Culture

The ‘Aldrich reaction’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Do you have a star or an asteroid named for you? Me neither. Nor have I discovered anything new on this planet of ours or in this universe or even so much as published a book that is “soon to be a major” anything.

Thinking on this sometimes leaves me feeling a little empty inside, so thanks for depressing me today, me.

There are many ways of achieving the immortality, or really, a slightly more famous mortality, that I desire. One of them, a Twitter bot named VanityScience, made its debut last week. The product of the imagination of a mathematician and columnist for Wired magazine named Samuel Arbesman, it promises one randomly generated “eponym” per hour. If you are a follower of the account, you will be awarded an eponym and thus have something named for you. Eponym is the word for the person for whom a discovery is named, like Alzheimer’s disease or Friedreich’s ataxia. But it can be good things, too.

The most recent eponym generated while I was writing tonight is this:

Yes, it is mine. All mine. The “Aldrich reaction” in the field of sociology. Named for me. For the length of time we like to call forever.

(I requested neither the field nor the type of discovery or previously unnamed phenomenon. The bot coincidentally came up with what may be, for me, the very best one possible. It may do the same for you.)

The laws in physics or corollaries in sociology (my field of expertise, as it turns out, so please refer all your sociology questions to me, @here) or principles in mathematics that the VanityScience bot names for its followers are not specified. That is why it is free, available only on Twitter, and has the word “vanity” in its name. But I do not think that this means the “Aldrich reaction” does not truly exist in the world or is not a recognizable reaction in society. I, a lover of humanity and all whom I meet student of humankind’s social structures, and a longtime encounterer of people, certainly have reactions.

I think the Aldrich reaction is an observable fact in sociology and thus worthy of study. In fact, I would say that it has been my life-long endeavor to make the world understand the Aldrich reaction.

There are many Twitter bots out there, from Tofu, which I do not fully understand as I have not played with it, to the grand Pentametron, which scours the Twitterverse for tweets that happen to be written in iambic pentamter and rhyme with one another, pairs them, and then re-tweets the resulting random couplet.

What happens when Twitter bots follow each other? Do we all become characters in Philip K. Dick story? Are we not already?

The creator of the Vanity Science bot explained his project in a blog post for Wired, “Vanity Science: Eponyms, Knowledge, and Twitter,” a title that in its precision actually obfuscates what it is about. The title should have been, “Vanity Science and the Arbesman Pride Rule (psychology): I Have Invented the Greatest Twitter Bot.”

100 Years with The Tramp

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One hundred years ago this month, Charlie Chaplin developed his most important creation, the Tramp. He started with the costume, and with it came the character, or the beginnings of one. On January 10, 1914, the Tramp, wearing what soon would be his globally recognized outfit of baggy pants, too-small derby hat, bendy cane, and little mustache, made his public debut in front of a crowd at a youth car derby in Venice, California. A film of his antics, “Kid Auto Races in Venice” was released a couple weeks later, in February.

The Tramp came to Chaplin fully formed, it appears. Not only is the costume complete in the movie but his full array of gestures—the twirl of the cane, the dismissive tip of the hat, the flat-footed walk, a kick of the leg to turn his body entirely around—is seen. (There is one prop and one gesture that are unfamiliar to viewers of today, though, and they did not stay with the character: he is seen smoking cigarettes throughout the short.)

“Kid Auto Races in Venice” is merely a series of unrelated scenes of the Tramp interfering with a film “crew” recording the day’s “Junior Vanderbilt Cup” races, an actual event taking place that day; in reality, the crew were actors and the real crew was unseen, giving us a very early example of a film within a film, a fictional documentation of a real event. The Tramp keeps sneaking into the camera frame, as if he wants to be in the movie, any movie, but before he can do more than mouth a “Hi” into the lens or primp himself up, he is pushed to the ground, pulled away, chased off.

(Here is all six minutes and nine seconds of “Kid Auto Races at Venice”):

In one five-second long sequence, he pushes a child out of the way so he can be seen alone on camera, flashes a quick “It’s okay” palm at the off-screen urchin, primps for the lens, and then reacts to a wad of paper thrown at his head by the child by wielding his cane like a spear. The child is spared by two film crew thugs who shove Charlie out of frame. Five seconds. It is sloppy–the child is off camera, after all, and the gestures are wild–but it is slick. A lot happens quickly. The moment is also a little mean, and that can be a surprise for someone whose main association with the Tramp is him holding the Kid in “The Kid,” made in 1921.

Chaplin_The_Kid_2

Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in “The Kid”



Some of the crowd, there to watch the races on the streets of Venice, California, were confronted by the sight of this one oddly dressed little man and what appeared to be two film crews photographing him (the real one and the “real” one). Onscreen, the spectators frequently ignore the cars zooming by to look at both foreign objects, the actor and those cameras and it often looks like the cameras were winning the attention of the crowd over both the cars and Chaplin.

He and the Mack Sennett crew were filming “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” when the studio decided to send the Tramp out into the world and visit the Venice races, and today, January 10, is the 100th anniversary of that debut. In February 1914, “Kid Auto Races” was released, followed two days later by “Mabel’s Strange Predicament.”

By the end of 1914, Chaplin would make another 33 films and become a national star; by the end of 1915, there were 13 more and his character was an international icon. In all, the Tramp appeared in 65 Chaplin shorts or features, ending with 1936’s “Modern Times.” (In “The Great Dictator,” from 1940, both his Jewish barber and the dictator Adenoid Hynkel certainly bear more than a passing resemblance to the Tramp.)

Chaplin was hired by Sennett at the end of 1913 and only instructed to be funny and look older. (He was 24.) He already had made one film for Sennett, “Making a Living,” in which he wore a walrus mustache and top hat (and complained that his best takes were cut out of the finished movie, forecasting future conflicts), and was making his second, “Mabel’s Strange Predicament,” when he was called to the set. In the rather cinematic version of the story he wrote in his “Autobiography,” published in 1964, Chaplin describes the moment:

I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living]. However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression.I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born.

Chaplin tended to romanticize his life story and he certainly had every right to, fifty years after the moment of his greatest creation. But the Tramp of these first Sennett one-reelers is not yet the plucky Everyman, he is by turns mean and put upon, apoplectic and self-centered. The one element already in place that would remain till the end of his career is the Tramp’s anti-authoritarianism: whoever is in charge–a film crew or the police, most especially the police–is there to be laughed at, evaded, escaped from, ignored, or swung at. Sometimes in a single gesture.

Film lovers would not be laughing at and studying Chaplin’s films one hundred years on if the Tramp had remained the pointlessly vain and strangely gymnastic dolt seen in “Kid Auto Races,” but this short movie shows more than a glimpse of what was to follow, for Chaplin and film. And it was made one hundred years ago today.

Retailizations

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A coffeehouse in France (okay, that right there may be one of the greatest four-word phrases I have ever typed; one almost does not need to continue. Please return from your daydream when you feel up to it) … . A coffeehouse in Nice, France (oh, come on, does this anecdote just keep getting sweeter? The setting may as well be, “A coffeehouse located in Sweet Kisses in Everyone Is Always Smiling Land”) … and, yes, I certainly know that the city’s name is pronounced “neese,’ and not the easy way to a punny joke, but a pun is a pun. 

coffee

Photo from Gawker.com

A coffeehouse in Nice, France, has posted a new price board, seen above and explained in “This Coffeehouse Will Charge You Less if You’re Nice.” If you stride up to the counter and demand a coffee, you will be charged 7€, which is approximately ten bucks and a typographical nightmare. If you say, “Please,” after, you will receive a discount. If you request the coffee and service in the more formal, polite, fashion, you will be charged even less. How great is this?

I worked at several retail jobs spread out over a quarter of a century. (I have also taught college composition, written for newspapers, and written and illustrated technical manuals. Either I have lived an interesting life or a shambling one; these are not mutually exclusive things.) I worked at a bookstore, an electronics retailer, a department store. At each, I desired the power to post a similar sign: a “ten-percent politeness discount on all hardcovers; twenty percent off before 11:00 a.m.,” at the bookstore, say. 

Retail clerks (sales associates, as we are more commonly titled now) occupy a couple different spaces in the average customer’s psyche, it seems. At the bookstore, there were customers who seemed to believe that one of the requirements for employment was that we had read every book in stock, and maybe every copy of each title. Some acted like they saw it as a personal challenge to find out which books I had not read. (At least once, after I had determined that a customer was playing this game, I started to insist that I had not yet read a book–any book–and that I just liked working retail jobs. “I’d like it more if we sold socks,” I told him.)

At the electronics retailer, it was assumed each of us working there was secretly a computer programmer and desktop publisher and ham radio operator who had not yet been discovered and, in our pure-hearted love of working a low-paying retail job as opposed to working as a high-paid consultant, we would/could/should provide professional-level advice for however much we were getting paid. Or for the fee of free.

Both customers are the same, of course, and they have a reasonable desire. Who doesn’t want to discover one’s own personal shopper at every store one walks into? We all want to be insiders. There were many customers at the bookstore with whom I shared great literary conversations and learned to anticipate their next reading needs, and there were many many customers at the electronics retailer.

But if I am your perfect personal shopper, I am probably letting someone else down. (While I was selling furniture at the department store, I had a customer ask me if I thought one couch was more comfortable than another. You know something? Furniture is a surprisingly personal choice. The couch I find comfortable might strike you as high-backed and about as inviting as a bus-station bench.) 

Other customers see the clerks in stores as interchangeable and invisible. Those are the customers the French coffeeshop is addressing. These are the customers who are supremely irked by the fact that a store opens at a certain time and not earlier–when they are there–or in fact has to close at a given hour–again, when they are there. They want to be treated as exceptional and important even as they treat the employees as the equivalent of a store fixture like a shelf or a display. This customer is the only customer who will actually say out loud to a clerk, “The customer is always right.” 

To handle this customer, I learned the “manager trick”: I would anticipate an impending complaint, announce preemptively that I would voluntarily involve the store manager in the conversation, sally forth to the backroom, and conduct the following conversation:

“Hi. Have you heard my chat with so-and-so?”

“Yes. It sounds like you know what to do.”

“I told her (or him) that I would demonstrate sympathy with their side to management, so I am speaking with you now.”

“This is a positive show of solidarity. But you’ll tell them I won’t budge, whatever the conversation is about.”

“Yes. Who are the Yankees playing tonight?”

I would return to the front of the store and repeat what I had been telling the customer all along, but with the added rhetorical support of the manager’s “words.” It usually worked.

It always worked, except once. I stupidly confessed to a friend that I sometimes employed the “manager trick,” and explained what it is, thinking it would amuse him. A few days later, a mutual friend began to negotiate something with me at the store. When I explained that I was going to speak with my manager, he accompanied me step by step to the back of the store. My friend had betrayed my secret.