Archive for July, 2007
baby voices
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Jennifer Tilly is the worst offender, I think. She’s a strapping great gal (eyes right) who insists on talking in a tiny voice. Daum thinks the "baby-voice" trend is on the upswing. Oh, damn.
It is a blight upon the beauty of the American woman.
How many times have you found yourself standing in line behind a woman of unsurpassed grace only to discover that she speaks like a cartoon character?
That’s me in 2004. I had just moved from Canada, and baby voices was one of my most distressing discoveries state-side. Since then the evidence has been piling up. Paris Hilton is merely the latest case in point.
These voices are acts of self diminishment. They say, "It’s just little me: childlike, innocent, unthreatening."
Oh, please. Just stop it. Do these women wish to seem brainless? I guess they must. I mean, if someone’s prepared to sound like a cartoon character, what are the chances she’s going to risk an opinion on the new Werner Herzog movie.
This voices are acts of "don’t mind me" apology. And that makes them the perfect gender counterpart to Charlie Sheen/Harper and the unapologetic male. Charlie Harper of Two and a Half Men is happy to let you know that he is completely self interested and utterly incapable of apology.
So it’s a match made in heaven: women who apologize with every word they speak companion to men incapable of even a single word so spoken.
But hold on. Are women using baby voices to apologize for being insubstantial or to apologize for not being insubstantial enough? I think, it might be the latter. I think that the classic marker of subordinated womenhood may be the new marker of superordinated womanhood. Now that some women are entirely in charge of their lives, they have a new message to send out…some sort of "don’t hate me because I’m successful" strategy. That they use the old apology as a symbol of new status, well, that’s just proof that "the more things change…"
How should women sound? Plainly, they should sound however they sound. But if cultivation comes into it, if they are going to move off their natural voice, I nominate Christine Lahti, Ann Curry, Diane Sawyer, Angela Basset, and Kate Winslet as role models. There are lots of beautifully voiced women in the world.
This is a new industry waiting to happen, a new transformational opportunity for our culture to embrace. God knows, we’ve tried everything else. Surely, the time for beautiful voices has come.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the head’s up.
References
Daum, Meghan. 2007. Little voices of distraction. Los Angeles Times. July 7, 2007. here.
Postrel, Virginia. 2007. Squeaky Voices. Dynamist. July 8, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. The Charlie and Barney Show: Birth of a new American male? This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. January 3, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Blaming Buffy. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. July 14, 2004. here.
Cloudy selves: navigational metaphors (just in time for summer!)
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Each of us is a network. A messy, crowded, cloudy network. We are some rough, disorganized but not entirely unconnected composite of our experiences, relationships, interests and outlooks. We are diverse, complex and multiple.
So what are the structural properties of this network? How do elements cohere? How do they survive passage through space and time? Why do they not just burst into flames and fall from the heavens? Icarus, like.
Like Icarus we should at least be punished for our presumption, the effort, in this case, to be all those people, engaged in all those activities, cultivating all those interests. But presumption aside, the question is how humans can sustain this much internal diversity. Are we "load bearing" and "aerodynamic" in ways we need to be?
Russell Davies refers today to "taste stalking" and "social slipstreaming."
By the first, he means using twitter and last.fm to keep track of the enthusiasms of our friends. These friends are auditioning the world for us. This used to be the job of magazine editors. More and more, knowledge and inspiration comes us from the friends on Facebook or MySpace.
By the second, Russell means a kind of division of labor. Each of us devotes the time and energy to cultivate an interest. And then we trade. You have access to my interests. I have access to your interests. We’re slipstreaming in turn.
"Taste stalking" is a good thing to do because it opens up the range of input, interest, experience, all-those-other-things-out-there to which we want to have access. Russell’s not crazy about the metaphor and I wonder if we couldn’t just as easily call these people "scouts." We follow them. We don’t haunt them.
"Scouts" is a bit "boys own," though, isn’t it? "Guides" is too patronizing, too old media. "Editors" is less bad, but it’s old media too. "Carnies" might work. (Carnies are those people who work for carnivals and shout things from booths.) What’s wrong with all these metaphors is that they imply that the person we "stalk" knows the value they create. And on the web, you may or may not know (or care) that someone draws value from your experience. The thing about the wisdom of crowds is that we are usually created a utility unwittingly. In del.icio.us we have no idea.
"Space probes?" These really are witless machines, banging through space, beaming things home mechanically, and as long as the battery lasts.
There are some probes that head for deep space, sending back impossibly exotic intelligience. The Voyager is now 15 terameters from the sun, and the human-made object furthest from the earth. We all have friends who "phone home" periodically with the most mysterious but precious of communications. I am still waiting to hear from Terry, a high school friend. We said goodbye, and he drove away in a typically exalted state of consciousness, and I couldn’t help noticing that his Harley ran 3 stop signs without so much as slowing down. I would really like to hear from Terry.
Navigational satellites? The Global Positioning System consisted of 32 medium Earth orbit satellites in six different orbital planes. This is more than I feel I need for getting and keeping my bearings. But that could change and no doubt will change as my self becomes ever cloudier. In fact, I quite like the idea of orbital planes, because in order to sustain a diversity of element within, I need quite a lot of diverse directional information.
The issue here is how networks manage the great clouds of information they need to sustain themselves and to grow. It certainly makes since to "shadow" or to "ghost" other networks, to choose what they choose, to exchange what we’ve got. These cloudy selves are going too large to be sustained by their owners’ efforts only. It is going to have to be a collaborative exercise. We are going to have to pool our resources. We are going to have to put our head’s together. We are going to end up with some out of body, out of mind, out of network, cross dependencies that put at risk our conventional ideas of the discrete, free standing, independent, liberty seeking individual. Right?
References
Davies, Russell. 2007. Taste salking, opinion surrogates, and social slipstreaming. Russell Davies: we are observing your earth. July 5, 2007. here.
Acknowledgements
The photo is from Eddie Dowds and his Flickr account. I am waiting for Eddie to tell me how he wants to be acknowledged and cited. I found this photo because the Flickr Nugget on my iGoogle home page is currently using "Ayrshire" as a key word. Ayrshire is, distantly, where I’m from, and I like to visit photographically whenever I can. Thank you, Eddie, for capturing a pretty good representation of my inner "complexity."
The Flight of the Conchords and splicing culture
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Flight of the Conchords would persuade us of its artlessness but there are several comedic subroutines spinning furiously within. I counted no fewer than 9 of them. (Aren’t anthropologists tedious? Always decoding culture, always overthinking things.)
1) the "second look" subtlety I talked about yesterday. As Flynn points out, the song lyrics demand careful attention and repetition.
2) broad humor, as when Bret glues Jemaine’s Kodak and cell phone together to make him a "camera phone." Or the robot video in which the boys dress up in aluminium foil and mechanical movements.
3) self mockery, as when Jemaine announces to the girl who is just about to dump him, "I’m usually more charismatic than this."
4) a passionate investigation of the bureaucratic sensibility, as evidenced by Murray (Rhys Darby) and his band meetings, roll calls and agendas. Anyone touched by the British Commonwealth likes this sort of thing, perhaps because the founding culture, England, managed to produce both a formidable love of bureaucracy and its anarchic opposite. In this view, Flight is to New Zealand what Monty Python was to Britain and Kids in the Hall were to Canada.
5) an affectionate investigation of the fan sensibility. The band’s fan Mel (Kristen Schaal) stalks the Conchords with insinuating questions that disclose a condition of imminent sexual ecstasy. In Schall’s best moment, she puts her nose to Clement’s shirt and inhales deeply.
6) Clement and McKenzie have a fine anthropological eye, and in the manner of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, they examine "nothing" carefully for its comedic opportunity.
7) an idiotic innocence, which Alessandra Stanley captures nicely. The boys can’t quite decide what put off the woman Jemaine went out with. The viewer knows perfect well that it’s because Bret interrupted them as they were about to kiss, but the boys can’t help wondering whether perhaps Jermaine failed to walk "on the outside of her." The boys appreciate that this mysterious ritual is an absolute deal breaker with it comes to soliciting kisses.
dissonance, as when Clement takes on child labor in one of his "message songs," only to spin off into a reflection on why sneakers aren’t cheaper, the suspicion that we pay too much for sneakers, before being thrown free of the song with a plaintive cry: "what’s your overhead?" This is anthropological trickery of another kind. Normally, the folk song and business analysis are things kept secret. Clement binds them up.
9) splicing. This isn’t something I’ve noticed before, and it’s not something I’ve seen talked about. Let me have a go and leave it to my readers to sort things out. By splicing I mean exactly what Wikipedia means by the term: joining two pieces of rope or cable by weaving the strands of each into the other" except in this case what gets joined are not bits of rope but culture. There is lots of splicing in Flight.
First order splicing
There’s the cheap kind, the kind I associate most with Larry David, as when some stray detail of the plot turns out to be critical to its outcome. In episode 3 of Flight, a monkey serves this purpose.
Second order splicing
There’s something more complicated as when Brett determines that to square things with Jemaine, he must recover the camera phone they lost in a mugging. The mugger returns not just the camera phone, but also the pictures he took with it. These include pictures of him because, well, he had to "finish out the roll." There’s actually a picture of the mugger ripping off a convenience store.
It’s good comedy and it works because it represents the intersection of people who should never see one another again, and objects that are themselves the outcome of a preposterous kind of splicing, which devices, it turns out, capture photos that should never have been taken. Both the camera and the photos end up exchanged by people who should be enemies in the creation of a social moment that should never have happened. Sure enough and the boys all become friends. This is splicing to make the head spin.
Third order splicing
And there are moments of highest order splicing. The boys go to a party and Jemaine spots the girl of his dreams and breaks into song, exclaiming that she is so beautiful she could be a "part time model" or "high class prostitute." While Jemaine sings, we understand that we are now in "song time." More specifically, we understand that we have entered another dramatic dimension that is rooted in "drama time" but a departure from it. (This conviction is well established in our culture and musical theatre depends upon it.) But no sooner have we got our bearings than Jermaine walks up to the party host in "drama time" and still singing asks him a question. Yikes. Drama time and song time are suddenly one. They are now spliced.
Now, it’s not impossible to imagine why we might be charmed by splicing. We live in a culture that is busting out in all directions. We attempt to manage selves that are themselves disparate and various. There is something deeply reassuring about a comedy that puts the world back together again.
References
Flynn, Gillian. 2007. Taking ‘Flight.’ Entertainment Weekly. Issue 941/942. June 29-July 6, 2007, p. 125.
Richmond, Ray. 2007. Flight of the Conchords: Can a couple of sullen, sardonic New Zealand boys find success singing, strumming and spoofing at 10:30 p.m. on HBO? I’m guessing no. here.
Stanley, Alessandra. 2007. The New Zealand Invasion: Digi-Folk Now! New York Times. June 15, 2007. here.
More details
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
HBO
Dakota Pictures, Comedy Arts Studios and HBO
Credits:
Teleplay-creators: James Bobin, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie
Executive producers: Stu Smiley, James Bobin, Troy Miller
Co-executive producers: Tracey Baird, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie
Producers: Anna Dokoza, Christo Morse
Director: James Bobin
Director of photography: Patrick Stewart
Production designer: Christine Stocking
Costume designer: Rahel Afiley
Editor: Casey Brown
Casting: Cindy Tolan
Cast:
Jemaine: Jemaine Clement
Bret: Bret McKenzie
Coco: Sutton Foster
Mel: Kristen Schaal
Murray: Rhys Darby
The Flight of Conchords and “second look” television
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Will HBO’s new show survive infancy? The fate of The Flight of the Conchords is now unclear.
The Hollywood Reporter predicts disaster, calling the show,
so cloyingly doofy that [protagonists McKenzie and Clement] are not only tough to root for but difficult to watch for extended periods.
Other critics responded more positively. Flynn of Entertainment Weekly, called the show a "simple bit of joy," and gave it an A-. Stanley of the New York Times offered a review that was thoughtful and affectionate.
Here’s the problem. This is "second look" television. It’s pretty difficult to appreciate the show unless you watch episodes a second time. Much of the show is resident in its subtleties. Miss these and you end up sounding like a Hollywood Reporter reporter. How embarrassing. (Imagine having your least observant moment committed to paper and national scrutiny?)
Traditionally, TV has honored a "one look" contract. In the early days, there were no reruns and no rewinds. The medium was obliged to keep it, um, medium. Things were served up with stunning clarity. Writers hated it, directors hated it, actors hated it. But in the democratic world of TV, no viewer was left behind.
The "one look" contract said keep the proposition loud and clear. If need be, repeat the proposition. When that didn’t work, have characters "explain" things to one another. And if that didn’t work, summon Dr. Exposition (as Mike Myers calls him), the character who’s sole function was to make things unmistakable clear…and have him make things unmistakable clear.
We have seen everyone’s media literacy get better. And many shows are now sufficiently sophisticated and understated to reward a second look, including the work of Aaron Sorkin, shows like Arrested Development, The Wire, and Homicide, and networks like HBO. A "second look" contract with the viewer now appears to be in the works. We talk about a "digital divide" to distinguish between younger media consumers who "get" digital, and older ones who don’t. I wonder whether there is another generational distinction to be made here, one between "one look" viewers and "second look" viewers.
So it we were doing this as a Harvard Business School case, the debate come down to this: how many viewers have migrated from "one look" to "second look" capability, and how many of those will find pleasure in the rest of Flight. ("Second look capability" is the necessary condition. "Pleasure in the show" is the sufficient condition.) Is this number smaller or larger than the one that HBO needs to sustain the show, or at least a "wait and see" commitment to the show? Hey, presto, we have cracked the case.
The secondary marketing question is how successfully HBO has identified a "second look" audience and how well have they reached out to this audience? Mostly this is a "word of mouth" undertaking, but we must hope HBO is being maximally strategic here.
As to the pleasure of The Flight of the Conchords, well, there’s lots of that, but more tomorrow.
References
Flynn, Gillian. 2007. Taking ‘Flight.’ Entertainment Weekly. Issue 941/942. June 29-July 6, 2007, p. 125.
Richmond, Ray. 2007. Flight of the Conchords: Can a couple of sullen, sardonic New Zealand boys find success singing, strumming and spoofing at 10:30 p.m. on HBO? I’m guessing no. here.
Stanley, Alessandra. 2007. The New Zealand Invasion: Digi-Folk Now! New York Times. June 15, 2007. here.
More details
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
HBO
Dakota Pictures, Comedy Arts Studios and HBO
Credits:
Teleplay-creators: James Bobin, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie
Executive producers: Stu Smiley, James Bobin, Troy Miller
Co-executive producers: Tracey Baird, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie
Producers: Anna Dokoza, Christo Morse
Director: James Bobin
Director of photography: Patrick Stewart
Production designer: Christine Stocking
Costume designer: Rahel Afiley
Editor: Casey Brown
Casting: Cindy Tolan
Cast:
Jemaine: Jemaine Clement
Bret: Bret McKenzie
Coco: Sutton Foster
Mel: Kristen Schaal
Murray: Rhys Darby
