Friday, August 31, 2012
Academia
Academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s sometimes
suggested, too often wish to give their fields the legitimacy and public
authority of science, and so write in highly technical, jargon-laced
prose. Academics in the hard sciences, for their part, are too concerned
with factual correctness to worry about making their productions
agreeable, even to co-specialists. Then, of course, there is the really
uncharitable interpretation: Many academics simply haven’t got anything
useful to say, but if they say it in a sufficiently complicated fashion
and use all the vogue terms, they’ll get credit for having said
something without saying anything worth defending. The really
troublesome thing about all this is that many academic writers, even in
the humanities, have legitimate and important insights to convey. Yet
they genuinely believe, whether for one of the aforementioned reasons or
for some other, that it doesn’t serve their interests to write
straightforward English sentences.
How Hilton Kramer Got Lost in the Culture Wars
- April 11, 2012 | 12:00 am
Hilton
Kramer, who died on March 27 at the age of 84, was a much more
complicated man than is sometimes acknowledged. He was both a
neoconservative cultural warrior who liked nothing better than plunging
into a noisy, nasty battle and an exacting aesthete for whom life would
have been impossible without the sustenance of art and literature. I
certainly saw both sides of Hilton during the decade that I wrote for The New Criterion,
beginning in the mid-1980s. When we went out for lunch in a little
French restaurant in the West Fifties that Hilton admired for its
tarnished savoir-faire, I think I recognized, behind his masklike
self-confidence, traces of the young man from Massachusetts who had
embraced intellectual and bohemian Manhattan with a lover’s ardor. And
when I read his craziest polemics—there were times when he seemed to
believe that The New York Times and The New York Review of Books
were responsible for everything that was wrong with American culture—I
knew that behind the fire and brimstone there was the pain of a
brokenhearted lover, who despite his irrepressibly upbeat demeanor could
not bear what Warholism had done to the world of artists and writers
where he had always felt most at home. He was right about Warholism. He
was right about political correctness. He was right about other things.
The trouble was that the fight took on a life of its own, until the
warrior in Hilton nearly crushed the aesthete.
Hilton’s almost two decades at The New York Times—the paper which he would so gleefully attack in later years—made him into a cultural figure with a reach that went way beyond the art world. Without his Times credentials, it is hardly possible that he would have had the standing needed to launch The New Criterion in 1982. But it is in the work he did at Arts magazine in the years around 1960—he wrote for the magazine and was for a time its editor—that you see the wide-ranging curiosity and undogmatic taste that really defined his cosmopolitan spirit. Among the artists at the beginning of their careers whom he wrote about with sympathy were the abstractionists Ellsworth Kelly and George Ortman and the representational painters Philip Pearlstein and Louisa Matthiasdottir. He was fascinated by the individual artist’s relationship with the wider world, describing in one instance what he called the “Pollock myth” and how “the context assumes an importance equal to—and possibly even greater than—the work itself.” As an editor, he was welcoming to the Dadaist Hans Richter’s memoirs and to the critic Vernon Young’s writings on film. Let us not forget that some of the Minimalist Donald Judd’s best writing was done for Hilton; years later, in the introduction to his collected criticism, the laconic Judd observed that “it may be hard to believe but Hilton Kramer was easy to work for.”
In his heart of hearts, I think Hilton always prized heterogeneity. His first book—The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972, which takes him from Arts to The New York Times—reflects his considerable range of interests, encompassing appreciations of both the “icy voluptuousness” of Richard Lindner’s “erotic fantasy” and the “Whitmanesque ambitions” of Mark di Suvero’s sculpture. Hilton wrote with great feeling about modern sculpture, cared deeply for unsung pioneers of American modernism such as John Storrs, and when photography was still seen as somewhat marginal in the art world he wrote about it at the Times with great consistency, vigor, and seriousness. The Age of the Avant-Garde and The Revenge of the Philistines—panoramic art chronicles that Hilton surely patterned after Edmund Wilson’s literary chronicles—are a passionately lucid achievement, a steady eye trained on the crazy quilt of art in New York and beyond. Hilton’s main weakness as a critic, at least as I see it, is his tendency to back away from a climax. Too often the judiciousness stands in the way of his enthusiasm; I want him to expostulate a bit more about the things he loves. What is remarkable is his extraordinary scope and pinpoint detail.
Rereading The Age of the Avant-Garde and The Revenge of the Philistines (what terrific titles!), I find myself wondering if the boldface simplifications of Hilton’s later polemics came out of his frustration at how little his most judicious judgments had done to affect the course of events. After years spent weighing the virtues of countless artists and exhibitions, he found all of his careful calculations swept away by the onslaught of Pop and the transformation of museums into funhouses. Who can wonder that Hilton lost his cool? Who can wonder that the complicator became a simplifier? I know I should not have been surprised. But I did find it strange to watch, beginning with the white-hot controversies around the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts, as this extraordinarily subtle man stood shoulder to shoulder with right-wing ideologues who cared as little for Mondrian as they did for Mapplethorpe. Hilton may have imagined that his own taste was too fine to be compromised by their outrageous crudity. Despite all he knew about the dumbing-down of the media, he underestimated the power of the press to coarsen his own ideas.
Until ill health made life in New York an impossibility, Hilton was an unfailing presence in the city, with a charm, sense of humor, and natural curiosity that could disarm even his staunchest opponents. I think there was also a deeper explanation for the fondness he inspired, even in some of those who loathed his taste and his politics. Although Hilton began at The New Criterion by quite rightly complaining that some on the Left had a litmus test for works of art, the truth was that as time went on Hilton could seem to be applying litmus tests from the Right. Eventually, he was willing to leave the impression that traditional values in the arts had an inherent relationship with what people on the Right in this country believe are traditional social values. This was a terrible lie. And it gave his opponents the license to dismiss paintings and sculptures that they in fact regarded as insufficiently hip by claiming that they were somehow politically reactionary. What was lost in this grotesque game of matching artistic values and social or political values was art’s freestanding power. But by then Hilton knew that the real explanations were far too elusive to ever be newsworthy. How, after all, do you explain why the pop-culture allusions in the work of Picasso, Léger, and Schwitters are so satisfying, while the pop-culture allusions in the work of Warhol and Lichtenstein fall flat? The arguments are by no means easy to make, especially now, when Pop Art is the establishment: A Lichtenstein retrospective is opening at the Art Institute of Chicago next month and Warhol is the subject of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall.
Despite all the fire and brimstone, Hilton may have been too much of an optimist to face squarely all the difficulties involved in defining the essential but elusive role of the arts in a democratic society. I think that part of what he loved about his years at The New York Times was the unprecedented opportunity he had to communicate with a large, heterogeneous public. But the public did not necessarily embrace his enthusiasms—or even know what he was trying to say. Moving on to The New Criterion, he came to believe that polemic might work where persuasion had already failed. Much good writing has been published in The New Criterion. But the problems in the art world that Hilton quite accurately diagnosed a generation ago have, if anything, become more acute.
Hilton soldiered on for as long as he was able. I think I speak for many people when I say that we were grateful to him for raising so many of the important questions about art and society, even when he was all too quick to embrace the wrong answers. Could it be that there are no satisfying answers? At the end of the day, that may have been what Hilton thought. He knew we were in for some tough times in 1985, when he titled his second book The Revenge of the Philistines. More than a quarter of a century later, the philistines are only more firmly entrenched.
Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.
Hilton’s almost two decades at The New York Times—the paper which he would so gleefully attack in later years—made him into a cultural figure with a reach that went way beyond the art world. Without his Times credentials, it is hardly possible that he would have had the standing needed to launch The New Criterion in 1982. But it is in the work he did at Arts magazine in the years around 1960—he wrote for the magazine and was for a time its editor—that you see the wide-ranging curiosity and undogmatic taste that really defined his cosmopolitan spirit. Among the artists at the beginning of their careers whom he wrote about with sympathy were the abstractionists Ellsworth Kelly and George Ortman and the representational painters Philip Pearlstein and Louisa Matthiasdottir. He was fascinated by the individual artist’s relationship with the wider world, describing in one instance what he called the “Pollock myth” and how “the context assumes an importance equal to—and possibly even greater than—the work itself.” As an editor, he was welcoming to the Dadaist Hans Richter’s memoirs and to the critic Vernon Young’s writings on film. Let us not forget that some of the Minimalist Donald Judd’s best writing was done for Hilton; years later, in the introduction to his collected criticism, the laconic Judd observed that “it may be hard to believe but Hilton Kramer was easy to work for.”
In his heart of hearts, I think Hilton always prized heterogeneity. His first book—The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972, which takes him from Arts to The New York Times—reflects his considerable range of interests, encompassing appreciations of both the “icy voluptuousness” of Richard Lindner’s “erotic fantasy” and the “Whitmanesque ambitions” of Mark di Suvero’s sculpture. Hilton wrote with great feeling about modern sculpture, cared deeply for unsung pioneers of American modernism such as John Storrs, and when photography was still seen as somewhat marginal in the art world he wrote about it at the Times with great consistency, vigor, and seriousness. The Age of the Avant-Garde and The Revenge of the Philistines—panoramic art chronicles that Hilton surely patterned after Edmund Wilson’s literary chronicles—are a passionately lucid achievement, a steady eye trained on the crazy quilt of art in New York and beyond. Hilton’s main weakness as a critic, at least as I see it, is his tendency to back away from a climax. Too often the judiciousness stands in the way of his enthusiasm; I want him to expostulate a bit more about the things he loves. What is remarkable is his extraordinary scope and pinpoint detail.
Rereading The Age of the Avant-Garde and The Revenge of the Philistines (what terrific titles!), I find myself wondering if the boldface simplifications of Hilton’s later polemics came out of his frustration at how little his most judicious judgments had done to affect the course of events. After years spent weighing the virtues of countless artists and exhibitions, he found all of his careful calculations swept away by the onslaught of Pop and the transformation of museums into funhouses. Who can wonder that Hilton lost his cool? Who can wonder that the complicator became a simplifier? I know I should not have been surprised. But I did find it strange to watch, beginning with the white-hot controversies around the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts, as this extraordinarily subtle man stood shoulder to shoulder with right-wing ideologues who cared as little for Mondrian as they did for Mapplethorpe. Hilton may have imagined that his own taste was too fine to be compromised by their outrageous crudity. Despite all he knew about the dumbing-down of the media, he underestimated the power of the press to coarsen his own ideas.
Until ill health made life in New York an impossibility, Hilton was an unfailing presence in the city, with a charm, sense of humor, and natural curiosity that could disarm even his staunchest opponents. I think there was also a deeper explanation for the fondness he inspired, even in some of those who loathed his taste and his politics. Although Hilton began at The New Criterion by quite rightly complaining that some on the Left had a litmus test for works of art, the truth was that as time went on Hilton could seem to be applying litmus tests from the Right. Eventually, he was willing to leave the impression that traditional values in the arts had an inherent relationship with what people on the Right in this country believe are traditional social values. This was a terrible lie. And it gave his opponents the license to dismiss paintings and sculptures that they in fact regarded as insufficiently hip by claiming that they were somehow politically reactionary. What was lost in this grotesque game of matching artistic values and social or political values was art’s freestanding power. But by then Hilton knew that the real explanations were far too elusive to ever be newsworthy. How, after all, do you explain why the pop-culture allusions in the work of Picasso, Léger, and Schwitters are so satisfying, while the pop-culture allusions in the work of Warhol and Lichtenstein fall flat? The arguments are by no means easy to make, especially now, when Pop Art is the establishment: A Lichtenstein retrospective is opening at the Art Institute of Chicago next month and Warhol is the subject of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall.
Despite all the fire and brimstone, Hilton may have been too much of an optimist to face squarely all the difficulties involved in defining the essential but elusive role of the arts in a democratic society. I think that part of what he loved about his years at The New York Times was the unprecedented opportunity he had to communicate with a large, heterogeneous public. But the public did not necessarily embrace his enthusiasms—or even know what he was trying to say. Moving on to The New Criterion, he came to believe that polemic might work where persuasion had already failed. Much good writing has been published in The New Criterion. But the problems in the art world that Hilton quite accurately diagnosed a generation ago have, if anything, become more acute.
Hilton soldiered on for as long as he was able. I think I speak for many people when I say that we were grateful to him for raising so many of the important questions about art and society, even when he was all too quick to embrace the wrong answers. Could it be that there are no satisfying answers? At the end of the day, that may have been what Hilton thought. He knew we were in for some tough times in 1985, when he titled his second book The Revenge of the Philistines. More than a quarter of a century later, the philistines are only more firmly entrenched.
Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic.
Time for meow close-up
In Search of the Living, Purring, Singing Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex
- August 31, 2012 |
The obvious place to begin an inquiry into the Internet cat is with Maru, the most famous feline on the Internet. Maru’s shtick, in brief: Maru gets into a box (“大きな箱とねこ,” 8.1 million views). Maru gets into a box (“箱とねこ８. A box and Maru 8,” 3.1 million views). Maru gets into some boxes (“いろいろな小さ過ぎる箱とねこ. Many too small boxes and Maru,” 7.9 million views). Maru tries to get into a box (“入れない箱とねこ. The box which Maru can’t enter,” 2.2 million views).
Maru, which means “circle” or “perfection” in Japanese, is a Scottish fold with nonfolded ears. He is 5 years old and lives in an undisclosed Japanese city that is, by consensual rumor, almost certainly not Tokyo, because no indoor cat in Tokyo has that much space to jump into boxes, especially not the bigger ones. Maru has upwards of 168 million YouTube views and, according to other rumors, has generated enough ad revenue to buy his owner a new apartment. His is the seventh-most-subscribed YouTube channel in Japan.
There’s also the famous flying-Pop-Tart cat, of course, Nyan Cat; his tie to Japan remains obscure unless you’ve been made aware, by someone who knows something about Japan and cats, that nya is how Japanese cats say “meow.” Some of Japan’s most interesting cat activity originally appeared on TV, but by the time we’ve been exposed to the game show that turns cats into weight lifters by putting increasingly heavy fish onto scales, or the variety show in which a phalanx of kittens is invited to nest in a patch of cooking pots (a fad called neko-nabe), we’re seeing them on the Internet, posting them to Facebook, emailing the links to our moms and yoga teachers.
The Internet’s preference for cats runs so deep that when Google’s secretive X Lab showed a string of 10 million YouTube images to a neural network of 16,000 computer processors for machine learning, the first thing the network did was invent the concept of a cat. America might have inflated the Internet-feline bubble—the Cheezburger Network raised $30 million last year in venture funding, and the Bible has been translated into Lolcat—but Japan was where the Internet-feline market began, and persists, as a quiet, domestic cattage industry. If you want to know why the Internet chose cats, you must go to Japan.
Photo: Alamy
<< Previous | Next >>
A
brief history of lolcats, keyboard cats, human-cat hybrids, caterwaul
cat owners, cat activists, and other feline milestones of Internet
culture. —Cameron Bird
July 1999
Cat-Scan.com—images of cats pressed on flatbed scanners—is the first post on community blog MetaFilter.
July 1999
Cat-Scan.com—images of cats pressed on flatbed scanners—is the first post on community blog MetaFilter.
Marx’s interest in cats lies in his work with the YouTube Partner Program, or YPP, a service that makes it possible to turn on ads to monetize your content, as the phrase has it. The deal is that the content has to be your own; you can’t just post G’n'R songs and then rake in ad money to pay for your brownstone renovation. Either you’re invited by the YouTube people because of your pageviews or you can opt in. Once you’ve joined, they help you with your marketing. They take you through the ad options (banners versus prerolls, etc.) and provide tools and tips for making successful videos. They’ve got representatives assigned to aid certain classes of partners with the marketing of their monetized videos: some who work with comedians, some who work with musicians, and quite a few who work with cats. Marx says he’ll email several new star cats, up-and-coming cats, and see what he can do. He says that a few years ago the cat people tended to be as reclusive as Mugumogu, but that the newer cat folks seem more amenable to revealing themselves.
A few days later, he emails me back: Sure enough, he has some famous cats willing to meet. I fly to Japan to meet the Musashis.
Hideo, as it turns out, speaks about his cats in calm, measured, elegant English. (He spent some of his childhood in England and the US.) “I started writing songs for cats because I’d gotten bored writing songs for humans. But the thing is, cats have limited vocal … limited vocal—”
“Limited vocal range?” Rebecca suggests.
“Yes, limited vocal range. I found I needed five cats to cover one octave.” We are sitting around an oblong dining room table in the sun-drenched cedar den of a ski chalet in a central Nagano prefecture, along with six cats spanning a spectrum of liveliness that runs from contemptuously drowsy to asleep. Manaho, Hideo’s wife and business partner, holds one on her lap, face out and totally blasè9 as it regards us. Hideo is trained as a musician and sound engineer and looks the part, with variable-tint eyeglass lenses (the panels now shaded graphite from the ambient snow glare), a retiring studio voice, a scruffy suggestion of goatee, and a relaxed-bemused ’70s mien. Manaho describes herself as a voice coach and producer.
Four of the cats are Norwegian forest cats. They’re huge, lustrous, woolly, like a sheepdog made into a pillow. Their coats have a glossy weft of lunar rainbow. According to a thinly sourced but entirely plausible Wikipedia squib, Norse legends refer to a skogkatt, a “mountain-dwelling fairy cat with an ability to climb sheer rock faces that other cats could not manage.” That’s apparently this cat’s pedigree; he is directly descended from myth. On the way up into the mountains, before I lost data service on my phone, Manaho friended me on Facebook, then sent me a photograph of Musashi hovering over snow. Rebecca worried I was bringing her to meet a bobcat. Hideo and Manaho’s teenage son, who is about to leave Japan to study animals at a university in Tasmania, hands me Musashi after I sit down. He holds Musashi out to me like a muff of fraying fog. Musashi makes no noise; he is sandbag-limp. The cat is 8 years old and weighs almost 20 pounds, his fur the ur-slate of celestial cinder. My chair bends back beneath his heft. He goes back to sleep as soon as the fuss of brief stir is complete, clucking and grumbling in his resumed dreams. He is the biggest cat I’ve ever seen. I hold him to me. I love him.
Hideo and Manaho Mori in-studio with the Musashis.
Photo: Panda Kanno
Photo: Panda Kanno
It was Christmastime then, so Hideo mixed a Christmas song—specifically “Jingle Bells”—out of meow samples and put it on YouTube. The music industry in Japan, like the music industry everywhere and every industry in Japan, has been depressed, and he thought that it might do something to help him introduce himself to new markets.
This was in 2007, soon after YouTube Japan got going. Before that, the Japanese had access to the regular YouTube, but now they had their own native version. The staff from YouTube Japan noticed the Christmas song video, called them up, and said, “We want to put your video on our homepage as we introduce ourselves.” They were going to have seven featured videos, a new one each day of their launch week.
In that week, the Musahis got 275,000 views. That was more than expected. But it wasn’t until a few weeks later that there was, in Hideo’s words, “the big explosion.” Manaho had set their YouTube account so she would receive an email alert on her mobile phone when someone left a comment. One day she got 4,000 alerts. She thought her phone was broken, so she called her telecom provider. There was no problem: She had just gotten 4,000 emails, was all.
The problem, as it turned out, was that their 275,000 views on YouTube Japan had brought the Musahis to the attention of the YouTube people in California, who put them on the global home page. The email alerts arrived in German, Hindi, Chinese, unrecognizable languages. Manaho turned off her email-alert function. Within a few days they’d gotten well over a million views.
That’s when the Korean TV station got in touch. It came down to Japan with a film crew and shot the Musashis at home. Soon after, Hideo and Manaho heard from NHK, the national broadcasting corporation of Japan. The people from NHK were surprised that no other Japanese networks had covered them yet, so they sent a crew to shoot them for a popular Sunday-evening program called @Human, which introduces a wide TV audience at home to the sorts of interesting things happening at the moment on the Internet. Manaho brings up a blog entry with a TV still of Musashi next to a cookie that has “NHK” printed on it.
He takes me back to his office, where there is a conference room with whiteboards for walls. He warns me that he’s unable to comment on or speculate about individual YouTube partners, but we can talk generally about cats. He can’t tell me exactly how many Japanese cat partners there are, but he nods when I ask if it’s more than a hundred. “There are cats,” he says, “that are making more money than the average salary in Japan”—which the Internet estimates to be around $29,000. Most of the partners, the active second-tier ones, are probably making much less, though a good deal of them are earning enough to put a dent in their mortgages.
Marx and I watch a few new cat videos, some of the up-and-comers, those challenging or exceeding Maru’s pageviews. “An interesting thing, here in Japan, is that it’s not just the cat partners who post cat stuff. It’s everybody.” Soezimax, for example, is an action-film maker, one of the most popular partners in Japan, with millions of views. But some of his most popular videos are the ones he posts of the fights he has with his girlfriend’s vicious cat, Sashimi-san, who regularly puts Soezimax to rout. He’s the anti-Maru, the standard-bearer of uncute Internet cat aggression. The videos are slightly alarming, especially when we’re all so used to anodyne felinity. Then Marx brings up Japan’s most popular Internet comedian, who used to post regular videos of himself in a cat café. (In Japan, they have cafés where you go to pet cats.)
“It’s like,” Marx says, “no matter how successful you are here on the Internet on your own terms, it’s de rigueur that you still have to do something with a cat.” In a culture of Internet anonymity, bred of island claustrophobia and immobility, the Japanese Internet cat has become a crucial proxy: People who feel inhibited to do what they want online are expressing themselves, cagily, via the animal that only ever does what it wants.
The Cateriam Cat Café in Tokyo.
Photo: Panda Kanno
Photo: Panda Kanno
Rebecca and I laugh.
Hideo doesn’t laugh. “No,” he says. “They paid in fish.”
I look to Rebecca for a cue about how Japanese etiquette might encourage us to react here. She looks at me defenselessly.
Hideo says, “They presented Musashi with a whole fish. Musashi put his paw print on the contract.” They laugh now, so we do too. Manaho returns to one of the two laptops on the table, browses her blog, and turns the screen back toward us to show a video.
Hideo narrates. “Those are the Stardust guys, getting the fish.” They bring it inside. “They brought it inside.” Musashi sits propped against the couch like the sultan of Brunei.
“That’s Musashi,” Hideo says, as if there is any other known cat that takes up a third of a couch, and as if he isn’t still sleeping in my lap. The men present Musashi with the fish. Musashi remains expressionless; whatever avarice the cat was feeling remained concealed behind his aldermanic composure. They zoom in. Musashi doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t notice.
“He’s thinking about it,” Hideo says. “Now he agrees.” Musashi puts his red paw print on the contract, then scuds off, blotting the couch with his cerise paw.
Hideo closes the laptop. “The whole thing is a joke,” he explains.
“But that was a real fish,” I say. He nods.
“Did they eat the fish?” I ask.
The son speaks up, rousing himself for the first time from the lidded pretend funk of filial humiliation. “No! We ate the fish.”
“You ate the fish?” Rebecca is incredulous. After all, Hideo made such a big deal about how the cats were signed by Stardust, not them.
Hideo seems a little sheepish. “The cats didn’t even know what it was! They’d never even seen a whole fish before. They didn’t recognize it. So we ate it.”
“Was there an agreement about royalties?” Rebecca asks.
“They wanted us to make video content for mobile phones,” Hideo says.
“Can we see the mobile phone content?” I ask.
“I burned you a DVD,” he says. He reopens his laptop and plays a video of the Musashis singing “Auld Lang Syne.” The chopped mews sting sharply, like slashes from an 8-bit-videogame sword, and Marble rings in with a hoarse bark that, knowing what we know now about his and Michael Jackson’s coincident deaths, is hard not to read as the kind of netherworldly incursion that used to get cats set ritualistically on fire. Musashi wears big, chunky studio headphones, which he subsequently throws off in a diva tantrum. All five Musashis at one point groom themselves while floating in the dim amniotic aura of pink orbs. They bleat the 18th-century tune in short squawks; it’s hard to reconcile the sounds with the majestically unrousable beasts loafing all around.
I ask Hideo about his one original composition for the cats, which he hasn’t played for us.
“Oh, that,” he says. “They wanted to use that as the theme song for a TV show.” This smacks of Stardust Promotion. “The show was on in the summer of 2008.” Rebecca asks what it was called.
“It was a family drama, and it was called …” Hideo thinks for a moment. “Daisuki! Itsutsugo.” Daisuki means “I like it a lot!” or “I like you a lot!” or, because the Japanese don’t really have a way to say it, “I love you!” The show was about quintuplets (itsutsugo) and the problems they face and then overcome.
The show’s producers wanted to use Hideo’s original composition for the show’s theme song, but the problem was that they needed lyrics. “But I told them, the cats don’t sing lyrics, they sing instrumental! So then they went and got the girls’ group.” The girls’ group was called P-A, for Pawa-Aiji, or Power Age. “They asked us to take the girls and the cats and make a song and a video.”
“What happened to P-A?” Rebecca asks.
“They already disappeared, naturally,” Hideo’s son says.
“But they were popular back then?”
“Uh, no,” Hideo says. “They wanted to make the girls popular. By using the cats, because the cats were already popular. So I said OK. But it didn’t work. The girls did not get popular. Still, the cats were the very first species besides humans to sing the theme song for a network TV show.”
We watch the video of five unpopular girls and five popular cats sing the theme song to a family drama about troubled quintuplets. It begins with scrolling Star Wars-style lettering announcing the publication of the Musashis’ first book. Then Leo and Luka bubble-chat as a UFO flies overhead. The cats appear backlit and powerful, then lift their paws out of a huddle. Each walks through the ether toward the camera. I refuse to continue describing this video. It is on the Internet.
An interlude: three Tokyo cat cafés, briefly reviewed.
Cateriam, Shimokitazawa: immaculate, homey, very gemütlich, with 9 to 11 above-average to excellent cats, including a docile rag doll good for holding and a lively Persian that yowls when won over. Cat books and manga for perusal line the walls, and the owner has thoughtfully hung branches from the ceiling for good overhead cat action. Cats may remain less than enthusiastic until engaged by an informative onsite shill/fluffer. Serves delicious green tea lattes and will gladly replace the ones that cats drink out of. Wireless Internet. 9/10.
Neko Café Club, Jiyugaoka: This former nail salon entertains upwardly mobile yoga moms with kittens, including the Internet’s beloved munchkin and Scottish fold varieties. No postcards or DVDs, unfortunately, and the large picture windows to the street make you feel as if you’re on the Internet. The cats are extremely high-quality, though they may be drugged. Private rooms available. 7/10.
So what, then, is it about cats? Internet pundits have drafted back-of-the-envelope theories. “The Internet is a dog park for cat people” is one line that gained online currency. Sounds good, but it doesn’t hold up: The Internet’s cat obsession goes well beyond so-called cat people. Plenty of those who’d never think of owning a cat are pleased to watch them on the Internet’s treadmills.
Time magazine put forward the proposition that “there’s something about watching a normally proud animal thrust into a humiliating situation that’s especially funny.” This is barely worth rebutting, as even the worst cat retains its dignity no matter the circumstances. The cat is the Thing That Will Not Be Humiliated.
The same Time piece then ended by taking Internet cats not seriously but simply srsly. “Or maybe we’re over-thinking it. ‘Cat videos are just cute,’ says [Nyan Cat creator Christopher] Torres. Indeed.” Except not indeed. Not even remotely indeed. Baby hedgehogs are also cute, arguably cuter, but they do not compete with porn for Internet real estate. One thing competes with porn, and that is cats.
In the course of my research, by which I mostly mean desultorily clicking on links in my friends’ Gchat away-statuses, I came across two seemingly unrelated but profoundly complementary recent scientific studies. The first, conducted by computer scientists and a psychologist at Missouri University of Science and Technology, took up the link between the Internet and depression. The people at MST had a few major findings that correlated patterns of heavy Internet usage, with some apparent statistical significance, to symptoms of depression. The first was the presence of P2P packets, an indicator of file-sharing—music and movies. The second was frequent email checking. A third example was increased “flow duration entropy,” a result of rapid switching between applications, and to that the authors of the study added increased video watching, gaming, and chatting. Their examples of depressive Internet activity overlapped nearly perfectly with most people’s idea of Internet usage. They didn’t break out the video-watching by genre, but one can only suspect that a lot of those depressive Internet users were watching cat videos.
In other words, your cat will like you best if you pretend that you don’t desperately want to play with it all the time. What the current group of researchers seemed to suggest was equally fascinating: The more neurotic the cat owner—the more desperate for fuzzy comfort and nuzzly security and unconditional affection—the briefer the interactions that damn cat would allow.
So we have a reputable study correlating Internet usage and depression. We have another reputable study correlating neuroticism and being ignored by cats. We are only one step away from the grand synthesis that has thus far eluded the ever-growing community of Internet-cat researchers.
This all comes together for me at that first cat café. I guess I feel about it what one might theoretically feel about an orgy, or that old chestnut about the ’60s: if you were keeping good notes, or if the memory is much more than a lot of velutinous petting alongside irascible demands for submaxillary attention, you probably weren’t making the most of it.
The real pathos of the Time segment, though, was a bit toward the end, where it was clear that the women couldn’t figure out why some of the cats were being standoffish; they looked like they thought they were doing something wrong. And the needier the women, the more indifferent the cats; they seemed not to understand that this is how a cat works.
Think of it this way: What we do on the Internet is mostly “like” things, and while liking them we wait for our own content to be liked. We check our analytics as we await retweets. This is where the cats come in. A cat will not retrieve some dumb object so that you can throw it yet again. A cat will not do a shtick to be petted on its head. A cat will not jig for a mackerel ingot. That goes against everything cats stand for. Or more often sit. It’s not just that cats are unable to be anything but real; it’s that cats both know they are performing and couldn’t possibly care less about how their performance is received. Their play in front of a camera is exactly like their play absent one.
What an Internet cat does is thus confront us with how cravenly we ourselves court approval. A cat, if it decides to love you, will do so only on its own terms, and, as that Viennese study showed, the more you let it come to you, i.e., the less you need it, the better loved you’re going to be. The reason the lolcat says “Oh hai” is because he only just noticed, and certainly doesn’t care, that you caught him serenely occupying ur nouns, verbing ur other nouns. He doesn’t worry about you or what you think; by his living in your screen, you can love him, but there isn’t a prayer of reciprocation. Thus is the Internet cat the realest cat of all.
The late-afternoon light is pink on the snow, and we need to drive out of the mountains before the roads freeze over. But there is one more thing I want to talk about.
“So,” I say, “are you guys interested in any, er, other Internet cats?”
“There’s Maru,” Hideo says right away. “He’s very interesting. He likes boxes. Jumping into them.”
I say I tried to meet him and was refused. I hope I sound convincingly flat, affectless, unfixated.
Manaho asks where Maru lives. “Nobody knows,” I reply.
“Ah so!” Manaho says. She continues in Japanese, and Rebecca translates. “She says they’re quite good videos, the way they shoot them. She also says she thinks it’s a professional doing them.”
It sounds to me as though she meant something weighted by “professional.” Later I ask Rebecca if I was right about that, or if it was just her translation. She says she thinks there’s something to it: To the resolutely DIY Musashis, the slick high-roller Maru might look like a bit of a sellout. “I mean, Hideo’s videos, they’re so aggressively amateurish. It looked like he’d just clicked the box for every single effect—highlight, aura, fade, starburst, whatever.”
Manaho asks why Maru declined my interview request. I tell her his owner thinks the cat is the way he is—uncorrupted by fame, unselfconscious in his performance—because she keeps him quarantined. If he met outsiders, she worries, he wouldn’t be the same anymore. He might get anxious.
Manaho nods. “Usually when cats encounter someone new they go and hide, but these cats are different.” She points under the table, where her cats are sitting and sleeping. “Because of their personality, we thought they would be OK with the media. It didn’t stress them out.” It didn’t even wake them up.
“Did it change your life at all?” I ask.
“Not at all,” Hideo says. “We weren’t the crazy mom and dad.”
“So are you still writing songs for the cats?”
“Not recently,” Hideo says.
Manaho breaks in, and Rebecca translates: “Of all the experience they have working with all the other artists—and she just named some pop stars even I’ve heard of—she says they can say that the cats are by far the most difficult. It really takes a lot of time. They don’t follow instructions. They don’t know where or when to meow. They won’t stand in front of the microphone. So the microphone needs to stand in front of the cats.” She makes a motion that is halfway between the operation of a boom mic and a lacrosse pass.
His cat-music career having foundered on the superciliousness and indifference of his imperious cats, Hideo tells me what he’s up to now. “I’m working on a charity song. After the earthquake and tsunami happened, there were so many pages on Facebook that people made to send their good wishes or money to Japan, but most of the comments on the Facebook pages were in English. I went to all the different pages for Japan and wrote that the people of Japan were grateful for their thoughts and prayers. I became friends with many more people on Facebook, from all over the world.”
He found an Internet that was accountable and kind, not anonymous and mean-spirited. “I wanted to share all of this with Japanese people, so I asked my friends on Facebook in all these countries if they would sing for me. I made a huge chorus of many voices that I’m still working on. I get to collaborate with all these people I’ve never met and never had conversations with but we can still make work together. Maybe you will sing for me?”
“I don’t think you want me singing for you.”
“But maybe you will write about this, and more people will find me and collaborate with me.” His name is Hideo Saito, and he is on Facebook.
The cedar shadows have grown narrow in the snow outside, and the cats snore and mutter in their dreams. We take pictures until we are all too sore to keep holding Musashi aloft. We all bow at each other. Rebecca and I bow at the cats. The cats drift off.
On the long drive home, Fuji hovering before us, solitary and immanent in cloudy magenta, Rebecca and I talk about how terrible we feel that we expected these Internet cat video people to be out of their minds. They are just normal people who have some special cats to share with the world and have gotten something back. I picture-message Micah, my brother, an image of Musashi obscuring my lap.
“That’s not a cat,” he texts back. “That’s a lion.”
“It’s a Norwegian forest cat.”
“Norwegian forests must be terrifying.”
“No, it wasn’t terrifying. It was really nice, and sleepy. If you want to see him sing, search YouTube for ‘だいすき! !P-A Musashi’s.’”
It takes him a few minutes to respond.
“Dude what the fuck.”
kthxbai.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus (gideonlk@gmail.com) is the author of the memoir A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful.
The Attack Ad, Pompeii-Style
By PHILIP FREEMANA.D. 79 was a rough year for Marcus Cerrinius Vatia. The up-and-coming young man was running for the important office of aedile, one of the two junior magistrates in the seaside town of Pompeii. A century earlier, the Roman orator Cicero had admired the generally honest and upright campaigns conducted in this provincial town on the Bay of Naples. Unlike in Rome itself, where corruption was rampant, any hardworking Pompeian man with enough money and friends might rise to the office of aedile — unless he was a member of an undesirable profession, a public executioner, for example, or an actor.
If Vatia could clear the first hurdle and be elected aedile, perhaps in a few years he would be chosen as one of the duoviri (“two men”) who presided over the city. But even as an aedile, he would be guaranteed a place on the town council and special seats for life at the local gladiatorial shows. So as the smoking crater of Vesuvius loomed over Pompeii, Vatia tried to drum up support on the usual round of guild banquets, tavern meetings and dinners with wealthy citizens.
But politics could be a dirty business, even in Pompeii. Sometime in the night, one of the professional political teams that painted signs around town whitewashed some old campaign ads from the previous year and replaced them with new graffiti, including “The petty thieves support Vatia for aedile” and “The late night drinkers all ask you to elect Marcus Cerrinius Vatia as aedile.” Poor Vatia had become a victim of negative campaign advertising.
Alain PilonThe almost 3,000 political inscriptions that survive from Pompeii tell us more about Roman elections than that they featured dirty tricks. Legitimate ads from individuals and groups covered the walls from the Temple of Venus to the Amphitheater, occasionally with warnings not to tamper with them (“If you spitefully deface this sign, may you become very ill”). Most are formulaic recommendations of a candidate as a vir bonus (“good man”) or, in the case of our Marcus Cerrinius Vatia, “deserving.” Other get-out-the-vote ads are more specific, like the graffiti for Gaius Julius Polybius, who “provides good bread”; for Marcus Casellius Marcellus, who “gives great games”; and for Bruttius Balbus, who “will preserve the treasury.”
Most of these ads were sponsored by men, but a surprising number were paid for by women, who along with slaves were not allowed to vote. Pompeian women knew that although they couldn’t cast a ballot, they could still influence an election. Respectable women like Taedia Secunda endorsed her grandson Lucius Secundus for aedile. But even barmaids like Aegle and Zmyrina — their Greek names suggest they had once been slaves — appeared to have commissioned sign writers to post ads outside their tavern on the Street of Abundance.
Group endorsements from professional guilds were also important. Surviving campaign inscriptions include ads from fruit vendors, mule drivers, goldsmiths, bakers, barbers, innkeepers, grape pickers and the chicken sellers, who “beg you” to elect “Epidius and Suettius as duoviri.” These various labor and business organizations wanted to make sure they had men in office who would keep their taxes low. Religious organizations also had their favorite candidates. Worshipers of the Egyptian goddess Isis urged passers-by “to elect Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus as aedile.”
Whether Vatia won the election and was sworn in in July is unknown, but the next month Vesuvius exploded and buried the town of Pompeii and its politicians under countless tons of pumice and ash.
Philip Freeman, a classics professor at Luther College, is the editor of “How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians.”
Clint Eastwood And The Logics Of Art And Politics
By
now, you’ve probably already seen or heard about Clint Eastwood’s
riveting, surreal address to the Republican National Convention (if you
haven’t, here’s a highlight reel and here’s the full thing), ably discussed by Mychal. The easiest way to understand what happened is, in Mike Grunwald’s words, simply that “a rambling old dude with no teleprompter” acted like, well, a rambling old dude with no teleprompter.But simply dismissing Eastwood’s performance as rambling insanity misses a crucial part of the speech: it was entertaining as all hell. Eastwood’s diatribe about Invisible Obama telling Romney to perform an anatomically impossible act on himself was met with riotous laughter from the delegates, as were most of his jokes. Even his politically importunate lines, like his poke at the futility of the War in Afghanistan, were well-received by the crowd. The speech was terrible politics, sure, but it was a funny stand-up routine — and that’s how the audience appeared to receive it.
One way to see Eastwood’s routine, then, isn’t that he bombed. It’s that he was doing he was doing the wrong kind of performance on the wrong kind of stage. In a certain sense, that shouldn’t be surprising. Though Eastwood isn’t shy about expressing his political views, and was once mayor of a small town in California, he isn’t a politician. First and foremost, Clint Eastwood is an artist and an entertainer. And the two types approach public performance in very different ways.
The qualities that make effective art are the opposites of the ones that make a good campaign spectacle. Art, even (or especially) when it’s political, succeeds by simultaneously entertaining the audience and opening up new avenues for thought. Art that attempts to lecture at you generally fails as art because it forgets what it’s best at doing. Campaign events, by contrast, are about selling one particular narrative as persuasively as possible. You’re supposed to come away from a campaign event or convention convinced that a particular candidate is Best For America, inspired to work for their campaign. It’s about getting you on a team, not getting you to laugh or think. Even humor deployed in a campaign event is carefully crafted to serve the event’s overall message rather than be comedy qua comedy. Political spectacle, while perhaps an art form, isn’t art.
So when the Romney campaign simply just told Eastwood to go talk (which is basically what happened), it was eminently predictable that he wasn’t going to give a campaign speech even if the scale of this particular meltdown was unimaginable. Eastwood has a history of making riveting, somewhat offensive political art; Gran Torino and its racist, cantankerous Jesus-protagonist being only the most recent and best example. When you throw someone with that sort of artistic sensibility in front of an enormous audience without a script or much advance planning, it’s utter folly to expect them to stay “on-message.” Clint Eastwood is a performer. He performed.
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