Am I the meanest teacher? Maybe. I think I'm about to get a really terrible song stuck in my students' heads. But it's for Learning!

The timbre of sincerity

Just to be clear: Lady Gaga is about (primarily visual) spectacle, not about music per se. That's not to say that her spectacle is necessarily immersive in the sense in which we classically think about spectacle. (By "we" I mean people who sit around thinking about panoramas and wax museums and are very fond of the work of Alison Griffiths and Vanessa Schwartz and spend rainy weekend afternoons leafing through The Arcades Project, which is to say all of us.) Her videos are not made for IMAX; they're made for YouTube. They are miniatures in their bigness.

To me the canonical Lady Gaga video remains "Bad Romance." I haven't even heard her new single; there's no video yet, so what's the point?



Notwithstanding the primacy of the visual in Lady Gaga, there's something that continues to fascinate me about the sound of "Bad Romance." I'm sure the observation has been made better elsewhere, but I'm still trying to figure it out. There is something about Gaga's vocal timbre that sometimes conveys irony, sometimes sincerity. Compare "love, love, love" at 0:55, 1:12, 2:16, and especially 2:32 to "I don't want to be friends" at 3:50 and especially at 4:05.

"Love, love, love" is gritty, a little nasal. It doesn't care. The air is contained; it's high in the throat; it's whatever air Gaga happens to have sitting around in her upper respiratory system. Nothing's being pushed. The quality of the sound tells us that "love, love, love" means something like a casual if ruthless desire.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends" is open-throated. There is diaphragm involved, projection, technique. It is what they call "belting." It's a little Broadway, a stylized sincerity augmented by the reintroduction of the "unadorned" Gaga close-up.

"I don't want to be friends" is the video's emotional climax, the sticky moment of investment and utter, fixed attention in an otherwise brittle, aggressive performance. Compare. The video starts with Gaga covered in a metal façade, and ends with her character, accessorized by matching flamethrower and cigarette, absently reclining next to a charred corpse. Most of the time the Lady Gaga character isn't "all there," whether her eyes are hidden behind a variety of shades or masks or popping wide open in a head-lolling stupor.

In contrast, "I don't want to be friends"--that belting of air from the bottom of the lungs--physically performs focused, self-possessed, fully conscious desire. It constitutes a break, and it's a break that you hear. The thorough integration of vocal texture with narrative is part of what makes this video brilliant.

It took a highly creative extended reading by Jack Halberstam to get me at all interested in the "Telephone" video. But "Bad Romance" belts its artful construction very loudly.


Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Griffiths, Alison. Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Print.

---. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print.

We all saw the numbers put out by VIDA recently. (A propos, here's Pollitt pointedly noticing something about a position I happen to hold.) I would just like to add that Jim Behrle's recent series of profanity-laced attacks on the VIDA-named pubs is hilarious. That is all.

Quiz

Name: ________________________________________ 2/17/2011


1. The author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is:

(a) T. S. Elliot

(b) T. S. Elliott

(c) T. S. Eliot

(d) I. A. Richards


2. His famous 1922 poem is titled

(a) The Wasteland

(b) The Waste Land

(c) “The Wasteland”

(d) “The Waste-Land”


3. April is:

(a) the coldest month

(b) a delicious cruller

(c) the cruelest month

(d) the cruellest month


4. The moral of this quiz is:

(a) It’s important to notice details.

(b) Your instructor is just a little compulsive.

(c) If you misspell a work’s title, or the name of its author, readers are unlikely to take you seriously.

(d) All of the above.

One reason that feral children are always partially fictive is that they instantiate the "forbidden experiment." To admit of the genuineness of any given case would be to outflank the prohibition.

Egypt

On the night Barack Obama was elected president, Berkeley celebrated. You could hear car horns honking late into the night. Kids were celebrating in the street. It was as though winning the election were a revolution, the voice of the people heard at last.

This Al Jazeera video is instructive. It's a few seconds of Cairo celebrating an actual revolution, one that the Obama administration did not meaningfully support.



It puts things in perspective.

The fictiveness of wolf-children

The question surrounding wolf-children is always, are they even real? They are the stuff of myth: Romulus and Remus, etc. But in the nineteenth century the many cases of wolf-children that were documented, especially by British colonial officers in India, were constantly dogged (so to speak) by doubts of the stories' veracity, or, granting that the children themselves were real, doubts that they were in fact raised by wolves (as opposed to just living in the wild). Adriana S. Benzaquén notes that

In a "well-known London club," an argument over whether the story [of Amala and Kamala, the "wolf-girls of Midnapure"] was to be believed ended in a fist fight. A few months later, a writer regretted that the wolf girls' return to civilization had been "tragically unlike that of fortunate Mowgli, who throve alike among wolves and men." (225)

Wolf-children are always to some degree fictive, even when they are real.

This is due, in part, to the colonial notion that wolf-children were an Indian thing; thus William Crooke's Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India (1906) contained an entry on wolf-children (Benzaquén 224). Anything from India, "that land of rhetorical conceptions and of mental imagery," as one British doctor put it in 1927, was likely to be fabulous (qtd. in Benzaquén 225).


Benzaquén, Adriana S. Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006. Print.

Better (than this): cuteness is a moment in the uncanny, the heimlich moment subject to reversal. The uncanny has a diachronic dimension that we tend to efface in our attention to it as a minor aesthetic category.

(By the way, Marilyn Ivy writes about the link between cuteness and the uncanny here [Muse], though I would go further than she does.)

I am sorry to gloat about the weather while everyone else is in a deep freeze, but it is just one of those perfect Bay Area weekends when you put on a chiffon skirt and you don't bother to dry your hair because it's warm out, and who cares if it's all frizzy and curly, it is spring, it is spring, and you go write grant applications in the glorious sunshine.

Noted:

1. The uncanny is the original minor aesthetic category.

2. Cuteness is a special (heimlich) case of the uncanny.

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’" In Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmud Freud. Ed. James Strachey et al. Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. 218-52. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-47. Web. JSTOR. 5 February 2011.

Seriously, [name of press redacted]? Papyrus?

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.