Ann Coulter
Coulter Shock
I
downloaded a long clip, over a minute, of Ann Coulter on Hannity and Colmes, arguing that it was "factually
correct" that Clinton "was a scumbag." What was immediately fascinating was the "cross
talk" on the sample, where multiple pundits were speaking at the same
time. It seems like some pundit
shows are nothing but cross talk.
Cross talk is information overload. It is impossible to pay attention to two or three people
talking at the same time. In the
effort for everyone to be heard, nobody is heard. Cross talking pundits give the impression of communicating
information while actually communicating nothing at all. I tried overlapping
the sample, creating artificial cross talk into a dense texture. I like this idea, but haven't yet used
it in a piece.
Instead,
I started thinking about pundits and meaning, specifically, the difference
between Limbaugh and Coulter. Ann
Coulter speaks in sound bites.
Everything she says is designed for maximum punch in as few seconds as
possible. And the punch she packs
is astounding. What rational
person would argue that it was "factually correct" that anyone was a
scumbag? Yet she said this about
Clinton. And then she goes on to
say that anyone who criticizes our current president is a traitor. In one clip that I use, she attacks the
very notion of polls when they show low points for Bush but then, without
pausing, attacks Kerry for polling low.
Her positions are, self-contradictory, indefensible and astounding, but
when she's asked to defend them, she does, again in little sound bites. She's impossible to argue with. It seems like any show she was on would
dissolve into meaningless name-calling or cross talk. And indeed, most of what she says is meaningless.
Ann
Coulter gives the impression of communicating ideas without actually doing so.
Her books, comments, punditry and columns essentially say nothing but
Republicans are right and Democrats are wrong, over and over again with no
backing, no real evidence, nothing but puzzling and meaningless sound-bites and
name calling. She is incredibly
talented at weaving nothing
into the appearance of something.
I
wrote a program that looked for pauses in her phrases and created long
"grains" based on her phrasing.
I then played out the grains in random order. I tested this using my original crosstalk laden sample. It was amazing how little the sample
changed. The pretense of meaning
was obscured, but the pretense was so thin to start out with that it was as if
nothing had been lost. When I
played the original clip (without video) for some of my comrades, they found
the unprocessed version nearly as incomprehensible as the re-ordered version.
Then, I tried creating artificial cross talk by sometimes slightly overlapping
phrases. It was exactly as if I
had punditry on a Television in the background and wasn't paying attention to
it.
I
downloaded as many other files of Coulter as I could. I discovered that her voice only has a few tones. She is either sarcastic and snippy,
sarcastic and smirking, shrill or defensive. I could put together phrases from any of her Hannity and
Colmes appearances and,
because the micing was always the same, it would sound like it all came from
the same appearance. The little
artificially constructed speeches produced by my process almost made sense. Her lack of timbral variation was as
interesting and useful as Bush's rich tones. Which is not to say that she doesn’t have timbral variation,
just that it is much more subtle and she doesn't have much emotional range.
Like
with Bush, I became fascinated by her voice. I created an 11-minute piece. The first 5 minutes start with her unaltered quote calling
Clinton a scumbag, which is then followed with re-ordered phrases from her many
media appearances. I got the audio clips from mediamatters.org, guaranteeing
that I had her most offensive comments from any of her appearances. (Also, I was unable to persuade anyone
to Tivo her for me, alas.) Then,
luckily, in the first week of October, her new book came out, thus greatly
increasing the amount of source material.
It was like heaven, except that my original fascination for her was
beginning to turn into hate.
The
second part of the piece takes a snapshot of the last pass of word
reordering. It then broke that
snapshot in grains all of equal size.
The number of grains was equal to 4 times the number of clips in the
re-ordering section. The play back
algorithm plays back the grains in a moving window, like a cloud
algorithm. On the second pass, the
grains are four times smaller and the window is five times bigger. This goes on in a loop of decreasing
grains and increasing window for about six minutes.
The
first part of this piece is inspired by countless speech remixes that are
common in politically themed popular music. These remixes are a problematic way to approach
discourse. 91Angels points out,
“[The] challenge seems to be to reveal underlying [inconsistencies] and
contradictions in the source material, as opposed to just twisting someone's
words around or trying to demonize your subject ad hominem . . .. Anyone can edit words into their
mouths and make them say silly things or take them completely out of context,
that proves nothing and is only good for some cheap laughs.” (http://www.livejournal.com/users/celestehblog/66886.html?thread=15686#t15686)
I have tried to avoid this trap by having my program make all decisions about
phrase order. Also, my point is not “Look, I can make Coulter say something
pointless and stupid,” but rather, “listen to how little this changes if you
randomize it.” The listener can
draw her own conclusions on whether this communicates anything about the value
of television punditry.
The
second part of the piece reminds me of the movies and TV shows about Max
Headroom. The movie concerns a television
journalist who died but then is replaced by a computer-generated talking head
who can do nothing but stutter catch phrases. In the movie, the talking head is deemed an inadequate
replacement for journalism. The
computer stuttering sound used by the fictional program was extremely popular
among children. My friends and I
would try to imitate it. This
effect became somewhat overused in the 1980s because of Max Headroom, but I liked it anyway as a degenerative
process. In the second part of the
piece any plausibility of meaning and content is destroyed. So the piece begins with a clip which
purports to communicate, is followed by a few minutes of remixed clips which
sound like they may purport to communicate, but do not, followed then finally
by increasingly small and scrambled grains which contain the timbres and
pitches of speech, but none of the word content.
I
first played in September of 2004 at Open Mic Night at It’s Only Natural. Unfortunately, this time the people
present were not "friendly" experiencers. They quickly became annoyed, possibly by the lack of pitch
material. It was almost the exact
same people as were in the audience for my piece with Bush and digital peaking,
however they were hostile to this one.
Several people got up and left during it. One person afterwards was explaining to me about how when he
was in music school, he'd learn to craft pieces that went somewhere and had been cautioned against distorting
recorded voice.
The
next performance was in Oakland, CA at the club 21 Grand. For that second
performance, I used greater diversity of source material. Coulter's book came out in the meantime,
giving her many press appearances and thus more material for me to choose
from. Instead of making the piece
longer, more samples were added in at a faster rate to cause the content to
change more quickly. Coulter's
book hyping created a plethora of material. I also added in a short clip of Hannity lying about Kerry to
increase the non-Coulter voices and make it sound more like a pundit
discussion. Since almost all the
samples come form Hannity and Colmes, his voice was already in the piece.
This
time, the friendly experiencers were entirely people from my mailing list and
the other performers playing that evening. They had entirely different expectations than did the open
mic attendees at ION. Also, it may
have been helpful to play George Bush’s Voice first, thus creating a bridge
between tonal content and tweaked word content. Fortunately, those listeners liked the piece.
I
played the same version of the piece at a House Concert at India House for a
mostly grad student audience.
Jascha Narveson heard it and invited me to submit it to the Red Festival
in Toronto where it was part of a “sound bar” where friendly experiencers
listened tape pieces through headphones.
I submitted almost the same version as the Oakland performance, except
that some amplitude inconsistencies were altered with selective normalizations.
This
piece was designed to change over time and it did for several months. I wanted the source sounds to change as
new material became available. In
this way, I hoped to extend the shelf life of the piece and be able to keep it
current as events warrant. I began
to tire of Coulter, however, and have quit adding new material and end up
abandoning a proposed third section of the piece.
Further
Coulter Ideas
Coulter’s
style of speaking tends to lead to cross talk, as she attempts to shout down
her foes with her insane sound bites about liberals and Clinton. Most of the Coulter-containing samples
I downloaded from Media Matters were from Fox News, especially Hannity and
Colmes. This was useful because they seem to
mic everyone the same way every time.
They set levels to reflect their ideology. Hannity, the conservative, has the loudest levels. The conservative guest, in these cases Coulter,
has the second loudest micing.
Next is Colmes, the show’s “liberal.” His voice is not powerful. His arguments are not powerful. His micing is low.
If he were better at representing a center-right or left position, he
would be fired. Al Franken found
that in one representative show, Hannity spoke 2,086 words and Colmes a mere 1,261.
(P 84) “Sean Hannity is the alpha
male to Alan Colmes’s zeta male.” (P 84), Franken noted. But Colmes is not the lowliest player
on the show. The lowest level of
micing usually goes to the liberal guest, usually someone of no significance or
occasionally someone who is actually not liberal at all.
At
some point, Coulter realized that she was turned up louder than everyone
else. Her voice is very powerful
and she can be loud, so she had the power to dominate the entire show. I downloaded a clip of her
intentionally speaking over everyone else, saying “And I’m not going to let you
talk . . .. They’re not going to cut my mic!” (In later
appearances, her level was turned down.)
This seemed like a good sample to explore cross talk, as it mostly contained
that. However, during the time I
was working on Coulter Shock,
my fascination with her was turning to hate. While I was assembling it, I listened to her over and over
again making baseless accusations, contradicting herself and saying whatever
obnoxious thing popped into her head.
The cross talk sample was her at her worst. I can feel my blood pressure rise when I listen to it.
Al
Franken spends many pages in Lies and the Lying Lairs Who Tell Them on the problem of “What is wrong with Ann
Coulter?” (P 50) He explains,
“Coulter for those of you lucky enough to not have been exposed to her, is the
reigning diva of the hysterical right.
Or rather, the hysterical diva of the reigning right.” (P 5) His chapter titles express his
frustration with her: “Ann
Coulter: Nutcase” and “You Know Who I Don’t Like? Ann Coulter.” She drives liberals crazy. Her book Slander starts with a complaint that political
discourse “resembles professional wrestling.” (Coulter quoted by Franken p 9) However, Franken notes, “[In] the entire 206 pages,
she never actually makes a case for any conservative issue . . .. The entire book is filled with distortions, factual errors,
and vicious invective . . . bolstered by [shoddy] research . . .” (P 9) Franken
explains, “What Coulter writes is political pornography. She aims directly at her readers’
basest instincts.” (P 19) Which
makes conservatives love her and tremendously frustrates liberals.
Her
lying and unrestrained exuberance made her seem charming at first, but, like
Franken, I found myself pondering what exactly is wrong with Ann Coulter and
then I discovered that I didn’t care. Buffalobeast.com published an article, The
Beast 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2004, in which they listed her as number
50. Their entry exactly reflected
how my feelings towards her had changed.
50.
Ann Coulter
Crimes: Coulter plummets down the list as she
slips into irrelevance. As her columns degenerate further into absurd,
incoherent attacks against her own personal paranoid fantasy of fanged,
drooling, Saddam-loving liberals who hate America and childish France-bashing,
we find our outrage slowly giving way to a baffled “I can’t believe I used to
go out with you” feeling. Her arguments are ridiculous, her vitriol forced, her
hatchet face even harder to look at. Still, she insulted a one-armed war
veteran, called reports of the hundreds of tons of missing munitions in Iraq
false, claimed Wesley Clark was pro-infanticide, and blamed Abu Ghraib on the
presence of women in the armed forces—they’re not all like you, Ann—and on and
on. It’s just not worth debunking someone who has no credibility in the first
place.
Smoking
Gun: Has credibility in
the minds of more people than we can stomach acknowledging.
Punishment: Skull crushed with rock.
(http://www.buffalobeast.com/66/50mostLoathsome2004.htm)
I
quit downloading samples of her and went back to look at some samples of Rush
Limbaugh that I had lying around from earlier.
This post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. Al Rights Reserved.
Tag: Ann Coulter
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