The Brunch Table

From an A.V. Club interview this week:

“I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. I was thinking about that this morning, and I thought that the thing about growing up in the South in the 1950s and early ’60s was that it produced memories that look like the 1930s and 1940s…I think that contributed a lot to my worldview, and the way I look at things as a writer. I could simultaneously see this ancient Cormac McCarthy kind of reality in this Southern mountain world, plus Sputnik and Twilight Zone on television. The gap between where I lived and the media universe was much wider than it possibly could be, now that everybody’s online.”

Marlies found this:

(Nijntje is a Dutch cartoon character who predates Hello Kitty by about 20 years. Her name means “Little Rabbit,” and is pronounced “Nine-cha”.)

Here’s a collection of shorts by Maya Deren, an influential ’40s filmmaker. She took the kind of narrative techniques that were just getting to a mature state in the commercial features of the day and applied them to her art films. Emotionally-affecting conventions that movie audiences had become sophisticated enough to expect–like “limited third-person perspective,” where the camera is restricted only to items of interest to one character–were still a startling novelty in the art world.

(Tangent: limited third-person perspective is so ubiquitous in films today that it’s better to illustrate it with an example of its absence. Part of The Phantom Menace’s lack of emotional affect is rooted in its mysterious reliance on “omniscient,” and not limited, third-person perspective, where the camera takes the viewpoint of an outside observer.

When Natalie Portman enters the Galactic Senate, most living filmmakers would, somehow or other, contrive to show us her face together with a view of the chamber from where she’s standing. We see a thing, we see an actress looking at the thing, and we read her for clues as to how we should respond to the thing emotionally. Instead of this, we get a wide shot of the chamber alone, like something out of Metropolis. Omniscient third-person perspective was a common tactic in the silent era, and it’s a key reason why modern lay audiences watching a silent film sometimes have trouble caring too much about what’s going to happen next. )

It’s perhaps a bit more difficult to appreciate Deren’s originality these days, when there’s a broad public understanding that Eisenstein’s rules aren’t for “the movies” alone, but can be deployed to whatever weird ends you like. (To get a better idea of her impact, consider that she influenced Kenneth Anger, generally credited as the inventor of the music video.) “Meshes of the Afternoon” is her most famous film, but I’ve always liked “At Land” best. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the rumor that she died in a voodoo ritual gone horribly wrong is not true.

Better late than never–remember that Washington Post experiment where they sent world-famous violinist Joshua Bell out busking?

“No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.”

It’s occurred to me that, while the Post was hung up on cultural reasons for his audience’s disinterest, there may have been something else entirely at work. A piece of music is built out of a series of phrases, and the relationship between whole phrases makes up a major part of how we experience it. Ever been to a concert, in any genre, where the performers showed technical skill, but somehow failed to make a lasting impression? The missing “spark” is hiding in the way the phrasing is structured.

Of course, the question of exactly what kind of structure we enjoy tosses us back into the realm of personal taste. In the case of Bell’s subway experiment, though, we add an interesting objective restriction: if we decide whether we like a piece of music or not based on the structure of the phrasing, then for a piece of music to grab our attention as we pass we must be able to hear a sufficiently-large sample of that phrasing. If you watch the videos included with the Post article, you can see that a single line from, say, Bell’s Bach selection just takes too long to reach a resolution. By the time he’s done, his prospective patron has already left the station.

Here is a selection from the Post’s recording of Bell’s performance:
(direct link)

This line resolves in two phrases and lasts a little over ten seconds. For comparison, here’s a selection from a Peruvian pan-flute band that a friend of mine recorded in the Paris Metro:
(direct link)

It reaches a resolution in one phrase of five seconds. (If you want more context, or just like Peruvian pan flutes, here’s a longer excerpt.)

It may seem like a very fine distinction, but just think–all else being equal, the second example fully doubles your chances of delivering a satisfying payoff while your target’s still in listening range. The experimenters, I think, just didn’t understand their audience.

“Edna Souza is from Brazil. She’s been shining shoes at L’Enfant Plaza for six years, and she’s had her fill of street musicians there…On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long…’He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police.’”

It’s significant that, out of all the Post’s interviewees, Souza’s the only person not mentioned as having some background in classical music who has something nice to say about Bell. And, the whole time, she was stationary.

“I Wanna Be Famous” with Portuguese subtitles:

(direct link)