Ray Kurzweil

Shortly after the Wachowski Brothers released a film called The Matrix in 1999, I got a job on a film shooting in Hendersonville, North Carolina about summer camp and spent a beautiful month and a half in a small cottage reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. It was a potent combination – the movie and the book; what the Matrix was doing for me spiritually, Kurzweil’s book seemed to be prepared to manifest on Earth.

Cut to a decade later, where I will be attending my fifth consecutive NAB Show – the largest tech and entertainment media show of its kind in the world – and have the opportunity to see Kurzweil actually speak in person for a power session entitled “The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Media, Communications, and Society.”

Kurzweil will begin the session with a presentation on how information technology is transforming traditional industries, including media and entertainment, into infotech businesses. He will explore how the exponential growth of technology and the influx of new chip-driven tools is upending free enterprise as we know it and paving the way for an unparalleled change in human history. After his presentation, Kurzweil will be joined on the stage by Professor Donald Marinelli for a special discussion highlighting topics that directly impact Hollywood and the entertainment technology arena.

This is precisely what I have been asked to speak about throughout most of my career – the confluence of technology and the arts – so you can imagine how excited I am to hear these two go on about it.

To give you a better idea about Kurzweil’s relevance (besides the fact that he invented speech recognition technology) he has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes and ranked 8th among entrepreneurs in the United States by Inc. magazine. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is a six-time national bestselling author whose works include “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “The Singularity is Near.” Which reminds me, Kurzweil also recently spearheaded the opening of The Singularity University where he invites the world’s foremost thinkers, doctors and technicians to figure out how to live forever, in harmony, probably with robots. And he is totally serious. And he might even pull it off.

Donald Marinelli is a tenured professor of drama and arts management at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the executive producer of that institution’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). The ETC is recognized internationally as Carnegie Mellon’s “Dream Fulfillment Factory.” Its emphasis is on bringing artists and technologists together to work on substantive, real-world projects combining the latest digital media technologies with myriad artistic, educational, and entertainment efforts. Marinelli’s book “The Comet & the Tornado” will be released on April 6th.

This event joins an impressive line-up of previously announced keynote conversations, including Dana Walden and Gary Newman, Chairmen of Twentieth Century Fox Television (TCFTV); and Stan Lee, the iconic comic book visionary who co-created Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Fantastic Four.

“A key theme of this year’s NAB Show is transmedia: developing, integrating and monetizing content for multiplatform distribution,” said Chris Brown, executive vice president, conventions & business operations for NAB Show. “Stan Lee has epitomized the concept of transmedia with his amazing creations, which have been turned into smash hit feature films, television series and innovative digital content.”

Did I already mention how excited I am?   This is like Christmas for prognosticators like me, never mind robotics fans. And manifesting dreams.  And wanting to live forever.  And SEO types.  And comic books.

The NAB Show will take place 10-15 April, 2010 in Las Vegas (exhibits open 12 April). It is the world’s largest electronic media show covering filmed entertainment and the development, management and delivery of content across all mediums. Complete details are available at www.nabshow.com.

Crumb – Dir: Terry Zwigoff

This is the film that first made me hyper-conscious of self-imposed, voluntary corporate branding as illustrator Robert Crumb observes that “these days” everyone is walking around wearing t-shirts and clothing advertising one company or another.  But the effects of this film cast a far wider net than mere corporate aversion.

Crumb is a complex man from a complex family; his two elder brothers are geniuses in their own right but each is also more mentally disturbed than the next which leads me to wonder, in this case with much greater emphasis than normal, whether it is the the anomalies and deviations from what is considered a “healthy, normal” mind that give rise to great art or whether it is the life of an artist that give rise to mental instability.  Of course there is no definitive answer but this film’s utterly deviant subjects underline that the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Required viewing.

In the Realms of the Unreal – The Mystery of Henry Darger – Dir: Jessica Yu

Continuing on this theme of mental instability and visionary creativity, here we have as our subject an ascetic, anti-social man about whom even his lifelong neighbors knew very little.

A janitor and avid church-goer, no one knew, until he was moved to a convalescent home in his final weeks on Earth, that in his single apartment he had written a fifteen-thousand page fantasy novel with profoundly complex and beautiful illustrations wherein all the young girls who were the subjects of his very innocent-spirited magnum opus (and even that is understatement) had penises – more than likely because he didn’t know better.  The study of his work is a study of how the mind attempts to heal it wounds – Darger was sent to boarding schools and even a sanitarium in his childhood – all of which he works out in the course of his book.

Rivers and Tides – Dir: Thomas Riedelsheimer

This documentary about nature-artist Andy Goldsworthy will, unequivocally change your life. using only things found in the natural world, he synchronizes himself with the patterns found in the world and ultimately finds a way to render found objects in a manner that pursues and underlines their energy.

Not only is it a fitting introduction to this extraordinary soul, but Fred Frith’s score perfectly punctuates this delicate process throughout.

Highly recommended. Beautiful beyond belief.

Surfwise: The Amazing True Odyssey of the Paskowitz Family – Dir: Doug Pray

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz is another man who turned his back on the conventions of society and decided to raise his nine children in a dilapidated RV, teaching them what he felt were the true values and virtues of life.  An expert surfer, and Stanford-educated physician who was head of the medical association in Hawaii, Paskowitz’ extraordinarily liberal views manifested different results in each of his children.  Living on a strict organic food regimen and making do with as little money as possible, this is a study in what it might mean to live virtually off the grid, for better or worse, and whether or not that is any longer possible.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill – Dir: Judy Irving

Concerning the life of homeless musician Mark Bittner who befriends a wild flock of stray parrots that live in San Francisco city proper.  What begins with a seemingly innocuous birdseed hobby becomes a life unto itself and he transforms into a kind of Francis of Assissi to this displaced, growing flock.  He conjectures the flock began as a group of runaway pets that found each other and eventually began breeding in the wild.  Mark champions them when public outcries by environmentalists to exterminate them so as to ensure the stability of the local ecosystem take on City Hall.  This film teaches a lot more than birdkeeping, however, as it observes what dynamics may unfold when we open our arms and our hearts to realities of the present and the abundance that exists in our ever changing world.

Man on Wire – Dir: James Marsh

I get vertigo even thinking about this film, let alone looking at the cover photo.  But yes, it is real – Phillipe Petit, a French tighrope walker, conspired, coordinated and ultimately manifested his ultimate dream – to walk a tightrope between the very top of the World Trade Center Twin Towers.  He pulled this off without any sanctions from the city of New York or permits whatsoever.  This document of the event is made even more amazing by the fact that the Twin Towers are no longer there.  Likely to be nominated for an Oscar in 2009, this is easily a film that will irrevocably change your expectations of what can be done while here on Earth.

Sharkwater – Dir: Rob Stewart

Speeding along on the inspirational humans train, we come to Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater that I had the great fortune of seeing when it had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival several years back.  Rob Stewart was, of course, in attendance, and confided that he simply set out to make a film about the ocean, and his love for sharks.  What he ended up with, however, is a precursor to Al Gore’s much more ballyhooed Inconvenient Truth; Stewart discovers that his beloved predators are being siphoned out of existence by the hundreds of thousands as the illegal shark-finning trade (that is, hunting the sharks for their prized fins and then dropping them, alive, back into the ocean) becomes ever more voracious.

Stewart gets arrested, deported, threatened by global blackmarket gangs and even goes undercover in some very dangerous locales after all of this, to bring us a critical warning: if we wipe out the top of the food chain, we wipe ourselves and everything below it out as well.  Suddenly Jaws seems like the worst kind of demonizer.  Much like Fatal Attraction did for empowering women back in the 80′s.  Shark Week will never be the same.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston – Dir: Jeff Feuerzeig

My favorite short story of all time is not The Lottery, but rather “Light Verse” by Issac Asimov wherein an irreplaceable broken robot is discovered to be the secret source of an artists unrepeatable holographic light sculptures.  When it is repaired, as a favor, by a visiting robotics specialist, she murders the man for having tinkered with her glitchy android worker.

Daniel Johnston sees devils, fears more things than you can count on your hands and contends with all manner of mental illness ranging from manic depression, schizophrenia, narcissism and bipolar disorder, and he is also considered to be one of the musical geniuses of our time by such luninaries as Curt Cobain and Thurston Moore.   Utterly self-obsessed to the point of exasperation, this doc provides an exahustive insight into Johnston’s world.

Dark Days – Dir: Marc Singer

Whoa.  Just – whoa.  I am not sure which is the real documentary I am referring to here: the film about secret underground village of homeless people living in an abandoned train tunnel in New York City, or the making-of documentary about director Marc Singer who gave up everything to make this film and ultimately find these people something better.  Perhaps because I was playing Bethesda’s Fallout 3, a first-person-shooter about the world after a massive nuclear holocaust, that tempered my response to this film.  Even then, I was still picking my jaw up off the floor.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara – Dir: Errol Morris

A composite interview with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a former president of Ford Motors, and a chief manager of the Vietnam war, reveals the complex decisions that must be made concerning war, career and the bottom line.  Regardless of your political leaning, exposure to McNamara’s perspective on all of these will expand and diversify, and perhaps even muddle your own arguments and considerations when opining on what is best and what is acheiveable in the fog of war.

The film won Morris the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary.