Film | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Factory Unmade

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for July 31 asks, “Automation has made it possible to produce so many objects—from bread to shoes—without the intervention of human hands (assuming that pressing a button doesn’t count). What things do you still prefer in their traditional, handmade version?”

Give me an old-fashioned, handmade iPad every time. You know the kind: Each one unique and prone to its own errors and quirks but the one that does some things uniquely better than any other iPad.

I know. It doesn’t exist, and why should it? But I have had favorite typewriters. And I continue to insist that I did not like the “feel” of certain computers, knowing that they are each the same, but still insisting that I can feel a relationship.

In one of my all-time favorite conversations, a friend and I attempted to identify whether various everyday objects were digital or analog. Not digital and analog devices and tools themselves, mind you. Not a digital watch versus a watch with a face, or “old” things versus “newfangled” digital things. We were looking at whether a device’s form or its function define its role in our world. (Of course, strictly speaking, we all live in an analog world in which digital—either/or—devices play a part.) In our game, if an object’s function defined its form, we declared it analog. If form ruled function, it was digital. (I know that this is a very incomplete analogy for digital versus analog.)

We were on a golf course while having this discussion, and we decided that my eight-iron was analog and his putter digital. You should have seen that putter.

In another conversation, this with my college roommate-slash-house philosopher Mike Pizzo, I found myself explaining in too much detail my ideas about this same concept. He sat patiently, waited for my big finish, and replied, “It’s heart versus brain,” which was his own pet analogy for, well, everything, but it also worked here.

Digital tools break tasks down into minute, discrete chunks. Analog audio records a stream containing a wave of sound, and a vinyl record or magnetic tape plays that stream of sound back; digital recorders also capture a sound wave but do so by capturing snippets of it at regular intervals, and digital players play back those snippets so quickly that it sounds like a stream of sound.

(Here’s a way to understand analog and digital. When I need to remember a letter’s place in the alphabet, I still sometimes silently sing the “Alphabet Song” I learned when I was a child and stop when I get to the letter in question. That is analog. If my brain was digital, each of the 26 letters would be equal and unique unto itself and I would be able to call up a letter’s file in question—the file for “G” says it is the seventh letter, for instance, but I needed to sing the song and count on my fingers to get that—without using its relation to the other letters in the alphabet.)

Digital audio and video are infinitely reproducible and can be manipulated almost to infinity (“that picture is fake! It was Photoshopped!”), and analog audio and video are not. In the digital world, there is no such thing as the phenomenon of “copies of copies,” in which a later generation copy of a document looks very little like the original, master document.

Conversations about a world that is only either digital or analog are digital; the rest are analog.

We live in a (mostly) digital world, a world that offers infinite reproducibility along with speed, the ability to produce the same loaf of bread or pair of pants or pop song again and again, the ability to meet goals more quickly by performing multiple, discrete tasks at the same time when once upon a time one had to perform those tasks in a particular order. (To get to “G,” I had to recite the alphabet part-way. What if I had all 26 letters’ files running in my head at the same time? “G” would be always already available to me.)

Automation gives us the ability to run multiple tasks at the same time with perpetually reproducible results. It gives us products that we can not have a personal relationship with, in spite of my insistence that I have a “feel” with certain computer keyboards. When perpetual reproducibility is something that is desired as a thing in itself, it can be disastrous.

Chaplin ridicules the heartlessness of automation for the sake of automation in one of his greatest films, 1936’s “Modern Times.” (If you are bothered by the sound of silverware scraping on a plate, this clip may irritate you.) It is a part of the famous 15-minute factory scene in which Chaplin’s Little Tramp eventually loses his mind while performing his gruelingly mindless drudge of a job (tightening bolts that are subsequently hammered by the worker beside him). The sales pitch for the “feeding machine” offers it as a way to “eliminate lunch hour” and stay ahead of the competition by keeping workers on the job while they are eating. Of course, the dance that is required to maintain anything like smooth operations is a delicate one and once any small element goes awry, the Tramp is almost beaten to death by the napkin holder.

Was my computer or your iPad built by a worker while they were being fed by a machine that held them in place on the assembly line?

I guess in my sloppy way I’m calling this “digital.” As in the conversation with my friend in which we declared certain things analog (handmade) and others digital, things that are not thought of in these terms, I offer the example of my haircut. The worst haircuts that have ever been foisted on me were automated in this way: a single set of clippers, five minutes and, “Next!” Those haircuts make me look like I have an audition next week for a acting job as a Marine gone bad. (And I am not an actor.) My current barber is more hands-on and takes 40 minutes on my head. He utilizes each pair of scissors in his arsenal. Each task on my head is addressed in turn and not rushed. He does not try to attack the whole job at once with a pair of (digital) clippers, unlike the mall hair cutters. I leave feeling like a piece of marble that had been worked on by Michelangelo. There is a line out his door most Saturday mornings.

The products of automation, much of the digital world, gives us a lot that is disposable, forgettable. Merely a long sequence of zeroes and ones. Useful, yes, but I like having things that show evidence of a human hand at work, evidence that someone cared. Like my killer haircut. I guess I want to see a hand-written sequence of zeroes and ones that would make a quirky iPad.

Shirley Temple and the Art of Obits

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

From 1934 to ’38, she was the biggest star, period. Anything with her image on it sold in the millions; you can still buy the “Shirley Temple doll.” Clark Gable, who finished in second to her year after year as most popular movie star, never had a hit song, and not many singers sold out movie theaters. Many a girl born in the period had to live for a time with her hair done in a perfect, bouncy mop (said to be 56 ringlets), whether or not her hair actually could be so styled.

Several obituaries for Shirley Temple Black yesterday included a quote like this one from people who lived through it: “That little girl danced us out of the Depression.” It is a true statement, both uppercase D and lowercase. More specifically, Shirley Temple sang and tap-danced 20th Century Fox from the edge of bankruptcy. In two dozen movies made in about five years, the country saw a child solve adult problems with a cute song, a dimply smile, and relentless optimism.

Even racism. As the New York Times noted in its own somewhat odd obituary (more on the oddness later), the child Shirley Temple “may have been the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on screen in her staircase dance with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson in ‘The Little Colonel,'” which was made in 1935. Robinson, born in the Reconstruction South of the 1870s, was a stage star, the most successful black performer of the era to bridge the worlds of white and black audiences, if only by always appearing relentlessly cheerful, as relentlessly cheerful as his child co-star. Their pairing, across four movies, made history by suiting Hollywood’s logic.

Once the dimples faded, though, her movie career declined—she was still popular as an icon, but the sight of a teen Shirley Temple reminded audiences too much of time’s passing, and people had their own lives to remind them of that. (The era of money-making nostalgia was still far-off in our country’s future. Today, in which history is not valid unless it is memorabilia, how is it that there is not an annual “Great DepressionCon,” at which cosplay performers wander around the convention floor dressed as hobos? If there was, Shirley Temple Black would have been a huge attraction.)

The rest of her life, a truly event-filled 85 years of life, minus any of the “child-star becomes a teenager, discovers they are not God, enters rehab” sadness, is sketched briefly in all of the obituaries, like so: Married to a businessman, she officially ended her show business career by age 30, discovered that the millions she had earned had vanished in her father’s bad business decisions, ran for office and did not win, and served in many official public roles.

She was a political fundraiser of such great note that two Republican presidents named her to official posts, only to discover that she was actually a talented and dogged diplomat, much like the dogged problem-solver of a child she played in her movies years before. She was a delegate to the UN, ambassador to Ghana under President Ford, and ambassador to Czechoslovakia under the first President Bush. She was a co-founder of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, which sounds anomalous but her brother had MS.

But the New York Times, in its long-standing role of uncle who you like to chat with about current events at parties until he gets creepy, got creepy in its obituary. I admit that I have not seen many of the famous “Baby Burlesks” that brought Shirley Temple to her first fame, but after reading this paragraph, I do not think I ever saw any, not any at all:

In 1932, Shirley was spotted by an agent from Educational Pictures and chosen to appear in “Baby Burlesks,” a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts in which children played all the roles. The 4- and 5-year-old children wore fancy adult costumes that ended at the waist. Below the waist, they wore diapers with oversize safety pins. In these heavy-handed parodies of well-known films like “The Front Page” (“The Runt Page”) and “What Price Glory” (“War Babies”), Shirley imitated Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and—wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and satin garter as a hard-boiled French bar girl in “War Babies”—Dolores del Río.

Later, after affectionately describing Shirley Temple’s partnering with Bill Robinson, the Times does this:

She may have been the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on screen, and her staircase dance with Mr. Robinson in “The Little Colonel,” the first of four movies they made together, retains its magic almost 80 years later.

Not everyone was a Shirley Temple fan. The novelist Graham Greene, who was also a film critic, was sued by 20th Century Fox for his review of “Wee Willie Winkie” in the magazine Night and Day, which he edited. In the review, he questioned whether she was a midget and wrote of her “well-shaped and desirable little body” being served up to middle-aged male admirers.

Does the next paragraph reveal the outcome of this lawsuit? No it does not. (The movie studio won a few thousand dollars, which at that time was enough of a hit for Greene to close the publication.) “Not everyone was a Shirley Temple fan.” That’s quite a non-transition transition. In its lurching, whiplash style, the Times moves on to the end of Shirley Temple’s contract days, her relief at this, and then … therestofherlife. The Greene anecdote is deposited into Shirley Temple Black’s obituary like any other fact of her life, like the duration of her marriages, say, and then given the same weight as any other fact.

The story of Graham Greene’s ancient movie review is worth exploring on its own because it raises issues of child stardom, audience participation in the fetishization of a child star, especially a female one, and even libel law. Greene’s attempt to capture the uncomfortable specter of middle-aged people leering at a young body instead veered most uncomfortably into the specter of watching a middle-aged Graham Greene leer at a young Shirley Temple’s body (he calls her a “fancy little piece,” for instance), but its place in Shirley Temple Black’s obituary, out of context, seems to place us in the leering role. The Times uses Greene’s language to raise the issue, then does not follow through on the issue because why would we, this is an obituary. It is the prurient censor urging us not to think thoughts we may not actually be having while holding up a photo, pointing at it, and telling us not to look.

Shirley Temple, a child star whose image became immortal eight decades ago, and Shirley Temple Black, dead at age 85, probably deserve better.

‘A Conversation with Cary Grant’

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

Cary Grant was born 110 years ago today.

Starting in the mid-1980s, Grant toured in a one-man question-and-answer show, “A Conversation with Cary Grant,” in which he spent ninety minutes or so answering questions from audience members. Several other movie stars and celebrities have since taken on similar productions in which they and their fans bask in an accepted and reflected adoration—Gregory Peck, for one—but Grant was the first. The show was an extended, and deserved, curtain call from beginning to end.

One cool feature to Grant’s tour was that it visited theaters in which he had performed during his vaudeville years in the 1920s. Thus it was that in April 1985 I found myself sitting in the balcony of the small (1500 seat) Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, NY, a stage on which he had performed. I was 16 and a movie nerd and Cary Grant was my idol.

Some of the evening is cemented in my memory. Judith Crist, the film reviewer for TV Guide, came on stage to introduce an introduction, the moment in 1970 in which Grant was awarded an honorary Oscar by Frank Sinatra. The movie screen dropped and we watched Sinatra introduce a well-edited reel of Grant’s “greatest” film moments that the Academy had compiled: five minutes of his seemingly endless supply of double-takes and reactions and several minutes of him being slapped by various leading ladies—a bit of good-natured ribbing by the Academy.

At the end of the clip, as Sinatra introduced, “Mr. Cary Grant,” the lights came on in our theater, and walking out stride by stride with his own oversize image on the screen was Mr. Cary Grant himself. It was a great stage moment. The greatest movie star of all time was magically walking off a screen and into our theater and our evening.

The stage was bare except for a stool, and he leaned against it, said hello and asked that the lights be brought up in the house so he could see us. “I’m here to answer some questions, but if you don’t have any we can dance and that would be fine.” From that moment on there was nothing he could do or say that we were not going to find delightful.

We did not wind up dancing, as we indeed had questions. He spoke of Mae West, in whose movies he had started to become a star, with great fondness. Hitchcock, too. There was seemingly not a single movie-making experience that he did not love being a part of. He described comic timing as something one was born with but added that there were techniques one could use. He admiringly cited George Burns’ ever-present cigar as an example of a perfect timing tool. A woman named Judy came to the microphone and asked him to say her name three times.

It is strange that any accounts of Cary Grant’s end-of-life American tour are anecdotal, like mine. Had no television network requested permission to record some of these sessions for a two-hour special? Wouldn’t PBS have made a fortune during membership drives with such a show? Or had Cary Grant simply nixed any such request, proposal, or offer to keep the evenings pure, purely theatrical moments between a star and audience?

One brief, three-minute, audio recording from one of these Cary Grant “conversations” has been circulating on the internet for the last couple years. Even though it is not from my evening with Cary Grant, it captures a couple aspects and moments that are very close to what I remember: the audible delight of the audience, Grant’s theory about the origin of “Judy Judy Judy,” and a man asking him to reveal some flaws, any flaws, because “it would help me a lot” with women.

By the end of the conversation I attended in Kingston, NY, Grant had sung a snippet from a song dating from vaudeville (would that I could remember it! Any hypnotists out there?) and happily introduced us to his wife, Barbara. And then it was over. No curtain calls. No need for any, as the entire evening served as a curtain call for his great career.

My friend and I got in our car and started to drive into the now-magical night. In the cramped parking lot next to us was a limousine with the back still illuminated. There was Cary Grant seated next to Barbara, a broad grin on his suntanned face, still taking it in.