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Go On Singing, But Sign Your Name: Orson Welles, the Unsigned Cathedral, and the Most Seductive Lie in “F for Fake”

Picture the man. He is past sixty, vast, wrapped in a black cape and a wide hat, and he has just spent an hour lying to your face on purpose. He told you at the start that for the next sixty minutes everything would be true, and you believed him, because the voice belongs to Orson Welles and that voice could sell you the deed to a bridge. Then the hour ran out, and in the last seventeen minutes he spun a whole story about a young woman, her grandfather, and twenty-two forged Picassos, walking you through it as documented fact before turning to the camera to admit he had been, in his own phrase, lying his head off. The film is “F for Fake,” from 1973. With the trick still warm, Welles plants himself in front of Chartres Cathedral, goes quiet and grave and beautiful, and delivers the line everyone carries away: maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.

Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much. Orson Welles, “F for Fake” (1973)

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The Placebo Button

The elevator in my building has a door-close button that does nothing. I learned this the way everyone learns it, which is to say I pressed it for years under the impression that it was speeding up my departure. The button lights up. It makes a small click when pressed. It provides every sensory signal of function. What it does not do is close the door any faster than the door was going to close on its own. The elevators in most American buildings installed since 1990 have door-close buttons wired to nothing, because the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the door to stay open long enough for a person using a wheelchair or walker to enter, and the button that overrides that requirement is accessible only to the fire department with a key.

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When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?

We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”

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Why Hillary Clinton Has Cooked Herself 30,000 Times Over

The Hillary Clinton email scandal is not over. Not by a bit! In reality, it has yet to commence! Yes, the 2016 presidential election is shambolic! Trump is inviting Russia to “look for” Hillary’s deleted 30,000 emails, and Hillary is claiming her emails were personal, and not work related in her role as Secretary of State.

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A Doctor By Any Other Name

What’s in a name?  If person says they are a “doctor” does that mean they actually have a medical degree or a just a PhD?  Context can’t always argue the right decision, and sometimes you have to actually ask, “Are you a ‘doctor’ doctor or just a ‘doctor of philosophy?'”

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Criminals Wear a Mask for a Reason

What’s in a fake name?  Do you ever occlude your identity online and have you ever generated a random identity to fool the cyberworld?  If yes, why?  If not, why not?

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Acting in Everyday Life

Many non-theatre students who take an acting class think two things:  It will be an easy class and acting is pretending to be something you are not.  They are always fearful to learn how  wrong they are on both counts.  The good students overcome their overweening to discover new niches of existence and broader planes of self discovery.

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