Christopher Hitchens died this week

The world lost an irreplaceable writer when Christopher Hitchens finally lost his battle with cancer this week. Only 62 when he died, Hitch wrote books, essays, articles, and was still churning out content in the weeks leading up to his death. The love has been pouring out of the media, particularly the publications he wrote for like Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and Slate.

 His Slate editor did a lovely round-up of some of his best stuff through the years, including his scathing obituary of Jerry Falwell. (It's incredible; here's the first line: "The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled 'credulous idiot.'") And don't miss Hitch's instructions on how to make tea. (John Lennon and Yoko Ono did it wrong, apparently.)

But my favorite is this list of the 15 most memorable things to come out of his pen. He was an incredibly smart, concise writer. Some of the shorter favorites:

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

"If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox."

And, of course,

"The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics."

We'll miss you, Hitch.

Steve Heminover, Mad Scientist

Last spring I got a chance to interview a really interesting guy named Steve Heminover who happens to do the light shows for all the sports events at the United Center. The fruits of that adventure are below. Enjoy!

Steve Heminover, Mad Scientist

The United Center is deserted. The building hums and the smell of stale beer lingers in the air. It’s eerie, cavernous. Yesterday, 22,000 spectators watched the Chicago Blackhawks defeat the Vancouver Canucks in Game 2 of the Western Conference Semifinal series. But tonight, we have the place to ourselves.

Steve Heminover flips on a light switch in the control box and motions me to a chair overlooking the ice. He turns on a computer that looks like it belongs in a NASA cockpit and drums his fingers on the table. Windows start-up chimes and after a quick test to make sure his half-a-million-dollar equipment is working properly, he starts the show. Four green aerial lasers shoot upward from the corners of the arena. A laser animation of Benny the Bulls mascot is projected onto the floor.

“It’s more impressive with the music,” he says apologetically. Indeed, Bulls fans might overlook the lasers with everything else going on during the opening – scoreboard videos, blasting music, dancing Luvabulls. The United Center is the only arena in the country with a permanent laser installation, and Heminover has been running the shows at Blackhawks and Bulls games for more than fourteen years.

“Have you ever played with an Etch A Sketch?” Heminover asks. “It’s like that but the computer does it so fast. It turns the beam on and off, changes the color, and it has to move it around and all these things have to coordinate at once to make it work.” The end result is a laser animation that represents decades of innovation.

Pre-game laser show during a packed Bulls game at the United Center. Photo courtesy of Steve Heminover.

Fifty-six-year-old Heminover has been working with lasers for so long that he’s helped build the foundation for the entire industry. “When I started in the laser business, nobody had any tools to do what I wanted to do,” he says. “So I had to invent them. I literally wrote, from scratch, my own graphics language for doing lasers.” That language is the ancestor to modern stereoscopy and 3-D technology. If you saw Avatar in 3-D, you can thank Heminover for helping to lay the groundwork.

“I used to wonder when I was growing up why I could do all these things,” Heminover says. “And I realized that what comes easy to me doesn’t come easy to other people. These things are gifts. I mean, I can work in several disciplines. To do laser light shows that I’ve done for years, I have to be an electrician, I have to be a plumber, I have to be a contractor, I have to be an artist, I have to be an engineer, I have to be a safety guy.”

In 1987, Heminover pulled his various talents together to found a multimedia company, Aura Technologies Inc., which specializes in finding creative solutions to technological problems. The company has designed instant-replay boxes for the Major League Baseball, fiberoptics for Motorola, and electronic packaging for Leo Burnett Worldwide ad agency.

“Someday you’ll see a cereal box with a video game on the front,” Heminover says. “You’ll just throw it away when you’re done.”

Heminover seems to live and dream in a futuristic movie. His office is decorated with Star Trek and Star Wars posters. His cell phone ring is a Jetsons jingle. He even looks vaguely like George Lucas. The geekiness pays off; with thirty years of experience in electrical and design engineering, it’s guys like Heminover that continually invent the things we couldn’t even conceive of ten years earlier.

“What did Arthur C. Clarke say?” he asks, eyes twinkling behind wire-rimmed glasses. “'Any technology, sufficiently advanced, will seem like magic.'” Whether it’s the rise of the Internet or 3-D printing, Heminover is always on the lookout for the next frontier. Lasers are just his day job.

At the United Center, my personal laser show is coming to a close. Before he shuts down the system, Heminover says there’s one more feature that is reserved for “special guests.”

“You’ll like this,” he says with a sly smile. “And they say we don’t have a sense of humor.”

He boots up software that came pre-loaded on the laser system. A faint “Pew! Pew!” sound emits from the control room speakers as the 50-by-50-foot grid lights up with the opening screen of one of the world’s most recognizable video games.

“You play Asteroids on the ice of the United Center?”

Heminover starts to answer, but the urgency of fragging a 30-foot laser rock distracts him. He hands me the controls to the world’s most expensive video game and asks, “You got another quarter?”

It's not the best quality video, but you get the idea.

White House Poetry Slam

This video apparently went viral back in the spring of 2009, but I missed it until my friend Franklin sent it to me this weekend. If you haven't heard of Lin-Manuel Miranda, here's a crash course: He's Puerto Rican, born in New York and in his early twenties he penned the music and lyrics for In the Heights. By age 28 he was playing the lead role in the Broadway production and winning Tony Awards and Grammy Awards and a bunch of other awards. He also helped Stephen Sondheim translate West Side Story into Spanish for a stage adaptation. Dude's brilliant, and his way of bending and mixing words is unreal. (He also really seems to "get" it: He taught English for awhile at his former high school in Washington Heights.)

I'm not terribly familiar with the slam poetry world, but sometimes a performance (or performer) just stops you in your tracks and demands that you listen. Miranda is one of those. And you have to love performance art that your high school U.S. History teacher would appreciate.

And look! We now have proof that Michelle Obama can snap. Of course, with those arms, we never really had any doubts.

RDMLKJD

We studied the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in one of my classes last quarter. I was familiar, of course, with his "I Had a Dream" speech, but I hadn't given much thought beyond that to the influence that Dr. King had on American rhetoric. He was an educated, incredibly thoughtful man, and the clarity with which he conveyed ideas through his sermons and speeches is breathtaking. He was a great writer, a great orator, an iconic preacher. His speeches are like music. Everything from the structure of his message to his use of alliteration, isocolon and especially rhythm serve to ensure his words continue to echo throughout our society. The truth that guided him continues to guide us.

We've come a long way since 1963. We still have a long way to go, but Dr. King's dream for a world that transcends what we used to think possible is alive and thriving in the minds of the people who will lead us further into the 21st century. I am hopeful, at least.

Strike a chord; don't pound the keys

In high school I started watching re-runs of The West Wing and dreaming about working in the White House. Specifically, I wanted to be either Press Secretary CJ Cregg or speechwriter Sam Seaborn or, most of all, head speechwriter Toby Ziegler. No one plays a tortured writer quite like Richard Schiff. (For the record, I would have also settled for dating Sam Seaborn. Rob Lowe in his prime, people.)

I'd never before seen speechwriting celebrated as an art apart from any other; this scene in particular is iconic in my mind:

In college I double-majored in journalism and political science, always thinking in the back of my mind of speechwriting but never actually attempting it. I spent a summer interning in the Washington, D.C. office of Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka, working on the Hill during the day and traipsing back to my West End sublet and devouring two or three West Wing episodes a night. Obviously reality didn't have much in common with my favorite TV show, but it was an incredible summer and I came away with a deeper appreciation for the complexities of working in government, particularly in communications.

Yesterday President Obama gave a speech in Tucson at the memorial for the victims of the shooting last Saturday. He's getting praise for it all over the place, and for good reason: It's a really, really phenomenal piece of writing. If you haven't seen it, read the transcript here or watch below:

The speech is emotional but balanced. It is precise and focused and does not take advantage of the situation. Most of all, it's sincere. This is the best speech of Obama's presidency thus far.

I'm a little embarrassed that I don't know more about Obama's speechwriters beyond the fact that a 29-year-old whippersnapper leads the team. Jon Favreau (no, not that one) started as a Kerry intern in 2004 and, six years later, is Obama's Director of Speechwriting. Talk about making me and everyone else under 30 look bad.

Besides an incident last summer wherein Favreau was photographed playing beer pong shirtless (the horror!), he's received mostly positive reviews under the current administration. Favreau was on the Time 100 list and also got some love from GQ and Vanity Fair.

(By the way, Favreau is not the youngest head speechwriter the White House has seen: That would be James Fallows, who wrote for Jimmy Carter in the '80s and has since established himself as a total badass with a pen, writing for the Atlantic Monthly and pumping out top-notch books like nobody's business.)

It's inspiring to see this caliber of writing coming from the very top of the government communication machine. It makes me want to be a part of politics again, a part of bringing eloquence to a national forum which is too often dominated by trying to out-scream the other guy. Of this speech, I think Toby Ziegler would be proud.

LEGEND

You guys. Charlie Brown is on the Northwestern football team.

Charlie Brown. CHARLIE BROWN!!

Made my day. Thanks, Dozer.

It's my Friday

I'm going to Hawaii tomorrow for a long overdue vacation and to see my family. As a result, I'm finding it hard to get anything done today. Join me.

This is pretty much the best thing I've seen since the Pachelbel Rant. Enjoy!



via Gabby Frate.

Happy Monday

I'm a sucker for fancy, animated infographics. And English accents. Check out this neat article from The Economist on how the world will reach a living population of seven billion in about a year here. The world has changed more in the last 60 years than in centuries before it; can you imagine where we'll be in another 60?

Found via wimp.com, a circa-1993-looking site that nevertheless links to cool and/or funny and/or informative videos on a daily basis.

P.S. It's 9 degrees in Chicago today. For any nerds reading, it's basically Hoth out there.

Post-Election Haze

This blog is not political, and that's the way I'd like to keep it. Therefore I have little to say about the results of yesterday's midterm elections except to mention that I cast my first ballot ever -- yay! (I even did my homework on the minor races, though I still don't know what the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioners do, exactly.)

I'd also like to direct you to this blog, written by a pair of hilarious octogenarians. Talk about street cred: surviving the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, disco, the transformation of the two-party system, and Vanilla Ice and then launching yourself onto the blogosphere. I hope I write like that -- clear, eloquent, and in touch with reality -- when I'm in my eighties and capable of wielding almost a century of experience. My favorite passage by Helen Philpot, to entice you to make the jump:

"Folks, from where I sit, we’ve never had it so good. One less war. Most of the TARP money paid back and another Great Depression avoided. Unemployment numbers are shitty – yes - BUT imagine how bad it would be if Republicans had done away with unemployment benefits like they wanted. And as someone who has Medicare, I can assure you that government-run healthcare isn’t Obamacare, it’s common-decency-care.

"The Tea Party wants to complain about Obama’s “run-away spending” but the fact is Bush spent billions on wars while Obama has spent billions on an economic stimulus package. Fact. More private sector jobs were created in the last 8 months than in the entire 8 years of the Bush presidency. Fact. The only thing the Republican Party has increased recently is the number of gay teen suicides."

Talk about sassy.

Persnickety Preconceptions

I wasn't expecting to like Virginia Woolf. I had some preconceptions, I guess. I mean, she is British. And that can only lead to trouble. Or maybe that movie with Nicole Kidman rubbed me the wrong way. (I haven't actually seen anything but the opening scene, where Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, drowns herself in a river.) I don't know what my deal was, but as we readied ourselves to read eight of her essays in my English Prose Style class, I was setting myself up to not like her. I was prepared.

Wow, did I have my head up my ass.

Before I say any more, go here and read "Craftsmanship" (written in 1937, 2,900 words) and go here and read "Professions for Women" (written in 1931, 2,400 words). I'll wait.

For those of you too lazy to hit the jumps -- but really, especially if you've never read Virginia Woolf, spend 15 minutes of your day and read these pieces. Trust me on this one -- here are some excerpts from "Craftsmanship":

"No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room."

"Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still--do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught?"

"...words do not live in the dictionary, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order."

I mean honestly, the woman is writing an essay about words. Just words. Stylistically there is so much going on here; the repetition that suggests she's rewriting, clarifying her ideas as she goes ("if you could teach, if you could learn" could almost have a "nay," in between the clauses) -- this is the major stylistic element Woolf employs that we talked about in class. We see her thought process as she goes, and gimmicks aren't needed to add emphasis; it's almost, in a sense, pure. She also can never seem to find exactly the right word, so she uses a bunch of them along with some asyndeton to give us a fuller picture: "unlectured, uncriticized, untaught." (In other essays, "it creates; it adorns; it enhances" and "a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat." And so forth.) It's almost poetic, this apposition, this redefinition. Both of these stylistic techniques -- along with Woolf's characteristic interrupters and parenthetical asides -- have already made their way into my own writing, as evidenced by this very paragraph. It's amazing how quickly something like that clicks in the brain and adds itself to the standard cannon. It seems simple enough, but I'm continually surprised by how much you can learn about writing simply by reading a lot.

Plus, how could you not love a woman who makes a joke about a typewriter? That shit's hilarious.

And then there's the content of what she's saying -- that "words, English words" really do offer an infinite number of possibilities. The relative ease of the modern publishing process -- as opposed to 200 or 100 or even 50 years ago -- has created a completely different literary landscape. There's a lot of crap out there. And yet Woolf points out that it doesn't matter, because there is still so much greatness to come. Isn't that just a wonderful and refreshing idea? I'm going to get straight to work creating beautiful, never-before-seen prose!!

Or, you know, writing a blog post about not hating Virginia Woolf. I think we'd be friends. Maybe we'd like hang out and go to the movies and she'd be the kind of person who talks through the whole movie about all the elements they didn't consider when writing the script. Then I'd shush her and tell her that you know what, Sofia Coppola is doing the best she can, and anyway she's been nominated for an Oscar and so you should just calm down and enjoy the cinematic presentation. And then she'd sulk and be silent at dinner and she wouldn't call me. And then she'd drown herself in a river.

Wow, that hypothetical went downhill really quickly.

The Novel

This is the kind of stuff that makes Family Guy hurt so good. Writers everywhere cringe with every uptick in Stewie's voice. Way close to home.

Confessions of a Sorkin Addict

My name is Brittany (hi Brittany), and I'm addicted to Aaron Sorkin.

Phew, that felt good. Okay, so if you don't know who I'm talking about, you're about to get a crash course. (Just go with it.) Sorkin is a writer whose most famous work is a little show called The West Wing. The show ran for seven seasons and won more awards -- including 27 Emmys -- than you can fit on even the most impressive mantle. I mean, hot damn. It was basically one of the best shows ever on the air. (omg West Wing clips) His other TV series -- Sports Night* (1998-2000) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006-2007) -- featured a similarly witty, intense, character- and dialog-driven television experience, though neither lasted more than a couple seasons. He's also written screenplays: The American President, A Few Good Men (which was actually a play a few years before Jack Nicholson yelled, "You can't HANDLE the truth!!" at Tom Cruise), Charlie Wilson's War, and this fall's feature on the founding of Facebook, The Social Network, among others. His characters are consistently brilliant, articulate, and self-aware. Sorkin somehow makes even the dullest discussion of political theory engaging, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I learned more about the American political system from the West Wing than in my freshman year American Politics class.

Basically, he's a BAMF.

So you can imagine how psyched I was when my friend Jason asked if I wanted to attend a production of Sorkin's newest play, The Farnsworth Invention, which is about the invention of television. The play ran on Broadway for fewer than six months (starring Hank Azaria as media mogul David Sarnoff; check out the trailer) back in '06-'07, and has since only been shown in small theaters in a few cities around the country. The TimeLine Theater Company in Lakeview is currently staging the Chicago premiere.

Okay, so I may be fundamentally biased because of my undying love for everything Sorkin, but this was quite possibly the best play I've ever seen. The scenes and transitions were crisp, the characters were lovable and flawed, and the acting and staging were phenomenal. Most of the engineering stuff went over my head, but that didn't matter in the slightest. The confrontation between Sarnoff and Philo Farnsworth -- a small-town kid from Idaho that invented television without so much as a college degree -- is played out to perfection. The two narrate each others' stories, bickering in the middle of scenes in the way that brings to mind a regular Monday meeting between Toby Ziegler and Josh Lyman. And as with everything Sorkin, you walk out of the theater knowing something new. (Of course, you have to take into account that the play is ficitonalized, but there are enough nuggets of truth to create a fairly complete tapestry, and the program notes belabor the actual facts if you're interested.) TimeLine took a really good script and put on a top-tier production.

Point is, if you're in Chicago, you gotta go. Soon, because it closes this month.

[Side note: In the process of writing this post, I've watched at least 20 minutes worth of WW and SN clips. It's a disease, I'm telling you. And it feels so good.]

* You can watch the entirety of Sports Night on YouTube. Begin your conversion here.