Yesterday, I linked to a Wall Street Journal article criticizing television networks for speeding up movies and television episodes to squeeze in more time for commercials. While an informed first-impression might react in horror at such a practice, I argued that it’s no big whoop for two reasons.
TV broadcasts and in-class screenings are, at best, proxies for the original work. No one should expect these viewings to be the canonical version of a film or a first-run broadcast.
Whereas time and pacing might be crucial for some films, speeding up a film by 2-4% doesn’t really matter for other works. An educated expert in film history and aesthetics like me should be able to determine when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
All of this was before I had read Marco Arment’s defense of letting people listen to podcasts at whatever speed he/she wants, published on Tuesday. He has an interest in the matter because he developed Overcast), a popular podcatching app for iOS. One of the unique features of that app is Smart Speed, which allows listeners to skip moments of silence to reduce the overall listening time of the program. In his nuanced argument, he distinguishes between certain podcasts, where timing and pauses are essential, and other podcasts where it is less relevant. He notes:
Podcasts (and video) are impossible to skim effectively, but we can vary our listening speed. Just as not every article is worth reading slowly and completely, not every podcast is This American Life. Even most episodes of This American Life aren’t as timing-sensitive as the Mike Daisey retraction. Some podcasts are painstakingly crafted, artistic “storytelling” shows, but most aren’t, by far.
The same is true for most feature films and television programs. There are some works where pace and tempo absolutely matter and others where it does not. As I wrote yesterday, I would never speed up a Hitchcock or Maya Deren film—or an episode of The Wire—because speed and tempo absolutely matters in those works. The same is true for even less artistic works, but it takes a trained and experienced viewer to know when it does matter. For example, in college, a well-respected film professor—I won’t say who—confessed that she “skimmed” certain silent films at double speed because, in her expert opinion, the time saved outweighed the original intent of some long-dead hack studio filmmaker making five films a week (my words, not hers).
One of the unique aspects of Overcast is its approach to reducing listening time. Most other podcatching apps simply allow listeners to speed up playback. For example, Downcast for iOS allows listeners to audition a podcast at 1.5x and 2.0x speed.1 I have used Downcast for years but never used its 1.5x/2.0x feature because it altered the pitch to such a degree that l simply couldn’t enjoy the content. Smart Speed in Overcast, on the other hand, is a compromise. It retains the same pitch, a crucial aspect of sonic fidelity, but also allows listeners to “skim” the content. Reducing the moments of silence might be terrible for a chilling interview on 60 Minutes, but it might not matter as much for a group of journalists discussing the television industry, despite the fact that both are excellent, informative, and well-produced programs.
You can be doctrinal about screening and auditioning things at their original speed, but as with everything good and holy in this world, it is more complicated than you might have initially thought. That’s why we have to make our own decisions about balancing our precious time, in-class discussion (or advertising minutes), and the integrity of a work.
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Remember, that I have only sped up fewer than ten screening and only at 1.02x–1.04x. ↩
Joe Flint, writing for the Wall Street Journal‘s Digital microsite, exposes cable TV networks that compress programming content, such as when TBS broadcast The Wizard of Oz last November, to fit in more advertisements in the same block of time.
Tinkering with shows to squeeze more advertising dollars out of them has been done before. Cable networks have long made room for ads by shortening the opening credits. Reruns of “Law & Order” on TNT have a 24-second opening, in contrast to the original 1 minute, 45-second opening when it aired on NBC.
But speeding up the actual content is a more subtle tactic TV networks use to achieve a higher volume of ads. TBS also has sped up sitcom reruns of “Seinfeld” and other shows, and sister network TNT has also employed the approach as well. Viacom Inc.’s TV Land has done the same with “Friends” reruns.
A colleague, who forwarded the article earlier today, called the apparently unprecedented practice “scary.”
But is it, really?
First, is this even new? I thought this was already standard practice, especially for movies broadcast on television. I remember watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) on Comedy Central in the 1990s with my roommate Rick. It was a movie we knew well, having seen it dozens of times between the two of us. We had even seen it on 35mm film, paired with Election (1999), at a double-feature at the New Beverly Cinema, in Los Angeles at the end of the Clinton Administration. But with this Comedy Central screening, we could tell something was off.
To confirm our suspicions, Rick fetched his VHS copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to screen it and compare it to the broadcast version. Going back and forth between the cable net’s feed and the VHS deck, we verified that Comedy Central had indeed sped up the movie. It was most evident when Edward R. Rooney proclaims that, because of kids like Ferris, he “weeps for the future.” The voice of Jeffrey Jones, who played Rooney, was easily an octave higher on the broadcast than it was on the VHS version.1
From then on, we noticed this practice on countless other Comedy Central movie broadcasts, too. I guess once you see something like that, you can never unsee it.
Second, I’m guilty of having sped up screenings in class. In a few cases, after a lengthy lecture and class discussion, it was clear that we were going to go over time. To fit the screening, I have played a H.264 file from my Mac using VLC, which has a playback-speed control. I’ve gone as high as 104% but usually keep it at 102% or so. When I’ve sped up a screening, I’ve previewed it to ensure the playback doesn’t appear off, and I’ve only used it on films where pacing or tempo is not a significant element of the filmmaking. I’ve done it for films like Flaming Creatures and Sins of the Fleshapoids, where a viewer would be too preoccupied with horror or laughter, respectively, to notice a 2% increase in speed. However, I would never speed up a screening of a film by Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Brakhage, or Maya Deren. In those cases, the pacing and rhythm are really important dimensions of their filmmaking.
Maya Deren, in At Land, can take as much time as she needs in my class.
Finally, is this even a big deal? The whole screening experience—in a classroom or on television—is already compromised. We watch with cheap projectors and television monitors that produce rainbow and soap opera effects. We listen with low-fi sound systems that don’t reproduce a full range of sounds. And, for decades, we have watched films that have been panned, scanned and center-cut to fit the aspect ratio of our TV sets.
Dr. Loretta Jackson-Hayes, an associate professor of chemistry at Rhodes College in Memphis, wrote a very popular editorial, published today, arguing that colleges should balance the push for STEM majors but not at the expense of a liberal arts curriculum. One reason is that having a strong arts and humanities background helps scientists explain their research.
Scientists are often unable to communicate effectively because, as Cornell University president David J. Skorton points out, “many of us never received the education in the humanities or social sciences that would allow us to explain to nonscientists what we do and why it is important.”
I can personally attest to the benefit of thinking across disciplines, by which I don’t mean a film person writing to a literature scholar. Can we call it disciplinary agnosticism?
Back in my grant-writing powerhouse days, I wrote a few grant applications reviewed by people at the graduate school, not just those in our field. One of the tips we received for writing these was to pitch it to a “New York Times-level reader.” The aim of the advice is to force students to write for intelligent, non-experts. But when I learned that professors from across the university would be reading my proposal, I always imagined a chemist, a mathematician, and an economist poring over my proposal. I pictured the physics professor from my first year of college, and the psychology TA from sophomore year.
In my mind, these “quants” would appreciate something analytical but light on impenetrable theory. I included a brief summary of the historical context, some concise reasons for why the US would care about Latin America during the Cold War, and a step-by-step outline of what I hoped to learn. In other words, I wasn’t seeking to impress my advisor or a panel at a narrowly focused academic conference. I had to explain, in logical terms, what my research was and why it was important.
Did it work? Aside from one time I was pressured to apply for a grant to research my “homeland” in Brazil—my family is from Guatemala—I never was rejected for a grant.
That, and I am happy that I can understand the history of radio frequency allocations in the United States as well as the difference between latency and throughput.
Not only do STEM majors need liberal arts and humanities, but liberal arts and humanities scholars also need to embrace the thinking STEM majors get from their work, too.
Next Thursday will be a big day for telecommunications policy in the United States. The FCC is scheduled to vote on whether it will reclassify broadband Internet service as a common-carrier utility (Title II) instead of its current destination as an information service (Title I). Classifying broadband as a utility would allow the FCC to enforce regulations aimed at prohibiting discriminatory and preferential treatment of Internet traffic. In short, under Title II, the FCC could institute and enforce net neutrality rules for an open Internet.
Because these rules threaten the status quo of telecommunications companies, particularly the MVPD (“cable companies”) that dominate the broadband market in the United States, there is an offensive designed to turn public opinion against net neutrality.
One unexpected place for this anti–net neutrality discourse came from the FCC itself. Earlier today, the FCC posted a press release on its website titled “What People Are Saying About President’s Plan to Regulate The Internet.” The document is a selection of quotes that oppose net neutrality, characterizing it as a regulatory burden on the innovative broadband industry.
According to some veteran communication lawyers who monitor the FCC, it is unprecedented for the FCC to release a preemptive, partisan position, such as this one, especially since this is a collage of quotes rather than an actual announcement. Press releases are intended to give news agencies content to reproduce or adapt for their publications. By releasing a series of quotes without any background, this release could serve as the basis for anti–net neutrality news articles, in the coming days, on the eve this potentially historic vote. This is especially troubling since, under the banner of the FCC, it sounds like a quasi official endorsement of these positions. Moreover, the title of the release includes references to “people,” giving the position a folksy, common-sense tone, and to the “president’s plan to regulate the Internet,” which not only sounds like a top-down executive decision but also a push to impose burdensome regulations on “our Internet.”
If this language–of President Obama threatening free-enterprise with regulation–sounds like a tired-old Republican talking point, that’s because opposing net neutrality is a tired old Republican position.
The FCC has five commissioners, each is appointed by the president. In order to ensure some political balance, no more than three commissioners can be from the president’s political party. The source of the press release referenced above is Brendan Carr, a staffer for Commissioner Ajit Pai. Commissioner Pai is one of the two FCC Republican-party commissioners and a net-neutrality opponent.
Even former chairman Robert McDowell (yes, another Republican) has chimed in comparing Obama’s push for net neutrality to the actions of Saudi and Russian dictators. Throughout his seven-year tenure at the FCC, he dogmatically opposed communications policies like net neutrality, universal access, and reviving the Fairness Doctrine. It’s nice to see he has been keeping busy since stepping down from the Commission in 2013.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve last lived with a dog—a small Tibetan Spaniel named Capella—but I think I know what a corporate lapdog looks like.
Update: The press release now indicates that it was issued from the office of Commissioner Ajit Pai.
Some years ago, I helped organized the NYU Cinema Studies student conference, an annual event that started as a practice-run for the much larger Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Under my guidance, we expanded it from a single-day conference of about a dozen speakers to one where we had about a dozen panels, with about forty presentations, over two days.
One of my goals was to include as many students as possible to present and to have the faculty also contribute. Not only did we manage to get every single faculty member to either moderate or participate on a panel, we also included undergraduate students and even some graduate students from other departments, specifically some art historians from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. The IFA panel was controversial because the audience thought the papers were really bad. Was it sour grapes because someone outside our field encroaching on our turf? Or was it because, as novice film scholars, they were unfamiliar with the fundamental scholarship in our field? Whatever the reason, I distinctly remember someone—I won’t say who—told me an unforgettable nugget after the IFA panel:
This is why we don’t let art historians do film.
L’Anticoncept
On Friday night, I went with my friend, softball teammate and esteemed art historian Annie to a screening of Gil Wolman’s L’Anticoncept at Light Industry, one of my favorite microcinemas in New York. The screening was packed. Part of that was due to the rare opportunity to see this particular work and because the College Art Association conference held its annual meeting in New York this weekend, bringing all kinds of art historians into town. One of them was Kaira M. Cabañas, an expert on the Lettrist movement and the author of a new book that includes an extended passage on L’Anticoncept. I’m not an expert on Lettrism, but I do have a very rough idea about it: I wasn’t expecting a “night at the movies.”
L’Anticoncept consists of a circular white image, alternating (or flickering) between complete white and complete black, projected onto a two-meter–wide white balloon. The white image fits exactly on the balloon that hangs from the ceiling. The work is historically significant because it anticipates the flicker films of Paul Sharits, someone who used single film frames and persistence of vision to fuck with viewers, by almost twenty years.
Also, the form and rhythm of the narration is as much a part of the film as is the image. According to Light Industry’s screening notes:
L’anticoncept’s sound track begins with a voiceover that invokes the history of moving images. Part two presents TRITS, a Lettrist poem structured around a chorus and punctuated by the whistling, phonemes, and other sounds pronounced from four superimposed voices, seemingly all Wolman’s. In part three, the longest part of the sound track, Wolman reads a disjointed story that he authored. Here the voiceover’s incessant speech contributes in large measure to the experience of an aural assault. The sound track provides little respite (that is, few silences) from its verbal bursts and abrupt shifts in volume and pace. Finally, after a short “Post-scriptum,” the film ends with approximately three minutes and thirty seconds of superimposed mégapneumie, what Wolman elsewhere described as a poésie physique that is based on breath, rather than on the letter as with Isou, and that explored the use of “all human sounds.”
As interested and knowledgable I am about experimental film, Annie is writing her dissertation on screens. A moving-image work that uses a white balloon as a projection surface is right up her intellectual alley, but neither of us could figure out how to engage with this work. Maybe because we were sitting in the back of the room, and couldn’t hear Cabañas very well, we didn’t know why this work is important. Instead of explaining in accessible terms the meaning of the work, Cabañas read a passage from her book. As I’ve written before, one of my biggest peeves with academic presentations is hearing someone read their paper instead of, you know, watching someone present their work. There were some interesting bits of information from Cabañas’s introduction, like that the film was banned, but I would have like for her to “coach us” on how to watch this film.
Another issue was the French-language soundtrack. To their credit, Light Industry distributed printed English-language copies of the narration, but since the room was dark, we couldn’t read the text unless one of us illuminated it with a phone. Moreover, attempting to read the text made it impossible to watch the image and its flickering. I understand that form is crucial for experimental works like this one, but it would have been nice to engage with the content, too.
Thirty minutes into the ninety-minute screening, Annie and I couldn’t take it anymore. We stopped paying attention and started to observe the number of people sleeping, texting, and otherwise uncomfortably fidgeting in their seats. A few minutes later, I turned to her and suggested we leave. Right as I turned to Annie, who sitting to my right, a guy sitting to her right shushed us and firmly suggested, “I think you should leave.” I was offended for a split-second but then realized that if this guy is really into the screening, God bless him. We promptly and quietly headed for the door.
On our way out, we encountered another art historian who was also in town for CAA and also left the screening early. We spent the rest of the night swapping stories about art and academia over a few drinks. At first, I felt like a troglodyte for not only leaving a screening, which I never do, but also being asked by a patron to leave. However, when we confirmed each other’s reservations about the experience, I felt vindicated about what I learned many, many years ago from organizing the student conference.
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This week, teaching classes has yielded more than one introspective moment. Yesterday, I learned that I am an innovator/achiever, according to a very popular psychographic scale that I discussed in class. Today, I had an even deeper moment of reflection. I realized that the French Enlightenment did not, in fact, result in the French Revolution. Well, it did, but things got complicated along the way to the Bastille.
Storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789.
In last night’s Media Technologies class, I surveyed some developments of early print and their impact on their cultures. It’s a very broad topic, ranging from different kinds of papers—bamboo, parchment, and cloth—to the spread of literacy and vernacular languages throughout Europe. While we do cover Gutenberg, his movable-type printing press, and his Bible, I was most interested in covering the big revolutions that print enabled, such as:
Protestant Reformation
Renaissance
Scientific Revolution
French Enlightenment and Revolution
American Revolution
Since I am not an expert in eighteenth-century France, I drew on what I remember learning in my high-school history classes and in my first-year Western civilization course at UCSB. In the course of my extended public-school education, I first learned about Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie. I was fascinated because the writing and publishing of that multivolume encyclopedia represented an early attempt by Europeans to collect the world’s knowledge and was a foundational text in the French Enlightenment.
In the context of a media studies class, the Encyclopedie represents a key example of print media resulting in an intellectual revolution. I connected the French Enlightenment to the French Revolution because that’s what I remember from my public-school education, and it’s not far from the conventional wisdom. For example, the Wikipedia entry on “The Age of Enlightenment” reads, “some of these [Enlightenment] ideals proved influential and decisive in the course of the French Revolution, which began in 1789.” Similarly, Maurice Cranston writes in History Today,” in the unfolding of the Revolution, what was thought, what was said, and what was advocated, was expressed in terms and categories that came from political theorists of the Enlightenment.” Even the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Enlightenment” concurs with this common wisdom: “Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution.” Where print helped spread the ideas of the French Enlightenment, those political ideas would in turn spark the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.
To supplement my summary of The Encyclopedie, I recommended that students listen to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 history series, In Our Time, on Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie.
As I listened to the program after class last night, they discuss the role that the Encyclopedie, specifically, and the Enlightenment, in general, had on the French Revolution. It challenged my thinking about the simple, direct connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
One of the panelists, Caroline Warman, says:
Certainly, the first stage—the 1789 stage—of the Revolution is the manifestation of Encyclopedie principles. It has to be… but then when it becomes and when it moves into the terror—when it becomes irrational, what will be called irrational—then I think it moves away from what we could ever call the Encyclopedie.
Host Melvyn Bragg then addresses the attack of the Encyclopedie during the Revolution, and Judith Hawley responds that “Diderot and d’Alembert would have been horrified by French Revolution. I don’t think they would have supported it all. They were horrified by violence.”
Even more surprising than learning that the Encyclopedie editors disapproved of The Revolution was how much it had turned against the ideals of the Enlightenment, Warman continues that the Revolution was “against reason. It was anti-intellectual elitism, too.” Warman recounts a story about one Encyclopedie contributor who “witnessed Robespierre’s parade [of terror], and this man reportedly dropped down dead in horror of what happened to Enlightenment ideas.” Not only that, but Warman concludes, “the Revolution killed scientists.”
So, it turns out that I was not completely right in linking the French Revolution to the French Enlightenment. While the early stages of the Revolution were informed by Enlightenment principles, it was, as these things usually are, more complicated than I had initially thought.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a sweeping piece of legislation passed in 1998, prohibits the circumvention of copyright controls, known as Technological Protection Measures (TPM). The aim of this prohibition is to prevent users from defeating TPMs to infringe on copyright. There are various measures in place, especially as newer media technologies emerged since 2000, and cracking them is not only difficult, it is actually illegal, even if you don’t infringe on any specific copyrights.
Every three years, the Librarian of Congress decides which uses are non-infringing and permits specific exemptions to the anti-circumvention provision. I first became involved with this triennial review on the eve of the 2006 rule-making process. At the time, media scholars and teaching faculty were legally hamstrung in extracting short clips and screen captures from copy-protected DVDs for teaching film and television classes at a college or university level. DVDs offered a better source than a film print or a videocassette for two major reasons: efficiency and fidelity.
DVDs offered a convenient package for us to extract clips and frame grabs. With a DVD, we would use a computer’s optical drive to extract clips. We could easily skip to a scene and take what we needed in a short amount of time. In the few times I took frame enlargements from a 16mm print, the process could take as little as a few days but would often take over a week. It would also be expensive because I had to buy 35mm film, pay to have it processed and printed. With a DVD, I could grab what I needed in a matter of minutes at almost no cost.
DVDs offered higher fidelity than what was available on videocassette and on some film prints. Not only does a DVD offer many more lines of resolution than a videocassette or look better than a beat-up film print, extracting a clip or a frame is an entirely digital process. We don’t have to resort to an analog conversion and the attendant generation loss. The image would look as sharp as it did on the DVD.
Moreover, the EFF (aka the “good guys”) have filed several briefs on behalf advocating for additional exemptions. Most of these exemptions account for emerging technologies that seemed fantastic fifteen years ago at the dawn of the millennium but are very real today. Some of the exemptions the EFF is seeking to secure include:
Accessing onboard computers on vehicles for research and repair.
Creating video remixes from locked videos on disks and from streaming sites to upload onto video sharing sites.
Jailbreaking phones and tablets.
Modifying video games so that they need not “phone home” to an authorization server when the server is offline.
While it is cumbersome to constantly reapply for these exemptions, it is important to continually update our laws. They should not only keep up with new emerging technologies, but also with our own ever-evolving culture.
We may have been exempt before then, but I was a scofflaw in this regard in 2006. ↩
The spring semester started yesterday at CUNY, and as luck would have it, it came just after a historic significant snowfall that receded in time for the first day of instruction. Also, as luck would have it, I teach two classes on Wednesday this semester at Queens College. This is a welcome relief from the past three semesters: I’ve either taught only one class or have had to make an hour-long, ten-mile slog on multiple days, at rush hour, and in peak-travel direction. It will be much more pleasant to have to only travel one day a week and at midday.
With the semester officially underway, I’m lifting my self-imposed embargo on publicizing the syllabi for my two Queens College classes.
For the last five semesters, I’ve taught the evening section of this introductory course on the development of communications technologies. In it, we cover the technologies of writing and print, mass culture in the industrial age, electronic broadcast media, and, of course, digital media.
This semester, I changed the textbook from Crowley and Heyer’s Communication in History (retail price: $154.00) to Irving Fang’s Alphabet to Internet (retail price: $60). While the students should appreciate the economic relief, there is a significant trade-off in adopting the Fang textbook. Whereas the Crowley and Heyer book anthology is an collection of condensed writings on communication technologies, Fang writes a more traditional textbook. I usually prefer the former and to read a variety of different writings on a topic especially because it fascinates me how greatly scholarship can vary despite each author writing on the very same subject.
However, I sensed that most students weren’t reading the articles I assigned. With students enrolled in an evening section of an introductory course, almost all of whom are coming from day jobs and have pressing family responsibilities, it’s remarkable to me that they manage to attend class in the first place. Consequently, I have decided to lighten the weekly reading load by adopting a more condensed textbook, and I’ll use our class session to elaborate on each topic.
To be honest, I always dreaded teaching this class. It used to be a 300-level class, and when I started teaching it, I upped the difficulty to meet my expectations for graduating students. I curated a collection of long, challenging readings; I assigned several writing assignments with a capstone; and I gave in-class exams with difficult essay questions. But after the first few weeks, I realized that I needed to do a lot of remedial work. Instead of having passionate in-class discussions about each reading, I had to teach students some fundamentals, such as how to outline an argument, how to compose a thesis statement, and the importance of opening each paragraph with a topic sentence. One semester, I even taught some research methods, such as searching catalogs and electronic journals, and I spent a whole week on citations and bibliographies. But I stopped doing that after one peer reviewer censured me for teaching so many nuts-and-bolts. After that critical evaluation, I became frustrated and gave up on figuring out how to teach this class. Thankfully, I was not asked to teach it again.
A few years have passed since I last taught the class, and both the class and I have changed in that time. Media Criticism has been reclassified as a 200-level class, presumably due to Pathways reform, and I am more experienced with teaching seminar-style courses, where I can let students talk. I’m now ready to retry teaching it as introductory media theory course: a course where we “criticize media criticism,” as I explained in class yesterday. This semester, instead of “curating” an overly ambitious collection of readings, I had the students buy one textbook, we’re comparing three or so readings each week based on themes that the anthology’s editor, Laurie Ouellette, presumably organized them and based on my own interests in media and cultural studies.
One of the reasons I chose Ouellette’s edited collection is because gender and race aren’t put into a “topical ghetto.” Instead, those are addressed in almost every reading throughout the book. When I explained to my students yesterday about the importance of “studying (or criticizing) media criticism,” I offered the following diatribe:
A few weeks ago, the Academy Awards nominated ten film actors and ten film actresses for best of the year. Not one of them is black, Latino, Asian, or any other American ethnic minority. Are you telling me that there’s not one such actor who was among the best last year, or was it that those in charge of making movies didn’t offer some one “different” an opportunity? Either way, as a country, we have failed when our most visible cultural form disregards our own people…those that make up this country.
It was a rare moment of seriousness for me, and I probably prattled on a bit longer than I should have. But I wanted to make a point about why it’s important for budding creative professionals to study theory. I attribute the representational failures of the commercial film and television industries, as evidenced by 2014’s films and the attendant nominations, to its anti-intellectualism. A little reading and critical thinking could do everyone some good.
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He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it.
However, the article has not yet been published. Why not?
They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.
You really should read Shrime’s bogus article yourself. It’s worth a few laughs. I only got through the first page because much like QuickType (a.k.a. Auto-Complete), the sentences are grammatically correct but semantically meaningless. My head began to hurt.
But the article was not all just algorithmically composed nonsense. Shrime clearly had a sense of humor when he came up with the institutions that employ Messrs. LeBrain and Welles (who, by the way, have very similar voices). Azusa Atlantic appears to be a play on Azusa Pacific University, a Christian college near Pasadena, California. As for the Green Mountain Institute of Nutrition, I am going to guess that Shrimes was making himself a K-Cup coffee when inspiration struck.
During last month’s end-of-the-semester Gradeathon, which is as painful but not as fun as the Climbathon, I spent a bunch of hours sitting at a few coffee shops around my Superfund site grading papers and exams. I like grading outside of the home and office for several reasons: it allows me to feel like a social being watching other “knowledge workers” do their thing, someone other than me makes me a fussy coffee, and I get to listen to something other than my stale music collection and esoteric podcasts.
One song I heard during my “residency” at Budin in Greenpoint was “Hollywood,” a song by Canadian singer Tobias Jesso, Jr. The song is very simple: it consists of almost all vocals and a few notes on the piano throughout the song, and it is punctuated by a few horn riffs at the end of piece. The lyrics are filled with agonizing feelings about Hollywood, apparently referencing some really difficult experiences Jesso had while making a go of it in Los Angeles some years ago.
And I don’t know if I can make it,
and I don’t know if I should,
I think I’ll say goodbye to Hollywood.
I don’t know if I can fake it,
if they tell me I’m no good,
I think I’m gonna fry in Hollywood.
It’s a lovely tune for what is a common refrain about struggling in Tinseltown and might make a suitable musical accompaniment for Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, a 1928 silent film by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich. In 9413, an actor with dreams of stardom arrives in Hollywood only to find a series of rejections. Instead of stardom, 9413 is anonymous and disposable.
As I listened to Jesso’s “Hollywood,” I kept thinking of 9413.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAEHFhxuQI
Kino included a version of this film on the DVD set Avant Garde: Experimental Film of the 1920s and 1930s, which is the same as the one I embedded above (and linked here in case oEmbed stops working). The music is so grating and distracting I always try to watch it silent. “Hollywood” might be for a better soundtrack to accompany 9413, or at least it will make for something to keep in my head because the song is much shorter than the film.
But unlike 9413, Jesso’s prospects are looking bright. Earlier this week, he released a second song, “How Could You Babe.” He also has an album, Goon, in the work for release in March on Saint Patrick’s Day. And he’s touring, too. He’ll be in New York at Baby’s All Right on Friday, March 27.
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