Start-up Sound

I have this weirdness about sound. I watch television with the sound off; mostly the sound isn't terribly necessary, often things are more interesting without it. I watch film trailers on-line without any sound, and don't seem to miss anything. The noise of a telephone ringing makes my head hurt. The volume on my Mac is almost always off, except when I'm actively listening to something. My fanatical intolerance for inconsiderate rustling of bags and sweet-wrappers and such is the stuff of legend. It seems to me the greatest rudeness to perform some public act - and so many more acts are actually public than people appreciate - louder than one must, and, conversely, the greatest act of awareness of the feelings of others to perform the same act no louder than one must.

So Start-Up Sound strikes me as far more than just funny - though it's that too. It's the first time I've seen any comment of any sort on the addition of the computer start-up chord to the list of noise pollution that we seem to have to take for granted: mobile phones; car alarms; musak; bass thumping from the tricked-out SUV behind; the manic R2D2 beeping of instant messaging call and response from some kid's dorm-room. Here's the point: the MS Windows start-up chord which serves in the film as the cue, is either functionally silent to the kids in the library, or is treated as if it ought to be blandly tolerable. They either don't notice it, or they ignore it. But it's not really any less intrusive in that context than the faked parody.

I do know this is mostly just me, by the way.

On the back of the dollar bill I have in my hand

In bold soft pencil:

To Bill's lucky hick ass! Nate.

I think there ought to be some systematic way of marking money as it passes through our hands, to show that it was ours, that it bought a winning lottery ticket, or a last minute of the poker game - or a half-gallon of milk, as this one's going to do after I've finished writing this. The circulation of money in society is much like the circulation of blood in the body: it goes on mostly unnoticed, but connects the organs to each other in rich and symbiotic ways. There are beginnings and endings to it, too. To Bill's lucky hick ass, I say, and to the liquor store to get some milk.

A World Without Grice

I'd like the DVD right now, thanks very much, because until I can watch Were-Rabbit, oh, maybe several hundred times more, I won't be able to compare it meaningfully with A Close Shave and (especially) The Wrong Trousers. In the meantime, I'll just mention in passing that I had a great time, and giggled uncontrollably in places - the childish glee with which many very-rude-indeed jokes ('may contain nuts') are smuggled into what passes for a kids' film is just the sort of subversion that I hope for from grown-ups.

But despite that knowingness, there's a true innocence at the heart of the film's world, which amounts to this: there's no meta-level for Wallace and Gromit; they exist only within their world, and only within their story. Two things put this into sharp relief: one is how much the film relies on our own meta-level awareness of film genre conventions and specific film references for extra layering (but not in the cheap, tawdry way that's become the DreamWorks fingerprint lately); the other is how more worldly - both within their world and within ours - the surrounding minor characters are. Both of those lift W&G themselves onto a higher, purer plane, and I think we associate so much with them because we'd like not to be quite so worldly ourselves.

The two principal layers of the film couldn't be much clearer: the outer layer is soaked in parody and playfulness, and asks much of our knowledge of film; the inner layer is one in which films don't even exist, and Gricean Maxims might as well be the name of some cheesy character - a bouffant game-show host, perhaps. While everyone else inhabits the outer layer, W&G (and perhaps one or two others) inhabit the innocent inner layer. The pleasure we get from watching them is partly, then, to lay down our own meta-level processing for a while - or to restrict it to the outer layer - as they progress wide-eyed through a plot that might be hackneyed, or a Frankenstein's monster of bit-parts, to us, but is completely fresh to them. It's like watching a child discover something that we've known for too long; we suddenly see it afresh.

It helps that W&G's world is conspicuously not our own. It's not the lack of comedy which makes us weary and angry with a film that presents Cute Teen A wandering into Creepy House B where we know she'll be attacked by Serial Killer C. What makes us weary and angry is that we know how these films go, so why doesn't she?. She lives in a world that seems to be ours, so doesn't she watch these films, the stupid bint? What's up with her meta-level reasoning? We don't expect that from W&G. Indeed, it would be terribly destructive to the tone of their world if they had such awareness. The plot might absolutely be one we recognise, but they must not. Sometimes that's made a virtue in itself: when Feathers McGraw pulls off the rubber-glove he's been using as a chicken-disguise, it's funny not just because to us it's been farcically obvious all along, but because we don't think W&G particularly stupid for not having seen it. Such disguises work in their world. In the same way, we don't consider Gromit to be slow for not having guessed (or suspected) the true identity of the Were-Rabbit earlier. It's just reasonable to accept that his world doesn't include such background information.

One way of accounting for W&G's innocence of anything meta is to present Gromit as child - an endearingly bright child, to be sure, but a child all the same - who encounters the world with a clean, sharp mind, but little accumulated wisdom; and Wallace as an endearingly dim grown-up, who conversely encounters the world with much wisdom, but little ability to apply it effectively. Between them, they function as a single entity, but the connection between Gromit's intelligence and Wallace's experience never gets made, so they remain forever innocent, living in a world without Grice.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Perviest thing I've seen in a long time. Chinese eBay vendor selling long human hair - specifically long ponytails - and including with each sale a DVD of the hair being cut. I can bend my brain enough to believe that the film is intended to form a record of authenticity, but would I be giving away my weirdness in admitting that there's something deeply disturbing, gnarly and just plain hot about the process? Thought so. Does the DVD accompany the hair, or does the hair accompany the DVD?

Empire of the humdrum

Your homework for today, class, is to identify what you feel are the essential differences between this:

and this:

I don't intend to throw stones at Warhol, but to exalt webcams just as highly as they deserve. I adore them. If art/drama/whatever is life with the boring bits taken out, then a webcam is - ought to be - life with all the interesting bits taken out. And that itself I find interesting: looking into the forgotten, elided, in-between places with a steady gaze. In that respect Empire isn't my sort of webcam: its subject is just too iconic. But a webcam is exactly what Warhol produced. It's not art, because a webcam makes its single profound virtue of being artless. Make it steerable or zoomable, or too well-centered on the relevant, and that's lost. It's all about not selecting, not filtering.

Can't resist this bit of art-wankery, though:

Curator Clare Carolin said Empire raised issues about "time and space".

Those 'issues' presumably being: time passes, and space is filled by things. However meagre the idea, there was an idea behind the film, but it's not an artistic one, except insofar as it's about seeing. The important component of the work is the other side of the equation's LHS:

Idea + Chutzpah = Conceptual Art

Maybe that's what I love so much about webcams: they don't claim anything, not interest, not value, not relevance. They absolutely must be statically locked-off, continuous - potentially infinite, even, capable of recording the passage of time with a dispassionate long-eye in the manner of those sequences in George Pal's The Time Machine where a shop-window is a metonym for human ephemera. It's about stopping to smell the flowers, but also to watch this piece of concrete, or that empty beach. Peace, I suppose.

Randomness and disenchantment

[A comment posted to Majikthise, which kinda stands on its own. Concerning why more people (elided qualifier here: 'in the US') don't believe in evolution, and considering both its random component and how it might be seen to take meaning away from human life:]

All of the above, of course, to some degree. Most dichotomies are false. (Or maybe they're not. It's definitely one of the two.)

I can't help noticing that woolly thinking has a very odd relationship with the concept of randomness: extreme distaste when it's presented as a necessary component of evolution; extreme glee when quantum uncertainty is leapt upon as science's Achilles heel and used to justify all manner of new age hooey. I don't think there's a consistent reaction towards randomness. I think it's accepted or rejected mostly based on whether it supports or denies one's preferred thesis.

Having said all that, something I think is often missed is just how badly evolution by natural selection is understood, specifically the extent to which randomness plays a part, and more generally the extent to which the entire process or complex of processes ought to be thought of as random. Even to the extent that people might reject evolution based on their personal distaste with randomness in their origins, if they're honest and well-informed they can only do that insofar as evolution is random. There are problems at both ends here. I think educators - and the informal educators of the mass-media might be most to blame here - often fail to appropriately qualify the randomnesses in evolution by carefully explaining the cumulative, ratcheting effect of natural selection. Also, there's an obvious willful ignorance in the still-current and still-way-off metaphors of hurricanes in junk yards and such, which clearly reveal a focus on the random and a lack of appreciation for the cumulative selection.

That evolution remains so clearly misunderstood in the public mind - its focus far too weighted towards the random element rather than the selection element - licences the latching onto the randomness as a target, whatever reason someone might have for wishing evolution not to be true. And though evolution might not necessarily conflict with theism, it absolutely conflicts with much conventional theology. I think Paul Myers is right to identify socially-received anti-evolutionism as a strong effect. I'd just pair it with poor understanding; the combination of the two gives a complex concept like evolution by natural selection little chance.