Parabasis

Not Ready For Post- (Part II)

Thinking about these issues some more, it seems the age that we've entered isn't post-racial, or post-homophobic or post-sexist. It is, rather, post-PC where we get a little thrill out of saying things that are somewhat transgressive and that is in its own way, humorous.

Which leads me to cavemen.  Specifically, the Geico Cavemen. Because if you stop and think about it for a moment, what, exactly is the joke of the Geico Cavemen?

The joke is that they're offended by something.  We laugh at them for being offended due to insulting advertising. It's an opportunity for all of us, no matter who we are or our background, to laugh at people for taking offense to something that is clearly insulting them.  It gives viewers a chance to enter the anti-PC majoritarian perspective regardless of their actual social status.  The Geico Cavemen are on some level a giant middle finger aimed at people who would dare be offended by representational issues in television.

This has reached a peak with the latest of the Geico Cavemen ads, where they go bowling to the horrible Three Doors Down song "Let Me Be Myself":

We're meant to laugh at this person being in pain for being insulted. We're meant to be the gloating majority lording it over the oppressed few, and to feel good about that.  The ad is, essentially, giving us the pleasure of being a bully. You'll note in this ad that there is no punchline.  In fact, if it was filmed exactly the same way, shot for shot, but with black people and it said at the end "So Easy a Black Man Could Do It" the ad could be a PSA against intolerance.  But it's not. It's about cavemen.   

I personally think this ad is a disaster on a lot of levels. Beyond being painfully, deeply unfunny, I think it backfires.  I think most people on some level will actually have negative associations with Geico by the end of it, because in the ad Geico is simply cruel and ruining some people's good times. it's an odd way to curry favor with the public.

But beyond that, this ad is a crystalization of anti-PC backlash that has now gone so mainstream we can sell insurance with it.

Of course, the problem is that there's a great deal of scientific evidence that people worried about representations of minorities in TV and Film (those who got branded as PC in the first play) were right and had an intuitive understanding of how our brains work. Our brains work through networks of associations. As things become more regularly associated together, our brains essentially "dial up" those associations faster.  This is why the Republicans have consciously turned "liberal" into a dirty word, they want you to think of "liberal" as a prescriptive term instead of a descriptive term, to associate it with phrases like "tax and spend" or "soft on crime" or "weak on national security".

There's quite a bit of evidence out there that seeing negative images of various groups can "prime" you to think more negatively about that group. And that being exposed to repeat negative experiences/language/representations can lead your brain to more readily activate negative networks. In other words, those of us who were worried about the constant representations of blacks as criminals on TV were worried with good reason, such representations can actually alter the unconscious ways that we think about African Americans.

Of course, telling ad men this ruins their good fun. So why not do a multi-year ad campaign about how people who are offended by their advertising are losers?

Not Ready For Post-

I think the Right's extreme (and openly racist) reactions to Obama's Presidency and Sotomayor's nomination for the Court have put to bed a lot of the "post-racial" talk going on in American Politics. And thank goodness for that.  It's certainly a sign of positive change that a black man can get elected President in America; the idea that it somehow moved us beyond race was ridiculous on its face.  The story of race in America is the story of America. And many chapters of American history that seem non-racial have race lurking just below the surface, waiting to be discovered.

This was driven home to me again recently when I was listening to an NPR story on the Bonus Army.  The Bonus Army was a group of WWI veterans who set up a camp in Washington, D.C. in spring/summer of 1932.  They were owed bonuses for fighting (and surviving) WWI. They were not scheduled to get the bonuses until the mid-1940s, but figuring that since (a) the war ended in 1918 and (b) many of them could be dead by then, they set up camp where the National Gallery of Art is today in DC to lobby Congress.  They were eventually dispersed violently by General MacArthur. It was one of many things that lead to FDR's triumph on Election Day.

The authors of a recent book on the Bonus Army spent some time trying to solve the riddle of why the bonuses weren't scheduled to be paid out until the mid-1940s.  After some digging, they finally found out the answer: many of the veterans were black, and the Government was worried that paying out bonuses to black veterans would catapult some black southerners into the Middle Class ahead of poor whites and that the ensuing race riots would destroy the country.  (Another hidden racial angle was that the Bonus Army's camp was integrated and peaceful, something never mentioned in the white press, but a hot topic of conversation in the black press. There is some evidence that the push towards integration-- particularly in the armed forces-- has some of its roots planted firmly in the Bonus Army's tents).

Anyway... this post isn't about the Bonus Army. It's not even about politics.  It's about the idea of "Post-", which I think is a lot more complex an issue than we like to discuss.  Specifically, the idea of "Post-" in comedy.  Long before we'll be ready for a post-whatever political reality, it seems, we're ready to laugh at post-whatever jokes.  The comedian Sarah Silverman, for example, has made a career out of post-racial humor, in which she says racist things and we are meant to laugh at her as opposed to with her for saying them. For the most part her work is a successful lampoon of vapid racism, even if her act gets incredibly boring after about forty-five seconds.  Once you realize what the joke is, you realize it's the same joke over and over again and the actual words in it don't matter.  Insert outrageous statement. Insert you laughing at it. Until it dries up.

That Silverman's act also relies on you laughing with her at another ethnic stereotype-- that of the Jewish American Princess-- is rarely discussed.  But we seem to have entered an age in which Jews are accepted enough in society that we can openly mock them, as long as they're mocking themselves at the same time.  When Eric Cartman speaks of the Jews and their conspiracies and exterminating them, we laugh for two reasons.  One of them is that it's patently ridiculous and reflects badly on him as a character. But the thing that gives us permission to laugh is that one of South Park's co-creators is Jewish.

Recently, I've noticed a wide-spread resurgence of homophobic language at the multi-plex and amongst my peers.  "That's so gay" has made an ironic comeback, as has the occasional use of the word "faggot". One gay friend of mine pointed out that he was unable to enjoy The Hangover because of the movie's constant homophobia.  He mentioned the "paging doctor faggot" scene. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it's a scene in which Ed Helms' ("castrating bitch" of a) girlfriend is complaining about his friends' immaturity while Helms is arguing that she just doesn't know them well enough.  Perfectly on cue, Bradley Cooper shows up in his car, honks the horn and shouts "PAGING DOCTOR FAGGOT" as Helms looks sheepishly at his girlfriend.

The comedy of the moment (for me) comes from Helms' pathetic attempts at justifying his friends to his girlfriend and being immediately shown up for it.  But I have to wonder (along with my gay friend) how much of the laughter in the multiplex comes simply from the fact that Bradley Cooper called his clearly emasculated friend a faggot.

And so I also wonder at my friends-- and to be honest, occasionally myself-- who are vocal advocates for gay rights, who have gay friends and bandy about phrases like that "that's so gay".  The quotation marks are heavy, it's meant to reflect back on the speaker as a joke at our own immaturity.  But at the same time, we have also used a phrase that ten years ago we would've been deeply offended by. And most of the people I know who deploy such post-homophobic language, don't do it around their gay friends.  

Which gets me to thinking.... If a non-Jewish friend said (jokingly) "don't Jew me" when we were sorting out the change at a restaurant, I'd be offended by it.  Furthermore, legal discrimination against gays still exists in a way that it doesn't towards Jews. Gays are openly and explicitly discriminated against by their own government. They are pretty much the only group in our society for whom that is currently true (legal discrimination against other groups tends to be covert, which makes it no less real, just different).

As I begin working on a play that-- for all its Ridiculous trappings-- is about the pain and terror of growing up gay in America, and as I look at our nation and how far we've come on these issues and how far we have yet to go, it seems ridiculous to me that we would use language like faggot and that's so gay and whatnot and think it was okay.  You can still fire someone for being gay in this country.   Who do we think we are to be saying shit like that?  

Demographic Appeal

I just finished watching a two hour PBS special on neuroscience, evolution and music.  Pretty interesting stuff.  The guests interviewed fell into two groups: Scientists (including big names like Brian Greene and Oliver Sachs) and Musicians.

The musicians featured on the show-- and they're featured heavily-- were with one notable exception taken from the Pop Classical world. Bobby McFerrin, Evelyn Glennie, Yo-Yo Ma etc.  The exception? Jarvis Cocker who was never interviewed and had less than five minutes of screen time because he was the subject of an experiment. The only references to rock music used either stock footage from Woodstock or generic fake soundtracking that sounded mired in the late 60s. For example, when they wanted to talk about enharmonics, and illustrate recontextualizing a note based on the notes around it, they used a Schoenberg piece instead of a more contemporary one.

Oh, and jazz never came up at all (sorry, Darcy). Unless you count a brief discussion of syncopation where as scientist said to Bobby McFerrin, "Yeah, that sounds like a mambo".

Now, I grew up listening to McFerrin, Yo-Yo Ma and Glennie. I even saw McFerrin in concert waaaay after his brief one-hit wonderdom was established. But I listened to all of them because they were my parent's music.

I've been thinking a lot lately about demographic appeal. What does it say to an audience member for a TV show (on PBS, no less) where the only music talked about or taken seriously is music that is marketed to and consumed largely by boomers? I'm not saying anything against them as subjects, they know what the fuck they're talking about. I'm just talking about audience and who you're trying to appeal to.  I mean, it shouldn't surprise me, NPR only features indie rock when it clearly thinks it won't alienate its existing boomer audience, and 50% of PBS' programming seems to be sad displays of ancient African American motown bands playing to packed houses of white boomers.  They know their demographic, so when doing a special, they pick artists meant to appeal to that demographic. Heck, it's probably completely unconscious.

And this got me thinking, again, about theatre. It strikes me that some of the appealing to younger/more diverse/whatever audiences puzzle is fairly simple. Do work that features people like them, made occasionally by people like them, at a price point they'll find reasonable. That's what (to take one example) Signature did up here in new york. Theaters are  already doing that for their existing audience. If they don't want to do that, I suppose that's okay, but then just admit whose interests are being served, ya dig?   Or, as a friend of mine put it in an e-mail lately, "Black people aren't going to come to your theater just because you do one August Wilson play in February, and young people aren't going to come just 'cause you give us free beer." 

I dont' mean to turn everything into a chance to rag on institutional theater, really I don't.  There are obviously other factors at work here-- appealing to one demographic might mean losing some amount of the other, or institutional priorities might make changing in that way difficult-to-impossible, or the artistic leadership might not like or be passionate about work that's different from what they're already doing. 

Anyway.. It's just as a middle class straight white dude, I am seldom in environments where I encounter pop culture that's clearly not meant for me, and seeing this special on PBS, I was like "this is something that fascinates me, presented in a way that is unintentionally alienating to me". And I wonder if in theater we do the same thing without knowing it.

An Off-Topic Thought I Had On My Commute About Internet Piracy

Reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (with a brief break in between to be mildly disappointed by Micahel Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) has been quite an edifying experience. The Gift and HCE were written over 25 years apart and yet they interrelate when it comes to one important subjetct: creating and anchoring communities.

In The Gift, Hyde contrasts again and again two different kinds of exchanges: Market Exchanges and Gift Exchanges. With Market Exchanges, I use money- which has no meaning beyond its ability to purchase things- to purchase goods or services from you. With Gift Exchanges, I give you something that has meaning-value. Depending on how big our Gift Community is, you might give me something in return, or you might give something to someone else who gives it to someone else etc. until you get back to me, which oddly enough is illustrated rather well by the Fraggles in the second best Christmas special of all time, A Muppet Family Christmas:

One of the salient differences between Market Exchagnes and Gift Exchanges (according to Hyde) is that the latter creates/establishes community and the former does not. In fact, it frequently abrogates it.  I wish I had the book in front of me to quote from, but the point is that gifts create bonds between people, and markets operate under the assumption that there is no bond, and therefore you should use money to guarantee you get fair value in your exchange. One everyday example that comes to mind is that, once you go to the same bar for awhile, you'll get comped a drink. This is a recognition that your relationship to that bar (or bartender) has at least partially transcended the market relationship you had previously, and likely will both recognize and further establish the ties between you.

Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody talks about how sharing (which is different, but related to Giving) anchors a community.  In fact, "Sharing Anchors Community" is the title of one of his chapters. In it he talks about how sharing information, or photos on flickr etc. and so forth creates communities on the internet. When you share something- say your photos of an event on Flickr- you become part of the community of other people interested in that thing.  Bloggng, in my experience, is similar. There's a community of theatre bloggers out there that I'm a apart of. We don't band together for collective action or anything like that, but I certainly have community-type fond feelings for my commenters and readers and fellow bloggers.

So how does this impact internet piracy? Well... okay, so the RIAA things of sharing music online as being like shoplifitng it out of the store. But to the people doing it, it's a lot more like making a mix tape, or burning a copy of a CD for a friend.  It's called "file sharing" for a reason. A lot of people pirating music on the internet don't think of themselves as deliberately stealing from record companies and artists. They think of themselves as part of a community of people interested in a particular cultural artifact.

To a record company, this is absurd. These people who they're sharing with are people they've never met, who they have no bond with. This isn't you going over to your friend's house and burning a cd for them of music you think is totes rad.  But this gets at least some aspect of internet piracy exactly backwards. It's the act of sharing that creates the feeling of community not the existence of community that creates sharing.

Again, not trying to justify internet piracy. Just trying to maybe understand how it works on a perhaps unconscious level a bit better.

Total Intellectual Property Insanity

If your business model relies on suing midwestern single mothers for millions of dollars, you really are not long for this world:

A Minneapolis jury ruled Thursday that a 32-year-old woman must pay $1.92 million dollars to six record companies for illegally downloading their songs from the Internet, Agence France-Presse reported. The woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from Brainerd, Minn., was found liable for violating the copyrights of major labels including Sony BMG, Warner Brothers and Universal for downloading 24 songs from Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file sharing service.  (emph. mine)

There are several interrelated issues here, and both have to do with technology.  First, is the creation of the CD, which lead people to re-purchase their music collections in a new format which lead to music companies making enormous sums of money and becoming much larger organizations than they used to be. But now something else has happened... the internet and the digitization of music, both of which are problematic for music companies. 

Digitization of music, however,  does not require repurchasing your existing music to make the transition. You just pop your CD in your computer and it downloads the songs. It's important to note how dramatic a difference that is from the way things were in the past.  In order to transfer your records onto tapes you had to put up with a loss in sound quality. Basically no one was ever going to transfer their tapes to CDs, and for a long time transferring records to CD was prohibitively expensive. None of these things are the case now, so a potential revenue stream that could've propped up record companies is gone.

And then we have the internet, which completely eliminates the chief way that record companies made money: their near-total ownership of the Means of Distribution.  They don't control distribution now, because distribution is incredibly cheap; you no longer needs lots of money to be able to distribute music (this is a similar problem that's affecting movies and television, btw).  Soon, record companies will almost certainly lose what little grasp on the Means of Production they have left. It's already fairly easy to make a good sounding album with cheap tools (thus abrogating the need of a record company advance to record your album).

This leaves them in a bind, because they are not answering the most important question: Why do/will we need record companies? Instead, what they are relying on is the property rights to music. This, however, is a losing strategy because it essentially looks backwards not forwards.  They're trying to make as much money off of their old business model as possible, but there's a limit to how long anyone can do that. A business model predicated on suing the people who want your product for millions of dollars is not sustainable. 

A Peek Into Artists' Spaces

"This is the first site on the web to show where real artists and designers work. Painters, musicians, photographers, illustrators.

The site lets you see their environment in which they go about the creative process and will hopefully inspire yourselves."

See it for yourself here.

Bold Idea: Something Already Going On

Jack Shafer at Slate has some ideas for what to do with newspapers. They're packaged in a lengthy piece about bold changes that could happen to save The Boston Globe :

Writing again last year in AJR, Meyer plotted an "elite newspaper" strategy for the slow liquidators. His plan is no resurrection prayer for dying dailies, but it makes more sense than running a newspaper down, down, down until it has one subscriber paying $5 million for home delivery, and then he dies.

Meyer thinks newspapers should accept that their mass audience is drifting away. (In the most recent reporting period, Globe circulation was down almost 14 percent over the previous year.) They should accept that non-news readers have stopped reading dailies, accept that newspapers can no longer satisfy everybody all the time with an "all-you-can-eat" buffet, and concentrate on publishing content of higher value. And they should "peel back" to their core functions of news, investigation, analysis, and interpretation "in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web."

What, might I ask, is the difference between this "new " thing Meyer is proposing and a magazine? And if that's the proposal, does anyone think a weekly mag called "The Boston Globe" will sell better than a daily newspaper called "The Boston Globe"? And are magazines doing any better than newspapers?

I'm pretty sure the answer to all three is "no", but I might be missing something here.

Something to Chew On

"All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has bee a subject of debate since before Aristotle.

And yet some aspects of the problem are modern... And the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The peculiar manner in which radio, television, the movies and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new, for example, and their `high finance' produces an atmosphere that all the sister arts must breathe... The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plentitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world-- an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community, or the race, nature or the gods. But none of these fruits will come to us where we have converted our arts to pure commercial enterprises."

-- Lewis Hyde, The Gift pp. 205-206

It seems to me that, amongst other things, this quote articulates a particular reasoning behind the non-profit arts movement.  It isn't just that art is expensive to create and not particularly remunerative, that the arts have always required some form of subsidy and thus to put it in crassly capitalist terms we needed to add a new kind of income beyond "sales" and add a tax-incentive. It's also that non-profit arts organizations are supposed to pursue goals beyond the market.  

Parallel Conversations

Similar to our discussion of the value of MFAs, I give you "Just Don't Go" a two part article about the fruitlessness of going to graduate school in the Humanities.  Here's a taste (emph mine):

Most undergraduates don't realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late.

Part one is here. Part two is here.

These are both tip of the ole hattola to a new (to me) blog called Gerry Canavan. 

Your thoughts?

... adding, let me just say that I don't know how i fall out on the whole advanced-degree thing.  I've applied for MFA programs in the past, so clearly there's been times when I wanted to go, or at least wanted to explore going.  I certainly think the way they've become increasingly a career requirement is not so great, but i certainly don't fault people for wanting to go and get them. 

The Death of Print

Business Insider has what is perhaps the most creative "death of print" article I've seen recently with this take on the New York Times titled (and the T really SIA here) "Printing the NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle". Their math seems way dubious to me, but it's a provocative thought.  

Now the whole Death-of-the-Newspaper is something I must admit I don't know a heckuva lot about, but then again nothing I've read has indicated to me that anyone else really knows what's going on either, or at least what the implications are beyond Newspapers Are Going Out Of Business.  But this is where I'm thinking about it right now. Please feel free to agree/disagree/discuss in the comments (or your own blogs!)

(1) Fewer people are reading print newspapers, and the lost readers are primarily going online.

(2) Online advertising does not generate enough revenue, however, to sustain news organizations

(3) Therefore, websites have to find some way to monetize their sites other than advertising. 

(4) Except the problem is we've already developed a culture where people are used to getting things... well, more accurately, not things, but rather information and content for free on the internet.  And, as the Times found out when it created TimesSelect, people feel entitled to free content and get annoyed when you screw with it. Whether that's spoiled of us or not (i kind of think it is, frankly), we want our content and we want it for free. And if you don't provide it for free, someone else will and we'll go over there. NBC has tried to compromise with Hulu, which provides streaming video of its shows, but they also screwed over viewers by not providing purchasable versions on the iTunes store, meaning if you want to watch a higher-quality, not-streamed version,  you have to download it illegally. 

(5) Does Slate sustain itself on advertising? ( I'm pretty sure as part of the WaPo it, like the flagship paper, is sustained by the fact that WaPo owns Kaplan Test Prep.) Does Salon?

(6) Many omagazines in the world, particularly those with an ideological slant, are sustained by foundations and charitable donations.  Neither Harper's nor The Nation nor The American Spectator break even on ad sales. Will the NYTimes become a 501(c)3? Or will it become like NPR? And would you support it if it did?

(7) Is it possible that one of the reasons why online advertising rates are lower and you can't sustain the NYTimes on them is that online advertising is backed up by hard data?  In other words, for the second half of the 20th century, have we been living through an advertising bubble where we thought advertising was far more effective than it really is?  Now that the internet is here where you can track click-throughs etc., is that bubble slowly deflating? Or are we suddenly so savvy corporations need to fund ten minute play festivals to get the word out about their products?