Rail: So did James Cameron really manage to solve the problem of the uncanny valley with Avatar?

Weschler: The problem with Avatar, despite James Cameron’s boast at the time, is that the skin of the Navi is blue, and not just blue but reflective blue. That and they’re aliens. So to the extent that they’re creepy due to uncanny valley, well, that’s what they were intended to be: creepy. I go into this further in the book. But when I was researching the story about the uncanny valley for Wired [Read it here. It's crazy], the first person I talked to was this professor at Stanford, whose specialty was animating milk. To which I said, “What?” I mean, this guy has access to any number of supercomputers in a digital animation studio, and he animates milk. Yet it turns out that to animate a glass of milk with a virtual light source moving around it is much much more difficult than animating a piece of wood, or plastic, or an insect’s body, or a dinosaur’s hide. All those things use Newtonian physics. The light just bounces off, which you can do on a laptop. But milk is tricky, in that it’s quantum physics. In other words, the light source enters the milk, bounces around in a quantum fashion against the atoms within, and comes out at completely weird angles. And so it takes a supercomputer to animate a glass of milk. At the time, this Stanford professor said to me: “Dinosaurs are easy. Milk is hard.” Which is something you sort of wish you could have on your bumper sticker.

“Mr. Hansen, who has not released a full-length album since his somber “Modern Guilt” in 2008, gave no indication about whether he might resume making music, though he recently produced the Thurston Moore record “Demolished Thoughts,” and has been producing tracks for the country musician Dwight Yoakam.”

It’s not “when he might resume,” but “whether he might resume.”

Then there’s Soderbergh (48), who, because his interpretation of Moneyball didn’t work out, began making threats that he’d retire. Can you imagine Dave Eggers (like Beck, 41) or Jonathan Franzen (52) talking about retiring from writing books? Unlike pretty much every American novelist these two could probably afford to retire from writing books. But they won’t, because you don’t retire from writing books, you just keep writing them. Even Mark Leyner, the post-modern novelist and DFW coeval, who I figured had stopped writing books, is apparently still writing books, as evidenced by his forthcoming 2012 release: The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack. And I’m really looking forward to reading it.

“That night, I gorged enjoyably at Tomo, a first-rate sushi restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel Arcata. Because it was the last evening of the year, it seemed important to have a night on the town. Up the street, at the Arcata Theatre, a gypsy jazz band was getting under way. The band was very good, but the crowd was going in for styles of West Coast whimsy irksome to a peevish East Coaster like myself. People in the throes of air-palming jam-band dances kept revolving in my personal space. Someone dressed in a dark shroud with a spray of foam swimming-pool noodles jutting from the top exhibited his or her liberty from hangups by painfully whacking the noodles into my and everybody’s face. Soon, it was necessary to go.”

Then there’s the Sean Penn piece, the first half of which recounts Penn’s involvement in Haiti over the last year, and his general reception in the US as a “tiresome pinko bloviator” and “bolshie movie star.” I’ve always liked Sean Penn, maybe because Spicoli still seems to be hiding somewhere behind the grimacing and the wild outbursts and the forehead furrowing. (Penn still surfs, according to the piece.) Through a series of interviews with the people on the ground and in Sean’s aid group, Jenkins/Penn Haitian Relief Organization (J/P HRO!), you get the sense that he’s a loud and overly earnest and somewhat antisocial dude — his “political affairs correspondent” all but rolls her eyes at the “That’s not good enough!” tirades her boss is known for — but who is nonetheless making a real contribution to cleaning up Haiti. He’s angry at the NGO’s, and he tells them so. He brags about potentially assisting in Wyclef’s failed run at the presidency. He gets super irritable at aid-group cluster meetings.

Then, suddenly, Heller gets a peak at Penn in full narcissism mode:

“He grimaced and wiped his dusty hands on his pants. “I once said to Charles Bukowski, ‘You’re so irreverent toward your public, why do you even value sharing stuff? Why do you even write? Is it just that you get off at being so great at it?’ He said, ‘No, it was not that I was so great. It was that the rest was so bad. Somebody had to do it decently.’ And I thought, That’s me! That’s me with acting, with film. And that’s me with this thing now. Some people have said, ‘The danger of Sean Penn is that he makes it look as if anyone can do this.’ And my answer to them is, ‘No, I just make it look like you can’t.’ ”

Although Penn is a fine actor — my brother thinks he’s the best — that seems immodest of him to say. Heller later points out that, on CBS’s “Sunday Morning,” Penn wished that his critics “die screaming of rectal cancer.” Later, when she questions his choice of words, he confesses that, yeah, I went a little overboard, but I was just joking, you know?

There are more than a few similarities here with Charlie Sheen’s crazed id explosion. And later on, we get what looks like a Tom Cruise-esque admission that he is the only one out there who is actually capable of and interested in helping other people (see Cruise’s Keep Scientology Working spiel). Penn may not understand Ayn Rand and Joseph Stieglitz, he says, but “What I do understand is that if your neighbor is screwed, you’ve got to help him.”

It must be tough being an actor. Unlike a lot of people I’ve talked to, I sympathized with Stephen Dorf’s portrayal of the drifting move star in “Somewhere.” Yes, sex comes absurdly easily for him, to the point that he’s falling asleep while twins twirl on portable poles in his suite and falling asleep in between the legs of a blond he met ten seconds before. But he’s empty. He’s nothing. When a friend of his says, “You could volunteer?” he just laughs pathetically into the phone. He’s not going to volunteer. Maybe because it’s too cliche — he’d quickly become a caricature of the humanity-saving movie star, and everyone would watch his every move and comment relentlessly on the fact that he’s only interested in Haiti, or Sudan, or Japan for the photo op and the PR boost and the self-justification and etc etc.

It seems that guys like Penn or Cruise are raging against the idea that, as movie stars, they’re incapable of doing anything authentic, of taking an unscripted form action to help humanity. Having experienced what it’s like to be a major movie star, Penn’s decided to align himself with Partners in Health. (There’s a great bit about how, if he weren’t in Haiti, “I know what I would be doing, and it’s probably got to do with designs on women.” So it’s partly to distract himself from lust and the availability of Scarlett Johanssen that he’s been carrying a Walki-Talki in Haiti.) But he can’t do it quietly, simply because he’s Sean Penn. He winds up overacting the role of humanitarian — stressing the fact that he, like Tom Cruise, is perhaps the only one who can make a difference. It’s even a little strange that Penn agreed to do this piece. But maybe that’s part of the complicatedness of it all. He needs the attention even as he despises the attention.

“A silence with a beautiful person always leaves you feeling you’re the boring one.”

Or:

“The drugs we really need wouldn’t make us high, rather reliably connect us with who we already are at our best.”

He does, however, occasionally quote famous authors:

“Haunted by Saul Bellow’s remark: ‘it is a wise man who is able to outgrow the attitudes to women of his father.’”

And seeing as though he’s written three novels, you sometimes get some 3rd person Tweets, too:

“Three times a day he had to feed the monster of self-criticism a few morsels of achievement not to be eaten up whole himself.”

It’s an interesting use of the Twitter medium: giving people a taste of your writing in between books; leaving a little trail of sentences from the last page of one to the first page of another, meanwhile generating a big stockpile of new sentences to unveil all at once and make money. Twitter wasn’t around when he wrote Architecture of Happiness, so he never quoted his own Tweets for the book. But might one of his recent Tweets show up in his new book, whatever it is?

You could imagine many of the sentences in Architecture of Happiness originating on Twitter. Such as:

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

The good thing about his books, and books in general, is that sentences are connected to other ones that form a narrative and let you escape the contextless, ADHD-inducing chaos of Twitter. So after the above sentences comes:

“Our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings, for it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities will be at its height.”