The Hazards of Applause Inflation: Modern Day Concertgoing

So I'm at the Tower Theater on Saturday night, waiting for the Decemberists to start their set, surrounded by a palpable air of anticipation. Then the lights dim, and the crowd -- a mixture of oldheads and hipster doofi -- starts cheering wildly. Jenny Conlee's muted organ introduction to The Hazards of Love begins but nearly founders, overwhelmed by another wave of applause. A spolight illuminates Conlee at her keyboards; hysterics ensue. The cheers then come at regular intervals as the rest of the band assembles, and when Colin Meloy shows up -- well, you can imagine. The crowd had shouted itself hoarse almost before Meloy had sung a word.

I'm not, of course, singling out the Decemberists, who put on a great show Saturday night. But how did we reach this point? What drives the concert audience to shower praise onto performers before they've actually done anything?

It is safe to say that this is a new phenomenon. We're not, after all, that far removed from vaudeville, which featured audiences that demanded entertainment and were not shy about showing their displeasure to the acts that failed them. Today's Apollo Theater audience is probably the closest approximation to the old norm, and even there no one tolerates throwing things at the stage.

But one does not need to go that far back. If you want to get really startled, listen to some of the live albums from the '60s and '70s. I'm thinking of two in particular: House Full: Live at the LA Troubadour from Fairport Convention and the Who's Live at Leeds.

House Full features two virtuoso musicians, Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and Richard Thompson on electric guitar, battling each other to see who can play the best and the fastest, all the while anchored by as professional a rhythm section as rock has ever seen. And all that the crowd gives them back for their efforts is about ten seconds of golf claps. Granted, House Full is the product of the first American tour an electric British Folk act, so I can see why some may say that this is not the best example. But you won't hear much more applause in Live at Leeds, perhaps the most ferocious live album of the rock era.

So why do we cheer so vigourously? My guess is that it represents some latent insecurity, where our need to show our affection to a performer actually overwhelms the desire to listen to the performance? But that is a guess. All I wish to point out is that, if a concert audience actually wants to hear a great performance, they would be better served to sit on their hands at the start of the show and make the performer earn the applause.

The joys of a well crafted fight scene: Dollhouse, Episode 11

Minor spoilers ahead (but not the Big One) . . .
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
There. I would have subtitiled this "Ballard vs. Langton" if it wasn't for the spoiler issue. And now that I think of it, non-Dollhouse fans may want to skip the next two paragraphs. Mostly, I want to write about a really good fight scene, but I feel compelled to note how well it works in the context of the season. So if, for some reason, you're not interested in the series, by all means, skip ahead.

Anyone who has been watching Dollhouse this year knows that this has been coming. Joss Whedon and his subordinates have been building up Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) and Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix) as the supreme hard asses of the show, sans peur et sans reproche. Neither of them has even come close to losing a fair fight yet. Hell, they both won most of their unfair fights. So, sooner or later, they would have to meet.

But the fight was not just a contest between the two toughest kids on the block. Both Ballard and Langton have settled on Eliza Dushku's Echo/Caroline as the chief justification for the sorry life choices that they have made. Ballard torched his FBI career to save Caroline; since Patton Oswalt's character dissected Ballard's motivations far better than I could in "Man on the Street", I'll leave that aside. But Langton isn't much better. He's never been shy about his mixed feelings about his gig working (and then running) security for the Los Angeles Dollhouse. His way of compensation? Develop a myopic concentration on saving Echo. A more productive neurosis than Ballard's, of course, but still a neurosis. And a neurosis that puts him at cross purposes with Ballard.

So that's the backstory, characterwise. Now for the fight itself, which largely takes place in the penultimate segment. Whedon fans, of course, should be quite used to fight scenes by now, which have largely been very well done. Many stand out, too many to mention, really; my three personal favorites are Connor's fight with the Beast and the Angelus/Faith wire fight (both from Season Four of Angel) and (God help me) the scene from the Season Two Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "What's My Line, Part One" where Buffy malarchuks* a demon assassin. What makes the "BriarRose" fight stand out is how intricately it is choreographed.

Granted, any self-respecting drama will take care when staging a fight scenes, which almost always serve as the dramatic climax to a film or episode. Does anyone remember anything from the series Dynasty other than the Joan Collins-Linda Evans confrontations? It remains a mystery to me that neither the Oscars nor the Emmys (nor the Tonys, for that matter) do nothing to honor fight choreographers. Say what you will about the MTV Movie Awards, but they at least do something to recognize how important a fight is to a film's ultimate value.

One needs only look at the Ballard-Langton fight to see how much work goes into designing these fights. At one point, Langton has Ballard dead to rights, holding a gun on him while Langton lies crumpled on the Dollhouse steps, by now shattered by ealier stages of the combat. Ballard knows that he has a deadly opponent by this point; his only chance is to attack Langton in a way where reflex overwhelms control. So he throws a piece of the shattered bannister at Langton's gun arm. Langton involuntarily flinches, and in the second that action gives him, Ballard kicks Langton's gun out of his hand, then moves to press his advantage. The amount of storyboarding, rehersals and camera shots it took to develop this scene, or put more simply, the care put into this scene, simply beggars the imagination.

I could rattle off any number of films or television series with iconic fight scenes: Errol Flynn vs, Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood; Marlon Brando vs. Lee J. Cobb in On the Waterfront, James Caan vs. Gianni Russo in The Godfather (OK, better known as "Sonny wailing on his brother-in-law with a trash can lid"), the "He ain't pretty no more" fight in Raging Bull (along with Sugar Ray Robinson's final shot against Jake LaMotta), and the first Darth Vader-Luke Skywalker confrontation in The Empire Strikes Back. But what I think of most when I think of the Ballard-Langton confrontation is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. There is a fight early on in the film (very ably described here) between the two main characters and a man who tried to cheat them out of a very small payday. This is not a fight between immortals; rather, it is a sloppy fight where the combatants pay for their many mistakes, winnning through endurance and guile rather than any clear supremacy. In other words, it is like the fights, real or rhetorical, that we ourselves endure throughout our lives.

Kevin Murphy once described fight scenes in the old Repubic Serial Commando Cody this way: "Cody and his pal Ted get beat up by Clayton Moore and his sidekick, taking twice as many direct, bare-fisted punches to the jaw as George Foreman has in his entire career, with no apparent damage or injury."** This fight scene is essentially the opposite of that sort of fight. Two equally matched opponents go at each other, earning every advantage through blood and cunning, where ultimately the fight is determined, not by the clear superiority of one over the other, but by the intervention of outside forces.

* Don't click on this link unless you have a very strong stomach. I'm still not sure how I feel about trying to create a verb out of Clint Malarchuk's near-tragedy (oh, BTW, he did live, and even got back to the NHL)

** To be precise: The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, page 12.

Worst Ensemble Cast Among MST3d Movies

OK, I'm a little desperate here to reinvigorate my posting discipline, so here's my recent post to the MST3Kinfo website's Weekend Discussion on the worst ensemble casts in the annals of MST3K:

I’d like to break this category down to distinguish between the five types of movies that wind up MSTed:
1)Movies with professional actors;
2)Movies with community theater actors;
3)Movies who draw their actors from their investors;
4)Movies where the director puts so little faith in his/her actors that he/she hires voice actors to dub the dialogue;
5)Movies where the director doesn’t trust the actors, but is too cheap to hire voice actors, so he/she (oh, who am I kidding, he)dubs the dialogue using his own voice and maybe his wife’s.
I think that we can all fill in the blanks here with the worst performances in each category. But here are my choices for each:
1)Hobgoblins. Stretching the definition of “Professional” here, but I can’t forget that Duane Whitaker was in “Pulp Fiction” (dishonorable mention: “Riding With Death”);
2)The Dead Talk Back. “Teenage Strangler” would be an acceptable alternate, but at least some of that cast was photogenic;
3)The Skydivers. Hard to leave “Red Zone Cuba” off here, but all of the “actors” in that were in this as well. And correct me if I’m wrong, but the “the Scotchman” did not show up in “Cuba”;
4)The Creeping Terror. Although I should give points for the very articulate and engaging narrator;
5)Manos, the Hands of Fate. Since I’m not one to pile on, I’ll be silent here.

Whedon and the Tabula Rasa: Thoughts on the "Needs" Episode of Dollhouse

Caution: Minor spoilers ahead

Many people have expressed variations on the same thought when it comes to Joss Whedon's new series Dollhouse. While his fans are happy to have Whedon back on the small screen, the show's premise creeps them out a bit, and on several levels.

And no wonder. Whedon presents his audience a world where a shadowy organization can erase the personality of a person and imprint a new one drawn to the specifications of a client for a specific task. Once the task is complete, the new personality, along with any memory of the "task," is itself erased, with no consequences to the client (apart from the fee) or the organization. We are assured, of course, that the "actives" (as the victims of the process are called) volunteer for the duty, and that one day they will have their original identities restored. Of course.

There's a lot of layers to this, many aspects that one could discuss, most of them very unsettling. So why did Whedon decide to explore this sort of territory? Perhaps the eigth episode, "Needs" offers a clue.

When not out on assignment, the actives are normally kept in a sub-childlike state where they spend their time eating healthy, exercising and resting. In "Needs," however, five actives wake up as themselves. While they have no memories of their previous lives, they apparently are who they were before joining the Dollhouse. The remainder of the episode spins off of this change, as the newly aware actives take steps to reconnect with their identities.

What is telling about "Needs" is that Whedon has used this trope before -- specifically, in "Tabula Rasa" from the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ; and "Spin the Bottle" from the fourth season of Angel (not to mention a significant chunk of that series' fifth season). Both contrive situations where the main characters forget who they are so they can interact unencumbered by the residue of their experienences. But the audience willingly overlooks the contrivance because of the sheer joy of watching characters they love freed from their pasts. And let's face it: if you live in Whedon's universe, you're going to have a nasty past.

Whedon has always been at pains to make sure that the actions his characters take have consequences. In his shows, characters do not wind up where they were at the beginning of the episode. Perhaps, as the son and grandson of television writers, he has a better grasp of the double edged nature of serial character development. The television series format, just like radio before it, allows -- demands, really -- for a writer to create characters that evolve over time. The best shows sustain themselves by focusing on this potential.

For a good discussion of this, one should seek out Melvin Patrick Ely's landmark work on popular culture, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy:A Social History of an American Phenomenon (University of Virginia Press, 1991). Amos 'n' Andy spent forty years on the air in part* because it let some of its characters change into different people. Amos, especially, moved on from his original characterization as the good-natured but weak-willed second banana to the comically scheming Andy. By series end, he had asserted independence from Andy, established a successful business, married the love of his life and became a doting, loving father.

But as Calvin's dad once remarked, "We all know how funny good role models are." By the time Amos had turned into such a shining citizen, the Kingfish had supplanted his role as Andy's comic foil, shunting Amos into the background. That, of course, is another way long running series sustain themselves: by developing new characters without the emotional baggage of the original ones. But audiences will only accept so many new characters; in the end, a show can survive as long as the audience still reacts to the factors that drew them in the first place.

I often think of Ely's description of Amos 'n' Andy when I think of Buffy's seventh season. For one thing, Xander Harris' path closely parallelled the path that Amos had tred sixty years before. But even for the other surviving Scoobies, contending with life on the Hellmouth had taken its toll. Buffy and Giles both allowed the burdens of their responsibilities to suck all the joy out of their lives. Willow, meanwhile, spent the bulk of the seventh season recovering from her actions in the sixth; only in the final episode did she show any of her old spark. In short, the main characters were used up. Whedon could not remain true to his characters' integrity and continue to produce an entertaining show.

It should, then be obvious why Whedon would be attracted to the Dollhouse premise. Here is a show where the main characters will always remain true to who they are because they can't remember the consequences of their actions. The major problem with this approach is that it asks the audience to care about characters who have no apparent emotional core. And it is precisely this problem that "Needs" addresses.

*Yeah, I know. But this is not the place to talk about that.

Why Does Art Affect Me?

Why do we expect art to affect us rationally? Art exists outside the realm of rationality, so why do we expect to react to it rationally? Perhaps, as rational creatures, we cling to the notion of a rational world that reveals itself to those with the patience to examine it.

But the world is not rational. Rational thought helped us move out of the trees and, eventually, let humans conquer the world. But it does not explain what drives us, any more than an understanding of the seasons helps us understand what drives the birds around us. Because they are attuned to the mechanisms of the world (if not the motivations underpinning those mechanisms), birds are free to react to the impulses of the seasons. Humans, who live in defiance of those impulses, can not understand them at any level beyond the intellectual.

". . .the hardest thing in this world… is to live in it." The line is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the feeling comes from the depths of human experience. If humans lived in concert with nature, then we would have never left the trees. We live in defiance of the imperatives nature imposes on us. But at what cost? Does life in opposition to the divine plan deny us any hope for a contented existence? It may be that it does. Perhaps in the next world we may come upon something that satisfies our longing, but we have no assurance of this in this life, baring the grace of divine knowledge that some of us experience.

As it happens, I have experienced the grace of divine knowledge. But it would be hubris to expect others to take my word for it. Some of the greatest saints have experienced spiritual aridity, so to expect others to take my word for the experience of divine knowledge is obviously a fool's errand. For whatever reason, I have been blessed. All I can say is this: I believe that there is something beyond what we can experience. Take that as you will.

Things that Shouldn't Be: Rock Edition

I heard from a friend of mine who went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex in New York over the weekend that the gift shop featured an obscenely expensive Led Zeppelin shot glass. Now consider for a moment the sordid end of John "Bonzo" Bonham, who consumed as many as forty shots of vodka the day he choked on his own vomit. Should Led Zeppelin shot glasses even exist? Obviously, no.

And yet they do. So indulge me for a moment as I try a free form writing experiment to see how long a list I can make (without research) of rock and roll memorabilia that the Hall of Fame might want to keep off its shelves:

• Sid Vicious Ginzu knives;
• Lynrd Skynrd air sickness bags;
• Janis Joplin hypodermic needles;
• Marc Bolan gear shift knobs;
• the phone number for the "Hells Angels Crowd Control Service;"
• Lou Reed's copy of the book" So You Want to Make Electronic Music;"
• The lyric sheet to the Spin Doctors' song "Cleopatra's Cat"
• Rick Wakeman ice skates;
• Jeff Buckley water wings;
• John Denver "Build It Yourself" plane kit (oh, wait, that might exist for real);
• A facsimile edition of Duane Allman's copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance;"

Well, that's enough for now.

In Praise of Tracy Morgan

Tracy Morgan possesses a rare gift: the ability to say with a straight face anything, no matter how ludicrous. Judging by today's comment page at hulu.com, many still do not appreciate this. But really, in today's comedy world does anyone do a better deadpan than Morgan?

I had hoped to post a link to the final sketch of last night's Saturday Night Live, where Morgan playing the director of a family film called "Rocket Dog," displays a somewhat cavalier regard for the lives of the dogs (and actors) under his charge. Hulu does not have that sketch up yet, unfortunately, so instead I will ask you to remember how much Morgan brings to 30 Rock (the link goes to last week's show; I'm thinking mostly of the bit starting at about 2:10). Like a good left tackle or a solid bass player, Morgan is so good at what he does that you don't notice what he does, but everything else would not (could not) work without his contribution.

Plus, who else can just sit passively in a chair in a shirt made out of money?