search me" gestures, finally offers to check the store's security videocassette for me. While waiting for him to return, I decide it can't hurt to ask the homeless*** guy whether he saw anything.
ME: Hey, I lost my wallet around here about two, three minutes ago. You didn't happen to see it, did you?
PROBABLY HOMELESS GUY: No, man, sorry. Damn. That's fucked up.
But he's a terrible liar. Possibly the worst liar I've ever encountered. It's instantly obvious that he has my wallet. I don't know exactly what nonverbal indications human beings pick up on when others are dissembling; whatever the reliable tells are, though, he's exhibiting all of them at once, jacked up to 11. I take him aside as best I can given that we're both standing on the street with a steady flow of foot traffic around us.
ME (super-conspiratorially): Look, anybody who did find my wallet, the only thing that's any use to them is the money, right? And a Metrocard that's gonna expire in like two days. I don't care about the money. What I need to get back is a bunch of other crap in there. Like phone numbers and shit. I'd be really happy to get the wallet back without the money. So I'm not accusing you or anything, but seriously, if you do have my wallet, you can keep the money if you just give me the wallet back, I'm not calling the cops, I don't give a shit. I would really appreciate it. And if you honestly don't have it and don't know anything about it then I apologize. But if you do, then please, cut me a break.
He looks at me frankly for about ten seconds after I finish this little speech, then says, "All right, man, since you asked nice. Because you asked with respect, all right?"
And takes my wallet out of his pocket, opens it up, takes out all the cash (only maybe $45), and hands me the wallet. The cash goes back into his pocket.
For some reason I can't think of anything to do except stand there, dumbfounded. I don't even necessarily know why I'm dumbfounded. I guess I just didn't imagine anyone could be quite that brazen about it.
After about ten seconds of my gaping, he says: "What? That was the agreement, right?"
I still can't think of anything to say, so I just stare some more. Another ten seconds pass. Then he gives a little snort. "All right, man, it makes you feel better." He reaches into his pocket, takes out the money, hands it to me. I riffle it between my fingers, then hand it all back to him. He pockets it again. "Thanks a lot," I say, and get a little mock salute in return.
The weird thing is, I actually do feel better.
* Quiz for the Henry Higginses among you: What part of the world is this man from?
** Poker bankroll excepted. Between spasms of panic, I congratulated myself for this elementary precaution. But I don't use the bankroll as petty cash, so I had to have my wallet at the store.
*** (Presumption)
NOTE: The date notwithstanding, the following is a true story, not an April Fool's joke.
On my way to the Q train this afternoon, I stop at the corner bodega to pick up a bottle of water and a copy of the Times. Total cost: $2.00. I pay with two dollar bills. Heading down the steps into the subway station, I put my right hand in my jacket pocket and am alarmed to realize my wallet is missing from its customary abode. Quick pro forma check of other pockets turns up nothing, so I dash back to the store, assuming I must have left it on the counter like a total idiot. But the bodega dude assures me I did not leave my wallet on the counter like a total idiot. "Possibly you left it at home*," he suggests, but I know that can't be so since I never carry money anywhere but my wallet.** And I'm pretty sure this guy didn't take it, since he and I share the friendly familiarity that neighborhood residents establish with local merchants. But a grand total of maybe 30 seconds had elapsed between purchase and revelation, and I'd traveled approximately a dozen yards. So if I didn't leave it on the counter, I somehow lost it in that short distance.
Now, the only other person in the vicinity at this time is a very cheerful fellow alternating between solicitations for spare change and flattery of random passersby (assuming there's a distinction to be made between the two). He's close enough to overhear my conversation with the bodega dude about my missing wallet, and if I somehow dropped my wallet between the store and the subway entrance he'd almost certainly have seen it. But he's ignoring me pretty strenuously. Which I guess I can't fault him for that, since according to him every single woman walking down Flatbush must be a model, right? That fine you have got to be a model. Lemme get one little smile from Miss America. Etc.
The bodega dude, mildly sympathetic but incapable of much more than shrugs and palms-up "search me" gestures, finally offers to check the store's security videocassette for me. While waiting for him to return, I decide it can't hurt to ask the homeless*** guy whether he saw anything.
ME: Hey, I lost my wallet around here about two, three minutes ago. You didn't happen to see it, did you?
PROBABLY HOMELESS GUY: No, man, sorry. Damn. That's fucked up.
But he's a terrible liar. Possibly the worst liar I've ever encountered. It's instantly obvious that he has my wallet. I don't know exactly what nonverbal indications human beings pick up on when others are dissembling; whatever the reliable tells are, though, he's exhibiting all of them at once, jacked up to 11. I take him aside as best I can given that we're both standing on the street with a steady flow of foot traffic around us.
ME (super-conspiratorially): Look, anybody who did find my wallet, the only thing that's any use to them is the money, right? And a Metrocard that's gonna expire in like two days. I don't care about the money. What I need to get back is a bunch of other crap in there. Like phone numbers and shit. I'd be really happy to get the wallet back without the money. So I'm not accusing you or anything, but seriously, if you do have my wallet, you can keep the money if you just give me the wallet back, I'm not calling the cops, I don't give a shit. I would really appreciate it. And if you honestly don't have it and don't know anything about it then I apologize. But if you do, then please, cut me a break.
He looks at me frankly for about ten seconds after I finish this little speech, then says, "All right, man, since you asked nice. Because you asked with respect, all right?"
And takes my wallet out of his pocket, opens it up, takes out all the cash (only maybe $45), and hands me the wallet. The cash goes back into his pocket.
For some reason I can't think of anything to do except stand there, dumbfounded. I don't even necessarily know why I'm dumbfounded. I guess I just didn't imagine anyone could be quite that brazen about it.
After about ten seconds of my gaping, he says: "What? That was the agreement, right?"
I still can't think of anything to say, so I just stare some more. Another ten seconds pass. Then he gives a little snort. "All right, man, it makes you feel better." He reaches into his pocket, takes out the money, hands it to me. I riffle it between my fingers, then hand it all back to him. He pockets it again. "Thanks a lot," I say, and get a little mock salute in return.
The weird thing is, I actually do feel better.
* Quiz for the Henry Higginses among you: What part of the world is this man from?
** Poker bankroll excepted. Between spasms of panic, I congratulated myself for this elementary precaution. But I don't use the bankroll as petty cash, so I had to have my wallet at the store.
*** (Presumption)
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