Brando-matic for the People

Truman Capote went to visit Brando in Kyoto in 1957 while he was filming Sayonara. He describes the Japanese-style hotel room:

"All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing, and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska."

An externalization of all of Brando's interests, aspirations, and failures, this description does more justice to him than any statement that he makes in his monologue about himself under the scrutiny of the tiny, malevolent writer. Capote's piece is like the mirror-image of a recent New Yorker piece by Claudia Pierpont. Capote documents Brando's contradictions, self-involvement, and childlike behavior, casting the actor as shallow, troubled, fragmented, arrogant, and alone. Pierpont turns that around and with the same information, creates a portrait of someone deep, troubled, fragmented, humble, and lonely. She is forgiving and compassionate, while recognizing all of the same issues. Brando in 1957 was already a popular obsession, universal icon, and cultural cliche. Where Capote tries to expose the man behind the curtain, Pierpont brings out the sadness and misery of a person in that position, with a talent that cannot be realized, not only because of the fame and expectations, but also because of emotional imbalance.

Pierpont also gives serious attention to Brando's talent, technique, and hit-0r-miss history. Describing Brando's performance in Streetcar, she conveys the artistry he brought to modulating his performance in order to make the transition from stage to screen. Viewed today, the hashed-over Kowalski tee-shirt rending Streetcar trope is banished by his physical beauty and his rendering of the childlike ignorance and menace that flicker through the movie like a living current of electricity. And yet, Capote quotes Brando himself as saying about the movie, released six years earlier in 1951, "Of course, movies date so quickly. I saw 'Streetcar’ the other day and it was already an old-fashioned picture."

Such a beautiful failure...

Claudia Pierpont Roth, New Yorker, 10/27/2008: Method Man
Truman Capote, New Yorker, 1957: The Duke in His Domain
Street Named Desire in IMDB

Twilight of the Guys

In case you haven't been watching the media lately, a new craze has taken over the hearts, minds, and tee shirts of the 12-16 year old female. Something like Rudolf Valentino, heroin, Walt Disney's Prince Charming, and NightStalker all mixed together, the Twilight Phenomenon was witnessed first hand this weekend, when some young friends went to the movie wearing Team Edward tee shirts (two store-bought and one home-made with green glitter pen.) Words cannot describe the pent up hysteria that threatened to unleash itself in the car on the way to the theatre. Dogs could not tolerate the frequency of the shrieking that reverberated through the theatre while waiting for the movie to begin. Long hair, tight straight legged jeans, Converse sneakers, and popcorn were de rigueur.

Stephanie Meyer's gothic teenage vampire franchise had its seeds in a dream she couldn't stop writing about, resulting in four books and now a movie about a teenage girl's obsessive relationship with a seventeen year and 100 year old vampire boyfriend. Bella and Edward have inspired the swooning equivalent of the bobby soxers, only these kids are reading. Also texting, IM'ing, Facebooking, and making green glitter pen tee shirts.


What is so bad about all this vampire love?

1. It's actually not the vampire-ness, but the same sort of distorted romantic expectations that were created in the mothers of the Twilight fans by the heaving-bodice-romance novels from the 70's like The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. Of course, rather than a dominance/submission fantasy, the vampire boyfriend is so attentive and devoted that he seems sure to turn into an abuser, as his protectiveness and perfect anticipation of the young heroine's needs begin to seem creepy and controlling to women familiar with the pattern. But not to young readers, who sigh for the brooding passion and mind-meld that emulates the constant connection they maintain with their female friends over their devices and in their giggling cliques. It turns out, fortunately or not, that men and women don't really relate like that, no matter how passionate or soul-matey their communion.

2. The heroine starts out as an extra smart independent girl who is funny and with whom people want to be friends. She ends up totally focussed on an icy cold boy who comes into her room and watches her sleep every night, drives her to school, and then inexplicably rejects her just when she is most vulnerable. All of that is in book one. The result, as you might expect, is not especially becoming or healthy.

3. The couple cannot have sex, although their desire is the engine that keeps the books chugging along. Also the quest for survival. And sometimes both at the same time. The boyfriend tries to protect the heroine from his dangerous desire to drain her of all of her blood, so they endure a forced chastity while spending 24 hours a day together. A more skeptical person might suspect that the boyfriend was really gay. But that's another book.


New York Times: The Vampire of the Shopping Mall
New York Times: Love and Pain and the Teenage Vampire Thing
Vanity Fair: The Twilight Zone

Commoners and Heroes

NPR's Weekend Edition today had a segment on Tod Machover, the inventor of the video game and cultural phenomenon known as Guitar Hero, composer of digital music, and creator of hyperinstruments and HyperScore, a software application that supports music composition through non-instrumental inputs similar to the Guitar Hero controllers.

Over the past several years, more and more people are playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band at parties, with their kids, and in their living rooms. Many kids are getting their first exposure to classic Rock through the game. According to Wikipedia, many people buy the songs they play in Guitar Hero, and Guitar Hero is replacing Karaoke at the local bar. And many players step into playing actual real guitars as a result of Guitar Hero, and may benefit from the foundation of dexterity, eye-hand coordination, and ear training that the game provides. However, like the mother who said her kids overestimated their ability to actually play real tennis based on their use of the Wii tennis game, players of Guitar Hero have no understanding of music, technique, or the actual mechanics of playing the guitar.

Machover's vision extends far beyond the commercial: he sees a future where the music in a person's mind can pour out unimpeded by the need to coerce sounds out of a balky instrument, made possible through the interface between the computer and the human body. He asserts:

"Imagine if [Guitar Hero] were truly expressive, truly personal, truly creative. The wonderful thing about Guitar Hero is that it opens up the door for everybody to be not just a passive listener but a real active participant in music," Machover says. "I think that is the future of music: music that is a collaboration between what we traditionally think of as composers and performers and the audience."

In a completely unrelated article in the New York Times Magazine today, Lewis Hyde is profiled regarding his work to define the particular landscape of American creativity and the cultural commons on which all creative people should be allowed to draw, re-think, re-assemble, and collaborative re-create into new expressions. His theory is that all creativity is a gift that gains currency and value through being shared. His enemies are the recently expanded copyright laws and growth of intellectual property wars.

Interesting that Guitar Hero provides to its players the opportunity to immerse themselves into the experience of performing the American Rock Canon, a most influential piece of our cultural commons. But Guitar Hero exists at the intersection of the opportunity for the commoner to make music without elitist training and the opportunity for money to be made from their desire to do so. Three chord music that retains the dusty DNA of its Deep South plebian origins, and yet, each and every part of it is licensed in a web of copyrights, clearances, royalties, secondary rights, derivative products, and lawsuits. Gibson has sued the company for copyright infringement on their use of the guitar controller. Aerosmith has made more money from Guitar Hero royalties than they have for any album. What do you think the blues players who played for change on the street corners of Mississippi would make of this?

American Election Idol

John McCain: 57,434,084 - 46.1%

Barack Obama: 65,431,955 - 52.6%

Sanjaya Malakar, Voted Off in Week 4, Ranked in the Bottom 2

Once again, the American Idol Effect has helped eliminate the obvious losers, as demonstrated by the choices shown above and their respective election results. Even the vote-for-the-worst strategy of the Republican party didn't pan out. Our participative culture actually got off the couch and voted in their local polling places instead of through a cell phone. According to Wikipedia, our touchstone of truthiness, 124,372,419 million voted this year.

"The voter turnout for this election was broadly predicted to be very high. One widely publicized early estimate predicted turnout of 136.6 million people or 64% of the voting population—which would have been the highest rate in 100 years. However, as of 1 p.m. Eastern Time on November 9th, with 99.6% of the precincts reporting, the total number of votes stands at only 124.47 million, just 2.2 million more than in the 2004 election."

While Sniffipedia may think that a 2% increase is just only a little increase, it should be hailed, as in 2004 fewer people voted for the winning candidate George Bush (62,040,610 votes) than voted for the winning American Idol contestant Fantasia Barrino (65 million votes). This year, Idol winner David Cook did not receive more votes than either McCain or Obama, although his 54.2 million votes were an impressive share of the all-time Idol high vote of 97 million.