MagicThought

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: the paternal, symbolic narrative of his-tory is told for the eye; the maternal, imaginary narrative of her-story is told for the ear. As such, it should come as no surprise that potentially the first woman president in the history of this nation, Barack Obama, has a more pleasing voice than Hillary. You’ll notice that the first word to describe the Barackster’s voice is “Magic.”

Does Obama’s baritone give him an edge?

A powerful voice is a “god-given sound,” says opera’s Lotfi Mansouri. Obama’s baritone seems to have that magic. Clinton’s higher-pitched voice, not so much.
By Frank Browning

Feb. 28, 2008 | What is it about Barack Obama’s baritone?

Aside from the symbolism of finding a new hero who might displace the shame and fear that has poisoned American public life since Martin Luther King’s murder in 1968, there is something in the very essence of Obama’s voice — its tone, its timbre, its resonance — that has struck deep chords among Americans and foreigners in this year’s campaign season. Not since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 has a black American moved so many other Americans, white or black. And once the matter of voice was raised for Obama, a not always flattering parallel immediately arose concerning the voice of the first real female candidate in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton.

Eager to probe deeper into the chords of the candidates, I called two of the world’s specialists on what moves us as listeners to others’ voices, Lotfi Mansouri and Rick Harrell, who have coached singers at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Conservatory opera program.

Says Lotfi, “The fact is that the basic timbre is a god-given sound. Through technique and vocal study and all that, you can learn to control it and develop it, but you cannot manufacture timbre artificially.” Adds Rick Harrell, “The old saying is the eye is the window of the soul. Well I would say the voice is the window into the heart. People, whether they be actors or politicians, can be slick and manipulative and pretend to be genuine or heartfelt. However, the sound of the voice or the sound of a baby’s cry or the sound of someone saying, ‘Please! I can do what’s best for our country.’ It comes across at a very gut level more so than at an intellectual level.”

When it happens that something within us shivers or tingles at the words of a great and moving voice — Martin Luther King Jr. for my generation, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt for my parents, or even perhaps for some others Benito Mussolini — it is because there is something that leaps forth from the very anatomy of the speaker, revealing the innate grain that vibrates with a receptive grain of our own. It is not about goodness or morality or truth-telling and is little affected by coaching or practice.

The late French semiotician Roland Barthes touched on this vocal magic in a famous essay called “The Grain of the Voice.” He cites the power of a Russian church cantor’s chant: “something … is directly in the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages … as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings.” Barthes goes on: “The ‘grain’ is … the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.” Like the variable grain of an oak or a walnut, it reveals, if we let ourselves hear it, the integral character of the person before us.

Mansouri and Harrell also wanted to talk about another iconic American voice — that of Frank Sinatra. By no account did Sinatra possess a great singing voice. To the contrary, it was by most musical assessments decidedly mediocre. And yet, when Sinatra sang, it was as though he filled all the inner and outer dimensions of our experience. “Take ‘One for My Baby,’” Lotfi said to illustrate. “He didn’t just sing the words; you got the whole atmosphere inside and around the words and you were enveloped by it.” Like the great Ella Fitzgerald, whom he studied, Sinatra employed all the technique he could muster: tone, phrasing, inflection, the single note prolonged beyond endurance. Yet all of that would have been as nothing had the story he was telling in his songs not also been the elemental, physical story of his own life. The mediocrity of his lightweight baritone disappeared and we became travelers on the pulsars generated by the anatomy of his voice box in a separate universe of his making.

Can we say that Barack Obama achieves something similar when he speaks his chant for change? That is apparently what is happening for tens of millions of Americans, not to mention the cheering galleries across Europe and around the world who want it to be so.

But set against that resonant Obama grain there is what appears to be a counter-grain of what is all too often labeled Hillary the Shrill, including all the gendered codes buried beneath the word “shrill.”

Natasha Williams, a longtime friend from Ukraine, who directs the Balagula Theatre in Lexington, Ky., says simply that it is jarring to hear a lineup of self-important, deeper-voiced males followed by a higher-pitched female. We are conditioned, she says, to look for authority in the male voice — even though she finds the Republican heir-apparent John McCain squeaky and the now withdrawn John Edwards tweaky. Hillary’s problem arises, Natasha says, “when she gets excited and it comes across as angry and that upsets voters more than if she were an angry man. It’s connected to the fact that when the mother is upset in a house, kids feel insecure. It’s not like that with the father because the mother stands in between the kids and the father. But when mother loses it, then it’s really scary because the whole sense of security goes tumbling down.”

That’s one interpretation. Lynn Meyer, who’s done everything from political consulting to selling Florida real estate to writing a detective novel, has a different take on how men hear women’s voices. “There are two voices that don’t seem very threatening [to men]. One is the little girl voice — either Valley girl or Jackie Kennedy’s little tiny whisper. The other is Lauren Bacall’s [she lowers her own deep and gravelly] very sexy voice. Anything between these two, women have to be very careful they don’t sound like what I call ‘the voice of civilization.’ That’s the voice who told you to eat your spinach, take your elbows off the table, asked you where’s your homework. It’s a voice that sounds like a bit of mother, then schoolteacher, and finally nagging wife.”

Sound like that and you’re dead in the water. That is too often Hillary’s problem when she gets excited, Lynn says. “Every time she changes her register, people use that awful, sexist word ’shrill’ and that’s really code for the voice of the scold.”

I put that proposition to Rick Harrell, the San Francisco Opera coach, who agreed that shrill is death to any public performer: “We wouldn’t want our hectoring mother speaking to us from the White House for the next four years.” Harrell’s Opera colleague Lotfi Mansouri broke in, “It’s a preconception. A cultural preconception.”

One of those apparent cultural preconceptions afoot in the current political fray is a rather odd preoccupation with the baritone quality of Barack Obama’s voice, an insight pointed out by my radio colleague Brenda Wilson, a woman raised in Virginia who often speaks in grave stentorian stanzas. “Type in the phrase ‘Obama’s voice’ on Google and see what you get,” she advised one day.

I did so as I was listening on the transatlantic phone line. “OK,” I said, still clueless. “There are a lot of listings.”

“More than just a lot, Frankie-boy,” she answered. “How many do you see?”

“Yeah, there are a lot. A whole lot. Sixty-some thousand. But what’s that prove?” I persisted. “Everybody knows he’s a great speaker.”

“Yes,” she said, the schoolmarm slipping into her instructions. “Now, type in ‘Obama’s baritone.’ What do you see?”

“Whoa!” I answered. “Two hundred and sixty-nine thousand results!”

“Um-hm,” she murmured.

I waited.

“That’s all,” she said. “Isn’t it curious that the hot candidate gets to be described as a baritone? I mean, really, what’s so good about baritones?” I took the question back to Rick Harrell.

“When you hear commercials, whether on the radio or voice-overs on television, when they’re saying, ‘Trust me, buy this,’ or ‘Trust me, go here, go there,’ as often as not it is a baritone voice. If they want to get you excited and stimulated, then they’ll go for a higher-pitched sound.”

Probing further into the hidden presumptions and preconceptions of the baritone, I came back to an old reference from Freud’s student Theodor Reik, who proposed that the true baritone is an evocation of the ancient shofar, the ram’s horn that came from Abraham’s sacrificial sheep but was also the instrument Moses used to call the wandering tribes together at Sinai to hear the thundering words of God. Retreaded into 20th century neo-Freudianism the shofar/baritone becomes the vocal embodiment of phallic authority.

Hear my horn, hear my authority. It’s not a great leap to hear the multiple meanings of the horn.

Freudians, we know, can find something phallic in just about anything that speaks, breathes or moves. But such interpretations of the power of the baritone long antedate Freud or even the children of Abraham. Last summer Harvard anthropologist Coren Apicella took herself and some tape recorders to visit the Hazda people of Tanzania, who live pretty much as their ancestors did several millennia ago. Apicella wanted to know what voice had to do with seduction, fertility and reproduction. To get at the question she invited a clutch of Hazda men into her Land Rover and asked each one to say, “Ujambo,” or “Hello,” in Swahili. Then she played her recordings for a group of Hazda women and asked them to rate the voices.

Hands down, the women chose the baritone “Ujambos” over the higher-pitched ones. “Why there’s this relationship we’re not entirely sure yet. It could be that these men have greater access to mates. And so maybe these men that have deeper voices have higher levels of testosterone, maybe they’re better hunters and they’re able to bring more food home to their wives,” Apicella told NPR reporter Sean Bowditch. As it happens, when Apicella reversed the gender recording, the Hazda men seemed to prefer women with higher voices.

When it comes to the public arena, however, baritone is still the winning vocal register — as Obama’s string of primary victories, even among blue-collar white men, would suggest. It all comes back to how the baritone “is the voice one tends to associate with authority,” as opera coach Rick Harrell says, to get people to buy stuff or take certain medicines or, where candidates are concerned, to “trust … [that they] know what’s good for the country.”

– By Frank Browning

You know for a long time I felt that the cultural unconscious was working itself to put the maternal at the locus of authority in this country, given the obsolescence of the paternal narratives brought on by the verifiability of paternity through paternity tests. Given that the for the first time in history fathers no longer have to abstract the paternal role in procreation in terms of the culture’s dominant writing technology, it just seemed the right time for the maternal imaginary to make a comeback. That led me to believe that Hillary would get the nomination and the election. Perhaps I was right, but had chosen the wrong mother.

The First Woman President?
Obama’s campaign bends gender conventions

SPECIAL GUEST COLUMNIST
Updated: 11:49 AM ET Feb 26, 2008
It has been a rarity in modern political life: a wide-open race for the nomination of both parties. But whatever happens from here on out, this campaign will always be remembered for the emergence of the first serious woman candidate for president: Barack Obama.

Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president.

It was Toni Morrison who first had the insight. In a 1998 essay in the New Yorker, the Nobel Prize-winning author described Bill Clinton as “the first black president,” commenting on his saxophone playing and his displaying “almost every trope of blackness.”

Obama doesn’t play the sax. But he is pushing against conventional—and political party nominating convention—wisdom in five important ways, with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities and values that women bring to organizational life: a commitment to inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing all the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is taking a more traditional (and male?) authoritarian approach.

Obama is advocating conversation and collaboration—talking with everybody, including those with whom he has significant disagreements. Several of the so-called “gaffes” targeted by Clinton and GOP front runner John McCain have been about Obama’s willingness to talk with people we aren’t supposed to like, such as various factions in the Middle East.

Clinton’s campaign, on the other hand, is centered on the idea that she is the experienced realist. She understands the rules in this man’s game of politics and governing, knows how to play by them and win, and can take the heat that inevitably comes with entering the fray. Obama’s argument is that he understands the rules and knows how to play by them—but that he wants to change those rules, because they embody values with which he does not agree. He manages to hold his realism and his optimism in constructive tension together, even though it opens him up to the charge that he is naive.

Clinton proposes policy solutions to every problem. She has the answers, fulfilling our expectations of an aspiring authority figure and the brightest person in the class. Obama often proposes process plans, without specific policy solutions, such as bringing together all the interested parties on global warming and having them hash out their differences in a transparent forum, taking the risk that what they come up with will not be his preferred outcome.

Obama is willing to acknowledge his indiscretions and not apologize for them. His drug use was part of his journey. He returned the campaign contributions of a former friend with an unsavory past. Clinton seems to think that admitting mistakes or acknowledging indiscretions—having second thoughts—is a sign of weakness.

Clinton’s message is that she will drive her solutions to enactment and implementation despite the forces of evil lurking everywhere. As a woman, Clinton feels constrained to portray herself as tough, competitive, willing to take on the bad guys. She has to be more male than men, in the same way that women are reluctant to leave the office early to pick up their children at day care because they fear they will not be thought of as serious about their careers, while men are applauded for doing so.

Obama can raise possibilities that are off the table for Clinton. She needs to tell us that she can solve our problems. Obama seems comfortable in what we think of as a female role: not overpromising what he can accomplish, and telling us that the work of change is ours as much as it is his. As recently as his speech in Wisconsin right after the Potomac primaries, Obama told his listeners that any real change was going to require difficult work on their part.

Elections aren’t about leadership. They are about winning, and winning requires pandering: telling people what they want to hear. Leadership is often about giving people news they don’t want to hear. My favorite definition of leadership is disappointing your own people at the rate that they can absorb.

While Obama has tried to combine optimism and realism, John McCain is the only candidate in the race who has consistently delivered messages that his constituents did not want to hear. He is the only one who has regularly gone in front of hostile crowds and been willing to stand and defend positions—on immigration, the Iraqi war, ethanol, restoring jobs in Michigan, and campaign finance—that were certain to offend people whose votes he was trying to secure. Despite the gender-bending styles displayed by Obama and Clinton, McCain’s manner of exercising leadership is an androgynous and rare activity.

Martin Linsky is co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and a longtime faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

One need only look briefly at any number of cultural traditions to know that when there’s a major technological transition in a given historical moment, then the monstrous mother comes out of hiding. I’m thinking here of Medea (greek alphabet) or Lady Macbeth (printing press) to name only two of many. Thus we should not be surprised at the recent spate of mothers killing their children as we move inexorably toward the total dissolution of analog culture, at the same point in the cultural unconscious when another mother grows more monstrous as her bid for the White House falters. Oh and notice that both writers of the following NYT article are Mac people vs PC, as in “M(a)cFadden” and “Macropoulous,” the latter name clearly of ancient Greek Origins, but also sonically identical to the name of a computer company

http://www.macropolis.hu/

and the title of a graphic novel about a sadistic serial killer created by, errr…. “Dreamweave Productions.”

http://www.hillcity-comics.com/graphic_novels/new_graphic_novel1549.htm

The ear knows all.

February 25, 2008
Mother Is Held in L.I. Slaying of 3 Children

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS
A Long Island woman described as emotionally disturbed and afraid of losing custody of her children called the police on Sunday and led officers into a blood-spattered bedroom where her young daughter and two small sons lay slain on a bed, investigators said.

The woman, Leatrice Brewer, 27, who lived with the children in an apartment in the Nassau County hamlet of New Cassel, was taken to a hospital for physical and mental examinations, the police said. Late Sunday evening, she was charged with the murder of all three children.

Neither the police nor the county medical examiner said what caused the death of the children, who were identified as Jewell Ward, 6; Michael Demesyeux, 5; and Innocent Demesyeux, 18 months old. But investigators said one appeared to have been drowned, while the others had been slashed to death.

“It was a very disturbing scene, not only because they were children,” Detective Lt. Kevin Smith of the Nassau police said of the bedroom where the victims were found, at 891 Prospect Avenue in New Cassel. He declined to give details, pending inquiries by homicide detectives and the medical examiner.

The killings on Sunday appeared to add another grim chapter to a growing casebook of children slain by mothers: five drowned in a bathtub near Houston; two battered with rocks in Tyler, Tex.; three drowned in San Francisco Bay. The cases — some ending in verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity — have ignited a national debate over mental illness and the legal definition of insanity.

Nassau authorities declined to discuss any motives behind Sunday’s killings. But relatives and acquaintances described Ms. Brewer as emotionally unstable.

The two fathers of the children said they had tried through the courts to gain custody. Ricky Ward, Jewell’s father, said he had been trying in Family Court for a year. “Whenever I tried to get my daughter, Family Court wouldn’t let me,” he said. “The courts wouldn’t hear me out. I blame this on Leatrice Brewer and Family Court.”

In the 12 years that he had known her, Mr. Ward said Ms. Brewer had tried to kill herself a number of times. The Nassau police said they were investigating a report that she had jumped out a window of her apartment on Sunday. “He problem was her mind state,” Mr. Ward said. “She wasn’t stable and wasn’t able to communicate. She didn’t want anyone to have her kids. It’s a tragedy that my daughter’s gone.”

Innocent Demesyeux, the father of Ms. Brewer’s two sons, said that he and Ms. Brewer had been battling in court for 18 months over visitation rights and custody of the boys, and that she feared she might soon lose custody.

“I’ve been fighting to see them,” he said. Interviewed while sitting in a car parked outside the scene of the killings, Mr. Demesyeux, 28, of Hollis, Queens, said he had last seen his sons a month ago. He said that he and Ms. Brewer had a date in Nassau County Family Court on Monday, and that he had hoped to win the case. He said Ms. Brewer had missed court dates recently and had refused to take drug tests, which he said he had passed.

He said that he had recently been in contact with a county child protective services agency and that a representative was to have visited Ms. Brewer’s apartment on Friday. It was unclear if that visit took place.

Some neighbors said Ms. Brewer had behaved bizarrely. “I used to see her walking down the street during the day in her pajamas,” said Lisa Jones, who said she was a distant relative of Ms. Brewer. Asked if Ms. Brewer had seemed mentally unstable, Ms. Jones said, “Absolutely.”

Tatiana Wideman, 13, who said she had been a baby sitter for Innocent, said of Ms. Brewer: “She was stressed out. Everybody knew it. She would go around asking people for money.”

The Rev. Elijah Crawford, pastor of the Healing Power Church, spoke on behalf of the family at the Westbury home of a relative of Ms. Brewer’s, where family members had gathered. He said he had been told that Ms. Brewer had snapped because money she had expected from a social services agency — money she needed for the children — had failed to arrive.

“She didn’t get it, and snapped out,” the pastor said. He later said of family members: “They don’t know what happened. All they know is that she snapped. They said she had great love for her children. It’s just something that happened all of a sudden.”

Lieutenant Smith said the police responded to a 911 call at 8:55 a.m., summoning them to the Prospect Avenue address. It is a white-brick, two-story apartment building on the northwest corner of Swalm Street.The avenue, lined with commercial and residential buildings, is the main thoroughfare of New Cassel, a hamlet in the town of North Hempstead with 13,000 residents.

The 911 caller was apparently Ms. Brewer, but the police declined to specify what was said. Officers arriving at the scene found a building with four apartments, two on the ground floor and two upstairs, and were met on the second-floor landing by Ms. Brewer, who took them into her apartment, No. 3, and then into the bedroom, where the three children lay on a bed.

The children, the lieutenant said, were “obviously dead.”

Homicide detectives and dozens of police officers arrived shortly afterward, along with a crime scene investigation truck, which pulled into a driveway behind the building. The avenue was cordoned off to vehicular traffic, and yellow tape was set up to contain the large crowd — people from New Cassel and adjacent Westbury, as well as members of the news media — who gathered to watch the police activity.

Many people emerging from nearby church services joined the throng, and the talk for much of the day was of the deaths of the children, whose bodies were in the building all day and into the evening. They were to be taken to the medical examiner’s office in Mineola, and an autopsy was planned for Monday.

While the debate over degrees of mental illness and the legal definition of insanity continues, mental health experts and defense lawyers in recent years have been encouraged by the outcome of several high-profile cases in which mothers who killed their children have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to mental institutions instead of prisons.

Last year, Lashuan Harris, 24, who threw her three young sons to their deaths in San Francisco Bay in 2005, was declared insane by a judge one day after a California jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. The defense argued that she was schizophrenic, borderline mentally retarded and convinced that she was acting on orders from God when she threw the boys — ages 6, 2 and 16 months — into the water.

In 2006, Andrea P. Yates, who drowned her five small children in a bathtub at their home in the Houston area in 2001, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in her second trial. In 2002, another jury had convicted her of murder, rejecting defense claims that she was so psychotic that she thought she was saving the souls of her children by killing them. An appeals court overturned that conviction because of erroneous testimony by a prosecution witness.

And in 2004, Deanna L. Laney, who bashed in the heads of her sons, 6 and 8 years old, in Tyler, Tex., in 2003, saying that God had ordered her to do it, was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity.

Her lawyers argued that insanity was the only way to explain why Ms. Laney, a deeply religious woman who had home-schooled her children, would kill her sons without shedding a tear. Psychiatrists testified that Ms. Laney believed that she was chosen by God to kill her children as a test of faith.

You know for years I’ve been wondering why Dragons play such a big role in all of these myths of parthenogenesis, paternity, and literacy. Well, I think I just figured it out, thanks to an article that appeared today in the NYT. It’s all there in the first line of the article: “DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion.” Having put together these seemingly incompatible mythic figures, the article then proceeds to provide scientific evidence of what they have in common. Both can give birth apparently without any role played by fathers. No wonder it’s a dragon that Cadmus slays, then plants its teeth in the ground, giving birth to both the founding Greek Paternal line and the alphabet.

February 24, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

By NEIL SHUBIN
Chicago

DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.

Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.

But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.

Komodos — like many fish, amphibians and reptiles — have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.

Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year.

The shark example is particularly striking because sharks are very primitive living fish, having shared a common ancestor with us over 400 million years ago. Biological cloning is not a recent invention of scientists; it is an ancient ability. And sharks, fish and lizards are probably only the tip of the iceberg. We know of virgin birth only in those rare instances when we’ve been lucky enough to see it. Nobody knows how common it is because there has been no systematic search for the phenomenon.

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes — there are many varied ways.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.

Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, is the author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”

First “Teeth,” now “The Eye,” the latest American remake of a Japanese Horror film — a trend started by the success of the American remake of “The Ring” — movies this year seem to be increasingly (albeit unconsciously) troubled by the threat posed to human existence in an era dominated by the Symbolic, thanks to the seemingly unstoppable digitalization of life as we know it. And all in a year when, at least on the Democratic side of things, the race for executive authority seems to be grounded in epistemic authority, i.e., the written page, as in the old joke, “What’s black and white and read all over?” That one of those candidates was raised without a father, and the other is a mother, makes it all the more interesting.

Thus, the latest remake, “The Eye,” starring Jessica Alba, who rose to fame starring in the tv show, “Dark Angel,” shortens the distance between the symbolic and the real (Death) by eliminating the need for the analog video cassette and tv set Samara must rely on to share her disturbing vision of the real. Alternatively, Alba’s character is given all of the technology she needs to navigate the symbolic through a cornea transplant. Once a blind violinist who was compelled to live almost totally in the imaginary, the realm of the ear and the inner eye, she now has access to the external world. Such access, as in The Sixth Sense, means that “She can see dead people.” Inevitably, what the film may suggest is that now that the maternal/imaginary is threatened with extinction, all of us may see dead people if we look hard enough because — increasingly forced as we are to live in a virtual/digital world — we have essentially become dead. Here’s a review from today’s NYT.
Dr.B.

It’s Enough to Make Anyone Blink

By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
“I want to see the world like everyone else,” the blind violinist Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) whines at the beginning of “The Eye,” the latest Western deconstruction of a successful Asian horror movie.

If only Ms. Alba’s narration — as vapid as her acting — were the film’s only problem. Blind since the age of 5, Sydney is unprepared when a cornea transplant not only restores her sight but also allows her to see dead people. As the departed stalk her in elevators and accost her in corridors, Sydney resolves to trace the origins of her new peepers. Naturally, every step of this journey must be spelled out — twice.

The original “Eye,” directed by the Thai filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, was an insinuating ghost story that cleverly exploited cinema’s fascination with all things ocular. But what the Pangs accomplished with little more than a talent for framing and focus, this remake (directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud) fails to achieve, despite an arsenal of strobe lighting and crashing chords. The debt owed by both movies to “The Sixth Sense” and “The Mothman Prophecies” is only more obvious.

Louder and more literal than its inspiration, “The Eye” benefits from a spiky performance by Alessandro Nivola as Sydney’s rehabilitation counselor. “Your eyes are not the problem,” he tells her at one point. He is so, so right.

“The Eye” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has bleeding eyeballs, burning corpses and screaming violins.

THE EYE

Opened on Friday nationwide.

Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud; written by Sebastian Gutierrez, based on the film “Gin Gwai” by Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oxide Pang and Danny Pang; director of photography, Jeffrey Jur; edited by Patrick Lussier; music by Marco Beltrami; production designer, James Spencer; produced by Paula Wagner, Don Granger and Michelle Manning; released by Lionsgate and Paramount Vantage. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.

WITH: Jessica Alba (Sydney Wells), Alessandro Nivola (Dr. Paul Faulkner), Parker Posey (Helen Wells) and Rade Serbedzija (Simon McCullough).

Somehow this op-ed piece comparing O&C touches on practically every pattern we examined except teeth, dragons, and vampires — and I wouldn’t be surprised if those show up in a subsequent op-ed piece. BTW, some of the oldest artifacts from ancient cultures before the advent of writing technology are “dice.” They were used for counting things as well as amusement.

December 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama-Clinton Issue

By DAVID BROOKS
Hillary Clinton has been a much better senator than Barack Obama. She has been a serious, substantive lawmaker who has worked effectively across party lines. Obama has some accomplishments under his belt, but many of his colleagues believe that he has not bothered to master the intricacies of legislation or the maze of Senate rules. He talks about independence, but he has never quite bucked liberal orthodoxy or party discipline.

If Clinton were running against Obama for Senate, it would be easy to choose between them.

But they are running for president, and the presidency requires a different set of qualities. Presidents are buffeted by sycophancy, criticism and betrayal. They must improvise amid a thousand fluid crises. They’re isolated and also exposed, puffed up on the outside and hollowed out within. With the presidency, character and self-knowledge matter more than even experience. There are reasons to think that, among Democrats, Obama is better prepared for this madness.

Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life.

Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.

Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.

Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.

Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation.

What Bill Clinton said on “The Charlie Rose Show” is right: picking Obama is a roll of the dice. Sometimes he seems more concerned with process than results. But for Democrats, there’s a roll of the dice either way. The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country.

Ok, so here’s the scoop. BS (Britney Spears) is in the early stages of being cast as the Virgin Mary in a film. This makes perfect, albeit bizaare, sense to me in terms of the way things are moving under the surace of this culture. Forget immaculate conception, it’s a miracle just to associate the word “Virgin” with BS. Those wacky French — they think of everything. First, it was cooking potato slices in hot oil, then they invented bread shaped in such a way that you could use it as a baseball bat after a few days, now it’s replacing the manger with a trailer. If the US wants to regain its position in the world, we need to eat more Pate.

Here’s what’s being reported on the gossip (etymology = Gods’ Parents) web sites:

A French producer wants Britney Spears to play the Virgin Mary in a new satire called Sweet Baby Jesus. The producer says the film will start shooting in March and Britney is reviewing the script, according to the latest issue of Us Weekly:

“Spears, 26, would play a pregnant 19-year-old unsure of her baby’s paternity who goes into labor on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, Maryland, as rumors swirl that the birth is Jesus Christ’s second coming.”

I have been to Bethlehem, MD, and I must say that beyond the city’s name, it is a perfect place to film the birth of Trailer Trash religion. Now if only they can get K-Fed to do a rap version of “Silent Night” for the soundtrack then my work on this earth will have been done. In the interim I’m lobbying for Lindsay Lohan to play Mary Magdalen, though I’ll settle for Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton. And if the film’s director doesn’t completely have his head up “sa cul,” he’ll cast Peter Doherty as BS’s “son” in the film. In terms of Joseph, I’m thinking Flava Flav. Oh, and as for the kid’s “Real” Dad, well I think Nick Nolte was born to play the role.

Dr.B.

A quick follow-up on Emily’s post. There is in fact another important connection between the film, I am Legend, and our class. The film is loosely based or at least thematically similar to a novel written in 1826 by …. drum roll please….. Mary Shelley. One of my former students is now working on her Ph.D. and is an expert on the book. She called my attention to the connection, but informs me that Shelley’s book is not a paternity/technology book. In herstorical/magical terms what matters in the context of this class is the connection between Frankenstein and a new film that is thematically similar to another book she wrote. If you’re interested in Shelley’s novel here’s a link to an online edition:

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/

And for those of you not up on your rap history, my title is a reference to Will Smith’s Hit song, Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It, from his 1997 album, Big Willie Style. As you can see from the lyrics below, the former Fresh PRINTS of Belair, had his EAR on the cultural pulse. Note all the momma stuff, a year or so after the internet was introduced.

Bring it.
Woo
Uh, uh, uh, uh
Ha ha, ha ha
What, what, what, what
Ha ha ha ha
Uh
On your mark ready set let’s go
Dance floor pro I know you know
I go psycho when my new joint hit
Just can’t sit
Gotta get jiggy wit it
Ooh that’s it
Now honey honey come ride
D-K-N-Y all up in my eye
You gotta Prada bag with a lotta stuff in it
Give it to your friend let’s spin
Everybody lookin’ at me
Glancin the kid
Wishin they was dancin’ a jig
Here with this handsome kid
ciga-cigar right from Cuba-Cuba
I just bite it
It’s for the look I don’t light it
Ill way to ‘aami on the ‘ance say oor flay
Giving up jiggy make it feel like foreplay
Yo my cardio is infinite (ha ha)
Big Willie Style’s all in it
Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It
na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it

What
You wanna ball with the kid
Watch your step you might fall
Trying to do what I did
Mama (uh) mama (uh) mama come closer
In the middle of the club with the rub-a-dub (uh)
No love for the haters the haters
Mad cause I got floor seats at the Lakers
See me on the fifty yard line with the Raiders
Met Ali he told me I’m the greatest
I got the fever for the flavour of a crowd pleaser
DJ play another
From the prince of this
Your highness
Only mad chicks ride in my whips
South to the west to the east to the north
Bought my hits and watch ‘em go off a go off
Ah yes yes y’all ya don’t stop
In the winter or the (summertime)
I makes it hot
Gettin jiggy wit ‘em

(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)

Eight fifty I.S. if you need a lift
Whose the kid in the drop
Who else Will Smith
Living that life some consider a myth
Rock from south street to one two fifth
Women used to tease me
Give it to me now nice and easy
Since I moved up like George and Wheezy
Dream to the maximum I be asking em
Would you like to bounce with the brother that’s platinum
Never see Will attacking em
Rather play ball with Shaq and em
Flatten em
Psyche
Kiddin
You thought I took a spill
But I didn’t
Trust the lady of my life she hitting
Hit her with a drop top with the ribbon
Crib for my mom on the outskirts of Philly
You trying to flex on me
Don’t be silly
Getting jiggy wit it

(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it
(na na na na na na na nana na na na na nana)
Gettin jiggy wit it

OEDIPUS Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,
To learn my lineage, be it ne’er so low.
It may be she with all a woman’s pride
Thinks scorn of my base parentage. But I
Who rank myself as Fortune’s favorite child,
The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.
She is my mother and the changing MOONS
My brethren, and with them I WAX and wane.
Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?
Nothing can make me other than I am.

Since Moons Wax, as do woman in their 20s nowadays, here’s a little information on Waxing moons and magic. At some point a waxing moon becomes a pregnant moon. Hmmmm. And there are connections suggested here to cutting hair and planting gardens.

MOON PHASES IN HOODOO MAGIC
How to Work Magic Spells by the Moon
and How to Know The Phases of the Moon
by catherine yronwode

Magic spells and rootwork that are worked to increase or expand something — love spells to draw someone to you, money spells to attract wealth, Crown of Success spells to advance a career and bring you the most recognition on the job or in school, spells to increase business or draw customers to your shop, and honey jar spells to sweeten someone to you — are often begun or worked entirely while the moon is waxing or growing bigger in apparent size. Folks who want their hair to grow thick and fast cut their hair when the moon is waxing. People plant crops that are grown for their leaves, flowers, or seeds during the waxing moon.

Not everyone times their magic spells or takes their hoodoo ritual baths or plants their garden by the moon, but if you want to do so, you not only need to know how to work with the moon’s influences, you need to know the cycles of the moon itself. The Moon goes through an entire cycle of waxing and waning about every 29 days. This is called a Lunar Month or Lunation. There are about 13 Lunar Months in a calendar (or Solar) year.

WAXING MOON

Let’s start with a Waxing Crescent Moon, the kind that looks like a Man in a Moon drawing or a cute Christmas tree ornament with a smiling face and a long white beard. When the Moon is a Waxing Crescent; the dark side is to your left, more or less, and the bright Crescent is to your right. (Sometimes the Moon is tipped a little, so it may not be exactly right or left, but you will know what i mean if you go outside and look at it.) You can use this time to perform waxing, drawing, increasing, or growth spells.

Every night the Moon rises in the East a little later and the thickness of the Waxing Crescent gets fatter, until the shape of the Moon is half a circle. This is the First Quarter, also called by some people the Waxing Half Moon. It is dark on the left and bright on the right. You can continue to do waxing, drawing, increasing, or growth spells.

After that, the Moon starts to look like it is pregnant — it is perfectly round on the right side, but bulged out past half-way on the left. This is the Waxing Gibbous Moon. You can continue to do waxing, drawing, increasing, or growth spells.