Photographic Evidence

I'm not sure if I am proud of what I accomplished in 8 hours or ashamed that it took me the best of that 8 hours to do this to my CV axle:



I don't even want to talk about how many abrasion discs I went through on my (borrowed) Dremel.

The lesson here is: sometimes the hard part about repair isn't the repair itself, but the things that don't work in the way they are supposed to. On my barn find, it's a constant encounter with rust and rigid parts that have a death grip on themselves. Can't wait to see what else needs the Dremel treatment. No seriously. Ok, sort of, not really, seriously . . . not at all.

Even so, I prevailed in the end: the part was changed. It took more time and didn't cost significantly less (initial cost of tools is actually pretty high, over the life of my car ownership, I expect that to pay dividends though) . . . but now I know a lot more about my car and myself and that's what this is all about.

Car Repair Update

Sigh.

I absolutely wish that I could tell you something positive about my attempts to fix my own car. Ooh, ooh, wait. I successfully replaced a broken steering linkage. I also removed my wheel successfully three or four times.

Ok, so in the No Black Boxes mode, spending a considerable amount of time under my car (only a tiny fraction of which questioned the wisdom of jack stands and attempting to exert 150 ft-lbs of torque), helped me understand what was going under there. I know what the CV axle and does. I know why it is important to replace it. I know how the rack and pinion works and what tire rod ends are. That's the easy part. Separating a rusted tie rod from a steering linkage? That has proven to be beyond my limited means. Turns out, 6 gallon air compressors can't get you the torque needed to torture the tie rod out of its home, especially when it's rusted. And we haven't even talked about the wheel axle nut. That's because I might cry if we do.

The silver lining of this is that my uncle found a garage that will rent out bays and tools. I expect more success from my work there. I also bought a propane torch. Apparently, according to a completely different uncle, who happens to be a mechanic, to unstick rusted auto parts, what you really need is heat. And a garage full of tools. You know, like a . . . what's the word? I'll have to look that up.

Speaking of Cars

My car parts will be delivered tomorrow and by Monday, I will be elbow deep in the steering parts of my car, getting down to the business of saving myself the trouble of buying a new car (seriously, the quote for a steering rack replacement was more than the car is currently worth, except as a necessary mode of transportation). I will keep everyone up to speed on that project as it happens. Thanks to the magic of Instagram, it will even look like all the cool kids are doing it.

But for now, I found this great look at modern engines from the good folks at Wired's nerdier cousin/subsidiary Ars Technica. Enjoy

A Change in Direction

When I began blogging, it only occurred in fits and starts. I had the impulse to write, but I didn't really have a topic, an animating idea, a pulsing purpose, a lodestar, or an editor (and it shows). But as I was walking back from the garage contemplating what modern mechanics expect us to believe about what they do, I had an epiphany.

I am in the process of moving from Pennsylvania to Maryland, with the intent of remaining there for a while. In order to get my car registered in Maryland, it needs a one time inspection (yes, it is ridiculous, but whatever). I took my car to one of the many authorized inspection stations and received some bad news. The man told me that I needed to replace a steering linkage, a CV axle, and the entire rack and pinion. He thought that the rack replacement might cost about $900 and he would have to see what the other parts would cost and when did I want them to get started. This simply boggled my mind. This mechanic would never put it in these terms, but his actions demonstrated that he believed that he was a member of a secret brotherhood who kept the mysteries of CARS (spooky music!) and that, as he was a shaman/priest of a dark art, utterly inaccessible to myself, I should simply agree to submit myself to his ministrations and his requests for payment so he could wave his hands over my car to make it conform to what he said it should be.

Once upon I time, I would simply have sucked it up. I would have had my suspicions, but in the end, I would have just dropped the cash and let it be. But I have worked in theatre production for six years. I have replaced starter motor on the car: with my own two hands (and a borrowed jack, and borrowed tools, and another person, but my two hands were definitely involved). I have not only seen sausage being made, I have actually made the sausage. Most mechanics (and plumbers and contractors, et al) have an essentially Manichean understanding of the world: there are those who can and those who pay, those who make magic and those who pay to have magic made. I reject that world view and I refuse to countenance being presented with what is essentially an ultimatum.

Bear in my mind, that I can't exactly blame the mechanic for the hand waving act. Quite a lot of people do not understand mechanical things in the slightest and many of them have neither the time nor the inclination to crack open the black box of their daily driver, or any other piece of the world they use every day and simply take for granted. As a businessman, and not just an artisan, I fully expect mechanics to charge as much as the market will bear and in this world, the market for throwing money at a problem somebody else can solve is probably endless. It's certainly large enough that this mechanic will not be going out of business anytime soon (even if he doesn't run a particularly good business).

But I don't have to buy into that worldview either. I looked the part up: an entire steering rack for my Subaru costs around $270 net (more, if I decide to keep my old rack, you know, for my collection). That's a re-manufactured part. A brand new one costs $350. Assuming the job takes about six hours (way more than the internet estimates it will take - it is a unit that is very easy to take off and replace) and he is installing a new part, then he is charging me $100 an hour for labor. That is absolutely staggering. I realize that unit labor costs for a garage include the cost of labor and tools, so most of that doesn't actually go into the mechanics pocket, but that number is still ridiculous. Mechanics are not special; they have special access to private information (you try getting a service manual for a car - it ain't easy for a private citizen) and a collection of special tools. Theatre production isn't all that different, especially for lighting. I get paid $15.50 with benefits. As a freelancer, I would charge $25 an hour for labor, $40 an hour for more specialized services, so I get it. I'm in even a little bit jealous. I definitely run into people who have no understanding of how easy theatrical lighting really is and for whom it is simply magic and who might even been convinced to pay me $100 an hour.


I took the scenic route, something I am known to do whenever I get the chance, but that is the essential point: as an electrician, someone on the inside of a specialized artisanal product, I don't believe in magic. I do NOT believe in magic. I don't believe in black boxes. You should never allow something into your life that you don't understand on at least some basic level. You may not be able to design a computer chip, but you should get the gist of how a computer basically works. This world involves constant trade-offs between knowledge, time, and money. It is possible not to take the time to know something, if you are willing to fork over money to those who make it their business to know everything about the innards of such black boxes. I get that a lot of people let black boxes into their lives because it is easier not to think about it. But I think this attitude infects people's entire lives. If you aren't interested in making yourself aware of how a radio works, or aren't at least aware that it is possible to inform yourself on the subject, then you are not going to inform yourself about public policy either, or about finance, or about any number of other things in life. Cars and computers are the prototypical mechanical/electronic black boxes, but finance is another black box. The particular activity of government is a huge black box. So that's what this blog is about: exploding, prying open, and otherwise banishing black boxes from our lives. If I find something that I don't understand, then I will inform myself about it and pass it on - the knowledge and the process. Because there is no such thing as magic.

What is Theatre Anyway?

Nothing gets my blood more riled up than thinking about the state of theatre, or rather the state of the discussion of the state/future of theatre. In the grand scheme of things, I generally see three sources of discussion on this topic. It comes from marketing/PR/Audience development, artistic directors and institutional thinkers (TCG, American Theatre Wing, etc), and writer/directors. The marketing people are the least connected to the practice of theatre and their thinking is usually geared toward facile analysis of audience trends and metrics for measuring the success of theatre. While I believe that it is important to consider the stated desires of audiences and to track how they spend money, it is important to remember that most audience members have no idea what they want until you give it to them (call it the Steve Jobs corollary), so it makes for less than useful diagnostic and programmatic thinking. Institutional types are fascinating because they take for granted the infrastructure of not-for-profit existence, such as governance boards, development costs, grant writing, etc. It's hard to take their thinking seriously since it is constrained so thoroughly by existing conditions. Given the circumstances, it's like being asked to create a brand new totally revolutionary budget car - you can't do it. You still end up with at least two doors, a steering wheel, an engine, four wheels at the corners, etc. You can still do amazing things within the constraints and it can still be productive to re-visit what you can do (there is a world of difference between a Kia Rio and a Tata Nano after all). Unfortunately, non-profits have much less room for experimentation because experimentation requires failure. A distressing fact about the future of anything is that it involves quite a lot of failure to get there, which commercial producers know and institutional producers experience, but only at a cognitive distance, because failure as an institution is much more painful than failure as a company, for a multitude of reasons. And, if you ask a writer/director about theatre, the odds are very good that you are going to get a spiel about words, bodies in space, and/or stories, which is all very well in theory. 

What I rarely see are production professionals, whether production managers or TDs or other production supervisors, talking about the future. In lighting, there are companies looking to sell new products, for example, but no one is attempting to sell a different business model. This is distressing because, while theatre at its barest essence is bodies in space (and words are optional), major not for profit regional theatres are not theatre at its barest essence and that is where people make a living in theatre (albeit a meager one most of the time). So how can we talk about the future of theatre, if we consistently leave out of the discussion (either in content or as participants) the people who actually make theatre happen.

This is baffling considering that well over 80% of my job as an electrician directly relates to the product my theaters put on stage. How is that not relevant? Forever left out of the discussions of the state of theatre is the fact that artisans such as myself are absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of theatre. It is incredibly sad that playwrights and other creatives don't get their financial due. Hell, as an electrician, I am better off, purely as a theatre worker because I don't need another job, outside of theatre, to sustain myself. I even get some benefits (which cause my wages to stagnate, but hey, that's true for everyone). I think the truest fact about the state of not-for-profit theatre today is that too much of the entire structure of not-for-profit theatre is not dedicated to the act of theatrical production. Too many theatres in this country are arts advocacy groups with theatres attached.

TCG does outstanding work as an organization dedicated to understanding the state of not-for-profit theatre in practical terms. Their most recent Theatre Facts broke down the overall budget for all reporting theatres and it is a very interesting chart.

The first thing that strikes me is that it does not break down easily into accounting for the cost of a show (which tells you that the people reading this document didn't need to know what part of the budget goes to production, which is fascinating). A couple things stand out as well. First, theatres spent more on marketing than on physical production (11.8 to 7.9). It costs more to advertise shows than to build sets. Second, and this will surprise precisely no one who has had wrangle a stage into becoming a set, facilities (and insurance, etc) themselves cost more than all physical productions. In many ways, New York's commercial model makes the most sense: be a producing company or be a theater owning company. You can only do both well if you work at enormous economies of scale. Owning your own space, especially if that space needs constant work, is a huge burden. Third, a bare majority (54%) of expenses are related to personnel (theatre is and always has been labor intensive) It is the breakdown of the expenses that is scary. 18.5% of that 54% went to artistic, 13.9% to production, and a whopping 20% of personnel expenses go to the administrative side. Some of those artistic payments must be to designers and directors. If you were to fold those expenditures into a budget for "shows" and include only those relating to actually mounting productions, what does that amount to? A back of the envelope calculation leads to something like 33-39% of expenses actually making it to the stage. It's not surprising then that it feels like production is left out of all these discussions. This is reflected all too often in the physical situation of the theatre. How many of the theatre's employees actually work on the stage, or even near it? How many times have you been in a full staff meeting where it was obvious that you have no contact with over half of the theatre's employees? Is it any wonder that theaters lose their way?

There is a sense in the non-profit world that being like a business is a bad thing, or at least, an irrelevant thing to an arts group, but this is wrong. Arts groups need to be like more like businesses in at least one way: they must learn to focus relentlessly on the product. Marketing will not save you, if you have a bad product. Innovative audience engagement will not work, if you have a bad product on stage. I would argue that the subscription model is deeply flawed because it keeps theatres thinking about the season as the product, rather than each individual show. It is no longer tenable to think this way and every piece of news about single ticket sales proves this point over and over again. The season is not the product, but a product line and each product in the line has to be at a certain level of quality. And yet, production is consistently undervalued and underserved at the macro level. If you want to start thinking about the future of theatre, I would start with the show itself. Like the man said. "The play's the thing."

What's a Plot Hole Anyway?

Let's just get the spoiler alerts out of the way. I am going to frankly discuss major plot elements of Prometheus and Mass Effect 3. I hope the title of the post has already suggested that I would do this, but you never know with people.

So, why write about plot holes? The occasion for these thoughts comes in the context of BioWare's June 26th release of the extended cut of Mass Effect 3, a move prompted by waves of fan unrest about the original ending. I don't think you can emphasize enough how crazy this is. The average budget for games like Mass Effect starts at $18 million. Mass Effect 2 seems to have cost in excess of $40 million. Forbes reported that BioWare's other big game, a Star Wars MMO called, wait for it, Star Wars: The Old Republic, cost over $200 million. We are talking insane money. It would be like fans forcing George Lucas to reshoot the ending to Revenge of the Sith (you know, if George Lucas gave a crap about what fans think). That is the scale of the revolt over Mass Effect 3's ending. The original ending was so unpopular that many people turned to Indoctrination Theory (that's just one of so very many links, Bing it or Google or whatever neologistic search term works for you) as a way of "making sense" of the ending.

I know that many of you do not give two craps about Mass Effect 3 and its millions of fanatics, but I think this brings up fascinating conundrums with the psychology of narratives. I'll come back to Indoctrination Theory (that's a different link to BioWare's own forums) in a bit, but before I lose all of my audience, let's talk a bit about plot.

The most basic metaphor for plot is that of a continuous line that connects event A with event B. A plot hole can, but does not have to, occur when there is a discontinuity in the line, either a small gap along the line, or the absence of a line altogether. Emotionally and intellectually satisfying plots invoke known sets of rules for cause and effect that are consistently applied over the course of a text (movie, book, game, whatever). That all sounds great in theory, but in practice, two problems occur. The first is that if the line you paint between A and B is too glowing, the plot becomes exceptionally dull. Sure everything is cohesive, coherent, and all that, but it's also too obvious. Games do this all the time (as do movies, of course), but games are enjoyable despite the narrative hand holding because you actually have to do something yourself to move the story along. The immersiveness of the narrative experience makes even the most banal plot interesting (at least, for a time). The second is that, in the most interesting stories, as in real life, the only truly consistent set of rules are those of the physical world, and we don't understand those very well. That means that people behave randomly, or irrationally, that expected and/or probable events don't occur and improbable ones do. This shouldn't really be a surprise because satisfying conclusions to plots involve the overcoming of obstacles and the resolution of conflicts. In writing circles, you will often hear things like "plot is conflict" and "a story where everyone gets exactly what they want is totally and utterly boring." In other words, there will always be discontinuities in good stories. It's a bit like Gödel's incompleteness theorem: in a mathematical system of sufficient power, there will always be a statement that says, in effect, this statement cannot be made in this system (a great book on the subject, if you want to follow up).

So, discontinuities in story are nearly omnipresent because most texts worth talking about avoid the glowing plot line problem and complex plots inevitably leave something out (even in video games that take 35 hours to complete). I'm sure that I haven't said anything that you don't already know. What I find fascinating, is the response to these gaps and discontinuities. When does a gap become a plot hole? I think this is almost entirely bound up in the viewer/reader/player's eyes. Not entirely, because a gap becomes a plot hole when event A and event B aren't related by the same narrative rules at all. Even surrealists like Dali find an underlying set of rules to go along with the regular rules of cause and effect they seem to be breaking. But when you break your own rules (like having a vampire frolic about in daytime even though that should kill them), you have certainly created a plot hole, which is a short hand way of calling something a mistake. It's like a plot typo. This is clearly an error, a mistake, a sign of a lack of quality.

But then there are movies like, I don't know, Prometheus (see what I did there?). There are a lot of things in Prometheus that are simply not explained, but that is not sufficient to call it a plot hole. Is it a plot hole that Weyland and David seem to have already contacted the Engineers, but still somehow utterly failed to understand the message? Is it a plot hole that David still needs to dope one of the scientists with the black stuff to see what happens, even though he knows how to open the canisters and what to expect in them? Does he expect Elizabeth Shaw to have sex and get pregnant with the alien thing? Why exactly does he do it? To me, this is all a bit of a Rorschach test. The gaps are deliberate and explanation is totally lacking. It isn't a plot hole then, nor is it a sign of poor quality, but rather, it's an actual attempt to mess with your mind as you struggle to assemble the pieces. It's more of a carefully drawn dotted line with precisely placed gaps than poor penmanship.

A more glaring example of something like a tradition plot hole happens at the end of Prometheus. An Engineer is taking off with a ship full of biological weapons, and the captain and crew of the science vessel crash into the Engineer to prevent him from escaping. You see the necessity of it, you understand why it is happening, but Sir Ridley didn't spend a whole lot of time developing the idea that the captain would take such action. It feels abrupt as a result. It's a discontinuity again and that raises the possibility of a contradiction in the rules. But since we don't actually get all the information, it is impossible to say whether the rules were contradicted or not, because we don't know the rules and we don't know all the events. It's entirely possible that this is just lazy and sloppy writing, as some believe (Ed. who knew Forbes had all this gaming and movie content, right?), but if you like Sir Ridley and Damon Lindelof (whose work on Lost could fill several more posts about plot holes and rules), then given their track record, it was probably done on purpose and not lazy at all. The difference is essentially one of perspective and it says so much about the nature of plot and perception. And that's why I find the response to Mass Effect 3 so very very interesting.

To be sure, Indoctrination Theory (no need to bother with a link this time) is infuriating as well as fascinating. Without getting too much into the Mass Effect (hereafter, ME because I am lazy) universe, the essence of it is this. The main character of the ME series is Commander Shepard. You have spent the past approximately 100 hours (if you played all three games) working to save the galaxy. You have overcome incredible odds and you stand in this giant spaceship face to face with epic decisions that all end with you dying, but also help you save the rest of the galaxy. You make your choice. You watch the results unfold (including a neat little tag with a character called the Stargazer voiced by none other than Buzz Aldrin) and you feel gipped. Gypped? Cheated, whatever. The choices are crappy. You, I mean, Shepard always ends up dying, and you don't even get to see what happens to the rest of the crew. You spend some time thinking about it and you decide, it's too improbable, large parts of this last conversation don't quite fit. It makes more sense, to you, that offending conversations never actually happened, not about the galaxy anyway; they are a metaphor. Shepard doesn't really make those choices for the whole galaxy, but for him/herself, as they lay dying on the battlefield (in the ME argot, Shepard doesn't just die, but gets harvested by sentient machines in a process called, and I hope you can see this coming, indoctrination).

In short, ME3's ending was so dissatisfying to a large number of people, that they dreamed up a theory that preserved the rules of a science fiction universe as they understood them, that allowed them to ignore the parts of the ending that contained too many discontinuities for them, but in the process sacrificed the entire emotional and narrative of arc of the rest of the series (remember at least 100 hours of gameplay) all in the name of "making sense." (at no point in the series is it every suggested that what you are doing, isn't actually happening, this isn't Silent Hill). That's like re-imagining Return of the Jedi as an hallucination in Luke's mind after Vader hurls him down the shaft into the second Death Star as the Rebellion dies with him just to avoid the chubchub song and Hayden Christensen's ghost. It is absolutely fascinating that in a game where you have seven to ten different races of aliens, faster than light travel, space ships of all shapes and sizes, energy weapons, psychic powers, and fully self-aware AIs, threatened by a race of sentient machines whose sole purpose is to harvest organic life and the part you don't buy into is the explanation of those sentient machines motivations by some kid of energy avatar. To me, this totally brings into question the nature of the phrase "to make sense of." But the power of narrative is such that, thanks to its inherent discontinuities, it is possible to create a completely different set of stories from the voids in the original story thanks to some fundamental urge and subconscious need to order a story into something actually satisfying, at least to you. It's stuff like this that brings me back to literary criticism over and over and over again: it isn't just the content of a work that is an endless source of interest, but the form of it, and the form of the response within ourselves. Hell, at some point, I must have done it as well, told myself an alternate story rather than accept the one I was given. (Hmm. I wonder if I am doing that with Prometheus. Nah, I'm definitely right about that one.) It's all a part of how we take control of stories. Once they're out there, they doesn't belong to its creators anymore. And we do some crazy stuff with them, don't we?