Tetherd Cow Ahead

The most recent effort in Australia to turn people off the idea of smoking has involved a confronting television campaign, and the printing on the cigarette packets of very graphic images of the effects of the habit; pictures of mouth cancers, rotting teeth, limbs with gangrene and so forth. Here’s a link (not for the squeamish).

Up until now, the packets have carried simple printed warnings, but the new ones are starting to appear on the shelf.

Last night a young woman beside me in the supermarket asked for a pack of Benson & Hedges:

“I don’t mean to be difficult, but can I get a packet without the scary photo? You know, just one with the warning that says ‘Smoking Kills You’?”

Even though that last story was told as an amusing anecdote, it points, as some of you quickly realized, to some fundamental and important ideas about sound and the way we perceive it.

The question “What if we could have the sound of nothing, rather than silence?” is not a question about sound. It is a question about psychology. Many questions about sound are.

My director continued:

“What I mean is that sound, you know, when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing there… You know, not silence, but an absence of sound.”

And, although there’s a complete logical stump-jump here, I do in fact know exactly what he means.

Of course there is no such thing in the natural world as ‘an absence of sound’.

The quietest natural environment in which I’ve ever been was a cave in Jenolan in Eastern Australia. I was helping some friends complete a geographical survey. They were also divers, and needed to survey a section of the cave that was underwater. I couldn’t help much with that part of the exercise so I sat in the cavern as they disappeared into the inky black water and listened as their scuba bubbles trailed off into… silence.

There was no sound. No water lap, no dripping, no wind, no airconditioner, no next-door tv, no conversation down the hall, no computer drives, no distant traffic. Nothing. After a while, if I moved, any little noise I made sounded unnaturally loud. It was dead, dead quiet. Silence. Well, no actually. Not silence. I could hear my breathing. I could hear my blood moving. I could hear my heart beating. Wow, after a while it was actually noisy. I knew at that moment that human beings never, ever know true silence.

But we nearly all have some experience of that deep contemplative quietness of nature, or the dark black hush of the early morning hours, or the unbearable silent weight of gaps between speech at a funeral.

The question my director is really asking, then, is a different one: “Is it possible for us to have our audience feel that kind of mental silence within the bounds of what we are doing?”

And the answer, in my educated opinion, is that in this particular excercise we will achieve that effect. Because it’s not about the sound we put there, in that place where silence is, but rather, how we get there and what we have encouraged people to be thinking at that time.

Listening is only partially about hearing.

The Art of (Cat) War #1:

Use extreme caution when your opponent gains control of the higher ground.

May Contain Traces of Nuts*

This is a little bag of snacky-type things they hand out on Vietnam Airlines.

This is the ingredient list on the back:

So far so good. Roasted mixed nuts, salt, vegetable oil. Yep, you know exactly what you’re gonna see when you open that little packet, right?

Wrong! You are in Vietnam, remember, where all rules and laws are merely suggestions.

This is what you’re really going to see:

I have marked for you the actual nuts. Yes, you counted right, three (3) cashews. Which as my friend Simon pointed out, are not even technically nuts. Everything else is definitely not a nut, even the cunning little things that look like peanuts. There are peas, little starchy corn things, and the fake peanuts that are probably made of some kind of crunchy soy product.

True, there was salt (probably – it tasted salty), and vegetable oil (I guess being charitable it could even have been peanut oil…). All in all though, the ingredient list is a much better guide to what’s not in the packet.

I had such a great time in Vietnam.

In Quang Ngai City, where I spent most of my time, there is a new supermarket. We love the supermarket. It is a place where you can spend a good few hours browsing.

In the liquor section, there was a bottle of wine which was labelled ‘Wine with Young Bees’. Floating in the bottom inch and a half of the bottle was a sludge of bee larvae. I held it up and to an old man who was watching us curiously examining the swirling insect brood.

“Good?” I mimed, with a big smile and a raise of the eyebrows.

“Nope”, he mimed back, shaking his head and making a face that said “this is one of the most disgusting things ever invented. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

Outside the supermarket, the road is divided into two sets of two lanes by a median strip. This is the only median strip in Quang Ngai. A median strip in Quang Ngai makes about a much sense as an amber traffic light.

You don’t need to understand Vietnamese to get the sense of perplexity people feel about the median strip.

“Why have they done this? What – we are supposed to cycle all the way down the end of this to the corner, turn around and come back to get to something on the other side? Why are they messing with our heads like this? Next they’ll be coming up with some daft concept like, oh, saying you can only go one way down a street or something.”

Consequently, if you need to get to a place on the other side of the median strip from where you are, you just ignore it! You just get on the other side of the median strip and cycle to where you want to be. Like it doesn’t exist.

I love Vietnam. Did I mention?

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*If you’re lucky.

This is a leaf from a small plant in a pot in my backyard. It’s a tree. An apple tree in fact, and not just any apple tree. It’s an identical copy of perhaps the most famous apple tree in the history of humankind (I exclude mythical apple trees).

Let me tell you its story.

My friend Rod is a cider maker. In Australia it’s pretty hard to make good cider unless you grow your own apples, because cider is not just made from your average garden-variety apple tree. As a consequence, Rod has become fairly knowedgeable about apple trees, and especially interested in apple trees that might have a little bit of heritage.

Some years ago, Rod’s partner Michelle was in Parkes, in western NSW, on holiday with their children. Parkes is the home of one of Australia’s most famous scientific landmarks, the Parkes Radio Telescope,* which was a stop on their itinerary. While they were there, Michelle noticed an old apple tree in the grounds. A small plaque on the neglected tree told visitors that it was a descendant of the tree under which Isaac Newton sat while formulating his hypotheses on the nature of the force of gravity. Rod travelled to Parkes and asked the management at the telescope if he might take some cuttings. It worked out well – the old tree got a much-needed prune, and Rod got a number of cuttings, or scions.

Rod tells me that his research has uncovered the information that the variety of the tree is called ‘Flower of Kent’ and the original tree was growing in Newton’s mother’s garden at Woolsthorpe Manor, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Newton had gone there to escape the plague which was rife in London at the time, and stayed there from 1665-1666 while he was consolidating his ideas on gravitation.

Apple trees are usually propagated clonally, that is, cuttings from one tree are grafted onto a sturdy rootstock to grow into maturity. This means that the descendants of the Newton tree are genetically identical to their parent tree. Clones of the Newton tree have been circulated to various scientific institutions across the globe. Parkes Radio Telescope was one of the destinations to which a Newton apple made its way. Rod made several new clones from the parent, one of which went back to the telescope grounds to be re-established in a suitable place at the visitor centre.

Rod also very kindly gave me one of the new little trees. I am not really sure he knew exactly how much it meant to me, but it is one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever received. I really wish I had a garden in which I could plant it. My tiny inner city house has nowhere at all for me to put it as it starts to grow. I’m now on the lookout for its new home. My intention is to plant it this winter with the ashes of my beloved Kate. I know she would like that.

*The Parkes Radio Telescope played an important part in the Apollo 11 moon landing.

In Tod Browning’s Dracula, there’s a great scene where Jonathan Harker arrives at Dracula’s castle and The Count bids Harker follow him up the stairs to his rooms. Bela Lugosi, in his most famous and inimitable role, walks up the stone stairway, across which is spun a huge spiderweb. He passes through the cobweb without even disturbing so much as a thread. Harker looks on dumbfounded and is forced to push away the thick webs so that he can follow. A spider scuttles away into the darkness.

It’s an amazingly creepy moment, and few cinema special effects have ever surpassed it for me. How is the Count’s unnerving act achieved? Simply with an edit: Dracula approaches the web, cut to Harker’s reaction, cut to Dracula on the other side of the web. Just like that.

You can pick up the Browning Dracula on DVD for a few dollars. It’s worth it. Sure, the script is lumbering and melodramatic by today’s standards, but I guarantee, if you sit in a darkened room with no distractions and immerse yourself in the black and white world of Browning’s interpretation, you can’t fail to be enveloped by the dark, dank atmosphere and the claustrophobic story.

If that scene was being made today, it would go very differently. Dracula would beckon Harker, and turn with a swirl of his cape into a tight close-up. Harker would not see The Count’s face morph for an instant into the visage of some hideous fanged-demon. Dracula would approach the cobweb, which would unwind strand by strand around his dark form. He would pass through the untwining web which a digital spider would then re-spin behind him. The sequence would have fifteen different CGI shots, thirty or forty cuts and a whole swag of obvious over-the-top sound effects. It would be impressive, possibly, but it would not be in the least bit creepy.

The modern cinema of the fantastic has lost its imagination. It has also lost its respect for the ability of the audience to have an imagination. In the Browning Dracula the spookiest moment of Dracula passing through the spiderweb happens way off screen, deep in the imagination of the viewer. No amount of clever CGI can ever hope to compete with that.

It’s time for ideas again. We’re all tired of seeing intricately detailed dinosaurs, gravity-defying superheroes and toothy aliens that look like they have bad head colds. We’ve seen it. It’s boring.

How about this for an idea Hollywood? Take away a third of the budget you spend on special effects and put it into creating some decent original stories. And for Pete’s sake, take some risks for a change.