NEW SAVANNA

In Memoriam: William Benzon

2012-01-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

* * * * *

From Dad

by Sally Benzon

William Benzon
(1912 – 1998)

Clinging to light
By weeping tears

Charged with this silence
Only sorrow can receive:

Whispered heights of trees
Sway the breathless memory

Out of nowhere,
From the airs of body

You walk at once alone,
And beside us: Not that we are

Asked by a flock of birds
Who insist on behalf

Of one shy authority,
“Part our days together

To a different branch. Larry, Sally,
Sing to laugh around the world

With me!” Tiding this canopy,
You are the man whose voice outlives

Agreeable disbelief
Into our inhabited green

Hundreds of leaves, golf balls, too
And leaves growing! . . .

Round of arms’ reach
The echo of echoed wings

Reveals the merry chance
Now a sunbeaming glow:

Chimes to sound
The melody of you.

ADD: Drugs Don't Work Long Term

2012-01-29T06:52:00.001-05:00

L. Alan Sroufe has an oped in today's NYTimes on the use of drugs to treat ADD (attention Deficient Disorder) in children: Ritalin Gone Wrong.

Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs.

He suggests that experience may be the cause:

Policy makers are so convinced that children with attention deficits have an organic disease that they have all but called off the search for a comprehensive understanding of the condition. The National Institute of Mental Health finances research aimed largely at physiological and brain components of A.D.D. While there is some research on other treatment approaches, very little is studied regarding the role of experience. Scientists, aware of this orientation, tend to submit only grants aimed at elucidating the biochemistry.

Thus, only one question is asked: are there aspects of brain functioning associated with childhood attention problems? The answer is always yes. Overlooked is the very real possibility that both the brain anomalies and the A.D.D. result from experience.

Here's some informal notes I did some years ago on the experience angle: Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Perspective:

Russell A. Barkley has argued that ADHD is fundamentally a disorientation in time. These notes explore the possibility that music, which requires and supports finely tuned temporal cognition, might play a role in ameliorating ADHD. The discussion ranges across cultural issues (grasshopper vs. ant, lower rate of diagnosis of ADHD among African-Americans), play, distribution of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, neural development, and genes in culture (studies of the distribution of alleles for dopamine receptors). Unfortunately, the literature on ADHD does not allow us to draw strong conclusions. We do not understand what causes ADHD nor do we understand how best to treat the condition. However, in view of the fact that ADHD does involve problems with temporal cognition, and that music does train one’s sense of timing, the use of music therapy as a way of ameliorating ADHD should be investigated. I also advocate conducting epidemiological studies about the relationship between dancing and music in childhood, especially in early childhood, and the incidence of ADHD.

More Fishy Business

2012-01-27T08:50:00.001-05:00

Mark Liberman has a run at Stanley Fish's recent fusillade against digital humanties, which turns on a pair of plosives in a paragraph in Milton's Aeropagetica. Fish makes a big deal out of Milton's p's and b's while Liberman does a statistical analysis of their occurence in the text and concludes that Fish's argument is much ado about nothing.

Which translates rather easily into much ado about Stanley Fish, opportunist extraordinaire. In the spirit of my own brief post from a couples days ago, I made the following comment to Liberman's piece:

It's difficult to know just how seriously to take this little performance, but it's worth setting it in the larger context of Fish's career as a theorist of methodology. Back in the dark and benighted times of the 1970s he wrote some take-downs of linguistic and statistical methods in stylistics which he included in his very influential 1980 collection, Is There A Text in This Class? Elsewhere in that collection he argued his version of the notion that the meanings critics find in texts are the meanings that they themselves put there (as authorised by their local 'interpretive community'). It was his ability to argue that point that put him on the map as a BIG THEORIST.

That, of course, is rather different from the position he's now claiming in this piece, namely that the meaning is put there by the author and that it's the critic's job to find it through arguments that can be right, a good thing, or wrong, not so good. THAT was the mainstream position at mid-20th century; that was the position Fish and others were then deposing.

So perhaps he's changed his mind. Though I note that only a few years ago he was arguing that what critics, such as himself, do is pretty much play around with texts in a way that is unfettered by utility in any way, shape, or form. And that's the glory of it all.

And that DOES seem to be what Fish was doing in his plosives palaver in this piece, playing around.

I note that in one of his excursions in the current piece, Fish argues against one Stephen Ramsay, who "doesn’t want to narrow interpretive possibilities, he wants to multiply them." That is, Ramsey seems to view digital explorations of texts as a means of playing around even more, a comfortable demodernist postconstructive recouperation of post-industrial capitalist technology. So, if Fish is going to position himself against THAT, well, what better position to assume than arguing for truth, justice, and the old intentionalst way?

Fish Argues Against Interpretation Via Digital Humanities

2012-01-24T16:16:00.003-05:00

He's at it again. Fish has another post contra-digital humanities, this time centering on interpretation. Not surprisingly, he's opposed, which is consistent with remarks he made about stylistics, including computational stylistics, in one or two of the essays in Is There A Text in This Class? What IS surprising, given the arguments in that—arguably ancient—book, is his final paragraph:

But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.

When did he revert to the beliefs he so strenuously argued against in that text, the beliefs that made him a Major Theorist?

But, of course, he's allowed to change his beliefs. We all are. For that matter, some of the positions he's arguing against aren't terribly attractive to me, at least as he presents them. But that's neither here nor there.

My major problem is that he's implicitly asserting that digital humanities stands or falls on its service to interpretation. It doesn't. And, heretical though though the idea may seem, interpretation need not be the central activity of literary criticism. We've been too long too greedy after meaning. Understanding how texts work is not at all co-extensive with figuring out, case by case, what this or that text means.

The Conversation Continues: What is Graffiti?

2012-01-17T16:19:00.002-05:00

My meeting with the Semiotics Workshop at the University of Chicago went very well, very well indeed. As you may recall, I was asked to present a paper: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: What is Graffiti? It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in an academic setting. The workshop coordinators, Britta Ingebretson and Chris Bloechl, had distributed my paper to participants ahead of time so: 1) everyone had read it and had a chance to think about it, and 2) I didn’t have to make a formal presentation. Instead, 3) we could devote our time to discussion. To get things started Joseph Weiss made some brief remarks about my paper and then the floor was opened for discussion.

That discussion, as I said, went very well. It continued through dinner afterward. And I’ve continued thinking about issues raised.

What’s a Site?

Britta Ingebretson wanted to know how I determined the boundary of a site, but, as things unfolded, I never got a chance to answer. The question is important because I’ve argued that the site is an important locus for analytical and explanatory attention. The site isn’t simply where the graffiti happens to be, but it somehow plays a contributory role in graffiti culture.

At one level the question is relatively simple, relatively, but not completely. I’ve organized my online photos by site, and I’ve even marked up a Google Earth map with outlines of those sites:

The pushpins indicate buildings (green = my apartment, blue = a high school, red = entrance to/exit from the Holland Tunnel) while the yellow rectangles bound sites. While there are tags on street signs and dumpsters all over, the pieces tend to be within the yellow boundaries. They are not, however, uniformly distributed within the boundaries. The exact distribution varies from site to site. The large rectangular site, HC (Holland Corridor, right of center), however, is a bit different. It is not densely packed with pieces, but pieces are here and there within the boundaries, though many are now gone as the buildings themselves have been demolished.

The long diagonal left of center, BA-EC (Bergen Arches-Erie Cut), has densely packed graffiti in about a half dozen regions, but not continuously. It is close to BR, CT, and YD, which are close to one another as well. However, local geography is such that BA-EC is invisible from the other three; thus I’d been photographing the other three for perhaps a year before I even knew that BA-EC existed. I treated the other three as separate sites because local conditions of access and usage—though all three are on posted land—dictated differences. Thus, CT (The Cut) tracks an active freight line that goes into a tunnel; there’s also a low cliff to one side atop which are vaults in which one finds graffiti. The Yard (YD) has extensive graffiti on support columns for viaducts, but also served as a staging area for construction equipment for about two years or so. That usage both attracted writers to the construction equipment and seemed to discourage them from going over the graffiti on the viaducts.

And so forth and so on, for each of the sites. Each has its own story, a story dictated by local geography on a scale of meters, 10s of meters, and 100s of meters. While these sites vary in size—think of size in terms of square meters of markable surface—by a factor of, say, 100 (I’m guessing) even the smallest has a half dozen or more pieces while the more extensive sites (e.g. BR, BA-EC) have 20-30 or more pieces, plus various tags and throwies.

Now, let’s look at a single wall in that CT site, a wall that I’ve called the Shrine of the Triceratops. This is what I saw the first time I saw that wall:

Here’s a somewhat different shot of the same wall, deliberately staged to create a sense of continuity between the train and the Triceratops:

This is the wall that got me thinking about the notion that graffiti somehow represents the spirit, the kami, of a place. The Triceratops is green, picking up the greenery at the site, while its massiveness participates in old tropes about trains as large animals, iron horses and fire-breathing dragons.

Now, that’s a fairly specific reading of that particular site. That Triceratops was by no means the only graffiti in that general area; and it’s no longer there. The weather degraded it over several years and then it was gone over, by two smaller pieces (L, Kemos; R, Jnub):

More recently, this pirate showed up just around the corner:

Could one think of these are representing the same spirit, the same kami, as the Triceratops? I don’t know. Nor, in the end, do I much care. What we’re looking at, of course, is how things change at a site.

As I said, it took several years for the triceratops to degrade. You can follow that happening in this set of photos, which includes some close-ups, such as this:

What that close-up reveals, of course, is that there was something painted on the wall before the triceratops. What? And for how many layers?

Some of the walls I’ve photographed have remained unchanged, except through weathering, for several years. While others, only yards away, have changed several times in a year. Why? Off hand I can think of several relevant factors: 1) quality of work, 2) accumulated credibility of the writer, 3) location factors such as visibility, accessibility, and use. Some walls were, in effect, protected because they are on property that was used as a staging area for construction work. Writers would tag the construction equipment, but they weren’t about to spend several hours doing a piece on a wall in the middle of that equipment. Tagging is hit and run; piecing is not.

And so, for each of the ‘macro sites’ I’ve outlined in that initial map I could look at each individual wall and develop an index of changeability. The index would have to be a crude one, as I didn’t photograph these sites at regular intervals, but it might make sense to divide individual wall sections into, say, three classes: 1) 0 to 3 changes in five years, 2) 4 to 10 changes in five years, and 3), more than 10 changes in five years. Now I don’t actually know whether or not those are reasonable cut-off points. The thing to do would be to score each and every wall segment and see what the numbers look like.

That would be a tricky thing to do for various reason. First, I didn’t photograph the sites on a regular basis and I tended to photograph only major changes. Second, matching photographs to specific walls and wall sections would be tricky. Given two different pieces of graffiti, photographed at different times (all photos are automatically date-stamped), it’s not, in general, obvious whether or not they are on the same or different wall segments. I made no attempt to work to standards that, for example, I rather imagine would be typical of archaeological fieldwork. I thought of doing that, but the peskiness of in-the-field note-taking worked against just going out and getting the photos at all. Yes, I made field notes once I’d returned from a photographing trip; but making notes while actually in the field would have distracted from actually observing the graffiti and taking the photos.

Now, if I’d been funded and could have afforded to pay an assistant to accompany me into the field . . . . Practically speaking, that’s what it would take to get a handle on how graffiti lives on particular sites. I may well have the most systematic record of particular sites that anyone has attempted. But what I’ve done is, in fact, crude and incomplete. Getting better observations would require funding.

Some Other Questions Raised

At the very end of the Chicago session, when we’d (happily) gone over the allotted time, someone named Eric raised a number of issues that deserve consideration, but not now. As I remember them:

1) Perhaps the illegality of graffiti has changed its ‘valence’ (my word) so that now it’s merely a ‘cost of doing business’ (my phrase) and is otherwise no big deal.

2) What about street art? Do the people doing what’s called street art come from a different demographic and different educational background?

3) ~~Some other specific thing which I forget at the moment, but which may occur to me sometime later~~. While graffiti may be considered a form of protest, it doesn't really offer much of a critique of social arrangements.

Finally, Joseph Weiss ended his prepared remarks by wondering whether or not I was, in fact, pursuing a general theory of graffiti? As the conversation fell out, I never got to respond directly to his remarks in general, nor specifically to this one. However, when he offered that suggestion my immediate, and silent, response was: No, no theory of graffiti. But then I realized that, of course, in some sense, that’s what I was pursuing.

But why? Why my initial denial? And why does graffiti (seem to) require a theory?

Listening is All

2012-01-16T17:15:00.000-05:00

One of the motifs that returns again and again in these “Inside the Actor’s Studio” interviews is listening. Most recently, the interviews with Michael Caine, Meryl Streep, and Juliette Binoch. Listening is all, listening is everything.

The first time I heard that it surprised me. And then became utterly obvious. I am, after all, a musician. To perform music, you must listen to your fellow performers. And it makes no difference whether the performance is more or less fully notated on a score or there is no score at all. In either case you MUST listen to your fellow performers.

For that matter, you must listen to yourself as well. The point of practice and preparation, in a sense, is that that, in performance, you play your instrument, sing, speak, by intending to HEAR something. The muscular stuff is subordinated to what you hear.

Now, I suppose I don’t have anything very specific in mind when I’m wishing that literary critics listen to actors talking about their craft. The thing is, if you take that actor talk seriously you have to accept that there is a deep and subtle process involved in simply speaking the words “as they are written.” And coming to grips with that process, whatever it is, is what we must do as critics.

And it is precisely what WE EVADE when we look for meaning. Whatever actors may think about if and when they think about meaning, they cannot be thinking about THAT when they’re listening to another actor, or actors, and summoning their lines in response to what they’re hearing.

That is, this actor talk is a way to get some sense of a process involved in simply and only speaking the words as they’re written. No hidden meanings required. The only other way to get that sense is to go more deeply into the cognitive sciences than, as far as I can tell, any of the literary cognitivists have been able or willing to go. You have to think, explicitly, formally or almost so, about computational process.

Ideally, both avenues. That is, if I could dictate the ideal undergraduate training for someone who wants to study literature at the graduate level, that training would include both a performance component, e.g. take acting classes and participate in performances (or music), and a deep cognitive science component, where you learn about computational cognition, and perhaps even do a bit of programming. Those two things are, obviously, very different. But someone who has done both has at least a ghost of a chance of understanding that ‘the text’ is something real, and something that we must learn to describe.

The idea is to foster useful intuitions. As things stand now, there are now useful intuitions. Just some version of signs pointing to signs pointing to signs in a godalmightlybuttfuckdaisychain of arbitrary signification. Those intuitions have failed.

Getting back to acting . . . 1) What does it mean to speak preset words immediately and spontaneously in response to someone who is speaking present words to you? 2) Recall that Shakespeare is at the canonical heart of the English-language literary tradition. He didn’t write novels to be read in the comfort of an armchair. He wrote scripts to be performed on the stage by actors he knew, and knew well. 3) What about novels, that aren’t written to be performed? What’s the process there?

As Actors Prepare, so Should Critics Learn

2012-01-15T16:37:00.000-05:00

Every once in awhile I like to listen to a bunch of James Lipton’s interviews with theatre and film people, mostly actors. They’re all over YouTube; just google “Inside the Actors Studio.” I’ve been doing so this weekend.

What I enjoy is the nitty-gritty sense of craft, of what actors do to prepare a role. For example, in this interview, starting at roughly 17:30 or so, Jeremy Irons talks about playing twin brothers in Dead Ringers (a film I’ve not seen):

He says that, in order to differentiate the two, he thought in terms of “energy point” (his term), acting one brother from the forehead and the other from the throat—but, note, that Irons didn’t use those terms. Rather, he pointed to the points on his body. I don’t know whether or not he was using “energy point” as a synonym for “chakra,” but I’d guess the idea is the same. In any event, his remark was immediately and intuitive to me, perhaps because I’m a musician and, as such, understand something of what’s involved in performing.

Whatever you think, however you think, it all MUST come out in how you use your body. Performance is physical. It’s easy enough to talk about embodiment—such talk has been fashionable in a number of disciplines for over a decade—but you can’t merely talk a performance. You must execute it.

More and more I think listening to such interviews could be more important for academic literary critics than learning philosophy or psychology or even literary theory. That’s all abstract, learning it always moves you away from the work, from the text, off into greedy meaning and abstraction. That’s easy and, at this point, it’s in the way of making intellectual progress.

Critics need a much stronger sense of literature as craft, of texts as things constructed, to precise and rigorous, if flexible, standards. Listening to good actors talk about their craft, and figuring out how to take such talk seriously, deeply, that might begin pushing our minds in the right direction.

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral: What is Graffiti?

2011-12-31T08:01:00.001-05:00

I'll be at the University of Chicago next Thursday talking about graffiti in their Semiotics Workshop (details here). The presentation will be informal and is based on a number of slightly revised blog posts. I've written the following introductory remarks to the posts.

* * * * *

Graffiti: Some Parameters

What is graffiti? That’s the question. Well, actually, it’s two questions. One is relatively easy to answer, though the answer is, inevitably, a fuzzy one. The other is difficult to answer, perhaps even, at this time, impossible. Impossible because we may not have the terms in which to state an answer. But perhaps impossible as well because graffiti is still in a state of becoming and, as such, has not yet settled into being some one thing or several delimited things. It’s the second question that interests me, but I can’t get to it until I’ve provided an answer to the first.

Names: Tags, Throwies, Pieces

On the first question, by graffiti I mean an expressive tradition that seems to have started in North Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which spread out from there. It’s now all over the world, with visible stylistic links back to the 1970s graffiti in the Northeastern USofA.

Graffiti’s about the name, the name a person takes when they decide to write graffiti: Taki183, Snake, Dondi, Blade, Seen, to name a few names. The word “graffiti” has been externally imposed, though it’s long been accepted within graffiti culture. Since the form is about the name, the people who do it think of it as writing, and of themselves as writers. They write graffiti. A writer may write under two or more different names, nor is it uncommon for a writer to get up (that is do graffiti on a wall) under the name of another writer in his crew.

The tag is the most basic form of graffiti, but it can, in some hands, take on the grace of a master calligrapher. Tags can be done quickly. Throw-ups or throwies are more elaborate, generally taking the form of block of balloon letters with outline and fill in contrasting colors. They cover more space that tags and take more time to do. Tags can be done in, say, a minute or less; throwies take several minutes. [When you’re avoiding the police, time to execute is important.]

Pieces, aka masterpieces, are the most elaborate of the basic graffiti forms. A piece is likely five or six feet high, maybe eight or ten, and can be 15 to 20 feet wide. The design of a piece may be worked out beforehand in a black book. Pieces may be multi-colored and may feature various kinds of representational art. If executed in so-called wild style the name may be so distorted and elaborated as to be unreadable.

But What IS it?

When Norman Mailer wrote his 1974 essay, “The Faith of Graffiti,” he declared it to be art, perhaps the first to do so. But many New Yorkers – most? – thought it was vandalism. After all, it was illegally done. So, is it art or vandalism?

They aren’t exclusive categories. Remember, however, that those original graffiti writers did not come up in the world of art schools, galleries, and museums. They operated outside of it. And getting away with vandalism was important to them. It still is. That is, the illegal nature of the work is not an incidental fact of its production. Even those among the very small number of writers who make a living working with design firms will still keep up their street cred by doing illegals.

A taq sprayed on a moveable board is just a tag. But it earns the writer no street cred. A tag on the back of a stop sign, or on the side of a water tower, that tag is illegal and earns points. It doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it’s identifiably the tag of a named writer: Ceaze, Tdee, KH1, Sol, Werds, to a name a few that have gotten up in my neck of the woods. Aesthetics counts, but just where and why and how much, that’s tricky.

Then we have a remark by Susan Farrell, who started perhaps the oldest graffiti site on the web, Art Crimes. She said, in an email a few years ago, that graffiti is a cross between art and extreme sport. One earns credit by getting up in places that are both highly visible and difficult to reach, on the upper parts of buildings and towers. Some writers have been known to use climbing gear to a gain access.

And then we have the standard advice on how to photograph graffiti (which you can find here and there on the web). Photograph it straight on, with no fancy angles. You can include some context if you wish, but the emphasis is always on the graffiti itself. Sounds sensible enough, no?

Well, not quite. A lot of graffiti is quite large and you may come onto it at odd angles. If you can get close to it, you probably will, at which point you can no longer see the whole thing. You may even all but put your nose on the wall examining a particular detail. In any event, you get close enough to see the grain in the concrete, or brick, or wood, whatever the surface may be. The way you look at it at different scales, that’s important. That’s how you take it in.

The standard advice ignores that. The standard advice, in effect, instructs you to pretend that graffiti is just like easel-painted art, except outdoors. And so that’s how you photograph it.

Through several years of photographing the same walls month after month, in different kinds of light, and at different seasons of the year, I’ve come to think of the site as itself and important locus of graffiti activity, perhaps THE most important locus. Thus I see it as a kind of ‘back door’ environmental art that changes constantly. The standard photographic advice simply makes that invisible, as do the usual accounts.

All of this taken together suggest to me that it is at least unwise, if not an outright mistake, to think of graffiti is some species of art that just happens to be on walls. It doesn’t just happen to be on those walls, and that the fact of it’s so being makes it illegal has far-reaching consequences, some of which I bring up in the notes that follow this introduction.

Finally, I note that photography has become integral to graffiti culture. Because much of the work is illegal, and almost all of it is outdoors, it is also ephemeral. It is either ‘buffed’ by the authorities, gone over by other writers, or simply degrades in the weather. So, photographs are important in documenting graffiti. Writers will photograph their own work, but there are also many photographers with a specific interest in graffiti (like me). And these photographs find their way onto the web in various photo-sharing sites, some general and some specific to graffiti.

The Rest of this Paper

consists of lightly revised posts from my blog. As such it is informal in tone and lacking in scholarly apparatus. It is also exploratory in nature. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, not reporting closely argued conclusions. I note that while writing these posts, which are recent, I’ve been under the influence of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennet (Vibrant Matter) and so have been seeing how it feels to think of the graffiti site as an agent, or actant (Latour’s term), in graffiti culture. I did a series of blog posts on Latour’s Reassembling the Social where I used graffiti as a touchstone example.

These are the posts I'll be working from:

Graffiti Hit the Reset Button on Culture

Graffiti and the Site: What's to be explained, anyhow?

The Spirit of the Site: Linked Poetry and Mu'en

Tossing Paint Binds the World, or, Green Chapel in Jersey City

Photographing Graffiti

The Paradox of Graffiti and Photos

The Peregrinations of Agency vis-à-vis the Text

2011-12-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

Back in the ancient days of the 1950s the intentional fallacy was invoked to separate the text from the author, indeed, it was invoked to separate any work of art from its creator. Agency was thus invested solely in the text itself, the autonomous text. It was the critic’s job to interrogate the text and thus discern its meaning.

As a practical matter, it turned out that texts spoke differently to different critics. For some this was evidence of the richness of texts, that they should support so many meanings. For others it was a problem.

The problem tried out various solutions. One line of thinking restored authorial intention, subordinating textual meaning to that intention, thus locating agency in the author. Another line of thinking killed the author and located meaning in codes variously linked to social structure or to the unconscious. Agency was thus denied to author, reader, and text and invested in those codes and the nebulous structures placing them on offer. Yet another line of thinking located agency in the reader.

So: text, author, codes, reader. What else could there be?

Now the speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists are investing the text with agency—see, for example, this Twitter lecture by Eileen Joy and this commentary by Levi Bryant. Is this but a return to an old position albeit encased in new terminology? Or will something new emerge?

Who knows? I note that Bryant ends by suggesting that we “allow the work of art to transform how we sense”—a old idea, tried and true: make it new.

I further note that Joy begins by asking: “First, what happens when we consider that literary characters are not human beings, but more like mathematical compressions of the human?” Indeed, literary characters ARE NOT human beings. Could we perhaps arrive at some understanding of just how they are “mathematical compressions” and of how we understand such compressions?

OOO is Very Abstract, but so is KR

2011-12-20T16:17:00.000-05:00

Over the past several months I’ve been reading around in object-oriented ontology (OOO)—I’m currently reading an interview with Levi Bryant—and I note that it’s a very abstract way of dealing with the world. Here, for example, is a passage from that Bryant interview:

Is use the term “withdrawal” in a somewhat different sense than Harman. For Harman, withdrawal means that objects are independent of all their relations such that they never touch or relate to one another. For me, by contrast, objects are capable of relating, but are also external to the relations in the sense that they can break with current relations and enter into new relations. With Harman I thus hold that objects are independent in the sense that they are not constituted by their relations, while contrary to Harman I hold that objects can enter into relations with other objects. For me, withdrawal thus means two things. On the one hand, withdrawal refers to the virtual dimension of objects. The virtual dimension of objects or their powers is forever withdrawn from other objects. Not only do objects have all sorts of powers that may or may not ever lead to manifestations or actualizations (a person might never get a tan because they live their entire life locked in a dungeon), but also powers as such are never themselves manifested. That is, the qualities an object manifests never resemble the powers that it possesses.

It’s all about JUST objects and relations, and powers, and qualities too. Very abstract.

There’s nothing surprising about that. That’s how philosophy tends to be. And I knew that going in.

What strikes me, however, is that this level of abstraction feels akin to knowledge representation (KR), the discipline in cognitive science and artificial intelligence about representing human knowledge in computational form. KR has many specific formalisms, but one can think of them as being about objects and relations, powers and qualities. If you’re building an expert system for medical diagnosis, well, what objects, relations, powers, and qualities do you need to have in your system in order to represent some body of medical diagnostics? If you want to be able to recognize stories about going into food establishments and ordering a meal, what objects, relations, powers, and qualities do you need to have in your system in order to do that? So, the study of KR is the study of how to deploy objects, relations, powers, and qualities in representing bodies of knowledge.

There are differences, obviously. KR will, at some point, involve formalized expressions of some kind—often based in set theory and predicate calculus—and may also involve diagrams. OOO seems not to involve those things at all, though there are the beginnings of such in Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object, with its Greimasian diagrams and ontographical notation.

I mean, I’m almost tempted to develop a graphical language to represent some of Harman’s notions. For example (pp. 115-116):

First, the location of sensual objects cannot be inside the mind, since both the mind and its sensual objects are located on the interior of a more encompassing object. If I perceive a tree, this sensual object and I do not meet up inside my mind, and for a simple reason: my mind and its object are two equal partners in the intention, and the unifying term must contain both. The mind cannot serve as both part and whole simultaneously. Instead, both the mind and its object are encompassed by something larger: namely, both exist inside the object formed through the relation between me and the real tree, which may be rather different from the trees found in everyday life.

The exercise would be to come up with a graphical notion that depicts four things, the real tree, the sensual tree, the mind, and the ‘something larger,’ AND their appropriate relations. That’s not going to be a very complicated diagram. The trick, of course, is to come up with diagrammatic conventions that will perspicuously handle a lot of situations.

And THAT’s what KR is about, coming up with such schemes.

Another thing, OOO is about the world in the deepest sense. It’s metaphysics. KR is, well, just what it is IS a bit tricky. For some investigators it’s about how the mind packages knowledge, and that is very different from being about the world as it makes no claim about ultimate reality. But lots of KR is done by folks who just want to set up a working computer system. There’s no explicit claim about how the world deeply is, nor even about how the mind represents it to be; there’s just the claim that this computer system will handle some circumscribed class of knowledge-based tasks, like medical diagnosis, ordering a meal, or, more recently, competing at Jeopardy.

Metaphysics and Jeopardy are very different games. But underneath, or is it above? each is a kind of chess. You’ve got a limited number of pieces, each with highly circumscribed moves, and you’ve got to cover the waterfront only with them.

Russell Hoban: Disappearances

2011-12-20T13:32:00.000-05:00

Was the late Russell Hoban an object-oriented ontologist? How's this sound?

More and more I find life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

H/t Michael Sporn.

Alenka Pinterič

2011-12-19T16:21:00.000-05:00

Nina Paley’s started background research for her Exodus project (aka Seder-Masochism). One aspect of her research has been to immerse herself in recordings of the theme song from Exodus, a hit movie from 1960 about a shipload of Holocaust survivors after World War II. The theme song became a hit in an instrumental version by duo-pianists Ferrante and Teicher and was covered in many other instrumental versions. Pop star Pat Boone wrote lyrics and vocal versions multiplied like rabbits, many of which are available on YouTube.

Paley singled out one version for special mention on her Facebook page, a version by one Alenka Pinterič, which she introduced with this sentence: “But I just came across this one, which is...special. Like, Trolololo special. It has viral potential.” That reads like Paley had her tongue in her cheek. And when you hear it, well . . . . The thing is, a day later she reposted that same version, remarking that it “is the only version of "Exodus" that gets BETTER every time you play it.” No tongue in cheek. In comments she says: “What makes it great is her palpable joy and confidence.” She’s right. I’m not sure that “great” is the word, but “palpable joy and confidence,” yes. Here it is:

And this is just one of hundreds of karaoke performances Ms. Pinterič has placed online. I’ve listened to, say, 10 to 20 of them, and don’t know quite to make of them, or of her.

Some are better than others, which is true for all artists. Her version of "Help" (the Beatles tune) was pretty bad, but she did much better on "Georgia on My Mind" (Ray Charles arrangement) than I'd have expected. When she sings "Boom Boom," well, her accent’s off; but she does get into it. There’s something that’s quite convincing about these performances, way more convincing that, for example, Pat Boone’s covers of Little Richard songs. If Pat Boone had an inner Little Richard, he certainly didn’t let on. But Pinterič does seem to have an inner Ray Charles and an inner John Lee Hooker, and she’s giving them access to her voice.

She's got sincerity to burn, a sentimental streak, and questionable judgment about what material works for her. She's obviously been at it for awhile and she's got some chops. But she's obviously enjoying whatever she's singing and she’s got resources of emotional expressiveness that many, most? singers do not have or, at any rate, do not use.

She’s got an IMDb entry that says she was born in 1948 in Maribor, Slovenia, and she’s got a Facebook page that indicates that she currently lives in Maribor. A little googling turned up this duet she does with one Helena Blagne, whom I presume is Slovenian as well:

Taken together with her IMDb entry, sketchy though it is, this suggest that Pinteričs is an entertainer of some significance in Slovenia.

How many Alenka Pinteričs are there in the world, and on YouTube?

Community Bands in America

2011-12-18T10:06:00.000-05:00

In 19th century America, the community band was at the center of community life. Here's a documentary about them:

Meet The Band, a Hindsight Media production, is a one-hour documentary tracing the history of community bands n the United States. We profile four very different bands from around the country and takes us through the American Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th century.

New coinage: "Assholocracy"

2011-12-14T15:14:00.000-05:00

Over at Language Log Geoffrey Pullum is arguing for "assholocracy" as a new addition to the English language. Donald Trump is his favored instance of the assholocrat, but examples are legion:

The whole Arab Spring has been a process of bringing down assholocracies. Italy suffered under one until recently. Russia and Syria are now protesting against their own crooked assholocracies, and the only reason North Korea and Zimbabwe don't do the same is that they daren't, they could be killed. We in the West are going to need a term for being ruled by assholocrats, because they continue to threaten to exercise power over huge parts of the earth's population even if not (yet) over us.

Vines

2011-12-14T11:37:00.000-05:00

Tank Tankoro, by Gajo Sakamoto

2011-12-12T12:11:00.000-05:00

Gaja Sakamoto. Tank Tankuro: Prewar Works, 1934-45. Presspop, Inc. 2011.

I was browsing in Jim Hanley’s Universe* a few weeks ago and saw a handsomely slipcased volume by someone I’d never heard of, Gajo Sakamoto, about a character I’d never heard of, Tank Tankoro. That I’d never heard of either means nothing, of course. The fine print on the label pasted to the cellophane wrapper indicated that this Tankoro character was “the preeminent robot superhero manga from pre-WWII Japan” and that it had somehow gotten lost even in Japan and wasn’t rediscovered there until the 1970s, at which point it was republished to much joy and acclaim.

A very convincing sales pitch and, as I said, the slipcasing was very handsome. But I didn’t buy that first time. But two weeks later . . . then I bought. I ripped off the cellophane wrapper, took the book out of its case and started leafing though. Good paper, high quality printing, I thought, and funny.

I leafed through to page 73 and noticed a bunch of guys and a canon, but no ammunition. I turned the page and saw a nice two-page spread (74-75), in four color printing (the earlier pages had been only black and red). On the right-hand page some guy had a basket stacked high with octopi while on the left-hand the guys with the canon were wondering “What’ll we do with them?”

Of course, I new exactly what they were going to do with them, and started chuckling at the notion of using octopi as canon balls (while also thinking that that wasn’t too kind to the octopi). And, yep! that’s what happened on pages 76 and 77. And then 78 and 79 formed another two page spread, which you can see on the web, here (page 78) and here (page 79). The octopi formed a chain stretching from Tankuro up there in the air down to the guys on the ground, who were trying to reel him in: “It’s like beach net fishing.”

What an utterly absurd and wonderful conception. Of course, it didn’t work. Tankuro freed himself, because he’s the hero. I was hooked.

The series was originally published in 1934 and seems mostly about war between unnamed combatants, though at the time Japan was fighting in Manchuria. Tank Tankuro and his monkey sidekick, Key-Ko, are on one side and Kuro-Kabuto and his troops are on the other side. But that doesn’t happen until after the octopi incident. Before that Tank just went up against this or that villain.

The drawing is vigorous, forceful, and simple in a way that leads you think, oh, I could do that. You couldn’t, of course. But kids reading it could and probably did think that and were not likely bothered by the difference between their imitations and Sakamoto’s original.

The story is episodic and more than a little surreal, as the octopi incident indicates. It’s worth noting that the octopus is a well-established motif in Japanese art, as well as in Japanese cuisine. So, in introducing octopi into his manga in this way Sakamoto was using a motif that had well-established meanings for his audience. But not, I suspect, as live feed canon fodder.

Then there’s Tank himself. As Sakamoto tells the story (in an essay appended to the volume) he’d been working on a strip that doesn’t seem to have been getting much response (p. ii):

The serial was a samurai story, but one day, there came a time when I had to strike out in a new direction. After much consideration, I came up with my very own superhero character. I decided to put a human inside an iron ball and make him act in amazing and unheard of ways.

Which Tankuro does. In an introductory historical essay Shunsuke Nakazawa points out (p. xiv):

Almost all other protagonists in pre-war manga were personified animals or pure human beings. These characters had a basically good nature, and could be a role model for their child readers. Tankuro was not as simple. I goes unexplained whether he was a robot, a super strong human being, or anything besides that. No one could fully explain his identity. He was not as safe and friendly as other peaceful and tamed characters of the time.

So, we have a character that’s drawn as a samurai in an iron ball and who functions as a trickster-like demi-urge, a being at once natural and mechanical who’s at home on land, in the air, on and even under water.

That’s what makes Tank Tankuro an important character in manga history, his indeterminacy. In that respect he’s more like Tezuka’s Michy, in Metropolis, than like the Mighty Atom (aka Astroboy). The Mighty Atom was quite clearly an electromechanical construction, but Michy was fashioned of synthetic cells and so straddled the distinction between organic and mechanical, as does Tankuro. It’s out of this indeterminacy that all those fantastical mange and anime creatures will grow in the post-war years.

* * * * *

*A major comics store in Manhattan.

Another one of those shots where the sun burns a whole in the fabric of reality

2011-12-09T13:34:00.000-05:00

David Graeber: Anarchism, Debt, and Militarism

2011-12-09T13:18:00.001-05:00

The White Review has a far-ranging interview with David Graeber, economic anthropologist and OWS theorist. Here he talks about how US overseas military arrangements and foreign debt amount to empire under a different set of names (paragraphing mine):

Since 1972 when Nixon went off the gold standard, the world reserve currency has been the US dollar, but what ultimately backs the US dollar? People say nothing, it’s ‘fiat money’ but I don’t think this is true. It’s a credit system based on the circulation of debt.

Of course the US has the enormous advantage of being able to write checks that are never actually cashed: US treasury bonds have become the basic reserve currency for the central banks and as Michael Hudson originally pointed out, most of these American treasury bonds are never really cashed in. They’re rolled over year after year to buy new ones, and these holders are taking a loss on them as they pay interest lower than inflation. So why are they doing that?

Well, if you look at the size of US deficit it corresponds almost exactly to the real saw [sic] military budget. If you look at graphs showing the growth of the US deficit, and the percentage of it held overseas, and the US military spending—basically, you see almost exactly the same curve. So basically, foreign governments and institutional lenders are buying US treasury bonds and paying for this enormous military spending.

So, who are the guys doing it? Well during the cold war it was especially West Germany, now, apart from China, the most important are places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Gulf states. What do these states have in common? They’re all covered in US military bases, or under US military protection. The US is borrowing the money to create these military bases from the very countries that the US military is sitting on top of.

In the past, such arrangements were called ‘empires’ and the money sent over was referred to as ‘tribute.’ Now apparently your not allowed to use that language, so it’s called a ‘loan.’ Nonetheless, that link between the military and the core of the financial system remains, it’s the thing we’re not supposed to think about.

Here's a nice review of Graeber's book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by Daniel Little. From the review:

He pulls out "materialism" as a thread in the philosophical systems that emerged in the Axial Age -- China as well as Greece -- and suggests an analogy between the idea of an abstract fundamental physical substance that is the substrate of everything physical, and the idea of an abstract unit of measure of all commodities, money (245); but it's hard to see a consistent and compelling idea here about the intertwining development of philosophy and economics. Here is the closest he comes to a statement of the nature of the connection he finds:
What we see then is a strange kind of back-and-forth, attack and riposte, whereby the market, the state, war, and religion all continually separate and merge with one another. (248)
Where does it all lead? After a walk through the Middle Ages (major improvement in quality of life over the Axial Age, according to Graeber), we get to capitalism:
Starting from our baseline date of 1700, then, what we see at the dawn of modern capitalism is a gigantic financial apparatus of credit and debt that operates -- in practical effect -- to pump more and more labor out of just about everyone with whom it comes into contact, and as a result produces an endlessly expanding volume of material goods. (346)

What’s an Object, Metaphysically Speaking?

2011-12-08T11:57:00.000-05:00

When I first got interested in object-oriented ontology (OOO) I wondered just what qualified as an object, metaphysically speaking. I suppose the question was particularly acute because, at that time, I was reading Tim Morton’s early thinking on hyperobjects, which presupposed ordinary metaphysical objects and seemed to extend it in some (possibly strange) way to some special class of objects, objects, Tim, said, that were massively distributed in space and time. Such as global climate change. What’s to be gained, I wondered, by saying that climate change is an object, as opposed, say, to a process?

And that question—what IS an object?—was still very much on my mind at the OOO meetings in New York City in mid-September. A brief exchange between Graham Harman and Levi Bryant clarified that at bit. I forget just what they were talking about, but they decided tnat, no, it wasn’t an object, it was a set, an arbitrary collection of objects. So, (metaphysical) objects are one thing, sets another. We’re getting somewhere.

Then I discovered, perhaps in reading The Quadruple Object (which I’m still studying, it’s a dense little book) that imaginary objects are as much under consideration as, well, real objects. Except, you see, that imaginary objects are real objects, don’t you see? but not real in the way that real objects are. Now, of course, that’s not what Harman says, nor is it quite what I was thinking or am now thinking, but it’s a useful index of potential confusion.

What I was looking for was some special definition of what constitutes and object. And there isn’t one. Objects are in opposition to relations, and there’s this story about a hammer, or an orange or a tree, whatever, that’s always withdrawing itself from us and from other objects: “. . . an object is anything that has a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces” (Quadruple, p. 116).

OK. So, is a shadow an object? Here’s a photograph of a shadow:

It’s perhaps unnecessarily complex for this purpose, but it will have to do.

The shadow is of a rail fence as it is cast on a field of grasses and wildflowers. The bottom rail is clearly visible about a third of the way up from the bottom. The top rail is above the middle but it tends to get lost in the darker green of the remaining leafage on the tops of the plants.

As far as I can tell, this shadow, and any other shadow, fails the autonomy requirement. Shadows exist ONLY in context. If you eliminate either the light source (or sources), the occluding object (or objects), or the receptive surface (or surfaces), and there is no shadow. Thus shadows aren’t objects. But they can nonetheless give rise to sensual objects, an example of which is captured in that photo, and I’ve got other photos of that shadow, other sensual objects. That shadow is as perceptible as any of the many plants on which it is projected.

So, a shadow is something that isn’t itself an object, a real object, but gives rise to sensual objects. Imaginary objects give rise to sensual objects too. But what sort of thing is a shadow that it has effects in the world like those of, well, real objects and imaginary objects?

I don’t know what kind of question this is in the context of object-oriented ontology. I don’t know how to resolve it or to weigh it. But it’s not shadows that I’m concerned about. It’s those imaginary objects, some of which are more or less like real objects, except that they’re imaginary, some of which are completely fantastic and only like real objects in this or that property or component, and some of which may even have been thought to be real but have now turned out to be only imaginary (dragons? phlogiston?). As far as I can tell, the imaginary objects of which we know require the support of human culture (though I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some animals experience imaginary objects) and human culture, conceptually, is a mess.

What worries me is that human culture may well rest on vast assemblages of things that exist and dissolve like shadows. To the extent that that is so—and I’ve certainly not demonstrated it—I’m not sure what object-oriented ontology is going to have to say about it. The physical set-up that gives us the shadow of a rail fence on a field is much like the physical set-up that gives us the image of Wily Coyote going over a cliff and hanging suspended in the air for a moment until he looks down and then, zip! he falls. Instead of the field we have a motion picture screen; instead of the sun we have the projector bulb; and instead of the occluding fence we have the film strip rushing through the gate. Eliminate any one of those and zip! no more Wily Coyote over the cliff.

There are other ways to cut that, but I’m not sure where any of them lead. What I’m wondering is whether or not, in claiming to talk about things like Wily Coyote as easily as it talks about hammers and tsunamis, whether object-oriented ontology isn’t claiming the prize before having run the race. The funny thing is, perhaps OOO in fact deserves that prize. But I’d like to see how it runs the race.

A Look Around a Tree

2011-12-05T15:52:00.000-05:00

Underbelly Links

2011-12-05T15:35:00.000-05:00

Jasper Rees was the journalist tasked with breaking The Underbelly Project in The New York Times and The Times of London. Now he tells the tale of going down there to get the story, The Underbelly Project: New York:

My pulse starts to race. This kind of excitement is not normally available to arts journalists (the PRs see to that). The surface underfoot suddenly turns rough and damp. My hand-torch – we’ve got two between four – picks out puddles among the loose cement. We clamber over various obstacles – details of what and how withheld – until we are in an empty space. In the dark, lit by our torches, it’s more like a concrete cave. I get the impression that pretty much nobody has been down here in decades.

Juxtapose Magazine goes to The Underbelly Project @ Art Basel Miami 2011.

Jeff Stark set a table for two in the Underbelly project in November 2011, and left the table behind. Now he sets a table in an abandoned marine park in Miami as part of the Underbelly festivities at Art Basel.

Conference on Psycho-Ontology

2011-12-05T14:29:00.001-05:00

There’s a conference on that topic at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem on 11-15 December of this year, with David Chalmers, Steven Pinker, Lera Bofoditsky and Jesse Prinz headlining. Here’s how the conference bills itself:

Do the operations of the human mind have something to teach us about the fundamental structure of reality? Philosophers such as Hume, Kant, James, Bergson, Husserl, Kuhn, and Goodman have, in different ways, seemed to believe this question should be answered in the affirmative. Yet as disciplines, cognitive science and metaphysics are usually conducted without reference to one another.

“Psycho-ontology” can be defined as the investigation of the relationship between human cognition and features of reality: We do psycho-ontology when we study the way perception, thought, and emotion play a role in helping constitute the world we inhabit. But psycho-ontology can also move in the opposite direction: It can involve studying the fundamental features of reality in order to gain insight into how human cognitive processes work.

It’s a subject of some interest to me, what with my long-standing interest in psychology of ontological cognition.

However, in looking over the program a bit, I suspect it may miss the point as far as object-oriented ontology (OOO) is concerned. The blurb for Chalmers gives it away: “What is the minimal vocabulary that Laplace's demon would need in order to know all truths about the world?” That’s not what OOO is about nor is it quite what I’m about. For my part, I fear that the notion of a fixed vocabulary is somehow adequate to all truths is somewhere between deeply problematic and hopeless one. But the broader point is simply that Chalmers seems concerned about enumerating the kinds of things in the world, which is what ontology seems to mean for this conference.

Harman calls that the Taxonomic Fallacy (The Quadruple Object, pp. 119-120):

The difference between people and minerals is vast indeed, but so is that between stars and black holes, or hunter-gatherers and string theorists. The point is to avoid the Taxonomic Fallacy of assuming that basic ontological divides can be identified with specific kinds of entities.

Instead, the basic rift in the cosmos lies between objects and relations in general: between their autonomous reality outside all relation, and their caricatured form in the sensual life of other objects. Whatever the special features of plants, fungi, animals, and humans may be, they are simply complex forms of the gap between objects and relations, just as heavier chemical elements arise from hydrogen and helium.

Finally, I take note of two of the ten areas of investigation posited for the conference:

2. Is the philosophical study of metaphysics actually the study of the nature of human cognition? Can metaphysics be conducted as a discipline independent of engaging with human psychology?

On that first question, I’ve made such a suggestion about Plato in an essay review on two books on cultural evolution (PDF). As for this are of inquiry:

10. To what extent is naturalism committed to a sharp separation between ontology and psychology?

What happens if we drop naturalism?

How Many Tables?

2011-12-01T09:30:00.002-05:00

Graham Harman has a recent post in which he wonders about tables:

Because of something I had to write I was going over A.S. Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (or over the Introduction, anyway, which was the relevant part for my purposes). This Introduction is famous for its discussion of the “two tables”: the scientific table that is mostly empty space and made up of rushing subatomic particles, and the table of everyday life (which Eddington confusingly names the “substantial” table, but never mind that).

I find that I have no sympathy for either of those two tables. The real table is the third table that is neither scientific nor everyday.

Under Eddington’s schema, both tables are dissolved into nearby sets of relations– either into their tiny little components detectable by the sciences, or into their effects on humans.

I’ve not read Eddington’s introduction, but only the single page that shows up in the Google Books preview. But that leads me to suspect that the situation is worse the Harman’s suggested.

The scientific table seems to be the quantum-mechanical table of sub-atomic charged particles, where those particle are not little itty bitty grains of sand, but even smaller; they’re something else. I suspect that Eddington’s “substantial” table is a conflation of all those various appearances (sensual objects in Harman’s terminology) the table presents to human perception and action with the classical table as defined in various respects by Descartes, Gallileo and Newton. It's the table of classical mechanics. If we count all those appearances as one table, that gives us three tables, two scientific tables (quantum and classical) and one everyday table (appearances). Harman’s real table is a fourth. It, presumably, is what holds those other tables together or, if you will, it is what spawns them.

Introduction: Fantasia and Me

2011-11-30T11:38:00.001-05:00

You can download a PDF of my Fantasia commentary here. For all most posts on the Pastoral episode, go here.

I grew up watching Fantasia episodes on Disney’s TV program and I saw it in theatrical release in 1969. It fascinated me as a child but as a young adult, eh, it’s not all that. Then I picked up a DVD in August 2003 in connection with a now-abandoned book project: WHAM! I was stunned.

I saw the film itself, yes, but though it I also saw the cumulated techniques of 3000 years of art history, Western and Eastern, and a large swath of the cosmos and of life on Earth. So I wrote a longish email about it, and more generally about cartoons and animation, to my colleague, Tim Perper. Tim had become interested in manga and anime so I figured he’d have some observations even if Disney and Fantasia didn’t particularly interest him.

I was right, Tim had things to say. He also got me interested in manga and anime, which have been a major part of my intellectual life since then. It’s been mostly the Japanese stuff, but I’ve also looked into some classic America cartoons, Winsor McCay, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz, and classic Disney, Fantasia above all.

In August of 2006 a made a post at The Valve in which I argued that Fantasia was one of the great works of the 20th century. Back then the claim struck me as rather outrageous. Now that I’ve gotten used to it, it still seems true, sorta’, but also beside the point—to which I’ll return in a moment.

When I made that post I didn’t intend to devote posts to each episodes. As a result of an email exchange with Michael Barrier I wrote a piece on Dance of the Hours in 2007 and that, I figured, was that. It wasn’t until the Spring of 2010 that I decided I might work my way through the entire film, starting with The Nutcracker Suite and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’ve now written about every episode, including the intermission. I’ve also written a concluding piece in which I examine episode order, arguing that the episodes on an increasing range of mental faculties until, say, Dance of the Hours, at which point the episodes begin asking: Just what does it mean to be human?

As for Fantasia being one of the great works of the the 20th century, you can read my argument on that, and the rest of my commentaries as well. But I do wonder what the greatness game is about. In January of 2010 Frederick Turner argued that Hayao Miyazaki is the world’s best living filmmaker, a judgment I’m not prepared to contradict. Miyazaki, of course, is working in the same medium that Disney did, animation, though his work is quite different.

But the greatness game is not simply or even primarily a game played by individual critics offering up judgments. It’s an institutional game. While Disney had his successes and his fame, including honorary degrees, and certainly his fortune, we have no institution that endorses the greatness of his animation, nor, as far as I can tell, is Miyazaki’s greatness endorsed by any institution—John Lassiter’s enthusiasm not withstanding. The institutions that underwrite greatness are not interested in animation and I’m afraid that neither my enthusiasm, nor Fred Turner’s, is going to change that.

The question, it seems to me, is this: Is Disney’s finest work, and Miyazaki’s, along with much other work—is this work destined to sing into the past without leaving a trace or, on the contrary, will it turn out to be the foundations of new institutions in new worlds that are, at best, only now hinted at? Only time will tell.

* * * * *

This document contains thirteen blog posts beyond this introduction. The first is that first essay in which I argue that Fantasia is a masterwork. Then there’s an short piece in which I discuss Disney’s framing device, the Deems Taylor introductions, which I wrote rather late in the series. After that comes the essays devoted to individual episodes, including the intermission. That is not, however, the order in which I wrote them. They vary considerably in length and approach.

The piece on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is the last one of those that I wrote, and one of the longest. In fact, I ended up writing a half dozen posts about that one episode. While it would have been easy enough to include all of them in this document, it seemed to me that that would place too much emphasis on that one episode. Yes, it can support that much commentary, but then so can the other episodes. I just don’t have the time to write it. Instead, I’ve gathered all the posts on that one episodes into a separate PDF. I’ve only included the first of those pieces in this document.

After the episode-specific pieces I have one in which I analyze the order of episodes. I conclude the document with two appendices. The first is an informal appreciation of The Nutcracker Suite episode, which is my favorite. The second is a review essay of two recent Disney biographies, one by Neal Gabbler and the other by Michael Barrier.

Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

2011-11-29T09:54:00.001-05:00

Sunshots 2.0

2011-11-28T13:49:00.001-05:00

I’d been taking sunshots before I’d seen any of Terrence Malick’s films, but seeing The Tree of Life heightened my interest in such shots. Recently been shooting the sun through dense thickets of denuded twigs and branches, giving the shots a rather different feel. Here’s an example:

The bluish tinge is an artifact of the photography process, though I’m not quite sure what “artifact” means in this case. The implication is that it isn’t really there, that you wouldn’t have seen it on site. But on site you don’t really look at such things long enough to register much of anything; the sun’s too bright. What I saw through the viewfinder—I think—was mostly light.

Here’s a rather different example:

I really like how the sun appears as a hole burned through film. I’m not sure, however, that I like the fact that the photo has no in-focus area. I didn’t intend that, but it’s not an accident either. It’s something that happens.

The problem is that the image is so out-of-focus that it’s hard to recognize it for what it is, trees and branches. It looks too much like an abstract expressionist painting. Of course, it’s supposed to look like that; it’s because of such paintings that I see images like this as worth consideration as photographs. At the same time, I do think it’s necessary to see what the image represents, so that the image of the sun becomes a hole in the fabric reality.

I took this shot 9 seconds after the previous one, so I must have been standing in much the same location, perhaps exactly the same location, but with a different focal length dialed on the lens and a different center-point:

This image suggests that there’s a trade-off between the burnt film look and having an in-focus image. Here the focal plane is set in the region where the light shines through, so one sees those twigs, vines, and branches clearly. Perhaps I could create the burned look through some photo-shoppery, but I’m reluctant to do that.

What I like about this shot is the way the sun ‘eats’ into the large tree-trunk:

I also like the strong transverse and diagonal lines.

Here’s an variation on the sunshot:

I’m shooting through some branches into swamp grass, with the sun falling on some leaves and a tassel at the right. In this next example we get both direct sun, just left of center, and some bright yellow-green leaves:

Finally, a return to basics, almost:

Episode Order in Fantasia: Revealing the Human Mind

2011-11-28T11:04:00.000-05:00

I began my exploration of Fantasia with an essay arguing that it was a masterpiece of 20th century art. That argument was about the range of material depicted within the relatively narrow compass of two hours. Disney, in effect, said: This is human life in the universe.

I now want to return to the whole film, but with a different question in mind. I want to look at the episode order. This is an issue that doesn’t arise in a film that tells a story, or, at least, at arises in a different way. The incidents in the story have an inherent order that must be respected, though foreshadowing and flashbacks are possible.

Fantasia isn’t like that. It tells no story. There is no order linking the separate episodes. In theory Disney could have determined the order by tossing a coin. But one can’t imagine him doing that. I assume that he and his team thought about the order and chose this particular order because it was somehow ‘the best.’

What guided their choice?

I don’t know. I’ve not seen the Disney archives so I’ve not examined any relevant records. But I’m willing to hazard a guess based on an analysis of the episodes themselves.

Concert Order

This problem is hardly novel. It’s been faced hundreds of thousands of times by musicians putting on a concert or organizing a set list for club performance. One principle, for example, is that you want to open strong. If you don’t get your audience’s attention at the very beginning of the performance, you may never get it.

By that principle alone, the episode order in Fantasia is a mystery. To be sure, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor opens very dramatically. Those opening cascades DO grab your attention. But that’s about it, at least for Disney’s middlebrow audience, people for whom “the classics” were unfamiliar and perhaps even forbidding territory. The toccata grabs you, but the subsequent fugue lacks the tunefulness that was central to popular music of the time—hip hop was WAY in the future. Further, the abstract visuals were just STRANGE. No funny animals, no people, no cars, no flowers, no nothing. Just violin bows and squiggles.

The fact is that this episode was so very strange that it was dropped from a 1942 theatrical re-release, though it was restored for subsequent releases. How could Disney and his team made such a mistake?

Perhaps they’d become so absorbed in the film that they couldn’t see the problem. But perhaps they had something else in mind, perhaps not consciously and explicitly, but tacitly, intuitively.

Form and the Mind

That’s the notion that I’m going to explore. And I’m going to explore it by offering an explicit hypothesis about what that tacit order is. It’s about the mind.

One of our oldest ideas about the mind is that it consists of a collection of more or less specialized faculties, vision, hearing, reason, passion, language, and so forth. In its most recent incarnation the faculties have been called modules. While the idea of mental modules is controversial—I’ve got problems with it myself—it is good enough for my purpose, which does not require a great deal of rigor and precision. However, I will revert to the older term, faculty, by way of indicating that I am not offering a strong proposal about so-called mental modules in perceiving and understanding Fantasia.

My hypothesis is this: The basic idea is to organize the episodes in such a way that the mental faculties required in episode N are retained in use for episode N + 1, and other faculties are added to the mental mix. This implies that, as we move though the film, more and more faculties are called upon.

Thus, while the visual content of the film has been dictated by the desire to present a rich cosmology—the argument I made in my first post about Fantasia—its overall form has been dictated by a desire to reveal the resources of the human mind.

This basic proposal, however, must be modified to fit the fact that the program is presented in two halves separated by an intermission and that Disney must somehow manage the transition into and from those halves. He must further manage the transition from one episode to the next. Disney dealt with the inter-episode transition problem by having Deems Taylor present a brief spoken introduction. Those segments necessarily involve a wide range of mental faculties, including, of course, language, which is otherwise absent from the film.

First Half: The Non-human World, Almost

When the film starts the audience sees and hears Deems Taylor making introductory remarks, to the film as a whole, and to the first episode in particular, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Think of that introduction as maintaining some continuity between experience in the lobby and then sitting with friends and family in the auditorium proper. You’ve been making small talk and getting ready for something special. Now you’re seated and Deems Taylor says a few words of introduction both to set you at ease and to prepare you for what you’re about to see and hear.

You hear the opening toccata, which is quite dramatic and in a free tempo. What you see are colored shadows of the musicians, with some here and there emerging into 3D relief through occasional front lighting. The relationship between what you see and what you hear is transparent, for the motions you see are the motions producing the music you hear.

When the toccata concludes and the fugue begins the visuals change dramatically. Now you see lines and forms moving in space; some of the forms are recognizable objects, violin bows, disks, gothic arches, and others, and many are not. What you don’t see, that is to say, what you don’t have to make sense of, is a coherent 3D space. There’s no sense that you are moving through a territory with this object fixed in this place, that object fixed in that place, that other object moving from there to here, and so forth. All you’ve got are objects moving in space, objects being driven by the music.

That’s what this episode is about, the relationship between sound and images. Of course, that’s true of the whole film, but in this episode the imagery is so minimal that the mind has little choice but to focus on the relationship between music and images, for the images do not present a world that has its own internal dynamics.

That changes in the second episode, The Nutcracker Suite. We’re now in a coherent 3D world, a small-scale world of plant life near a small pond. Our faculty of object recognition now has plenty to work on, recognizing the various plant forms, and our navigation faculty can track our (that is, the virtual camera’s) movement in this space. At the same time the relationship between the music and the imagery is no longer so immediate as it was in the opening episode. The mushrooms and flowers dance—not realistic, of course, but then neither are the fairies—and the goldfish swim about.

The Nutcracker world is less dream-like, more solid than the Fugue world. It is more ‘distant’ from us, more self-sufficient. This difference increases in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a world with two people in it, the Sorcerer and his Apprentice, a role played by Mickey Mouse, whom I will treat as a person in accordance with the conventions of ‘funny animal’ cartoons.

Now we’ve got a world with solid recognizable objects situated in a coherent 3D space, though the layout of the space is a bit mysterious. The faculties that were activated by the Nutcracker world must remain active, but we now need to understand the actions of these two people, which calls on the so-called theory of mind faculty. Further we must distinguish between fantasy—Mickey’s dream in the middle—and reality, the rest of the episode. Note, however, that the world-commanding imagery in Mickey’s dream, the comets, winds, waves, and clouds, prefigures some of the imagery that opens the next sequence, Rite of Spring.

There are no people, however, in Rite of Spring, though one might argue that some of the animal-animal interactions are complex enough that we call on theory of mind to read them. Perhaps, but I’m not prepared to lean on that too heavily. What’s important about this episode is that it presents us with a world that’s vast and strange. The Fugue world was abstract, while the Nutcracker and Apprentice worlds were concrete and composed of familiar objects. In Rite of Spring we see things that no one’s ever seen; it’s a world constructed through (more or less) scientific conjecture.

We’ve got to recognize the macro-scale views that open the sequence, where we start outside the solar system and zoom in on the earth, and the micro-scale views we get a bit later when we go under water and see single-cell organisms. Between those two, of course, we saw volcanic cataclysms and storms. After it we’ll see the emergence of animal life on land, dinosaurs, a grand battle between two dinosaurs, and then their extinction. Whatever faculty or faculties are required to order and keep track of all THAT, they’re active in this episode in a way they weren’t in any of the previous episodes.

Further, the evolution sequence about a quarter to a third of the way through the episode locates a generative power within the non-human world, in contrast to human magic in the previous episode. This episode depicts a vital evolving world that’s independent of human being and will. And that, it seems to me, is the dominant sense of the film’s first half. Except for the third episode, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, this is a non-human world. The second half, by contrast, is about human beings, almost.

That’s the first half. And it makes sense to place an intermission after this episode, for the music is so dramatic that it’s difficult to follow it with any of the other pieces on the program. So, don’t follow it with anything. Let people rest a bit.

Second Half: The Human World, Almost

Before we can start the second half, however, we’ve got an intermission interlude. When the audience has returned to their seats and the film begins, they see a short jam session, a bit of swing music that is perhaps more congenial to their tastes than the ‘heavier’ classical fare on the bill. This is followed by the short bit about the soundtrack, which serves to explicitly restate the relationship between sound and images that was established in the opening episode, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

The second half of the program starts with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which Disney uses as a vehicle for presenting domestic life. We have a coherent world of objects arranged in a 3D space, and we see various objects under different aspects at different times in the episode. I’m thinking particularly of the small temple that appears in all five segments; but there is also Mount Olympus, that dominates the opening and the end and other bits and pieces of scenery. This is the setting in which the various creatures, animal-animal hybrids (cherubs, winged horses, and unicorns), animal-human hybrids (fauns and centaurs), and gods (represented as humans), play out their lives.

For our purposes we can think of all those creatures as playing the role of humans. We see parents and children, courtship, communal celebration, mutual aid and protection, and bedtime and sleep. Whereas we had only one human relationship in the first half (Mickey and his boss), now we have snippets of 10s of relationships. Beyond the individual relationships, there’s sense of community conveyed in the dancing during the baccanal and the gathering at the end.

By this point in the movie Disney’s summoned a full range of mental faculties into action: those for recognizing objects of various kinds, situating them in spatial relationships, navigating from one place to another, understanding human motives, attitudes, and actions, and keeping track of a community. These remain active during Dance of the Hours, where they are put to a specialized use. Successive groups of animals—ostriches, hippopotami, elephants, and alligators—dance ballet. That is, they take the roles of human dancers.

But, as I’ve argued in my analysis of this episode, the animals have trouble keeping in role. The ostriches are distracted by fruit, which they eat, the elephants get tripped up by bubbles, and an alligator becomes smitten by Hyacinth Hippo. It’s not at all whether he’s merely dancing a role or, rather, as seems more likely, if absurd, he really is smitten, making his courtship, and her response, real. Then we have the grand finale, in which alligators carry elephants around, hippos toss alligators and all sorts of other shenanigans ensue, to the almost total destruction of the stage set. That, presumably, was not choreographed.

It is impossible, of course, to draw the line between what might have been choreographed by the imaginary choreographer of these dances and what happened because the dancers fell out of role. Nor does it much matter. What matters is that that’s what’s at issue, and to see it we have to attend to the nuances of facial and bodily gesture, more so than we’ve done in the Pastoral Symphony or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. What’s at stake is human nature: Are we humans or are we animals? Are we in control of ourselves or are we at the mercy of the animals within?

That question is brought acutely into focus in the next, and penultimate episode: Night on Bald Mountain. The episode is dominated by the demon Chernobog, animated by Bill Tytla. We see only Chernobog’s upper body and head; his lower body seems to be the mountain from which he emerges. That Chernobog’s eye sockets are empty defeats our attempts to read his mind—has he one?—yet Tytla’s close-up animation of his face, and his hands, and his animation of Chernobog’s upper body, especially in the last shots, is regarded as the aesthetic pinnacle of hand-drawn animation. Chernobog is not human, but he calls on our full capacities for reading human minds and gestures.

The middle of the episode has two sequences that may be the busiest in the entire film. In the first sequence Chernobog holds his hands before his face and manipulates creatures in them, conjuring them out of fire and returning them to fire. Here we are challenged to track the identity of some of these creatures as they change form from human female, to animal, to imp. In the following sequence the camera looks into the flames and we’re challenged to make sense of whatever whizzes past, blue and red flames in female form, harpies, head, and skulls, all zoom by so quickly you’re not sure you saw what you saw.

At this point we’re in a position to see a rough overall dramatic design in Fantasia. From the opening Bach episode through the Pastoral Symphony Disney is building the capacity to represent human interaction and community. The central sequence of the symphony shows humanity at the edge of slipping away in drunken revelry, revelry which is, paradoxically, an aspect of the machinery used to forge communal bonds. Having established humanity, Disney then Dance of the Hours shows how fragile that achievement is, as the animal dancers slip out of their roles and chaos ensues. What saves them is, in effect, the fact that they ARE on stage. They may have demolished their assigned roles, but they’re still putting on a show, albeit an improvised one.

In Night on Bald Mountain, humanity is shattered. The mental faculties are there, but the order is gone. Chernobog, in effect, stages a show on his hands, but it gives him no satisfaction, nor is there any for the morphing creatures in the show. The rules are gone. All we’ve got is a demonic Dionysian revel with no hope of satisfaction. The bell tolls, and it comes to an end. Chernobog retreats back into mountain form.

Now Disney has one last problem to solve: How can he help his audience compose themselves so they can exit the theater feeling satisfied and refreshed?

He says, in effect, forget about it; it’s not about us. That, I argue, is the burden of the final episode, Ave Maria. There are humans in this episode, but only in the first half, and even their they are utterly impersonal. We have a line of pilgrims walking slowly into the forest. They’re so small that we can’t see their faces and their other movements are imperceptible. There’s nothing to read except the fact that they are human.

Otherwise all we see is a forest stylized as a gothic cathedral. The camera takes us through it slowly, very slowly. For a few seconds in the middle we see nothing, and then the forest re-emerges, and the sun rises. There is order in the world, but it’s not about us.

That fact is, one has to work to follow the all-but-nonaction in this episode. The mind is spinning from the chaos of Bald Mountain. Unspinning it takes some effort. The stately images, and slow music, of Ave Maria provide a point of attachment for that unspinning.

What Hath Disney Wrought?

Disney set out to present classical music to the masses, and, incidentally, to himself as well. At the same time, he wanted to showcase this new medium that he’d help create. There’s no reason to believe that he was interested in setting out a all-encompassing view of the world, from basic objects and motions through plants and animals on both macro and micro scales, to human community and the difficulties of being human. That simply emerged from the need to use different and contrasting material for each episode.

Given those different episodes, Disney then had to come up with some order for his concert program. The fact that the episodes were so various in kind allowed Disney to order them in a way that elicited a cumulative arousal of mental faculties. The result is a film that is at one and the same time ‘about’ the world in the large and ‘about’ the mind, and yet was not conceived as being about either of them.

It just happened. It took over three years of work, 10s if not 100s of artists, musicians, technicians, and craftsmen, and, in the end, Fantasia just happened. Something beyond the imaginations and intentions of any of them. With all its flaws it was, and is, magical. Supreme magic.

Delicate Matters

2011-11-26T09:11:00.000-05:00

Be It Ever so Humble, There’s no Place Like Elysium

2011-11-25T09:02:00.002-05:00

A PDF of a complete set of posts on Disney's Pastoral Symphony may be downloaded here.

I grew up watching episodes of Fantasia on TV, and saw a theatrical version in 1969, which didn’t impress me that much. It wasn’t THAT psychedelic. Then, for over three decades, nothing. I suppose I thought about the movie every so often, and perhaps recalled an episode or two, but I didn’t see it at all.

When, a few years ago, I picked to DVD, I was stunned by it, the variety of animation styles, the variety of subjects. It fascinated me. I liked some episodes more than others. The Nutcracker Suite and Rite of Spring were immediate favorites. The Pastoral Symphony was my least favorite; I was almost embarrassed to watch it.

How come, then, that I’ve written more about it than any of the other episodes?

For one thing, by the time I got around to it, I’d learned a lot about describing and analyzing cartoons, not only from the work I’d done on the other episodes, but from work I’ve done on other cartoons as well: Miyazaki, Walter Lantz, Warner Brothers, other Disney (Dumbo), and some others here and there. I was better at my craft; I knew what to look for, and how.

Then there is the episode itself. It’s one of the longest in the film—only Rite of Spring is longer—and one of the most complex. In particular, it portrays a wider range of human social life than any of the other episodes, dealing, as it does, with child-rearing, courtship, celebration, and security (from the storm). Simply describing what Disney’s depicted and how he’s organized it, that takes time.

Now that I’ve been through it all I have a better sense of my embarrassment, which centered on Bacchus, though not entirely so (those centaurs are rather clunky, and that cherub’s bottom, what’s up with that?). Bacchus is given a complex job, perhaps more than he could handle. In the voice-over commentary to the version packaged with Fantasia 2000, historian Brian Sibley notes that the lead animator for Bacchus, Ward Kimball, came to think that he’d laid it on rather too thickly. Perhaps it did, but he had a tough job. As I read Bacchus, not only must he be a randy old man,, but he’s also a puddle-splashing infant. And somehow he must be both of those and be believable in the context of this movie.

Well, men are randy, old, and infants, but generally not within the compass of 10 or 15 minutes. It’s one thing to be each of those in its own context, isolated from the other, but to be them all, all at once, that just rather rubs one’s nose it the absurdity, the ridiculousity, if I may, of being human. Maybe Kimball didn’t go overboard at all. Maybe he was just doing his job, and doing it well, indeed.

Perhaps embarrassment was the necessary point. Whatever. In any event, I’ve made my peace with Disney’s Pastoral Symphony. I no longer find it embarrassing. Instead, I’m filled with wonder at what Disney attempted, and what he actually managed to accomplish.

* * * * *

Finally, a note on method. When I first starting writing about this episode I did not intend to make six posts, or seven including this introduction. I intended to write one post, though I knew is would be a long and complex one. Which it was.

After I’d posted it I continued to think about the episode and decided that I probably needed another post, just to tie up loose ends. I wanted to say something about the thread of oral imagery that ran through the episode; there was more to be said about color; and I began to suspect the episode had a ring form structure. I figured I could knock that out in another post, albeit a long and complex one.

Wrong.

As soon as I sat down to write I knew that one post wouldn’t be enough. I decided to pick one topic and write on that, color and sound. By the time I was done with that post I knew that I didn’t quite know where this was leading.

And THAT’s how I ended up doing six posts on this episode. Much of the work was descriptive, from beginning to end. I didn’t get around to ring form until the fifth post, though I saw it coming as early as the second. The assertion that Disney’s visualization of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony has a ring form, that’s a descriptive statement. But it took a great deal of prior description and analysis to get there.

My point is simply that description is neither obvious nor easy. It seems to proceed in ‘layers.’ You start at the ‘surface,’ get that laid out, and then proceed to the next layer, and the next.

The order in which I wrote those posts is, in this instance, the order in which I did the descriptive work, though my mind darted all over the place in the process. That is, I didn’t make a bunch of notes, organize them, and only then start to write. Description is discovery, exploration, and one must LEARN to do it. It doesn’t come naturally. Further, it’s inevitably intertwined with analysis, and with interpretation.

That is to say, it’s not as though one FIRST undertakes describing, THEN one analyzes, and ONLY THEN does one interpret. No, you’ve got to do them all, in cycles. The hermeneutic circle is an old and venerable trope. Well, that same circle might as well be the descriptive circle. The circle is the same, moving from parts to the whole to parts through acts of description, analysis, and interpretation. If it’s interpretation you’re after, then you call it the hermeneutic circle. If analysis is your game, it’s the analytic circle.

Description’s my game these days, and so I now call it the descriptive circle. What I’m after, as I’ve indicated here and there, is an objective account of what’s in the text, a text that, in this case, happens to be an animated film. When I end up arguing that Disney’s Pastoral has a ring form, I believe that is an objective statement about how the episode is organized. Ring form is not something I’m projecting onto the text through my wily critical ways. It’s really there. For everyone, whether they realize it or not. Of course, it isn’t necessary that you realize it has a ring form, nor is it necessary that you know anything about transformational generative grammar in order to speak English, Japanese, or any other language. It’s there.

I do understand that these methodological matters are much in dispute, so I don’t expect my assertion of objectivity to be taken at face value. Nor do I believe that it is up to me to make that determination. My job is to do the best interpretation, analysis, and description that I know how. When I say that ring form is an objectively real attribute of this episode I’m telling you what I’m up to.

I’m after truth. Whether or not I’ve got it, that’s another matter. Making that determination is the job of an intellectual community. That determination must first focus on the description. If we can’t agree on that, we’ll not agree on anything else. Description isn’t all there is, but it’s where we must start the process of arriving at mutual understanding and agreement.

What we’re after is understanding, explanation: Why does this film have the form it does? How does it work in the mind? In order to answer such questions in intellectually satisfying detail we must first understand just what the film is. Description is the tool for that job.

* * * * *

This episode is available online at YouTube. Here’s one version. But Disney’s original version is a bit different from the current version. It had several scenes involving a centaurette called Sunflower. She’s based on an offensive nickaninny stereotype that Disney decided to excise. Thanks to a comment by ramapith, here’s a clip that contains those scenes.

In Plato's Cave

2011-11-25T08:14:00.003-05:00

Fall Colors Peekaboo Here Come the Sun

2011-11-24T13:31:00.000-05:00

What’s in a Name? “Pepper Spray”

2011-11-24T06:02:00.000-05:00

The police use of so-called pepper spray is much in the news and on the web these days, especially as a result of its use at University of California at Davis. According to The New York Times “Megyn Kelly on Fox News dismissed pepper spray as ‘a food product, essentially.” That same story also reports:

To the American Civil Liberties Union, its use as a crowd-control device, particularly when those crowds are nonthreatening, is an excessive and unconstitutional use of force and violates the right to peaceably assemble.

A food product? Excessive and unconstitutional? One and the same product.

I understand the name’s derivation, that the active ingredient—technically, oleoresin capsicum—is the chemical that causes the 'bite' in peppers. The use of THAT name, of course, automatically associates the spray with food. Not only is food innocuous, it's necessary for life. So the name tells us that this agent is, at most, an exaggeration or amplification of something that's good for us: "Eat your spinach, it's good for you." We don't think that such an agent could put someone in the hospital or induce possibly permanent nerve damage.

How would these stories play out if the spray was known as 'liquid pain' or 'torture spray'? How would the officers using the agent think of themselves and their actions if they thought of the agent as torture spray rather than as a food derivative?

Summer and Fall

2011-11-23T11:26:00.000-05:00

Pastoral 6: All Together Now: Nietzsche, Lorenz, Jakobson

2011-11-23T11:04:00.002-05:00

Toward a Compositionist Aesthetics in which Nothing is Hidden, All is Revealed

In the past several decades the standard modes of literary and film criticism have sought to find hidden meanings. The work was thus conceived as a device to smuggling various meanings though lines of conscious defense. When the critic had found those hidden meanings, his or her work was done.

Under such a critical regime the psychological patterns I’ve found in earlier posts—sexual in the first and third, oral in the fourth—are such hidden meanings. In that regime everything else I’ve looked—the treatment of sound and color, ring form, cuteness—all that’s just deceptive camouflage. Now that the critic—that’s me, but you as well—has penetrated it, it can be discarded in favor of the REAL meaning, that ‘hidden’ sexual stuff.

The major problem with such readings is that they, in effect, discard the artistry, treating the text or film as an odd species of argument that makes its point almost completely by indirection. Well, if that’s what’s REALLY going on, then why not make the argument directly and dispense with all the artistic window dressing?

It’s not a very convincing style of criticism, though it’s been the norm for half a century. I was trained in such criticism, among other things, and have come to believe we need something more. Just what isn’t entirely clear. But what I’ve been doing with the Pastoral episode—indeed, with all of Fantasia—is to explore other ways of looking at, in this case, film. In this regime, the one I’m making up, that psychological material is still there, but I don’t regard it as particularly hidden nor do I think that pointing it out is the ultimate goal of criticism.

That psychological material is just stuff, raw material, out of which the artist, or artists in this case, construct a work of art. Those other things, color, sound, form, cuteness, they too are stuff. The purpose of this post is to begin thinking about how all this stuff works together to create a work of cinematic art. As for what that work means, I don’t know and I don’t care. Not here and now. What matters is how it works.

Cuteness and the Audience

Disney’s infamous cuteness is lavished on this episode. I’d like to suggest that Disney uses it for the same reason it has been adopted by the Japanese in manga and anime. Here’s what I said about it in a review of an exhibition at New York’s Japan Society a few years ago (Godzilla’s Children: Murakami Takes Manhattan, Mecademia 2, pp. 283-287):

This play on cuteness, in particular the emphasis on large heads with large eyes, evokes the stylistic feature that is most remarked by newcomers to otaku culture. Males as well as females, adults and young adults as well as infants and children, all are depicted with these kawaii overtones in a large range of manga and anime titles, many with large adult audiences. Is this an assertion of the infantile nature of the Japanese psyche?

I do not think so. This stylization reminds me of what ethologist Konrad Lorenz called the infant schema [which I’m taking from chapter 31 of Wolfgang Wickler’s The Sexual Code]. Lorenz observed that, in a wide variety of animal species (reptile, bird, mammal), infants have rounder faces than adults, with less prominent noses, relatively larger eyes, and rounder cheeks. This morphology has a signal function; it is meant to elicit certain kinds of behavior from conspecifics. There is, one infers, some circuit in the brain that is sensitive to this morphology and that biases behavior in emotionally positive ways.

Taking this at face value we can ask: why is much manga and anime designed to activate these particular circuits? Whatever the artists think they are doing, the effect is to license, to legitimize, non-standard behavior enacted by these characters. The infant schema evokes care-giving attitudes in the audience. In reality, infants are given license to do all sorts of things forbidden to older children, much less to adults. In manga and anime, teens and even adults are given such license; those high foreheads, diminished noses, and big eyes signal the readers and audience: “Cut me some slack, I’m experimenting, trying new things. Care for me. Care about me.” This is most obvious in the case of those magical girls who utter a magic phrase and, in a dazzle of pixie dust, don magical garb and wield superpowers.

I suggest that the same considerations apply to Disney, and that despite the fact that he hadn’t particularly identified children as his audience at this time.

Or perhaps, this argument is particularly important because Disney was not making films expressly for children, not in 1941, when Fantasia premiered. He was certainly aware that children watched his cartoons—the only films he made until after WWII—and marketed franchised goods to them. But he was making films for the general film audience, adults and children alike. It’s in THAT context that we have to interpret all the cuteness.

My remarks about cuteness in manga and anime amount to saying that cuteness is a distancing device that allows greater acceptance of whatever the characters are doing. We treat their actions as play and we accept those because we’re unconsciously treating and indulging them as children. But that also distances us from their actions. We don’t have to imagine ourselves doing such things because, hey! we’re adults and they’re not. They’re some other kind of creature, not like us at all.

Follow the Cuteness

The first moving creatures we see are young unicorns romping across a field, and red, white, and blue unicorns at that:

Then the fauns and the flying horses, with all the business about the young ones playing in the water. The adult horses are not cute, of course, they’re majestic.

In the second segment the cuteness is supplied by the cherubs, who are all flesh-colored, unlike the young unicorns or flying horses. The centaurs are not cute; the centaurettes are, but more in as adolescents than as children.

Cuteness becomes peculiar in the Bacchanal. The fauns are cute, and they disappear at the mid-point. The unicorn-donkey is certainly cute, but his tipsiness puts something of a damper on that, as we see in his cross-eyed close-up in the central shot.

And then there’s Bacchus. Just what is he? Is he really cute? Perhaps. He’s certainly round and when, after the vat burst, he splashes around in the spilt wine, actions we associate with infants and young children. Perhaps he was intended to be cute, but he doesn’t quite pull it off; his baldness is that of an old man, and old men can’t be cute. Once Zeus and Vulcan appear we see that he’s definitely not like them, but he’s not like the centaurs either, to the extent that one can compare them.

He’s ambiguous.

That bacchanal he presides over is dangerous. Given that Disney and his team had to make this story up, we can only assume they made it up to suit their purposes. They surely knew where such drunken revelry led, where it was intended to lead. And they can’t go there. Even if Disney had presented these actions as those of ordinary human adults, he’s at the end of the representational line. He simply can’t depict either an orgy or private sex off in the bushes or in private rooms somewhere in the Elysian Palace Love Hotel.

In any event, he doesn’t have to depict those actions. The adults in his audience who want to imagine sexual activity are free to do so; those who don’t, won’t even be tempted. As for the children, what they see is this funny old man playing around with this funny donkey with the unicorn horn.

Still, if he can’t represent sexual activity (remember the closed curtain at the end of the previous segment?), he’s still got to finish out his episode with more material. What to do?

What he does, as we’ve seen, is stage a storm, with Zeus and Vulcan in the middle of it. They’re not cute at all. But they’re not vicious. There’s something almost playful about their activities:

When he’s had his fun, Zeus gives a yawn and goes to sleep. The storm is over.

During the storm all the cuteness went into hiding, for example:

But when it’s over, all the cuteness comes out to play in the final segment. We now see Bacchus and his donkey-unicorn again being playful, but in a different mood, and we see the cherubs and the young horses fly and swim about.

In particular, we see that the young flying horse who took his first hesitant steps in the morning (say, twenty minutes ago in the film) is now confident in his abilities. While we could ask, “how’d he get that way?” that’s the wrong question, as I indicated in the post on oral imagery. Disney gives us no explanation at all.

All that matters is that WE see that mastery. Like everything else, including the cuteness, it is there for its effects on us. The Pastoral episode, like every episode in Fantasia, like all films, like all art, is created to have certain effects in the audience. Disney’s put us through an experience. What’s the arc of that experience?

Apollonian and Dionysian

Let’s go back to the middle segment, the Bacchanal, and to Bacchus. Bacchus is presented as both an old man and an infant—both of which are bald. He’s also presented as a lecherous man, going after all those centaurettes whom we’d just seen pair off with centaurs. Moreover, he’s sharing wine, not only with an animal, but an animal unlike any other in this world, a unicorn-donkey.

It’s all just a bit unseemly, not simply because of the implied sexuality, but simply because it makes nonsense of the social world. Bacchus and his steed violate the system of social categories on which that social world is based, the categories that dictate expected actions. And THAT, in effect, is why Zeus and Vulcan, both unambiguously male, take up arms against him, him and his wine. When the wine is destroyed and the revelry dispersed, order can return, order based on a clarification of categories.

That clarification happens during the storm. As the storm breaks the various creatures go into protective mode. A centaur protectively leads a centaurette to shelter—it’s the couple brought together by the cherubs—thus affirming a proper relationship between a man and a woman, unlike the improper relationships that Bacchus sought from those centaurettes young enough to be his daughter. A mother unicorn protects her children and a flying-mare rescues one of hers. Again, these are proper relationships between parents and children. At the same time they also properly reflect a social hierarchy, parents over children and, in the case of the centaur and centaurette, male over female, which is surely how Disney and his audience thought of it, if not how we think of these matters today. Does this logic imply that, when a centaurette rescues a young unicorn, that centaurs and hierarchically superior to unicorns in the social system of this world? I think it does.

By the same token, it’s hard to see that Bacchus makes any particular effort to protect his unicorn-donkey. They flee from Zeus’s thunderbolts together. At one point we see Bacchus pulling his companion; lightening strikes and their positions are reversed; and, after being blown about by the wind, they race to the vat together, but untethered.

Given their odd position in the hierarchy—Bacchus as god at the top, as infant near the bottom; donkey-unicorn as ambiguous—that makes sense. And, of course, the lightening is directed at them, though in the end it’s the wine that’s destroyed, not Bacchus. This is, after all, a comedy.

What of the cherubs? As we saw above, they hide. But they do that of their own accord. No one helps them to their hiding place.

And just what is THAT hiding place? It’s a temple, the one temple we’ve seen at various times in the episode. No creature is explicitly above them in the hierarchy, but, in the temple, they are effectively under the protection of the gods. When the storm’s over, we see them on the roof of that temple playing in a water puddle that reflects the rainbow:

The storm has prompted the creatures to affirm their proper places in society. That reverses the descent into drunken chaos threatened by the bacchanal. Not only does the sun come out but we see Apollo driving his chariot and waving to the Elysian creatures.

But it’s Diana and her deer who presides over the final moments of the episode:

At this point we should recall that the Greek correlate to Bacchus is Dionysus, and that Friedrich Nietzsche created a theory of art around and opposition between “the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music,” asking us to “first conceive of them as the separate art worlds of dreams and intoxication” (The Birth of Tragedy). Disney has given us intoxication in the bacchanal and dream, well, the whole episode, the whole film, is a dream.

Now, by invoking Nietzsche I do not mean to imply that either Disney or anyone on his staff had read Nietzsche and deliberately brought him to the table for this episode. We don’t need to suppose any such thing. Nietzsche didn’t conjure his theory out of thin air. He conjured it out of his knowledge and experience of art. To the extent that art is as Nietzsche theorized, it’s not the least bit surprising that Disney and his team should produce their own mythological invocation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. After all, they’re working in a medium that combines the Dionysian abandon of music with the differentiating clarity of vision.

Roman Jakobson and Structuralist Poetics

And that brings us to a last line of argument, one based on the classical structuralist thinking of the great Roman Jakobson. Jakobson was a linguist, one of the greatest of the previous century. In 1960 he attended a multidisciplinary conference on linguistic style at which he gave a closing address, Linguistics and Poetics, that has become one of the classic statements of structuralist thinking about language. In this address he outlined six functions of language: referential, phatic, conative, emotive, metalingual, and poetic. He pointed out that, while any given ‘chunk’ of language could involve several of the functions, one is likely to predominate. In the case of poetry the poetic function dominates.

It is to Jakobson’s poetic function that I want to turn. To be sure, we’re not dealing with poetry, we’re dealing with film. But Jakobson stated his functions is such abstract terms that we can apply them to other media.

Jakobson’s first characterization of the poetic function goes like this: “The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. . . . This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.” [Thomas Sebeok, ed. Style in Language, 1960, p. 356.] “The set toward the MESSAGE,” we’ve already looked at that in the post, Color and Sound. The very fact that the palette is so bright and saturated, and the colors so often atypical, draws our attention to the color itself, not to mention the Art Deco styling that draws our attention to forms. Color is further emphasized by the prominence of the rainbow in the last segment. Similarly, the moments where an onscreen character, a faun or a centaur, plays an instrument that picks up a musical line in the soundtrack, those moments call our attention to the music itself.

When, in the bacchanal, a faun blows grape juice through his pipes, the music-making is linked to the oral imagery:

And when, at the end, Bacchus drinks rainbow-tinted water from the cup that had formerly held wine, the visual element is now linked to oral imagery:

Thus, by implication, the sight and sound are now linked within the episode itself and not simply in physical composition of film.

A bit later in his essay Jakobson offers another formulation of the poetic principle where he talks of selection and combination in linguistic process (p. 358):

If “child” is the topic of the message, the speaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar, nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certain respect, and then, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semantically cognate verbs—sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.

We’ve seen this at work too, most critically in the Bacchanal where the unicorn-donkey is substituted for a centaurette in Bacchus’s succession of dance partners. The unicorn-donkey and the centaurette are equated to one another because they play the same combinatorial role in an activity, the dance (and subsequent kiss).

And this is how music, grape juice, wine, and rainbow have been equated in those two shots we just examined. Music and grape juice are equated in the first shot—both come out of the pipes—and wine and the rainbow are equated in the second shot—Bacchus drinks both from the same cup.

A Final Word

For all that happens in this episode, it doesn’t really tell a story. It doesn’t have a plot. It is a collection of vignettes illustrating activities from everyday life. The drama lies not in the fortunes of this or that character, but the order itself, and the threat to that order posed by drunken revelry.

And yet, at the very end, when Disney has Bacchus drink the rainbow water, he associates the film’s artistry, his own artistry, with that revelry. There is, of course, nothing more conventional than the association of artists with drunken revelry and such. That’s been a common place at least since the Romantic cult of artistic genius. Such associations would have been particularly problematic for Disney as he was anxious to present his work as more wholesome than the usual Hollywood fare, a point Nicholas Sammond makes in Babes in Tomorrowland.

I thus can’t but help seeing an echo of his 1934 “The Grasshopper and the Ants.” As you know the grasshopper spends his summer singing and having fun while the ants industriously pile up food. When the winter comes along the ants have plenty of food but the grasshopper has none, and the ants allow him to starve.

Disney is nothing if not in favor or industry and hard work. That’s certainly what he did and it’s what his audience valued. But Disney worked hard at producing entertainment, grasshopper stuff. And so, in his retelling of Aesop’s fable, the ant agree to take the grasshopper in and feed him, on one condition: that he make music for them. His treatment of Bacchus, and his unicorn-donkey, seems to be a more elaborate version of the same compromise.

Nature Walk

2011-11-22T12:37:00.000-05:00

One takes a nature walk, I assume, to experience the natural world. It is not clear to me, however, just how deeply one’s experience of nature depends on a sharp division between nature and society, or nature and culture. To the extent that the nature walk depends on such a distinction it is, of course, problematic. For the walker is always, by definition, inextricably bound up in society and culture, no matter how long the walk nor how remote that place.

My nature walks do not take place in remote locations. I doubt that I’ve even been to a truly remote location, not when flying over the Grand Canyon in a small plane, not when walking in a deep wooded glen at summer camp near Altoona, Pa., nor when walking with a woman in a field near Laramie, Wyoming. For all of these places were within easy distance of roads, villages, and towns.

These days I take my nature walks in Liberty State Park, which is in Jersey City, on the shore of New York Harbor opposite the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. That is to say, in the middle of one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. Hardly a wilderness.

I’m told that this, more or less, is where Henry Hudson first set foot in the New World in 1609, near a footpath the Lenni Lanape walked down to the shore to fish. Their footpath became a road, and that road became a street, Communipaw Avenue. I live a block off Communipaw on Van Horne, a Dutch name I assume.

That’s near the northern end of the park. There’s an abandoned railroad station there, and a ferry dock, from which one can get a ride to the Statue of Liberty. Which I’ve not done. I mostly photograph the statue from afar, on my walks at the southern end of the park. There’s a salt marsh down there, and an interpretive center that tells you about the wildlife in that marsh and more widely in the general area.

I don’t really know, as I’ve only been there once and didn’t pay much attention to the exhibits. They were mostly about the birds—ducks are plentiful, and I’ve seen a white heron or two—which don’t interest me that much. Don’t have the patience, or the camera, to photograph them. I’m more interested in the flora, the weeds, flowers and trees. The interpretive center didn’t seem to have any exhibits devoted to them, though one did identify those yellow flowers and goldenrods. “Ah, goldenrods, that’s what they are. Now I remember.” And so I did.

I generally, almost always, in fact, so far, always, have my camera. I like to take pictures. It would be a bit misleading to say that I’m in a meditative state when I’m walking nature, taking pictures. But not terribly misleading. I’m in a zone.

Certainly not an exclusive zone. My mind does wander. I DO hear the planes and helicopters that fly overhead. Once I’m off the path I’ve got to attend to my footing, for the ground can be a bit treacherous, low crawling vines to trip on, leaves piling and obscuring the firmness, rocks here and there, and so forth.

Looking for shots, always looking for shots. One here, three there, move back, or ahead, to the left or right, depending on the framing I’m after. Maybe catch the sun in a corner or along an edge. Whatever calls.

Another Latour Locus

2011-11-20T11:28:00.000-05:00

By Latour locus I mean a place that isn't necessarily only that place, a place that implies, connects with, other places. I also mean photographs of such places, or photographs that link disparate places together, near and far. This photograph is a Latour locus only only in the first sense:

There are no distant buildings or mountains on view. What you see is more or less there, except, of course, for the clouds and contrails in the sky.

This is a Latour locus by virtue of the implications of what you see in the photo, which depicts the Liberty State Park stop on the Hudson Light Rail commuter line running along the Hudson River in northern New Jersey. The phone booth in the middle allows you to talk with someone anywhere in the world, though I center it is used mostly for local calls. Someone's who's doing business in Singapore is not likely to make a business call from this phone, though they might well be traveling to or from the office through this rail line.

But what I had in mind is the map to the right, which is a map both of the rail system and of the bus lines. Actually, it's two maps. Along the left edge of the map you see a highly stylized map depicting only the stops on the rail line and eliminating all geographical details except relative order. In the map proper, the body of water along the right is New York Harbor and the Hudson River. The Passaic River is on the left, leading into Newark Bay.

I don't know where the electrical power that runs the rail system and the lights at the station comes from.

Intuition and the Real 2: On the March

2011-11-20T07:50:00.000-05:00

I’ve got another case to add to those in my earlier post on intuition and the sense of reality. This case arose in a long, and often interesting, discussion of the recent evictions of Occupy Wall Street encampments. The discussion has been taking place at Crooked Timber and has involved, among other things, a fairly extensive conversation between one Adrian Kelleher, about whom I know nothing, and Rich Puchalsky, whom I know from The Valve and CT.

Kelleher has been making long, detailed comments saying, more or less, “you’re doing it wrong, you can’t possibly succeed.” Puchalsky, who’s been working with the Occupy group in his neighborhood somewhere in in not-Boston Massachusetts, has been saying, “you don’t at all understand the Occupy movement.” In particular, Kelleher made two long comments, 333 and, particularly 334, which is about how OWS is swimming against “the tide of history.” Puchalsky responds in 341.

Here’s my reply to Puchalsky:

Puchalsky: It’s possible for someone to have quite conventional political views and yet act quite differently within a social situation that is different.

BB: Bingo!

Puchalsky: When that failure happens, people in OWS will have friends that they can trust, people who they’ve worked with at a very elemental level.

BB: Bingo! Bingo!

BB: Let me invoke Marley's Theorem, named after my old buddy Jason Marley: "If you want to know what it's like to drive a car, you've got to sit in the driver's set and drive the car." Sitting in the passenger's seat watching the driver won't do it, nor will sitting in the back seat, and certainly not sitting at home in your den imagining what driving a car is like. You've got to be IN the car, making decisions about traffic, the road, and pedestrians. It's that elemental.

That last paragraph is where we get the intersection with my earlier remarks about intuition. Puchalsky is IN the OWS movement and so understands it from the inside; he’s in the driver’s seat. Kelleher, apparently, is not.

As for me, well, perhaps. I visited the OWS camp at Zuccotti Park before the police trashed it, with the sanitation department cleaning up after them. I was surprised at how small and cramped it was, but also at the diversity of people, young, old, male, female, various races and ethnicities.

But that visit counts mostly as that of a sympathetic tourist. I’m not IN the Occupy movement the way Puchalsky is. I am, however, a marcher, and that’s how I’m judging things these days.

I was in marching band in the 1960s. That was an instructive and ambivalent experience. The band was a good one. We worked hard, that is to say, we were worked hard. It was a strictly hierarchical system, of course, with the band director the undisputed commander-in-chief. He was, after all, a teacher and we were only students. Within the band itself, well, there were elected officers, but each rank had a right guide and a left guide. They were appointed by the director and they were responsible for keeping the rank in shape in practice and on the march.

The hierarchy didn’t appeal to me, and the music was, well, it was marching music. Much of it very good marching music, but marching music is rather limited in scope.

But when the band was ON, which it was often enough, it felt good. There is such a thing as spirit, and it can be very powerful when a band plays together and marches together. There’s a reason why William McNeil wrote a book, Keeping Together in Time, in which he argued that dance and military drill, though not music itself (I wrote that book, Beethoven’s Anvil, and he blurbed), are a substantial social and historical force.

So that’s one marching experience. I also marched in the civil rights and the anti-war movements of the 60s and 70s. Those were not military marches, obviously. There were leaders who organized those protests, of course, but the marches were just people marching, carrying signs and yelling out chants. There was no marching in step, and no music.

That’s changed in this, the new millennium. There was music in the large anti-war march held in New York City on 22 March 2003. There were no marching bands, not that I could see, and no rigid marching in step. But there was music. People brought instruments, percussion and horns, and somehow musicians found one another, formed into groups, and played together. Spontaneously. Bottom-up. And the crowds were electrified. The spirit moved, and moved us.

I know, because I was there, playing trumpet. And on many subsequent protest marches in NYC, trumpet and bells, all the time, it works. And it worked on 5 October of this year, when the unions and students marched in solidarity with OWS. I was in the middle of that, playing bells, trumpet, chanting, and avoiding photographers, who were everywhere.

That’s different, it’s new, this spontaneous bottom-up music on the march. I don’t know where it came from, what happened in the culture that made this possible, but whatever it is, it’s good. I’m betting that the Occupy movement comes from the same well.

Kiddie Lit

2011-11-20T06:36:00.001-05:00

Back in the middle of 2006 I’d blogged about Kiddie Lit. I’m republishing that post because it’s directly relevant to my recent series on Disney’s Fantasia and, in particular, to the issues of cuteness and family presented by the Pastoral episode. I note also that I’ve been looking through Nocholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (2005).

* * * * *

Two or three years ago I read Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark (2003). I had just gotten interested in manga and anime and figured that, as many titles are produced for children, that scholarship on children’s literature would be useful. I was attracted to Clark’s book because it addressed the institutionalization of children’s literature, which I figured would help me think about the institutional landscape in which manga and anime must make their way in America, along with homegrown comics, and graphic novels, and cartoons.

Clark argues, and demonstrates, that our (that is, America’s) fairly firm distinction between adult literature and children's literature did not exist in 19th century America (probably not in the UK either). Writers would write for both children and adults, the reviewers would review (what we now think of as) children's books as well as (what we now think of as) adult books. And magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly assumed their audience included children as well as adults.

As one case study, Clark considers Mark Twain, in particular, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These days we think of Huckleberry Finn as an adult book and Tom Sawyer as a boy's book. But that distinction was not a firm one for Twain and his contemporaries. In his own statements on both books Twain vacillated in his sense of his audience and so did his reviewers. Similarly, Louisa May Alcott and her audience did not think of Little Women as a specifically girl's book. It was a book that could be read with pleasure and edification by both children and adults. In fact, at the time, some considered it a mark of excellence that a book was accessible to children as well as to adults.

The move to differentiate the adult from the children's audience came in the first and second quarters of the 20th century and succeeded so well that we now assume it without question. And children's literature has been, for the most part, marginalized.

Clark devotes her final chapter to Disney. She makes the point that prior to the 40s Disney and his work was quite highly regarded in intellectual circles. Some even thought his cartoons were more aesthetically significant than contemporary live-action films. She also points out that anyone going to the movies assumed they would see cartoons before the feature. It didn't make any difference whether the feature was a light-hearted comedy or a serious drama, you'd see cartoons first. Cartoons became children's fare, she argues, after WWII and as a side-effect of TV, which made it easier to develop niche audiences. Families went to the movies, but it was easy to let kids watch cartoons on TV while mother went about her duties elsewhere in the house. As for Disney, Clark argues that opinion turned on him when he introduced human figures into his cartoons (with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the later 1930s, his first feature-length film).

One issue looms large: How can we properly value children’s literature? Is the study of children’s literature a proper part of the general study of literature or should it remain the province of schools of education and developmental psychologists?

* * * * *

That’s not the issue that faces me now, however, though it’s important, not simply to literary culture, but to film culture as well. There IS Disney, of course, but also Hayao Miyazaki and a host of others.

All in a row

2011-11-19T15:21:00.000-05:00

The Lady and the Swamp

2011-11-18T14:48:00.001-05:00

Pastoral 5: Ring Form Construction

2011-11-18T09:59:00.000-05:00

At the time when I’d finished my previous post about Disney’s Pastoral, on oral imagery, I figured that my next post would be my last. I was wrong. This, my next post, is not that one. This is something that had been brewing during the orality post and that I figured I could toss off as one section in the final post. But, as I thought about that last post, everything got larger and larger, but especially this topic.

So this has become a separate post. The topic is one I’ve already addressed, but in connection with a post in which I discussed both The Nutcracker Suite and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, that of ring form. I’ve now come to suspect that the Pastoral episode has a ring form as well.

Looking for a Structural Center in a Temporal Work

The idea is that this episode has a section that is structurally central and that the other sections are somehow arranged around that. Why would I think that? Well, for one thing, the episode has five sections, which means that one of them is, numerically at least, central. That’s the Bacchanal. What would it mean for that to be structurally central?

Imagine for a moment that, instead of a film, we were examining a painting on five panels, perhaps an altar piece. Let us imagine that this central panel was larger than the others and that it depicts, say, Christ on the cross, or the Madonna and Child, well-known objects of veneration in Christian art. The other four panels have figures in them as well, and those figures are all looking toward the central image. All of that indicates that the middle panel is also compositionally and iconographically central. This is not, of course, a required feature of paintings spread over five panels. I have no trouble imagining a set of Chinese or Japanese painted screens with five panels where none of the panels is compositionally more important than the others. That’s a very different kind of composition. In that case the fact the one of the five panels is numerically in the middle is structurally irrelevant. That’s not what interests me.

What’s worse, what interests me is a work of temporal art, a film. In the case of a painting one can see all five panels at a glance and one can easily run one’s eyes over the panels in whatever pattern is interesting and convenient. One can grasp and examine the entire composition. That’s not possible with a film, which unfolds in time. One can see and hear only what’s unfolding at the moment, though one can recall previous sights and sounds and anticipate future ones. This pretty much means that, if there is some section that is structurally central, one is not likely to register it as such at the time for the simple reason that one doesn’t know what’s coming up and so has no way of assessing centrality.

Ring form works unconsciously. One discovers it only through deliberate analysis.

The Center: Centaurette to Bacchus to Donkey

The episode’s five-part structure holds open the possibility of ring form, but that possibility is not what set me thinking. What tipped me off is a scene within that third section, the Bacchanal. And not so much a scene as a shot, the one where Bacchus pours wine into his donkey-unicorn’s mouth and which then becomes a close-up of the donkey-unicorn smacking his lips. The shot’s about nine seconds long and is, I believe, the longest close-up in the episode, and the strangest (I haven’t actually measured the others, such as the ‘hatting’ of the centaurettes in the second segment). It ends with the donkey looking us in the eye, albeit rather unsteadily so, the only place in the episode where that happens:

There’s only one other place in the film where that happens, in the Arabian Dance sequence of The Nutcracker; and it happens in the middle of that sequence, with the sexy goldfish. Further, if oral imagery IS important in this episode, as I’ve indicated, though not really argued, in the previous post, then this is also the longest single bit of oral imagery. And it’s interesting on other counts as well.

In the first place, the wine is poured into Bacchus’s cup by a centaurette whose human half appears to be black or, if you will, African-American, though, obviously, there’s not context within the film to establish any kind of American identity. Bacchus is flanked by two such centaurettes, who also have zebra-striped bodies, marking the African connection I suppose. There’s only one other black centaurette in the film, and she’s been cut out of current versions. She appeared as a maid servant in the courtship sequence. The stereotyping apparently was so bad that she had to be cut from the film.

The point, of course, is that it isn’t just any centaurette who poured the wine. No, the wine is poured by one who is visibly marked as being Other, as being different from the standard run of centaurettes.

Similarly, Bacchus is one of only three ‘pure’ human forms in the episode. Zeus and Vulcan are the other two. Both of them are broad-shouldered and thickly muscled; that is, they are physically highly masculine types.

Bacchus is not, he’s rounded, rotund, at the very least he’s not-masculine, if not quite feminine. Or perhaps he’s infantile—recall how he splashes around in the wine after the vat’s been destroyed and then again at the very end where he’s sitting in rainbow patterned water. And the donkey, the donkey isn’t a donkey, but has a unicorn horn. For all I know there may well be donkey-form unicorns in some mythology, but such creatures aren’t standard in Greek or Roman mythology. They appear to have been invented by Disney’s staff. That is to say, they are anomalous.

What we have then is an atypical centaurette pouring wine into a cup held by a non-masculine male which then spills into the mouth of another creature that’s atypical, even for this mythological bunch, the unicorn-donkey. And it’s wine that’s being poured, a substance whose purpose is to put one into a mental state in which one’s thoughts and actions are lax, as is certainly the case with Bacchus.

All of which is to say that this shot is Very Strongly Marked, both in terms of its visual form—a sustained facial close-up leading to direct eye contact—and the characters it links together, all atypical. Anyone who’s earned their Junior Semiotician merit badge can see that this shot is VERY IMPORTANT.

That doesn’t necessarily make it structurally central. Let us note, however, that it does occur more or less in the middle of the Bacchanal, which, in turn, is in the middle of the entire episode. The Bacchanal is roughly three minutes long and this shot happens early in the second minute. More important, before this shot the action involves filling the vat and stomping the grapes; after this shot the action switches to drinking and dancing. At least within this scene, then, it marks a turning point.

Now it’s beginning to look like a structural center. It’s the middle of the middle and what goes before is different from what comes after.

Widening the Ring: First and Last

Let’s look at the first and last segments. The first opens at dawn and takes us into early morning while the last straddles the transition from dusk to night. That’s very promising because it makes one transition obviously the reverse of the other: night to day vs. day to night. Yet that’s just a bit too easy. We need more.

And we’ve got it. In the first segment we’re introduced to a young winged horse whom we first see suckling. And then we see it take its first flight and we see its awkward movements in the rest of that segment.

Its awkwardness is stressed by setting it among siblings and peers who move more gracefully and confidently. But that has changed by the last sequence, when that same youngster is shown flying and swimming about with ease and confidence. That behavioral change is the sort of thing that leads me to believe that, yes, the last segment is opposite to, explicitly in contrast with the opening segment.

Just how that change came about is something of a mystery. But that’s OK. What’s important is simply that there is change and thus contrast.

Now, in psychoanalytic thinking, there’s more to orality than just the use of the mouth. Psychoanalytic theory is developmental; that is, it is about how the mind develops from birth into adulthood and then, ultimately to the end of adulthood, though most of the emphasis and thinking has, I believe, been on infancy through adolescence. In this development, orality is the first phase of psychosocial development (see, e.g. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, 1982). For the young infant, the mother is the center of the world, if not the entire world, and feeding at the breast is the central activity, hence orality. Orality is thus associated with dependence.

In that context, then, the confident flying in the last segment is a sign of independence from the mother. That youngster can now get about in the world on its own, independently of mother. And that’s what we see. It flies and swims with the cherubs, and with siblings and peers, with mother nowhere in sight. Of course, this youngster is by no means totally independent of mother; Disney doesn’t want us to believe that. At the very end we see him settling down for the night under mother’s wing, along with his siblings. But there’s no sense of the breast or feeding at this point. The youngster is lying on his back with his muzzle away from the breast:

As a final contrast with the first segment I note that in that various groups of creatures going about their own business. We see the unicorns and fauns at the opening, and then the action moves to the centaurs. But we don’t see the unicorns, fauns, and centaurs all together. In the last segment there’s a shot where all the creatures are gathered together on a promontory observing the blazing sun.

Widening the Ring: Second and Fourth

What, then, do we make of the second and fourth segments, courtship and the storm? I note first that we have a complete change of scene and characters from the first to the second segment. Yes, this is obvious, but it is also an important feature of how the episode is organized. There’s also a break from the second to the third (middle) segment. The scene and the nature of the activity shifts radically, though the centaurs and centaurettes remain on stage, while the cherubs are dropped in favor of a reappearance of the fauns.

But the shift from the third (middle) segment to the fourth is not so discontinuous. Yes, the mood changes, and does so quickly, but the scene and characters are the same. Then, as the segment moves along, the centaurs, centaurettes and Bacchus remain on stage while the flying horses and unicorns return. And they remain present for the fifth and last segment and, again, the transition from fourth to fifth is continuous.

So we now have a formal distinction between the first half and the second half of the episode. Transitions from segment to segment are discontinuous in the first half—one → two, two → three—and continuous in the second half—three → four, four → five.

Now, when the cherubs show up in the second segment, they aren’t just a new set of characters, along with the centaurs and centaurettes. They’re also a new kind of actor. They’re creatures of the air who facilitate interaction among the ground creatures, the centaurs and centaurettes. This segment is about courtship, and that’s what the centaurs and centaurettes do, but they’re helped by the cherubs. We don’t have any such helping characters in the first segment nor in the third.

But we do in the fourth, though the ‘helping’ is of a different kind. Again, creatures of the air, Zeus and Vulcan. The cherubs are infants of unspecified gender while Zeus and Vulcan are adult males. But, on the surface they wouldn’t seem to be helpers. They aren’t facilitating interactions among the other creatures, including the cherubs. Rather, they’d seem to be wreaking havoc.

But, consider what actually happens on the ground. While Zeus tosses the thunderbolts at Bacchus, centaurs and centaurettes seek shelter together:

A centaurette rescues a unicorn:

And a mother horse rescues one of her children:

Characters are goaded into action and in such a way that they are brought closer together, if only in twos, threes, and fours.

So, two and four are alike in that they involve intervention by creatures of the air. The two sets of creatures are unlike one another (infant vs. adult, gender neutral vs. male) and act in different ways. And yet, ultimately their actions have similar effects, creatures are brought together.

The final action in this segment, of course, is the destruction of the vat of grape juice / wine. I’ve already offered a sexual interpretation of this event. Now I’ll offer another interpretation: The destruction of the vat puts an end to oral dependency. Drinking is obviously an oral activity, and Bacchus’s drinking (and dancing) dominated the second half of the middle segment, but there are explicit ‘grape events’ in the first and second segments. In the first segment one of the youngsters was eating a bunch of grapes and in the second segment we have the grape kiss and the centaurette feeding grapes to a centaur. The destruction of the vat all but puts an end to the grape / oral imagery.

Yes, after the vat was destroyed Bacchus sits in a puddle tasting spilled juice/wine, but mostly he and his companion, the donkey-unicorn, play around in the wine. Then, in the last segment, we see Bacchus drinking, but it’s not wine that’s flowing from the cup, it’s rainbow water, whatever THAT is:

That is, we see drinking again, but Bacchus is drinking something else, something infused with color, the very substance of these images. And he’s not acting like he’s drunk at all. All of a sudden he’s transformed, as is everyone else. The storm’s over, there’s a rainbow in the sky, and it’s a new world.

So, is the destruction of the vat sexual or is it the end of (a certain kind of) orality? Why not both? But that’s a discussion for the next, and I hope the last, post about Disney’s Pastoral.

Formal Counterpoint

It’s time to bring this to a close.

What we have in this segment is a kind of formal counterpoint. On the one hand we have the ring form that I’ve been discussing. But that is superimposed on a cumulative and forward-driving structure that’s perhaps most obvious in the music. The fourth segment is the dramatic climax of the music, with it’s dramatic thunder-claps, including the most dramatic one of all, the one that destroys the vat. From that point the mood changes and evolves to celebration in the last segment.

Then, as we’ve already seen, there’s an overall pattern of accumulating characters:

flying horses, unicorns, and fauns
centaurs, centaurettes, and cherubs
centaurs, centaurettes, fauns, Bacchus and donkey
centaurs, centaurettes, fauns, Bacchus and donkey, flying horses, unicorns, fauns, and cherubs
centaurs, centaurettes, fauns, Bacchus and donkey, flying horses, unicorns, fauns, and cherubs

But in the fourth segment, while all hands are on deck, as it were, they’re under threat from the storm, and we see two rescues. In the fifth and final segment not only are all hands on deck, but peace has been restored to the world. The cherubs and young flying horses are at play, in which they are joined by the nominally adult Bacchus, who’s traded drunken lechery for drinking rainbow water—a figure for making art, perhaps?

Finally, I note that this segment has more kinds sky creatures than any of the others: Iris brings the rainbow; Apollo, the sun; Morpheus, the night; and Diana, the moon.

Now, perhaps, we’re reading for a final post that puts everything together.

I’ll believe it when I’ve written it.

Two Very Different Photos

2011-11-18T06:20:00.000-05:00

One grainy,

One not.

That, of course, is not the only difference between them. But it IS one worth thinking about. Especially because no film is involved.

Intuition and the Feeling of Real

2011-11-17T11:38:00.000-05:00

This is not about either ontology or epistemology. I don’t think. It’s about one’s intuitions, one’s sense of things.

Example 1: graffiti site

An example: the graffiti site. I’ve blogged quite a bit about graffiti and, in particular, about the graffiti site. The notion of a graffiti site is ‘real’ to me mostly because I’ve documented (that is, photographed and made notes about) a handful of sites over several years. Many of the photographs are available on the web, as are my comments. But, to use an old old metaphor, what’s in those documents is only the 10% of the iceberg that floats above the surface of the water. Most of what makes those sites real to me is beneath the water, in all those hours of experience that I have not and even cannot transform into sharable documents.

For some purposes those public documents, taken in conjunction with other such documents, whether on the web or in many of the books and articles about graffiti, are sufficient. But not necessarily for all purposes. When I argue that the site itself is the proper object for study and analysis and, in particular, when I argue that the site is an agent, NOW I’m drawing on my intuition, on the submerged 90% of the iceberg.

How does my reader get access to that? Here I assume a charitable reader who’s willing to grant that I know what I’m talking about, that I’m a serious thinker. But if that charitable reader doesn’t have their own well of direct experience with graffiti sites, I’m not sure how ‘real’ my assertions can possibly be to them. This reader may well believe me, but . . . something’s missing, something vital to the sense of reality that I’m trying to convey.

I suppose what’s missing is a certain kind of direct experience with graffiti. Without such experience, my propositions, even if granted, are likely to seem hollow.

Is appropriate direct experience irreducibly necessary for understanding? Can the needed intuitions be built only on direct experience, not on reports or documents of any kind?

Sensory experience would seem to be of that nature, wouldn’t it?

Example 1.1: film, screen shots

And that does seem to be, in part, why I like to include so many screen shots in my posts on films. It’s not enough that my reader believe me when I make this or that assertion about what’s happening on the screen. They need to see it for themselves. Including screen shots is a crude way of doing that. Ideally the reader—that’s you—wouldn’t simply take the screen shot at face value but rather would use it as a guide into the film itself.

Example 2: Church service and religion

Another, different example. I recently went to church for the first time in years. I went, not in the spirit of checking out a possible church I could attended, but because I wanted to check out the minister. But those two hours changed my sense of what religion is.

But not in the sense of giving me new ideas about religion, or new propositions about religion. I already had THOSE propositions, about how religion is more than believe in certain supernatural beings, about how it is belonging to a community, etc. I already knew that.

But sitting there in church that Sunday I saw the community all around me. Those abstract propositions gained life and substance that that didn’t have before.

Example 3: Objects

Third time around: and then we have object-oriented ontology, which, at least in Graham Harman’s version, builds an awful lot on intuitions gained from thinking about simple human scale objects, such as hammers or beach balls. We all have experience of such things, but it’s not clear how one can extend that kind of experience to very different objects, such as quarks and protest movements. That seems to me almost a slight of language. I don’t see why those basic intuitions grounded in human scale objects should simply transfer that anything language allows us to treat as objects.

And yet, it’s not clear to me that such transfer is actually wrong or misleading. I’d like to see an explicit construction of this, shall we say, intuition by proxy. Is that what Being’s supposed to be?

And then, I suppose, there's the ineffable, isn't there?

Big-Time Athletics and the Funding of Higher Ed

2011-11-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

Some informal reflections on the dynamics of money and college athletics. No details here, just a general sketch.

I don't really know when college and university sports became big business, but I'd think the impetus was TV money. TV exposure, in turn, propelled traditional college sports rivalries into the national spotlight as entertainment for all. Thus a significant segment of college athletics became part of the entertainment business and operated outside or at least beside the normal institutional dynamics of colleges and universities.

I did my graduate work at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-1970s. When SUNY took over the University of Buffalo (UB) in the late 1960s it did so with the intention of turning it into "the Berkeley of the East." The English Department was, for whatever reason, one of the first to be targeted for significant upgrading, which it had achieved by the time I got there. That's why I went, following a newly established 'pipeline' between Johns Hopkins (my undergraduate school) and UB.

However, things were also heading into decline when I arrived at SUNYB in Fall of 1973. The student riots a couple of years earlier had panicked the local worthies and they put the brakes on SUNYB's rise to academic greatness. Still, it took awhile for the English Deaprtment to loose its luster.

Anyhow, either at the very end of my years there or, more likely, some time later, SUNYB started discussing whether or not it should beef up its football program, which had been nothing special. In fact, it may have been on a multi-year losing streak, I forget the details. The logic of that discussion was simple:

a good football team generates school spirit
school spirit generates alumni loyalty
and loyal alumni shower their beloved alma mater with $$$$

But UB didn't hire a Joe Paterno. I don't really know how that plan went, though, of course, I am aware to the funding nonsense that's recently been going on in the SUNY system as a whole.

Thus big-time athletics functions as a funding mechanism for higher education. Just how the funds generated actually work in the school budget, I don't know. My guess is that they mostly support the big-time athletics that generated them in the first place, which means that its not much of a funding mechanism at all. It just creates public visibility that has nothing to do with education or with research. In the case of Penn State, Paterno himself was genuinely interested in the school's educational mission and he put his own funds and fund-raising energy into academic endeavors. But that's not the norm for big-time football coaches.

Now, think of the Ivies and would-be Ivies (like Johns Hopkins). They take a measured stance on big-time athletics. They DO understand and support the notion of atheletics generating school spirit, but they're cagey about it. In the case of good old JHU, football wasn't much of a thing. But lacrosse, THAT's another matter. And when I was there men's fencing was a big deal. Among the Ivies proper, well, they've got their traditional football rivalvies, etc.

But the general line is that these schools want student athletes and that's more or less what they do get. More or less. But they can afford to do this because they don't need the TV exposure to generate money and interest in the school. They've got history and old money in the endowments. They've got their own brand of elite status to generate institutional loyalty. And, though their elite alumni etc, they've got good access to government research funding, etc.

It's an odd system.

At places like the large state universities we've got what is, for all intents and purposes, a professional athletic program flying under a schools' flag. The atheletes are poorly paid and may or may not end us with a viable education. A very few get a shot at professional athletics, but only a few. The schools students get a team to root for and, who knows, maybe the school does reap financial benefits from sports-fueled alumni loyalty.

And these are the schools whose educational mission is most threatened by online education. The well-endowed Ivies and their non-Ivy peers will survive the growth of online education. The state schools are another matter. What's an intercollegiate athletic program to students who aren't even on campus?

ZAP!

2011-11-16T06:21:00.000-05:00

Scandal at Penn State: Does not compute

2011-11-15T14:41:00.000-05:00

I don't have much to say about the mess at Penn State, perhaps because I don't understand it. But I'm not sure what understanding would get me. But I'd like to offer a simple observation andd a dumb and simple-minded comment.

One. Though Sandusky is the one accused of child molestation, we're not discussing him. We're discussing Paterno. It's as though we know Sandusky's story but . . . Whether or not we think we know Paterno's story, he's the man with the bigger than life reputation. So he's the one who gets discussed.

Two. The Paterno discussion would be much easier if we put him through a Magnetronic Being Splitter that would turn him into four different persons: 1) Paterno the winningest coach in college football, 2) Paterno the benefactor of good things at Penn State, 3) Paterno the figure-head of PSU, and 4) Paterno the guardian of children.

If we could do that, then we could execute #4, burn #3 in effigy, give #2 a plaque in the lobby of the PSU library, and erect a statue to #1. Alas, the Magnetronic Being Splitter hasn't been debugged yet, so we can't do that. We're stuck with having 1, 2, 3, and 4 in one indivisible person; and we don't really have a way of making sense of such people.

The Paterno problem does not compute. It's the sort of thing that, nonetheless, human beings somehow muddle through, but that causes super smart computers hell-bent on world destruction to explode.

Swamp Grass

2011-11-14T10:43:00.000-05:00

Pastoral 4: Orality and Mastery

2011-11-14T10:31:00.001-05:00

While I emphasized sexual imagery, both explicit and implicit, in my first post on Disney’s Pastoral, the episode also has a good deal of oral imagery. That’s what I want to discuss in this post.

Oral imagery shows up well before any sexual imagery. It’s there at the beginning, albeit in a very special form, that of an on-screen character playing a musical line from Beethoven’s score. As I indicated before, this is the only episode in the whole film where that happens, and it happens several times throughout the episode. Further, the instrument is always a wind instrument, never a stringed instrument, though Beethoven’s symphony abounds in strings.

In the first case we see a faun playing pan pipes. He’s joined by other fauns, all piping and dancing away, and they’re joined by unicorns. Then one faun and one unicorn get to playing around. The faun climbs a pedestal and alternately plays a riff on the pipes and strikes poses, as though he were a statue, while unicorn attempts to make sense of it this harmless trickery. At the end of this back and forth the unicorn licks the faun on the face:

Think of it as an oral link between a faun and a unicorn. We’ll see other such links.

Then we have the young winged-horse at breakfast, then licking his lips afterward:

After that we see one sibling nibble at some flowers and another eat grapes:

Flowers will appear as a motif in the second movement, which is about courtship, while grapes will run riot in the third, showing us wine-making, drinking, and dancing.

There is at least one more case of on-screen piping in this first movement, just before the transition to the second. As the second movement evolves we see a cherub pluck a grape from a vine and then present it to a centaurette. She kisses it and the cherub then eats it:

In another scene a centaurette feeds grapes to a recumbent centaur:

Do those grapes have any cherubic magic infused into them? Whether or not they do, the cherubs close out the movement by playing pipes to entice he and she to meet:

At this point music has actively entered into the story as an agent forging certain kinds of relationships.

That movement gives way to the third, the Bacchanal, which opens with centaurs and centaurettes carrying baskets of grapes to a large wooden vat while fauns pipe merrily away. Some of the fauns are inside the vat, piping and stomping. At one point one faun spews grape juice from his pipes. Now we’ve got grapes, and their juice, explicitly identified with music, forging another oral knot.

Then Bacchus enters with his entourage and we have the single most intense bit of oral imagery in the film. One of Bacchus’s attendants refills his cup. He then pours the wine into his donkey’s mouth while sticking out his own tongue for a taste. The donkey drinks, smacks his lips, and burps in satisfaction:

Note that this donkey, like unicorns, has a horn on its forehead. Perhaps Disney wants us to recall that earlier image where a unicorn licked the face of a piping faun. Perhaps that horn is also phallic. Who knows?

We’ve seen how the dance unfolds in the previous post. Bacchus gets drunker and drunker and ends up kissing his donkey:

Now the merriment ends and Zeus conjures up a storm and zaps Bacchus and his donkey with thunderbolts. The last one destroys the grape vat and, by implication, puts a damper on further oral (and sexual) pleasures.

Still, Bacchus and his donkey manage to exact some last oral pleasure as they sit in a river of spilled wine, playing and drinking:

Then a centaur stands on a promontory and signals “all clear” with a horn call. The storm is over and the last movement can begin.

As I indicated in the Color and Sound post, this segment focuses on a rainbow and, in particular, on the cherubs and winged horses playing in that rainbow. Disney focuses on one winged horse in particular:

That’s the youngster we first saw suckling. Then, still in the first movement, there’s a sequence where he takes his first uncertain flight, helped by his mother. While he flies with his family through the rest of that movement he’s clearly more awkward than his older siblings. That awkwardness is gone in his rainbow flying. He flies with strength, ease, and confident playfulness, alternately chasing and being chased, and swimming on the water and under it as confidently as he flies.

How’d that happen? I suppose we could imagine that he spent the day furiously practicing while we were watching the courtship and the dancing. But that sort of real-world answer won’t do.

For this is not the real world. This is fantasy. And fantasy answers such questions in a different way. But not here and not now.

Here’s the last oral gesture in the film:

As the youngsters swim away in the rainbow (you can see it on the surface of the water) a faun pipes away. This scene will give way to a group scene where all the characters gather on a promontory to watch the setting sun.

Later.

Next Up: Pastoral 5: All Together Now, Toward an Aesthetics of Surface and Depth, in which Nothing is Hidden, All is Revealed

Pastoral 3: Come Dance with Me

2011-11-13T12:02:00.000-05:00

Let’s take a close look at the dance sequence in the Disney’s realization of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. As I indicated it ends with Bacchus kissing his donkey. I want to see how they got there.

The sequence starts with Bacchus in the middle of an opening in the forest, drinking away as the centaurs and centaurettes dance figures around him. He soon joins in, dancing with one centaurette after another (3rd, 4th, and 5th frame following, the centaurette in the 6th seems to be the same as the one in the 3rd).

Now the donkey slips in for a turn. And only a turn. But Disney’s established that the donkey is a suitable dance partner.

[BTW what’s that horn in the middle of the donkey’s forehead? How’d that unicorn feature get transposed into this donkey, and why? Inquiring minds want to know.]

Another turn with a centaurette:

Then it’s into the center:

While yet another centaurette beckons from not-so-afar. She moves away, Bacchus follows, falls, and sits on the ground, drinking away for a moment.

But he gets up and goes back into the fray and, after missing a centaurette or two, manages to grab a centaurette’s tail—a body part she shares with donkeys. But he can’t hang on; she twirls and he goes flying into the air:

He’s flying high and heading toward his donkey and two fauns. The fauns manage to get out of the way. The donkey does not. Bacchus grabs him by the forepaws, presumably thinking he’s a centaurette, and gives him a kiss upon landing:

And that’s it. The sky will cloud up, and everyone will head for cover. We’re into the next sequence in the film.

The important thing to notice is that pass in the middle, the one where Bacchus does a figure with his donkey. He’s open-eyed for that one; he knows what he’s doing. And the donkey seems to proud and happy too.

That’s where Disney sets us up for the ending. It’s as though, in this setting, a donkey’s as good as a centaurette. At the end, things are a bit different. Bacchus is a bit drunker, he’s dizzy from spinning, and he’s blinded by a bunch of grapes over his eyes. He can’t see that it’s his donkey he’s kissing. It’s when he realizes the truth that the storm comes and the episode moves to a new phase.

Next Up: A look at oral imagery in the episode.

Pastoral 2: Color and Sound

2011-11-12T11:01:00.001-05:00

It seems that I’m not done with Disney’s Pastoral. I want to think about Disney’s palette in the Pastoral in this post and I’m planning another post on the dance sequence.

It’s not simply that the colors are often garishly saturated. They’re often unnatural as well, and the forms are highly stylized, as we see in the next five frame-grabs. The first two come quite early in the film, shortly after the establishing shot of Mount Olympus at dawn. The next two are near the end of the first segment while the last comes early in the courtship segment.

I’ve decided that there’s more here than simple exploration and extension of visual possibilities, though there is that.

The imagery in the Pastoral episode is the most highly stylized imagery in the film, even more than the Ave Maria. And one cannot help but be aware of it: Whoa! Those colors, those shapes! Disney establishes this awareness early and definitively in the episode.

And he amplifies that awareness in the last segment, where a rainbow appears after the storm. Disney revels in that rainbow. It’s the main event in the sequence. The visual point of rainbows, of course, is color, and color is what images are made of, color and form. Notice how Disney has the characters work with the color:

Look closely at the wine Bacchus is drinking; it has all the colors of the rainbow. He’s drinking the color.

Now the cherubs and the young horses take flight into the rainbow.

They’ll play IN the color for 45 seconds or so, which is a substantial length of time. Disney works hard to immerse us in the color.

Yet it’s not simply that these children are playing in color. We’re also to notice that it’s the young horses playing with cherubs. Why’s that significant? Because the cherubs have an ambiguous place in the episode.

They appear in the second sequence, the courtship sequence. They observe the courting, but they also participate in it, creating hats for the centaurettes and, at the end, making a match. They’re outside the main action, but manage it and comment on it.

At the very end of the sequence, when the match has been made, the cherubs draw a curtain across the scene. Where did that curtain come from? Do such curtains hang around here and there in the Elysian Fields? Perhaps. And perhaps Disney is just having the cherubs step outside the scene entirely as a way of marking a sharp transition to the next sequence, the Bacchanal. In so doing, of course, he pushes the audience out of the scene as well, making us aware of the staginess of it all.

It’s the cherubs that do that. They’ll reappear in the storm segment, where they flee, cower, and hide. And they reappear here, at the end, where they play with young winged horses. Now they’re thoroughly ‘inside’ the action and thus inside the film. They’ve assumed the same status as the horses. By linking these two sets of characters together in the midst of rainbow color Disney is, in effect, intermixing the ‘inside’ (the flying horses) and the ‘outside’ (the cherubs) of his fictional world, the imaginary events and our awareness THAT they are imaginary.

It’s not simply that Disney is going ‘meta’, breaking the fourth wall as he does when the cherubs draw the curtain, but he’s playing around while doing so. If you will, he’s flirting with us, and with his characters.

And that, I suggest, is how we are to understand those moments where it is as though part of Beethoven’s score is being played by an onscreen character. By breaking the ‘wall’ between the characters and the soundtrack, Disney calls attention to the music itself and to the conventionalized relationship between music and visible action.

There’s a particularly interesting case of this motif in the Bacchanal, just before the dance. A red runner is being unrolled up steps toward Bacchus’s throne:

But no one seems to be unrolling the carpet. Rather, the fauns at lower left are playing horns, and the carpet unrolls as they play and advance up the stairs themselves. Thus the sound itself is affecting the physical world, which is a bit different from the cherubs using sounds to entice a centaur and centaurette to one another. That music CAN work in THAT way, such understanding is well conventionalized. That music can unroll a carpet up the stairs, THAT’s something that happens only in Cartoonland.

Which, of course, is where we are.

Just before the Pastoral Disney had that intermission episode in which we saw the correspondence between musical sound and visual images. That, I suppose, is not so much that the sound caused the image, but that the sound and the image are both manifestations of the same thing. Then there’s the opening episode, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As I observed in my post on that episode:

... the changes in the imagery are synchronized to the music. The sparkles, bows, waves, disks, and so forth, move in time to the music. Transitions between one type of imagery and another are synchronized with the transition from one musical phrase to another. To the extent that it makes sense to talk of causality in this fantastic world, it is the music that drives motion in the imagery and causes one type of imagery to give way to another.

There’s an echo of that effect in the relationship between the fauns’ horn playing and the unrolling carpet.

Thus in this episode Disney calls our attention both to color and to music, the dual substance of his art while at the same time unfolding a sexually charged panorama of domestic life. It’s an astonishing conception. Perhaps a bit overwrought, but nonetheless astonishing.

As for the cuteness, I’ve almost forgotten about it. Almost.

Those Objects'll Get You Every time

2011-11-11T14:03:00.002-05:00

Domestic Tranquility, NOT: Disney’s Pastoral

2011-11-11T10:41:00.015-05:00

I’ve saved the most troublesome for last, Disney’s setting of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. It was soundly criticized upon initial release, mostly, or especially, for Disney’s use and reworking of Beethoven. THAT doesn’t bother me at all. That kind of artistic license is pretty much the price of admission for Fantasia. No, what bothers me is the cuteness, but secondarily the palette. Both are obvious enough, but it’s the cuteness I want to grapple with.

For THAT is one of the central criticisms of the Disney aesthetic, it’s too cute. This is certainly not the only episode in Fantasia where cuteness rears its ugly head. Yet it’s not bothersome in the dancing mushrooms, and it’s easily set aside in the goldfish and the baby dinosaurs. But it’s front and center in the Pastoral.

Moreover, the Pastoral is in the heart of Disney’s imaginative world, for it’s about family life. The first segment shows us a family of winged horses—inspired by Pegasus—mother, father, and children. One of the children takes its first flight before our wonderstruck eyes. Then see the little ones at play and the whole family parading majestically across the sky. That’s the heart of Disney country. And its followed by courtship, a rousing party, a storm that drives adults to protect children and males to protect females, and then the storm breaks, out comes the sun. Everyone’s happy. The sun sets. Bedtime.

Why all the treacle, in the character designs, in the actions, and in the palate?

Let’s work our way through it.

A Day in the Life

The segment opens with a shot of Mount Olympus, and it will end there as well. We see bright fields with scampering unicorns and fauns. One of the fauns plays the pan pipes:

Here Disney does something he doesn’t do anywhere else in the film. The faun’s playing matches a part in the symphony, as though that particular bit of music were being played by the faun. This will happen a half dozen or so time throughout the segment. It has the effect of bringing the music into the action rather than having it being, well, an accompaniment to it.

Whether or not this is an incidental feature of this segment or it is somehow organically linked to Disney’s purpose is not clear to me, though I’ve not been able to come up with a rationale for such linkage. The mere fact that it happens, however, is sufficient to justify mentioning it.

After a bit more romping we see the winged horses and, in particular, a mother and child. First we see the child suckling, then it stands:

This child will take its first flight—at least, it is logical to assume that it is its first flight. That involves a number of gags, but, once the little nipper gets going he joins the family in parading across the sky. They land in the water and, as they’re swimming, we get perhaps the loveliest sequence in this episode. A whole herd of flying horses spirals across the sky and lands in the water:

The effect of the reflections moving on the surface of the water is marvelous. Of course they move in parallel to the horses themselves, but they also cut through the family that is already in the water, playing around.

This segment gives way to the second movement, which depicts the courtship of centaurs and centaurettes, aided and abetted by dozens of cute cherubs. The centaurs are awkwardly designed and stiffly animated. The centaurettes fare rather better and John Culhane is right to praise their facial expressiveness (Walt Disney’s Fantasia p. 141). One of the loveliest moments occurs when one of the cherubs positions a dove’s wing so as to form a hat for a coy centaurette:

And perhaps the worst moment in the episode comes at the end of this segment, after three cherubs have successfully introduced a lonely centaur and a lonely centaurette to one another. The three of them draw a curtain over the scene, but one lingers on, peeking through the curtain to observe the scene. Here we see his every so cute little bottom:

In a few frames that will morph into a heart. So cute and adorable.

Yuck!

Now we get to the heart of the episode, the middle segment, the Bacchanal. It opens with fauns, centaurs, and centaurettes bringing grapes to a large wooden vat and the fauns dancing on the grapes while gleefully playing their pipes—as though they were the source of soundtrack music. Then Bacchus enters, flanked by centaurettes, attended by fauns, beneath a canopy held up by cherubs, and riding a donkey that’s considerably smaller than he is:

After this bit of business and that, the dancing begins, centaurs, centaurettes, and Bacchus himself, the randy old goat. Well, not a goat, but obviously randy, he dances with a number of centaurettes, one after another:

But Bacchus is thoroughly drunk and can’t stay on his feet. So he ends up sitting on the ground, not merely embracing, but kissing—no, not a centaurette—his donkey! What next? Well, what next is that a cloud looms over the scene:

The sky darkens and rain begins to fall, a fierce rain. Everyone scurries for cover. Fauns, unicorns, centaurs and centaurettes, and flying horses—there’s a sense of real danger and distress. Thus a centaurette rescues a young unicorn stranded on a rock in the river; the cherubs huddle fearfully inside a temple; and a centaur sounds the alarm (yet another of those moments where the music emanates from onscreen action):

But the real action in this sequence comes from Zeus, who hurls thunderbolts down to earth. He doesn’t aim them just anywhere. He aims them at Bacchus:

Here he chases Bacchus and his donkey across a field:

At this point they’ve taken refuge behind a tree, which Zeus zaps:

And all the creatures come running out from behind that tree:

We follow various creatures here and there before once again joining Bacchus, who seeks refuge under the wine-making vat. Which promptly gets zapped:

The grape juice spills from the vat, floods the land, and Bacchus ends up playing in a puddle of grape juice. He’s OK:

At this point Zeus looses interest and indicates that Vulcan should stop forging lightening bolts. Which he does. Zeus falls asleep. The storm is over.

[Note: Yes, I know that “Zeus” is a Greek name and “Vulcan” and “Bacchus” are Roman. But those are the names Disney’s team gave to these creatures.]

There’s no climax at all. Or, rather, the bursting of the vat and the flowing of wine, THAT was the climax. We’re now into the denouement.

Which is utterly uneventful, but lovely here and there. The sun comes out, everyone’s happy, night descends, everyone goes to sleep, and we end with another shot of Mount Olympus:

What Just Happened?

First, as I indicated at the beginning, this episode is about domestic life. First, parents and children, represented by the flying horses. Then we have courtship between centaurs and centaurettes, which is followed by the Bacchanal, then the storm, and, at last, happy good night for everyone.

We have five segments, with the Bacchanal in the middle. The action’s in the Bacchanal and in that storm. Why did Zeus specifically target Bacchus, that rotund randy fellow who ended up kissing a donkey?

Let’s set-aside all the cuteness, and especially the depiction of Bacchus—I have a vague memory that one reviewer termed him “Bacchus in diapers” but I can provide no citation—and think of this as, well, as myth. Bacchus is the Roman version of the Greek Dionysus, who was the son of Zeus (the guy hurling the thunder bolts). Bacchus/Dionysus are associated with wild passionate rites where anything goes, and that most certainly includes sex. If those centaurettes were sexy women and Bacchus were a virile young man we’d have no trouble believing that there were sexually interested in one another and that, given a suitable opportunity, they’d have sex.

But they’re not. Well, the centaurette IS sexy, in a centaurette kind of way, and we’ve just had a segment where centaurs and centaurettes were courting, and you know what THAT leads to, don’t you? So, yes, she’s sexy, but since she’s a centaurette we don’t have to take her sexuality seriously. As for Bacchus, he’s an obese old man. The idea of him have a sexual relationship with a nubile young woman, well, that’s JUST disgusting. Which is the point. It’s so disgusting that THAT cannot possibly be what’s going on there on the dance ground, even though he dances with centaurette after centaurette and one even beckons to him. No, it’s not happening.

Except that it very obviously is. That the women aren’t human and the man is old and fat. That’s all camouflage, plausible deniability; in psychoanalytic talk, it’s defense. And the big defense is when the drunken Bacchus ends up kissing his donkey. How silly. How very silly. No sex there.

Well, a couple of years later, 1944, Walter Lantz made a cartoon called Abou Ben Boogie, a companion to The Greatest Man in Siam. The singer in Abou Ben Boogie is modeled on the same character as the sexy daughter in Greatest, and she’s wooed by a strapping young man. One of the running gags is that the sexy singer gets swapped for a camel while the young man doesn’t know it. Here we see two versions, the second coming from the end of the cartoon:

There’s no doubt that there’s a sexual interaction between Abou Ben Boogie and the singer. But there are, of course, limits to what can be depicted on screen. There are limits to how far you can go, as it were. But, if you are clever, you can go further, or at least gesture toward what’s next along the line, by substituting. So, you swap out the woman and swap in a camel. The juxtaposition is so absurd that it effectively disguises what’s really going on. Which is that Ben Boogie and the lady are making the beast with the two backs.

And so it is in the bacchanal sequence with Bachus and the centaurettes. Except that his donkey has been substituted for a centaurette. He can embrace and kiss the donkey and no one’s sensibilities are offended. It’s a good gag, just a good gag.

But obviously someone’s sensibilities WERE offended. Because that’s when the sky clouds over, just as Bacchus and his donkey were getting down to business. And, as we’ve seen, it’s Bacchus who’s the target of those thunder bolts. That storm isn’t just any storm. It’s a storm about him, and his actions, and their implications. The storm ends those Bacchanalian revels, it ends the license, it ends the fun. THAT’s why Zeus took aim at Bacchus. The old killjoy in the sky wanted to restore order.

But what ends the storm? The destruction of the grape vat, that’s what. And it’s the wine of the grape that’s the agent of all that licentiousness, no? And Bacchus presides over that, no?

Now, and here we’re swinging for the rafters, doesn’t sexual intercourse usually end in an explosion of fluid, and isn’t that what we get when the vat, under which Bacchus is hiding, gets zapped? After that, what happens? Relaxation and sleep maybe? Bacchus and the donkey play around in a puddle of grape juice and Zeus goes to sleep.

It all fits. And it’s outrageous. But then, that’s how things go, isn’t it?

A couple more observations and we’re done.

Notice that we don’t see any winged horses in either the courtship segment or the bacchanal. Their segment is about parents and children, and about children learning how to move about in the world. Disney keeps that separate from courtship, in the second segment, and licentious revelry, in the thirds. That makes sense. But the horses do make a brief appearance in the storm sequence. A young one is having trouble flying and he’s retrieved by mother and taken back to the nest. The storm threatens all.

In the final sequence, when the sun comes out and then the night falls, all the creatures are on stage, including the winged horses. The youngsters are now frolicking in the sky, and with the cherubs, those cute creatures that fostered the romance that leads to sex that leads to babies:

Cherubs lead to babies, yes they do. Here they are, next to one another, but in such a way that the causal relationship is utterly obscure. Which is how art sometimes works.

To Cuteness, and Beyond?

Make no mistake, Disney’s Pastoral is plagued both with cuteness and with a garish color scheme. Yet, in standard Freudian fashion, the repressed keeps popping up. The sexuality that Disney, on behalf of middle America, repressed, it snuck in there anyhow. The vat exploded and all’s right with the world.

Yes, Disney DID sanitize his world, but we can go overboard with that charge. His Rite of Spring sequence ended in gruesome lingering deaths for those dinosaurs, a sobering experience to take into the lobby at intermission. He followed the Pastoral with Dance of the Hours. One can argue whether or not those animals are cute, but they sure had big eyes. More to the point, they had trouble keeping in role. They keeping losing touch with the roles they were supposed to be dancing and, instead, lapsed into, well, mere animals. Isn’t that what happens in a good rousing bacchanal? You get so drunk that you’ll even fail to attend to the difference between a person and a donkey.

And then we have Night on Bald Mountain, the other Fantasia episode framed by a mountain. That episode too has frenzied revelry at its center. But, where the revelry in the Pastoral is stopped by a dominating male figure, the Bald Mountain revelry is stoked by a dominating male figure, as though it were the Pastoral’s negative transformation.

And beyond this film there’s Dumbo. Yes, Dumbo is cute, and Disney plays him for all he’s worth. But the film takes a soberly cynical view of circus management and is straightforward in depicting the back-breaking physical labor required to run a circus.

Alas, Disney never did another film like Dumbo. That remained a world unexplored. Nor did he do another Fantasia, though his successors gave it a go with the inferior Fantasia 2000. For whatever reason he was never able to integrate these diverse aspects of human life into a single coherent aesthetic vision. What we get is fragmented and scattered. And, often enough, as it is in Fantasia, magnificent.

* * * * *

It’s a good thing you can’t bring an intellectual property suit against someone who ‘infringes’ on your intellectual property even before you created that property. If THAT were possible then no doubt St. Jobs would have sued Disney for infringing on his logo:

ADDENDUM: I've now got two more posts on this episode:

Pastoral 2: Color and Sound—with particular attention to playing in the raindbow at the end and some remarks on (all but) breaking "the fourth wall."

Pastoral 3: Come Dance with Me—over 20 frame grabs of the dance sequence, with light commentary, and, BTW, how'd that donkey get a horn in the middle of its head?

I'll be doing a fouth post, which will be about oral imagery and master, and then a fifth, about overall artistry.

OOO: Issues, Questions, Befuddlement, Stuff

2011-11-10T15:59:00.002-05:00

The universe consists of objects. What else?

Well objects have qualities, so they must be different from objects. How so? For example, we can say that red is a quality of a beach ball, a flame, or blood. But is there a ‘redness’ object? If not, just WHY not?

Objects can enter into relations with other objects, which may or may not yield new objects. So relations too are different from objects.

Can events, actions, and processes be objects? What of a race, for example? Perhaps the race where Usain Bolt first shattered the world record in the 100 meter dash. An object? Why or why not?

The hammer is an object, as is a nail and a plank of wood. But the act of hammering the nail into the plank, is that an object? If not an object, what is it? A set of relations? An action? Is an action a different kind of thing, alongside objects, properties, relations . . .

And sets, we know sets aren’t objects, as set membership can be arbitrary.

So, one thing is to separate (metaphysically considered) objects from grammatical categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and then there’s the pesky noun phrase, which can be used to nominalize just about anything. But does nominalization make an object of something? A tree is an object, but what of the falling tree, that is, the ‘time slice’ of some tree that’s falling? Is THAT an object?

OOO holds that the universe consists of multiple layers of objects, none of which can be reduced to any of the others. OK. I like that. What I’m looking for is an argument that says that if X exhibits the (metaphysical) properties of an object, then it cannot be reduced to some arrangement of other objects because those properties make such reduction impossible.

So, we’ve got an apple. It has such and such a shape, a red flecked red surface, such and such a texture, and taste, and so forth. But THOSE are not the properties I have in mind. Rather, it’s more like the fact that an apple CAN have properties, and that it CAN be ever WITHDRAWING, that’s what makes it an object.

Does THAT even make sense?

You see, I’ve dealt with the problem of mapping out conceptual worlds, of figuring out what kinds of concepts we need, how they’re related, etc. Don’t have that one locked down, not by any means. But I know what’s going on there.

Figuring out the universe? THAT’s very strange. It can’t be just objects. But what else is there?

More Birches

2011-11-10T15:13:00.000-05:00

The Underbelly Project, Big Art or What?

2011-11-09T10:46:00.000-05:00

It’s only been a year since The Underbelly Project sprang from the pages of the The New York Times and the Times of London. From a certain point of view what’s interesting is that it embraced both graffiti and street art. That’s but secondary to the question of whether or not tUP is a PR stunt intended to set-up a nice cash payout or whether it is, for lack of a better word, real. [My posts on tUP are here.]

As someone who feels the mystery of dark places, hidden away, even illegal, I think it was conceived and executed in the grandest style of the The Real. Until the day of the Big Reveal. Then all hell broke loose and tUP ceased to be the property of PAC and Workhorse, the founders and curators, and the many artists who participated.

Just who put what down there in the hole and why, that’s become secondary to what gets made of it in our minds. That is, what gets made of the knowledge that it’s there and of whatever tangible evidence we have of it, photos, videos, and the like. Well, it seems that we’re in for an exhibition at Art Basel in Miami, a special edition book, and a serf’s edition of the same book to be released in February.

From my point of view, what matters most, and it’s almost the only thing that matters, is whether or not the importance of the site itself somehow survives this assault by Big Art. It’s the site itself that spawned the project, as though those abandoned tunnels called Workhorse and PAC into the ground so they’d conceive and execute the project. And it’s the site itself that’s effectively beyond reach.

Those who were there, they remember. The rest of us, we can see photos and videos and hear accounts, but we cannot know, not directly, what’s down there under the ground. We cannot feel THAT mystery, or THAT fear. THAT’s what’s real. If the shadow of that reality is able to survive all the Big Art packaging and hype, then reality will have one.

But it will be a tough struggle.

* * * * *

Remember, in the beginning there was the name, and the name was on a wall. Someone else’s wall. The name became a claim: I EXIST, I WAS HERE.

If you take the name off the wall and put it onto a canvas, well, then it’s only a name. A name without a claim. A photograph of the name on the wall preserves a memory of the claim. Perhaps the Underbelly documents will do that and do it well.

You see—or maybe you don’t—that’s what’s so difficult to get across, the importance of the place. That’s because art-on-canvas or art-on-boards IS NOT about place. It can go anywhere. But graffiti and street art live in the place, and the place lives through them. That abandoned subway stations IS NOT a gallery that just happens to be rather inaccessible. It’s not a gallery at all. It’s a living place, giving life to the art on its walls and gaining life from that art.

That fact that we can no longer access that place at least forces us to think about the place itself. That’s important.

OTOH, an exhibit “fashioned to simulate the rawness of the abandoned station four stories beneath the bustle of New York City,” that bothers me. That sounds a bit too much like a jungle adventure ride at a theme park, as though the Art Baselers are going to get the Disney version, with grit. Will the exhibit aspire to an oppressive authenticity, or will it breathe?

We shall see.

Or, rather, some of us will so. Most of us, not.

Stay tuned.

Parable of the Reeds 2 (No Figuring Needed)

2011-11-09T07:17:00.000-05:00

The Underbelly Rising

2011-11-08T12:06:00.000-05:00

The Underbelly Project is coming up for air, and, I suppose, a spot of cash and glory too. I just got an email from the project (you can sign-up on the web, here). Here’s the scoop:

After taking time to reflect on The Underbelly Project, we felt it was important to share what it was like in the abandoned subway station. To show the work being created, to show the life that was happening on the dust lined tracks. To do this we will be holding an exhibition during Art Basel Miami. For this exhibition, time lapse videos will be shown of each artist creating their work, a video walkthrough of the station will show the entire station right after the work was completed, and photo documentation will help illuminate how the artists created their work . Unique artifacts from the abandoned station will give viewers insight into the process. It is our hope that this show will help convey what it was like in our dark corner of the world for that brief time.

In addition to the documentation of the project, we thought it was important to showcase new works created by artists from The Underbelly, outside of the physical limitations of the tunnel. To showcase work that was created in favorable conditions without the fear of being arrested or discovered. For this a sampling of the painters, sculptures and installation artists from the tunnel were chosen to represent the variety of talents that left their mark in this abandoned subway station.

That opening phrase—“after taking time to reflect . . .”—is, of course, bullshit. Which may well be OK depending on all sorts of things, including what actually happens at the installation at Art Basel in Miami this year.

Here’s more:

Fashioned to simulate the rawness of the abandoned station four stories beneath the bustle of New York City, the exhibit will attempt to capture the experience of artists’ that were invited leave their creative mark four stories beneath the city streets. The show will feature video footage of artists at work, still documentation, as well as recorded sounds heard in the tunnel.

Exclusively at The Underbelly Show, the unreleased We Own the Night: The Art of The Underbelly Project book, will be available as a limited edition collectors boxed set before the public release in February. This boxed set will include a hard cover book along with 9 unreleased photos packaged in a hand crafted oak box engraved with the names of each artist that contributed to the project. Before the general viewing there will also be a book signing featuring many of the aforementioned artists.

This had to be planned, if not from the very beginning, at least from some time well before, like, March or April of this year, or even before November or December of last year. Workhorse and PAC may not have planned the book and the Art Basel exhibition from the beginning. But they must have had something like it in mind, otherwise they wouldn’t have documented the process from the get-go.

We're also told that "this exhibition will highlight the essence of the abandoned New York City station known as the Underbelly." THE essence? Really? Color me skeptical. Why? Because going to a chi-chi pop up gallery Art Basel is not the same as illegally going underground into an abandoned tunnel system that's dark, dirty, and genuinely scary. Not the same at all.

Still, the exhibit might nonetheless be effective. Or it might be hype. It's hard to tell without actually being there.

Of course, unless you live in or near Miami, you have to be part of the 1% to get there and get in to see the show. And to actually buy the art, you have to have a top 1% income in order to afford it.

Because that’s how art is. And a few, a very few, artists make enough scratch that they can enter the 1% themselves instead of serving them as high class serfs. Will any of the Underbelly writers and artists make it into the 1%? The gallery owner? Who knows?

You can follow developments on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/UnderbellyArt

The Varieties of Descriptive Experience

2011-11-08T11:04:00.000-05:00

Or, literary hermeneutics as blind butchery

First, I note that I’ve blogged a number of posts dealing with description, either as a main or a subsidiary topic. In particular, there’s this post where. among other things, I note that a grammar is a description of language, specifically, that the Chomsky revolution in linguistics was about a certain way of describing a grammar. And there’s this post where I talk of abstract pictures (as descriptions), using the Watson/Crick double-helix model of DNA as my prime example. And then there’s this post, about the distribution of paragraph lengths in Heart of Darkness, again, description.

Those are very different kinds of description. Back in my days teaching technical writing I had students describe a mechanism in one assignment and a process in a different one. There we have two more kinds of description. In one case you’re describing something that’s static and in the other you’re describing something that unfolds in time.

Here’s a descriptive passage that’s of still a different kind. Technically, I suppose, it’s a description of an object. But the description is fundamentally expressive in nature, the concluding sentences from Mark Twain’s “Speech on the Weather”:

Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the New England weather--no language could do it justice. But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would not like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries—the ice-storm:

when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top—ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence.

One cannot make the words too strong.

I suppose we could go on and on cataloging various kinds of description. And perhaps someone has done so.

The description that most interests me these days, of course, is the description of literary texts. And not just any old description, but a certain kind of description. Just what kind that is, that’s a bit tough to specify. There IS this longish essay in which I say that a text has a computational form.

That’s what I want to describe. But I can’t say just what that is a priori. At least I can’t do that very well. That is, in part, because the nature of computation is itself rather obscure, as this article on Computation in Physical Systems lays it out.

It is my belief that such descriptions are necessary if we are to construct objective knowledge of literature of a new kind. That’s what I’m after, objective knowledge. What must those descriptions be like in order to be the foundation of objective knowledge? The Watson/Crick description of DNA became one of the foundations of objective knowledge about the molecular genetics of biology. Thousands upon thousands of morphological descriptions prepared over three or four centuries provided Darwin and others with the foundation on which to develop the idea of biological evolution.

THOSE are the kinds of descriptions I’m after. But not of biological objects. Of literary texts. I want descriptions that carve nature at the joints, to use a figure that dates back to Plato, Phaedrus (265e-266a):

. . . we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher, but to take example from our two recent speeches. The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions . . .

And so forth. You get the idea.

It’s clear to me that, as long as the explication of textual meanings is the primary tool of literary criticism, we’re just hacking away like blind butchers. If we want to carve our texts at the joints, we’ve got to open our eyes, and describe what we see. Slowly, patiently, accurately.

It’s not easy, it’s not self-evident. It’s worthy of our best efforts. In fact, believe it or not, it requires invention. We need to create tools and tactics for doing the descriptions. Why? Because they’re not there ready and waiting for us. Biologists had to figure out how to describe organisms and molecules. We’ve to do the same, and the things we’re describing, they’re not so tangible.

Parable of the Reeds (You Figure it Out)

2011-11-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

I’m quite fascinated by reeds. And these reeds are tall, five, six, seven feet and more. I like to take closely bunched shots.

Here, notice that leaf just to the left of center:

There it is again, a bit further away:

But not really. I’m standing in the same place. Just changed focus.

Now, I’ve panned right, but also changed focus a bit. But you can still see that same reed, further to the left.

Look at the lens flare!

Now we’ve lost it, that reed we’ve been following:

But we’ve still got lens flare. But the angle’s changed on it. No doubt if I knew something about optics I could explain that. The direction of the lens has changed, but the sun’s still the same place in the sky.

And I’m still standing in pretty much the same place. Look at that broken reed that cuts diagonally across the center line, ‘moving’ toward the upper right. You can spot it in the previous photo.

It would be nice to print these, say, eighteen inches wide and mount then vertically on a panel, one above the other, a bit like a Chinese scroll painting.

[I wonder. Do the object-oriented ontologists observe the world even this closely? Or are they too busing jumping up and down about zombies and such? I do wonder about these folks.]

Some Birch Trees for My Sister

2011-11-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

And a grape vine.

Three Objects, All Real

2011-11-06T16:21:00.001-05:00

Or, There’s an Aesthetic in this Photo

By three objects I mean, of course, the two trees and the lens flare. One could, I suppose, quibble with my counting. Maybe it’s three trees, counting the shorter one at the lower left corner. And perhaps the one tree should be counted as a tree enwrapped by a vine, upping the object count still further. Nor is the lens flare a single object, and maybe we should also count the sun itself as it does appear to cut the rightmost edge. But all that’s secondary.

What matters is counting the lens flare as real right along side the trees. That is, I’m discounting the obvious fact that lens flare is an artifact of the photographic process. I didn’t see it with my eyes before, during, and after I took the photo. I didn’t even guess that it might show up when I took the shot. I just took the shot and there it is. Which is fine by me.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s real. And, it REALLY is. Moreover, it’s compositionally useful. If it weren’t there I might well have cropped the right side of the photo a bit. Or not, as I don’t mind asymmetry. It’s hard to tell about these things.

Fact is, though, the lens flare did show up. And its presence does make for three STRONG objects in the photo. that, in turn, counts as a visual realization of my attitude about these things.

that is

art

reality

no sweat

Some Recent Graffiti

2011-11-05T11:21:00.000-04:00

Occupy Wall Street: America HAS a Ruling Class

2011-11-05T09:09:00.000-04:00

The OWS movement recognizes that America is divided into a ruling class and a class of servants.

Yes, America DOES have a ruling class. It’s not a hereditary ruling class, like the old European aristocracies. It’s permeable. One can enter it from below, and one can be thrust out of it too.

Of course the existence of this ruling class contradicts official doctrine, which says that American is ruled by the people and for the people. Members of this ruling class, therefore, will deny its existence. Certainly, the politician members MUST deny it.

Just what these rulers say among themselves, at the Bohemian Grove, in board meetings of for-profit corporations (e.g. General Motors, Goldman Sachs) and not-for-profit (e.g. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ford Foundation), in private clubs of various kinds, that’s a different matter. On that, I suspect, some are frank about being among The Rulers while others persist they are still of the people.

Nor do non-member Americans recognize the existence of this ruling class. Well, some of us do, some of us don’t. It’d be interesting to see whether recognition of the ruling class is stringing among non-voters than among voters. After all, if you do see that there’s a ruling class, what’s the point of voting? You vote doesn’t matter. At the same time, one might vote out of identification with and affirmation of that very same ruling class. After all, maybe you too will be tapped to enter into the sacred halls of the ruling class.

All of which is to say that, while a ruling class exists, though not a classical ruling class, class consciousness is weak, on both sides of the divide.

Outing the Class Divide

And THAT’s the biggest service that is being performed by Occupy Wall Street: identifying the class divide in America. The 1%, that’s the ruling class. The rest, no matter how many things otherwise divide us, we are the 99%.

THAT’s why it is not so important, at the moment, for Occupy Wall Street, to come up with a concrete and actionable set of demands.

THAT, also, is why Occupy Wall Street’s experiments with self-organization and direct democracy are so important, simply as examples of a different way of organizing collective life.

And THAT too, is why, for example, Lawrence Lessig can call for the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to come together on the issue of electoral reform. Of course one rather expects the Koch brothers to oppose such cooperation, but perhaps rank-and-file Tea Partiers will come to see that, as members of the 99%, they should make common cause with Occupy Wall Street.

And THAT finally is why Occupy Wall Street, and its various sibling Occupiers, must avoid violence. Violence WILL muddy the main message, the we are effectively divided between the rulers and the ruled. Let physical violence be the tool of the ruling class. The more they exercise it, the more they out themselves as Rulers who care more about Rule than about justice and equity.

The Rulers Crave Bigness

Establishing the existence of this class divide, of course, is only one thing, perhaps THE first thing. It is about equality and justice. The next thing, however, is to clarify the nature of the world the 1% presides over. It’s a world of BIGNESS: Big Business, Big Government, Big Media, and, well, a Big World, one that’s international in scope. It’s a world whose BIGNESS is brittle, e.g. a supply chain failure in Taiwan will impact the distribution of consumer goods around the world, and unsustainable, for bigness requires BIG ENERGY and BIG RESOURCES.

But that’s a rant for another day.

Say What?

2011-11-04T08:48:00.000-04:00

Objects, Intuitions, the Imaginary, and Language

2011-11-04T08:38:00.000-04:00

I’m heading toward language, imaginary objects, and the cognition of ontology. But I’m not ready to go there, not yet. There’s some preliminary hemming and hawing I want to do, so bracketing, as it were.

What’s with Withdrawal?

I’m thinking intuitions and how they inform our understanding of this, that, and the other—one of my current hobby horses. In one of the sessions at the recent Object-Oriented Ontology meetings in NYC someone asked Graham Harman, more or less: “What’s this about objects withdrawing? How can they do that? Who’s doing the withdrawing?” Those aren’t the exact words, but I believe they’re a reasonable rendition of the (vague) sense of the question.

Harmon, of course, was stumped. He’d been asked to explicate perhaps the originating metaphor behind his philosophy. Harmon knows very well that there’s no agent in the, e.g. hammer, that’s somehow how pulling it back from someone who sees it, grasps it, or hears its impact. That’s not it at all. But . . . What could he say? There’s nothing behind the metaphor beyond the sense that, no matter what one does to or with a physical hammer, there’s always more. Always.

It’s like someone who’s learning chess. They say to the teacher: “Tell me why bishops move diagonally and castles move rectilinearly or I won’t play.” The only answer to the question is: “Convention.” If that’s not good enough, then asking the question amounts to a refusal to play the game. So it is with: “What’s this withdrawal stuff?” If you want to play the game, if only out of curiosity, then you MUST accept the language at face value and see where it leads you.

Which is what I’ve been doing for these past several months. Now I want to ‘push back’, as the current idiom has it. Just a little.

While I’m willing to accept the foundational language of ‘withdrawal’ and so forth at face value, I’m not quite sure what the implications are.

Objects and Objects

Let me explain. The rock bottom intuition on which Harman builds his metaphysics is the distinction between real and sensual objects. He begins the first chapter of The Quadruple Object by observing (p. 7): “On my desk are pens, eyeglasses, and an expired American passport. Each of these has numerous qualities and can be turned to reveal different surfaces and uses. Furthermore, each object is a unified thing despite its multitude of features.” And he goes on from there to mention Egypt, an ideal sphere, and a unicorn, among a dozen or so others. They too are objects, but I’m not entirely sure how to take intuitions developed through thinking about, say, a hammer (Harman devotes two chapters to Heidegger’s tool analysis) or an apple, which seems to be my own default example, and apply those intuitions to those other often very different kinds of objects.

Consider atoms, more or less as modern science understands them—well, probably less, as I’m working from poorly remembered high school chemistry and physics. Though they are physical things, we have no direct perceptual or kinesthetic experience atoms as individual objects; we know them only in the aggregate as things such as, well, hammers, apples, pens, eyeglasses, and passports. So just what IS the sensual as opposed to the real atom? I suppose that what we’re talking about is the sensual atom that one atom is to other atoms. I don’t even know what the sensual atom would be TO me. Is it the atom as I merely think about it? But which atom? Any old atom? And, while one apple is different from another apple, though perhaps only in small ways, it’s my understanding that there is no difference between one cesium atom and another; they’re all alike.

What of a nation, such as Egypt or the United States? I’ve got a box full of old income tax filings along with associated documentation. That’s a fairly direct manifestation of the United States as nation-state. A couple of years ago I had to get a passport and so I had to do several things: get a birth certificate, get a photo, fill out an application, submit them, and pay a fee. That whole process is a manifestation of the United States. Decades ago I went through a rather longer and far more complicated process to become a recognized as a conscientious objector to war and therefore exempt from induction into the military.

All of that, and much much more, is my ordinary, untutored, naïve experience of the United States. How does the philosophical analysis of objects into real and sensual add to that? In the case of an apple my naïve experience says I can fully grasp it, as I can literally grasp it. The philosophical analysis tells me, no, I can’t fully grasp the apple, that the apple is ever withdrawing. Well I don’t need any philosophic analysis to tell me that the United States is way way beyond my experience of it and always will be. So, how do I differentiate between my ordinary experience of the United States and my philosophically tutored experience? Is there such a difference at all?

I don’t know. Perhaps the basic intuitions gained from the philosophical analysis of an apple or a hammer can be applied to atoms and nations, not to mention any number of other objects. But I’m not sure. So, for the moment, I’m going to bracket them out and say that I’m interested only in human scale physical objects.

Imaginary Objects

That’s still granting quite a bit, it seems to me. Enough to work with in developing a contrast with imaginary objects at human scale, such as unicorns and centaurs, or Hamlet, Sailor Moon, and Bambi.

At this point we have a minor terminological problem. In ordinary usage, hammers and apples are real objects while unicorns and Bambi are not, they’re imaginary. But, philosophically, unicorns and Bambi are real as well. I have no problem with that. But that makes “real” ambiguous as between philosophically real and commonsensically real. For the moment I propose to substitute factually real for commonsensically real.

So, how do we analyze the difference between factual and imaginary objects? It may be sufficient, as Levi Bryant has suggested in a discussion of texts as factories, to observe that Bambi and unicorns lack referents in the factual world. But I’m not sure what that gets us. Or, perhaps it gets us there too quickly. For it tells us little or nothing about our experience of unicorns and Bambi, nor of how we know that they lack referents in the factual world.

If unicorns lack referents in factual world, then how can we have any experience of them at all? Well, we can draw pictures of them, weave tapestries about them, tell stories and write poems about them, all of which, as physical things bearing representations, do have referents in the factual world. But we also make representations of factual things. So, what’s the difference between representations of factual and imaginary things?

At this point it seems to me we’re at the edge of dangerous territory: epistemology. If we’re not careful we’re going to be assaulted by Cartesian malignant deities trying to fool us, or not. And we don’t want that. It’s not epistemology that I’m after. Rather, if you will, I’m after a world in which epistemology has work to do.

If, for some reason, it’s impossible to conceive of any but factual objects, then we have no need of epistemology. That’s not the world in which we live. We can conceive of imaginary objects. We have need of epistemology so as to sort unicorns, hippopotami, and the Loch Ness monster into the imaginary, factual, and doubtful bins, respectively.

Language and the Mind

What’s epistemology have to work from? That’s the question. And it seems to me that that question brings us to language, the mind, and the collective (to use Latour’s term). On the mind, I offer my standard observation from Weston La Barre’s The Ghost Dance (Delta, 1972, p. 60): “The fact that he dreams first forces on man the need to epistemologize.” At what point were our ancestors first able to remember both dream events and real events, to compare them, note the differences, and wonder about those differences?

Surely our ancestors had to use language to talk about and compare their various experiences, dreams and factual. And I’m guessing that it is through that talking that they would begun sorting their experiences into different domains. That is, the sorting out is a process that takes place in the collective and, once the collective has arrived at a determination, e.g. unicorns are imaginary, Komodo dragon lizards are factual, that determination can be taken at face value and the laborious reasoning and negotiation behind it can be, well, all too often in fact IS, forgotten.

Language is indifferent about the factuality of things and, as Harman has noted in his recent ASK/TELL interview, while “language cannot make the things directly present... The attempt to set up rules for how to use language logically to refer to the real world rather than referring to mere illusions is hopeless.” He’s right, and I have no intention to take up that Sisyphean task. But I do note that it IS language that makes it so easy to take intuitions forged through the philosophical analysis of a hammer and apply those intuitions, at face value, to anything that language treats as a object, such as unicorns, atoms, nations, time machines, galactic clusters, Bambi, anthropogenic climate chaos, and prions.

Of course, language also treats language and the mind as objects. And I suppose that object-oriented ontology may do so as well, sticking them out there among all the objects, including the humble apple. Which is to say, that they are available to us as we attempt to sort things out.

And that’s what we’re going to have to do. If we want to understand how it is that we unicorns, hippopotami, and the Loch Ness monster into the imaginary, factual, and doubtful bins, respectively, then we’re going to have to think about language, the mind, and the collective. All of them. As for whether or not that understanding is of a philosophical kind, or some other kind—compositionist?—well, I’m not so sure that it matters.

But it WOULD be nice to have, wouldn’t it?

THAT sorting-out is where I see a place for ontological cognition. Keeping in mind that ontological cognition, as I understand it, is about how the mind works, not how the world works, ontological cognition plays a critical role in sorting things into the factual, imaginary, and we don’t know bins. Our experience of unicorns IS different from our experience of horses and narwhales, and ontological cognition plays a role in sorting out the difference. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s another conversation, for another day.

The crucial point is simply that ontological cognition is necessary in a world where epistemology is necessary. It’s not the same as epistemology, but it IS a tool used by epistemology. I’m now proposing it as a tool to be used by object-oriented ontology.

Another day.

ADDENDUM: Plato’s Rock Bottom Intuitions

Tim Morton had a recent post about Plato’s advocacy of geometry. I offered an old notion of mine that geometry is the source of Plato’s rock-bottom intuitions about the Forms:

Well, Tim, one of my pet ideas is that Plato got the idea of the Ideal Forms from geometry. One of the things that gets pounded into you in middle school geometry class is that the triangles we actually draw (yes, with compass and straight edge) aren't 'true' triangles. They've always got defects. But the abstract triangles in geometrical constructions and proofs, they're 'true', they're 'pure'. So, take that insight from geometry, where it becomes very 'real' through practice, and extend it to everything. Hence The Forms.

Jamming the Soundtrack: Fantasia’s Intermission

2011-11-03T10:38:00.000-04:00

Fantasia was conceived as a concert; indeed, its working title was The Concert Feature. Concerts of classical music had, and still do have, intermissions. It follows then that The Concert Feature had to have one as well.

But Disney conceived of his intermission as more than just a break in the program where people could stretch their legs, go to the restroom, or chat with companions. He also provided a film segment that played the role of intermission. This comes between the fourth and fifth musical selections on the DVD. When Fantasia was first shown in theatres it came, I presume, after the actual break, which would have been at the same point in the program.

People are sitting in their seats, the curtain opens, and the film rolls. What the audience sees is pretty much what they saw at the beginning: an empty stage with a podium, music stands, and risers. Gradually, as at the beginning, musicians enter and take their places. There’s a bit of tuning up, and then things become quite different.

Before Deems Taylor appears, and certainly before Stokowski mounts the podium, a bass player sets a riff, plucking the strings rather than bowing them:

He’s quickly joined by a clarinetist and a violinist:

Pretty soon most of the orchestra’s merrily riffing away, playing a little swing music, the popular music of the day.

Disney’s now waltzed into one the standard tropes of films and cartoons from the 30s into the 50s, the tension between classical and popular music. Any number of cartoons and live action films were built on this conflict. Fantasia, of course, is grounded in it, if only obliquely. The music, except for this little bit, is classical. But the film medium itself is popular; the notion of film as high art was a bit in the future.

The music’s still riffing along as Deems Taylor walks on stage. But, as musicians notice him, they stop playing, all but our riff-happy clarinetist. Taylor mutters “Oh yeah”, gives a little cough, and that’s the end of, well, intermission riff.

But Taylor doesn’t go right into the next selection, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. He has a little interlude of his own prepared. Observing that “every beautiful sound also creates an equally beautiful picture”, he introduces the sound track:

The sound track sidles in from the left, needing a bit of coaxing, and takes position at the center of the screen, scintillating softly away. Taylor asks him to make a sound, and he does, producing a so-called “Bronx cheer”, with appropriate visuals.

Not quite what Taylor had in mind.

But, an more to the point, just what are ‘appropriate visuals’? That’s THE question about the whole film, no? Each segment consists of iamges that are said to be appropriate to the music. There’s no claim that those images are uniquely appropriate. In some cases other possibilities are explicitly mentioned, as in the introductions to the Nutcracker Suite and the Rite of Spring. But this intermission segment is different. Disney isn’t presenting whole compositions, just the sounds of individual instruments, in order: harp, violin, flute, trumpet, bassoon, and percussion.

The notion here is that the images we’re seeing ARE, in some sense, also the sounds we’re hearing. There’s no pretense of science about this, as though we’re being let in or a Deep Mystery. It’s all done with a bit of humor. Thus the trumpet cracks a high note (a well-known hazard of the trade) and the percussionist can’t help but break into a swing solo on trap set, another intrusion of pop music into the classical temple. But we ARE told that the images we’re seeing are somehow intrinsically the expression of the sounds we’re hearing.

And I for one find the demonstration a plausible one. Consider these three frames:

These are all from the segment given to one of the instruments I’ve listed above. Which one? Similarly, these three frames are from the segment for a different instrument:

Again, which of the six is it?

I’d be enormously interested in knowing how people make the identifications. While I don’t expect that everyone would get them correct, I would expect that, in a large enough population, correct answers would be above chance. I’d further expect that, among the wrong answers, there’d be some pattern. That is, that when people make the wrong identification for the first three, that those mistaken identifications aren’t evenly distributed over the other five possibilities. They’re going to be biased toward a subset of those five. And the same with the second three.

Now, let’s make the identification task a bit easier. One of those sets is from the percussion segment and the other is from the harp segment. Which is which?

I’d expect a high percentage of correct answers on that one. Further, if we worked through the whole set of six, forming all possible pairs, I’d expect a high percentage of correct answers in all cases. Whether or not the percentage would be the same for all pairs, I don’t know. But if it’s not the same, well, maybe I’d be interested in that too.

[In fact, I’d prefer to run the trials with actual animated segments, minus the sound tracks. But that’s a different matter.]

What I’m suggesting, of course, is that there are systemic correlations between the qualities of sounds and the qualities of the images Disney’s animators used to express those sounds. Where do those correlations come from? What’s their basis?

Beats me.

In the case of the two sets of frames we have here, there are some obvious differences between the two sets. The first set consists of smooth curves against cool background colors (blue and blue-green) while the second set consists of angular lines against warm backgrounds (reds). The first set of patterns seems somehow looser than the second set, nor are they quite so symmetrical (look at the third frame).

There ARE systematic differences between these sets of frames. As there are throughout the six segments. But where they come from and how they’re related to sound, that’s a mystery. And THAT’s the mystery that’s at the heart of Fantasia. For each segment, the sound and the images DO GO TOGETHER.

That’s what this medium, animation, is about, the correlation between image and sound. Yes, animation existed in the days of silent films, and some of it was brilliant (Winsor McCay for example). But it didn’t take off until Disney had the idea of synching the images to music on the sound track. That brilliant stunt had people lined up around the block for weeks waiting to see Steamboat Willie. That’s what made Disney’s little two-bit operation into a major force in the entertainment industry and the art form, animation, into a major force, not only in popular culture, but in culture at large.

While Fantasia, in the large, is about the world, human and non-human, from very small to very large, in this one little segment it’s about the mind. For it’s the mind that puts image and sound together thereby presenting the world. This little segment is thus the toy in the Cracker Jacks box, the key to the treasure, and it’s hidden in plain sight, right in the middle of the film.

* * * * *

Oh, you got it, the first three frames are from the harp segment, the last three from the percussion segment.