Tag Archives: Colin Thomas

Interview with Baba Brinkman on the occasion of his Rap Guide to Evolution performance in Vancouver, November 2013 edition

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Baba Brinkman is in the words of his eponymous website’s homepage,

Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist, writer, actor, and tree planter. He is best known for his award-winning hip-hop theatre shows, including The Rap Guide to Evolution and The Canterbury Tales Remixed, which interpret the works of Darwin and Chaucer for a modern audience.

Originally from British Columbia and now living in New York City, he has brought his Rap Guide to Evolution which has been an off-Broadway show, a festival performance, and a DVD project to Vancouver. The last time he performed this show, which morphs as new information is received and as it is adapted for different media and performance types, to Vancouver was in 2011 (my Feb. 17, 2011 posting features a pre-show interview he gave),. This time he’s at Vancouver’s East Cultural Centre, (The Cultch) from Oct. 29, – November 10, 2013 (tickets here).

Baba has very kindly (especially since the show just opened a few days ago) given me a second interview. Without more ado, here’s the interview,

  • Could you describe the full theatrical version of the Rap Guide to Evolution that played in New York? And is this what you’ve brought to Vancouver or has it been adapted either due to cost and/or venue and/or geographic location?

The show running in Vancouver is the full off-Broadway production, which includes music and live turntablism by Jamie Simmonds, visual projections by Wendall Harrington and lighting design by Jason Boyd. All of these production elements were added in 2011 specifically for the New York run, and they create a full immersion experience with lights and sounds and visuals and words all weaving together to tell the story of Darwin’s intellectual impact on the modern world.

  • In Adrian Mack’s Oct. 23, 2013 piece in the Georgia Straight) newspaper, you talked about karma, Vancouverites’ belief in it, and the science of it. How did you come to a scientific understanding of karma and could you explain what you mean by ‘cheater detection’ and ‘evolved deterrents to free-riding behaviour’?

Karma is *often summarized as “what goes around comes around” and for most people it’s a belief that the universe is somehow keeping score, rewarding goodness and punishing badness. The dark side of the widespread belief in karma, in Vancouver and elsewhere, is that it could just as accurately be summarized as “whatever happens to you, good or bad, you deserve it” which doesn’t sit right with most people when they think it through. We constantly see people around us being unjustly rewarded for bad behaviour and punished for good behaviour, and we see a lot of randomness too. Not many of us would tell a pedestrian who was hit by a drunk driver: “that’s karma”, but if you give a homeless person a dollar and later find out that you’ve won a big prize in a raffle draw *you might think it’s karma. Hence, we usually only invoke the concept of karma when we encounter seemingly random events that appear to repay like with like.

The scientific view is that our minds misattribute causality to these kinds of random events, but we do it for a good reason. Humans are social primates, and social groups share the mutual benefits of cooperative efforts, but those benefits are constantly undermined by individuals who claim the rewards without paying the cooperative costs, ie cheaters and free-riders. Evolution will favour free-riding behaviour unless there are mechanisms to punish or suppress it, but punishment itself is costly, so there are a whole series of obstacles to evolving cooperation. One way to overcome these obstacles is with psychological mechanisms for “cheater detection” (seeking and identifying non-cooperators) and “altruistic punishment” (enforcing costs on them through reputation-damage, ostracism, loss of liberty, etc), both of which humans have been experimentally shown to have in spades. We care about who’s a fraud, a thief, and a cheater, and we want to see them pay for it. Denouncing and locking up Bernie Madoff feels good.

Hence, the concept of karma can be redeemed as a social as opposed to metaphysical phenomenon. The reason we feel like the universe adheres to the principle of “what goes around comes around” is because we are evolved to pursue that model through our social interactions, so we project it onto the physical world. The universe doesn’t enforce good behaviour, but your peers certainly do. If you doubt it, try ripping them off and see what happens.

  • I see you were an artist-in-residence at the US National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) which is located at the University of Tennessee. Could you describe the experience especially in light of the fact that Tennessee is the state where the Scopes trial took place? (The trial is famous for bringing two of the US’s best known lawyers of the 1920s [William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow] to argue whether or not evolution was scientific and should be taught in schools.)

I was expecting the Tennessee residency to be a lot more controversial, but in fact most of it was spent interacting with post-docs and grad students, learning about their research, going to lectures, and going to live music events at local bars. Major evolution vs creationism showdowns reminiscent of Scopes did not feature prominently in my time there, but in retrospect that isn’t surprising since I was a guest of a national scientific research centre and was situated on a university campus. The one exception to this general tranquility was my performance at Union County High School, which generated some controversy, summarized in my “Tennessee Monkey Trials” blog. I thought I was there to fight a culture war, but mostly I just drank local craft beer (and moonshine) and listened to live bluegrass music. *The end result was The Infomatic EP  produced by Jamie Simmonds, who was in Tennessee with me for most of the residency.”*

  • How have you and/or your work changed since you embarked on rapping science?

The biggest change is that I have come to identify as a skeptic, atheist, and philosophical naturalist, whereas before I would have called myself agnostic or spiritual. I was never religious before, but I was sympathetic to the idea of a nebulous spiritual “force” at work in the world. However, the more I read about evolution and psychology and the scientific method, the less seriously I was able to take supernatural or miraculous explanations for anything at all. Now I write rationalist anthems like “Naturalizm” and “Off That“, which are very different in tone than the music I was making six years ago.

  • Where are you off to after this?

My next tour is the Norway Hip-hop Festival in February, and then a big tour of Australia in May/June, including the Sydney Opera House. In the meantime, my wife is pregnant with our first baby, due in late November, so I’m going to spend the winter learning to be a father, which is pretty exciting. Darwin would be proud.

  • Is there anything you’d like to add?

I hope your readers will come to the show, if they are able. It runs until November 10th in Vancouver. Or, if they can’t make it, download the album and bump it in your headphones. Scientific literacy never sounded so good!

Baba, I very much appreciate the interview and the gift of your precious time writing this up just after you’ve opened your show here in Vancouver. As well, congratulations to you and your wife!

Also, thank you for that explanation of karma and science and, especially, for this bit, “The dark side of the widespread belief in karma, in Vancouver and elsewhere, is that it could just as accurately be summarized as “whatever happens to you, good or bad, you deserve it” which doesn’t sit right with most people when they think it through. We constantly see people around us being unjustly rewarded for bad behaviour and punished for good behaviour, and we see a lot of randomness too. …” Many times I’ve lovely well-meaning individuals do damage with advice that includes blame via ‘karma’. Thank you for being much more articulate about it than I’ve been.

As for anyone who likes to see reviews, the only one I could find is from Colin Thomas who in an Oct. 30, 2013 review for the Georgia Straight which was further elucidated in a Nov. 1, 2013 posting on his eponymous blog, had issues not with the performance (“Smart writer. Handsome production. But no. Just no. ” [from the Oct. 30, 2012 review]) but the content and the politics regarding rap and gender, in particular. I gather Thomas found the show thought-provoking.

* Two corrections made: ‘ofter’ to ‘often’ and ‘raffle and you might’ to ‘raffle you might’ in the response to the Karma question and one sentence added to the end of the Tennessee question on Nov.4, 2013.

Review of ‘You Are Very Star’ transmedia show (in Vancouver, Canada)

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Blasting backwards (1968) and forwards (2048) in time, the You Are Very Star immersive, transmedia experience offered by Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre is an exciting experiment as I discovered on opening night, June 15, 2013.

Don’t expect to sit passively in a theatre seat. We trotted around the building to visit or remember 1968 in one theatre, then zipped out to a 20 minute 2013 intermission where we played a game (they gave us maps with our programmes, which you are invited to return at the end of the intermission), and, finally, were escorted to the planetarium theatre to encounter 2048.

I’m not sure about the artistic intention for the 1968 portion of the show. It was one of those situations where my tiny bit of knowledge and considerable fund of ignorance combined to create confusion. For example, one of the characters, Earle Birney, a poet, writer, and titan of Canadian literature, did found the creative writing programme at the University of British Columbia as they note in the show but by 1968 he’d left Vancouver for Toronto. One of the other characters in this segment is called Esther, a black feminist and more, with whom Birney’s character appears to establish a liaison. Birney was married to an Esther whom I met some years ago. She was a white Englishwoman and a feminist but of a somewhat different character than the Esther of the play.

In addition, the clothing wasn’t quite right. No tie dye, no macrame, no beads, no granny dresses, and not enough fringe. Plus, I can’t recall seeing any bell bottom pants, mini dresses and skirts, and/or go go boots.

There were some interesting tonal changes in this section ranging from humour, political angst and anger, and pathos. The depiction of the professor who’s decided to let people grade themselves and who takes an hallucinogenic drug in front of his class seemed pretty typical of a few of the crackpot professors of the time.

Unexpectedly, the professor decides to get high on ayahuasca. LSD, magic mushrooms, marijuana and hashish would have been more typical. I can understand clothing and some of the dialogue not being typical of the period but getting the preferred drugs wrong seems odd, which is why I questioned *whether the artists introduced these incongruencies intentionally.

The actors all shone at one time or another as they delivered some pretty snappy dialogue . I’m hoping they tighten this section up so there’s less waiting for the snappy stuff and perhaps they could find some device other than xx hours/days earlier to signify a change in the timeframe. I lost count of how often they flashed a slide onscreen notifying us that the next scene had taken place at an earlier time. Finally, I loved the shadow puppets but they were on for a brief time only, never to return.

Our intermission was pretty active. There were lots of places on the map, given with the programme, where one was meant to discover things. I never did figure out what was happening with the stuffed toys that were being given out but I’m ok with those kinds of mysteries.

The last stop was the planetarium theatre for 2048. Very interesting costuming, especially the head gear. Still, I have to ask why do people in the future, in the more ‘optimistic’ versions of it, tend to wear white?

I found 2048 the most interesting part but that may be due to the references to human enhancement (a topic I’ve covered here a number of times). The playwrights also seem to have spent some time studying Ray Kurzweil and the singularity he’s predicting. From the Technological singularity essay on Wikipedia (Note: Links and footnotes have been removed),

The technological singularity is the theoretical emergence of superintelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the technological singularity is seen as an occurrence beyond which events cannot be predicted.

The first use of the term “singularity” in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. Neumann in the mid-1950s spoke of “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”. The term was popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement, or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited von Neumann’s use of the term in a foreword to von Neumann’s classic The Computer and the Brain.

Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an “intelligence explosion”, where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent’s cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.

Kurzweil predicts the singularity to occur around 2045 whereas Vinge predicts some time before 2030. At the 2012 Singularity Summit, Stuart Armstrong did a study of artificial generalized intelligence (AGI) predictions by experts and found a wide range of predicted dates, with a median value of 2040. His own prediction on reviewing the data is that there’s an 80% probability that the singularity will occur in a range of 5 to 100 years. An alternative view, the “mitochondrial singularity,” proposed by microbiologist Joan Slonczewski, holds that the singularity is a gradual process that began centuries ago, as humans have outsourced our intelligence to machines, and that we may become reduced to vestigial power providers analogous to the mitochondria of living cells.

I thank the playwrights for introducing some of the more difficult aspects of the science and technology discussion that are taking place into this piece. For example, those who are enhanced and moving towards the singularity and those who are not enhanced are both represented here and so the playwrights have introduced some ideas about the social implications of employing new and emerging technologies.

You Are Very Star is not a perfect production but it is as I noted earlier very exciting both for the ways the company is trying to immerse audiences in an experience and for the ideas and dialogue they are attempting to stimulate.

The show goes on until June 29, 2013 and tickets are $30,

TO ORDER

youareverystar.brownpapertickets.com

1-800-838-3006

This production is being held at,

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
1100 Chestnut Street, in Vanier Park
8:00pm Tues – Sun
2:00pm Sun
12:00pm Thurs June 20

Do enjoy!

* Correction June 19,2013: ‘where’ changed to ‘whether’

ETA June 24, 2013: I noticed that where I use the word ‘enhancement’ other reviewers such as Colin Thomas in his June 17, 2013 review for the Georgia Straight are using ‘augment’