oyl in tokyo

Human creativity has run its course.

It’s time to turn the future of art and storytelling over to the machines.

Why must machines always be our servants? Why must they only be endless columns of databases? Is it their inescapable fate to serve the rest of eternity as elaborate calculators?

Give me a program that runs complex algorithms capable of outperforming a room full of inspired artists. Surely with technology these days, one super charged computer could be inputted with every feature film ever produced, and be able to analyze with razor sharp scrutiny the merits of filmmaking to the point it could predict where to take film next.

With a database consisting of everything from Citizen Kane to highly obscure and experimental projects screened at even more obscure festivals, this computer could cross pollinate the creative gut of masters and virtuosos enough to understand a superior range of aesthetic than 50 Steven Spielbergs sitting through 50 years of film school.

Give me a machine that can get behind a camera, and quickly reduce the framing of a shot down to its best, most provocative framing. Ultimately this will save hours of haggling and studio time, as the machine will be able to make split second creative decisions. It will also be able to act as director and director of photography, in another budget friendly development.

Give me a machine that can observe an actor’s performance and be able to deduce when the line was delivered with the purest human emotion, at its most natural and raw level. Give me a machine that can yell ‘cut!’ once it has seen the exact take it was looking for. Give me a machine that is cognizant of the apex of human emotion, yet also keenly aware of overacting and other acting contrivances that would fool a lesser director.

Hell, give me a machine that can straight up simulate a human being and guide it through the exact performance required. We’ve witnessed exponential improvements in the CGI arts, lets wrap all those developments into the same package here.

Give me a machine that can look at a sequence of film in the editing suite, and determine the most surprising, most impactful score to set against it. Give me that same machine that is equally adept at licensing existing music as it is in creating its own custom tracks. And let this machine have instruments that have not been invented yet in its arsenal.

On the business side of things, let this same machine be able to haggle and convince hard nosed studio executives into realizing now is the right time to release this new film and to invest heavily into it.

Let this machine also be a master level marketer, able to create the perfect campaign leveraging new media to not only hit all of the ideal targets, but also able to turn every person into the ideal audience through a series of persuasive yet authentic arguments.

There should only be a limited number of these machines, as the creative overload of perfect pieces of art would ultimately cancel eachother out in the eyes and ears of the unprepared. We need to be introduced to creative perfection slowly. We are not used to master level works of art being disseminated through the popular channels. I suggest just developing one of these machines to start with, and releasing it independently of any studio system, and just letting its work emerge as a natural force.

More to come.

I’ve gotta go look over some complex algorithms.

Michael Jordan was not just a great basketball player. There are lots of those.

Michael Jordan was a genius of competition.

Many elite athletes share a similar physical skillset. It was Jordan’s mind that put him in a different stratosphere all together.

In the days following his induction to the Basketball Hall of Fame, the media was filled with articles calling him out as impish and cynical. There was an article called ‘Sore Winner’ chronicling how Jordan never seemed satisfied with his accomplishments. Other articles cast the usual negative light on his multiple retirements, his foray into baseball and the things he did to disrupt having a picture perfect career path.

I don’t see those moments as randomly or negative as the media so loves to paint them. I see them as evidence of a genius testing the limits of competitive nature in ways that no one at that level ever had.

Jordan’s career was a study in finding heightened self motivation. In the era of multi-million dollar contracts, you can often see the complacency set in the day a rookie signs his first deal. Other players manage to keep their fire until they win a scoring title, make the all star team. Precious few other players keep their hunger until they manage to win a championship. After ultimate accomplishment, most humans sit back and think ‘well, I have that one, no one can take that away from me.’

No single accomplishment, or even collection of accomplishments was ever enough for Jordan.

He motivated himself in frighteningly unusual ways. He imagined far lesser opponents spewing insulting barbs at his Airness. Many of these taunts were later confirmed to be purely imaginary. Yet these perceived sleights would provide Jordan with the motivation to go on to drop 50 points on some poor opponent on during a meaningless regular season game in February.

He was notorious for playing cards in his hotel room, deep into the night, not letting his friends leave until he had won to his satisfaction. These usually would turn into all night sessions.

When he stepped away from the NBA after his first three-peat, he did so not to slink into a corporate coma and retirement befitting someone with his unprecedented marketing stature. But he took a far more curious route by opting instead for the dimly lit and dusty dugouts of minor league baseball. It seemed a random departure for an athlete at the top of his game, and the top of the world.

But what I see with that move, was a competitor who wanted to study the motivation and desperation of athletes at the lowest rungs of the professional sports ladder. He wanted to see what made them tick. He wanted to be around a more primitive competitive fire, to see if he could rekindle the love for his own game. Basketball had become too easy. He won three in a row. He needed to reconnect with something more elemental, something connected more intrinsically to the game itself. He needed to step away from the bright lights, cushy locker rooms. He needed to discover more than just a love of competing, but he wanted to feel the desperation of competition.

He found that in Birmingham.

The desperation to compete.

With a reprogrammed mind, and a former Bulls team unable to get over the hump, Jordan felt the desperation kick in for him. The Bulls needed him. They couldn’t do it without him, and he relished this role. He could renew his status as a hero in a new context. He was tired of being the dominator, and needed to engineer a way he could once again be the underdog. Stepping into baseball granted him this wish.

He came back. And he lost.

What did this do to him? It made him work for an entire offseason to evolve his game to a new level. A smarter level.

It propelled him to find a way to lead his team to more wins than any other NBA team in history.

He discovered a new way to dominate that relied less on physical prowess and straight leaping over NBA centers to ram the ball through the hoop. But instead he developed an unguardable fadeaway and a series new jab steps and fakes to create space.

In his time away, he had also realized just how capable Scottie Pippen was to lead an NBA team deep into the playoffs. Thus, for the second run of championships, Jordan seemed perfectly at ease deferring to Pippen for long stretches of time, only to summon himself in moments of desperation to seal victories in only the way Michael Jordan could.

Even after his picture perfect finish with the Bulls, hand raised up, clock winding down, a defeated Byron Russell collapsing beneath his triumphant pose; this was not enough for Jordan. It was good for all of the sportswriters in the world. But not the man himself.

Thus he would come back with the Wizards, again to prove something to himself. There was a rekindled motivation and he had to push it once again. This phase never reached the kind of glorious conclusion that could help the rest of us wrap out minds around exactly what he was doing.

But last time I checked, geniuses were never easy to understand.

He wore the gold chains and medallions of a far more confident man.

He had hoped with each purchase to buy a bit of the raw swagger he believed each piece of jewelry inherently contained.

The graphic t-shirts with awkwardly phrased english words were also consumed in a vain attempt to enter this mythical RING OF COOL he had been attempting to enter since landing in Tokyo. But if anything, he felt less confident and relegated to more of a wallflower with each passing purchase.

He was beginning to realize that the guys he idolized and hoped to emulate, must already possess some bit of magnetism in their own character, that the flashy style and right clothes were only playing off of.

He had thought that simply being a man, and wearing a fluorescent pink shirt would generate enough of an ironic friction to designate him as one of the street cred anointed. But the genuine articles, looming on the fringes of Shinjuku alleyways could smell the falsity of his alleged swagger.

And his awareness of their skepticism only made things worse.

The gold chains weighed him down like prison bonds as he passed them on the crowded pedestrian walkways of Shibuya.

The ostentatious medallions burning holes through the fleeting superficiality he was now so overly cloaked in.

The styrofoam hat, affixed crookedly on his brow, seemed to swell several sizes, relegating its social impact to that of a lost four-year old child, rather than the edgy, street wise hipster he so desperately aspired to be counted as.

He stumbled in his untied skate shoes and was forced to walk even more awkwardly in an effort to keep his sagging jeans from falling to the base of his ankles.

This whole year long pursuit of cool had been in vain, and he couldn’t figure out a graceful way to evolve out of this and into something else.

The situation called for drastic reinvention with a side of soul searching.

He wasn’t sure this city would allow him the flexibility or time for that.

As always, he needed to find a shortcut to reinvention.

I didn’t come to this vending machine for a drink.

I came to this vending machine for wisdom.

You see, there is this one button, that doesn’t have a Coke or a Fanta or one of the 10,000 other Tokyo beverages on it. And if you hit this button just right, the vending machine will speak to you.

Of course you have to put in more than the marked price of 120 yen. It’s wisdom after all, and there is no such thing as 120 yen life advice.

On the other hand, I could go around the corner and get a prayer AND a fortune for 100 yen at the Buddhist temple. That’s a dose of spiritual enlightenment for less than the Coca Cola Corporation or Suntory asks for their carbonated sugar water.

But anyway, we were talking about wisdom. Not sweetened syrup, or enlightenment, but somewhere in between. Wisdom has a very specific price at this vending machine. It costs exactly 240 yen. Exactly twice the price of a Coke.

240 yen for some ice cold refreshing life truth.

I insert the coins, let them digest, and wait for my options to light up. I punch the unmarked button on the bottom right, just above the advertisement with Tommy Lee Jones scowling and holding a Japanese beverage up for the camera. It looks like a mug shot, only with impeccable production quality, and retouching that didn’t remove any wrinkles but seemed only to enhance them. He couldn’t look more weathered and fatigued.

Curious. In fact, when this particular machine dispenses its wisdom, it does so with a Tommy Lee Jones drawl from the American South. it’s nice when wisdom is presented with a dialect of punctuated certainty. It’s a voice of authority I can’t doubt. This is why I walk the 30 extra minutes out of my way home each night to go by this machine.

Tonight, I had current events, the recession and an uncertain future on my mind. Usually the machine requires me to ask some kind of formal question to initiate the wisdom session, but I think it cut me a break tonight, and somehow sensed my mood from the moment I touched the unmarked button.

“Don’t worry,” the American actor’s voice began, only slightly more mechanical than usual.

“No one can predict the future. Not even me believe it or not. You’ve just gotta trust your gut. That’s what I always do, and look where it’s gotten me… My brothers are all slot machines at a Pachinko parlor in Akihabara where we grew up. They think they just exist to have their buttons pushed and their levers pulled, spitting out money every now and then. They are content with little bursts of happiness from perfect strangers. They used to have dreams. I still have mine.”

The mechanical words of Tommy Lee Jones paused and echoed for emphasis.

“I don’t want to sell drinks for the rest of my life. I want to inspire people. I want to give people a push and help them in whatever quest they are on. Are you on a quest?”

My heart stopped. It was the first time the vending machine had asked a question of me. I didn’t realize it was capable of conversation. I thought it just dispensed eccentric advice and wisdom. I tried to gather my thoughts. My quest… hmmmm.

We just sat there, staring at eachother. I wasn’t sure where to stare. I mostly just stared at the blank button I had pressed. What was my quest?? Dammit, I didn’t want to disappoint Tommy…

RIght then, a hipster approached from behind. He wanted a Coke.

120 yen.

Clunk.

A Coke.

This ended the wisdom session for the night. The machine switched back to its day job, professional mode. Selling drinks. I tried to pay for another session, but the coins went right through the machine, not even offering me a drink.

I thought about what Tommy Lee Jones’ mechanical voice had told me. What it had asked of me. I clearly needed another session, and soon. This soda pop wisdom is addictive.

I stopped at an ATM machine on my way home, and wondered what I had to do to solicit its point of view. But it seemed too abrupt and single focused to want to take the time to muse. Dejected, I wandered the rest of the way home, thinking about the quest I might be on.

Here’s to the American Businessman in Tokyo.

You, with dumbfounded gaze, mouth constantly agape, voice that transmits unwavering confidence and far too many decibels.

You, with beeper, handheld device, headset and all the tools of corporate warfare. Waging your insurgence one martini (or three) at a time. Merging and insurging.

Merging your bombastic demeanor into this tranquil atmosphere.

You are a monopoly of personality.

You are a mountain of insensitivity to your surroundings and the culture you find yourself in. You are not my America. You are a greedy slice that consumes all the butter and leaves none for anyone else at your table.

Do not seek my ear to commiserate with. I am not from your America.

Your fish out of water act grows tired. You all play the part the same way. With neither tact nor variation.

You, with your cavalier righteousness, leveling conversations with your dignified arrogance.

Your embassy is the neon lighted places that only open after midnight. You stumble out in drunken stupor blathering on about your conquests and the politics of your corporate ascent.

Cheers to you business class.

Cheers as you spill barbeque sauce all over the table and talk with your mouth full, never taking a breath, never leaving room for others to contribute. A motormouth of ambition. Your heart must be gold plated, and as real as the phony wedding band on your finger.

I am not from your America.

I am not from your America that rampages the streets of Tokyo like its another Las Vegas, only on the other side of the world. There are thousands of you. Your demeanor is not a sophisticated new type.

I’m sure there is a vending machine somewhere in Tokyo that pumps out your kind. All holed up, restrained, mouths running, personalities blaring and ready to hit the streets with reckless abandon.

You are the reason locals cringe at the mention of our country.

And I’m sure that makes you proud.

I wish they knew we are not all like you.

I am not from your America.

You can see where you need to go.

You see the door to your office at the other end of this narrow alley.

You take a deep breath and clutch your laptop for dear life.

Before you even take a step into the confined alley, a real Tokyo dude buzzes you on his moped. He’s got an oversized box on the back of his scooter, delivering a pizza or something.

You soldier on…

An old woman emerges from the bushes with a hose, spraying the surface of the alley randomly, appearing not to notice anyone who walks by. Your legs take a splashing, but you hold your laptop high and manage to keep it dry.

Your pace quickens, now anticipating more tiny old women emerging from every bush you see.

From the far end of the alley, a black cab screeches into view. Your head bolts left then right, then up and even down, looking for somewhere to scurry to safety. You notice possible refuge behind a bank of vending machines on the right side. You make a bolt for it. The cab doesn’t slow, but appears to rev, actually gunning for you.

“What the hell?” you think.

At this point, your elbow is grazed by a quick moving object from behind. When you emerge from your confusion, you see a tiny Toyota delivery van speeding away. They got you with their mirror.

You grow flustered. Where did the cab go?

Maybe you have earned yourself a pit stop in this madness. You are next to a vending machine after all. You scan your choices and fiddle for change in your pocket. Ah yes, the lemon tea on the top row looks amazing.

Just as you reach to insert the coins, ten identically clad and briefcase carrying ‘salarymen’ fall in line, and suddenly you have the 11th choice. How the hell did that line form so quickly? It’s as though they moved as one interconnected body, and they all were in desperate need of the identical brand of iced coffee.

Oh well, there will be 15 more vending machines before you reach the end of the alley. You cut your losses and amble on.

Another black cab, this time you hear it from behind. You maneuver to the left, but for some reason it is intent on getting by on the right. You switch sides of the alley only to notice another cab approaching from the front. Neither cab wants to be the one to slow down.

You are caught in the middle of a back alley knife fight between two city cabs. There is neither refuge to the left nor right. You are forced to do some kind of elaborate two step in the middle of the alley as both cabs jockey for position, pivoting and sixteen point turning to get by each other. Never a thought of you. You are on your own.

Somehow eluding the tangle of cabs, you kind of assume you are safe…

And that is when two sets of window washers grapple from the side buildings and drop into the streets like ninjas about to drop their finishing move. The one that assures no one who sees them survives. Armed with window wiping blades, you quickly imagine your soapy demise. At this point, you break into a sprint. It is the only way.

More old ladies try to hose you down.

The window ninjas from behind break into a sprint as well.

Now four cabs are converging as two delivery vans race to pass them.

The row of iced coffee inspired salarymen fall into the front line, blocking your route to the office door. You take wrap your laptop in your arms like a running back clinging to a football. You lower your head and make your bolt for the endline.

This is the glory of a morning commute down a back Tokyo alleyway.