Posts Tagged ‘soap opera’
“So much of performing is a mind game”*…
As John Seamon explains, in describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory…
… Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.
Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text. In his book “Acting in Film,” actor Michael Caine described this process well:
You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously…
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Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use this strategy to enhance everyday retention. In picking up an apple at the grocers, for example, you can look at its color and size, you can say its name, and you can think of its nutritional value and use in a favorite recipe. Focusing on these visual, acoustic, and conceptual aspects of the apple correspond to shallow, moderate, and deep levels of processing, and the depth of processing that is devoted to an item or event affects its memorability. Memory is typically enhanced when we engage in deep processing that provides meaning for an item or event, rather than shallow processing. Given a list of common nouns to read, people recall more words on a surprise memory test if they previously attended to the meaning of each word than if they focused on each word’s font or sound.
Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known. Retention is enhanced because elaboration produces more meaningful associations than does shallow processing — links that can serve as potential cues for later remembering. For example, your ease of recalling the name of a specific dwarf in Walt Disney’s animated film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” depends on the cue and its associated meaning:
Try to recall the name of the dwarf that begins with the letter B.
People often have a hard time coming up with the correct name with this cue because many common names begin with the letter B and all of them are wrong. Try it again with a more meaningful cue:
Recall the name of the dwarf whose name is synonymous with shyness.
If you know the Disney film, this time the answer is easy. Meaningful associations help us remember, and elaborative processing produces more semantic associations than does shallow processing. This is why the meaningful cue produces the name Bashful…
On the art of recall: “How Actors Remember Their Lines,” an excerpt from Seamon’s book, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us About Memory, from @mitpress.
* Joshua Bell
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As we recollect, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that Guiding Light (AKA The Guiding Light) transferred from CBS Radio to CBS Television… and, as while radio actors could read from scripts, tv performers couldn’t, an enormous new occasion for the memorization of lines was created.
And indeed, there were lots and lots of lines to remember: with 72 years of radio and television runs (18,262 episodes), Guiding Light remains the longest-running soap opera, ahead of General Hospital, and is the fifth-longest-running program in all of global broadcast history.
“In the nineties, culture jamming has been used extensively for the subversion of advertising and brand culture”*…
In the 1990s, a group of radical artists smuggled political messages into Melrose Place…
… Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.
It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing.
The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended. Twenty-five years later, discovering this project while researching a book about the culture wars of the late 20th century, I was left with several questions: Who were these people? Is what they made art? Did it matter? And how in the hell did they get away with it for so long?
Television,” Mel Chin [see here] told me, “is the modern cathode ray etching products into our brains.” Chin is the MacArthur “genius grant”–winning artist who was the mastermind behind the GALA Committee. On the phone from North Carolina, where he now lives and works, he explained the confluence of factors that led to him making secret art for a blockbuster prime-time soap opera…
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… Over Melrose Place’s fourth and fifth seasons, the GALA Committee wound up smuggling more than 100 pieces of subversive art—VHS boxes marked STD, a baby’s crib mobile designed to look like an enormous remote control, a painting of “fireflies” based on the U.S. military’s bombing of Baghdad—onto American television screens. Some of the artworks were quite small—a cigar box that couldn’t be opened, for example, symbolically referencing the Cuban embargo—but some were massive. GALA went to the set of Shooters, the local watering hole frequented by the show’s characters, and relabeled all of its liquor bottles with works meant to document the intertwined histories of slavery, agribusiness, and alcohol in the United States. The committee designed an ad campaign for D&D called “Family Values,” which featured silhouettes of same-sex couples with children. (The “campaign” won the character of Billy a fictional advertising award.) Over those two and a half years, nearly every Melrose Place episode contained some large or small political statement, crafted by contemporary artists, tucked into shots with the show’s bombshells and hunks as they faked blindness, abruptly drowned, and tricked one another into thinking they had epilepsy…
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… It is very seldom that we get the opportunity to see art in its original context. When we go to a museum, we are viewing work that was originally intended for religious spaces, or Parisian salons in the 19th century, or the Leo Castelli Gallery at 4 E. 77th St. in Manhattan. Yet you can experience In the Name of the Place in its original context right now: Just stream an episode of Melrose Place from the show’s fourth or fifth season. Knowing what to look for transforms both the art project and the TV show that incubated it. Instead of a series of random curios, what emerges is a surreal embedding of the subtext of 1990s American life into the urtext of 1990s America: the American unspoken, slipped into the biggest, brightest, blondest version of America there was.
Soap operas have always been vehicles for our anxieties about marriage, domestic life, the workplace, and whether we could trust—or truly know—one another. In Melrose Place, those anxieties manifested in delicious plot twists, but the origins of those anxieties—the tyranny of heteronormativity, the AIDS crisis, the legacy of slavery—also popped up, subliminally but repeatedly, in a hundred or so mysterious, often hilarious objects. It’s as if the characters are dreaming, as if all of us are dreaming, and our subconscious keeps trying to show us something: something we could see, if only we could pay close enough attention…
The remarkable story of “The Virus Inside Your TV,” by @parabasis in @Slate. Eminently worth reading in full.
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As we plant Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that NBC aired a made-for-TV movie, The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid, which was based on a commercial Mean Joe Greene had done for Coca-Cola two years earlier.
In the ad, a young boy offers the football player a Coke after he loses the game. As a thank you, the player tosses his sweaty jersey to the kid. Considered one of the best commercials of all time, the film expanded the story so that Greene and some of his teammates adopt the boy (played by Henry Thomas, who would later star in E.T. The Extraterrestrial).
Possessed of the cloying sweetness of Original Coke, it is, as far as we know, free of covert political messages.
“Without geography you’re nowhere”*…
Finding meaning in maps…
You may not know it, but you’ve probably seen the Valeriepieris circle – it’s that circle on a map of the world, alongside the text ‘There are more people living inside this circle than outside of it’. The name ‘Valeriepieris’ is from the Reddit username of the person who posted it and in 2015 the circle was looked at in more detail by Danny Quah of the London School of Economics under the heading ‘The world’s tightest cluster of people‘. But of course it’s not actually a circle because it wasn’t drawn on a globe and it’s also a bit out of date now so I thought I’d look at this topic because I like global population density stuff. I’ll begin by posting a map of what I’m calling ‘The Yuxi Circle’ and then I’ll explain everything else below that – with lots of maps. As in the original circle, I decided to use a radius of 4,000 km, or just under 2,500 miles. Why Yuxi? Well, out of all the cities I looked at (more than 1,500 worldwide), Yuxi had the highest population within 4000km – just over 55% of the world’s population as of 2020…
More– including fascinating comparisons– at “The Yuxi Circle,” from Alasdair Rae (@undertheraedar)
* Jimmy Buffett
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As we ponder population, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that the day-time soap opera As The World Turns aired its 10,000th episode. Created by Irna Phillips, it aired for 54 years (from April 2, 1956, to September 17, 2010); its 13,763 hours of cumulative narrative gave it the longest total running time of any television show. Actors including, Marissa Tomei, Meg Ryan, Amanda Seyfried, Julianne Moore, and Emmy Rossum all appeared on the series.
“Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed”*…
The economy is in a very confusing place. Happily, the good folks at Full Stack Economics weigh in with data in the form of illuminating charts….
It’s a turbulent time for the US economy. The economy largely shut down in March 2020 only to come roaring back a year later with the highest inflation in almost 40 years. No one is sure what’s going to happen next.
At Full Stack Economics, we believe that charts are an essential way to understand the complexities of the modern economy. So in recent weeks, I’ve been looking far and wide for the most surprising and illuminating charts about the US economy. I’ve compiled 18 of my favorites here. I hope you enjoy it…
Speaking for myself, I did enjoy (and appreciate) it. I’m still confused, but I’m confused at a much higher level.
Take a look for yourself: “18 charts that explain the American economy,” from @fullstackecon (@AlanMCole and @binarybits)
* Chinese proverb (often mis-attributed to Lao Tzu)
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As we ponder the portents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1937, on NBC Radio, that The Guiding Light premiered. A soap opera created by Irna Phillips, who helped develop the template for the day-time serial drama targeted to women, it ran for a decade before shifting to CBS Radio, where it ran until 1956. But in 1952, CBS transplanted the series to television, where it ran as a daily (weekday afternoon) staple until 2009.
Irna went on to create other soaps (e.g., Another World) and in the process to introduce and mentor the giants of the form (including William J. Bell, James Lipton, and the great Agnes Nixon). With 72 years of radio and television runs, Guiding Light is the longest running soap opera, ahead of General Hospital, and is the fifth-longest running program in all of broadcast history– behind only the country music radio program Grand Ole Opry (first broadcast in 1925), the BBC religious program The Daily Service (1928), the CBS religious program Music and the Spoken Word (1929), and the Norwegian children’s radio program Lørdagsbarnetimen (1924–2010).
“H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?”*…
A treatise on the the letter “H,” on the occasion of its becoming an arbiter of class in the later 19th century…
In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which inspired the musical My Fair Lady, a fictional linguist describes a phonetic endemic: missed employment opportunities due to the connotations of a person’s accent. Addressing the “many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue”, the professor insists that “the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first”. Shaw’s wit shows through in the near homonym: aspirations of social mobility, in this period, often included pronunciationary emulation — the breathy aitch sounds of aspirated consonants.
Alfred Leach, who Steven Connor, in Beyond Words, calls one of the “doughiest defenders of the h”, believed that English’s aspirated aitch (or rather, haitch) signaled a direct inheritance from Classical antiquity. In the pronounced h of words like “herb” — notably lacking from American English — he heard the “spiritus asper” of Hellenism. Leach was writing in a period when linguists began reflecting on the shifting history of aspirates and the role they played in indicating status, class, and education. These traits continue into our present day. The historian of language Henry Hitchings, whose own name is uncannily reminiscent of Shaw’s Henry Higgins, argues that the pronunciation of this letter is “still a significant shibboleth”, and quotes Leach’s contemporary, Oxford scholar Henry Sweet, who called it “an almost infallible test of education and refinement”.
Why so much huffing about the letter H? Throughout the nineteenth century, this aspirated sound was on the rise. At the end of the previous century, Received Pronunciation (RP) became known as the accent of aristocracy, leading to aspirational elocution guides like Poor Letter H (1854). While words like “hotel” had once been pronounced in the French style (oh-tell), English speakers had begun to exhale audibly, as if yawning at the continued Norman influence on British tongues. Leach led the charge against “English Grammarians” who “conspired to withhold from us the means of propitiating this demon Aspirate”. In The Letter H, he ridicules those he calls “H-droppers”, speakers whose phonetic errors seem to snowball: “lost H’s have a knack of turning up in wrong places, when they return at all”. Leach is prone to hyperbole — “the early aspirative labours of a converted H-dropper give birth to monstrosities” — and sneers at Cockney speech: “Horkney hoysters, ‘amshire ‘am, and ‘am and heggs”…
More, from Hunter Dukes (@hunterdukes) in @PublicDomainRev: “Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880)“
(image above: source)
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), The Hostile Hospital
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As we ponder pronunciation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Coronation Street premiered in ITV in the UK. It holds the Guinness World Record for longest running soap opera.
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