The design of public space serves to provide the initial conditions to a complex system of interaction that, if well designed, encourages the emergence of some set of behaviors or norms. Although the environment is designed and certain types of interaction may be preferred by the designer, behavior itself is still dictated by the collective behavior of individual agents; the role of the designer is merely to provide an environment that is more or less conducive to serendipitous interaction. Individuals can choose to frequent some places while avoiding others based on preference, but by virtue of its complex nature, public space must afford some degree of serendipity.

Like an individual navigating public space, an individual may choose to frequent some media outlets while avoiding others, usually because of a preference for a choice made by one producer or editor over that made by another. In deciding which individual pieces of content to publish, producers are creating an environment that offers a greater degree of uniformity or variety, offering a greater or lesser amount of exposure to content that readers or viewers may not have chosen for themselves in an individually filtered environment.

Just as urban planners an architects make decisions that impact the interaction within the spaces they design, through the decisions they make as filters, producers and editors can choose the extent to which the media environments they design afford serendipitous content discovery.

In a signal processing course I took back in my Electrical Engineering days, we were given an audio clip of then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s translator issuing the following phrase:

But we too, as you know, don’t kill flies with our nostrils.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation did a segment around that time on phrases that don’t translate well, and I submitted the audio clip. It got read on the air a few days later.

This past weekend

This past weekend I went skiing in northern Michigan with some friends from school. Among them was a winter-admit student who is just starting this semester.

Today

I randomly decided to search for that old Khrushchev phrase to see if there was any more info about it out on the internet. Searching for the exact phrase in quotation marks returned only one result: a tumblr page on which someone had posted the quote.

It turns out that tumblr page belongs to the girl I met this weekend. This is not the first time such a thing has happened to me, but it’s still crazy.

Part I: Gone

I’ve traditionally been a pretty interruptible person: I get Growl notifications when I receive new emails and tweets, I get push notifications on my phone of Twitter mentions and direct messages, and my phone is always on me, subjecting me to potential phone calls and SMS messages. On top of that, I have a work-to-“reward surfing” ratio that is probably approaching 1.25-to-1 (although I haven’t done any work to confirm this with Slife or RescueTime). It’s pretty bad.

Partly so I could finish the paper in a reasonable amount of time, partly as an experiment in uninterruptibility, and partly to prove to myself that I wasn’t addicted to the constant stimulation of communications and information technology (“I could quit if I wanted to…I just don’t want to.”), I decided to take myself entirely off the networked communications grid for a large block of time.

I had toyed with this tactic before, abstaining from email and Twitter for 30 or 60 minutes at a time, but addictive behavior suffers from a slippery slope problem, so I inevitably was able to rationalize leaving Mail.app open in the background, convinced its interruptions would be negligible, which is, of course, a fantasy.

And so: my phone was in airplane mode in my bag; everything but the Airport, volume, keyboard (I use Dvorak), and Dropbox menu extras were gone, including the clock; Growl was stopped; the hot corner for Dashboard was disabled; the only apps I had running were Preview (gotta read), Pages (gotta write), and Safari (gotta find what to read); browsing was allowed for the sole purpose of finding and downloading academic papers, which meant primarily the university and ACM libraries. The goal was to block out any external information not directly related to the completion of the paper. I still kept approximate time, but the old fashioned way: by the clock tower.

And so I read and wrote, from 8:15 to 17:15. (Ok, I had lunch.) And the incredible thing was: it wasn’t that hard! By setting explicit rules up front rather than allowing myself to decide when I’d “earned” a break, I was able to stick to it because I gave myself no option, no opportunity to start sliding down that slippery slope. If the temptation to check something arose — which was surprisingly infrequently — I was able to refrain because I knew how angry I would be with myself later.

Another observation about this experience is that by not subjecting the mind to a constant bombardment of information, it is able to stay calmer and quieter, which, as I know because of the sabbath, can be incredibly refreshing.

Summary: it is possible to disappear for a day, it is a very productive tactic, and it feels very rewarding.

Part II: Supply-Side Interruptions

I read four studies on interruptibility (three from ACM/SIGCHI, one from ASIS&T). I also read two essays on the subject: a wonderful work by David Kirsh aptly titled A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload, and the classic chapter from Yoshiro Miyata and Don Norman, Psychological Issues in Support of Multiple Activities.¹

I came to the following rather disheartening conclusion: the current vein of HCI research into interruptibility and notification ignores a substantial body of work, including some by the very authors I take issue with, that suggests that in order to be truly productive, people need uninterrupted blocks of time that are at least 15 minutes long; some say up to two hours. Yet the systems they are devising and testing, the aim of which is to delay interrupting notifications until appropriate “break points”, delay on the order of just 90 seconds. While there is some evidence to suggest that this might be helpful, I feel the real issue lies elsewhere, and is being ignored by the HCI community.

The demands that social norms have placed on users have led them to believe they are more capable of handling interruptions than they really are, and they expect their computing environments to satisfy that belief. Under the current interruption regime, people are never given a chance to engage in Miyata and Norman’s task-driven processing (a state in which a person is so engrossed in an activity that they essentially block out all external stimuli); an entire generation has been groomed to be entirely interrupt driven (a state in which a person is very sensitive to external stimuli, i.e., easily distractible), and until interruptions start coming at a much slower rate, people will continue to suffer from an inability to complete tasks uninterrupted.

While I can appreciate what the current work is trying to accomplish — making interruption more manageable and palatable — there is a failure to recognize that there are two sides to the HCI equation: human and computer. It is unquestionably easier to engineer computers than it is to engineer humans, yet the human mind has adapted, albeit for the worse, to the demands placed on it by computers, and those of us in the HCI field must take more drastic action to begin to reverse the chaotic, interrupt-driven, anxiety-laden demands placed on all of us by increasingly pervasive networked computing.

What is needed is a paradigm shift from purely technical solutions to the problem of interruption to one that also helps get at the root, social cause of the issue. Just because I can check my email while in the shower does not mean that I should, that I should want to, or that I should be expected to. This last point, social expectation, is what drives technical innovation. Perhaps it is time to push back the other way.

1. References available upon request.

On January 9, 2009, Phil Schiller (Apple’s VP of Worldwide Marketing) revealed to New York Times technology columnist David Pogue that Apple’s product timeline was settling into an annual cycle that included updated iPhones in June. For nearly a year-and-a-half, the maximum available storage capacity had been stagnant at 16 GB. The day the original iPhone was introduced, I had decided that I would get one as soon as it hit 32 GB. Now there could be little doubt: a 32 GB iPhone would become available in June or July of 2009.

Fast forward to May. The Apple rumor mill is swirling with speculation about the imminent, but still unannounced, iPhone, and the general consensus is that it will be revealed at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference; the keynote speech — complete with product unveilings — is to be delivered June 8th.

The Great Switch

Since we first got mobile phones in the mid-to-late 1990s, my family had been with Verizon. Generally, we had been happy with the coverage, and had relatively few complaints, with two major exceptions: one is that they have a poor selection of phones, and those that they do support come laden with their proprietary firmware that cripples Bluetooth functionality forcing customers to pay ungodly sums of money to transfer photos (or other media) to and from their phones. The other is their lack of iPhone. (That Verizon turned down the iPhone when first approached by Apple is not surprising considering their history of wanting complete control over their phones’ software.) The iPhone is, of course, only available in the United States on AT&T. Therefore, I would have to switch all five lines of my family’s plan to AT&T.

The fine print

Over two years had passed since the last time any phones on our account had been upgraded. The exception was my sister, who had broken her phone in November of 2007. At that time, I told her to make sure that when she got a new phone, that she did not sign any contracts because I wanted to go month-to-month in anticipation of the iPhone. Evidently, the Verizon people who sold her a new phone were sneaky, because while she insists that she did not accept a two-year agreement, her phone was in fact under contract until November of 2009.

I would have none of it! A new iPhone was coming out in June, and I was going to get it in June!

That’s when I started googling (I believe “proper verbs” can be lowercase) around for ways to finagle my way out of a Verizon contract without having to pay an Early Termination Fee (ETF). I found several options of somewhat dubious moral quality (having someone claim that you died, etc.) before I finally hit the jackpot, thanks to Ely Rosenstock.

The gist of it is that a Verizon contract stipulates that they have the right to change their prices during your contract, but that if any of those changes have a “material adverse effect” on you (i.e. it’ll cost you more than it did before), you have the right to cancel your contract with no ETF, provided you do so within 60 days of being notified of the change. Luckily for me, about 55 days earlier there had been a note on the bill informing us that the Federal Universal Service Charge (FUSC) would be increasing by some nominal amount. But a material adverse effect is a material adverse effect no matter how small, so with just a few days left, I gave them a call.

Actually, before calling Verizon, I figured I’d give AT&T a quick call to find out how number porting would work, especially since I suspected it might not be a straight-forward cancelation because I would be exercising the ETF loophole. This is where I learned how a number port works:

To switch from Provider A to Provider B, you give Provider B your Provider A account information so Provider B can call Provider A and them to both port the number and close the account.

I thanked Patricia, my AT&T sales representative, for the information, and told her that I wasn’t quite ready to make the switch yet because I had to work everything out with my family (remember, I’m switching four phones in addition to mine) and Verizon. Seeing a sale slip through her fingers, Patricia told me that it was my lucky day because if I switched that day, and that day only, she could waive the activation fee on all five lines (a $36 x 5 = $180 value). That sure got me moving, and she agreed to call me back at 22:00 Eastern to finish the sale.

Following Ely’s detailed instructions, I called up Verizon. I had a really great rep. in the cancellation department named Phyllis. (Seriously, really great.) She put me on hold for maybe 10 minutes while she consulted with her supervisor, and when she came back she said that as long as the number port was complete and the account closed by June 1, I would not have to pay the ETF.

Patricia called me back right on time. I went through the process of opening an account and ordering five free phones. The only things I paid for were two car chargers for my parents and two-day shipping, which I bought to make sure I’d be able to activate them easily by the 1st.

Activation

A big box from AT&T arrived at my dad’s office on Thursday the 28th. My parents came to Ann Arbor to have dinner with me that evening, so I took my new, but temporary, Sony Ericsson W350a (which I got because it has iSync support), and tried to activate it right away. I first tried the online activation system, but for reasons that remain a mystery to me, I was unable to activate successfully. Once again, this time from Skype in anticipation of my number being cut off during the call, I called customer service. A helpful — but somewhat less knowledgeable — woman took care of porting my phone number and activating my new phone. Not all was well in the netherworld that lies betwixt Verizon and AT&T, however.

My number had made the transition to AT&T, but the other four lines on the account were stuck in purgatory: calling any of those numbers resulted in a recorded message from Verizon stating that the number was no longer active. This meant that AT&T had instructed Verizon to close the account, which they are supposed to do only once all lines had been activated on AT&T’s network. Consequently, each of the other phones had to be activated on AT&T in order to remain an active line. Since my parents were not planning to activate that night, the process had to be accelerated somewhat. I know not whether it was the fault of the rep. who took care of my activation or if it was a systemic problem. I suspect the former.

My mom called me in a panic, saying that the AT&T customer service call center was closed for the night, and would not reopen until the next morning. This was, in fact, a serious issue because my parents’ land line is a VoIP line through Vonage, which relies on both power from DTE Energy and data from Brighthouse, making failure a not-too-unlikely prospect. Fortunately, Vonage offers automatic failover to another line, in this case my mom’s mobile. Because of her aging parents, it is necessary that she be reachable twenty-four hours a day, so a night without an active mobile phone was not an option.

After calling several numbers and listening to several recorded messages, I finally discovered the AT&T after-hours emergency service number which, incredibly, does not have an automated call screening system; a human answered my call right away. He was able to connect me with the automated, over-the-phone activation system. My mom’s phone was all set within ten minutes. The next day I called the automated activation system myself and took care of the other three phones. Finally, we were settled in to our new wireless provider. All that was left was to wait for the new iPhone to be released — or so I thought….

This opportunity may self-destruct in 30 days

I’d first heard rumblings that I might not qualify for full upgrade pricing if the new iPhone was not released within my 30 day “buyer’s remorse” period when I went to see the (quite good) Disney-Pixar movie Up. A friend of a friend told me that he knew people who, when the 3G came out, were unable to get it at the cheapest (i.e. most highly subsidized) price because they were too far into their AT&T contracts, but not far enough in to warrant an upgrade. This concerned me because, though rumors were plentiful, Apple had yet to make any official announcements, and I was taking a bigger gamble than I thought.

I called Patricia, my AT&T sales rep, to double-check that as long as I re-up my two-year contract, I will be able to get the new iPhone, whenever it comes out, at the fully subsidized price. She assured me that it would be no problem. I am not sure she was right, but fortunately, it didn’t matter.

The Announcement

On June 8, Phil Schiller gave the keynote address at WWDC 2009. I won’t give a full review of the address, but suffice it to say that with about fifteen minutes to go of the two-hour talk and no word of new iPhone hardware, I was getting very nervous. Finally, with ten minutes remaining, Phil announced — in classic Steve form, but without his inimitable[1] style — that there would, indeed, be a 32 GB iPhone, and that it would be available in eleven days, on June 19. Worry and anticipation could now be replaced by excitement and anticipation.

I thought it prudent to spend those ten days making sure everything was in order; it’s a good thing I did. As soon as the availablility date was annouced, I tweeted, “I will be getting an iPhone on June 19″, and no corporation was going to make a liar out of me.

Some eligibility is more equal than others

When I got home from work that day (if I waited even that long), I checked my upgrade eligibility at both Apple’s and AT&T’s websites. Both said that I would have to pay the full, unsubsidized price of $699, which I was definitely not about to do.

The following morning, I called AT&T customer service on my way to work. The representative I spoke with was very friendly, but very uninformed (and quite possibly less intelligent). I explained that I was in my 30-day buyer’s remorse period, and would be returning my current (i.e. stopgap) phone for the iPhone the day it was released. I explained that I was hoping to pre-order the phone, and wanted her to change my eligibility status in the computer system so I could do so. She told me, correctly, I later learned, that she could not do that. She went on to say, however, that Apple handled all matters of eligibility with regard to the iPhone. This made no sense to me, but I took her word for it.

The next day, I stopped at the Apple store on my way home from work. I explained to one of the guys working the floor that I had spoken with AT&T and was told that it was Apple who handled iPhone eligibility. He said that my instinct was right, and that Apple has absolutely nothing to do with upgrade eligibility in AT&T’s system. This made much more sense to me. I called AT&T back, hoping that this time I would win the game of call center roulette.

I spoke to a guy who told me that as long as I had my temporary phone, I would not be eligible for an upgrade. In other words, what I would have to do is return my phone, which would change my eligibility, and buy an iPhone. Since I wanted to pre-order, I would have to be without a phone for a week. If I wanted a phone during the time between when I returned my temporary phone and had an iPhone in my hands, I would have to borrow a GSM phone from a friend.

That day, AT&T revealed that all new pre-orders would not be filled until the first or second week of July. This limited my options further, because it meant I had to pre-order from Apple.

The next day, I went to the Ann Arbor AT&T store, where Rodger was able to confirm what I had been told on the phone. He had the additional suggestion of buying an off-the-shelf pre-paid phone from Best Buy or Wal-Mart for not much more than $20 and dropping in my existing SIM card. At that point, I remembered (I don’t know why it escaped me until then) that my sister, who was out of the country for several months, had a phone sitting in a box at my parents’ house (35 miles away in Farmington Hills) that I could easily borrow for a week.

On Sunday the 14th, I went home. With only six days remaining until I would have an iPhone, I immediately swapped the SIMs, cleared what had been my phone for the last two-and-a-half weeks, synced my sister’s phone with my computer so I would have my contacts, and went to return my phone to the local AT&T store.

The saleswoman thoughtfully wanted to make sure that I had upgrade eligibility before walking out of the store. Several times she tried performing a procedure that I came to know was called reversing an upgrade, but to no avail. Unsure why it didn’t work, she added a note to the account, but I left with two phones, and without eligibility.

The clock was ticking.

Back in Ann Arbor on Monday, I decided to try again. This time, it was Kyle who helped me. After much back-and-forth between several employees, assistant managers, and the manager, it was finally determined that reversing an upgrade is exactly that: reversing an upgrade. New service is not considered an upgrade; therefore, there was no upgrade to reverse, and there was no way I could get iPhone eligibility before the fast-approaching Friday release date. I went ahead and returned my phone anyway, just to get half of the exchange process out of the way before what I was anticipating would be a busy Friday morning at whatever store I ended up.

Now I had one, and only one, option for getting an iPhone on June 19th: wait in line at an AT&T corporate store. No pre-ordering. No Apple store.

On Thursday evening I was back in Farmington Hills for a rehearsal, so I decided to spend the night there. My dad and I would wake up early to get in line, then, hopefully, both get iPhones. On the way home from rehearsal, I made a quick stop at the AT&T store just to double-check that everything was squared away. It was. I also made sure that pre-sales and regular sales worked the way I hoped. Again, they did.

The store would have two separate stocks of iPhones: one for those who pre-ordered, the other for anyone who had not. The doors would be opening at 7:00 am. Customers who had pre-ordered would be allowed in first. Not until 10:00 am (or no one in line had pre-ordered, whichever came first) would other customers be served. That meant that the only way I could absolutely guarantee that I would have a phone was by being the very first non–pre-orderer in line.

The line, if you could call it that

The store is situated in the heart of suburbia in a corner building shared with Old Navy and Potbelly. Determined — perhaps overly so — to be the very first person in line, I arrived at 2:30 am, just as the cleaning crew was leaving Potbelly. I backed into a parking spot and settled in for the wait with a book, some lentil soup, and a jar of water. I slid over to the passenger seat to read, while my dad was resting at home; it would be up to me to let him know when he should come out.

I couldn’t have been there for more than an hour when two Farmington Hills police cars pulled up. Evidently, someone thought it suspicious that someone would pull into a parking lot in the middle of the night, back into a space, and sit in the car as if they were waiting for something. I politely explained the situation, that I was first in line for the new iPhone. They doubtlessly thought I was odd (an accurate assessment, I admit), but they let me be. They probably had a good chuckle about it as they were driving away. At least it’s nice to know the neighbors are vigilant.

Much to my surprise, suburbia does not sleep at night. It was particularly interesting to watch the near-constant flow of trucks, most of which were carrying food, lumber in and out of parking lots and loading docks. It was a small glimpse into one of the many hidden components of our society that make it tick.

Around 4:30, the thunderstorms started to roll in. I was expecting them, but the lightning was impressive indeed. Still the only one in the parking lot, it was becoming apparent that no one else would be braving the rain, even from the relative comfort of a car. Shortly after 5:00, I went home to use the bathroom and to see if my dad wanted to come back for the final stretch.

I pulled back into my parking space shortly after 5:30. This time, there was a single other car in the parking lot, which I quickly realized belonged to the store manager. In half-hour intervals, more employees would pull in, each bearing some sort of refreshment: bagels, coffee, ice, juice for the line that they, too, were anticipating. Each time, I was hoping that someone would join me. I watched as the first two employees took down the 3G poster and replaced it with that for the 3GS. I watched as the cleaning lady (who drives a late-model Cadillac) vacuumed and dusted the store. I watched as the manager replaced the floor model 3G iPhones with the 3GS iPhones. Still, I was the only one in line.

It was not until 6:45, fifteen minutes before the store opened, that a family of five pulled up in their SUV. Finally, someone else in line!

They, like most people who showed up right at seven, had placed pre-orders. Only the guy directly behind me hadn’t pre-ordered. Luckily, few people braved the weather, so it didn’t take more than twenty minutes before I was allowed in. While Chelsea was helping me through the transaction, my dad came in to join me. (I had called him.)

The store employees were just as surprised as I was at the meager turnout. The previous year, they said, the line had been wrapped around the corner. The bad weather must have kept people at home.

Finally, I could relax. I had my iPhone. Mission accomplished.

[1] I first heard this word from Professor Mick McQuaid, in describing the desirability of his classes as a result of his teaching style. He was right.

I just spent about half an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the Digi CoreAudio driver to work. It knew that in order to grab the audio from a given application, one needs to launch that application after the CoreAudio Manager is connected to the hardware.

This whole “re-launch the application to grab the audio” thing reminded me of Audio Hijack/Airfoil without Instant Hijack installed, so it occurred to me that maybe Instant Hijack inserting itself between my applications and the Digi driver.

Turns out I was right: I uninstalled Instant Hijack (a quick and easy process, I might add), and when I logged back in, the CoreAudio manager was able to “attach clients”.

I certainly can’t blame either of these companies — they’re both trying to do some rather unsupported stuff with system audio — but I figured I post in case anyone else runs into a similar issue.

Last week I worked tech for a student-produced (MUSKET) musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman — quite a good show, I might add — at the Power Center. It was really great to be back in theatre, and especially great to be back behind a board. The fact that, as a sound guy, it was the “wrong” board, the light board, was irrelevant; it was a lot of fun.

With just a few quick stints in between, it was really the first time I’d done any theatre tech work since high school, and this time I looked at everything with a very different eye: the eye of an HCI student.

Trying to explain what studying “information” means to the uninitiated has always proved challenging, and explaining it to my fellow theatre techs was no different. What I ended up saying that I study user interface design. Overhearing this from across the empty auditorium, one of the lighting guys made an obvious, but not-so-obvious, jump, shouting, “You’re majoring in control surfaces‽”

“Well,” I thought, “from his perspective, yes.” So much of what we study in school is limited to on-screen interactions, be they in traditional software, web applications, or mobile applications, that input devices have been relegated to a single day’s worth of discussion in one class. This pushes more complex input devices, like control surfaces, way out into the periphery. But there it was: I’m majoring in control surfaces. Brilliant.

This realization got me started thinking about the control surface with which I am most familiar: the analog mixing console. This is truly an elegant device, with one channel strip for each input channel, and each channel strip laid out as the signal flows: preamp gain at the top, then processing, routing, and finally level. These are then mixed together and sent to the outputs.

Then along came digital. Sure, they can have a much higher input density, and the power to run dozens of mixes from one board is very cool, but it comes at a significant cost to usability. Wikipedia agrees:

Analog consoles remain popular due to their continuing to have one knob, fader or button per function, a reassuring feature for the user. This takes up more physical space but allows more rapid response to changing performance conditions. Most digital mixers take advantage of the technology to reduce the physical space requirements of their product, entailing compromises in user interface such as a single shared channel adjustment area that is selectable for only one channel at a time. Additionally, most digital mixers have virtual pages or layers which change the fader banks into separate controls for additional inputs or for adjusting equalization or aux send levels. This layering can be confusing for operators.

The reason, I believe, for many of these usability problems is that much as computers rely on a nested-folder analogy to manage files and have only recently begun to take advantage of their digital nature by using tags (think Gmail’s Labels), digital mixing consoles are using the analog mixing console as an analogy for digital signals.

This point was really driven home when the lighting designer explained to me that the market leader in moving light consoles has been uncontested for ten years because its designers gave serious thought to what makes moving lights different from conventional lights, and what designers and operators need to do to accomplish their goals; in other words, user-centered design.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I believe that some fundamentally different way of handling large volumes (pun intended) of audio channels in a reasonably sized board is lurking just out of reach.

Post your sightings, vote up new contributions, and discuss grammatical errors.

Hello,

Thanks for making it so easy to pay online. I do have a complaint, though.

On the Make Payment page of the QuickPAY ASP system, there is a sentence that says:
“Note: This screen is for Student Account payments only – Not for Enrollment Deposit’s!”

Never mind the somewhat sporadic capitalization and the use of a hyphen where there should be an em dash (I’m something of a stickler) — the apostrophe in “Deposit’s” should not be there.

Thank you!
-Noah

Spoiler alert! If you have not seen Wicked but intend to, do not read on!

Two weeks ago today, I saw Wicked at the Detroit Opera House (which was great except for the seating fiasco). Two weeks later, I’m still listening to it — and thinking about it. I already knew the music, but the Original Broadway Cast recording is brilliantly done so as to not reveal the plot; therefore, I had constructed my own version of the plot in my head, one based on traditional character interpretations. I was in for quite a surprise, and two weeks later, I’m still analyzing the story, analyzing the characters, and generally thinking about what made it so compelling.

First, a note on the production. As a theater tech guy, that’s usually what I watch for. It was a very good production: the sets were minimal but great, the lighting during the last scene of Act I was absolutely brilliant (pun intended), the pit was really good (as was the pit mix), and I could hear everyone without straining, although the mix between Elphaba and Glinda was a bit uneven sometimes. And although outside my area of expertise, the costumes and wigs, especially those of the Ozians, were at once over the top and perfectly fitting. But more than the tech, it was the story and characters that drew me in (a highly unusual occurrence), so that’s what I’m going to talk about.

The Oz of the musical (I’m only a few pages into the Gregory Maguire novel on which it is based right now) is based more on that of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz than the Oz of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is actually highly consistent (though not perfectly so — the Scarecrow at the end comes to mind) with the film, which is impressive considering the unexpected interpretations of the characters.

In trying to figure out why I personally found the story of Wicked, and the character of Elphaba in particular, so compelling, I first came up with the obvious answer about how everyone has the desire to be accepted rather than being the outsider, but I think it goes deeper. For me I think it has to do with two things: one is that she does what she knows is right, not what society tells her is right; the other is that I really love how she holds people accountable for their failings, like when she finds out that the Wizard is a fraud. I don’t know; I just think she’s a really cool character. Plus the fact that the story turns something familiar on its head and makes you think about the effect on the social psyche of which labels are able to persist (i.e. history is written by the victors).

This is achieved by adding a tremendous amount of depth to one one of the modern literature’s flattest, and most flatly evil, characters, the Wicked Witch of the West, named Elphaba by Maguire (apparently in honor of L. Frank Baum, whose initials, L.F.B., when pronounced phonetically, are “el fa ba”). G(a)linda, the Good Witch of the North, is still a two-dimentional character, but rather than seeking good, she is really just seeking attention in the form of popularity. The Wizard of Oz himself, we find out, is a fascist ruler intent on keeping the Ozians (an ethnic majority) happy by scapegoating and persecuting the animals (an allegorical ethnic minority). This is the stroke of genius that makes the entire show so compelling: Glinda is willing to sacrifice morals and grovel in submission to the Wizard in order to feed her own ambition, her political career, whereas Elphaba stays true to her sense of right and wrong when she is confronted with the fact that not everything is as she believed, that the Wizard lied to the people of Oz about his power and intentions, and is willing to abandon her lifelong dream of working with the Wizard, becoming more cynical all the while.

In this sense, Elphaba really is a fascinating character, and, I think, the best character in the story. Best in the sense that she (and Fiyero) were the only uncorrupted characters.

In one of the most important scenes of the second act (Wonderful), the Wizard tells Elphaba how the world is and about how he got hooked on power and glory and being “wonderful”, but she knows that it’s wrong and refuses to accept it (“So you lied to them.” — a line brilliantly delivered by Idina Menzel on the OBC recording). He goes on to explain how you’re “a liberator or ruthless invader” depending on “which label is able to persist,” powerful commentary on the power of history. It sort of reminds me of how the world is a much nicer place when you’re young because you’re naïve, then you find out all the nasty stuff that goes on behind the scenes (i.e., behind the curtain).

(At this point I have to step out of the story for a moment to comment on how incredible Idina Menzel’s performance is on the OBC recording; specifically, the way her tone changes from light, airy, and optimistic to dark and cynical. (I only mention this performance because it’s the one I’ve heard the most.) Compare The Wizard and I to No Good Deed. Or the contrast between “I can’t want it anymore” (wistful) and “Something has changed within me” in Defying Gravity. You can hear the growth and transformation of the character in her voice. Wow.)

Everyone else submitted to the Wizard’s very fascist agenda (all-powerful leader, discrimination against an innocent segment of the population as a scapegoat, a literal witch hunt, etc.). Elphaba saw through it all, and made it about the truth and common good rather than about herself. As she says to Glinda, “I hope you’re proud how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition.” That’s not what “Elphie” was about.

Glinda, of course, was all about pleasing others; that made her happy. Even at the beginning of Act II, when it becomes clear that Fiyero doesn’t love her, by the end of Thank Goodness she is apparently happy again because she is basking in the praise of the Ozians.

Elphaba does have two lines that have me stumped, though: at the very end of As Long As You’re Mine when she says, “…for the first time, I feel wicked”; and during No Good Deed, when she asks, “Was I really seeking good, or just seeking attention?”

Personally, I think the latter question was a moment of self-doubt brought on by her awareness of her friend Glinda’s personality, but I’m not sure. “If I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free” would seem to corroborate that.

The wickedness referred to at the end of As Long as You’re Mine, I wonder, may just be a stand-in for “naughty”, which is a wonderfully humanizing interpretation. This is in contrast with the wickedness referred to at the end of No Good Deed (“Let all Oz be agreed: I’m wicked through and through”), which I think is only a little bit about how she sees herself (I’m not convinced she really believes the “no good deed goes unpunished” creed; it’s a heat-of-the-moment passion thing) and more about angrily coming to terms with how she is viewed.

Before I wrap it up, I also have to quickly comment on Stephen Schwartz’s use of leitmotifs. The way the songs reference one another to represent certain characters and ideas is incredible. (I noticed a lot of the subtitles of the score before reading this, but it’s a great discussion of the themes and leitmotifs, as well as the creative process.)