Where am I going to buy my guitars?

As a small disclaimer - I will admit right out that I have little to no understanding of economics on either a micro or a macro scale. What I want to express in this post is my personal experiences as an amateur musician in Sydney. I understand that as good as times may have been in a personal sense, sometimes these changes just have to come about for the world to roll on in an economically sustainable sense. This is just my personal ode to Rocco, from Music 101. 

Allans Billy Hyde - possibly the most ubiquitous 'modern' musical instrument store chain in Australia - closed its final store two weeks ago. I've been out of town for a while - so this blind-sighted me somewhat. The thought of not being able to say "well I can always head to Allans" if I can't find something in the guitar shack around the corner of my house makes me feel a bit lost and confused. 

Allans Billy Hyde Pitt St store closing down sale - original photo from flickr.

That said, I'm actually not particularly concerned about not having somewhere to buy my guitar gear  (contrary to the title of this blog post). If these fighting words from Gallin's Music are to be believed, the gaping market hole left by the liquidation of both Allans and Billy Hyde will be filled by Gallin's and its parent company. That is, Gallin's and its affiliates will pick up the market share of name brand guitar and band equipment and expand accordingly. 

My particularly visceral emotional response to this news came from one damn lousy afternoon I had about 3 years ago: when I found out Rocco's Music 101 had closed down.

Music 101 was a tiny little guitar store in the inner west of Sydney. It lay on a strip of Parramatta Road in the suburb of Annandale that I like to call "the guitar strip". That length of road had vintage guitar specialists, a dedicated instrument repair shop and a peppering of small independent guitar stores. It ended at Billy Hyde Camperdown - arguably the largest guitar store in Metropolitan Sydney and a commercial behemoth amongst the other smaller boutiques.

Music 101 was the smallest of these. The first thing you expect to see when you walk into most guitar stores is racks upon racks of shiny new guitars of all the famous brands. But the first thing you saw when you walked into Music 101 was a rack of music memorabilia (framed posters and the like), old records, two conspicuously half finished guitars, a stack of old guitar amplifiers in one corner and a rack of guitars (that almost no one has heard of) in the other. The centre piece of this wonderful store was a grey 1970s leather couch slap bang in the middle. This couch, of course, was positioned so that you had a front seat to an overused work-bench and the big curly-haired Italian man who inhabited it - Rocco.

Rocco, sitting behind his work bench - source

That couch summed up everything that was great about Rocco's store. When I walked into any guitar store as a young'un, I was terrified of touching any guitar for one reason - the salesmen. If you touch it, you had to have a pretty damn keen interest in buying it. The salesmen would either go all out with their sales pitches, or kick you out on your ass for wasting their time.

But when you walked into Rocco's store, without fail you'd be on that couch, playing some new guitar that he'd gotten in the week before and talking about how much it sounds like a Fender Stratocaster, but with a different texture. Or colour. Or clarity. Or aggression. Rocco was in the business not because he loved music, but because he loved sharing that music with other people.

His attitude is bessed summed up with this story: when I first met him, I was looking for a bass guitar. And it was pretty obvious that he didn't have a bass guitar that was suitable for me. But instead of trying to sell me what he did have, he took a full hour out of his day, sat me down on the couch and taught me how to pick out a guitar that would be perfect for me. And he did this so that I would have the right tools to buy the guitar from someone else.

And mind you this was all happening whilst other people were walking in and out of his store. They would pop in, either to say hello, look for a guitar or drop one off for servicing. Rocco would invite them in on the conversation, asking the passers by if they had any tips for the young'un sitting on the couch (in time, I too became one of those passers by, giving advice to other young'uns). He didn't care that you weren't in there to spend money, the only thing he wanted was to make sure that you realised your passion in music.

That he ignored how much money you would spend in his store, however, may have been his ultimate downfall. He knew that he couldn't compete with the Billy Hyde megastore down the road, so he tried to market himself on his alternative qualities as a vendor. Instead of going for the big name brands (Fender, Gibson etc), he went for the smaller, less well known but equally awesome brands.

The essential problem with this strategy, though, is that you have to do extra legwork to try to market your  product to most buyers. Rocco and others like him have to do a lot of extra convincing to prove that you don't have to buy a Gibson Les Paul to get that the guitar that suits you. This extra work, whilst an excellent investment in karma, doesn't yield good cash dividends.

The Fender Stratocaster - every man and his dog knows one and wants one

So one afternoon 3 years ago, I brought my guitar to him for it's 6 monthly checkup -and Music 101 wasn't there. Another guitar store had bought Rocco out. Despite all of the friends and friends of friends I tried to point his way, it wasn't enough. His business lost out and he had to quit music.

Being an aspiring hippie (or hipster, take your pick), I was really angry at 'the man' for a long time. I blamed Allans Music and Billy Hyde. I was angry that commercial marketing won out over something that was special and unique and couldn't be replaced. In my mind, Allans Billy Hyde had won, and they didn't deserve to.

So imagine my shock when even they announced liquidation.

As I said earlier, the situation is by no means dire. Rocco's was an isolated case. There are other small guitar stores in Sydney that sell big name brand guitars - more than enough to fill the market gap. And if the analysis given by Gallin's Music is correct, Allans Billy Hyde went under due to shoddy management rather than market decline. On a positive note - these other stores do tend toward the passionate side of music - preferring discussion to sales. But you can always spot the glint in the salesman's eye. And when you do, it has the potential to ruin what might have been a sincere exchange.

When I heard that Allans Billy Hyde were going under, I felt a pang of sadness and disappointment. But it wasn't for them, it was because I remembered Rocco. Coming to that store, sitting on that couch and watching that man at work is what I miss the most.

I hope that someday he'll open up a store again. I'll bring all my friends. Bring yours.

Zombies, and such

The mantra of zombie-apocalypse fiction is essentially this: watch people go mental as the world goes to shit around them. And my god, we can't get enough of it these days.

Somehow, in the last 10 or so years, Zombies went from the realm of hammy horror movies to the obsession of not only geeks, but a good chunk of the young populous. The once small sub-genre of horror has now become a monster of popular culture in its own right, spawning fiction that has more or less transcended the horror parent-genre from which it came. It's even inspired some very specific and quite successful satire.  So why do we love zombie apocalypses so much? Because we all reckon we could survive one. 

It wasn't always like this. Zombies were popular pre-2000, yes - but only as much as other recurrent horror themes, like dream invasion, maimed serial killers or crazy Texans with chainsaws. The zombie movies of old, the Night of the Living Dead series being possibly the most notable, were just horror movies. And as serious as horror movies try to be, sophistication and artistic integrity has always been sacrificed for the gore factor. Zombie movies, like other horror movies, used to have a very simple task - scare people and freak them out on a basic, visceral level.

Today zombie fiction is prolific - and some of it is pretty good at that. Both the comic and television series of The Walking Dead are doing immensely well and are quite compelling. The subject matter was treated quite realistically and with much consideration in World War Z. And it's been lampooned very successfully in both quintessentially English and quintessentially American ways in Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, respectively. Our Zombie obsession extends beyond even fiction - we have best-selling educational guides on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. 

Shaun of the Dead - somewhat funnier than the Scary Movie series

Starting at around about the time Lost came out, the popularity surrounding zombie apocalypse fiction skyrocketed immensely. Despite the fact that show itself wasn't about zombies, it did well to popularise many of the themes that we seek from zombie apocalypse fiction today. It portrayed people put in a desperate (though not impossible) situation and losing their sense of human decency as the comforts of 'civilisation' were removed. We subsequently came to love Zombie fiction for two main reasons - survivalism and psychology. 

It is interesting to note that what sets Zombie fiction apart from other horror fiction is that humans are given a fighting chance. The Resident Evil franchise, 28 Days Later,  I Am Legend (the Will Smith version, not the one with Moses in) and pretty much all other zombie fiction depicts humans as having a damn good fighting chance. 'Healthy' humans are portrayed as being able to defend themselves, establish stable communities and, in some cases, even fight back the horde. The same cannot be said for much other horror fiction. The Halloween and Nightmare on Elm St. series tease the audience with hope that the protagonists can survive, but they are invariably overwhelmed by a boogeyman that proves to be too powerful for them.

Zombies are slow and dumb. Their advantages lie in the fact that they only have one weak spot, are unperturbed by fatigue or exposure, and in their overwhelming numbers. They are a manageable threat, and as a literary antagonist do not have any surprises that supernatural boogeymen or overly-intelligent axe maniacs traditionally have (by virtue of vaguely defined abilities). We seem to have zombies figured out, and for that reason, given a little bit of common sense, we believe we would survive in the face of the apocalypse. Pack camping gear, grab a melee weapon, avoid drawing attention, and, in the face of danger, go for the brains.

The seemingly widespread nature of this zombie survival knowledge adds an extra layer of enjoyment when flexing our 'well I could do better than that' reflex. When we read action based fiction, we realise the protagonists are probably more prepared than we are for the situations they get into. When we get into Drama shows, we acknowledge that human emotion is rather complex and that we don't have full control over how we might react to a given scenario. But Zombies? The pack from Shaun of the Dead should have picked a more fortifiable position than the local pub. Rick from The Walking Dead should have probably should have realised that Shane was a massive prick a long time before he actually did. And in the same series, the character of Glenn seems to be an homage to us, the well-informed zombie pop culture consumer. In a rather meta-fictional way, he's got a knack for avoiding zombies for no other reason than he is a massive geek.

Glenn from The Walking Dead  - 'What'd you do before all of this?' 'Delivered Pizzas'.

With this, though, we come back to where we started - watching a group of people lose all sense of human decency. This is a staple of survival fiction. If civilization falls down, if basic assumed comforts are taken away, a group of people will turn on each other and it will get nasty. Stuck up city types grow indignant at the lack of homely comforts and sometimes get violent. Hermits are forced to interact with other people in uncomfortably close quarters, and sometimes get violent. Police Officers, teachers and other authoritarians get ignored, and sometimes get violent.

We have become fascinated with the idea of human behavior under dire straits. Recent times and increasing existentialism has made us really want to examine the idea of humanity and human decency. Do we sacrifice our moral codes for the sake of survival? Is human decency and basic consideration other people just artificial constructs of our society, or should we live by these moral codes, even in the face of the end of the world? Do we euthanise the bitten infected little girl who's about to turn? What about when we start running low on food? Do we kill people, leave them behind so that we can make it to the next town?

These questions have popularised the standard profile for the protoganists of  survival fiction. He (or she) is invariably a strongly moral person who is forced to question whether or not he is meeting the bottom line for survival, or whether or not he is being brutal enough to protect the group he is leading. And they are a character who sometimes does abandon his morals. Despite the mistakes of the protagonist, good invariably wins out (except in some rare cases).

For this reason we derive some sort of hope from it. We get a payoff as an emotionally invested audience that human beings aren't just animals at the end of the day. When it all goes bad, we can be like the hero, we can defend humanity in the face of brutality. We like to believe so, anyway.

Jack of Lost - the protagonist mould into which Rick Grimes  from The Walking Dead and Shuan from  Shuan of the Dead are cast.

Given global warming, the impending energy crisis, recent economic disasters, increased awareness of ongoing global conflict and the end of the world slated for 2012, we can't help but be pre-occupied thinking about what would happen if an apocalypse came to pass. And as cynical as our parents claim us to be, we still want to believe that we could survive, and uphold human decency in the process. Zombies give us a well defined scenario that we can prepare for. We like it because at the end of the day, if a Zombie apocalypse happens (and by some stroke of luck it happens exactly in the manner in which we're expecting), you can be damn sure that we'll survive, shotgun and shovel in hand.

Batman is better than Superman

Unless you're a die-hard fanboy (ahem), it is very hard to read a Superman comic or watch a Superman film and feel connected with the big blue boy scout. It's taken me three awesome Batman films, all of the films leading up to The Avengers and the recent reboot of the DC comics universe for me to realise this - but it's become almost impossible to write a compelling Superman story. 

Batman stole his chips

Let me start by backtracking my blasphemy just a little. Superman has been many times referred to as the superhero - the first, the most righteous, and arguably the most powerful. He is the moral compass of the DC universe and the light which many other superheroes follow. He is invulnerable as well as being (pretty much) infallible in his morals.

But it's for precisely these reasons that the Superman franchise has become stale.

This becomes particularly clear when you examine the last two Christopher Nolan Batman films What made The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises so compelling was that the Joker and Bane bested Batman - intellectually, physically and spiritually. One of the core elements that made Nolan's films so compelling was that you really did not know if Bruce Wayne could pull through. The grit and reality with which he portrayed that struggle was what we wanted to see.

This 'come at me bro' ends badly for the Bat.

The first problem with Superman is there is never much of a contest (in any believable context). In Superman Returns, despite the plot having to fall back to the anti-deus ex machina that is Kryptonite, he still pulls through and lifts an entire island of Kryptonite and throws it into space. And the Death of Superman comic story arc was supposed to present the Doomsday monster as his final match - culminating in a violent and bloody death. But this was all completely undone when a) he came back to life and b) subsequently defeated an entire army of Doomsday clones in a later Superman/Batman story arc. 

What films like the recent Amazing Spiderman and The Dark Knight Rises have is a true sense of heroic struggle. Peter Parker has to grow as a person and become stronger physically in order to actually get to a point where he can save the day. Bruce Wayne not only gets his back broken, but has to confront human indignity at almost every turn before he manages to beat Bane. In both of these movies we see the kind of conflict that makes us slump back in our seats and say 'crap, he might actually not make it out of this one'.

Andrew Garfield gets curb-stomped rather alot

And this is the second and essential reason why people don't connect with Superman - no conflict means no growth. In the first Superman movie, he looses and like a petulant child, disobeys his father's dictum to 'not mess with humanity' and decides to turn back time. With Doomsday, as with Superman Returns, the writers decide to take advantage of how ambiguous Superman's powers are and pull an extra can of whoop-ass out of the bag at a convenient plot point. 

None of these instances in Superman's history have inspired us to really feel for the guy. We connect with losers. And strangely enough the problem isn't that he never looses (nor do any of the other superheroes). The problem is we don't know how he could loose. No one has done a good job of defining the limit to his powers and put him in a context where he really has to struggle to break those limits. And no, Kryptonite doesn't count because it is an overused deus ex machina and its speculative effectiveness was nullified in Superman Returns.

In fairness - Superman II and Superman Returns show him getting curb stomped in a much similar fashion to other successful superhero movies, but neither really show how any personal realisation helps him overcome the conflict. This inner journey is what we crave from superhero movies. Ultimately we've grown to a point where we don't just want big effects, seeing superhero beings destroy the cityscapes. If we just wanted that we'd just go and see The Avengers again. There's a deep philosophy behind being a superhero and the idea of power being inherently tied to social responsibility. We're aware of this, and we get disappointed when we don't see it in a Superhero story.

So what would make a good Superman story? I have some ideas - but my not being a professional writer basically shafts all my ideas into the realm of fan-fiction (let us never open that box of despair). But the essential crux is that one would not only need to put Superman into some sort of dire situation, but one that takes a hell of a personal journey to fight back from. And given the stigma that already exists with how uninteresting he is, Zack Snyder is going to have to pull one hell of a cat out of his bag for Man of Steel.

Don't get me wrong - I still love Superman. Despite the fact that he's a wildly imaginary character, I look up to him. There's something in his infallibility and his bravery and his strength that gives you something simple and grand to aspire to. But I'm a particular type of romantic that way. I realise that the rest of the world has a tendancy for not being giddy at the thought of having a big red S emblazoned on their chest.

The thing about Bond

I think (or would like to believe) that as a literally mature society, we realise that James Bond is particularly stylised action hero. That is to say, we know that there cannot exist a secret agent who is able to fight off an machete wielding psychopath, get poisoned, suffer a heart attack and be defibrillated, only to return in an immaculate tuxedo minutes later, ready to play poker with all the witty quips a sophisticated British gentlemen should have at all times.

Despite his evolution in recent times into a 'grittier' and 'more believable' character (culminating in the dirty tortured and generally bad-ass Daniel Craig incarnation) I can't quite seem maintain my suspension of disbelief. In the lead-up to the release of the much-anticipated Skyfall, I began re-watching Casino Royale with the intent of finishing the evening with Quantum of Solace. A strange thing happened - I couldn't finish Casino Royale. Craig, despite his more 'real' portrayal of Bond, was still too unbelievable for comfort.

First - a brief history. Ian Flemming created the character James Bond out of his experiences in Naval Intelligence during World War II. What resulted was a thoroughly romanticised image of a 'secret agent' who was all of suave, impulsive and deadly with a sharp wit to boot. The mix of all these things created a rather exciting character that made for some riveting film making. To describe the effect that he had on popular culture, one can only really fall back to an cliche - "men want to be him, and women want to be with him".

"I'm very well dressed, and you're about to die"

This romanticism of the spy industry worked back in the 50s when we weren't so obsessed with 'gritty realism'. We would happily watch the likes of Sean Connery and Roger Moore face off with any number of foreign and very nasty henchmen and come out without a single scratch, physical or mental. Being in the mood for suave seduction after having killed one (or several) men was a staple for the first half of the Bond franchise.

With the 80s through to the 00s, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan brought a more tortured air to Bond in an attempt to make him more three dimensional. Both Dalton and Brosnan had a bone to pick. Bond's otherwise incredible aloofness was portrayed as a psychological necessity of the mental scars accrued by a man who has love and lost far too many women and killed far too many men. 

These portrayals worked in their own contexts. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, we never demanded gritty realism or psychologically complex protagonists in our genre films. We went to the cinema and saw Bond because we expected gadgets, explosions and scantily clad women. In the interest of satisfying an increasingly intellectual audience, Dalton and Brosnan began to move that trend along to modern day. But remember that even they existed in an era when the cast of The Expendables were all at the height of their fame. We didn't care too much about realism in action movies at that point.

Dalton, angry Bond

Given the recent wave of films, books and video games, however, we've been demanding a lot more grit and reality out of our action heroes. Since then and now, we have had Die Hard, The Matrix, The Dark Knight, all the Call of Duty video games and extensive media coverage of both Gulf Wars. All of these things have given the public an increased insight into the nature of 'action', and therefore what is and what is not possible.

Couple this with a general increase in the quality of education in literature and we have a movie going audience where the old action movie tropes just won't cut it. Even for your average "show me some explosions" Joe. It becomes very hard not to ignore the image of Austin Powers when watching Sean Connery work his magic on screen.

In this context, I concede the creative step between Die Another Day and Casino Royale was a good one. Both the Daniel Craig films have presented a more believable Bond who is more well adapted to our modern tastes. This Bond sweats, destroys pristine white shirts with some fairly gruesome blood stains and actually has open wounds and raw knuckles that persist after each fight. To top it all off, Eva Greene as the main Bond Girl of the film doesn't take killing so lightly, ending up sobbing in the foetal position under a cold shower after witnessing Bond kill several men.

So why did I stop halfway through Casino Royale? The answer lies in when I stopped - on the train to Montenegro when Vesper Lynd and Bond are introducing themselves to each other for the first time. That conversation in content and execution had reeked of all the elements of Bond that didn't age well. 

Lynd put it well when she expressed her disbelief in the idea that Her Majesty's Secret Service chooses to wage the success of a mission on one man's poker skills. As much as the script makes efforts to convince Lynd (and therefore the audience) that this is, in fact, not the dumbest idea in the universe, the core concept stated in simple terms still stinks of the overly fantastical.

Bond himself is still an Oxbridge educated man who enjoys his fine liquor and high flying lifestyle He eats fine lamb on a first class European train trades quip for quip with the sassy leading lady.  We are supposed to believe that a man who is horrifically scarred by war and dangerously cynical can still indulge himself in these aristocratic niceties and bourgeoisie conversations.

I concede that changing either of these two elements, the plot devices or the man himself, would be removing the 007 out of a 007 story. But despite how valiant Eon Production's efforts are in modernisng the international man of mystery, I'm not sure I can enjoy him on the serious level that Eon is trying to pitch.

Or maybe I'm thinking about this too much.

 

Vlogging and Death

On my very (very) long flight to Europe, I managed to digest a book by John Green called The Fault in Our Stars. Rather shamefully, I found it in the "Young Adults" section of the Kinokuniya in Sydney. Of course - the book is classified as young adult fiction and therefore would be in the teenager section (which is incidentally next to the brightly coloured kiddy section) - but it doesn't change the small amount of shame that a 20something year old alternative wannabe feels when taking a book from that shelf.

Why am I reading a book for teenagers? Other than the fact that the book was profoundly moving and made me emotional in a way that made me slightly embarrassed during the flight, John Green, along with his brother Hank Green represent the very essence of what makes awkwardness, geekiness and nerdiness so awesome.

Below is a video that combines two otherwise annoying things into one of my favourite past-times - Twilight and being a smartass:

A brief history - in 2006 Hank and John Green started a project called Brotherhood 2.0. The aim of the project was for the two brothers was to abandon all forms of  "textual communication" (being mail, SMS, E-Mail etc.) and to communicate purely via video blog posts on Youtube.

Such was the magnetic geeky charm of Hank and John Green that over the years of 2006 and 2007 the video channel gained popularity in it's own right - that is, beyond the novelty of the project. Thus evolved the Vlogbrothers. A quick skim of their youtube channel and it becomes clear how hard it is to resist their geeky charm. As their video blogging has evolved they've gotten a solid grasp on how to pace vlogs and keep people entertained.

More to the point though - to almost literally a legion of fans (dubbed "Nerdfighters"), they have become champions of geekiness and awkwardness everywhere. Hank and John were the awkward kids who sat in the corner, read books instead of playing sports, got beat up by the jocks and all those other nerd clichés. Except they grew up without growing up. Their Vlog is a celebration of harmless intellectualism. The kind of intellectualism that makes you wonder why barns are uniformly red and what happens when a completely physically inept human being attempts to tear down a wall.

Hell - it's worth subscribing to their channel just to get an explanation on the importance of the Higg's Boson that not only is entertaining, but actually stays somewhat true to the physics:

But back to where this post started - The Fault in Our Stars. 


John Green (the elder brother) makes his living by writing novels - and good ones at that. And the reason why his novels are so good is for the aforementioned reasons for which his and Hank's Vlogging is so engaging.

The Fault in Our Stars portrays young teenage cancer patient, Hazel Grace and her romance with Augustus Waters, an equally young recently recovered cancer patient. What follows is  a story that is brutally honest and quite profoundly moving on a very visceral and emotional level.

The beauty of the portrayal of the tragedy in Hazel's life is in the manner-of-fact way in which Green portrays her condition. The struggles of cancer take on a uniquely cynic-but-sweet twist which could only be achieved through the eyes of young sassy teenager. Hazel, despite her age, has come to a thorough acceptance of her condition. Even then, she isn't portrayed as the clichéd bright 'trooper' or the emotionally distraught heroine you might come to expect. She accepts that she will die, though she chooses not to give into becoming chipper and to attack every day 'like her last'. She treats her life with a maturity, that is incidentally made terribly fragile by how young she is. With this attitude, Green does an amazingly good job of making her honest and relatable whilst putting her through an experience that almost none of us have gone through.

What comes through in this novel, and his others (Looking for Alaska, Will Grayson, Will Grayson and others which I have still to read) is that same celebration of being the awkward teenager. Hazel Grace defeats the sadness of her situation with craziness and a weird, meandering imagination I get quite a lot. There's a subtle honest optimism to his writing which seems to resonate not only with myself but all of Nerdfighteria.

Even in a book with subject matter as potentially depressing as The Fault in Our Stars, John Green in his writing and his Vlogging scream a message of meaningful enthusiasm for the world. It's ok to be 30something year old nerd who loves Harry Potter and gets excited about science you don't understand. To Hank and John - the world is a giant playground where its ok for two married men to engage in a noodle war. More people could do with that kind of attitude.

The final pages of The Fault in Our Stars moved me to tears, but it left me with more faith in the ability for people to be happy than before I read it.

Apologies and Travel

I know I know, it's been more than a week. I've been busy trying to get ready to leave the country. I'll get to it soon enough I promise.

Meanwhile - I've started a travel blog: Le Piedfour. Check it out.

The Brave and the Bechdel

Two things happened to me recently: I saw Disney/Pixar's latest offering, Brave, and a friend of mine introduced me to the Bechdel Test.

Very many reviewers have already examined what I noticed about the film - that the story seemed to change style somewhere in the middle. The animation, scenery and general visual effects of the film were all quite breathtaking. However, the apparent shift in storytelling paradigm resulted in a movie that was somewhat less baked than it could have been. The main thematic source of praise for the movie stems from the quite honest and endearing portrayal of the mother-daughter dynamic between the protagonist, Merida, and the queen Elinor.

The film's strength - the relationship between Merida (left) and Queen Elinor (right)

This is where the Bechdel Test comes in.

The Bechdel Test is a simple gender-bias test for movies, born from the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. To 'pass' the test, a movie is to satisfy three criteria:

1. It has at least two (named) female characters
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man.

At a cursory glance, the test is a very straightforward way to assess the meaningful presence of women in a film. As a statistical tool, it's an uncomfortable yardstick that sees a significant majority falling well short of these criteria (as simple as they may seem). 

Qualitatively, passing the Bechdel Test signifies that there is portrayal of women in the context of something that doesn't center around a male character. This ostensibly means that the movie attempts to address issues for women in a feminist, or at least a non misogynistic manner. (The extent to which this is the case, though, depends on the length of film for which rule 2 is satisfied).

This is where Brave does quite well. It is un-self-consciously about women. And I say 'un-self-consciously' because it addresses a particular issue pertinent to girls and women without the necessary involvement of a man. At it's heart the movie is about two generations of women reaching a better understanding of each other. 

This is in comparison to Disney's Mulan. Although Mulan is film with strong feminist overtones, the film (and indeed the original fable) concentrates on Mulan filling a role traditionally filled by men. This of course puts a strain on Mulan's ability to pass the Bechdel Test - the film's central conflicts are between Mulan and men, or Mulan arguing about men.

Mulan - masquerading in a male dominated world

Although I say that Mulan and other feminist movies like Mulan are self conscious, I do not doubt the meaningfulness with which they portray their female characters. These characters are able to be important role models for young girls and women.

And although I say that Brave is not self conscious, this doesn't necessarily work in its favour. The elephant in the room, that is that a woman should be used as a political bargaining chip, is never directly addressed. Though this issue is resolved in typically cheesy Disney fashion, the essential feminist issue is never looked into.

Merida draws her bow in defiance of her intended role

In a way, examining Disney films for feminism isn't the best way to go about measuring gender bias in modern cinema. Disney represents a particular branch of American mass media intended and manufactured for a very specific demographic. 

This same fact, however, allows Disney to be used as a yardstick of the progression of gender bias in modern cinema. As the tastes of modern Western parenting have become more progressive, so do the production houses that cater to those tastes. If the sample space were more statistically indicative, it would be interesting to see if there were a correlation between children's cinema passing the Bechdel Test, and modern western cinema in general.

Brave is an interesting step forward. Yes, it has a kickass female protagonist. Yes, Merida is strong, independent, believable and relatable.  And yes, the movie focuses on two women and their struggle to identify with each other. That it seems to overlook one or two issues is a problem that can be attributed to the same reason that the movie comes off as slightly a mediocre piece of storytelling. Hanlon's Razor (modified) - the screenplay was just not that good.

PS: For a more in depth treatise of the effectiveness of the Bechdel Test, read The Bechdel Test: What It Is, And Why It Matters by Emily Monaghan on Squarise.com.

Doing Stuff For Free

I've been in a number of situations where I've had to sit down and really question why people would bother volunteering. The most obvious answer to this is purpose and belief - that is, having a firm belief in the mission of the body that you are volunteering for. Falling back on this and this alone, however, has been the downfall of many university based societies that I've witnessed. Not only do you have to put effort into reminding people of this purpose, but you have to put a lot of legwork into making sure that your volunteers are happy campers.

This, then, begs the question - what keeps a person working hard for no pay?

Certain clichés in American High School film tend to portray students who put significant efforts into extra-curricular activities as being inherently self-serving. Community Involvement in a lot of literature has been portrayed as way to accrue entries on a resumé leading to favourable scholarship or employment opportunities.

Whilst I certainly know a few cases where this is only motive, this isn't the case for a lot of people who volunteer their time for clubs and societies. Far from being involved in such things for tangible gain, my experience has led me to believe that the drive to volunteer or be involved is deeply psychological. Many of people I have come across actually express their desire to volunteer as fulfilling much the same psychological needs that would make a paid employee happy in the framework of a bigger company.

The Aspiring Pragmatist explains in her post (on Wikipedia as representative of a new marketing paradigm) that in order for an individual to feel happy they must feel fulfillment in three distinct psychological needs: autonomy, competency and relatedness. That is, feeling like you're in control, feeling like you're able to do something, and feeling that by doing something you will impress yourself upon other people or the world. 

By natural selection, corporate evolution or just plain common sense, it is somewhat fascinating to note successful management of volunteering bodies have more or less pinpointed these exact three things.

Let us start with the easiest to digest - relatedness. Volunteering bodies and extra-curricular activities by their very nature fulfill this psychological need without too much fuss. Putting time into aiding the disabled, protecting the wildlife or even putting a satellite into the sky not only obviously makes you feel as if you're contributing toward something, but also draws you to others who want to achieve similar things. Careful encouragement of purpose and cause reminds volunteers that they are contributing in a meaningful way to something significant. Organisation of social events and fostering a community culture makes people feel as though they've found a fulfilling group of friends.

Competency comes about with somewhat more effort. On a very straightforward level, simply gaining experience in doing certain things, be they directing foot traffic, or cooking meals en masse for the homeless, will increase your feeling of mastery of certain skills. You inevitably gain more and more expertise in the area that you chose to pursue in your activity. In addition to this, many programs offer the opportunity to gain training in entirely new skills altogether. Tangibly, this manifests itself as a significant entry on your resumé as well as being something that you can simply be proud of - a reason to keep on volunteering.

Autonomy is the hardest facet to actualise, though the arguably the most fulfilling. The ability to feel as though you're in control of a situation is hard enough in and of itself, let alone trying to make someone else feel like that. Achieving this successfully however, (the methods by which is a complex field of psychology which I don't have the expertise to go into) is confidence building, character building and opens you up in a way that few other things can. The feeling of being able to do achieve something significant by your own means and solving a problem with your own mind makes you feel profoundly useful.

Beyond the altruism of volunteering, there are benefits to doing so. It makes you feel good, it lets you gain experience in things outside of your normal life and it connects you to people who are enthusiastic enough to do stuff for free. And take it from someone who knows these kinds of people quite personally - they're awesome. And most of the time, you grow to love the cause you're working for - it can be a fundamentally eye opening experience.

Try it out, give some of your free time to a good thing.

I see your film conventions, and I raise you Tarantino

Kill Bill Vol. 1 did two things when it came out in 2003. The first is obvious - a collective parental furor that a movie so violent could be accessible to eager teenage boys. The second is slightly less obvious - intense curiosity brought about by the fact that an entire fight sequence in the film had to be turned to black and white in order to pass censorship. 

My fascination, though, was never to do with the violence in the film or the fact that it got censored - it was the way in which Quentin Tarantino went about bypassing said censorship. Plenty of films in the past have been revised to cut out shots or even entire scenes in order to be approved for general distribution. Tarantino could have easily done this, cut out a few shots of dismembered limbs (or several hundred such shots) and have the film eligible for classification. But he didn't, and that is the whole point of what makes Tarantino films so fascinating.

The Crazy 88s - dismembered in original colour

What Tarantino does best is messing around with our expectations. Instead of doing the usual thing when confronted with the Crazy 88s fight scene, he chose to colour it black and white - and it worked. This, I thought, was beautifully representative of how off-kilter and yet commercially successful Tarantino's film making is. He is a director who does not make films that could be considered conventionally entertaining. Yet his films resonate with a breadth of audience normally associated with big blockbuster Hollywood films. How does he do this? Genre.

He is, as a friend significantly more intelligent than myself put it, "a master of genre".  When we watch movies of a particular genre we know what to expect.  'Revenge Thrillers' we know will fall out in a particular way, and similarly 'sci-fi epics' and 'buddy cop movies' have standard characters and plot devices that we are all familiar with. What Tarantino does, however, is use our knowledge of a particular genre to two particular ends: to skip unnecessary steps in storytelling and then to subvert our expectations from that genre.

 

Reservoir Dogs is an example of Tarantino messing around with plot. The movie is a heist movie where no details about the heist are ever shown. The movie's focus is the personal stories of each of the characters. This fact becomes effective beyond cliché, though, when Tarantino treats the heist as assumed knowledge in order to get on with it. No film making effort is wasted on portraying the planning or the execution of the crime - Tarantino puts all his effort into creating tension and unwrapping the psyche of each of his characters.

Reservoir Dogs - The men, not the crime

Pulp Fiction manages to take a handful of known characters and spin a completely new light on them. In this movie we see armed robbers, gangsters, a mob boss, and a host of other characters that we see in other films and expect to do certain things. Much of the movie, though, acts as a 'what happens when...' for these particular tropes. What happens after an armed robbery when the two thieves decide to stop off in breakfast for a diner? What happens in the car with two gangsters on the way to a job? What do they talk about?

In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has quite a lot of fun portraying these characters in situations that would never be shown on camera. You would expect to see two gangster hitmen receiving a job, preparing their guns and taking out their targets. Instead you see them talking about holidays in Europe, gossiping about bosses' wives and having to clean up after a non-chalant but very messy mistake with a handgun.

Films that are this unconventional don't generally find the following that Tarantino's films do. Not to say that other indie films haven't found cult followings. But few have been as big commercial successes as Pulp Fiction or Inglorious Basterds, films that made back their budget almost as many times as you can comfortably fold a piece of paper. And he achieves this by essentially exploiting our knowledge of genre conventions and surprising us in the process.

The second big reason he's able to do this (the first being that he is generally quite insane) is that he spent a great deal of his life watching everything. He spent a significant portion of time as a video store clerk, where all he did was watch films, talk about films and observe what other people liked in films. Tarantino as the ultimate consumer has a profound insight into what his audience knows. He uses this with gay abandon to generally bugger about and have lots of fun. We're fortunate that in this process he's turned himself into a successful film maker with lots of films we can enjoy.

I quite like Quentin Tarantino. He's a man who very un-self-consciously took what makes him feel like a little boy and not only turn it into career, but something that he can exhibit and make the rest of us feel like kids, discovering new things and having lots of fun.

Popra

When I walked into uni this morning, I was accosted by a good friend of mine with "Dude, I went on Youtube and looked up Kimbra and it was all girly pop stuff". 

Well, yes.

I would be lying if I said that I had no shame about my love for Kimbra. I'm young, and therefore I have a deep seated desire to be alternative. As wonderfully interesting as her music is, Kimbra is not alternative. This fact was made abundantly clear to me by the demographic of the attendees of her concerts and by the weird looks that my colleagues gave me as I was blaring her music from open-back headphones.

If one were to scroll down and read other articles I have written, you'd see that my music taste is borne from the 'alternative', or rather, music that is not 'pop'. Although Muse, the Arctic Monkeys, Oasis and Led Zeppelin were always hugely popular, they've never been labelled as true 'pop'. Aficionados of this music tend to look with some slight disdain at the throes of young girls flocking to see artists like, well, Kimbra.

As much as I do have a desire to be alternative, I enjoy Kimbra immensely. I even listen to Amy Winehouse, Duffy and even some of Adele - all music that is 'pop'. The very nature of this fact, though, inspires a prejudice against musical integrity that is somewhat unwarranted. And more to the point - pop seems to be dragging itself out of the blandness and back into something a little more interesting.

Kimbra's first album, Vows, is unambiguously a pop record. The production quality, synth tracks, layered vocals, abundance of sounds (that would be hard to recreate live) and general fun air about the music betray it as such. The music has an undeniable flavour about it that appeals to the majority of young people - she came to prominence within the US after one of her tracks was featured on Grey's Anatomy and The Sims.  It's fun and emotionally is accessible enough to quite a lot of people. Such is pop.

There is a stigma, though, that detracts from the fun you can take away from this music. Pop is called pop because it is exactly that - popular. Ergo this music is always a sure money maker for your clichéd record executive who cares not for musical integrity. Two very negative conclusions about pop music are drawn from this fact: 1 - that the music is produced primarily for the purpose of money making and 2 - that it is therefore exploitative of its captive audience.

The alleged malice of 'the corporate machine' aside, the essential gist of the issue that hipsters have with pop music is that musical interestingness is cast aside for a focus on crude and catchy tunes. This point has varying levels of truth with the different examples you choose to examine.

Take your Americana country pop-rock - Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus et al. I don't believe for a minute that these artists set out to be intentionally bland. In fact there's a quiet tragedy to their misguided belief in the idea that their music is powerful, poignant and/or mind-blowing. If anything, though, these artists maintain integrity because for the most part they create music which they truly enjoy. That they are not pushed to be more creative than their peers is the fault of us, our culture and what we choose to accept and pour money into.

The trashier artists, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha and Britney Spears are somewhat exploitative. The lyrics and the beat of the music are meant to appeal to a very visceral and basic part of our minds. The music of large parties and dance floors where you don't want to think, you just want to move. The ability to create this effect is a musical skill in its own right. Again, it's not that it's terrible, it's just never appealed to anything inside of me.

In a nutshell, pop music for the most part represents music that has gone far enough for us to accept it. It's only unfortunate to people with particular tastes that this is either not far enough, or is an entirely different place for them to enjoy the music.

So why my love for Kimbra?

I have a weakness

It becomes apparent in live performances how much of a musical tour-de-force this young kiwi girl is. Her contemporaries, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and others, for all their vocal talent, are never able to actualise that individuality of voice or performance in any musical way. Lady Gaga is very much a performer who relies upon the visual spectacle of her shows and her person. She is someone who must be in costume everywhere she goes. This, ultimately, is why many people are attracted to her and listen to her music.

On the other hand, Kimbra's musical offerings are laced with genuinely quite amazing vocal acrobatics and personal flair. Yes, her music like all other pop music is laced with back-up vocal tracks and effects. But those vocal tracks are all her - and they're amazing. Her vocal control and range aside, what she is able to sing, the varying texture of her voice and the energy that she very obviously puts into every performance is similarly amazing. 

Prominence and uniqueness in vocal ability is seemingly making something of a comeback in pop. The late Amy Winehouse being the prime example, and the somewhat mixed Duffy and Adele following in her wake. These artists, like Kimbra and unlike the others I've mentioned, place a strong emphasis on being able to sing in a unique and ultimately very pleasing way. Such that Amy Winehouse recorded a live cover of the motown classic "I Heard it On The Grapevine" and Adele regularly performs soul legend Sam Cooke's "That's it, I Quit, I'm moving on". These are classic, blues and soul pieces relying on their singers' command of the scale to make the song interesting.

What set's Kimbra apart, though, is that she can compose. A quick examination of the CD jacket from Vows (which, yes, I own), reveals that she is the chief songwriter for almost all her songs. This, from a 22 year old singing her debut album is quite impressive. Considering the quality and variation of the music on the record, it speaks of a musical creativity to be reckoned with. Vows is a collection of the most diverse and varied songs I've ever seen on a single CD for a fairly long time.

Yes, Kimbra is pop music. But pop music can be good, and this is it.

PS - Yes. It's been a while. Dw I'm back. Weekly.

The Ocean

On a whim, I bought the Led Zeppelin live DVD one afternoon on one of my ritual after-school visits to the CD shop in the city. I had seen the rendition of Moby Dick that was played at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 and figured that it couldn't be a bad thing to pay 20 dollars for 2 DVDs worth more of a good band. 5 hours later and I became the prophet of Zeppelin you all know and love today.

'The Ocean' is what Led Zeppelin affectionately called the seething mass of fans they would greet as they walked on stage to play gig after gig after magical gig. It's no secret that Led Zeppelin were one of the most prolific gigging bands of their era - and with good reason. Aside from their growing underground popularity, what the band appreciated was the magic of on-stage performance. The electric spontaneity that came with the ability to move an audience at your will was a rush that was almost as exciting a trip from a colourful stimulant.

I have developed a firm belief that the mettle of a band is only truly tested in their live performances. To grind an old gear, too much of modern music places too much value on image manufacturing and clever marketing. The common indie-hipster adage is that big record companies are too focused on what constitutes good business and that in this process, musical integrity loses merit. (This, though, is part of a larger cultural phenomenon that I have a rather significant beef with. I'll maybe talk about this in another post).

All of this comes out in the wash, however, when you begin to examine the live performance of a musical act. Live and in the moment, you can see the artist for what they are, get a chance to really feel their music and, in many cases, come to appreciate their musical integrity. On-stage, musicians are aren't just performers who are showing off how well they can perform their craft, they're also entertainers and experimenters. 

  

Led Zepplin - Live and in the moment

By and large the best concerts I have been to or watched are concerts where either the band actively interacts with the audience or deviates significantly from their original source material. 

The first kind makes for entertainment that is genuine in a way which is rare amongst other forms of stage-craft. In these cases, the artist is reacting to feedback from their audience - a process which is intensely emotional for anyone who takes pride in their work. The result is that we can witness how self-effacing, comically-egotistical or entertainingly bizarre some bands and their frontmen can be. It provides us  with an entertaining window into what must be rather complex and artistically creative minds.

Some examples: Jarvis Cocker of Pulp likes to drape himself over pieces of sound equipment whilst relaying tidbits of wisdom to his audience. Linkin Park got an entire audience to sing happy birthday to a roadie at a concert that a friend of mine went to.  And Oasis... well it was fun to see two idiots from the north of England bicker and fight.

The second kind evokes a different kind of magic. Bands are able to take their original music, and not only evolve it, but evolve it spontaneously and evolve it because they are inspired by the live atmosphere and playing to a live audience. The on-the-spot nature of this improvisation and evolution speaks of a level of musical prowess and creativity that you hardly ever see in modern music. It shows a creative drive that proves that the band doesn't stagnate, even when they choose to play the same songs.  These changes take their music to an entirely different place and can drastically change your experience of the original song or piece. All you have to do is youtube concert versions of Zepplin's Dazed and Confused or Jeff Buckley's Mojo Pin to feel what I mean.

Jarvis Cocker during a recent Pulp concert - known for his on-stage antics and toying with the audience.

I love live music. It's an experience which can inject a vigour into love of a particular music that you never knew you had. To go to a concert and see performers react to you and play for you creates an excitement and a rush that sweeps you into the moment and has you dancing and singing along to their music with energy that would be embarrassing in every day life.

It's worth remembering that it should be live gigs that form the backbone for the music industry and not the other way around. Past the marketing, the promotional interviews, the auto-tune and sound production, truly good music finds its grip on us when it's laid bare and sung to our faces.

Fun Links:
Jeff Buckley - Mojo Pin (live at Chicago, audio only)
Led Zeppelin - Dazed and Confused (Live from the Royal Albert Hall, 1970)
Led Zeppelin - No Quarter (Live from the Song Remains the Same)
Pulp - Live at Reading 2011 (entire set)