Eating like a man
Monday, January 08, 2007
In Issue One of Uncompressed, Brian Wuest observes and critiques the increasingly pervasive television advertisements that equate “manliness” with eating poorly (among other things). For example:
From Brian’s article:
The first message these commercials communicate to us is that it is manly to eat in an unhealthy way. In these we see manly men and manly meals, and a clear association between the two. Burger King presents us with two fine examples of such. First, this summer’s BK Stacker ad campaign: the BK Stacker is a sandwich that includes only bread, meat, cheese, bacon, and special sauce. It’s called the “Stacker” because you can choose if you want a Double, a Triple, or a Quad Stacker, the latter of which contains four beef patties, as the name suggests, and 68 grams of fat. The most interesting thing about this sandwich is the rhetoric used to advertise it. First, the advertisements emphasize the absence of any vegetables on the sandwich. “Hold the produce,” one paper ad read; “No vegetables,” a radio ad reported and a television ad included a boss yelling at a worker for trying to add a tomato to the sandwich. The paper and radio ad are especially interesting because they use the absence of vegetables as a selling point. No lettuce here, please; just the multiple beef patties.
A Burger King television commercial from earlier last year showed men running rampant through city streets in celebration of the Texas Double Whopper (two beef patties, bacon, cheese, vegetables, jalapeños). The riot is set off by one man’s decision to no longer eat “chick food.” Men begin crowding the streets, breaking cement blocks with their heads, punching each other in the gut, and eating “until my innie turns into an outtie.” “I AM MAN,” they triumphantly declare.
The Dairy Queen Chili Meltdown GrillBurger takes food’s gender-defining power to a more literal level. This burger’s commercial shows a male-female couple sitting on the couch, watching a weepy melodrama. The man is eating a DQ burger, and then woman asks for a bite. After tasting the burger, she nods appreciatively, then undergoes a transformation. She slides down in her seat, spreads her legs, places her hand in her pants, and switches the TV to a sports game. “Dude – pull my finger,” she says. As a result of such a manly burger, she’s becoming masculine (or the commercial’s perception thereof) in her behavior. And to eliminate any possible remaining ambiguity, the commercial ends with “It’ll make a man out of you.”
The message is clear: if you’re a real man, you’ll eat like a real man. “Stack it high, tough guy,” one Burger King add suggests. Men eat a lot, and preferably a lot of meat.It follows logically that the first message would give way to a second: as eating this food makes you a man, eating healthily makes you less of a man. Take a recent Hummer commercial. A man is standing at the supermarket while the cashier rings up his purchases: tofu, a large collection of vegetables, etc. Another man comes up and starts unloading his items, which must include half a cow of red meat. The two men’s eyes meet, and the vegetable man looks away sheepishly. The meat man has clearly proven his alpha status in the interaction. The vegetable man must go purchase a Hummer in order to reclaim his manhood.
I encourage you to read the rest.
Body piercing saved my life.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Journalist Andrew Beaujon has published an excellent, detailed exploration of the underbelly of Christian music and evangelical subculture. We’d recommend this book anyway, because it is a meticulous, generous, and often funny treatment of a subject that usually garners a lot of pointing and laughing but not much in the way of substantive research. But we also recommend it because it devotes an entire chapter to Beaujon’s experience at 2005’s Festival of Faith and Music. Student Activities guru Ken Heffner is quoted extensively, and the chapter’s conclusion is poignant and challenging. Check out passages like this one:
It was too easy, I decided, to look down on Christians struggling with whether to engage the world outside. If you were raised, as David Bazan was for example, in a Christian culture where you had to twist yourself into intellectual knots trying to figure out a way to enjoy non-church-sanctioned music that nonetheless spoke to you, it’s a radical idea to allow yourself to look for God in the work of, say, Lil’ Flip. ...
Surely there must be limits to this approach. Is the divine revealed in John Waters films? Okay, bad joke. But what about in porn? In music explicitly hostile to religion? And are kids who’ve grown up experiencing every innovation in music, every film, every television show through the filter of evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on absolute truth, really going to have the tools to be as discerning as Ken Heffner wants them to become?
That, of course, is exactly why we’re doing the stuff we’re trying to do at Calvin, and I’m thankful that Beaujon got a glimpse into a different side of the Christian subculture.
This post already contains far too many fawning adjectives, so go ahead and pick up Beaujon’s ably-written study. You can also check out his blog, Body Piercing Saved My Life, which is already packed with interviews and reviews. (I recommend his personal blog for regular reading and sharp music criticism as well.)
Behind the music.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Last weekend, Calvin hosted its biggest concert of the last 15 years. And that’s not just hyperbole. Between crews working around the clock (9am on Saturday to 5am on Sunday) to set up the Fine Arts Center and the opportunity to host this particular band at the height of its popularity, the Sigur Rós concert was historic in its technical scope and cultural significance.
If you were at either of the shows, you experienced this scope and significance firsthand. Now we want to fill in the gaps with some behind-the-scenes reflections. For instance, you might be interested to know that the front of house engineer noted afterwards that the 11pm show was the best of the Sigur Rós and Amina’s last 100 shows—thanks, in part, to the fact that the band had an opportunity to get to know some of its audience beforehand.
Long before a band ever sets foot on campus, Student Activities Director Ken Heffner petitions the manager for what we call “a conversation with the artist,” a chance for concert-goers to interact with the musicians about what they will be experiencing later that night. Sometimes artists will turn us down (Patty Griffin, for instance, is not fond of public speaking), but usually they agree, coming into the conversation both confused and intrigued by something that is neither a press conference nor a meet and greet.
Sigur Rós’s visit to Calvin marked the first time they had ever had a formal dialogue with “lay people” who were more interested in their art than their celebrity. Although they were a bit uneasy and evasive at first, the four band members warmed up to the dialogue and answered the group’s questions with both thoughtfulness and humor. (You can hear an mp3 of the conversation in its entirety at our website.)
As much as these discussions are an opportunity for the audience to learn from the artists, the converse is true as well: they also help the musicians get their bearings. After the show, lead singer Jonsi said that the afternoon talk gave him a sense of place, a better understanding of where he was when performing that night. We’re realizing now that the conversations play a role other than just informing the audience—they help inform the artist, too, contributing to a stronger performance as a result.
This sense of reciprocity between the artist and audience was a recurring theme as we reflected on the weekend. During the conversation, one question in particular illuminated this relationship. A student asked the band what they made of critics who called their music “angelic” or “heavenly,” adjectives consistently used to describe the transcendent qualities of Sigur Rós’s musicianship and live concert experiences (as in this excellent review by Andy Whitman).
As one might expect, the band members distanced themselves from this sort of language. Lead singer Jonsi and keyboardist Kjartan said that their intention is not to evoke religious imagery, and bass player Georg joked that he had read one critic who called their music “God’s golden teardrops from heaven”—clearly an absurd and quasi-poetic overstatement.
Yet many people experience Sigur Rós’s music as transcendent—so what do we make of this? Obviously an artist’s vision and intention is an important contribution to any conversation about that art. And in this context, it makes sense that a musician would back away from charges that they are providing the soundtrack to heaven; to embrace that lofty intention would be the height of hubris.
But what about the audience’s experience? Judging from students’ reactions to the concerts last Saturday, transcendence was par for the course. Our office assistant Katelyn Beaty, for instance, wrote in the Chimes newspaper of a friend who had “visions throughout the show of people walking toward a holy city, singing with the angels their Hopelandic praises.” Evidently, the artist’s intentions can only take the audience so far; we all bring to music (especially live music) our own worldviews, intentions, and backgrounds. In some ways, this concert was as much a dialogue between artist and audience as the actual conversation that preceded it.
Although we need to respect musicians by taking into account their intent, we also need to recognize that art can be saying something that the artist did not intend, for better or worse. In this case, Sigur Rós is communicating something more than they know with their music—and that’s a good thing. As Ken Heffner put it, “We are all puny people, so if art can only be as big as the artist, our art would be puny.” And Sigur Rós’s music is anything but.
In this sense, we need to recognize that the net effect of art is often more expansive than the artist knows. The members of Sigur Rós may balk at a review like Whitman’s, which is completely within their rights as the creators of their own music. But like many of us in the audience, Whitman brought to the show a worldview that allows not just for beauty and art, but for the idea that those things point beyond themselves to another reality. That reality may not be soaked in treacly teardrops from heaven (thank God), but it may reflect Whitman’s link between the now and the not yet: “There is some good here on earth, common grace abounds, and there’s no sense in the wholesale banishment of the familiar from the afterlife,” he writes. “The music will be new, but it will retain echoes of what was good and glorious on this earth. And if I’m right, then I suspect I got a preview of the heavenly host last night.”
Can I get an amen?
Calvin writers on…
Relevant magazine online featured two articles by Calvin folks (one current student and one alum) this week. Check ‘em out!
Sigur Ros concert review by Cara Daining
The Dark Side of the iPod Age by Phil Mollenkof
Waiting on the docks.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Waiting on the docks
by Kate Bowman Johnston
Network television is the bastard child of popular culture criticism—especially in Christian circles. While evangelical critics are, at long last, receiving film and contemporary music as important works of art, we are still trailing when it comes to engaging and assessing the small screen.
Read the rest of this article (including my top ten favorite television programs) at *catapult magazine.