Publication Date: Friday Mar 31, 2000

Triggy business

I have his voice on my answering machine. He stammers, regroups, chuckles, hems/haws, deftly manages both sides of the conversation, all after my long beep. He's telling me that he will have to call me at a wholly unspecified time for our interview.

So I begin to wait for Josh Kornbluth to call me back. Never too far from the phone, I start to remember all the times I have seen Josh (we're on a first-name basis in my mind) do his thing. He's a monologuist. Part comedian, part actor, part memoirist, he sweats and bellows his way through a roughly 90-minute, somewhat-improvised solo performance chronicling some excruciating period of failure and loss in his life.

Like a loose tooth you can't keep your tongue away from, Josh circles round and round the circumstances of his painful rites of passage. These rites may be idiosyncratic and highly personalized (he's an overweight, underachieving New York Jew with Communist parents and an affinity for math and the oboe, after all) but everyone can relate to his wincing memories of perfect moments ruined and opportunities never seized. And despite all this gooey pathos, the guy is ripsnorting hilarious.

On April 7 and 9, Kornbluth brings his "Mathematics of Change" to Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium. It's a show he debuted in 1993 in San Francisco as part of the Solo Mio festival. Since then the show has expanded and contracted to contain the story of how, as an 18-year-old, Kornbluth "hit the wall." Every budding mathmatician's worst nightmare, this is the point at which your mind just can't fit around a new mathematical concept. The moment came in his first calculus class at Princeton University, ending with a thud his father's prediction that he would be "the greatest mathmatician who ever lived."

Of course, anyone familiar with Kornbluth's work will remember that his father also predicted that Josh would lead the Communist revolution. He may have been a lot of things, but the senior Kornbluth was no soothsayer.

Although he died some years back, Paul (yeah, I'm on a first-name basis with him, too) features widely in his son's monologues. In "Red Diaper Baby," the senior Kornbluth lumbers around naked in a haze of baby powder and explains the history of Communism to his young son.

"According to Marx and Engels--and my dad--the first human society was Primitive Communalism: everyone's just kind of dancing around, like at a Grateful Dead concert. The next stage after Primitive Communalism was Slavery--which must have been a bummer of a transition. Then from Slavery to Feudalism, and from Feudalism...Well, we've learned from history that it's very important after Feudalism to stop in Capitalism before moving on to Socialism. Very important to stop in Capitalism. Because that's where you get your appliances. So you stop in Capitalism, you get your stuff, and then you move on to Socialism, and finally to Communism--and you're back at the concert."

You can see why Josh might have been a little messed up. Let's just say he didn't get a lot of dates. Another monologue, this one subtly titled "Moisture Seekers," deals with the trials and tribulations of Kornbluth's first sexual experience. Another piece called "Haiku Tunnel" covers his stint spent as a temporary office worker with extremely low morale. A more recent monologue, "Ben Franklin: Unplugged," deals with questions of what it is to be American (and delves into the fact that Kornbluth looks uncannily like the Franklin of American currency).

But it is "Mathematics of Change" that gets underneath the skin of anyone who's ever suffered from math anxiety. With a blackboard and chalk as his only prop, Kornbluth tells the story of his pilgrimage to the Ivory Tower of pure math. He begins by talking of his early affection for numbers: "3, with its beautiful, nurturing curves--I like 3! But then, one day I happened to be approaching my beloved 3 from the wrong direction and ...ow! It pierced me! That's when I learned about the terrible schizophrenia that numbers can have. They can help you, they can hurt you--it all depends from which side you approach them. 3: very unpredictable, very scary."

This realization is echoed throughout "Mathematics of Change," this conviction that math can hurt you. Josh Kornbluth is jilted by math, abandoned by math, and left to pick up the pieces of his tentative, self-flagellating, undergraduate self. But as I waited for Josh to call me back, I realized that all of his monologues share something hopeful that is articulated at the end of "Mathematics of Change."

He describes the identity function:

"In the identity function, x, the variable, goes into the function machine. But instead of getting transformed into y, instead, miraculously, it reemerges as x itself....You can graph it. On the graph, the identity function first appears as a line--a line rising slowly, perhaps even reluctantly, from out of the murky depths. But then, at the very moment it crosses the x-axis--at that precise instant--it becomes...a point. A single point. Floating in a sea of possibilities."

Throughout all of his life experiences, Josh Kornbluth reemerges as himself, buoyant in a murky sea of possibilities.

What: Stanford Lively Arts presents Josh Kornbluth's "The Mathmatics of Change"

Where: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Lomita Drive, adjacent to Tresidder Memorial Union

When: Friday, April 7 at 8 p.m. (show is sold out) and Sunday, April 9 at 7 p.m.

Cost: Tickets are $28 and $25.

Call: (650) 478-BASS. 

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