Twitter Quitters

A news blip today on the cultural radar screen reveals a statistic that shows that a lot of folks – 60%, I believe – try Twitter then don’t come back. This doesn’t surprise me at all, and I believe it has to do with the unforeseen use that people would make of this new social networking tool.

I wrote in an earlier post about celebrity narcissistic Tweeting, if we may call it that. This is the phenomena when some celebrity giant garners 6 million followers just based on their fame, and in turn responds by following 12 people. A Twitter rule of etiquette is to “return the follow” and follow those who follow you. Well, obviously John Mayer can’t follow the 798,000 people who follow him. He’d be buried in tweets. When you follow someone, Twitter allows them to tweet you directly. A “direct message”. They would receive literally thousands. In fact, it's kind of funny that even though these guys have hundreds of thousands of followers, they can only find a couple dozen people to follow themselves. I mean, if we're really talking about social networking, do any of us have a network of hundreds of people that we communicate with dozens of times a day? Still, I admire the celebrities that at least bother to follow some of their vast throng of followers (Paula Poundstone). And, Katy Perry, it wouldn't kill you to follow 20 people, you know? It's not like you're giving them your phone number. You can even block followers. But if it's avoiding the followers while being followed, is this really what Twitterr is all about?

So, my conclusion in that blog is that it’s really not a conversation within a social networking system, but more of a celebrity billboard. With all the free marketing that Twitter is allowing these celebrities to garner, I'm surprised they aren't considering charging them for the service based on a per follower rate.

Well, my guess is that these 60% folks join, and if they follow celebrities, they’ll read all sorts of posts. If they join only to connect with their friends, associates, and family, they probably had 3 follows and 2 followers. Not much fun. A whole lot of folks are using tactics and tools to gain followers, for narcissistic reasons, or, more likely, to market something (most of my followers are trying to sell me something. Ironically, some are trying to sell me tips and tricks to gain more followers. Something strange about that.)

Twitter is not becoming a social networking app. It’s becoming a celebrity reflection pond. I would love to see some statistics of number of tweets distributed across users. Or more importantly, number of followers of celebrities vs. regular joes. I’m sure the system is awfully top-heavy with celeb tweets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s kind of fun to follow some of them. But if you actually think you’re doing social networking with them, well, you’re probably destined for the 60% bin.

Later.

On Being Meek

I read once that a white male in this society at the age of 55 is at the very peak of his career and wage earning years. I was probably sitting at home sending out resumes or trying to kick start my business when I read this. Most folks don’t remember what the headlines read before 9-11-2001. I do. It was ‘Nasdaq Tanks as Tech Stocks Plummet”. In one two year period ending somewhere in 2004, almost one third of all high tech jobs in this country disappeared. I had been going through the usual ups and downs if IT work – periods of unemployment brought on by layoffs, downsizings, company buyouts, company failures – and decided to take my first love, music, and see what I can do with it. I am grateful in large part for the opportunity to pursue my passion, but I am paying for it. I make about as much money as a good poet. But, after sending out 1,000 resumes in two years, it was a change that I really didn’t have much choice but to accept.

I am a meek person. I am a man. For a man to say that he is meek is like saying that he is weak. In fact, the words even rhyme. The Bible tells us that the meek shall inherit the world. I’m struggling with this. I pretty much see companies, empires, countries - you know, the high end components of our culture - run by very much non-meek people. I suppose the Bible is telling us that money’s not everything; earthly pursuits are vain, etc. but it doesn’t say that us meek people will get our reward in heaven. It says that we’re going to inherit the earth. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw that read “The Meek Will Inherit the Earth. The Strong and the Wise Will Move on to New Worlds” (Long bumper sticker.) Well, I’m ready for my inheritance. Or perhaps I could just get a small advance on my inheritance. Cash would be nice, but securities, something fairly liquid would help me make it to next month.

I like meek people. My very favorite people are pretty meek. Most non-meek people I know are rather, ummm, let’s say assertive? That’s about the best word I can come up with in polite company. When I am in their presence I can feel the life force sucked out of me, flowing into their veins with an almost perceptible flush of power and control. I can be made to feel just about like a 13 year old kid in the presence of a captain of industry. And, you know, I really don’t mind. If sharing this planet with non-meek people means letting them be large-and-in-charge in personal interactions, that’s fine. I can avoid that. What I can’t avoid is this notion that I’m supposed to be inheriting something. I’d like to see something tangible fairly soon. Not getting any younger. Devalued stocks, CDs, anything. Maybe we can start small. Like the keys to some small midwestern town. Nothing big. They wouldn’t even notice me. I’m meek. I’d ask their permission to take possession, probably.

So, an acoustic musician cum web developer is what I am, meek or not. I’m not really expecting to inherit anything except some old books from my mom some day. And, all things considered, I choose meek, inheritance or not. When I’m not starving to death or worried about getting the utilities turned off, I sleep well at night.

Later.

Gretchen Weiners

Ok, I’m going to out myself here. I have a huge stupid freaking crush on a movie character. No, I am not 13 years old. I’m closer to 113 than to 13. Here’s the deal:

A few years ago I went through a divorce. After two 10 year marriages, I decided to get off the marriage-go-round and kind of took myself out of circulation. I didn’t purposely decide to not date; just to not pursue dating. At my age, it doesn’t take much not pursuing to assure non-dating. I was home sick one day trying to figure out just exactly what people watch on TV in the middle of the day if they can’t stand soap operas and fluffy talk shows. The movie “Mean Girls” came on, a teen coming-of-age, girls-inhumanity-to-girls type comedy, and I decided I’d rather watch it than the same 20 minutes news loop on Headline news for the 3rd time. If you’ve seen this movie, you’re familiar with the main characters, all “queen bees” of their high school. One, Gretchen Weiners, played by Lacey Chabert (who played Claudia on Party of Five) is a somewhat clueless, yet conniving, yet somehow fragile portrayal of a girl whose pedigree gets her in the top club, but now that she’s there, she’s not quite mean enough to pull rank on anybody, and therefore is willing (if not destined) to follow them in a sheep like manner. She is, however, completely, thoroughly, insanely, intensely beautiful to my old eyes. Ms. Chabert is of Cajun extract, her father being a French speaking Cajun originally from Louisiana. She has that beautiful dark complexion, hazel eyes, dark brown hair of a classic Cajun beauty. And she’s easily half my age. So, what’s the attraction? “What is this really about?” as my therapist would say.

Let me take you back to 1971. I was a junior in high school, a recent transplant from a smaller school, and as such, somewhat considered “fresh meat”. I was marginally successful at athletics and didn’t break mirrors when I passed them, so I was considered something of a “catch” in this little high school. I wound up dating the homecoming queen, herself a bit of a “queen bee”. She was no “mean girl” by any stretch, but she was top echelon. There was a girl at the outskirts of the queen bee circle who I had classes with and knew through friends, although not closely. Her name was (if memory serves) Jane Newirth. She was dark complected, dark hair, dark eyes, quiet, even a little timid. But I was going steady, as they used to say. (Do they still say that?) I found myself in many situations, even a couple after high school, where I would be in the same room as Jane, and friendly smiles would be exchanged, a little prolonged eye contact, but she was shy, and so was I. My relationship with the queen bee had fizzled out just as my freshman semester at college had, and I was “at loose ends” as they used to say about 300 years ago. I’d walked into about the only decent bar in town, and suddenly Jane planted herself in front of me - perhaps emboldened by a couple of beers - such that I would either have had to run her over to get by her, or ask her out. I didn’t. Jane was my Gretchen Weiners.

I suppose it is the provenance of aging folks that we should sit and wonder, wish about long times past; “What if” ourselves. I really regret having never had the nerve to ask her out. We may not have had anything in common, but we certainly both knew that we were connected in some basically physical, almost spiritual way. Now, these hundreds and hundreds of years later, I’m sure she’s a grandmother, although she’s fixed in my mind as that long, dark haired beauty planted in front of me at the Fyfe and Drum in DeKalb, Illinois. My memory might even be gussying this whole deal up. Perhaps she just wanted to talk. Perhaps she was leaving, although I doubt it. I was not the assertive jock that I might have been perceived of at first. I wound up on the creative writing team, for crying out loud. We were pretty timid. If I could go back, I wouldn’t be timid. I better stop now because I’m starting to sound like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite. Jane/Gretchen, you still haunt my dreams.

Later.

The Night Watch

4-17-09 11:00 pm, from the soft white underbelly of the health care system, the emergency room at Harris Methodist hospital in Fort Worth,Texas.

My mother is 92. She remembers horse drawn wagons, the new electric lamps on the street where she grew up. Once, when I was a child, she fascinated me with a story about how when she was very little, she stood holding her father’s hand as the Memorial day parade floats went by in suburban Chicago, watching one wagon that carried little old men in blue uniforms with long beards. They were Union soldiers; Civil War veterans from that part of Chicago.

I listen as my mother lies in bed looking impossibly frail.

“Do you see him?” she asks.

“No, mom” I say, turning to look at the blank emergency room curtain in front of her rheumy stare. Her eyes, once china blue, my eyes, are now dim and misty, an indeterminate grey, like a puff of magician’s smoke A dull silver grey fish color is in them.

“The little old Dutch man.” She says, pointing.

Her health had been deteriorating for weeks. Kidney failure was signaling changes to come in the not too distant future. She’d fallen last night and hit her head, been groggy all day. She was mostly lucid, but she had been hallucinating. She had a subdural hematoma, the same pooling of blood on the brain that had taken Natasha Richardson’s young life not two weeks prior.

“He’s wearing a blue suit. He has a mustache.”

I play along. “How do you know he’s Dutch?” I ask.

“I’ve been listening to him talk. He’s been walking up and down, right out there.” She said, motioning to beyond the curtain that separated her little emergency room bay from the main floor, a little put out that I hadn’t obviously heard the Dutch being spoken not two feet behind me. I looked, and of course there were nothing but doctors, orderlies going about their duties.

“Are you going to take me home?” she asked, and I suddenly flashed back to a summer Illinois day on the farm where I was raised. My friends were busy, I’d eaten lunch and had to rest for a little while after eating. But that was OK, because she was reading Huckleberry Finn to me every day at this time. I remember looking out the window at the giant Sycamore outside the second story window. The leaves moved slowly in dappled sunlight. Huck and Jim were on the river. They’d “lit out”.

“You’re searching for the traditional Albert.” This caught me off guard. I asked her to repeat herself as I leaned closer, making sure I understood her words, thick and syrupy.

“You’re searching for the traditional Albert.” She repeated.

“You… are… searching for the traditional Albert!” She said, urgently, leaning towards me a little. Her face was suddenly intent. I had no idea how to respond, so I didn’t.

“You should be. It’s about that time.” She said, content that I’d finally gotten the message. These were the last clearly spoken words I heard from her, save for her calling me “Jack” about 3 am., my father’s name. I hadn’t heard her say this name in 20 years. It came out clear, succinct. I almost expected him to respond from somewhere in the cold dark ICU room. I’d checked her into the hospital at 7 pm. By 11 pm it was mostly gibberish, slurred words. By 3 am, after hours of fighting to get out of bed (“I want to go home now.”) the nurses put her in a restraint. This was necessary, but a kind nurse asked if I wanted to go outside, knowing what it looked like. I shook my head No. Watching someone restrain your mother is something no child should ever have to see. She fought, literally for 5 hours, to get out of the bed, at one time plaintively wailing what I think was “You can’t do this to me!”. At 4:45 am she fell asleep. I had been clenching my teeth so hard that my jaw hurt. I went to the waiting area to try to lie down, but an Indian couple had taken up camp there; magazine, food, TV blaring, newspapers. I wondered whom they were waiting for to die. I was on a death watch. You are close to death at all times in a hospital. It is the hush that floats over the florescent lit hallways, fake leather furniture. The empty chapels and consultation rooms wait like dugouts for the teams of life and death. I once said to a nurse friend of mine that with all the death that happened in hospitals, you would think that you’d hear all kinds of stories about haunted hospitals. She simply said “You’ve never asked a night shift nurse, have you? You just haven’t talked to the right people. When you’re sitting there at the computer in the nurses station and doors open and close with no one there, well, you’d think differently about that…’

Watching the sun rise grey amidst the hospitals steel, brick and glass towers, I felt no warmth or relief. The coffee had made me nauseated. It was Saturday morning. Hospital staff were starting the morning shift, slowly, quietly filling the hallways, but without imbuing the place with any sense of life. Just presence.

My mother’s condition improved today. Much of what she had been struggling with, despite the subdural hemotoma and kidney failure was simply a lack of oxygen and too much carbon dioxide. The more distressed she got, the less she breathed though her nose where the oxygen tubes were, and the more she gasped fish like through he mouth, worsening the situation. By 5 am, her struggle to talk had left her horse which, combined with the rattling of her breathing gave her the unnatural sound that the ghost in the movie The Grudge made. I looked at the clock thinking it had frozen. I had pleaded with her for hours to sleep, and finally given up when it was clear she didn’t even know where she was. As she fell asleep I prayed for understanding.

Later that day the news got better. She may even recover from this, although it’s by no means certain. My father died suddenly – for the most part. Rather, he lost consciousness almost immediately although his heart fought on for a few days. Mom always said she wanted to go this way. Her nightmare would be to malinger, and I had watched her malinger for 14 hours.
God in all his wisdom know where this will go, and we have little control over it. Tonight, while she is intubated, assuring the oxygenation, I will sleep, hopefully well, in my own bed. I am so tired.

Later.

Twitter and the Culture of Celebrity

I started compiling some data today after a few weeks of stalking celebrities on Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for almost 5 weeks now, so I’m clearly an expert.

As I wrote in an earlier blog posting, there’s a little bit (or a lot) of celebrity narcissism going on with Twitter. The whole concept is that you get your friends and family to join and you can send Tweets to one another. But you also have the ability to search for other people. You can search for, find, and follow anyone, theoretically. In a climate like this you can imagine that celebs would be buried with “follows”. While the rest of us are, well, not exactly buried. I’m down to 12 now. I lost one yesterday somehow. When you follow someone you see all of their “tweets”. You can even respond to them. In the friends and family model, you would post your tweet and Gramma, sister, cousin will all read and respond. You’ll read their responses and their tweets as well. Pretty egalitarian and balanced. Now imagine you are an A list actor. You have nearly a half million (not exaggerating at all here) follows. It’s considered “Twitequette” to follow your follows. Obviously they can’t follow all, any more than they could personally respond to all their fan mail. This gives them, as you can easily imagine a pretty huge voice in the “Twittesphere” (These naming conventions are already getting a little cloying.) So while it is pretty impressive that one person can have such an enormous voice, you can see that it’s also obviously a popularity poll. And it can easily lead to some narcissism. I started a spreadsheet to try to track some of these enormous inequalities in follower numbers, but then hit on the idea of comparing them to their following habits. Seems like there should be at least some relationship between the two, right? I mean, if I have a half million followers I should at least follow more people than somebody who has less than a hundred followers, right? Not so much. So I built in a simple division formula (number of followers divided by number of follows) to track this sort of response factor for celebrities of different stripes and levels of notoriety. To whit:

In graph form:

This produced some interesting results. Sure, the numbers are going to be heavily weighted against the celeb who has zillions of followers, but as you can see, this varies some from celeb to celeb. Paula Poundstone, bless her heart (as they say here) in Texas, is the champ at returning her fan’s follows by following them. She had at the time of this writing 8,600 followers, and was following an amazing 8,200. She deserves a Twitter award with some catchy name like “Twitresponder”. In the extreme opposite, John Mayer is the champ in the greatest number of unreturned follows category.

I don’t know what sweeping generalization I can come to about this. I mean, it’s no fault to John Mayer than he can’t respond by following each of the hundreds of thousands of people who follow him. The lad can’t help it. I think what bothers me a little is that I’ve read the tweets of some of these celebrities who talk about how “connected” Twitter makes them feel, and how they love being in a conversation with their fans. Well, as far as I can tell, Ms. Poundstone is about the only one who can claim that distinction.

It is the nature of celebrity that it be a one-to-many relationship with people. That’s kind of a given in the life of any famous person. The Internet has always been a leveling factor in our culture. Anybody can host a website with a home page that looks just as entreating and wonderful as Microsoft. It is somewhat iconoclastic just by its nature. And I think that’s what bugs me a little. That Twitter, designed for two way conversations should be, at the highest level, quite the opposite. I think the first time it really struck me was when I saw one celebrity in my follows tweeting to another celebrity. At that point I felt like removing my follow to both of them, and I had to do some digging to figure out why it bugged me. Did your high school have a “commons” or cafeteria that acted like kind of a social gathering place when you didn’t have classes? Well, if you’ve ever seen the movie “Mean Girls” you’ll know what mine was like. Certain cliquey tables only allowed certain people to sit at them. There was a sort of hierarchy of how this worked, radiating outwards in rows of tables to the hinterlands by the tray return which was so loud and smelly you could barely stand to sit there. But those top couple of tables talked to one another. If you happened to walk by for the most part they wouldn’t even lift their gaze to acknowledge your presence. As something of an athlete in high school, I was a member of one of these inner circle tables, so I know what it feels like from that perspective, as well as the perspective of the hinterland tables. This Twitter phenomenon has something of that feel to it.

While Ashton Kutcher is currently engaged with CNN in who can get to a million followers first, perhaps we all ought to sit back and reconsider where this new juggernaut of the Internet is going. Quite frankly, except for the following of celebrities, I have no use for it. My loyal throng of followers tweet about once a day, if that. At the high end, there are folks who are tweeting every few minutes. This is supposed to be a social networking app, but I think it’s fast becoming anything but that. Until everybody gets on here, including the people who you know and care about what they’re doing as well as those who care about what you’re doing, it’s more like a two-tiered system. If you built an upside down pyramid based on this ratio, you could easily scoop off an entire sector of celebrity tweeting. If, as I have also noted, they tend to respond to each other’s tweets to one another, there is even more of a sort of apartheid at work. Would this work? Would it benefit anyone? Of course not. I’m guessing at human nature here, but I sincerely suspect that some of these celebs wouldn’t even be involved in Twitter if it weren’t for their fan base of thousands. Not only that, but I’m guessing a whole lot of the hundreds of thousands of us who follow them wouldn’t much be interested in Twitter, either, if we were not able to follow them.

So what’s this all mean? Probably the only safe conclusion you can draw from this is that Twitter is almost certainly not playing out as it was intended to. Last night, in a competition with CNN, Ashton Kutcher reached over a million followers. If I changed his numbers today, I’m sure he’d surpass John Mayer on my charts. Is this social networking at all? It’s becoming less about networking and more about broadcasting in my view.

 

Later. 

I'm all a twitter

Twitter

The latest internet viral app appears to be Twitter, a messaging service that seems to be a hybrid of instant messenger, email and blog. It’s advertising says that it answers the simple question “What are you doing now?” What they don’t say is “And if you have no followers, no one cares.” I’ve been on for about a month now. I am up to 12 followers, 8 of whom are trying to sell me something. Of the remaining 4, at least 3 don’t respond to my Tweets, so I may, for the most part, be pissing down a well, as they say.

Here’s my best explanation of how Twitter works.

·        You can follow anyone, absolutely anyone.

·        Anyone can follow you, but they have to know you to find you in the first place

·        You can respond to anyone you are following.

·        Anyone who follows you will see your Tweets

Twitter has one substantial, fundamental flaw in my view. It presumes that you have a network of Twitter users to connect to. (If it continues to grow exponentially, you probably will, as more and more of your friends join). But let’s say that you join Twitter, ask a few of your friends if they use it yet, get mostly No for an answer. Can you use Twitter, and even if you can, is it relevant to you? Here are some of the things I’ve discovered.

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have about 1.5 million followers between them. If you are a celebrity, all you have to do is join and let one of the many sites that tracks celeb users post your ID. Remember, your activity will be dependent not on whom you know, but who knows you. And I don’t mean personally. You can elect to follow anybody. When you do, you get their personal little messages right on your computer as if the 1.5 million of you are having a cozy little chat with them. Your chances of even having your tweet read by a celeb, much less responded to, much less have the celebrity think “You know, this one guy here, out of 876,980 responses, is quite a wag. I think I’ll follow him.” Are about, well, one in 1.5 million. So who do the celebrities follow? Easy. Other celebrities. It’s getting a littttllllle bit cliquish in here.

So what are we all left to do until we can coax a few friends to try it out? I mean, it’s really nice to know that the lead singer for one of the top bands in the world is making a fresh salad for lunch, but I’m really kind of looking for a little more out of Twitter than this, and that would even be cool if he knew me, because I could then respond with “Hey, don’t forget the arugula!” And we’d have a good laugh between us.

With MySpace, for example, you can publish a page with your profile and have hundreds of page views in a month. The same “search based on key word interests” exists in Twitter, but it doesn’t have a critical mass yet. Demi and Ashton’s number of followers is growing exponentially. Mine is growing arithmetically, one at a time. At this rate, by Christmas I’ll have 18. Also, the tendency (no names mentioned here) for celebs in this one sided environment to use their tweets as a bully pulpit is rich. You’ll see a bit of evangelizing, some channeling of Zig Ziglar, and a bit of condescension in these tweets.

Think of this as a metaphor. Right now, tweet activity is based on you creating your own network of users. For celebrities, it is more like a constantly refreshing personal billboard on a busy freeway. They are free to say anything they want sure that what they say will be read by literally 100s of thousands of people, but those people can’t interact in any real sense with a billboard. Merely drive by and read it. So for me, with my 4 followers, it’s a little like posting a billboard in my back yard. I can see it quite well, but that’s about it.

Until Twitter goes critical mass, I’ll just spend my time reading about celebrities changing the oil in their cars and renting movies. Occasionally, I’ll post my own Tweet to no one saying “If a tree falls in a forest…”

Later.

Actors vs. Musicians

Reading about Billy Bob Thornton’s recent bizarre interview with CBC Canada made me think about various interviews I’ve read or seen with other Hollywood actors who’ve also battled to get their music taken seriously. BB T had been interviewed by a Canadian radio station which referred to his acting first, rather than his music, despite the fact that he was sitting there with his band, doing an interview for his appearances in Canada with his band. He responded with truculent, terse “I don’t know what you’re taking about” type phrases, clearly peeved at the tone of the interview. I also read an interview with Alyssa Milano who, according to some sources, is better known as a singer than an actor in Japan, where albums she produced in her teens sold platinum. Asked if she would consider a serious musical career here and now, she responded with the observation that “actors aren’t taken seriously as musicians”. I’ve read a similar quote from Jennifer Love Hewitt. Perhaps the greatest and most outlandish example of this is the metamorphosing of the actor Joaquin Phoenix into the bearded rapper that you now see.

Because of my own music, this makes me think of Steve Martin. I’m a bluegrass musician, and as such when I think of Steve Martin, I don’t think “comedian”. I think “extremely good banjo player”. He’s not only very accomplished on the instrument, he’s also one of the biggest collectors and fans. And yet, to most of us, his playing his always been a sort of goofy prop to his comedy. Which is a shame. (Not that I’m out to evangelize for the bluegrass banjo, but if you think it’s some silly hillbilly toy instrument, just try playing one once. Sound of me stepping down off my soap box). I’ll put it this way; I’ve been playing for 40 years and I’m not as good as him. But, because he’s a comedian, he’ll never be taken seriously as a musician.

It’s not so much that this stigmatizing might be limiting these people from pursuing music seriously, it’s that the flow in the opposite direction doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as impeded. Hollywood seems to be experiencing a flush of newly minted actors who were formerly (or are presently) successful musicians. Here’s a first blush short list: Harry Connick Jr., Harry Belafonte, Mark Wahlberg, and Will Smith seem to have made pretty decent careers of it. David Bowie, LL Cool J, and in fact, many rappers have made this jump. (Ice T most notably).
One actor that appears to be simultaneously bridging this gap is Zooey Deschanel. Not only is she becoming a sought after A list actor, but she is being taken very seriously as a singer with a sultry chanteuse-ish voice that sounds wise and sophisticated beyond her years. Perhaps it’s because she is breaking out as both and actor and a singer at about the same time. That is to say that maybe she’s not yet will known enough as an actress to preclude her being taken seriously as something other than an actor.

I think the irony of all this is that musicians rarely, if ever, have any sort of dramatic training. Conversely, most trained actors took voice and singing lessons. It seems like the predilection for movement from one to the other almost ought to be to the actors. I’m always amazed when I hear the singing voices of actors. This year’s Academy Awards were topped, I think, but Hugh Jackman’s song and dance as host. Alyssa Milano and Jennifer Love Hewitt have beautiful voices. Lacey Chabert (formerly Claudia on Party of Five, now all grown up and beautiful, still acting, most recently in the newly released “Ghost of Girl Friends Past”) sang on the Ed McMahon hosted “Star Search” as a child, and sang the role of Cosette in Les Miserable on Broadway. These guys can sing.

So what is it with musicians coming in as actors? I think of Dave Mathew's role in the great kids movie “Because of Winn Dixie”. I don’t remember hearing anybody bust his chops for trying to pull off acting. Sure, no academy award noms, but not a shabby job. I’m thinking that this probably has to do with the fact that singing is something that people are all over the radar on in terms of self assessment. Almost everyone will say “I hate my voice.” This may lead extroverted actors, springboarding from their fame, to sing when perhaps they shouldn’t. And there are cases of this, no doubt. I remember both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy putting out albums at the height of Star Wars fame.

So, let’s cut the musicians cum actors some slack. Sure, Billy Bob’s a little quirky, but then so am I.

Later.

Britspeak in American Movies and TV

What is up with all the British/New Zealandish/Walesish/Scottish/Irish actors sucking up great paying gigs in Hollywood? First, let me assure you that I have no axe to grind against the fair folk of the British Isles, former penal colonies of the Queen, and outlying island nations under her flag. My people came over huddled in the steerage of ships with the plague fleas from Liverpool, after all. I’m all for fair and open markets, too. Of course, I’m not a working actor in Hollywood, either, and I therefore don’t feel any competition from this. Having said all this, I am curious as to how this came about and what it signifies, if anything.

I was first aware of this, I think, when watching Daniel Day Lewis playing the role of Natty Bumpo in “Last of the Mohicans”. Ok, the guy’s probably the greatest actor of my generation, and I don’t see anything unusual about him playing roles outside of his Irish nationality. I would think it rather unusual were he to limit himself in this way, actually. I sort of filed this away until one fateful evening while watching “Batman Begins”. I was, by now, aware of the fact that Christian Bale was Welsh. I’d seen him in a couple of movies of no real significance in which he plays a person with a UK accent of some sort. Here I have to own up to my own addiction  to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). My oldest son is a film maker and turned me on to it. It’s a classic example of the inherent genius of the basic internet model; a site that relies on the hyperlink to illustrate the incredible inter-relatability of people, places and things, and the entertainment industry is rife with this. So, IMDB in hand, I start surfing the character’s bios. It should be stated that this movie is, as you might imagine, all about deep, dark “Gotham”, (translate “every hick’s nightmarish notion of what New York must be like without ever having been there”.) Here’s a short list (thanks to IMDB):

Actor	Character Portrayed	Nationality
Christian Bale	Bruce Wayne, titan of industry in very Amercian “Gotham”	Wales
Liam Neeson	Henri Ducard, some kind of mystical Euro-guy martial arts person	Ireland
Gary Oldman	Jim Gordon, American speaking nerdy kind of guy	England
Michael Cain	Alfred the butler. At least this Brit speaking actor is playing a Brit speaking role	England
Cillian Murphy	Spooky psycho bad guy, American English speaking	Ireland
Tom Wilkinson	I love this one. He plays Carmine Falcone, a very Cicilian type mafia boss. Just at the edge of a New York Italian accent.	England
Rutger Hauer	Earle. American accent	The Netherlands (OK, so it’s not UK, but my underlying point remains)
Linus Roache	Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce, also, obviously, an American character	England
Sara Stewart	Martha Wayne, Bruce’s mom. American	Scotland
Gerald Murphy	Judge Faden	Scotland
Colin McFarlane	I love this one,too. This guy plays an American black character named Loeb. You guessed it good – he’s from…	England
Richard Brake	I love this one too. You’d recognize this guy. He not only plays American characters, but specializes in sleazy sort of Southern truck stop hillbilly guys with some kind of twitchy hair trigger emotional problem. He plays a character named Joe Chill.	Wales, of course
Lucy Russell	“Female restaurant guest”	England

 

I could go on. Ok, so when I tell my son about all this, he says “But Dad, the movie was made in England by an English director.” Which, I guess, is something of an explanation, but my rejoinder is then “Isn’t this like making “Tess of the D’Urbevilles” in the ‘States using all American actors doing English accents?” to which he responds with “Yes, Dad.”. OK, so the point is we’ve been doing this for years. I guess turn around is fair play.

A couple of weeks went by and I sort of put this on the back burner. Now, I’m a big fan of the TV series “Charmed”. Alright, I admit it. I’m a big fan of Alyssa Milano. I even watch the makeup infomercial she does just to see the 25 seconds she’s actually onscreen. She’s beautiful. Sue me. (Please don’t. I can’t afford a lawyer). There’s a recurring character on the show named Cole, an uber-demon of sorts who gets killed and resurrected about 15 times, each time with a distinctly American English accent. You would probably know him today as Dr. Christian Troy from “Nip/Tuck”. Another Amercian English speaking role. His name is Julian McMahon and he’s from Australia. His father was Sir William McMahon, former Prime Minister of the counry! Can’t get much more Australian than that! Ok, so he plays two roles with Yank accents. Then, one day I saw an interview with him on one of the entertainment shows. He did the entire interview not in character as one of his roles, but in what must be his overarching character of “Australian actor passing as an American”. Since then I’ve seen him a few times on TV, always as an American English speaker. OK, this is something different here. I guess that to an Australian actor, or an actor from virtually any country, Hollywood is Heaven in terms of roles and salaries. But to cop a completely new American identity? What must Australians think when they hear him doing this? I mean, we’re all over Britney Spears for speaking in a British accent for 20 seconds while buying snacks at a convenience store, but here’s a guy who’s living an entirely fabricated identity, and no one says anything at all.

I was listening to an interview not long ago on NPR with Christian Bale. He did the interview in his native Welsh accent but the interviewer asked him if it was true that he had done interviews during the promo period of “Batman Begins” in his Gotham character accent. He said Yes, a little defensively, stating that he did so so as to avoid “any confusion”. I’m sorry, but that is confusing.

More examples? Did you see “3:10 to Yuma”? No “made in England” dodge here. A very Western remake of a very Western movie done in the States by a very U.S. director for a very U.S audience. Lead roles: Christian Bale, Wales and Russell Crowe, New Zealand.

One of the things that surprised me about this phenomena other than the fact that no one seems much bothered or even interested in it is the observation that we, as Yank speaking Americans, seem to be completely either fooled or content with these accents. In fact, the real puzzle to me is this: I can spot an American actor from a northern state doing a Southern accent in a heartbeat. (They all think that Southerners drop their “r’s” like Scawhlett O’Haawaah). And I’m a native U.S English speaker. But these actors, on the other hand, seem capable of producing nearly flawless U.S. accents. I think the greatest example of this is Hugh Laurie who plays the title character in “House, M. D.” I was aghast when my son told me that he was from England. Not only does he do a dead solid perfect U.S accent, but he’s even got the flat, even, short vowel sound Mid-western accent so dead on it fooled this native Illinoisan. I’ve never heard a slip to bely anything but a native US speaker. Bale, Crowe, and McMahon, on the other hand, do occasionally slip, but so as not to tip there hand, or, if so, not to the point that it’s objectionable, apparently.

What I don’t get is this: I can watch Leonardo DiCaprio in “Blood Diamond” and balk at his horrible South African accent wondering what an actual South African must think of it, and here we are completely fooled by UK actors doing our own accent. I mean, Kevin Costner didn’t even try to hide his Midwest accent when doing “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”, a role that probably couldn’t get any more British. Is this because – as with international air transportation – the whole world is going to U.S English as the standard language and interpretation of it? Perhaps some day there won’t be an Australian accent. Hard to imagine.

We’ve always been in love with the British accent. Perhaps it has to do with our still working out our whole independence thing, but whenever we need to substantiate some character from some solar system light years away and thousands of years in the future, we give him a Brit accent to give him “gravitas”. (I’ve been waiting for years now to use this word in context). And here we see this sort of phenomena in reverse. In order to substantiate American roles we need native UK’ers to do the Yank accents.

I’m OK with this. Just puzzled at the Why of it. And the How.

Cell Phones

I was at a bluegrass concert a couple of weeks ago in a very high end concert hall in Fort Worth. The hall, designed for full symphony orchestra, is nearly acoustically perfect by many estimates. A bluegrass fan, I’d been there to see Ricky Skaggs and his band Kentucky Thunder a few years earlier. At one point in the evening, after a break, he’d come back on stage by himself, walked to the microphone, and announced that he was going to try an experiment. Much to the concern of the sound and light people, he waked to the very end of the proscenium, out of reach of microphone and nearly in darkness, and began to slowly sing the bluegrass gospel song “Talk About Suffering” a ca pella. Skagg’s rich voice flowed effortlessly to every seam and fold of that building, and by the end of the song, you could quite literally have heard a pin drop. It is an experience I won’t soon forget.

This night, Del McCoury and his fine band attempted the same thing. All four singers in the band strode forward and began a rendition of “Sinner Man”, an equally haunting a ca pella song. A few bars into the song the first cell phone went off. Then another. Then two at once. Many heads turned to the offending sounds, myself included, and what amazed me more than anything else is that the people receiving the calls actually answered them and began speaking in low tones.

I grew up on a farm in rural Illinois in the 60s. That’s 1960s, incase you’re wondering if I go back to the War of Northern Aggression or not. Still, just 40 years ago or so, technologically speaking, it may as well have been 1860. We had a single phone in our house, hard wired into the wall. It was so un-portable that it wasn’t even plugged into a receptacle that would allow you to move it from room to room. It was hard wired. It had a crank. Yes, a crank. No buttons, not even a dial. I’ll never forget: our number was two longs and one short. If you wanted to call us on this little local farm town circuit, you turned the crank all the way around twice, waiting for the crank to unwind twice, slowly, then did three half cranks. Our phone would ring, and, if someone were home, in the house, not in the shower or basement, they’d answer the phone. I’m pretty sure it was a good 15 years before we had any kind of answering machine. If no one answered the phone, no one was home to take the call. And that was simply accepted. “Oh, the Pensons aren’t home.” You would think and try again later. Or, “They must be out in the garden.”

Eventually, phones became modular, then remote (wireless, but still tied to a base receiver in your house), then sort-of-portable (remember those “car phones” that were welded to the car’s console?). Then a phone they lovingly called “The brick” which looked like its namesake, weighed about as much, yet allowed you to talk to the three other people with a wireless phone in your state, as long as they weren’t indoors and were somewhere near one of the two existing signal towers in the country. Now, these days, it’s pretty rare to find a 3^rd grader who’s not checking in with his mom on his cell phone as he walks home from school. And this is good, right? I mean we have instant, global, uninterrupted access to our loved ones, friends, business associates, relatives, whoever. But that’s the problem…

Along with all of this comes the expectation; No, the obligation, to be 24/7, dead-of-the-night, in the bathroom, at church, in traffic, always available. In fact, if you don’t answer, you are somehow breaking this unspoken commitment to everyone around you. I teach music in my home, and have a pretty firm policy of turning my phone off during lessons. I don’t have a land line, just a cell, so I can effectively “turn off” phone contact completely for that one hour lesson. After the student leaves, however, I find myself almost running to my phone to turn it back on, check missed calls, voice mail, messages, anything, just to make sure that one of my children hasn’t been abducted, my mother hasn’t died, a comet hasn’t struck the earth, markets haven’t failed, or any other calamity hasn’t befallen me or a loved one. Sometimes I’ll get testy messages left by friends admonishing me for turning my phone off as if it is an open act of disrespect aimed at anyone who should seek to contact me; sort of the equivalent to being home, closing the blinds, and not answering the door.  You know what? Sometimes I don’t feel like answering the freaking thing, OK?

Part of the problem is the cell phone itself. I just recently learned this from a History Channel show: Cell phones operate by sending and receiving two simultaneous but different frequency radio signals, one for incoming and one for outgoing. This doesn’t always work perfectly, hence the awkward “both talk at the same time five times in a row” thing that seems to happen on cells. As cell phones get smaller, they get a lot easier to carry around but infinitely harder to use. If you’re my age, you probably need a couple of pairs of reading glasses stacked on your nose to be able to see who’s calling or even dial a number. Talking into it is kind of like talking into your daughter’s toy Barbie phone. And even the best cell reception still carries the sound quality of a radio dispatch from the front, which is not very conducive to conducting a nice, relaxed conversation.

All parents see cell phones as a sort of life line to their kids. We all run these disaster scenarios through our heads in which our children have been abducted and are being held for ransom in some dingy prison and that single cell phone call alerts the police and saves their lives. I don’t know about you, but the last phone call I got from my kid was a wrong number; she meant to call her friend and peremptorily hung up on me.

I drive a very old pickup truck and feel somewhat comforted by having the cell with me in case of a breakdown. I went through this scenario in my head, though, one day while driving down a lonesome back road and couldn’t for the life of me figure out who I’d call if I did break down. I’m not a member of AAA. I guess I’d have to call a friend and ask them to Google auto towing on the web and give me a number to call. But this is kind of a false sense of security, anyway. If you break down somewhere, chances are the first three cars that stop to help you are going to have cell phones with them anyway, so you may as well have left yours home. And how long is it going to be before in car navigation systems like Garmin take over the role of onboard telephony?

If you call me tonight at 11:30 to tell me your niece got selected to study in France for six weeks, “and isn’t it exciting?”, I’m almost certainly not going to answer the phone. Pretend like I’m “not home at the moment”, but what I really am is “I don’t want to talk to you right now. Your desire to talk to me does not automatically trigger a similar, mirrored response from me. This does not mean you are any less precious to me. It means that I’m probably watching a Laker’s game while playing Spider Solitaire, and darn it, I’ve got voice mail, so please use it, and the first opportunity I get to trump up some interest in your daughter’s education, I promise I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Pet Phone Peeves:

1)      Voice mail saying simply “Call me.” You see, your wanting to talk to me does not mean that I share this desire. I am not responsible for initiating communication simply because you got my voice mail.

2)      Text message saying simply “Call me”. This is the best way in the world to get me to call and leave a voice mail saying “Text me.”

3)      Refusal to use voice mail, hanging up, redialing the number of times it takes to make me finally succumb and answer. This is the best way in the world to get me to turn my phone off and piss you off when you go straight to my voice mail.

4)      Calling and asking me “Hey, what are you doing?” I’m probably going to answer by saying “I’m currently trying to surgically bisect my own Vas Deferens glands”, or more directly, “I’m wondering why the hell you called me.”

5)      Calling after 10 pm. I’m a musician, and I do stay up late, but I was raised in that sort of sensible Midwestern way that says that Aunt Bertha better be damn near dead if you’re calling me after 10. She’ll still be dead in the morning, and there’s not a damn thing I can or will do about it tonight.

6)      Setting your ring tone to your favorite song. NO ONE CARES! EVERYONE IS ANNOYED! Ok? No one is thinking “My! He must be a rather interesting young fellow to have chosen such a probing, well-crafted song for his ring tone! I think I’ll strike up a friendship with him!”

7)      Using your phone in the car. If you can’t bring yourself to use your turn signal or rear view mirror because of the phone propped against your head, it’s time to question your priorities.

I know cell phones are here to stay. My hope is eventually they will merge with the computer completely, and my hand held computer can handle my calls.

Later.