FILM

Movies to rent this weekend:

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS

"This is private, so if you're not me, you shouldn't be watching." So warns David Friedman into a video camera as he records his dew-eyed rantings regarding the sex scandal that was devouring his family. At first you feel like a guilty voyeur to witness such raw emotions, but then you think: Wait, who else could have given the maker of "Capturing the Friedmans" the tape?

The contradiction is typical of the Friedman family and Andrew Jarecki's disturbing, multilayered, compulsively watchable documentary. Every time you think you have a handle on who these people are, what this story is, some new piece of information, usually ugly, gives you a fresh case of mental whiplash.

Appearances are deceiving, and the Friedmans are obsessed with making them. Apparently no moment was too intimate or uncomfortable for someone to turn on the video camera or tape machine.

What we see and hear is the implosion of a formerly respectable suburban family. What we experience is more complex: a challenge to our sense that the truth is ultimately knowable if you just dig deep enough. Here the truth is more like a cloud blown apart by the crosswinds of memory, recorded images, group psychology, imagination, repression and secrets that may remain forever elusive.

On the surface Arnold and Elaine Friedman are living an unextraordinary life with sons David, Seth and Jesse in the affluent Long Island town of Great Neck when police bust Arnold, an award-winning schoolteacher, for possession of a child pornography magazine. As detectives recall, Arnold insists there's just the one magazine - until they find a stash tucked behind the piano.

Like a loose thread pulling apart a sweater, Arnold's claims and the family members' lives unravel. Investigators canvass the neighborhood with questions about the children's computer class that Arnold taught in his basement, and soon Arnold is arrested on child sex-abuse charges - as is his youngest son, 18-year-old Jesse.

All of these events are recounted in the film's opening minutes, yet the story continues to develop and deepen in surprising, suspenseful ways. Jarecki masterfully interweaves his own after-the-fact interviews with TV news coverage of the events and the Friedmans' own stash of home movies, videos and audio tapes. (Jarecki initially intended to make a documentary about David Friedman as New York City's most popular birthday-party clown until David related his family's story and offered the tapes and access in an effort to set the record straight.)

The narrative is clear and moves along briskly, even as it explores a great range of complex issues. Arnold and Jesse protest their innocence, Jesse louder than Arnold, David loudest of all as he stridently supports his father and viciously tears into his mother for expressing any doubts.

The reserved but blunt Elaine, isolated among the tight-knit males in her household, doesn't know what to believe as she learns that her 33-year marriage has been built on a foundation of lies. ("There was nothing between us but the children we yelled at," she says in retrospect.) We come to share her confusion.

The vivid accounts of computer-class assaults are undermined by an almost total lack of either physical evidence or previous complaints of abuse, leading one investigative journalist to inquire whether the entire case is built on community hysteria and the detectives' leading questions.

Jarecki allows his own interviews' wholly contradictory accounts to smack up against one another. One former student describing Arnold's basement sessions as nothing more than a boring computer class is followed by the lead investigator characterizing them as a "free-for-all." At first this lack of resolution is frustrating, like Jarecki owes it to us to solve this case in a way that investigators and journalists couldn't. But some facts may never be known, and others exist in such subjective places that they're beyond reconciliation.

One telling moment comes when David says he doesn't remember the night before Jesse's final court appearance except for what's on the family videotape. What he sees becomes his version of truth.

The same is true for this movie's viewers, who are sure to develop their own theories to make sense of the events. "Capturing the Friedmans" follows Arnold's and Jesse's cases through the court system and beyond (I won't give away what happens here), and we come to question our responses to just about everyone on screen. On the surface David comes across as the most unhinged of the Friedmans, while Arnold remains mild-mannered, Jesse relatively cool-headed.

"Capturing the Friedmans," which won the Grand Jury Prize at January's Sundance Film Festival, is a family drama that takes on an epic, Shakespearean scope. The more you learn, the more questions you have about life in that Great Neck house. Leo Tolstoy wrote that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own fashion," but not even he could have invented the Friedmans.

SPELLBOUND

On its most basic level, Jeff Blitz's Spellbound (ThinkFilm) documents the 1999 nerd Olympics: 9 million nationwide spelling-bee contestants reduced to 249 finalists reduced to one winner. But the contest turns out to have a deeper resonance than if the sport had been merely physical: Among other things, mastery of the English language becomes a means of affirming one's American-ness. The movie is chiefly a portrait of eight aspiring contestants and their families. The first half introduces them singly in their hometowns: five girls and three boys from all over the country, from different races and economic classes—Angela, Nupur, Ted, Emily, Ashley, Neil, April, and wacky Harry. The second half is the bee itself, in Washington, D.C., where Blitz shows them knocked off, one by one, as in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None—a favorite of the director's. But these kids aren't expendable drawing-room-mystery victims: It's devastating to watch their stabs of grief when they misspell obscure words (care for a hellebore, anyone?) and the bell goes ding! The movie becomes a nail-biter, the audience hanging on every letter. Who could have anticipated that a spelling competition would yield such a heartbreaking thriller?

You know that the director is onto something with the very first girl, Angela, whose father, Ubaldo, a ranch manager in Texas, speaks no English: The family crossed illegally into the United States from Mexico before she was born. Blitz doesn't sit the father down, the way he will the other parents, as if sensing that a straightforward interview would diminish the man. His uninsistent camera shows Ubaldo traipsing around the ranch, his domain, while his older son explains the risk his dad took so that his children would have an education. Fueled by little more than her parents' dreams, the gangly, giddy Angela is the best speller in her part of Texas—and the family will go to Washington for the first time in their lives.

You'll wonder how Blitz can top Angela, yet almost all these kids hook you on the same level. Nupur is the daughter of Indian immigrants—whose children, says her English teacher, have "a great work ethic." Then there's a cut to Nupur, sawing determinedly on her violin, serious beyond words. Blitz, who shot most of the movie himself on digital video, is a natural at framing these people in a way that captures their glorious individuality yet gives their lives a powerful social context. "You don't get second chances in India the way you do in America," says Nupur's father. And this is Nupur's second chance: The year before, she got knocked out of the nationals in the third round. This year, three local boys do their best to psych her out in the regional bee. But Nupur is unfazeable. The local Tampa, Fla. Hooters celebrates her regional win on its sign: "Congradu tions Nupur."

It's no wonder that the immigrant motif emerges so strongly in Spellbound: This melting-pot nation has a melting-pot language. English has roots in both German and Latin/French, with regular vocabulary infusions from sundry immigrant populations. Mastering its spelling requires both prodigious memorization and a grasp of each word's origins. Distress isn't limited to non-native speakers.

To select his subjects, Blitz and his co-producer, Sean Welch, reportedly combed lists of returning regional champions and picked the brains of countless officials and coaches. The order of the stories is significant, with the worldly, confident Nupur followed by Ted, a rural Missouri kid whose sense of isolation is palpable. "There are a couple of smart kids in my class but not many," he says—not sounding snotty, just lonely. Then it's on to the well-to-do Emily, who has a nice Connecticut home, an au pair, and a warmly supportive community; and Ashley, an African-American girl in southeast Washington, D.C., who has little community support or recognition. Ashley's mother sits smoking at her kitchen table, listing the obstacles her daughter has had to overcome, bitter over the lack of attention: The winner of the Washington metro bee, Ashley doesn't even have a trophy. But the girl herself—dressed in immaculate white—is radiant. "I'm a prayer warrior," she says. "I just can't stop praying. I rise above all my problems." Trying to convince herself as much as Blitz's camera, Ashley makes you want to cry.

In wealthy San Clemente, Calif., we don't see much of Neil—the focus is on his Indian father, whose children are vessels for his seemingly boundless ambition. He loves America: "If you work hard, you'll make it," he avers, and he has Neil working superhumanly hard, drilling him endlessly and hiring tutors in French, Spanish, and German to supplement his school's program in Latin. When we finally meet Neil, the kid seems barely conscious—diffident, almost robotic in his obedience. You know he'd rather be shooting hoops. Blitz follows the most high-pressure dad with a sweetly pessimistic one. In Ambler, Pa., cute, doleful April studies by herself from a battered unabridged dictionary while her father, owner of the rundown "Easy Street Pub," describes himself as "not a real success story," and her chipper mother says, "I can't even pronounce these words. It's rather sad." Surveying her own chances, April confesses, "I don't expect to get past the first round tomorrow." (Of course, I was rooting for April.) The final subject is New Jersey's irrepressible Harry—a twitchy, compulsively prattling uber-geek who tugs at the microphone ("Is this thing edible?") and nearly brings the national bee to a halt.

It's understandable that we root for the less privileged kids because they've made their own way in the world—but I wish that Blitz didn't show us Connecticut Emily trotting on a horse to reinforce the point that she has money. That said, Emily ultimately comes off as a nice girl with a healthy attitude. It's a measure of Blitz's humanism that even Neil's overbearing father has moments of grace. You can't hate him when you see him rocking in prayer for his son to succeed.

Spellbound is a gorgeous weave. When the contestants take the stage, the editor, Yana Gorskaya, cuts fluidly from the kids to their parents—often doubled over with anxiety—and back to the harrowing recitation of letters. Daniel Hulsizer's simple, plinking chords remind you of "Chopsticks" or a child's building blocks: It's the perfect music for this innocent—yet unnerving—milieu. The real-time tension is so strong that it's a relief when the movie takes a breather to meet contest officials and past spelling champions, among them the very first winner, from 1925. They remember their own sense of monklike isolation while they studied, the bond they felt to other social misfits when they arrived at the national finals, and their Olympian pride in victory.

Since seeing Spellbound, I've had many conversations with friends and colleagues about their spelling bee experiences. In the early '70s, I was in the last little group of spellers at my local Connecticut bee but got nailed—symbolically, it has been suggested—by the word "responsibility." My wife, only a decade before she'd embark on thousands of hours of therapy, flamed out on the word "psychiatrist." In Spellbound, Emily hates the word that knocked her out of the '98 bee and says that before it's all over, "I'm probably gonna hate one more word." The brother of a contestant who spells "distractible" with an "a" instead of an "i" insists, "I still think he spelled it right."

There is astonishing skill in Spellbound, but there are also accidents that seem blessed. It's almost like a novel when poor Ashley, the prayer warrior, freezes in terror on hearing the word "ecclesiastical," and when the Indian-American Neil, his head overstuffed with Latin, French, Spanish, and German, registers nothing but bewilderment when asked to spell "Darjeeling." The winner finishes with "logorrhea," which must be someone at the bee's idea of a grand joke. It sounds corny, but I had a hard time seeing any of these kids as losers—and a harder time figuring out how this deeply generous American documentary could have lost the Academy Award to Bowling for Columbine. Is it fair to ask whether most of the voters saw Spellbound? Or would that be irresponseble?

SWIMMING POOL

French director Francois Ozon doesn't like to repeat himself. His last film, 8 Women, was a theatrical, rather campy piece of fluff starring la crème de la crème of contemporary Gallic actresses. Before that came Under the Sand, an unsettling drama about a woman (Charlotte Rampling, giving perhaps her finest screen performance) who loses her grip on reality in the wake of her husband's disappearance. That film was preceded by Water Drops on Burning Rocks, a perverse psychosexual farce adapted from a play by the late German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ozon's latest offering turns another 180 degrees. A delicious little thriller about an uptight, ill-humored English mystery writer who becomes enmeshed in murder, Swimming Pool is at once comical, contrary, resourceful and ambiguous. Only after it has ended does one realize that its salient characteristic is actually playfulness.
In her second collaboration with Ozon, Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a British crime novelist whose repeated success has done nothing to improve her sour disposition. Bored with her own exceedingly popular literary creation, Sarah wants to stretch her artistic muscles, a desire discouraged by her editor and sometime lover John (Charles Dance), who is all too familiar with his client's prickly personality and demands for attention. John suggests that Sarah take a holiday and offers her the use of his home in the south of France. After initial grousing, she accepts.

It turns out to be just what the doctor ordered, a beautiful, quiet country home, peaceful and sunny, the perfect environment for Sarah's work. Her tranquility is almost immediately interrupted, however, by the unexpected arrival of John's teen-age French daughter Julie (another Ozon favorite, Ludivine Sagnier). The product of one of John's many extramarital liaisons, Julie is sexy, nonchalant and completely uninhibited. She lounges around the swimming pool topless and sleeps with a succession of unsuitable men. When her attempts to get along with Sarah are met with undisguised animosity, she stops trying.

Sarah's curiosity about Julie, however, grows. She takes to voyeuristically watching the young woman, going so far as to riffle through her diary. In an even more shocking lapse of ethics, Sarah pilfers passages from the diary for her new novel.

Giving away more of the plot would be unfair to the movie. While some of what transpires feels outlandish and even artificial, everything falls into place by the time the story draws to a close. And that's no mean feat.

Both actresses are superb. The normally sensual Rampling looks appropriately dour in unfashionable dresses and sensible shoes, but it is her clenched jaw, erect bearing and purposeful strides that so perfectly communicate her petulant nature and disdainful attitude toward her housemate. A scene in which she attacks a plate of profiteroles in a passive-aggressive rage is wonderful.

With her perfect breasts, pouty Lolita-esque posture and enviable lack of self-consciousness, Sagnier manages to convey a wide range of seemingly contradictory emotions and qualities: brashness, shyness, confidence, vulnerability, wanton sexuality, persuasive innocence. While Julie is supposed to be all of these things, it is difficult to think of another young actress who could suggest such conflicting traits so convincingly and in such a sympathetic manner.

Swimming Pool is Ozon's first English-language film (though a quarter of it is in French--subtitled, of course). Contributing greatly to the picture's overall effectiveness is Phillipe Rombi's Hitchcock-flavored score, a chilling little melody that crops up at infrequent intervals like signposts along a deserted highway, warning viewers of something off-kilter just beyond the bend.

CITY OF GOD

FIRST-TIME director Fernando Meirelles' "City of God" is like a bomb exploding in a fireworks factory: It's fierce and shocking and dazzling and wonderful. It opens with an absconding chicken, hot-footing it through a Rio de Janeiro slum, chased by a pack of gun-wielding teens firing off salvos with abandon. This place is called Cidade de Deus, or City of God - a misnomer if ever there was one, because it looks a lot like hell, and guns are as omnipresent as drugs.

The level of cruelty is bone-chilling, as seething hatreds fester and trigger-happy kids kill each other, but the sheer brilliance of Meirelles' filmmaking is in presenting the ultra-violence in a way that is neither heavy-handed nor blasé. Consider also the fact that Brazil's foremost director of commercials infuses his thoroughly engaging, character-heavy story with wicked humor and a truckload of style, and this debut marks him as one to watch. Screenwriter Braulio Mantovani has done a superb job adapting Paulo Lin's fact-based novel for the screen - no easy task, as Lin's book is an epic that spans three decades and features hundreds of characters.

The cast of mostly amateurs is exceptional, fully inhabiting the myriad characters who people this non-linear film, each one telling a different, interlocking story and each one unforgettable. Backtracking from that bravura opening scene to the 1960s - when the housing project was a moral vacuum, but not yet the diabolical gangland it would become - we meet two 11-year-old kids who will grow to take divergent paths: Rocket (Luis Otavio), a sensitive kid looking to escape the menace of the streets, and Lil Dice (Douglas Silva), a boy with a bloodlust that's shocking in its purity.

Cut to the '70s, and Lil Dice has become Lil Z (Leandro Firmino da Hora), the most feared drug dealer in the city, heading an army of killers as young as 9. When Lil Z gratuitously rapes the girlfriend of Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), one of the few good guys in this wretched hellhole, Ned is bent on revenge. Ned goes over to the dark side, joining forces with Lil Z's rival drug dealer, Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele), and, by the 1980s, the two warring gangs have begun tearing the city apart. Rocket (now played by Alexandre Rodrigues), meanwhile, has picked up a camera and has unparalleled access to no man's land. His pictures start landing on the front page of the newspaper.

Cinematographer Cesar Charlone illuminates the sun-drenched war zone with a golden hue and Meirelles' extraordinarily assured visual maneuvers (jump cuts, split screens, video capture, fast motion and scenes of carnage shot from on high, à la "Taxi Driver") make the frenzied action burn beneath a soundscape of funky samba rhythms and a blazing sun. "City of God," Brazil's official Oscar entry, is that rare film that manages to be seductively entertaining without ever compromising its authenticity and power.

LIVES LIVED

"Now, don't drone on ... "

That was Sandi Richmond's last teaching advice. Sandi's final instructions for her own memorial service were given to her friend and eulogist, Patricia, two days before she died. All of us at that service stopped weeping and started smiling -- exactly Sandi's intention -- when we heard those words. Spilling out the doors of West Vancouver United Church we sang the Ode to Joy and meant every note. Strangers, semi-strangers to each other -- but all friends of the incredible Sandra Richmond.

She is gone a month now, but my heart still jumps when I hear the low whirr of a wheelchair behind me, or see one hove into peripheral vision. Is that Sandi? No, no, of course not; but I'll bet I'm only one of hundreds on the North Shore with that reaction.

Sandra Diana van Zonneveld was born in Makassar, Celebes, a spice island in Indonesia; perhaps this is why she was so darkly exotic, so stunning in vibrant tropical colours.

When she was two years old she moved with her family to Vancouver. Always spunky, she was also gorgeous and popular, a cheerleader at Sentinel high school in West Vancouver, a great jiver in the sixties. But her real extraordinariness did not become apparent until tragedy struck. She met her husband Eddie at the University of British Columbia where both were studying physical education. They graduated, married and both got teaching posts in Kelowna. On summer break the young couple drove east, exploring Canada. One night, near Thunder Bay, their car slid on a soft shoulder and hit a sharp corner. Sandi was thrown from the little sporty car. She hit rocks and her neck snapped.

Half Sandra Richmond's short life -- the better half, she was adamant -- was lived to the hilt from a wheelchair. Yes, there were painfully slow years of rehabilitation at the G.F. Strong Centre where she clawed back some power in her shoulders, arms and two fingers. Years Eddie gave up his teaching job in Kelowna to be near her in Vancouver. Yet to know Sandi at all was to forget she was quadriplegic.

Minutes into meeting her, you just didn't notice any more. Her mischievous joy was utterly contagious. She not only got on with the business of living, but she told how it's done with a powerful novel for young adults: Wheels For Walking.

Sandi and Eddie Richmond were married one year when her life changed. They remained very happily married and after nine years Sandi took on her greatest joy and challenge: motherhood. She gave birth to two sons, Jimmy and Michael. Homemaker magazine ran an article on the courageous young family. Sadly, Sandi and Eddie ultimately decided to live apart. However, each took turns with the task closest their hearts: raising two wonderful boys. Thus, the family formed itself into a strong unit that would always cope and endure.

Out of this tremendously difficult decision came Sandi's greatest strengths. She bought a fitted van and took to the road -- and to life. She started to swim, her greatest pleasure -- eschewed earlier because she had been unable to move her head to breathe in the water. Now, by the simple expedient of going in on her back, she found she could move all by herself. And did she go -- up and down the pool at the West Vancouver Recreation Centre every day, the tortoise among the master-swimmer hares. Lap after lap, looking up at the roof -- thinking and planning her life as she went. She felt closest to free in the water, particularly in the sea.

No mother was more effectively and wholeheartedly involved in her childrens' daily lives than Sandi. Her writing was sidelined in the early, hectic years, but she had so much fun as a "hockey Mum" that she began stealing time to write another book Shoot to Score. Also Stripes of a Zebra based on her Dutch/South-African heritage. When her publisher suggested she might be biting off more than anyone could chew -- taking on apartheid, a mixed race teen romance and disabled characters -- Sandi merely smiled: "That's me -- just rolling along the edge..."

Meanwhile, life was again wondering what it could possibly do to faze this amazing woman. Inflammatory breast cancer was its answer. She was diagnosed early in 1995, with her boys then almost thirteen and eleven. Along with the difficulties of her normal life she now took on surgery, radiation and repeated chemotherapy. For nearly four years she carried on, business as usual.

She learned to sail in a specially fitted boat, part of the Terry Fox legacy. She flew the helijet, filled her sunny garden with flowers, dined out, took her boys and her own Mum to Hawaii. She watched whales, played bridge, and drove to every hockey arena in the province. She was always a strikingly beautiful figure, a bird of paradise rolling through Ambleside in those vibrant colours that suited her so well. The wigs at the cancer hospital were usually for older, greyer heads, so Sandi preferred hats, especially when a little of her own hair remained to show under their defiantly tilted brims. And when she did have to wear a black curly wig, she merely launched into On The Good Ship, Lollipop, watched by another bemused black mop, her giant poodle, Sasha. Together, they put in many a mile on the seawall.

Nothing stopped her for long, not breakdowns of her chair, nor harrowing therapies, and certainly not the heedless who parked too close to her van for her to wheel in. A passer-by would be blithely commandeered to move the van -- until Jim turned sixteen and could proudly reverse his Mum's van to where she could take her place at the controls. When her doctors feared she could not possibly tolerate any further chemotherapy, she said: "If you can buy me two more days with my boys, hit me with it."

We all wanted to hover around her, but she shooed us away while there were still precious days to be lived. Yet when the time came, there was no one ever more organized, more ready. When her doctors said it would have to be palliative care now or a nurse at home, Sandi just said "Give me my van and I'm outta here." Her closest helpers, Cheryl, Michelle and nurse Jan, took time off work to be with her day and night so she could be at home.

This is the kind of love she inspired in all her friends. From the four bridesmaids who attended her at her wedding and all her life, to the thousands who but met her once and never forgot her. "Not now death, I'm busy. Maybe next year." She used her four-year journey towards death to complete and fulfill an extraordinary life. On the one hand she milked every hour, on the other she arranged every detail of her funeral service except the date.

She asked for Let it Be to be sung to her boys, a song written by a son for his own mother who died of breast cancer. A son who did not know then this killer would also claim his wife. Sandi slipped away from us with customary style and grace, leaving her two "stars," her mother, Eddie, her siblings and her army of friends all bereft, but united in grateful awe.

And even now life can't quite stop this woman. Her second book, Shoot to Score, will be on the shelves in February. Her sons will read it to her grandchildren. No, nothing will ever really stop Sandra Richmond. Because Sandi's assignment that fateful night in Thunder Bay was simple: To be the teacher she always was. She taught everyone she met how to live. And when she had done that, she taught us how to die.

As Patricia, her eulogist said: every obstacle we would ever meet, every catastrophe, every hurdle, would be easier for knowing Sandi. Because of her courage, her joy, we might well learn how to let it be.

(by Mary Walkin Keane)

BOOKS

PROPERTY by Valerie Martin (Abacus)
Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all she longs to be free of her suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon’s husband’s inclinations lie. This private drama is played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon’s house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn…
Beautifully written, Property is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.
http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/2003prize/winner/index.html

THE LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt (Bloomsbury)
Although the Cleves generally revelled in every detail of their family history, the events of ‘the terrible Mother’s Day’ were never, ever discussed. On that day, nine-year-old Robin, loved by all for his whims and peculiarities, was found hanging by the neck from a black-tupelo tree in his own garden. Twelve years later, the mystery – with its taunting traces of foul play – was no nearer a solution than it had been on the day it happened. This isn’t good enough for Robin’s youngest sister Harriet.
Only a baby when the tragedy occurred, but now twelve years old and steeped in the adventurous daring of favourite writers such as Stevenson, Kipling and Conan Doyle, Harriet is ready and eager to find out and punish her brother’s killer. Her closest friend, Hely – who would try anything to make Harriet love him – has sworn allegiance to her call for revenge. But the world these plucky twelve-year-olds are to encounter has nothing to do with child’s play: it is dark, adult and all too menacing.
In Donna Tartt’s Mississippi, the sense of place and sense of the past mingle redolently with rich human drama to create a collective alchemy. Here eccentric great aunts bustle about graciously despite faded fortunes and a child’s enquiring mind not only unearths telling family artefacts, but stirs up a neighbourhood nest of vipers and larceny. The Little Friend is a profoundly involving novel which demonstrates how the imaginary life embraces what literature we read, what special places we inhabit and what kindred souls we recognise, to help crack open even the darkest secrets life has hiding for us.

ANY HUMAN HEART by William Boyd (Alfred A. Knopf)
AT 17, Logan Mountstuart starts a journal. He faithfully keeps it, except when he can't bear to, until his death at 85. It records, mostly at a cool panoramic distance but with plunges into close-up shattering, his life as a minor British writer, art dealer, spy, chance acquaintance of dozens of the famous, repeatedly ill-fated husband and lover, and broken-compass navigator through the mild pleasures and harsh poisons of English life over most of the 20th century. At times he may suggest Flashman, Zelig or even Baron Munchausen. But Logan's creator, William Boyd, is multifaceted and inventive, and he plays a deep game under his agile card tricks. Ultimately Logan is a stoic Everyman, his inborn snobberies weathered away through years of misadventuring and misapprehending.
Do not mistake my extravagantly deluded clowns, Boyd tells us: unless we too are extravagantly wrong-footed we are not human. Nearing 60 and beginning to fade, Logan is accosted by the outraged New York father of a girl he has bedded. ''Loser!'' the man yells, his ultimate insult after a string of others. And Logan reflects:

''But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person -- or a European -- it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. But not in the U.S.A. Perhaps this is the great difference between the two worlds, this concept of Loserdom. In the New World it is the ultimate mark of shame -- in the Old it prompts only a wry sympathy.''

So, for much of the time, does ''Any Human Heart.'' Wry sympathy ought not to be much of a hook to haul us through an account that for long stretches -- the book lasts nearly 500 pages -- is not particularly sympathetic or even particularly exciting. Yet hauled we are and, despite some becalming, pleasurably. Boyd endows his narrator with no special quality of perception or sensibility as he recounts his sorties, ambitions, exuberant gains, painful reverses and long-term decline. What he does give him is integrity of voice if not of spirit, the lightest mockery of his own inconsequentiality and a gracefully chiseled play of sentence and phrase. Then, periodically, jolting the reader into disoriented attention, the even current is churned by a whirlpool.

Logan was born in Uruguay, where his father ran a corned-beef plant before his transfer back to Birmingham headquarters. Boyd has in mind (part of his book's generosity is the great variety of things he has in mind) that British superiorities, whether aesthetic or of class, often float up through the generations from the equivalent of the corned-beef factory. Logan's school days -- what English roman-fleuve could possibly lack an account of them? -- are described largely in terms of the private (and ironic) challenges that Logan and his friends Peter and Ben assign themselves. Unathletic Logan, through a mix of recklessness and scheming, wins a place on the rugby team. Peter seduces, or gets himself seduced by, a local farm girl. Ben, a Jew, tries and comically fails to convert to Roman Catholicism.
All blithe enough, except for the whirlpool. Facing expulsion for one of his escapades, Logan is summoned by the headmaster, who breaks the news that his father has died. No expulsion, therefore. Instead, he gets a violent beating. It's a moment of fulminating shock: the old Spartan, public-school myth of stoic endurance, playing fields, empire and so on magnified into insane savagery. His psychic wound, never healed, partly cripples Logan for the rest of his life -- even as it partly claims him -- until a gradual odd deliverance near the end.

Logan's blitheness begins to be marred by shallows of depression. One of these turns a promising Oxford start into mediocre failure; two unhappy love affairs don't help. (Boyd's deeper game is to show how easily Logan's lofty veneer is cracked.) Then a spell of good fortune. His study of Shelley is published to high literary acclaim; a subsequent sexy novel, deplored by the literati, makes a lot of money.
Logan floats among intellectual and social circles. After a brief, bleak marriage to an earl's daughter and miserable rustication on the earl-provided estate, he finds the closest thing to enduring love with a second wife, Freya, and their daughter. Making frequent visits to Paris, where the intellectuals honor him for a study of several obscure French writers, and where his schoolmate Ben has started a an art gallery, he buys a small Juan Gris for £50 and starts a valuable collection of his own.

He is atop the world (the journal form subjects him to the day's delusory perspective) and is clearly headed for a fall (we readers see farther, if only by turning pages). There will be many falls, in fact -- including the worst imaginable. In their declining arc they are too various and intricate to detail here; only at the end, after a lifelong slow conversion by ordeal, does he achieve words for them:
''My personal roller coaster. Not so much a roller coaster -- a roller coaster's too smooth -- a yo-yo, rather -- a jerking, spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child, more like, trying too hard, too impatiently eager.''

Boyd jiggles the yo-yo; he is a writer who, without undermining his story, keeps us suspicious of what he is about to do with it. There are the Zelig moments, for instance. At Oxford Logan gets wise advice from the future novelist Anthony Powell; at a party he is kissed by a man who may or may not be Evelyn Waugh. At another party he scolds Virginia Woolf for snobbery. In Paris, and during the Spanish Civil War (when he's a correspondent), Ernest Hemingway lends him a friendly hand. Picasso sketches him. He offers James Joyce a verbal discombobulation for ''Finnegans Wake.''
And so, when he allows the Duke of Windsor (the abdicated Edward VIII) to play through on a golf course, we assume it's another amiable Zeligry. In fact it leads to an intense wartime adventure. Recruited into British naval intelligence (by Ian Fleming, of course), Logan turns up in the Bahamas, where the duke, whose pro-Nazi sentiments worry Churchill, has been sent as governor to keep him out of trouble. Logan's job is to befriend and keep an eye on him. Trouble erupts, nonetheless. (Boyd elaborates fascinatingly on a forgotten bit of history.) The duke, petulant and lethal, turns on Logan, and he becomes a scapegoat. Parachuted into Switzerland on another tortuous mission, and possibly betrayed by those who sent him, he spends two years incommunicado in a villa used by the Swiss to jail embarrassments.

Years later, he plays a marginal though dignified role in Nigeria's civil war. Still later, destitute and scrabbling to survive on a tiny pension, he hawks newspapers in London for a violent anarchist group. They send him on a hapless courier mission to an underground contact -- in Switzerland of all places. (Boyd, in whose books people's lives and characters angle about in continual change, has no use for a country where bland force is applied so that nothing will change).

Quite deliberately, though, what the author conveys with the tautly intricate staging of each of these stories, and the intriguing cloudiness he veils them in, is not the thrill of Logan's exploits but their futility. It is only at the end that genuine excitement, so long withheld or rigged, makes its entry. We read of the humiliations of British genteel poverty and of Logan's threadbare expedients. A face emerges from the masks when we were wondering if there was one.

In bereft old age the voice simplifies and deepens: relinquishing his maze of purposes, Logan retains only one or two. He has moved to the Midi, where his penury pinches less and his slender means go farther. Boyd makes his love of France not only evident but alive. The beauty of place, of light, of manners -- the villagers are tactfully helpful to an old man whom they honor as an écrivain -- extend Logan's resources far differently than the dog food that stretched his diet in London.

''I am I and my circumstances,'' the Spanish saying goes. In the village the ''I'' dwindles and the circumstances swell. We see Logan no longer as the verbs and adjectives of his journals' actions and attitudes, but as a human noun, subjected. The approach of death, held by existentialism to give meaning to existence, infuses something better than glory: the dignity of a naked life quite free of the strivings and pretensions it sought to clothe itself in.

ARTICLES

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
(New York Times)

If Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine. You are wrong to think that you will be more unhappy with a big single setback (a broken wrist, a broken heart) than with a lesser chronic one (a trick knee, a tense marriage). You are wrong to assume that job failure will be crushing. You are wrong to expect that a death in the family will leave you bereft for year upon year, forever and ever. You are even wrong to reckon that a cheeseburger you order in a restaurant -- this week, next week, a year from now, it doesn't really matter when -- will definitely hit the spot. That's because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong.

A professor in Harvard's department of psychology, Gilbert likes to tell people that he studies happiness. But it would be more precise to say that Gilbert -- along with the psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, the economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon and the psychologist (and Nobel laureate in economics) Daniel Kahneman of Princeton -- has taken the lead in studying a specific type of emotional and behavioral prediction. In the past few years, these four men have begun to question the decision-making process that shapes our sense of well-being: how do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy -- and then how do we feel after the actual experience? For example, how do we suppose we'll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we'll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions -- the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck -- are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events.

Until recently, this was uncharted territory. How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research. But in scores of experiments, Gilbert, Wilson, Kahneman and Loewenstein have made a slew of observations and conclusions that undermine a number of fundamental assumptions: namely, that we humans understand what we want and are adept at improving our well-being -- that we are good at maximizing our utility, in the jargon of traditional economics. Further, their work on prediction raises some unsettling and somewhat more personal questions. To understand affective forecasting, as Gilbert has termed these studies, is to wonder if everything you have ever thought about life choices, and about happiness, has been at the least somewhat naive and, at worst, greatly mistaken.
The problem, as Gilbert and company have come to discover, is that we falter when it comes to imagining how we will feel about something in the future. It isn't that we get the big things wrong. We know we will experience visits to Le Cirque and to the periodontist differently; we can accurately predict that we'd rather be stuck in Montauk than in a Midtown elevator. What Gilbert has found, however, is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions -- our ''affect'' -- to future events. In other words, we might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as predicted. The vast majority of Gilbert's test participants through the years have consistently made just these sorts of errors both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. And whether Gilbert's subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.
Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ''impact bias'' -- ''impact'' meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ''bias'' our tendency to err. The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. Would a 20 percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost surely it won't turn out that way. And a new plasma television? You may have high hopes, but the impact bias suggests that it will almost certainly be less cool, and in a shorter time, than you imagine. Worse, Gilbert has noted that these mistakes of expectation can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure. He calls this ''miswanting.''

''The average person says, 'I know I'll be happier with a Porsche than a Chevy,' '' Gilbert explains. '' 'Or with Linda rather than Rosalyn. Or as a doctor rather than as a plumber.' That seems very clear to people. The problem is, I can't get into medical school or afford the Porsche. So for the average person, the obstacle between them and happiness is actually getting the futures that they desire. But what our research shows -- not just ours, but Loewenstein's and Kahneman's -- is that the real problem is figuring out which of those futures is going to have the high payoff and is really going to make you happy.
''You know, the Stones said, 'You can't always get what you want,' '' Gilbert adds. ''I don't think that's the problem. The problem is you can't always know what you want.''

Gilbert's papers on affective forecasting began to appear in the late 1990's, but the idea to study happiness and emotional prediction actually came to him on a sunny afternoon in October 1992, just as he and his friend Jonathan Jay Koehler sat down for lunch outside the psychology building at the University of Texas at Austin, where both men were teaching at the time. Gilbert was uninspired about his studies and says he felt despair about his failing marriage. And as he launched into a discussion of his personal life, he swerved to ask why economists focus on the financial aspects of decision making rather than the emotional ones. Koehler recalls, ''Gilbert said something like: 'It all seems so small. It isn't really about money; it's about happiness. Isn't that what everybody wants to know when we make a decision?' '' For a moment, Gilbert forgot his troubles, and two more questions came to him. Do we even know what makes us happy? And if it's difficult to figure out what makes us happy in the moment, how can we predict what will make us happy in the future?

In the early 1990's, for an up-and-coming psychology professor like Gilbert to switch his field of inquiry from how we perceive one another to happiness, as he did that day, was just a hairsbreadth short of bizarre. But Gilbert has always liked questions that lead him somewhere new. Now 45, Gilbert dropped out of high school at 15, hooking into what he calls ''the tail end of the hippie movement'' and hitchhiking aimlessly from town to town with his guitar. He met his wife on the road; she was hitching in the other direction. They married at 17, had a son at 18 and settled down in Denver. ''I pulled weeds, I sold rebar, I sold carpet, I installed carpet, I spent a lot of time as a phone solicitor,'' he recalls. During this period he spent several years turning out science-fiction stories for magazines like Amazing Stories. Thus, in addition to being ''one of the most gifted social psychologists of our age,'' as the psychology writer and professor David G. Myers describes him to me, Gilbert is the author of ''The Essence of Grunk,'' a story about an encounter with a creature made of egg salad that jets around the galaxy in a rocket-powered refrigerator.

Psychology was a matter of happenstance. In the midst of his sci-fi career, Gilbert tried to sign up for a writing course at the local community college, but the class was full; he figured that psych, still accepting registrants, would help him with character development in his fiction. It led instead to an undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado at Denver, then a Ph.D. at Princeton, then an appointment at the University of Texas, then the appointment at Harvard. ''People ask why I study happiness,'' Gilbert says, ''and I say, 'Why study anything else?' It's the holy grail. We're studying the thing that all human action is directed toward.'' One experiment of Gilbert's had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

Much of Gilbert's research is in this vein. Another recent study asked whether transit riders in Boston who narrowly missed their trains experienced the self-blame that people tend to predict they'll feel in this situation. (They did not.) And a paper waiting to be published, ''The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad,'' examines why we expect that bigger problems will always dwarf minor annoyances. ''When really bad things happen to us, we defend against them,'' Gilbert explains. ''People, of course, predict the exact opposite. If you ask, 'What would you rather have, a broken leg or a trick knee?' they'd probably say, 'Trick knee.' And yet, if your goal is to accumulate maximum happiness over your lifetime, you just made the wrong choice. A trick knee is a bad thing to have.''

All of these studies establish the links between prediction, decision making and well-being. The photography experiment challenges our common assumption that we would be happier with the option to change our minds when in fact we're happier with closure. The transit experiment demonstrates that we tend to err in estimating our regret over missed opportunities. The ''things not so bad'' work shows our failure to imagine how grievously irritations compromise our satisfaction. Our emotional defenses snap into action when it comes to a divorce or a disease but not for lesser problems. We fix the leaky roof on our house, but over the long haul, the broken screen door we never mend adds up to more frustration.
Gilbert does not believe all forecasting mistakes lead to similar results; a death in the family, a new gym membership and a new husband are not the same, but in how they affect our well-being they are similar. ''Our research simply says that whether it's the thing that matters or the thing that doesn't, both of them matter less than you think they will,'' he says. ''Things that happen to you or that you buy or own -- as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you're wrong by a certain amount. You're overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that's true of positive and negative events.''

Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950's to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.'' In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ''We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.''

It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time -- this is a long-known trait -- but that we're generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.

As Gilbert points out, this glitch is also significant when it comes to negative events like losing a job or the death of someone we love, in response to which we project a permanently inconsolable future. ''The thing I'm most interested in, that I've spent the most time studying, is our failure to recognize how powerful psychological defenses are once they're activated,'' Gilbert says. ''We've used the metaphor of the 'psychological immune system' -- it's just a metaphor, but not a bad one for that system of defenses that helps you feel better when bad things happen. Observers of the human condition since Aristotle have known that people have these defenses. Freud spent his life, and his daughter Anna spent her life, worrying about these defenses. What's surprising is that people don't seem to recognize that they have these defenses, and that these defenses will be triggered by negative events.'' During the course of my interviews with Gilbert, a close friend of his died. ''I am like everyone in thinking, I'll never get over this and life will never be good again,'' he wrote to me in an e-mail message as he planned a trip to Texas for the funeral. ''But because of my work, there is always a voice in the back of my head -- a voice that wears a lab coat and has a lot of data tucked under its arm -- that says, 'Yes, you will, and yes, it will.' And I know that voice is right.''

Still, the argument that we imperfectly imagine what we want and how we will cope is nevertheless disorienting. On the one hand, it can cast a shadow of regret on some life decisions. Why did I decide that working 100 hours a week to earn more would make me happy? Why did I think retiring to Sun City, Ariz., would please me? On the other hand, it can be enlightening. No wonder this teak patio set hasn't made me as happy as I expected. Even if she dumps me, I'll be O.K. Either way, predicting how things will feel to us over the long term is mystifying. A large body of research on well-being seems to suggest that wealth above middle-class comfort makes little difference to our happiness, for example, or that having children does nothing to improve well-being -- even as it drives marital satisfaction dramatically down. We often yearn for a roomy, isolated home (a thing we easily adapt to), when, in fact, it will probably compromise our happiness by distancing us from neighbors. (Social interaction and friendships have been shown to give lasting pleasure.) The big isolated home is what Loewenstein, 48, himself bought. ''I fell into a trap I never should have fallen into,'' he told me.

Loewenstein's office is up a narrow stairway in a hidden corner of an enormous, worn brick building on the edge of the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Pittsburgh. He and Gilbert make for an interesting contrast. Gilbert is garrulous, theatrical, dazzling in his speech and writing; he fills a room. Loewenstein is soft-spoken, given to abstraction and lithe in the way of a hard-core athlete; he seems to float around a room. Both men profess tremendous admiration for the other, and their different disciplines -- psychology and economics -- have made their overlapping interests in affective forecasting more complementary than fraught. While Gilbert's most notable contribution to affective forecasting is the impact bias, Loewenstein's is something called the ''empathy gap.''

Here's how it expresses itself. In a recent experiment, Loewenstein tried to find out how likely people might be to dance alone to Rick James's ''Super Freak'' in front of a large audience. Many agreed to do so for a certain amount of money a week in advance, only to renege when the day came to take the stage. This sounds like a goof, but it gets at the fundamental difference between how we behave in ''hot'' states (those of anxiety, courage, fear, drug craving, sexual excitation and the like) and ''cold'' states of rational calm. This empathy gap in thought and behavior -- we cannot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state -- affects happiness in an important but somewhat less consistent way than the impact bias. ''So much of our lives involves making decisions that have consequences for the future,'' Loewenstein says. ''And if our decision making is influenced by these transient emotional and psychological states, then we know we're not making decisions with an eye toward future consequences.'' This may be as simple as an unfortunate proclamation of love in a moment of lust, Loewenstein explains, or something darker, like an act of road rage or of suicide.

Among other things, this line of inquiry has led Loewenstein to collaborate with health experts looking into why people engage in unprotected sex when they would never agree to do so in moments of cool calculation. Data from tests in which volunteers are asked how they would behave in various ''heat of the moment'' situations -- whether they would have sex with a minor, for instance, or act forcefully with a partner who asks them to stop -- have consistently shown that different states of arousal can alter answers by astonishing margins. ''These kinds of states have the ability to change us so profoundly that we're more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person,'' Loewenstein says.

Part of Loewenstein's curiosity about hot and cold states comes from situations in which his emotions have been pitted against his intellect. When he's not teaching, he treks around the world, making sure to get to Alaska to hike or kayak at least once a year. A scholar of mountaineering literature, he once wrote a paper that examined why climbers have a poor memory for pain and usually ignore turn-back times at great peril. But he has done the same thing himself many times. He almost died in a whitewater canoeing accident and vowed afterward that he never wanted to see his runaway canoe again. (A couple of hours later, he went looking for it.) The same goes for his climbing pursuits. ''You establish your turn-back time, and then you find yourself still far from the peak,'' he says. ''So you push on. You haven't brought enough food or clothes, and then as a result, you're stuck at 13,000 feet, and you have to just sit there and shiver all night without a sleeping bag or warm clothes. When the sun comes up, you're half-frozen, and you say, 'Never again.' Then you get back and immediately start craving getting out again.'' He pushes the point: ''I have tried to train my emotions.'' But he admits that he may make the same mistakes on his next trip.

Would a world without forecasting errors be a better world? Would a life lived without forecasting errors be a richer life? Among the academics who study affective forecasting, there seems little doubt that these sorts of questions will ultimately jump from the academy to the real world. ''If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure,'' Daniel Kahneman says, ''then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.'' To Kahneman, who did some of the first experiments in the area in the early 1990's, affective forecasting could greatly influence retirement planning, for example, where mistakes in prediction (how much we save, how much we spend, how we choose a community we think we'll enjoy) can prove irreversible. He sees a role for affective forecasting in consumer spending, where a ''cooling off'' period might remedy buyer's remorse. Most important, he sees vital applications in health care, especially when it comes to informed consent. ''We consider people capable of giving informed consent once they are told of the objective effects of a treatment,'' Kahneman says. ''But can people anticipate how they and other people will react to a colostomy or to the removal of their vocal cords? The research on affective forecasting suggests that people may have little ability to anticipate their adaptation beyond the early stages.'' Loewenstein, along with his collaborator Dr. Peter Ubel, has done a great deal of work showing that nonpatients overestimate the displeasure of living with the loss of a limb, for instance, or paraplegia. To use affective forecasting to prove that people adapt to serious physical challenges far better and will be happier than they imagine, Loewenstein says, could prove invaluable.

There are downsides to making public policy in light of this research, too. While walking in Pittsburgh one afternoon, Loewenstein tells me that he doesn't see how anybody could study happiness and not find himself leaning left politically; the data make it all too clear that boosting the living standards of those already comfortable, such as through lower taxes, does little to improve their levels of well-being, whereas raising the living standards of the impoverished makes an enormous difference. Nevertheless, he and Gilbert (who once declared in an academic paper, ''Windfalls are better than pratfalls, A's are better than C's, December 25 is better than April 15, and everything is better than a Republican administration'') seem to lean libertarian in regard to pushing any kind of prescriptive agenda. ''We're very, very nervous about overapplying the research,'' Loewenstein says. ''Just because we figure out that X makes people happy and they're choosing Y, we don't want to impose X on them. I have a discomfort with paternalism and with using the results coming out of our field to impose decisions on people.''
Still, Gilbert and Loewenstein can't contain the personal and philosophical questions raised by their work. After talking with both men, I found it hard not to wonder about my own predictions at every turn. At times it seemed like knowing the secret to some parlor trick that was nonetheless very difficult to pull off -- when I ogled a new car at the Honda dealership as I waited for a new muffler on my '92 Accord, for instance, or as my daughter's fever spiked one evening and I imagined something terrible, and then something more terrible thereafter. With some difficulty, I could observe my mind overshooting the mark, zooming past accuracy toward the sublime or the tragic. It was tempting to want to try to think about the future more moderately. But it seemed nearly impossible as well.

To Loewenstein, who is especially attendant to the friction between his emotional and deliberative processes, a life without forecasting errors would most likely be a better, happier life. ''If you had a deep understanding of the impact bias and you acted on it, which is not always that easy to do, you would tend to invest your resources in the things that would make you happy,'' he says. This might mean taking more time with friends instead of more time for making money. He also adds that a better understanding of the empathy gap -- those hot and cold states we all find ourselves in on frequent occasions -- could save people from making regrettable decisions in moments of courage or craving.

Gilbert seems optimistic about using the work in terms of improving ''institutional judgment'' -- how we spend health care dollars, for example -- but less sanguine about using it to improve our personal judgment. He admits that he has taken some of his research to heart; for instance, his work on what he calls the psychological immune system has led him to believe that he would be able to adapt to even the worst turn of events. In addition, he says that he now takes more chances in life, a fact corroborated in at least one aspect by his research partner Tim Wilson, who says that driving with Gilbert in Boston is a terrifying, white-knuckle experience. ''But I should have learned many more lessons from my research than I actually have,'' Gilbert admits. ''I'm getting married in the spring because this woman is going to make me happy forever, and I know it.'' At this, Gilbert laughs, a sudden, booming laugh that fills his Cambridge office. He seems to find it funny not because it's untrue, but because nothing could be more true. This is how he feels. ''I don't think I want to give up all these motivations,'' he says, ''that belief that there's the good and there's the bad and that this is a contest to try to get one and avoid the other. I don't think I want to learn too much from my research in that sense.''

Even so, Gilbert is currently working on a complex experiment in which he has made affective forecasting errors ''go away.'' In this test, Gilbert's team asks members of Group A to estimate how they'll feel if they receive negative personality feedback. The impact bias kicks in, of course, and they mostly predict they'll feel terrible, when in fact they end up feeling O.K. But if Gilbert shows Group B that others have gotten the same feedback and felt O.K. afterward, then its members predict they'll feel O.K. as well. The impact bias disappears, and the participants in Group B make accurate predictions.

This is exciting to Gilbert. But at the same time, it's not a technique he wants to shape into a self-help book, or one that he even imagines could be practically implemented. ''Hope and fear are enduring features of the human experience,'' he says, ''and it is unlikely that people are going to abandon them anytime soon just because some psychologist told them they should.'' In fact, in his recent writings, he has wondered whether forecasting errors might somehow serve a larger functional purpose he doesn't yet understand. If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ''The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,'' he says. ''When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn't sweat as much because you'd say: 'You know, I'll be happy in both. I'll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there's no use in killing myself for the next week.' But maybe our caricatures of the future -- these overinflated assessments of how good or bad things will be -- maybe it's these illusory assessments that keep us moving in one direction over the other. Maybe we don't want a society of people who shrug and say, 'It won't really make a difference.'
''Maybe it's important for there to be carrots and sticks in the world, even if they are illusions,'' he adds. ''They keep us moving towards carrots and away from sticks.''

PAINTINGS



"Madrid", G. Richter

FILMS

What's playing at Sundance this week:

GARDEN STATE

"Garden State" is an exciting debut for a young man mainly known as the star of a glib medical sitcom. Written and directed by Zach Braff (he's on the NBC hit "Scrubs"), this definitely ain't no sitcom, though at times the film is a shade too quirky-cutesy for its own good. And while Braff's script may suffer from long-windedness, his direction - of both cast and camera - is so confident that this debut could well mark the start of a major career.
Braff himself plays Andrew Largeman, who is first witnessed experiencing a plane crash. A disconcerting way to begin a movie, to be sure, though of course it's only a dream. The reality Andrew wakes up to isn't much better, though - depression, heavy medication and the news that his mother died the night before. To make matters worse, Andrew - an actor of some kind - waits tables in a trendy L.A. Vietnamese restaurant, and must wear eyeliner while doing so.
Back in New Jersey, Andrew runs into a high school buddy at his mother's funeral - he's a gravedigger now (played by the fantastic Peter Sarsgaard). Now somewhat reconnected to his past, the zombified Andrew floats along like a 21st-century Benjamin Braddock in a post-9/11 world of forced fun and even a druggy spin-the-bottle party. The "Graduate" comparison is also apt because of Braff's percocious mastery of widescreen visual puns, and gracefully interwoven melancholy folk-pop by the likes of The Shins, Nick Drake and yes, even good old Simon & Garfunkel.
So that's Andrew's dislocated life. He's 26, he hasn't been home for nine years, and he can't relate to his father (Ian Holm), his friends, anyone. He can't even grieve for his mother. Just when "Garden State" threatens to dissolve into a plotless quirkathon, in comes The Girl to perk things up, in the fine form of Natalie Portman (who, between this and her ferocious work in "Cold Mountain" has made up for that whole Queen Amidala thing).
Portman's Sam is a talky, funky local lass who instantly recognizes the pain in Andrew, and makes it her mission to draw him out. In short order, she brings him home to meet her mom and brother (an African immigrant, long story) and check out the world's largest Habitrail, complete with dead hamster. The burial of said hamster is Andrew and Sam's first real bonding experience, and it makes for a touching scene that sends the film in a new, more heartfelt direction. Portman's young Diane Keaton mannerisms give way to a more nurturing, comforting side; it suits her. And sure enough, Andrew begins to open up, about how long he's been on medication, why he's on medication, and most importantly the series of sad events leading up to his mother's death.
The chemistry between Braff and Portman and their characters goes a long way, saving the film when it takes a few too many bizarre plot/location turns and overplays its dramatic hand towards the finish, especially as concerns Andrew having a long-delayed "deep and meaningful" with his dad. Effusive emotional outbursts aren't the film's best style. But when Braff keeps the tears and the kookiness in check, he takes us into some unusual, interesting areas of the human psyche. And makes us laugh a good deal while he's at it.

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

So, this is very much like a sequel to me. I was first introduced to some of these characters in a short film called “Peluca” that screened at Slamdance ’03. I fell in love with the quirky humor of filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess, I just wished the effort had been feature length. Welp, I got my wish and this film is every bit as funny as I knew it would be. I’m a smart one. I know my A-B-C’s.
Napoleon Dynamite is an uber-geek high school student – thick glasses, red, messy fro, walks kinda like he has a stick up his ass, looks like his mama dresses him – who spends his time drawing flatulent unicorns, scouring the local thrift store for shit like bad dance instruction tapes, jamming his pockets full with tater tots and engaging in plenty of other odd activites. As we observe Napoleon’s daily eccentricities, we meet his grandmother who goes off to race a quad runner in the desert only to end up putting herself in the hospital, his brother, Kip, who spends most of his time chatting with women online, their bozo door-to-door salesman uncle who plots to build a time machine so he can revisit his football glory days, and Pedro, a new student who Napoleon makes friends with and convinces to run for school president.
The cast playing these eccentric characters is magnificent. Each actor perfectly compliments the Hess’s original brand of humor that keep steady giggles bubbling from the audience, inspiring frequent bursts of uproarious laughter. This is definitely one of the most unique comedies you’ll see all year. No doubt about it. This one will be heading your way sometime in the near future.

OPEN WATER

That’s just plain mean. Yet even though I knew all along this movie was totally manipulating me, I followed along on the terrifying ride. I feel so dirty and used. For that, Kentis and his great cast deserve big props.
“Open Water” taps into everyone’s fear of being lost. Everyone knows how that feels and that fear is what made “The Blair Witch Project” so stomach churning. It’s also what makes this film so gut wrenching. Well, that and a whole bunch of huge sharks.
Kentis and his cast also deserve huge kudos for the fact that there are no computer effects in this low budget movie. When a shark swims by the lost couple, it’s a real shark. The only tiny issue with “Open Water” is it’s shot on a really low quality DV. I’m not anti-DV by any means but the continuity suffers big time here. That’s a minor quibble though as this film is downright freaky. Every hour that ticks by your stomach drops a little more as the outlook becomes more bleak.
Another interesting aspect of this movie is the script. We literally see these people lose their minds as they drift and drift…and drift in the endless sea. I do feel bad for the dive industry as anyone who sees “Open Water” will likely never set foot on a dive boat again. It is based on a true story. But the thrill of this movie probably makes up for that.

RIDING GIANTS

For its first-ever opening night in Park City, the Sundance Film Festival chose to premiere "Riding Giants," the first documentary to open the festival. It was an understandable though curious choice. Understandable because Sundance is not only proud of the large role it has played in showcasing documentaries from its very beginnings, but the festival also loves to celebrate its alumni. "Riding Giants" director Stacy Peralta won the audience and director awards at the 2001 Sundance for his docu "Dogtown and Z-Boys." Curious because this film about surfing fails to thoroughly investigate the subculture and all too easily settles for an admiring promotional film, albeit one with lively moments, a good sense of humor and colorful real-life figures who will captivate even nonsurfers.
At the moment, however, the film is unlikely to play to many nonsurfers. "Riding Giants" is at least 15 minutes too long. Repetitive shots of giant waves and wipeouts diminish rather than enhance one's appreciation of the courage of today's surfers. "Riding Giants" seems intent on selling the sport rather than examining why people are willing to risk their necks to challenge nature at her most volatile.
While the film begins with a brief historical overview of the sport, the focus swiftly shifts to one subject: the lure of riding "big waves," swells that can reach up to 70 feet. While this is a bit like making a documentary on boxing that focuses only on heavyweights while ignoring all other weight divisions, there is no doubt this is the most exciting and dangerous aspect of the sport.
In an often tongue-in-cheek manner, Peralta and co-writer Sam George trace the evolution of big-wave riding from the conquest of Hawaii's Waimea Bay in the 1950s, following the introduction of lighter boards made of balsa and fiber glass, to today's tow-in surfing that allows surfers to ride giants.
Three figures emerge: Greg Noll, who, with his muscular build and striped trunks, led the charge in the '50s and '60s
Jeff Clark, who discovered but kept secret for a while the treacherous Mavericks surfing area in Northern California
and Laird Hamilton, today's blond god of contemporary Hawaiian surfing.
The movie has fun with the Gidget movies that, while popularizing the sport around the world, were treated with contempt by real surfers. It also has solemn moments, showing the drowning death of top Hawaiian surfer Mark Foo at Mavericks in 1994.
Peralta, who made his mark with skateboarding movies, is new to surfing films. He is either unaware of or unwilling to utilize the advanced techniques and surf-cam operators employed by filmmakers like Dana Brown, whose "Step Into Liquid," released last year, let viewers get up close and personal with big-wave riders while inside those watery tubes.
As waves pound endlessly at the audience and big questions about the surfing lifestyle and lure of risk-taking never get asked, the movie shamelessly exposes its own promotional side. For a film exec produced by Laird Hamilton to call Laird Hamilton the best big-wave surfer ever is not only disingenuous but ignores the controversy of that statement in the surfing world. Hamilton may well be top dog, but he tends to shun championship competitions, where it might be put to a test.
The use of archival footage, much of which is probably home movies, is quite good, and Peralta's interviews often produce sharp, revealing comments. But he and his cohorts let salesmanship triumph over filmmaking.

TECHNOLOGY

ABSOLUTE POWERPOINT: CAN A SOFTWARE PACKAGE EDIT OUR THOUGHTS?
by Ian Parker; The New Yorker (May 28, 2001)

Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations, but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren't listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So, one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft's PowerPoint program, and typed:

Family Matters
An approach for positive change to the
Wyndham family team

On a new page, she wrote:

· Lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members
· Disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life
· Disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family

Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing key-the key to success. The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the Wyndham girls burst into tears.
PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn't seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it-you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.
But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion-an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion-about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world. One feature of this is the AutoContent Wizard, which supplies templates-"Managing Organizational Change" or "Communicating Bad News," say-that are so close to finished presentations you barely need to do more then add your company logo. The "Motivating a Team" template, for example, includes a slide headed "Conduct a Creative Thinking Session":

Ask: In what ways can we...?
· Assess the situation. Get the facts.
· Generate possible solutions with green light, nonjudgmental thinking.
· Select the best solution.

The final injunction is "Have an inspirational close."
It's easy to avoid these extreme templates - many people do - as well as embellishments like clip art, animations, and sound effects. But it's hard to shake off AutoContent's spirit: even the most easygoing PowerPoint template insists on a heading followed by bullet points, so that the user is shepherded toward a staccato, summarizing frame of mind, of the kind parodied, for example, in a PowerPoint Gettysburg Address posted on the Internet: "Dedicate portion of field-fitting!"
Because PowerPoint can be an impressive antidote to fear-converting public-speaking dread into moviemaking pleasure-there seems to be no great impulse to fight this influence, as you might fight the unrelenting animated paperclip in Microsoft Word. Rather, PowerPoint's restraints seem to be soothing-so much so that where Microsoft has not written rules, businesses write them for themselves. A leading U.S. computer manufacturer has distributed guidelines to its employees about PowerPoint presentations, insisting on something it calls the "Rules of Seven": "Seven (7) bullets or lines per page, seven (7) words per line."
Today, after Microsoft's decade of dizzying growth, there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes. In darkened rooms at industrial plants and ad agencies, at sales pitches and conferences, this is how people are communicating: no paragraphs, no pronouns-the world condensed into a few upbeat slides, with seven or so words on a line, seven or so lines on a slide. And now it's happening during sermons and university lectures and family arguments, too. A New Jersey PowerPoint user recently wrote in an online discussion, "Last week I caught myself planning out (in my head) the slides I would need to explain to my wife why we couldn't afford a vacation this year."
Somehow, a piece of software designed, fifteen years ago, to meet a simple business need has become a way of organizing thought at kindergarten show-and-tells. "Oh, Lord," one of the early developers said to me. "What have we done?" Forty years ago, a workplace meeting was a discussion with your immediate colleagues. Engineers would meet with other engineers and talk in the language of engineering. A manager might make an appearance-acting as an interpreter, a bridge to the rest of the company-but no one from the marketing or production or sales department would be there. Somebody might have gone to the trouble of cranking out mimeographs-that would be the person with purple fingers.
But the structure of American industry changed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Clifford Nass, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Stanford, says, "Companies weren't discovering things in the laboratory and then trying to convince consumers to buy them. They were discovering-or creating-consumer demand, figuring out what they can convince consumers they need, then going to the laboratory and saying, 'Build this!' People were saying, 'We can create demand. Even if demand doesn't exist, we know how to market this.' SpaghettiOs is the great example. The guy came up with the jingle first: 'The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon. And he said, 'Hey! Make spaghetti in the shape of small circles!'"
As Jerry Porras, a professor of organizational behavior and change at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says, "When technologies no longer just drove the product out but the customer sucked it out, then you had to know what the customer wanted, and that meant a lot more interaction inside the company." There are new conversations: Can we make this? How do we sell this if we make it? Can we do it in blue? America began to go to more meetings. By the early nineteen-eighties, when the story of PowerPoint starts, employees had to find ways to talk to colleagues from other departments, colleagues who spoke a different language, brought together by SpaghettiOs and by the simple fact that technology was generating more information. There was more to know and, as the notion of a job for life eroded, more reason to know it.
In this environment, visual aids were bound to thrive. In 1975, fifty thousand overhead projectors were sold in America. By 1985, that figure had increased to more than a hundred and twenty thousand. Overheads, which were developed in the mid-forties for use by the police, and were then widely used in bowling alleys and schools, did not fully enter business life until the mid seventies, when a transparency film that could survive the heat of a photocopier became available. Now anything on a sheet of paper could be transferred to an overhead slide. Overheads were cheaper than the popular alternative, the 35-mm slide (which needed graphics professionals), and they were easier to use. But they restricted you to your typewriter's font-rather, your secretary's typewriter's font-or your skill with Letraset and a felt-tipped pen. A businessman couldn't generate a handsome, professional-looking font in his own office.
In 1980, though, it was clear that a future of widespread personal computers-and laser printers and screens that showed the very thing you were about to print-was tantalizingly close. In the Mountain View, California, laboratory of Bell-Northern Research, computer-research scientists had set up a great mainframe computer, a graphics workstation, a phototypesetter, and the earliest Canon laser printer, which was the size of a bathtub and took six men to carry into the building-together, a cumbersome approximation of what would later fit on a coffee table and cost a thousand dollars. With much trial and error, and jogging from one room to another, you could use this collection of machines as a kind of word processor.
Whitfield Diffie had access to this equipment. A mathematician, a former peacenik, and an enemy of exclusive government control of encryption systems, Diffie had secured a place for himself in computing legend in 1976, when he and a colleague, Martin Hellman, announced the discovery of a new method of protecting secrets electronically-public-key cryptography. At Bell-Northern, Diffie was researching the security of telephone systems. In 1981, preparing to give a presentation with 35-mm. slides, he wrote a little program, tinkering with some graphics software designed by a B.N.R. colleague, that allowed you to draw a black frame on a piece of paper. Diffie expanded it so that the page could show a number of frames, and text inside each frame, with space for commentary around them. In other words, he produced a storyboard-a slide show on paper-that could be sent to the designers who made up the slides, and that would also serve as a script for his lecture. (At this stage, he wasn't photocopying what he had produced to make overhead transparencies, although scientists in other facilities were doing that.) With a few days' effort, Diffie had pointed the way to PowerPoint.
Diffie has long gray hair and likes to wear English suits. Today, he works for Sun Microsystems, as an internal consultant on encryption matters. I recently had lunch with him in Palo Alto, and for the first time he publicly acknowledged his presence at the birth of PowerPoint. It was an odd piece of news: as if Lenin had invented the stapler. Yes, he said, PowerPoint was "based on" his work at B.N.R. This is not of great consequence to Diffie, whose reputation in his own field is so high that he is one of the few computer scientists to receive erotically charged fan mail. He said he was "mildly miffed" to have made no money from the PowerPoint connection, but he has no interest in beginning a feud with an old friend. "Bob was the one who had the vision to understand how important it was to the world," he said. "And I didn't."
Bob is Bob Gaskins, the man who has to take final responsibility for the drawn blinds of high-rise offices around the world and the bullet points dashing across computer screens inside. His account of PowerPoint's parentage does not exactly match Diffie's, but he readily accepts his former colleague as "my inspiration." In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, Gaskins was B.N.R.'s head of computer-science research. A former Berkeley Ph.D. student, he had a family background in industrial photographic supplies and grew up around overhead projectors and inks and gels. In 1982, he returned for a six-month overseas business trip and, with a vivid sense of the future impact of the Apple Macintosh and of Microsoft's Windows (both of which were in development), he wrote a list of fifty commercial possibilities-Arabic typesetting, menus, signs.
And then he looked around his own laboratory and realized what had happened while he was away: following Diffie's lead, his colleagues were trying to make overheads to pitch their projects for funding, despite the difficulties of using the equipment. (What you saw was not at all what you got.) "Our mainframe was buckling under the load," Gaskins says. He now had his idea: a graphics program that would work with Windows and the Macintosh, and that would put together, and edit, a string of single pages, or "slides." In 1984, he left B.N.R., joined an ailing Silicon Valley software firm, Forethought, in exchange for a sizeable share of the company, and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. They began work on a program called Presenter. After a trademark problem, and an epiphany Gaskins had in the shower, Presenter became PowerPoint.
Gaskins is a precise, bookish man who lives with his wife in a meticulously restored and furnished nineteenth-century house in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. He has recently discovered an interest in antique concertinas. When I visited him, he was persuaded to play a tune, and he gave me a copy of a forthcoming paper he had co-written:"A Wheatstone Twelve-Sided 'Edeophone' Concertina with Pre-MacCann Chromatic Duet Fingering." Gaskins is skeptical about the product that PowerPoint has become-AutoContent and animated fades between slides-but he is devoted to the simpler thing that it was, and he led me through a well-preserved archive of PowerPoint memorabilia, including the souvenir program for the PowerPoint reunion party, in 1997, which had a quiz filled with in-jokes about font size and programming languages. He also found an old business plan from 1984. One phrase-the only one in italics- read, "Allows the content-originator to control the presentation." For Gaskins, that had always been the point: to get rid of the intermediaries-graphic designers-and never mind the consequences. Whenever colleagues sought to restrict the design possibilities of the program (to make a design disaster less likely), Gaskins would overrule them, quoting Thoreau:"I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad."
PowerPoint 1.0 went on sale in April, 1987-available only for the Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies. (This was before laptop computers and portable projectors made PowerPoint a tool for live electronic presentations. Gaskins thinks he may have been the first person to use the program in the modern way, in a Paris hotel in 1992-which is like being the first person ever to tap a microphone and say, "Can you hear me at the back?") The Macintosh market was small and specialized, but within this market PowerPoint-the first
product of its kind-was a hit. "I can't describe how wonderful it was," Gaskins says. "When we demonstrated at trade shows, we were mobbed." Shortly after the launch, Forethought accepted an acquisition offer of fourteen million dollars from Microsoft. Microsoft paid cash and allowed Bob Gaskins and his colleagues to remain partly self-governing in Silicon Valley, far from the Microsoft campus, in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft soon regretted the terms of the deal; PowerPoint workers became known for a troublesome independence of spirit (and for rewarding themselves, now and then, with beautifully staged parties-caviar,
string quartets, Renaissance-period fancy dress).
PowerPoint had been created, in part, as a response to the new corporate world of interdepartmental communication. Those involved with the program now experienced the phenomenon at first hand. In 1990, the first PowerPoint for Windows was launched, alongside Windows 3.0. And PowerPoint quickly became what Gaskins calls "a cog in the great machine." The PowerPoint programmers were forced to make unwelcome changes, partly because in 1990 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint began to be integrated into Microsoft Office-a strategy that would eventually make PowerPoint invincible-and partly in response to market research.
AutoContent was added in the mid-nineties, when Microsoft learned that some would-be presenters were uncomfortable with a blank PowerPoint page-it was hard to get started. "We said, 'What we need is some automatic content!'" a former Microsoft developer recalls, laughing. "'Punch the button and you'll have a presentation.'" The idea, he thought, was "crazy." And the name was meant as a joke. But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name-a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers.
Gaskins left PowerPoint in 1992, and many of his colleagues followed soon after. Now rich from Microsoft stock, and beginning the concertina-collecting phase of their careers, they watched as their old product made its way into the heart of American business culture. By 1993, PowerPoint had a majority share of the presentation market. In 1995, the average user created four and a half presentations a month. Three years later, the monthly average was nine.
PowerPoint began to appear in cartoon strips and everyday conversation. A few years ago, Bob Gaskins was at a presentations-heavy conference in Britain. The organizer brought the proceedings to a sudden stop, saying, "I've just been told that the inventor of PowerPoint is in the audience-will he please identify himself so we can recognize his contribution to the advancement of science?" Gaskins stood up. The audience laughed and applauded. Cathleen Belleville, a former graphic designer who worked at PowerPoint as a product planner from 1989 to 1995, was amazed to see a clip-art series she had created become modern business icons. The images were androgynous silhouette stick figures (she called them Screen Beans), modelled on a former college roommate: a little figure clicking its heels; another with an inspirational light bulb above its head. One Screen Bean. the patron saint of PowerPoint - a figure that stands beneath a question mark, scratching its head in puzzlement – is so popular that a lawyer at a New York firm who has seen many PowerPoint presentations claims never to have seen one without the head-scratcher. Belleville herself has seen her Beans all over the world, reprinted on baseball caps, blown up fifteen feet high in a Hamburg bank. "I told my mom, 'You know, my artwork is in danger of being more famous than the "Mona Lisa."'" Above the counter in a laundromat on Third Avenue in New York, a sign explains that no responsibility can be taken for deliveries to doorman buildings. And there, next to the words, is the famous puzzled figure. It is hard to understand the puzzlement. Doorman? Delivery? But perhaps this is simply how a modern poster clears its throat: Belleville has created the international sign for "sign."
According to Microsoft estimates, at least thirty million PowerPoint presentations are made every day. The program has about ninety-five per cent of the presentations-software market. And so perhaps it was inevitable that it would migrate out of business and into other areas of our lives. I recently spoke to Sew Meng Chung, a Malaysian research engineer living in Singapore who got married in 1999. He told me that, as his guests took their seats for a wedding party in the Goodwood Park Hotel, they were treated to a PowerPoint presentation: a hundred and thirty photographs-one fading into the next every four or five seconds, to musical accompaniment. "They were baby photos, and courtship photos, and photos taken with our friends and family," he told me.
I also spoke to Terry Taylor, who runs a Web site called eBibleTeacher.com, which supplies materials for churches that use electronic visual aids. "Jesus was a storyteller, and he gave graphic images," Taylor said. "He would say, 'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,' and all indications are that there were lilies in the field when he was talking, you know. He used illustrations." Taylor estimates that fifteen per cent of American churches now have video projectors, and many use PowerPoint regularly for announcements, for
song lyrics, and to accompany preaching. (Taylor has seen more than one sermon featuring the head-scratching figure.) Visitors to Taylor's site can download photographs of locations in the Holy Land, as well as complete PowerPoint sermons-for example, "Making Your Marriage Great":
· Find out what you are doing to harm your marriage and heal it.
· Financial irresponsibility
· Temper
· Pornography
· Substance abuse
· You name it!

When PowerPoint is used to flash hymn lyrics, or make a quick pitch to a new client, or produce an eye-catching laundromat poster, it's easy to understand the enthusiasm of, say, Tony Kurz, the vice-president for sales and marketing of a New York-based Internet company, who told me, "I love PowerPoint. It's a brilliant application. I can take you through at exactly the pace I want to take you." There are probably worse ways to transmit fifty or a hundred words of text, or information that is mainly visual-ways that involve more droning, more drifting. And PowerPoint demands at least some rudimentary preparation: a PowerPoint presenter is, by definition, not thinking about his or her material for the very first time. Steven Pinker, the author of "The Language Instinct" and a psychology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that PowerPoint can give visual shape to an argument. "Language is a linear medium: one damn word after another," he says. "But ideas are multidimensional...When properly employed, PowerPoint makes the logical
structure of an argument more transparent. Two channels sending the same information are better than one."
Still, it's hard to be perfectly comfortable with a product whose developers occasionally find themselves trying to suppress its use. Jolene Rocchio, who is a product planner for Microsoft Office (and is upbeat about PowerPoint in general,) told me that, at a recent meeting of a nonprofit organization in San
Francisco, she argued against a speaker's using PowerPoint at a future conference. "I said, 'I think we just need her to get up and speak.'" On an earlier occasion, Rocchio said, the same speaker had tried to use PowerPoint and the projector didn't work, "and everybody was, like, cheering. They just wanted to hear this woman speak, and they wanted it to be from her heart. And the PowerPoint almost alienated her audience."
This is the most common complaint about PowerPoint. Instead of human contact, we are given human display. "I think that we as a people have become unaccustomed to having real conversations with each other, where actually give and take to arrive at a new answer. We present to each other, instead of discussing," Cathy Belleville says. Tad Simons, the editor of the magazine "Presentations" (whose second-grade son used PowerPoint for show-and-tell), is familiar with the sin of triple delivery, where precisely the same text is seen on the screen, spoken aloud, and printed on the handout in front of you (the "leave-behind," as it is known in some circles). "The thing that makes my heart sing is when somebody pressed the 'B' button and the screen goes black and you can actually talk to the person," Simons told me.
In 1997, Sun Microsystems' chairman and C.E.O., Scott McNealy, "banned" PowerPoint (a ban widely disregarded by his staff). The move might have been driven, in part, by Sun's public-relations needs as a Microsoft rival, but, according to McNealy, there were genuine productivity issues. "Why did we ban it? Let me put it this way: If I want to tell my forty thousand employees to attack, the word 'attack' in ASCII is forty-eight bits. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 90,112 bits. Put that same word in a PowerPoint slide and it
becomes 458,048 bits. That's a pig through the python when you try to send it over the Net." McNealy's concern is shared by the American military. Enormously elaborate PowerPoint files (generated by presentation-obsessives --so-called PowerPoint Rangers) were said to be clogging up the military's bandwidth. Last year, to the delight of many under his command, General Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an order to U.S. bases around the world insisting on simpler presentations.
PowerPoint was developed to give public speakers control over design decisions. But it's possible that those speakers should be making other, more important decisions. "In the past, I think we had an inefficient system, where executives passed all of their work to secretaries," Cathy Belleville says. "But now we've got highly paid people sitting there formatting slides-spending hours formatting slides - because it's more fun to do that than concentrate on what you're going to say. It would be much more efficient to offload that work onto someone who could do it in a tenth of the time, and be paid less. Millions of executives around the world are sitting there going, 'Arial? Times Roman? Twenty-four point? Eighteen point?'"
In the glow of a PowerPoint show, the world is condensed, simplified, and smoothed over -- yet bright and hyperreal -- like the cityscape background in a PlayStation motor race. PowerPoint is strangely adept at disguising the fragile foundations of a proposal, the emptiness of a business plan; usually, the audience is respectfully still (only venture capitalists dare to dictate the pace of someone else's slide show), and, with the visual distraction of a dancing pie chart, a speaker can quickly move past the laughable flaw in his argument. If anyone notices, it's too late--the narrative presses on. Last year, three researchers at Arizona State University, including Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and the author of "Influence: Science and Practice," conducted an experiment in which they presented three groups of volunteers with information about Andrew, a fictional high-school student under consideration for a university football scholarship. One group was given Andrew's football statistics typed on a piece of paper. The second group was shown bar graphs. Those in the third group were given a PowerPoint presentation, in which animated bar graphs grew before their eyes.
Given Andrew's record, what kind of prospect was he? According to Cialdini, when Andrew was PowerPointed, viewers saw him as a greater potential asset to the football team. The first group rated Andrew four and a half on a scale of one to seven; the second rated him five; and the PowerPoint group rated him six.
PowerPoint gave him power. The experiment was repeated, with three groups of sports fans that were accustomed to digesting sports statistics; this time, the first two groups gave Andrew the same rating. But the group that saw the PowerPoint presentation still couldn't resist it. Again, Andrew got a six.
PowerPoint seems to be a way for organizations to turn expensive, expert decision-makers into novice decision-makers. "It's frightening," Cialdini says. He always preferred to use slides when he spoke to business groups, but one high-tech company recently hinted that his authority suffered as a result. "They said, 'You know what, Bob? You've got to get into PowerPoint, otherwise people aren't going to respond.' So I made the transfer." Clifford Nass has an office overlooking the Oval lawn at Stanford, a university where the use of PowerPoint is so widespread that to refrain from using it is sometimes seen as a mark of seniority and privilege, like egg on one's tie. Nass once worked for Intel, and then got a Ph.D. in sociology, and now he writes about and lectures on the ways people think about computers. But, before embarking on any of that, Professor Nass was a professional magician - Cliff Conjure - so he has some confidence in his abilities as a public performer. According to Nass, who now gives PowerPoint lectures because his students asked him to, PowerPoint "lifts the floor" of public speaking: a lecture is less likely to be poor if the speaker is using the program. "What PowerPoint does is very efficiently deliver content," Nass told me. "What students gain is a lot more information-not just facts but rules, ways of thinking, examples."
At the same time, PowerPoint "lowers the ceiling," Nass says. "What you miss is the process. The classes I remember most, the professors I remember most, were the ones where you could watch how they thought. You don't remember what they said, the details. It was 'What an elegant way to wrap around a problem!' PowerPoint takes that away. PowerPoint gives you the outcome, but it removes the process."
"What I miss is, when I used to lecture without PowerPoint, every now and then I'd get a cool idea," he went on. "I remember once it just hit me. I'm lecturing, and all of a sudden I go, 'God! "The Wizard of Oz"! The scene at the end of "The Wizard of Oz"! Nass, telling this story, was almost shouting. (The lecture, he later explained, was about definitions of "the human" applied to computers.) "I just went for it--twenty-five minutes. And to this day students who were in that class remember it. That couldn't happen now: 'Where the hell is the slide?'" PowerPoint could lead us to believe that information is all there is.
According to Nass, PowerPoint empowers the provider of simple content (and that was the task Bob Gaskins originally set for it), but it risks squeezing out the provider of process--that is to say, the rhetorician, the storyteller, the poet, the person whose thoughts cannot be arranged in the shape of an AutoContent slide. "I hate to admit this," Nass said,"but I actually removed a book from my syllabus last year because I couldn't figure out how to PowerPoint it. It's a lovely book called 'Interface Culture,' by Steven Johnson, but it's very discursive; the charm of it is the throwaways. When I read this book, I thought, My head's filled with ideas, and now I've got to write out exactly what those ideas are, and-they're not neat." He couldn't get the book into bullet points; every time he put something down, he realized that it wasn't quite right. Eventually, he abandoned the attempt, and instead of a lecture, he gave his students a recommendation. He told them it was a good book, urged them to read it, and moved on to the next bullet point.