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koganbotOrange Caramel's "A~ing♡" is our problematic video of the week, which I posted over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
poptimists, but since almost no one there writes comments anymore, I'm putting it up here as well. As Mat says, "It's odd, because they almost have a supermodel look to them with their long legs, and it just seems grotesque to put them in cheap girly Halloween costumes." I wouldn't say I know what's going on with Orange Caramel. The videos don't seem like camp or parody, but do seem deliberately "off." Or maybe we're just the ones who think it's off, and for the core audience stuff like this is bacon and eggs, seven days a week. Anyhow, you can see what I said; you also might want to check out the convo that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
petronia, Mat, and anhh had here a month ago on related subjects.
EDIT: Of course, just because something might strike us (in our ignorance) as grotesque doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it, or anything problematic. Or the problem might only be ours, that we don't understand what's going on. But women acting girlie can raise a red flag. That is, do women in that world generally have a choice not to act girlie? What are the consequences for those who don't act girlie?
poptimists, but since almost no one there writes comments anymore, I'm putting it up here as well. As Mat says, "It's odd, because they almost have a supermodel look to them with their long legs, and it just seems grotesque to put them in cheap girly Halloween costumes." I wouldn't say I know what's going on with Orange Caramel. The videos don't seem like camp or parody, but do seem deliberately "off." Or maybe we're just the ones who think it's off, and for the core audience stuff like this is bacon and eggs, seven days a week. Anyhow, you can see what I said; you also might want to check out the convo that petronia, Mat, and anhh had here a month ago on related subjects.EDIT: Of course, just because something might strike us (in our ignorance) as grotesque doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it, or anything problematic. Or the problem might only be ours, that we don't understand what's going on. But women acting girlie can raise a red flag. That is, do women in that world generally have a choice not to act girlie? What are the consequences for those who don't act girlie?
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Date: 2011-01-14 01:05 pm (UTC)“Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means”.
(if you are interested in the context I’m using to approach this: http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/rodriges)
Extending somehow Huizinga’s definition, Roger Callois in “Man, Play and Games” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Play_and_Games) made the following chart (http://img215.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=08943_callois_122_989lo.JPG)
explaining the different type of games. So we are dealing with a mimicry game, but with not so much ludus as a normal theater spectacle, then with more paidia and closer to child games. (And for moralists in the world, like Callois was, this almost implicitly implies that games can develop into obsessions and addictions).
The use of this is to generate empathy (as much for the shared game as for the mimicry itself: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/body/mirror-neurons.html ) as a way of inscription via intimacy (almost literally embodying values and feeling what the other feel as in cosplay). And mostly this is how it works in idol music in Japan.
To complicate things this is a bit mocking this, not necessarily dismissing it but kind of a in-joke (another group made a male version of this unit), but works in the same way. But to make this even stranger (but maybe less complicated, we are playing and then we do “serious” things, nothing about losing yourself in the game):
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Date: 2011-01-14 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 02:37 pm (UTC)However, she continued, “After practicing several times, I realized that it was very addicting. The more we would do it the more attached I got to the song and began to enjoy it. It was fun to see others’ shocked reactions to the fact that After School would release a concept like this
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Date: 2011-01-14 04:10 pm (UTC)EDIT: Of course, just because something might strike us (in our ignorance) as grotesque doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it, or anything problematic. Or the problem might only be ours, that we don't understand what's going on. But women acting girlie can raise a red flag. That is, do women in that world generally have a choice not to act girlie. What are the consequences for those who don't act girlie?
I've only skimmed the piece about Huizinga and games. I take it that Huizinga's a big deal, still, though I'd never heard of him (which wouldn't mean he's not a big deal, since this is one of the many areas in which I'm not well-read). I gather that he works hard to show that "play" is not the opposite of "seriousness." But it looks to me that he failed to* - though he should have - also taken pains to show that play is not always or necessarily the opposite of work. And he seems far to rigid in setting up a strict opposition between doing something for its own sake, on the one hand, and doing it to accomplish some ulterior purpose, on the other.
In any event, his definition of "play" seems like too much of an attempt to counter the functionalists, so goes to an opposite extreme. It's way too purist. I suspect that his ideas are actually more subtle than his definition would imply. I also wonder if a definition of "play" is even necessary, or could ever be accurate. Which doesn't mean a provisional, qualified definition might not be useful in certain circumstances.
Quickly, my problems with his definition are: (1) The sentence, "It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it," seems obviously wrong, since people often do profit from play. I think what Huizinga's really trying to say is that the play can't fully be explained or understood by reducing it to its functional aspects, in which case I heartily agree with him. But I'd say that the very same can be said of a lot of things, including work (and that it wouldn't be a good idea to say that anything "has an element" if it can't be reduced to a material interest or to profit; an editor's pride in craft and attention to grammatical detail, for instance, doesn't seem like "play" to me, but can hardly be fully explained by material interest and an attempt at profit; or if we do want to call such things "play," then we've stretched our use of the word to the point where we'll have trouble using it to distinguish any activity from any other). (2) Any activity that's somewhat distinct from other activities will have features that make it stand out from the rest of life, and some of these will do so by coming up with explicit rules that govern behavior in the activity, and some will use shifting and ad hoc habits and models; but either way, play is not unique in this. (3) Even with the scare quotes around "ordinary," it's probably not the word he wants, since ordinary doesn't differentiate the "serious" from the "nonserious" but rather the habitual or conventional from the novel.
But anyway, I'm critiquing something on the basis of a single definition and a quick skim of an article that wasn't by the guy, just something that referred to and made use of some of his ideas. My guess is that he's better in the details than in the definitions. And I haven't even addressed your ideas, and may not get the chance to today.
Anyway, I'm delighted you're back here posting, and I hope I get the chance to do your idea justice.
*At least Rodriguez doesn't bring it up, if Huizinga did soften the distinction.
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Date: 2011-01-14 04:12 pm (UTC)(But I'd point out that we suspend the expectation that what will happen on the screen will match up with real life not only when we watch a video like this that signifies "PLAYFULNESS" in big letters, but also when, for example, we watch IU's "MIA (Missing Child)," but that the "MIA" video, unlike this one, doesn't signify "PLAYFUL.")
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Date: 2011-01-14 04:20 pm (UTC)"and that it wouldn't be a good idea to say that anything 'has an element' if it can't be reduced to a material interest or to profit"
=
"and that it wouldn't be a good idea to say that anything 'has an element of play' if it can't be reduced to a material interest or to profit"
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Date: 2011-01-14 06:09 pm (UTC)For what it's worth, yes, women do have a choice. It's kind of an expression of personality. Whenever I've been in a Korean social group, someone will invariably bring up the question of whether men actually like women with 애교 (this sort of cutesy younger girlishness).
I don't know Orange Caramel's target audience, but I know a lot of these idol bands are actually targeted towards elementary school students, so I suspect that makes it skew more childish.
What I find interesting about the music is its retro sound; I think they're deliberately echoing old songs.
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Date: 2011-01-14 07:03 pm (UTC)Huizinga is a historian, not somebody doing concepts hard like stones to throw to other people’s heads to open them. The problem of this definition is that it arrives after like twenty five pages of examples and explanations (and it is only the first chapter), so is just more a handy way of repeat the main points than anything else. So some of the chapters in “Homo Ludens: A study of the play-element in culture” are “The play-concept as expressed in language”, “Play and contest as civilizing functions”, “Play and law”, “Play and war”, “Playing and knowing”, “Play and poetry”, “The elements of mythopoiesis”, “Play-forms in philosophy”, “Play-forms in art”, etc.
To your objection in point one, Huizinga uses as example of games cats trying to catch their own tails or dogs bitting other dog’s ears, so is a bit anthropocentric. But being less silly, obviously people profit from games (like paying to access to them or betting in them) but not in games, people play and maybe play to win money or fame or food, but the game is just the interaction, or if you want the joy we extract from it (like exchanging arguments about some band to win the discussion, or playing with the words to find the correct way to express something, or watching a movie, or playing loud bass music to fill the vibrations in our organs, etc.).
To point two, many people resume Huizinga using the “magic circle” idea, the place where the game is inscribed and where the players inscribe themselves, so we can do a karate match and break our bones doing it, but if it was a correct match we just played hard, nothing of that transcends to daily life (but maybe my mother and father would think in a different way about it). But yes, is not exclusive of it (Rodriguez connects it with performance art or with conceptual art, that doesn’t necessarily imply in them a play-element on their development of the happening action).
To point three, I think the definition is a response against certain claims more than the assertion of those claims, like if you are playing videogames you are not doing something meaningful or something of value, something that could be taken “seriously” like getting good grades or bringing food to your table…
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Date: 2011-01-14 07:04 pm (UTC)About my ideas, I don’t remember having them, but I suppose I’m trying to use the idea that somehow aesthetics interventions in the world are a way to experience alterity, see the world from outside of your embeddedness in it through your access to it or your bias in your way of interpreting it (being them culturally learned, through your ideas or believes or by default), but frankly, this sound to serious and maybe is just a way to express my preferences. But maybe I should read Theodor Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” or something like that… stones, heads, need to sleep…
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Date: 2011-01-17 09:18 am (UTC)If f(x)'s Amber is anything to go by, you get an "ankle injury" and stop appearing with your group for 6 months.
Something that is weird about Orange Caramel for me is that the MV seems aimed at little girls, so much as to establish the little girl as the protagonist when she enters the storybook world at 2:26, but their chanting fans sound overwhelmingly male (from 0:20 onward in this video):
I'm pretty sure the same thing happens for almost every girl group, including After School (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQwY9rsi_I8), but in that context it's less off-putting because they're being deliberately sexy, rather than using the erotic appeal (uh...such as it is) of childishness/girliness - or more specifically the erotic appeal of someone with a womanly body acting girly or childlike. I guess I'm mostly confused as to where exactly little girls themselves (not teenagers in drag as little girls) fit into this scheme.
I think that the "why" of Orange Caramel, including why they are not camp, is something cultural, the subtleties of which might be hard to pick up on if you aren't raised with "cute culture" as something normal (as you say, bacon and eggs). The Grand Narrative touches on mixing cuteness and sexuality in Korean culture here (http://thegrandnarrative.com/2009/04/28/korean-teenage-adolescent-sexuality/).
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Date: 2011-01-17 11:02 am (UTC)I would say that most of the big girl groups get dominant girly screams, including Miss A, 4Minute (and Hyuna, with the most ridiculously long 'screaming the artist's name' section in fan chant history), 2NE1, etc..
Hardly a scientific endeavour as the chants sound different from show to show. After School mostly gets girly screams as well, far as I can remember. Perhaps the more cutesy the song, the weaker the girly shouts of support? Or maybe they're still there, but drowned by truly engaged guys.
SNSD gets a mixed chorus, but on the topic of fan chants I have to post this video with the loudest Music Bank crowd ever. And any excuse to embed this compilation...
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Date: 2011-01-20 09:26 pm (UTC)Slightly off-topic since we're talking about girl groups and fan gender, but do you know if there are any boy groups for whom the chanting is more audibly male than female? From what I've seen the answer is no, and I assume that's because for boy groups the fan chanting is based less on "I really love your music/when you sing this part!" and more on "You are the most attractive boy and I'm happy to see you! Take off your shirt!" (Thus vocal male support for a male performer is "gay", which I assume to be as much of a cultural no-no there as here.) I guess I just find it interesting that for girl groups the fan chanting is fairly unisex but for boy groups it is (almost?) always female.
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Date: 2011-01-20 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-23 07:11 pm (UTC)Thing is, I don't consider Gee cutesy, not in the annoying-cutesy way. Jeans and t-shirts, that's a solid look, and the song isn't that sugary.
This is annoyingly cutesy
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(catchy song tho)
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Date: 2011-01-24 08:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 11:19 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
I like the vocal timbre of the two first members singing here, Nana and Raina. Slightly nasal but not only that? Sticks out more (in an exciting way) in their cutesy tracks.