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Archives: May 2008
May 30, 2008
More Transmedia NewsI've been meaning to do another post on this topic for a while. First, I was inspired by a story in Fast Company, sent to me by Jesse Alexander, which described a gathering of Hollywood's fan boy elite to talk about the futures of cross-platform storytelling: Tim Kring, the lanky, goateed guy at the head of the table, created Heroes, NBC's hit television show about superpowered people. To his right, in a black hoodie and narrow black-framed glasses is Damon Lindelof, cocreator of Lost, ABC's island-fantasy juggernaut, as well as producer of next year's eagerly anticipated Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams. Across the way is Lindelof's buddy Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of Heroes (formerly of Lost and the pioneering she-geek hit Alias). Nearby is Rob Letterman, the self-described nerdy director of DreamWorks' next mega-franchise movie, Monsters vs. Aliens. He's chatting up video-game creator Matt Wolf, who's developing a project with Alexander....The long-haired bearded guy pouring straight bourbon is Ron Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel's acclaimed reimagining of the classic series. The guy eating pizza on the couch is Javier Grillo-Marxauch, a veteran producer of Lost and NBC's paranormal series Medium, who's now having his own fantasy graphic novel, Middleman, turned into a series on ABC Family.so, how come I never get invited to parties like this? The article goes on to introduce the concept of transmedia entertainment and to suggest that it is one of the hotest topics in the entertainment world today: "In five years," Kring is saying, "the idea of broadcast will be gone." The article offers a pretty good snapshot of where the industry's thinking is at in terms of transmedia properties and certainly offers an up date on my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture. This week, the New York Times reported on the plans to release a suplamentary dvd to more or less coincide with the release of the Watchmen movie next year: The second film, tentatively called Tales of the Black Freighter, follows a side Watchmen storyline about a shipwreck and will arrive in stores five days after the main movie rolls out in theaters. The DVD will also include a documentary-style film called Under the Hood that will delve into the characters' backstories. Those of you who have read Alan Moore's original graphic novel will recognize both of those titles as materials which are complexly woven into the narrative, offering us a glimpse into the way popular culture might have evolved -- towards pirate comics -- in a world where superheroes are real (Black Freighter) and a sense of the ways superheroes might be covered as cultural celebrities (Under the Hood). As the producers have striped down Watchmen for the screen, they have pushed these elements to the margins. In another era, they would have been left on the cutting room floor, but instead, they are becoming the backbone of Warner Brother's transmedia strategy for the film. The article also noted: In addition, the studio plans a dozen 22- to 26-minute Webisodes to help make the complex story easier for the uninitiated to digest. Called "The Watchmen Motion Comic," it will be a panel-by-panel slide show of the graphic novel narrated by an actor.Keep in mind that Warner Brothers was the studio which sponsored the Wachowski Brothers's transmedia development around the Matrix franchise. All of this suggests how central transmedia entertainment has become to the thinking inside Hollywood today. So it is great to have a chance to share with my readers some insights from a real master of this practice.
May 30, 2008
Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (Part Two)How important do you think hardcore fans are to the success of genre entertainment? How do such fans create value around your properties?
What do you see as the downsides of generating such passionate consumers?
As some of these genres have become more commercially viable, the San Diego Comic Con has emerged as an important media marketplace. Can you speak to the role this gathering plays in the marketing of your properties?
Comic Con International in San Diego plays a more and more pivotal role in heralding, marketing and launching new genre efforts. In the midst of negotiating with executives at The Walt Disney Company for a job working with one of their largest franchises, Starlight Runner took them on a tour of the Comic Con exhibition floor. Many of the "worlds" we helped to develop were on spectacular display: Mattel's Hot Wheels universe, the fantasy realms of Magic: The Gathering, high priced back issues of Valiant Comics, and the announcements for new video games and comic books based on Turok and our own "Team GoRizer" at Disney's own booth! Suffice to say, a deal was quickly sealed! The Christian community might be read as another kind of niche public for media properties -- often alienated from mainstream content, deeply interested in providing alternative forms of entertainment for their families. What are the challenges of reaching these consumers, and can their tastes be reconciled by the demands of the mass audience? Like any niche audience, the Christian community wants to enjoy entertainment that reflects their values and sensibilities. Interestingly, the classic Hollywood ethos reflects Judeo-Christian values: good usually wins out over evil, the hero triumphs after embracing the just and moral path. The problem is actually rooted in how the studios choose to communicate with them. To extend the religious metaphor of "cult media," do you see cult fans as playing a particularly important role in proselytizing for the content, "evangelizing" the brand? Fan "apostles" often play an instrumental role in spreading the word and drawing attention to niche content. Many studios and publishers of genre entertainment are currently developing programs to secure relationships with the fan community (or various subsections thereof). While this is not easy to do and often brings on headaches large companies would rather avoid, it is becoming inevitable. After all, without evangelists, how can new religions (or tentpole franchises) spread? Some have suggested that media producers with strong niche followings might be able to develop alternative distribution models for their entertainment content, marketing their properties directly to the public through subscriptions or downloads, rather than negotiating with networks or film studios. How realistic do you think this scenario is within the current marketplace? What do you think are the obstacles of establishing such a direct relationship between producers and their fans? There has never been a better time to explore and establish alternative distribution models for niche entertainment content, but these opportunities are still not easy to exploit and may not last forever. It takes a cocktail of money, talent, timing and pure luck to build a major head with direct digital distribution of entertainment content, particularly if your resources are limited compared with those of a Hollywood studio or entertainment firm.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink
May 28, 2008
Talking Transmedia: An Interview With Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (part one)Jeff Gomez, the chief executive officer of Starlight Runner entertainment, spoke at Futures of Entertainment last fall as part of a panel discussion on Cult Media, which also included transmedia creator Danny Bilson, Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander, ; and Gordon Tichell from Walden Media, the company which produces the Narnia films. Not surprisingly, given I was moderator, the session quickly became a geek out festival mostly centered around issues of transmedia entertainment. You can enjoy the podcast of the event here. As we were preparing for the session, we distributed a set of questions to the speakers, some of which were covered during the panel, some of which were not. Gomez recently wrote to send me his further reflections on many of those questions in the hopes to continue public conversation around recent developments in transmedia entertainment. Here's a bio on Gomez: As the Chief Executive Officer of Starlight Runner Entertainment, Jeff Gomez is a leading creator of highly successful fictional worlds. He is an expert at cross-platform intellectual property development and transmedia storytelling, as well as at extending niche properties such as toys, animation or video game titles into the global mass market. Let's start by examining the concept of "cult media." What does this phrase mean to you, and do you think it accurately describes the kinds of projects you've worked on? Why or why not? To me "cult media" is exemplified by the slow crumbling of traditional media content aimed at huge swathes of the population, down to the more contemporary approach of designing content to engage subsections of that population or even smaller "niches." The idea of cult media historically referred to films that appealed to a fairly small niche of consumers. But many genres, which once were regarded as cult -- fantasy, science fiction, superheroes -- have emerged as increasingly mainstream. What's changing? What accounts for the mainstreaming of niche media? There are five factors that seem to be contributing to the "coming out" of cult media:What do you see as the challenges of generating content that appeals to both niche and mass publics at the same time? Like any good story, content designed for genre-lovers or niche markets should contain strong characters, evocative issues and clear, accessible throughlines. Story arcs must be designed from the outset to feel complete and deliver on their promise. What kinds of trade-offs have to occur in order to broaden the appeal of media properties? Studios and entertainment companies are now learning that fewer and fewer trade-offs are necessary to broaden the appeal of niche or "cult media" properties. Contemporary audiences are now primed for high quality genre entertainment across all media platforms. So long as marketing efforts place focus on a driving platform, the launch platform and complementary content can be used to build anticipation, educate audience "gatekeepers" about the property, and enrich the overall experience. What are the risks involved in alienating the base of your audience? Franchises are built on the energy and loyalty of their hardcore fan bases. While these bases are often a fraction of the size of the total audience, they are indispensable, because they are vocal, passionate and active. A tiny fraction of the genre television series Jericho sent tons of jars of peanuts to the network that had just cancelled the program--moving them to reinstate the series. A small group of fans that gathered at conventions and shared amateur publications centered on the original Star Trek series managed to bridge the period between that series' cancellation and the Star Wars-inspired relaunch of the franchise in the late 1970s.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:20 PM | Permalink
May 26, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Four)Forms Stretched to Their Limits In this intensified comic atmosphere, it should be no surprise that bodies - whether that of live comic performers or cartoon characters - were reduced to, in a phrase associated with Jack Coles, "forms stretched to their limits." Vaudeville's performer centered mode of production and its emphasis on constant novelty and heterogeniety pushed its stars to develop a range of performance skills and to exploit as many of them in any given performance as possible. This push towards intensification resulting in such specialties as the protean or quick change artist who might transform his identity dozens of times in the course of a performance, trying to play all of the parts in the enactment of a Shakespearean drama or an adaptation of War and Peace. It also resulted in the tradition of the eccentric dancer, whose performance would include back-flipping acrobatics and rubber legged dance moves, which often defy our normal assumptions about human anatomy. One can see remarkable examples of this tradition in the preserved segments from Spike Jone's TV work. In "I Like to Sock Myself in the Face," Peter James, a regular member of Jone's stock company, sings a rapid patter song which proclaims the masochistic pleasures of self-directed violence. The clown, dressed in an over-sized checkered suit which defies every advice ever given about what to wear on early black and white television, races onto the stage, hurls himself up the curtains, bobs up and down in rhythm to the music, before proceeding to slap and kick himself in the face, run circles around the bandleader, winding up his legs and kicking in all directions, and turning back flips. He flings himself on all fours, bouncing up and down on the floor. All of the above is performed live by the breathlessly enthusiastic entertainer and unveiled for us in a series of long takes which make it clear that there is no trickery involved. Such a performance might well be called "cartoonish" and that's precisely the point - it offers us the illusion that a live performer's body may be as elastic and protean as that of a cartoon or comic book character. There is little separating Peter James's proclaimed joy in socking himself in the face and the prolonged sequences of Wolfie's equally intense gyrations and contortions in response to Red Hot Riding Hood in Avery's cartoons. Wolfy gets shown going stiff as a board, stretching his arm across the auditorium to pull his beloved off the stage, banging himself in the face with hammers, whistling and pounding on the table, popping his eyes out of his head, and shooting himself in his desperate and uncontrollable expressions of erotic desire. These hyberbolic reactions became the primary source of comedy for extended sequences in the film and such displays are often what people remember most vividly about Avery's cartoons. Art Spiegelman finds a similar fascination with hyperbolic extensions of the human body in Jack Cole and his most famous creation, Plastic Man: "Plastic Man had all the crackling intensity of the life force transferred to paper....Plas literally embodied the comic book form: its exuberant energy, its flexibility, its boyishness, and its only partially sublimated sexuality."The pleasure of reading a Cole comic was watching his protagonist stretch and pull in all directions, changing shape and identity at will, often anchored only by our recognition of the red, black, and yellow coloring of his costume. In yet another analogy to modernist art, Spiegelman argues that the character "personified George Bataille's notion of the body on the brink of dissolving its borders," suggesting a sexual charge to images of Plas's bulbous head at the end of his extending, flaccid or erect neck, or at the suggestion that any body part might take any shape at a moment's notice. The same might be said of the characters depicted by Basil Wolverton, whom art critic Doug Harvey has linked to a much larger tradition of grotesque caricature, again drawing on references to surrealism, expressionism, and dada: "Wolverton's obsessively detailed images of impossibly distended organs, alarming proliferations of extra limbs, seething oceans of twisted, sagging,and diseased integument, and traumatic and impractical fusions of man and machine in which man inevitably got the painful end of the stick.... His work has a singularity of focus and vertiginous sense of exhilaration that verges on nausea, and it has continued to be vital and grown increasingly relevant, from the days of vaudeville through to the post-McLuhan mediascape. And if it makes your sister puke, it's done its job." Spigelman has emphasized the kinetic qualities of Cole's artwork, tracing the ways that Plas moves from left to right, top to bottom, from panel to panel, forcing the reader to scan his eyes rapidly from place to place within the frame: " Plastic Man's S-curved body ...loops around one pedestrian in the distance and extends between two lovers about to kiss - lipstick traces are on his elongated neck as he passes them - to swoop up between an old man's legs like an enormous penis wearing sunglasses and stare into his startled face."Wolverton achieves a similarly kinetic quality within single images as mouths, eyelids, hair, wrinkles, all seem on the verge of drooping and sagging, like so much meat ready to fall off the bone or where a man might tied his neck into a knot to avoid the temptations of drink or another might attach a fan to his nose to disperse the stinch of his buddy's garlicky breath. One character may be all mouth, another all nose, another might have four or five chins, each so butt ugly that we stare at the page like rubber neckers at a car accident, unable to take our eyes away even as we feel mounting disgust. This gagging sensation is suggested by the moment at the end of the above quote where Harvey breaks from the sanctifying language of the art critic to acknowledge a much more adolescent and masculine pleasure in watching his sister's retching. For the most part, the 'vulgar modernists' were misbehaving schoolboys, running amuck, seeking to shock their teachers, mothers, and sisters with their willingness to transgress norms of taste and decorum. There was an inherent tension between all of this frantic activity and any sense of spatial orientation. Jack Cole's Plas zigzags across the page. Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper makes expressive use of speed lines which seem to swoop upon us from all sides. Peter James races, leaps and tumbles around every corner of the stage. Olsen and Johnson walk through a series of movie sets with each match on action revealing them wearing a different period costume. A chase scene in Tex Avery's Who Killed Who shows multiple versions of the same characters racing around different parts of the space at the same instant. Another gag shows the detective falling down a trap door in the bottom of the frame and then falling into the same shot from above. Don't expect spatial relations to make sense, don't expect the world to cohere, just sit back and watch as they rip the screen apart and put it back together again. We can celebrate their formal inventiveness , the giddy excitement created by such unfettered movements, their expressive graphics, yet we also have to acknowledge how much of this humor was directed at women -- literally in the case of Avery's representations of the wolf's pyrotechnic desire or figuratively, in the ways that the works associate all of that ballet, opera, and classical piano music we've described with a feminized realm of high culture. In a world where men display phallic energy through their ability to extend their bodies in all directions, women are often depicted as fixed and static - witness the use of rotoscoping to give Red a much more realistic appearance than Wolfy in the Avery cartoons. There are exceptions, such as Martha Raye's character in Hellzapoppin who shows an ability to freeze frame and reverse the action at one in one particular musical number. Yet, for the most part, male characters enjoy much greater freedom of movement and fluidity of identity. One could argue that such male-centered pleasures are consistent with the analogies to modernism, given how often, say, critics have pointed to the masculine assumptions which shaped artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollack. Indeed, high and popular artists may be complicit in reinforcing this particular set of gendered relations. Consider the case of Lena the Heyena, Wolverton's most famous work. The drawing was produced in response to a contest hosted by Al Capp's Little Abner and judged by a panel that included Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff, and Salvador Dali. The image won out over those produced by such comic book rivals as Jack Cole and Carl Banks, first appearing in Abner and later recycled for a famous early cover for Mad Magazine. Here, high meets low on equal terms, with Dali recognizing and rewarding the "surrealistic" elements in Wolverton's decisively more lowbrow work. We should not be surprised, then, that alongside Dali or Hoberman, the most famous patron of the "vulgar modernists" was Hugh Heffner who sought to recruit many of those discussed here, including Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Elder, to work for Playboy. While the temptation is to talk about the "no holds barred" nature of their postwar work, we can see the kinds on invisible constraints that shaped their work if we look at the much more sexually explicit but formally similar work Elder and Kurtzman did on "Little Annie Fannie" for Playboy a decade or so later. Biographers describe the cartoonists' discomfort with the more explicit imagery and subject matter Hef expected them to produce for his men's magazine, even as he provided them more creative freedom to fill panels with "chicken fat" gags, to introduce intertextual elements, or to shatter the frame borders. (The recent reprinting of Little Annie Fannie includes an extensive set of annotations in the back trying to explain the numerous topical references that ran through the series. ) In the end, we don't know whether the sexuality was sublimated in their postwar works or whether the sexual explicitness of their later work was forced in their efforts to remain relevant to the sensibilities of a different generation. Basil Wolverton's grotesques informed later underground comicbook artists like R. Crumb. A famous portrait of Crumb, his legs twisted and tangled, bears unmistakable similarities to a Wolverton drawing showing a similar contorted male figure. Crumb would give the grotesque elements of Wolverton's work a political charge: Crumb used images of contorted human figures to push back against what he and others in the counterculture saw as the state's repressive control over their bodies, offering up much more aggressive representations of racial difference as a challenge to a sexist and racist society (in effect, taking the 'innocent' ethnic types found in the earlier work and shoving it back into the shocked faces of a generation which had been too complacent about racial inequalities). Reading the "vulgar modernists" alongside Crumb, one seems just how good natured and complacent they were, how much they observed limits and respected norms, even as they sought to enact their disruption and transgression. While the comedy rests on our acceptance that they hold nothing sacred, there is, in fact, much that remains sacred and protected within the humor of the 1940s and 1950s. While Kurtzman and Gaines faced rebuke before the Kefauver committee for their role in creating E.C. horror comics, Mad was seen as a safer alternative to which they retreated in the aftermath. If it was not exactly exhaulted, it never faced government scrutiny. None of these clowns or comic artists were blacklisted during the McCarthy era; their formal transgressiveness and sublimated eroticism would have felt much more comfortable in the context of their times while overt ideological critique would have been much less acceptable. Hoberman was drawn to these artist at a time when politically engaged filmmakers and cultural critics saw reflexivity as a way out of the illusionism of classical Hollywood cinema, seeing shattering textual codes and conventions as the beginning of a different kind of relationship to spectators. When they looked at the films of Tex Avery, say, they could find many examples of this kind of formal transgression. Avery's films sent characters flying outside the frame or showed them straddling a line separating black and white and technocolor. One character in Batty Baseball (1944) stops the picture and demands that they go back and show the lion roar and provide opening credits, while the dog begs for the picture to end after being beaten mercilessly by Screwball Squirrel. The character at the start of Who Killed Who is reading a book "based on the cartoon of the same title," turns to the audience, and explains that if the cartoon is anything like the book, he's about to be murdered. Screwball Squirrel lifts up the bottom of the frame and takes a peak into the next scene to see what he's supposed to do next. And we could go on and on. As Dana Polan notes in an essay principally focused on another "vulgar modernist" text, Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck (1953), there is a difference between reflexivity as a formal practice designed to defamiliarize various textual codes and conventions and reflexivity as a political practice designed to critique real world institutions and practices. One takes pleasure in pulling the rug out from Hollywood conventions, while the other teaches us a new way to see the world or offers us new perspectives on the realm beyond the movie house. Reading Mad magazine taught the coming generation to be skeptical of political authorities or the influence of Madison Avenue, but they would have to push its humor up several notches before they could find a mode of comedy well suited to the politics of the counterculture. These artists paved the way for everything that came yet they might have been the last generation of American humorists who could transgress wildly and yet still hold a place within the consensus culture. They were, in short, marginal but not outside the frame of mainstream culture. From a critical perspective, then, the question is whether we should allow ideological criteria to always trump aesthetic ones. Modernism, in the high art sense, was certainly divided between artists, or even works within the body of the same artist's careers, which were more focused on formal innovation and ideological critique, and we have found a way to accommodate both strands in the cannon of western art. Cannons often get defined in terms of the lasting impressions and continued influence of an artist's body of work and by that criteria, these artists continue to exert a strong influence on our culture down to the present day. As Doug Harvey writes in regard to Wolverton, "generations of comic creators, from Will Elder, Gahan Wilson, R. Crumb and Gary Panter to Peter Bagge, Drew Friedman, and Charles Burns, have been influences by his meticulous technique and pictorial audacity. Artists from the world of 'fine' or 'high' art, such as Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Kenny Scharf, Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, and many others turned Wolverton's pop-culture monstrosities into museum-worthy artifacts."Similarly, Tex Avery's influence is explicitly acknowledge through Jim Carrey's performance in The Mask, through the opening sequences of Who Frame Roger Rabbit?, or throughout Tiny Tunes, Ren and Stimpy, and Animaniacs while it is hard to conceive of the world depicted in The Simpsons or South Park in the absence of Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Hoberman's essay ends with the suggestion that "what was once oppositional in vulgar modernism has largely been co-opted by the culture industry" (pointing to the then contemporary examples of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Saturday Night Live.) I have argued the opposite here-- that their containment within commercial culture worked to mute any overt political statements they might have made and that subsequent generations, following their example, have often pushed their transgressiveness much further. Perhaps these later works are consistent with Hoberman's closing call for a "vulgar postmodernism" though I will leave to someone else the always thankless task of policing the borders between modernism and postmodernism. That these works are a living presence in our culture makes the project of revisiting Hoberman's essay and reassessing this body of work that much more urgent. We have been able to only start the project of a comparative or cross-media analysis of "vulgar modernism" and its place in American culture. Hoberman's intuitive grouping of these artists proves rewarding whether we address the question in terms of biographical details or close textual analysis. These artists were fellow travelers in an artistic project none of them sought to articulate but all of them sought to demonstrate. It was a project whose roots could be traced back to vaudeville but which has been read in relation to a range of modern art movements, caught eternally in a struggle between competing claims of low-brow audacity and high art respectability. Calling them vulgar may oversell their transgressiveness, calling them modernist may overstate their avant garde impulses, yet the reality lies somewhere in the tension between the two. Whatever we want to say about them, they were artists who experimented with the basic building blocks of their respective media and taught a generation a new way to look at the world around them. When Powerhouse Pepper nonchalantly tells us in the final panel of a rather freakish comic story that certain specified pages were a dream sequence, when Startchie explains to a friend that the hearts flying around his paramour's head might mean simply platonic friendship in "cartoon language," they depict a world whose characters (and through extension, their readers) understand themselves as being constructed through recognized artistic conventions. When, in Symphony in Slang, Avery constructs a whole film around literalized metaphors, then we can see him inviting us to reflect on the role of language in shaping how we see the world. And, yes, they could make your sister puke, your mother blush, and your teacher sputter. Not bad for a day's work.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:35 AM | Permalink
May 23, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Three)Chicken Fat If Avery used the opera singer and the magician as comic stand-ins for the text's struggle between norms and their disruptions, the aesthetics of early Mad Magazine can be read through a more literal conflict, or at least competition, between writer Harvery Kurtzman and artist Will Elder for the attention of the reader. Elder liked to cram his panels with what he called "chicken fat," extraneous gags and signs which pulled our attention from story actions in the foreground to seemingly irrelevant background details. As Elder explained, "chicken fat is the part of the soup that is bad for you, yet gives the soup its delicious pleasure." For the most part, these background gags were Elder's own additions, not dictated by Kurtzman's script, though some have suggested Kurtzman increasingly created opportunities for such elements. At other times, the writer expressed frustration when these gags overwhelmed the basic building blocks of his narrative or upstaged his verbal humor. Readers would linger on a single panel, scanning for more comic elements, rather than following the forward momentum of the plot. One frequent form of "chicken fat" were advertising signs or graphiiti, texts which often annotated the action or offered conflicting ideological perspectives on the events. Throughout Elder's "Startchy," (Mad, 12) background details hint at a much harsher social milieu than depicted in the Archie Andrews comic books. Yet, Elder can not resist putting a Burma Shave rhyme on the butts of a series of background figures in one panel. A scene from "Shadow!" (Mad, 4), showing a young woman falling down a flight of stairs, places a different advertising slogan on each step, while the natives in "Ping Pong" (Mad, 6) defend themselves with the Blue Shield and Knights of Pythias icons, playing cards, board games, roulette wheel, and surf boards . Such images need not be consistent from frame to frame, as in "Sooperdooperman" (Mad, 4) where a different icon appears on the chest of battling caped crusaders, in each panel, further undermining any conception of a coherent or consistent fictional world. Elder's contemporary, Basil Wolverton, is similarly known for his use of background details and signs which distract us from the main action. Consider the range of different signs depicted on the cover of a single issue of Powerhouse Pepper: "Fighters: Don't Mope on the Rope," "Seconds don't count. The Referee does!," "Don't Pile in this aisle!," "Tonight: Powerhouse Pepper vs. Doug Slugmug," "Next Week: Rush Crushmush vs. Bopper Sloppermopper," "If you must smoke, light up with genuine boxing matches." A heckler from the crowd asks via a word balloon, "How's to sell you life insurance?" while the protagonist is distracted from punching down his over-sized opponent by a shapely woman walking down the aisle. A semiotician would have a blast interpreting the various functions of such signs (promotional, regulatory, informative) within the fictional world as well as the ways that their language, especially the rhyming slang which was Wolverton's trademark, become a source of pleasure well beyond any meaningful function they might serve within the depicted space. Wolverton similarly deploys sound effects graphics as a source of pleasure in and of themselves, often using them to distract from rather than reinforce the main action. One illustrated essay. "Acoustics in the Comics," captures the cartoonist's fascinations with sound effects. Wolverton begins the essay describing his uncertainty as he tries to figure out the best way to graphically convey the sound of a horse stepping on someone's head. Responding to critics of his often wild and crazy images, Wolverton embodies such criticisms through the figure of an editor who insists on "realistic" sound effects. Across a series of misadventures, he depicts the cartoonist as trying to identify the precise sounds required to represent a range of unlikely experiences, so that flup represents the sound of "dropping your uppers on a gob of putty," Jworch as the sound of a safe falling on a man, Koyp as the noise a skin pore makes with it snaps shut upon contact with cold air, and soop as the sound of "a octopus tentacle slapping a bald bean" assuming the head is round (though it makes a "spoip" sound If the head is flat. These acoustic gags play upon the ways that Wolverton's art refused to abide by realist or classical expectations, preferring to draw his readers in more zany and improbable directions. Wolverton was interested in how wacky or improbably sounds might disrupt the norms of a classically constructed text; many of his best graphics engulf his frazzled protagonists with textual representations of their disruptive and distracting sonic surroundings. One representation of artists at work included the sounds of pens scratching on the sketchpad, of someone pulling on his hair, and the astonished response of critics and readers asked to make sense of what the artist is depicting. Another shows an anxious man trying to watch a movie surrounded by other patrons chomping popcorn, popping gum, and rocking in their chairs. A Good Humor truck appears alongside a tank brigade. A sign pops out of the top of a flame thrower promising "I don't want to set the world on fire." The Hitler-like Big Bad Wolf steps out of a truck which bears the label, "Der Fewer (Der Better)," and holds up a sign to the camera, "Go on and Hiss! Who cares!" (which gets pelted with tomatos by the picture house audience.) When the Wolf's Der Mechanized Huffer Und Puffer blow the little pigs's house down, it reveals a sign reading "Gone with the Wind" before the camera pans to show a second sign, "Corny Gag, isn't it?" An endless pan up the barrel of an alied weapon pauses long enough to let us read the words on yet another sign, "Long darn thing, isn't it?" and when the weapon fires, it whips out a graphic representing Japan and yet another sign drops down from off-screen space informing us that "Doolittle Dood it!" Again and again, such signs destabilize our relations to the represented actions, sometimes suggesting that the characters are themselves aware that they are appearing within a cartoon which we are currently watching (as in the wolf's direct address to the audience) and to which we may respond (as in hurled fruit) and other times speaking on behalf of an unseen narrator, who feels compelled to comment on the depicted actions (including labeling gags as "corny"). Avery also often based gags on the disjunction between sound and images. Consider three examples from Screwball Squirrel. In the first, Screwball closes the door to a phone booth before letting loose with a prolonged raspberry, a sequence designed to call attention to the act of censorship which represses some of his more bodily humor. (This particular rude noise is specifically prohibited in the Production Code). In the second, the camera pulls back from the canine antagonist rolling down the hill in a barrel to show what we might have first read as non-diegetic musical accompaniment as having a source in the fiction: Screwball is making appropriate sounds using drums, timpani, and bird whistles. At another point, as the dog relentlessly chases the squirrel, we begin to hear repeated noises on the soundtrack and the image gets caught into a loop, which suggests the recycling of stills that go on routinely in animated shorts. The image freezes, the Squirrel steps away, hits the needle of a phonograph, gets the music on track, and then, steps back into his place in the chase. In all three cases, Avery refuses to allow us to take the relations between sound and images for granted. Like Jones and Wolverton, Avery sees noise as the source of comic disruptions of the well constructed texts, finding pleasure in the breakdown of normal codes and conventions. Terry Gilliam has described what he values most about Will Elder's work: "the way he filled every inch of the thing with, just stuff....jokes on jokes on jokes." Such visual clutter and comic density is especially visible in the expanded panels which open many of Elder's Mad parodies. One such panel for "Is This Your Life?" (Mad, 24) tries to engulf all of 1950s American culture, into a single crammed and cramped image, including fictional characters (the Lone Ranger, Donald Duck), news casters (Edward R. Murrow) and political personalities (Nikita Khrushev, Richard Nixon), television and film stars (Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Marilyn Monroe), and brand icons (Aunt Jemima, The Smith Brothers, the Quaker Oats man, Snap, Crackle, and Pop), on and on. The opening of "Starchie," shows Blondie and Little Orphan Annie as another two students attending Riverdale High, while Annie carries a textbook, "Freud is a Fraud by Freed" which pulls us into another discursive field altogether. Such plays with intertextual references are also common to the work of Tex Avery (see Who Killed Who, 1943, where Santa Clause pops out of a closet and pulverizes the protagonist for failing to respect a sign warning him not to open the door before Xmas) or in Hellzapoppin (where Johnson bumps into a sled marked Rosebud and mumbles that he thought they had burned that thing or where the Frankenstein monster pops out of the audience and hurls Martha Raye back on stage during the disrupted ballet sequence described earlier.) All of this suggests that what Hoberman described as the "encyclopedic" nature of Frank Tashlin's comedy, "an elaborately cross-referenced Bartlett's of mass media quotations"[p.34] or the "collage-like" qualities of Will Elder's comics [p.37] might be extended to describe the tradition as a whole. These artists borrowed freely across media, genres, modalities, and cultural hierarchies. Moreover, these artists saw visual density as a source of pleasure in and of itself. Often, the specific details are less funny than the sense of their accumulation, of so many unlikely things occurring in the same space at the same time. Consider Hoberman's description of the opening image of "Ping Pong,"(Mad, 6) Elder's parody of King Kong: "a giant slobbering ape towering above the mass of screaming humanity that flees before it on vehicles ranging from flying carpets to pogo sticks. Although the overall effect is monumentally static, the image yields a dozen miniature emblems of exaggerated panic: one man is running with a bathtub clutched around his middle, another's eyes have just popped from his sockets, someone else appears to have plunged his hand through the back of the head in front of him so that it emerges, flailing, through its mouth. Meanwhile, Ping - brushing off the scaffolding that has suspended itself from his underarm in an attempt to plaster a 'Post No Bills' sign across his torso - is being attacked by a cannon firing puffed rice, a parachutist with a peashooter, a machine-gunner suspended in a diaper that is carried by a stork, and an army helicopter whose rear propeller has unobtrusively pulverized a portion of the frame line."(p.37) This dense image seems appropriate for a post-war era where critics were commenting on the struggle of Madison Avenue executives to grab our attention in an increasing noisy and distracting visual landscape. We can't take it all in. No two readers see the same thing. And indeed part of the pleasure is the promise of comic effects beyond comprehension. The Hell sequence at the start of Hellzapoppin is as visually dense as anything Elder ever created with acrobats leaping and flying in every direction, with people walking in between jugglers hurling flying sticks back and forth, with elements thrust into the frame from every possible off-screen space, and with gag elements appearing and then vanishing again with no real explanation. The introduction of Olsen and Johnson gets heralded by a menagerie of chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, and dogs, in a scene which includes everything but the kitchen sink (which, have no fear, gets brought in for comic effect in one of the film's later scenes.) At the risk of a bad pun, this "devil may care" attitude reflects a sense of old vaudeville, burlesque, and joke book gags, being pulled out of moth balls, for one last play, with everyone involved recognizing how tired or hokey these devices may be individually but hoping that if they throw enough things at the screen at once something will produce a laugh or a sense of wonderment. And when the word play gets too bad, one can just step outside of the joke altogether: "corny, isn't it?" These comic artists flag their jokes the way Babe Ruth point out his homeruns: we know where they are going to go but it's still amazing to watch them get there.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink
May 21, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Two)
Hoberman's most important contribution is the way that his essay takes artists who are often discussed as idiosyncratic within their own medium and reads them collectively and comparatively as part of a larger artistic project that took shape across and between media in the post-war period. There is still a lot we do not know about these artists and how they might be related to each other, but it is increasingly clear that Hoberman's intuitive sense of their fit with each other reflects some behind the scenes collaborations. Let's take for example the musician Spike Jones. Jordan R. Young's biography of Jones, The Man Who Murdered Music, traces his migrations across different media (stage, radio, live action and animated cinema, comics, television, and records) as well as his collaborations with a range of other artists often associated with 'vulgar modernism': Jones sought advice from Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin on gags for his various film and television performances, contributed material to Ernie Kovacs' television series, and published pieces in early Mad magazine. All signs are that these artists knew each other socially and professionally, were informed by each other's work, drew on the same aesthetic roots, and in every other sense, constituted what we might describe as a circle. They did not adopt a shared label or issue manifestos to describe their motivations. Basil Wolverton, for example, did speak, tongue in check, of himself as belonging to the "spaghetti and meatball" school of art, a term which reflected his own low-brow aspirations and to the particular way in which he drew flesh and hair, but this term never extended to the others in this circle. Over the past decade or so, each of the artists associated with "vulgar modernism" have undergone a rediscovery with new books published on Will Elder and Jack Cole, a recent coffee table book reprinting sketches and published works by Basil Wolverton, and the reissue of some long-lost television and radio performances of Spike Jones on dvd. This essay draws heavily on this new material to reconsider the Vulgar Modernists, attempting to offer a more systematic mapping of their shared aesthetic vision. I will define what they had in common and why it is productive to draw comparisons between works produced across such a broad array of different media. For the moment, I am accepting Hoberman's 'vulgar modernism' as an inherited and problematic term, which reflects the ways a generation of critics has talked about these works I write this essay in the hopes of sparking further evaluation rather than making a definitive statement. My focus is going to be on Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Olsen and Johnson, Will Elder, Jack Coles, and Basil Wolverton, but for space considerations, I am not taking on Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs, Frank Tashlin, and many others who would also belong in a more thorough discussion of vulgar modernism. My focus here is primarily formal, though there are important ideological questions, having to do with their representations of race, gender, sexuality, wartime propaganda and postwar advertising, censorship and regulation and so forth, which will need to be confronted in any larger discussion. In short, this essay opens a can of worms, hoping more people will pay attention to these artists and their contributions to American culture. But then, comedy is always messy business. Enough throat-clearing. Let's begin with a consideration of one of the emblematic moments from Tex Avery's oeuvre, the opening sequence from Screwball Squirrel. The streetwise protagonist highjacks "the picture" from his cloying counterpart, Sammy. Sammy's big eyes, fluttering eyelashes, baby talk, coy gestures, and sentimentalized music stands in sharp contrast to Screwball's aggressive manners, broad gestures, nasally voice, slangy language, elastic body, and slapstick gags. Sammy and all of his "cute little furry friends in the forest" are no match for Screwball who takes the more effeminate squirell behind a tree and knocks the crap out of him, turning to the camera to explain "you wouldn't have liked that picture anyway" and promising "funny stuff" as soon as the phone rings. Animation scholars have correctly identified this moment as a critical confrontation between two schools of American animation, though most of them have incorrectly aligned Sammy with Walt Disney, where-as read in the context of Tex Avery's recent move from Warner Brothers to MGM to take over the animation division, it is more likely that the immediate reference point was to Harmon-Isling his predecessors. We can read the gesture as acknowledging the changing of the guards at Metro, much as Avery began his first MGM cartoon, Blitz Wolf, by offering a syncopated version of the MGM Lion's opening roar. Both moments mark a repudiation of the past and signal that nothing was going to be taken seriously in the Avery era. There were, of course, other works by the Vulgar Modernists which more explicitly took on Disney, such as Will Elder's "Mickey Rodent", which opens with a panel depicting, among other thinks, the Fox walking a naked Pinocchio on a leash and Horace Horszneck being taken away by goons from Walt Dizzy because he went outside without his white gloves. Basil Wolvertoon created two sketches for his own amusement showing Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto confronting the kind of grotesque creatures which were his own stock and trade. Perhaps more broadly, we can see these artists as taking on what Mark Langer has called the West Coast school of American animation with its middle class ideology, middlebrow taste, and classical aesthetic, in favor of a style which took nothing sacred, including the norms of classical cinema, and which saw itself as more "adult" at a time when American cinema in general was re-inventing itself to reflect the sensibilities of a post-war audience. Langer, himself, contrasts the West Coast school with the New York School, which he associates with the Fleischer Brothers. Many of the defining traits of the New York School carry over to this post-war generation of artists, including a focus on transgression of social norms, an emphasis on the artificiality of the characters and their drawn nature," the use of "exaggerated effects" which call attention to the "artificial" and "manufactured" nature of cartoons, and a "polyphonic and heterogeneous" mixture of elements. Many of the 'vulgar modernists", however, come from the middle parts of the country, not from the coastal cities, and fell outside both urban sophistication and middle class propriety. Yet, like the Fleischer Brothers, their work was informed through borrowings from the vaudeville tradition where so many of them got their start. Indeed, there is a long tradition of confusing the kinds of transgressions found in vaudeville with devices associated with modernist distanciation, but it's worth remembering that the devices are deployed here to very different effect: to intensify rather than diminish our emotional experience. We might understand the opening of Screwball Squirrel in relation to a widespread vaudeville trope, the interrupted act. In another essay, which traces this motif across Buster Keaton's film career, I describe the functions this device played in variety entertainment: " The interrupted performance was a common act structure within the vaudeville tradition, seeming to hold open the prospect of onstage action as spontaneous, unrehearsed, improvisational. Vaudeville sought to maintain the illusion - and it was only partially an illusion - that the audience's response shaped the performance. In a theatrical tradition described by one Chicago critic as 'the field of the expert,' there was a certain pleasure in watching a performance go awry, witnessing events disrupt and threaten the performer's mastery over stagecraft, only to see order restored once again."Such moments enact the tensions between narrative and spectacle or between normality and transgressions which are central to this school of comedy. We take pleasure in the disruptions and interruptions even as we hope for order to be restored. In their stage show, Hellzappopin, Olsen and Johnson took this principle of the interrupted performance to the absolute limits, resulting in a show which was able to sustain the longest run of any Broadway production up until that point on the promise of the unexpected and the spontaneous: " During Hellzapoppin, the audience had bananas, beans, 'pottie-seats,' eggs, and live chickens hurled at them; loud shots exploded; planted hecklers raised a rumpus; a ticket scalper cavorted up and down the aisles with tickets for a rival show; a clown tried to extricate himself from a straightjacket for the show's duration; an elderly woman, outraged that her dress had been lifted by a trick gust of air from under the stage, attacked the entire cast with her umbrella...A woman persisted in bellowing 'Oscar, Oscar'; the audience was bombarded with rubber snakes and spiders; and a whirling madness of cacophonous pandemonium and blatant boorishness engulfed the theater."Universal brought the production to the screen as one of the last gasps of the 1930s anarchistic comedy tradition, resulting in what Hoberman described as "an alternative universe as might have been scripted by Victor Shklovsky under the influence of mescaline." The opening sequence literally pulls the floor out from under a high class musical number, sending a chorus line dressed in fine evening clothes and singing about heaven, falling gracelessly towards the pits of hell. The film concludes with Olsen and Johnson's elaborate attempts to disrupt the performance of a play within a play, destroying a ballet sequence, for example, through the tactical deployment of sneezing powder, sticky paper, men in bear suits, and thumb tacks, among other things. While some of the running gags carry over from the stage, Hellzapoppin also finds cinematic equivalents for the play's disruptions of the theatrical experience, introducing, for example, an ongoing battle between the characters in the film and a projectionist (played by Shemp Howard), who grumbles about being forced to become an onscreen actor, mixes up the reels, jolts the projector sending shockwaves through the fictional world and in a gag which confuses the role of cameraman and projectionist, refuses to pan to follow the action but prefers to remain focused on a bathing beauty extra. In discussing the Comedian Comedy tradition, Steve Seidman and Frank Krutnik have argued that both social and formal transgressions get articulated around the figure of the central comedian whose normalization and social integration by the final reel shuts down the possibilities for reflexivity. In Hellzapoppin, this formal transgression can get dispersed across a range of different performers (here, including not just Olsen and Johnson but also Shemp Howard, Martha Raye, Hugh Herbert, and others). A woman crying out for "Oscar" interrupts Olsen and Johnson so many times that they demand someone do something about her, a request accompanied by off-screen sounds of gunshot and then silence. A title asking Stinky Miller to go home is projected over the action of a musical number, which ultimately has to stop dead until the silhouette of an audience member passes out of the theater. Hugh Herbert bombards Olsen, Johnson, and Raye with arrows during one particularly exposition-heavy conversation, with characters nonchalantly dodging or plucking away the projectiles whizzing all around them. Just as disruption of the stage performance of Hellzapoppin could come from any direction and could exploit any aspect of stagecraft, the film version promises us a world where "anything can happen and probably will." Hellzappopin embodies this tension between the textual and the extratextual in the recurring gag of the distracted and increasingly antagonistic projectionist. In one sequence, a fight in the projection booth jolts the projector, causing the characters to bounce uneasily on the screen; their attempts to restore balance by adjusting the frame line throws the image further off kilter bringing the film itself out of alignment; one character's head gets repeated slammed against the frame bar as they try desperately to right themselves; and then, the characters get thrown into another film altogether, a western spliced in the middle of their reel, where they must battle Indians, before finally arriving back in their proper place in the film. After all, an opening title warns us that Hellzapoppin will bear no resemblance to any actual motion picture. This interrupted performance structure was the stock and trade of another 'vulgar modernist,' Spike Jones. Literary modernist Thomas Pynchon emphasizes these elements in an essay written in tribute to the man known for his contributions to "music depreciation," "Spike's preferred structure was first to state the theme in as respectably mainstream a manner as possible, then subversively descend into restatement by way of sound effects, crude remarks, and hot jazz, the very idiom Spikes Jones and his Five Tacks had begun with back in high school, to the great displeasure of their parents."Jones and His Cityslickers produced a range of fractured recordings of classical music but could also directed these auditory challenges at middle brow lounge music, as might be suggested by his best-known work, "Cocktails for Two." One widely circulated recording of the song opens with a few bars on the piano and a humming chorus, gradually complimented by strings and a male vocalist who valiantly tries to maintain his decorum as the band adds gunshots, clinking glasses, slide whistles, kettle drums, fire bells, gasps, coughs, hiccups, and belches. It is a classic showdown between music, which defines the high, and noise, which defines the low. Many modern listeners know the audio recording of "Cocktails for Two" which was a favorite on the Doctor Demento radio show but the stage performances relied as much on sight gags as on comic sounds, including the use of drunken midgets, two headed men, acrobats, and a range of other activities which upstage and engulf the soloist (as can be seen on recently reissued kinoscopes of his television series). Members of the Spike Jones troope always emphasize the highly structured nature of these comic disruptions - describing how they had to be taught to burp with the beat, if not in tune with the music. As Dick Webster explains, "The things that seemed so crazy on stage were intensely worked out. It looked like bedlam but it was organized bedlam." The dvds give us access to multiple versions of "Cocktails for Two," each sharing common elements, but each also including novel additions, suggesting a structured but still open space for improvisation within each performance. From "Cocktails for Two," it is not hard to find our way back to Tex Avery's The Magical Maestro, which depicts the showdown that occurs when a carny magician , knocks out an orchestra conductor and takes his place, waging war on an opera singer who is offering a fairly straight rendition of a classical aria. The maestro does everything he can to distract his high class rival, including magical transformations of his identity, turning him into, among many others, a ballet dancer, a football player, an Indian chief, a convict, a black-faced minstrel, a South Seas Islander, and a Chinaman. These disruptions include both visual gags (proliferating Rabbits) and sound-based gags, including abrupt shifts in musical genre (including Hillbilly, Hawaiian and Minstrel performances). While the film offers a narrative frame for the interrupted act, disruptions, as in Hellzapoppin, also occur from outside the narrative space, such as hair which seems to get caught up in the film's projector and lingers until the opera singer plucks it away. Once again, the interrupted performance structure allows us to pit high culture against low, music against noise, and professional polish against liberating improvisation. (To Be Continued)
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:45 PM | Permalink
May 19, 2008
"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part One)The following essay is a work in progress, produced for an anthology of essays on animation and its relations to live action comedy. I see it as a chance to explore cartoons, long a passion of mine, but so far, not a topic I've written about. It also gave me a chance to return to the field of comedy studies, where I began my career. For more of my work on this topic, see What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Asesthetic, Classical Hollywood Comedy, and the essay on Lupe Velez in The Wow Climax. It also extends the exploration of the relations between high and popular art which runs as a theme through the essays in The Wow Climax, but especially those dealing with Matthew Barney and with what Gilbert Seldes might have taught us about the aesthetics of video games. This essay is a bit on the academic side compared to much of what I post on this blog but my hope is that readers will bear with it for the insights it offers into postwar animation, comics, and comedy.
Read today, the essay feels more timid than it did a few decades ago - an attempt to negotiate with the sensibilities of a high art readership (and thus preserve entrenched cultural hierarchies) even as it rescues certain key popular artists from the margins of critical consideration. We see this exceptionalism in the speed with which he labels such works "para-art" (by the start of the second paragraph) or the ways in which he sets up his beloved creators through analogies to already acclaimed modern artists, describing Tex Avery, for example, as "the Manet of Vulgar modernism." [p.33] In short, some artists rise above the "muck" that surrounds them, to reference another analogy in Hoberman's essay. To this day, his almost oxymoronic coupling of "vulgar" and "modernism" sparks controversy from those celebrating popular art and those defending high culture alike; we still have a long way to go before we resolve the vague discomfort which comes from applying formalist criticism to what we call popular culture more often than we speak of popular art. Modernism? Hoberman's concept of 'vulgar modernism' exists primarily as a frame for his close readings of particular texts and artists, so the passage quoted above is as close as he comes to an wholistic explanation of the concept. Modernism operates in his argument as a very broad and loose signifier of 20th century high art (and has become even more elastic as developed by subsequent generations of critics informed by his interpretations.) What links these popular artists to "modernism" for Hoberman is their interest in foregrounding the materiality of their medium and the conditions of its production and reception, their embrace of reflexivity and intertextuality. See, for example, his description of what Will Elder brought to early Mad Magazine: "His best pieces are collagelike arrangements of advertising trademarks, media icons, banal slogans, visual puns, and assorted non-sequiters....As Mad's leading formalist, Elder allows internal objects to tamper with the boundaries of a panel, breaks continuous vistas into consecutive frames, offers visually identical panels with wildly fluctuating details, and otherwise emphasizes the essential serial nature of his medium."[p.37] In short, Hoberman is interested in these popular artist's refusal to produce a coherent, consistent, or classically constructed world, openly displaying their own interventions as authors into the represented events. Hoberman, in that sense, was inspired by Screen's attempt to generate a Brechtian mode of film theory in the 1970s and by the French rediscovery of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, both of which rested on arguments that self-reflexivity and intertextuality shattered the codes and conventions of classical cinema. Hoberman's project has been most vigorously taken up by cartoonist and cultural impresario Art Spiegelman, who has used these artists as a missing link between the gutter art of the Tijuana Bibles of the 1930s and the underground comics of the 1960s and art comics of subsequent decades. Spiegelman has, in the process, broadened the cannon of the vulgar modernists by, for example, reprinting works by Basil Wolverton in his influential Raw anthologies, writing a book focused on the modernist sensibilities of comic book artist Jack Cole (Plastic Man) or for that matter, designing an album cover for a reissue of Spike Jone's music, bringing this once cornball music to the attention of new hipsters. Let's be clear about the terms of this discussion. Hoberman's vision of "vulgar modernism" is very different from the concept of "cartoon modernism" being promoted in a recent book by Amid Amidi. Amidi is interested in the design aesthetic introduced into American animation in the 1950s by cartoonists such as Ward Kimball, John Hubley, Maurice Noble, and Ernie Pintoff, among others, which was explicitly informed by trends in contemporary art. Here the focus is on simplification, stylization, abstraction, the flattening of depth perception, and the expressive and non-naturalistic use of color, among other properties. If Hoberman is linking the vulgar modernists to Brecht's concepts of distanciation, Amidi defines his cartoon modernists in relation to Picaso, Matisse, Miro, Klee and bebop. Tex Avery would be an interesting figure for closer consideration because he is the one cross-over between these two very different conceptions of the relationship between American animation and modern art, having embraced aspects of this design aesthetic in his final few years of work (see, for example, Symphony in Slang). Vulgar? We might use the term, "vulgar," in a descriptive sense to describe the relatively low cultural status granted their work at the time it was being produced; we might deploy the term, "vulgar," to refer to certain intentionally distasteful aspects of their representation of the body and sexuality, their deployment of everyday materials including advertising as the inspiration for their own artistic production, though in that sense, they prefigure where art has gone in the postmodern period. Can we rescue "vulgar" by redefinining it in terms of transgressions committed both against the institutional practices of mainstream media and the world of high art or are the class politics of "vulgar" so deeply entrenched that it resists re-appropriation on this level? We might also see them as "vulgar" in much the same way that Marian Hansen has spoken of "vernacular modernism" (here, drawing heavily on slapstick comedy as a primary reference point) and its relationship to classical cinema: "the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with the connotations of discourse, idiom and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity and translatability." Like Hoberman, Hansen welcomes the productive tension between popular art and high culture. I am holding onto Hoberman's term, "vulgar modernism," for much the same reasons: it generates discussion precisely of the relations between the two terms which needs to occur if we are not to simply naturalize old assumptions about the relations between high and low. I want to move us away from Hoberman's use of the concept of "para-art" and the implication that these works are not quite art, worthy of aesthetic consideration but not perhaps the ultimate recognition given to "true artists." I start from the assumption that popular art needs to be evaluated on its own terms, that it needs to be understood in relation to its own aesthetic goals and circumstances, and that no apology need be made for popular artist simply because they work in institutional settings other than the art world. (To Be Continued)
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink
May 16, 2008
More News for Aca-FenI wanted to send out two belated announcements: this past term has run away from me and I never seemed to have gotten around to posting these announcements, both of which are relevant of those of you who are fans but especially for those of you, across a range of different disciplines, who are involved in studying fan culture. The first comes from the Organization for Transformative Works and centers around the launch of a new online journal. Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an open access, international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC's aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community. We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000-8,000 words). Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory's broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000-7,000 words). Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500-2,500 words). Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item's content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500-2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org. TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site. Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org). The editorial board for the journal reads like the roster from our Gender and Fan Cultures conversation here last summer: Nancy Baym, U of Kansas - Will Brooker, Kingston U - Wendy Chun, Brown U - Melissa Click, U of Missouri - Abigail Derecho, Columbia C Chicago - Catherine Driscoll, U of Sydney - Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Pomona C - Sam Ford, Convergence Culture Consortium - Jonathan Gray, Fordham U - Judith Halberstam, USC - C. Lee Harrington, Miami U - Heather Hendershot, City U of New York - Matt Hills, Cardiff U - Henry Jenkins, MIT - Derek Johnson, U of Wisconsin - Roz Kaveney, Independent - Derek Kompare, Southern Methodist U - Anne Kustritz, U of Michigan - Elana Levine, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee - Farah Mendlesohn, Middlesex U - Helen Merrick, Curtin U of Technology - Jason Mittell, Middlebury C - Lori Morimoto, Indiana U - Roberta Pearson, U of Nottingham - Sheenagh Pugh, U of Glamorgan - Aswin Punathambekar, U of Michigan - Bob Rehak, Swarthmore C - Robin Anne Reid, Texas A&M-Commerce - Sharon Ross, Columbia C Chicago - Cornel Sandvoss, U of Surrey - Avi Santo, Old Dominion - Louisa Stein, San Diego State U - Catherine Tosenberger, U of Florida
May 16, 2008
Dumbledore for a Day: The Things You Can Do in Second Life
A while back, I shared with my blog readers my experiences in Teen Second Life, thanks to an organization called Global Kids. I've gotten a chance to work more closely with Barry Joseph, Rafi Santos, and others from the Global Kids organization over the past year or so and each encounter has left me even more impressed with their respect for their young participants and their imaginative use of virtual worlds to focus young people on issues impacting the real world.
Well, they invited me back for a return engagement -- what they billed as the Hogwarts Dance Party of Good and Evil -- this time focused around Harry Potter fandom and what it may tell us about the new media literacies. There's an extensive discussion of Harry Potter in Convergence Culture and ever since, I've found myself speaking to Harry Potter fan conventions -- including the Witching Hour in Salem, Phoenix Rising in New Orleans, and the upcoming Portus in Dallas. I am also featured in the documentary, We Are Wizards, which is currently making its way on the festival circuit.
For this event, a teen designer, Sylver Bu, developed a perfect melding of my own iconic persona and that of Dumbledore, the Wizard. As wizards go, I was not particularly skilled -- in part because I use Second Life so infrequently and because I am clumsy in my off-line persona too, so I muffed my dramatic entrance, but I got much more comfortable as the event went along. Barry Joseph, who conducted the interview, dressed up in a dragon avatar for the festivities. The interview segment was enhanced by periodic trips to the dance floor -- this time to boogey to Wizard Rock recordings, most of which had some broad social message. The selections were chosen for Global Kids by USC's own Suzanne Scott, who is completing a dissertation which deals in part with Harry Potter fan music production and distribution. Our discussion ranged from the basics of fan culture to the particular ways that groups like the HP Alliance have used J.K. Rowling's world as a starting point for social and political activism, the ways Wizard Rock exploits social network technology,the current legal battles around the Harry Potter Lexicon, and the global nature of contemporary fan culture. For Rafi's account of the event, see this blog post. Global Kids has posted a full recording of the event for anyone who wants to relive the experience:
May 14, 2008
Still More Toy Stories...In what can only be perfect timing, I got e-mail this weekend from Damon Wellner of Probot Productions was founded in 1998 by former Emerson College film students, Damon Wellner and Sebastian O'Brien, as an experimental attempt to create a universe of "living" toys, and to lampoon Hollywood with its own merchandise. Probot's world of Toy-Cinema was hatched out of the elaborate action-figure battles staged by Damon, Sebastian, and their toy collecting friends. Their first project, ALIEN 5, was made with no editing facilities, so the entire movie had to be shot in sequence, and edited in-camera, a painstaking process which took 6 months to complete. The resulting 22 minute video was finished for under $150.... Thanks to my young nephew, Jacob Benson, I wanted to share another delightful example of how childhood play is giving rise to new forms of participatory culture -- in this case, through the use of hand puppets rather than through the animation of action figures. "The Mysterious Ticking Noise" is my favorite of a series of episodes of an amateur produced Potter Puppet Pals series. It's hard to explain why this one brings a smile to my face but it just does.
May 14, 2008
Sometimes My Kids Seem Like a Bunch of Kangaroos!This past week, I contributed a post to In Media Res, a site which I have mentioned several times before, where academics share clips of contemporary and historic media content with critical commentary. Each week, In Media Res adopts a specific theme and invites in five scholars who come at that theme from different angles. Last week's theme was "Toys," and the result was an interesting series of explorations of how toy branding and advertising connects to issues of gender, practices of childrearing, collector culture, and transmedia entertainment. Raiford Guins, State University of New York, Stony Brook, extends Roland Barthes' analysis of the move from wood to plastic in toys to examine collector culture and the practices which are designed to preserve value by keeping toys in their original packaging. Caryn Murphy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, shares a segment from Good Morning, America on Disney's "Princess" franchise, which she reads through a consideration of media conglomeration (reflected as much by what the piece doesn't say as in what it does). Derek Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison, shares some early animated commercials for G.I. Joe, which he describes as a prototype for the subsequent cartoon series; interestingly, these spots were developed for Marvel's G.I. Joe comics in order to skirt regulatory restrictions on the use of animation in toy commercials, representing one of the few times that comics have been directly advertised on television. And Avi Santo, Old Dominion University, shares some examples of cross-universe branding -- advertisements for Underoos and for action figures which mix and match characters from several different media companies, a practice common enough in actual play but far less common in the marketing of franchise related toys. As for my own piece, I've reposted it below since I thought it would be of interest to my regular readers. It is closely related to a series of essays I've been writing off and on for the past decade on post-war children's culture and its relationship to permissive childrearing. If you are interested in this line of investigation, you can find an essay on Benajmin Spock's ideas about child sexuality in The Children's Culture Reader, on Doctor Seuss and debates about the family as a seedbed for democracy in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, on the ways Hank Ketchem's Dennis the Menace retooled the "Bad Boy" tradition in The Revolution Wasn't Televised, and how Lassie got retooled to reflect shifting understandings of childhood and parenting in The Wow Climax. Someday, I hope to pull together a book which deals with the figure of the boy in the striped shirt as an embodiment of a particular conception of boyhood which shaped the baby boom generation. Needless to say, this involves looking closely at media texts, toys, and cultural practice which shaped my own boyhood through a historical and cultural lens.
These three commercials from the 1960's suggest the roles popular culture played in promoting some of the core premises of what I am calling Permissive Child Rearing Doctrine, a set of ideas most closely associated with Dr. Benjamin Spock, but which were shaped by a much broader array of post-war advice literature. Writing in the 1950's, Martha Wolfenstein saw the shift from a culture of production (with its demands for discipline and regimentation) to a culture of consumption (with its expectations of a "fun morality") as a major force shaping child-rearing practices in the twentieth century. The emergence of permissiveness in the postwar era, she argues, was partially a response to the expansion of the consumer market place and the prospect of suburban affluence, both themes which should be clear from these sample commercials. Permissive conceptions of the child embraced pleasure as a positive motivation for exploration and learning. The home was being redesigned to accommodate children's impulses and urges. The family was being redirected from a Father-Centered to a Child-Centered model. Fathers were being taught to become tolerant and indulging playmates for their children. Mothers were being instructed to deploy pleasure to get children to do what was expected of them. All of this is wonderfully summed up in this Madison Avenue fable of a mother who sees her pogo-stick-playing children as kangaroos bouncing through her kitchen. A previous generation would certainly have believed that they could, in fact, "change" their family through discipline and regimentation; she's being told, instead, to change her floor wax and otherwise create a space which can tolerate their rambunctiousness. Similarly, consider the ways that Trik-Trak assumes the children will be able to play "all over the house" and that their father will be happy to have their toys racing under his feet even as he reads the evening newspaper. The Dick Tracy radio watch commercial extends the children's play environment from the home into the entire suburban neighborhood, reflecting the freedom of movement experienced by the post-war generation. Sociologists in the early 1970's estimated that suburban boys enjoyed a free range of 1,200 yards while their sisters might travel only 760 yards without adult permission. By the end of the decade, conservative cultural critics, such as Spiro Agnew, will be blaming Spock for the counterculture's anti-authoritarian views, suggesting that anti-war protestors should have been spanked when they were little boys and girls. Later child-rearing experts have rejected "permissiveness" in favor of more "authoritative" models for the relations between children and adults, insisting that adults need to set firmer limits on what happens in their homes. But, in the early 1960's, these commercials were selling permissiveness as much as they were selling particular toys and products. We can see these assumptions at play from a historical distance. But, how are contemporary models of child-rearing impacting the ways children's toys are designed and marketed?
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:36 AM | Permalink
May 12, 2008
From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (Part Two)Friday, I ran the first installment of this two part interview with Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns, who discussed his core thesis about the blurring of the role of consumer and producer in the new cultural economy. Today, he extends this concept of "produsage" to explore its implications for knowledge production, citizenship, and learning, as well as provides us a glimpse into the innovative academic community which has informed his work. What are the implications of the produsage model for understanding how knowledge gets produced and circulated? You clearly are interested in this book in Wikipedia. What core insights can we take from Wikipedia that might be applied to other collaborative enterprises?
Is it appropriate to apply the same concepts to talk about our new roles as consumers/producers of culture and our shifting roles as citizens?
In talking about education, you describe a shift from "literacies" to "capacities." Explain. What kinds of skills are required to become a produser and what steps might schools take to insure access to those skills? Especially in light of what I've said in the political context, education becomes even more crucial. The more central produsage becomes to our society on a cultural, social, and political level, the more do we need to work to close the "participation gap" that you've highlighted in your own work. I see this as a two-step process, which mirrors the two elements that come together to form produsage itself: on the one hand, there's a need for people to become sophisticated users of the tools and content artefacts provided by produsage - they need to understand how these things have come to be, and what they represent (for example, how trustworthy and reliable they are, whose ideas are reflected in them, how they may be utilised, and with what limitations). Your work has very much been informed by the context in which you work. Can you share with us some sense of the intellectual community which has emerged around the Creative Industries group at Queensland University of Technology? What commonalities do you see across your projects? Creative Industries, as I see it, is itself a way to look beyond recognised realms of cultural and creative activity, and to highlight the social as well as commercial impact of creativity well beyond traditional "high culture". I've talked in the context of knowledge and expertise about the way in which produsage and expert communities may join together as the below-water bulk and the above-water tip of the iceberg, and it seems to me, for example, that the work being done at QUT to map the impact of creative industries activity on economy and society follows a very similar logic. What happens at the top end - highly visible commercial and taxpayer-funded cultural production - really couldn't exist without the presence of a much larger, much harder to grasp bulk of everyday grassroots and Pro-Am creative practice. The grassroots sector is the incubator and proving ground for new creative talent and ideas, some of which gradually gain enough visibility to be drawn out into the open and into the creative industries proper - at this grassroots level, there's a strong similarity to what I've described as produsage, then. Dr Axel Bruns (http://produsage.org/) is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). He is a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has also authored Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) and edited Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture which publishes M/C Journal, M/C Reviews, M/C Dialogue, and the M/Cyclopedia of New Media, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. His general research and commentary blog is located at snurb.info , and he also contributes to a research blog on citizen journalism, Gatewatching.org with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink
May 9, 2008
From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (Part One)I have long regarded the Creative Industries folks at Queensland University of Technology to be an important sister program to what we are doing in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Like us, they are pursuing media and cultural studies in the context of a leading technological institution. Like us, they are adopting a cross-disciplinary approach which includes the possibility of productive exchange between the Humanities and the business sector. Like us, they are trying to make sense of the changing media landscape with a particular focus on issues of participatory culture, civic media, media literacy, and collective intelligence. The work which emerges there is distinctive -- reflecting the different cultural and economic context of Australia -- but it complements in many ways what we are producing through our program. I will be traveling to Queensland in June to continue to conversation. Since this blog has launched, I have shared with you the reflections of three people currently or formerly affiliated with the QUT program -- Alan McKee; Jean Burgess Thanks to my ties to the QUT community, I got a chance to read an early draft of Bruns's magisterial new book, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), and I've wanted for some time to be able to introduce this project to my readers. Bruns tackles so many of the topics which I write about on the blog on a regular basis -- his early work dealt extensively on issues of blogging and citizen journalism and he has important observations, here and in the book, about the future of civic media. He has a strong interest in issues of education and citizenship, discussing what we need to do to prepare people to more fully participate within the evolving cultural economy. As his title suggests, he is offering rich and nuanced case studies of many of the core "web 2.0" sites which are transforming how knowledge gets produced and how culture gets generated at the present moment. He has absorbed, engaged with, built upon, and surpassed, in many cases, much of the existing scholarly writing in this space to produce his own original account for the directions our culture is taking. In this interview, you will get a sense of the scope of his vision. In this first installment, he lays out his core concept of "produsage" and explains why we need to adopt new terms to understand this new model of cultural production. In the second part, he will explore its implications for citizenship and learning. So, let's start with the obvious question. What do you mean by produsage? What are its defining traits? Why coin a new and somewhat awkward word to refer to this phenomenon? How does Produsage differ from traditional models of production?
Your analysis emphasizes the value of "unfinished artifacts" and an ongoing production process. Can you point to some examples of where these principles have been consciously applied to the development of cultural goods?
Dr Axel Bruns (http://produsage.org/) is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). He is a Senior Lecturer in the ,a href="http://www.creativeindustries.qut.edu.au/">Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has also authored Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) and edited Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture which publishes M/C Journal, M/C Reviews, M/C Dialogue, and the M/Cyclopedia of New Media, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. His general research and commentary blog is located at snurb.info , and he also contributes to a research blog on citizen journalism, Gatewatching.org with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:32 PM | Permalink
May 8, 2008
Remix: A Contested PracticeWhile we are on the subject of Remix Culture, I wanted to call attention to a contest being run this month by the website, Total Recut, designed to get remix artists of all types reflecting on what remix and fair use means to them. If you don't know Total Recut, you should check it out since it is one stop shopping for a range of diverse and interesting examples of remix video -- examples which run from fan vids to political propaganda and includes both obvious and obscure examples. Here's some of the details of the contest: Create a short video remix that explains what Remix Culture means to you. Using video footage from any source, including Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed work, we want you to produce a creative, educational and entertaining video remix that communicates a clear message to a wide audience. The video is to be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer then 3 minutes in duration. Entries should follow the guidelines on Fair Use issued by The Center for Social Media, guidelines we discussed here a while back. I was proud to be asked to be a judge for this competition, which emerged in part in response to a discussion with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher about the work our Project New Media Literacies has been doing focusing on the ethics and poetics of remix culture as we are supporting the teaching of Appropriation as a cultural competency through our curricular materials. We have, for example, been collaborating with the fine folks at Organization for Transformative Works who are producing videos for our learning library about vidding. And we are developing a whole curriculum around Moby Dick which centers on historic and contemporary examples of remix. So, I am personally very excited at the prospect of this competition leading to the production of new materials which might help students, teachers, parents, and the public learn more about remix, creative commons, fair use, appropriation, and participatory culture. Total Recut has pulled together a truly diverse and interesting group of judges, including Pat Aufderheide (from the Center for Social Media), legal legend Lawrence Lessig, Darknet author J.D. Lasica, fan vidder Luminosity, Documentary filmmaker Kimbrew McLeod, and Negativeland's Mark Hosler. I hope that this range of judges indicates just how open the competition is to a range of different communities who are finding remix an effective mode of creative expression and social commentary. Even if you are not interested in the contest per se, you should check out this resource page which already includes a number of useful materials for explaining why remix matters in contemporary culture.
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:29 AM | Permalink
May 8, 2008
What's Behind 'The Glass'?Over the years, I have often been asked to explain the appeal of slash to people who really don't have a clue what the genre is all about. The topic crops up in class as I am teaching my work on fandom; in conversations with journalists doing the now obligatory fan fiction story; and with strangers who learn what I research and want to know why. I know many other aca-fen face this same question and that a range of different strategies have emerged for talking about it. My approach has been to try to connect them with an iconic moment from the history of fandom, one where the original text clearly expresses issues of desire and affection between two men, and one which historically packs an emotional wallop even for non-fans. I reproduced my basic argument in the essay, "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," which was reproduced in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. This past weekend, I was delighted to learn that the passage in question had inspired a fan vidder, thingswithwings to produce an original work based around the iconography of the glass wall. The Glass does what the best vids do: it not only demonstrates an interpretation of the original work through the manipulation and mobilization of visual evidence; it also makes us "feel" that interpretation from the inside out by tapping the emotional power of that original imagery and upping it a few levels through its juxtaposition through editing and the soundtrack. We've had several discussions here of vidding in the past for those of you who are not familiar with the form. But this is a particularly vivid example of how an idea might move from theory into artistic practice. In the process, the artist has expanded my original insight about Star Trek to show how persistent this image has become across a range of fannish texts. It seems that fans are not the only ones who find the forced isolation of characters as a situation which produces intense longing and which gives physical expression to the emotional bonds between characters. Just wanted to share this particularly interesting example of the flow of ideas within the aca-fan world. Thanks to thingswithwings for giving me permission to share her work with you.
May 5, 2008
Spy StoriesThis is the fifth in a series of "intimate critiques" developed by CMS Masters Students as part of my Media Theory and Methods Proseminar. Here, Xiaochang Li interweaves her reflections on the Spy genre, especially Get Smart and Alias, and her own personal and family history. This distinctly cold war genre is deployed in an effort to understand her own identity as a Chinese-American. (Of course, though this will make sense to few outside our circle, but the most fannish gesture in this essay may be, in Xiaochang's case, the opening reference to Marcel Proust!) Spy Stories Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves. And in the weeks following, as if anticipating my arrival, footage of the Berlin Wall being In those first long rudderless years within an aggressively unfamiliar landscape -- the Rewatching those episodes now, they are fraught with the almost too-obvious appeals But Maxwell's advantage was not in his ability, his comic incompetence, but the very As I got older, the pressures of fitting in drew me further and further into narratives of In fourth grade, a classmate explained to me patiently, "You could never be president On TV, Sydney Bristow embodied a vision of individual agency, and the pleasure of As such, she became too the fantasy of a preservable sense of self, despite the Through her, blending in, passing, became not a denial of history but a tactical and The problem, of course, is this: I am no Sydney Bristow, and I've had more than one The allegory of racial assimilation as espionage a nice fantasy, a neat justification, but it Because in the end, all of this conflicted, contested, treacherous allegory of identity Xiaochang Li Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn. Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.
May 2, 2008
Bitch Ass Darius "Follow The Sound" MixtapeThis is the fourth in a series of "intimate critiques" produced by masters students in my Media Theory and Methods proseminar. Here, Kevin Driscoll walks us through the process by which he learned to hear and appreciate a mix tape which initially challenged him both formally and ideologically. In the process, as a young white male, he confronts some explicit lyrics which force him to re-examine some of his assumptions about race, class and sexuality. This essay may take some readers out of their comfort zone -- and that's part of its point, since he is trying to explain how we renegotiate our senses of ourselves when we encounter forms of expression which do not fit our norms or pre-established tastes.
The CD itself is rather unassuming. Sleeveless, its face bears a name and phone number handwritten in Sharpie. Flip the disc over and you might suspect it is blank. The area pock-marked with data stretches from the center hole to just before the outermost edge. Drop it into a CD player and you'll discover that there are eighty tracks, few of which extend beyond sixty seconds. I met Joe Beuckman in the summer of 2003 when we performed together in a small artspace located inside one of dozens of post-industrial hulks scattered around Allentown, PA. He gave a demonstration about reverse engineering Nintendo cartridges, showed off a vinyl record used to store executable computer instructions, and then scratched that record over Three 6 Mafia's "Sippin' On Some Syrup" while shouting, "I'm scratching data right now!" I introduced myself after the show and he gave me CD-Rs containing the latest mixtapes from two of his DJ alter-egos: Kenny Kingston and Bitch Ass Darius. Kenny Kingston is a lover of early-90s dance music: house, hip-hop, r'n'b, and new jack swing. Bitch Ass Darius plays a mixture of Miami bass, acid house, and pitched-up Detroit techno known occasionally as "ghettotech" or "booty bass". While I found familiarity, comfort, and nostalgia in Kingston's pop-heavy mix, everything about Darius' mix, from the super-fast tempo to the puerile lyrics, felt alien and alienating. Despite (or perhaps because of) my utter inability to relate, I did not discard Follow The Sound but continued to return to it. As I grew more affectionate of the recording, I became more literate in its governing logics. This change happened with the same slow haze that enshrouds the acquisition of any new language. Meaning and distinction emerge from the undifferentiated whole as the gradual process of Platonic recollection plays out. Details pop into relief along the surface of the text that can be used to uncover further information. A snippet of one lyric is found repeated in the title of song on another mixtape. In time, I began to construct a likely tracklisting, to understand the recording and performance technique, to relate with the lyrics, and to imagine and embody the physical movement booty music is designed to accompany and control. This passage from confusion and alienation to conversant literacy and familiarity necessarily involved a confrontation with the uncommon lyrical content of most booty music. In 2003, I (somewhat naively) considered myself anti-racist, a feminist, and self-reflective about my own privileged social status. Gripped by a fear of repeating patterns of domination, I avoided all but the most clearly "safe" heterosexual scenarios. As such, most of my intimate encounters took on a tone of conservative sexual diplomacy and made no room for the absurd, titillating application of domination at play in lyrics like "girl, let me nut on your face / and let me know how good it tastes." By struggling to understand this strange music, I was forced to put my own sexual practices in question. Constructed in the tradition of non-stop DJ mixtapes found in hip-hop, dancehall reggae, house, and techno, Follow The Sound differs significantly from the compilations traded among fans of other musical genres. The mixtapes discussed in this essay are collections of sound recordings gathered from different sources and collaged by an individual DJ using tools for sound manipulation, playback, and recording. While a personal computer can perform all of these tasks, it is common for mixtape DJs to deploy some combination of analog and digital technologies in their production process. Turntables, CD players, analog mixers, samplers, microphones, and tape machines sit alongside personal computers in the mixtape studio. Listeners construct an image of a traditional recording artist by reading the voices, instrumental performances, and deployment of studio technology on a track. It is not possible to locate the mixtape DJ using these signs, however, as few of the tracks feature newly recorded vocal or instrumental performances. Rather, the DJ reveals or obscures her position in the text through strategic sonic interventions, specifically, the selection, sequencing, remixing, and blending of existing tracks, the inclusion of voice-over and/or sound effects, and the improvised (often atypical) application of studio technologies. Though only a handful of the eighty tracks on Follow The Sound feature original production by Bitch Ass Darius, the DJ is nonetheless embodied in the recombinant whole. Using three turntables connected to a mixer, Darius is able to synchronize and layer multiple existing recordings to create a new continuous piece of music. In addition, rather than smoothly blend one track into the next, he calls attention to the seams between various recordings through deployment of conventional DJ transitions: scratching percussive snippets of an incoming track, suddenly turning off the motor of a spinning platter, or manually rewinding an outgoing track while slowly reducing its volume to create an ascending "zip-zip-zip" effect. Drawn from over two decades of electronic dance music, many of the tracks on Follow The Sound share certain formal characteristics that unify the mix and enable imperceptible transitions between existing recordings from different sources. Most of the tracks are in 4/4 time and feature a handclap, snap, or snare drum on beats 2 and 4. They are also synchronized to approximately 150 beats per minute and usually aligned such that the first beat of an incoming track matches the downbeat of the track (or tracks) currently playing. To achieve this synchronization, Bitch Ass Darius uses turntables with variable speed motors to adjust tempo. The use of similar synthesizers, drum machines, and samples among dance music producers further facilitates this process of layering, stacking, and blending tracks. Not all of the songs on Follow The Sound were unfamiliar on my first listen. Track 24 features Michael Jackson's "Rock With You" played atop a sparse acid house track built of a hi-hat, clap, and a synthesized bass line. To match the relatively slow original Jackson recording with the fast tempo established earlier in the mix, the vinyl record designed to be played at 33rpm is "pitched up" by setting the turntable to spin at 45rpm. Although this technique yields the desired tempo, it substantially distorts the pop recording, producing a "chipmunk" vocal effect. Isolated from the rest of Follow The Sound, this disruption would sound uncomfortable to listeners familiar with the original version. In the context of the mix however, this alteration is coherent and consistent with an established logic. An important distinction between Beuckman's Kingston mix and his Darius mix is the nature of the source materials. In the case of Kenny Kingston, many of the original recordings are songs that follow a traditional pop structure. Their composers anticipate that the recordings will be heard from beginning to end as they would on typical pop radio programming. The tracks on Follow The Sound, however, are primarily composed with a DJ in mind. They often feature long repetitious passages to facilitate blending and synchronization. This shift in imagined audience on the part of the tracks' composers indicates an important distinction between the dance music following in the disco tradition and the rest of Western popular music. To understand Follow The Sound, I needed to learn how the logics of disco-derived dance musics contrast with the rest of pop music. The clearest distinction is in the division of labor between the producers of recordings and the DJs who present those recordings to the public. In some dance musics, the marketplace mirrors this separation. Vinyl singles are printed in limited qualities and marketed to DJs who then play the tracks in clubs, on the radio, and on mixtapes for the general audience.[1] Whereas the value system at play in many traditional genres of pop music demand that the application of sound recording apparatus be limited to the creation of accurate representations of historical events [2], dance musics necessarily distinguish a musical recording from a musical performance and treat the construction and assembly of an audio recording as a creative end in itself. Beyond the technical concerns of the recording studio, dance music producers must imagine the audiences and contexts for whom and within which their recordings will be played. While it is not uncommon to hear dance music used as retail ambiance, employed in scoring films, or playing out of car stereos, headphones, and radios, this essay concerns those recordings constructed specifically to be played on a sound system to a group of people in an environment that permits and encourages dancing. To engage with the bodies of an unseen audience is at once a mysterious and an intimate act requiring producers transcend the contrast between a typical music studio and nightclub dancefloor. I have twice referred to disco as the antecedent for the music found on Follow The Sound. I make this connection because disco's core innovations have been carried through several generations of dance music to find themselves echoed in the essential framework of booty bass. In the 1970s, disco producers brought a straightforward drum pattern to the front of the mix by simplifying some of the swing and syncopation of funk, soul, and r'n'b. (The Black and gay roots of disco complicate the arguments of critics who suggest this "simplifying" was also a "whitening".) Typically organized in 4/4 time, disco established the dominance of "four on the floor" drum patterns in which the bass drum is struck on all four downbeats while the snare is played on the second and fourth. Disco singles were also the first records to be pressed onto 12" vinyl, a size typically reserved for full-length albums. This permitted the production of much longer versions of songs and lead the way for the lengthened intro, break, and outro passages in which a song is stripped down to its barest parts. With the availability of these records and their shared "four on the floor" drum pattern, nightclub DJs soon developed an overlapping style of mixing records that maintained a steady rhythm throughout the evening. Thus opened a transit of inspiration, need, innovation, and fulfillment among the producers of musical recordings, DJs, and dancers. To attend to the needs of a live mixing DJ and a dancing audience, disco records vary little in their core rhythmic pattern and tempo. In the 1980s, disco was superseded by house, techno, and bass music in the U.S. and the distinctions between dance music and traditional popular music genres became more clear. Producers of dance music, aware of the DJs future interposition, tend to delay (or altogether deny) the visibility of a central melodic figure in their compositions, upsetting one of pop music's cornerstones: the hook. Pop's verse / chorus structure also gives way to highly repetitive compositions that gradually vary in timbre and instrumentation over the course of a track with no identifiable resolution. These changing production concerns reflect changing expectations and demands on the part of dancing audiences. Whether at a nightclub, a hall, a bar, a gymnasium, or a living room, the dancefloor is a social space that encourages an emphasis on embodiment. Drowned out by loud music, verbal communication gives way on the dancefloor, and the dancer's public performance of identity is centered on the movement of his body. By joining the dancefloor, the dancer has entered into a new trusted relationship with the DJ and the music being played. If the sequence of songs progresses in a sufficiently familiar fashion, he will be able to establish a comfortable sense of himself and his place within the dancing crowd. With subtle shifts, raised tempos, or tonal transitions between each track, the DJ can thus carry this dancer from a familiar sonic space to a fairly alien one without damaging his sense of trust and comfort by causing him to falter or feel otherwise embarrassed. Tempo and timbre can be shifted subtly on the dancefloor without disrupting the dancer's experience of self. The introduction of lyrics, however, requires its own consideration. In a loud nightclub, lyrics, whether in a familiar language or otherwise, necessarily introduce a power imbalance. Dancers have no voice and are thus spoken for by the voices in the recordings selected by the DJ. Since disco distinguished club music from pop, dance musics have struggled with their relationships to lyrics. One role of lyrics in dance music can be to affirm, motivate, and direct dancers. The most didactic example of this type being the square dance caller. Various subgenres and producers take different approaches to the deployment of voice and verbal signs. Some focus on vaguely affirmative lyrics about dancing and partying ("Move your body!"), or positive messages ("I'm feeling so free!"), some opt for looping familiar phrases sampled from rap acapellas or film soundtracks, while others still forgo lyrics altogether to produce strictly instrumental music.[3] Taking its cue from the sex rap found in Miami Bass, booty bass lyrics represent a sophomoric approach to sexuality. They typically feature snippets of schoolyard sex talk repeated ad naseum such as:
During my first listen to Follow The Sound, I recall laughing out of discomfort and surprise at lyrics like, "Big booty bitches / They talk a lot of smack / Bring your ass here / And ride on this dick". I tried to mitigate this discomfort by exoticizing the lyrics and acting as though they were of an alien culture I could no more understand than judge. Yet as I was drawn deeper into the music, through repeated listens and exposure to other DJs, artists, and - most importantly - dancefloors, I had to challenge this uncritical approach. By reading the lyrics literally, I was ignoring their role inside the logic of dance music. If the dancefloor is a place where it is safe to move one's body in unusual ways, perhaps it is also a space where the embodiment of the sex act can be exposed, toyed with, and manipulated. Like sampled drum hits and sped-up Michael Jackson songs, the coherency of booty bass lyrics is threatened by decontextualization. The boundaries are flimsy between the technical and social structures of booty music. For example, the practice of "pitching up" records complicates typical gender performance and sexuality among vocalists. The following lyric is sung in a gender-ambiguous high-pitched voice to a feminized "girl":
Often, the mention of particular sexual organs or gendered slang is the only way to visualize an orator. In several tracks, a call-and-response takes place between supposed male and female voices. For example, on track 19, we hear the following exchange: F: Nigga what's your cheddar like? This preposterous conversation overgrounds the most subterranean inner-dialogue of the sexually-charged dancefloor. It amplifies the basest voice of the dancefloor id. The joy I find in booty bass is not simply the naughty thrill at hearing sex chat but is in the liberating potential of a construction of sonic space in which sexual desire, fetish, and perversion are no longer taboo. The experience of dancing to these tracks in trusted spaces challenged my assumptions about sex and power. By treating sex like a courtroom proceeding and trying to remove all hierarchies from the physical interplay, I was actually maintaining my hegemonic power over the relationship. If there is no space to be be a "freak", to say and do freaky things, then the "safety" I sought has not actually been established. The absurd lyrics by DJ Nasty, DJ Funk, and DJ Assault all revel in these moments of "freakiness" where people willingly submit to themselves and their partners. By exploring these themes and ideas through movement on the dancefloor, I learned to complicate my own understanding of sex and sexual desire.[4] [1] This model is quickly collapsing as the reduced costs of online distribution and digital DJ tools remove the need for pressing vinyl records. [2] Consider on-going controversy surrounding authenticity and the use of pitch-correction software in country music. In 2003, singer Allison Moorer put stickers on her CDs that read, "Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch-correction was used in the making of this record." (www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct03/articles/vocalfixes.htm ) Notably and consistent with a history of creative appropriation, hip-hop producers have recently begun to deploy the maligned "auto-tune" software in unexpected ways. [3] Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is interesting to consider the role of language in the global movement of dance musics. How do verbal samples function differently as they move among communities and changed territories? There is considerable opportunity for an investigation of the materiality of voice, exoticism, and globalization in the ways that various dance musics carry with them vocalizations in Brazilian Portuguese, Puerto Rican Spanish, Jamaican Patois and countless other languages, slanguages, and dialects.
Kevin Driscoll earned his BA in Visual Art from Assumption College in 2002. He joins CMS after three years teaching Computer Science at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, MA. There he explored issues of identity management, media production, literacy, hacking, and hip-hop with the consistently brilliant students in grades 6-12. Inspired by a challenging first year in the classroom, Kevin co-founded a non-profit organization called TeachForward (later re-named Developing Curriculum, Inc.) to encourage the sharing and development of high-quality, free learning materials on the web. In addition to his work in education. Kevin is a frequent collaborator with internet-based artist Claire Chanel and a hip-hop dj responsible for Gold Chain and Todo Mundo events. Check out his blog at
Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:15 AM | Permalink
May 2, 2008
The Further Adventures of The "Henry Jenkins" Cartoon CharacterIn response to my post earlier this week, reader Iain Robert Smith from the University of Nottingham shared with me this "Henry Jenkins" cartoon.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More about Henry Jenkins is available here. 
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