The Pond: Micro-Ecological Melodrama
Oct. 11th, 2004 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
I told you a couple of weeks ago that I'd been devouring The Sound of Life, a BBC Radio 4 series featuring the work of sound recordist Chris Watson. Well, I've been following that up with another excellent series of the same type archived on the BBC website. The Pond is the history of an Oxfordshire village pond and the frogs who reside there. The series was transmitted in Britain this August. Watson is again capturing the soundscapes.
Chris Watson, who's featured in an Invisible Jukebox in the September issue of The Wire, was one of the three original members of Cabaret Voltaire. He left in 1981 to work on sound for television and radio, specialising in field recordings of birds, mammals and insects. Even while working on mainstream BBC TV series with David Attenborough he continued to make more experimental tape collages with Andrew Mackenzie of The Hafler Trio. He's released three solo albums of wildlife sounds on the Touch label and currently has a sound installation featuring the sounds of Mexican railways running in Mexico City.
The Pond is a subtly innovative series in a genre we might say began with the influential 1996 cinema documentary Microcosmos ('Jurassic Park in your own back garden'). You could call the style 'Micro-Ecological Melodrama' (or Micro-Eco Melo for short). There are parallels with the 'microhouse' genre which began at about the same time; small organic events are magnified until they become highly dramatic. Things previously unnoticed, meaningless and random suddenly take centre stage, become highly theatrical, and reveal fascinatingly complex patterns of meaning. Who can forget the Sisyphusian scene in 'Microcosmos' where a dung beetle painstakingly props a ball of manure against a small twig? That beetle should totally have cleaned up at the Oscars that year -- the year melodrama went small.
In an old essay of mine entitled 'Death In Siam' I complained about how difficult it is to experience true strangeness:
'I fly from Japan to Thailand by Air India. I often measure the likely exoticism of my experiences on the scale foreign, double foreign and triple foreign. It's foreign for me, a Scot, to be in Japan, doubly foreign to be going on holiday from Japan to Thailand, and triply foreign to be making the transition on an Indian airline. But the expected Bollywood musicals fail to materialise. The in-flight entertainment is a Nicholas Cage movie, The Family Man. Clever, moving, socially conservative, normative, moralistic. American.'
The Pond seems to be aware of this problem, and of my boredom with the old journalistic model, in which all that's strange is mediated to us by a series of metaphors and idioms designed to bring stuff closer, to sugar the pill, to take the edge off the otherness of the Other. The Pond is part of a new template I'd like to call Double Strangeness. Instead of halfing the strangeness of the frog spawn and gloop which is its subject matter -- as, for instance, 'A Bug's Life' does, by anthropomorphising the insects, giving them familiar human traits -- the programme doubles the strangeness. It does this in a structural way, a way similar to the technique I call, in my own work, 'genre splicing'. Taking the worn formula 'Life and Times' to highly original lengths, The Pond uses both history and biology to look at its subject. It's not only interested in the taxonomy of species to be found in the murky water of the pond, but also in the human history happening around it. It pushes us not only into the murky water, but into a time machine too. The five episodes wrestle (not always successfully, but that's in the nature of experiments) with a structure which melds seasons of the year with periods of human history. 'It's late spring in medieval Britain, and the Black Death has reduced the population of humans living around the pond'. In this way we're never able to settle back into the comfortable cliches of biology lessons or history lessons. It's truly interdisciplinary, and, like a deliberately mixed metaphor in a poem, the spliced genres make us see things afresh.
The genre splicing is happening on a formal level as well; in this sense it reminds me of Derek Jarman's late film 'Blue', which I was involved in. 'Blue' is a radio piece you watch in the cinema, a plain blue screen you project your own pictures onto for ninety minutes. Simon Turner's evocative soundscapes really do put images in front of your eyes, but since the film is an autobiographical description by Jarman of his own AIDS-induced blindness, it's appropriate that we should struggle to see anything. 'Blue' was also remarkable for its juxtaposition of formal passages read by a Shakespearean actor, and more informal speech, including the voice of Jarman himself. The Pond does this too, and I'd say its constant transition from the formal narrative of Peter France to the much more impromptu, unscripted comments of the various biological and historical experts creates an almost Brechtian form of 'epic radio'. France announces the experts like a butler in a morning coat announcing guys in jeans and sneakers. Sometimes it doesn't work; the informal bits sound forced, their very unscriptedness highly scripted.
Meanwhile, the soundscape backdrop is continuous. And there's no music of any kind. Unless frogsong is the new music. A possibility I'm happy to contemplate. I'll certainly be doing my share of 'nature composition' in Hokkaido this winter. Mother Nature; my current favourite artist.
The Pond Episode 1
The Pond Episode 2
The Pond Episode 3
The Pond Episode 4
The Pond Episode 5
An interesting addendum: the BBC sticks to the phrase 'Listen Again' for its archived online digital radio streams. In fact most people listening to these streams are doing so for the first time, not the second. They're listening to get a fresh experience, not to duplicate one they've previously had. The BBC knows this, but doesn't want to stir up controversy amongst some of its more narrow-minded listeners and funders. After all, this is high quality free content, paid for by UK license and tax payers, available free to anybody with internet access anywhere in the world, with no advertising intrusion and no propaganda value for Britain. Aside from the fact that free programmes this good make Britain look like a very generous, curious and sophisticated place indeed.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 02:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 05:27 am (UTC)(sorry this is off-topic)
hearts
Adam
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 07:15 am (UTC)---
Who can forget the Sisyphusian scene in 'Microcosmos' where a dung beetle painstakingly props a ball of manure against a small twig?
:D
Pond Life
Date: 2004-10-11 05:43 am (UTC)Thanks as always, Momus, for more intriguing listening tips (though I'm still in the depths of "American Mavericks"). I've never forgotten that brave beetle's performance in "Microcosmos," either. Perhaps you can find some interesting new collaborators in the woods or along a seashore.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 09:16 am (UTC)Two years ago, we were working with the AMNH on new illos for the Hall of Ocean life. Among the reference material from the museum curators and scientists was a videotape from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute: it was a video field recording from one of ALVIN's dives. There was no audio, just a menagerie of animals completely new to science drifting in and out of the frame--in some cases, this tape was the sole documentation of an animal's existence. We would sometimes watch it late at night to get the full effect.
I've seen the dung beetles ply their trade first-hand this summer. A tragicomic scene, to be sure; Rhino middens are veritable dung beetle tenements. Did a short entry on these myrmidions a while ago:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lord_whimsy/28352.html
The garter snakes are now warming themselves on the sunny stones,
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 11:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 12:34 pm (UTC)That said, I admit that I am partial to exuberant specimens: explorers, polymaths, dilettantes and natural philosophers. At the moment, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) is a favorite: a man of many talents, I view him as the British Franklin. Many credit him with proposing the nascent theory of evolution, as his writings in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life suggest. Who would not love a man who posited his scientific theories in verse?
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/Edarwin.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/darwin_erasmus.shtml
The Lunar Society were an exceptional group of men, Erasmus being one of them.
The snakes are indeed out, as are some curious, finger-long millipedes that are a steely silver on top with a rosy pink on the sides and legs. This time of year, it's always a pleasure to come across them basking in a sunny spot on a trail in the woods and sit beside them (they go into a basking stupor, you see) and marvel how such different creatures such as they and I can share the same lineage (Deism has its charms to which this agnostic is vulnerable at times).
There are rumblings of a new illustration project for the Museum (http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/ocean/) in the works: an upcoming exhibit on Darwin, which means that my beloved wife and I may have to make our pilgrimage to the Galapagos for project research within the coming year. Oh, to have gone diving beneath the waves with Good King Erasmus!
W
Herps
Date: 2004-10-11 01:43 pm (UTC)May and June are busy time about here, as the local Red-Bellied and Snapping Turtles cross the back roads to lay eggs. Some of their shells get as large as my ribcage. This, sadly, does not prevent them from being struck on occasion, and once a year I find myself extracting eggs from a freshly-killed carcass so that they might be incubated. To date, despite assistance from some herpetologists, none have survived.
A light amphibian anecdote: I once had a randily vocal Fowler's Toad right beneath my bedroom window late one evening. I found my field recording of that particular species, placed it on the stereo, adjusted the bass, and played it loudly for a couple minutes. Our little friend, thinking himself outclassed, left for the back garden.
W
Home from Heimat
Date: 2004-10-11 10:10 am (UTC)http://www.cinematheque.org/html/current.html#21
Brighton's Cinematheque is proof indeed of a generous, curious and sophisticated place. Like anywhere, you just have to look in the right ponds.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 11:17 am (UTC)how about M.E.Mo. ?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 11:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 12:24 pm (UTC)That's certainly a very touchy issue right now, especially after the BBC was branded -- quite unfairly, I believe -- as having "sexed up" the "sexed up" reports.
That said, I'm not convinced that there aren't real benefits to Britain that come of archiving all their broadcasts online and making them publicly available. When the BBC was having their mandate reviewed recently, I submitted a letter (http://www.culture.gov.uk/BBC_online_responses/Kraft_Mark.rtf) to their defense, and tried to point out that there was an "economic and educational effect that will easily justify the entire cost of the site."
Of course, the *REAL* reason for doing it and giving it away for free has relatively little to do with economic arguments, though I would argue that the future belongs to those who are most intellectually and creatively generous. Sometimes, though, economic arguments are the only arguments that politicians will listen to -- and often, not even then. When it comes to politics, ideology usually trumps reason.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 04:03 pm (UTC)HK Radio
Date: 2004-10-11 12:43 pm (UTC)You remind me of a German of friend in my classes - who oddly sounds and looks much like yourself.
http://www.friendlyhamster.com/
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 01:59 pm (UTC)http://www.anivegvideo.com/
some nice people attached video cameras to the heads of various non-human life forms. the frog video is somewhat sedentary compared to the crushingly cute sight of the armadillo's ears being pushed around as he investigates yucca plants.
Channing
ponds as inspiration
Date: 2004-10-11 02:23 pm (UTC)-Roddy
some time ago
Date: 2004-10-11 10:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 10:45 pm (UTC)I'd just like to query one of my own points, though. Why should genre splicing result in 'double strangeness', necessarily? Mightn't putting two cliched generic approaches together just result in double the number of cliches? And isn't anthropomorphism a kind of 'genre splicing' in its own way? It's both genre splicing and gene splicing. Although perhaps 'A Bug's Life' doesn't aim for or achieve the kind of strangeness that would shake us into a new perceptual mode which would allow us to see the uncanniness of everything, nevertheless anthropomorphism -- defined as the mixing of man and beast in one character, rather than simply assimilating animals to human-like forms -- has great potential for doubling rather than halfing strangeness. Look at Ovid, look at Matthew Barney.