(Re)crossing The Break

About three weeks ago, I began my first serious effort at learning the clarinet, and it gave me an entirely new appreciation for what it means to be a student of music. And by that, I mean the clarinet kicked my butt and reminded me what it means to completely suck. But I wasn’t discouraged: I found a way to look at my failures and actually be quite inspired. It was a whole experience.

Some context: saxophone is my primary instrument. Most sax players who come up through their elementary school band program start on clarinet in 5th grade and transition to alto saxophone by 7th grade. I’m a third-generation saxophone player, so my dad already had an alto at home when I started band. With some parental meddling, I was able to skip clarinet altogether and get a head start on the sax. I was told it’s easier for students to start on clarinet and move to saxophone later. But having never picked up a clarinet myself, I always accepted this conventional wisdom without questioning why nobody ever does this in reverse. That is, not until now, SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, when I needed to record the simple melody of Silent Night on clarinet for this year’s Christmas arrangement.

You see, saxophone is the easiest wind instrument in the whole concert band to learn. You basically just blow into it, and if you wiggle your fingers the right way, it plays the right notes. Unlike the flute or clarinet, the keys are quite big, so it doesn’t matter if you have small or large fingers. The upper register of the sax is played identically to the lower register, except you add the octave key with your left thumb. That’s pretty much it. I mean, actually developing a good tone requires years of practice, but it takes relatively little effort for a beginner to successfully navigate around the full range of the instrument.

Meanwhile, a brand new clarinetist could spend weeks or months practicing their instrument and still have trouble playing smoothly above a middle A. The clarinet has a nasty design quirk fittingly named “the break” (I assume because it breaks your spirit to continue playing the clarinet). On one side of the break, Middle A is played with all but one of the holes in the clarinet wide open, so the air escapes at the top of the instrument. On the other side of the break is the B above, where you need to use nine fingers to close virtually every hole and force air out of the bell all the way the bottom. It’s very awkward to go from all open to all closed. It’s easy to misplace your fingers. And your air instantaneously must travel much farther, so you need to support your playing with a lot of it or you might not make any sound at all. Worse yet, you could accidentally hit a really high harmonic and produce a horrible squealing, honking noise. Crossing the break is a big deal. It needs a lot of attention and practice. I estimate it’s the number one reason why a beginning clarinet player and an angry goose sound virtually indistinguishable. I was totally unprepared to struggle this much.

When I first started clarinet last month, I did so having completely forgotten how hard it is to learn an instrument you can actually play written music on. I spend a lot of time on piano and I know some guitar and ukulele chords, but actually playing written parts on those instruments would be a painstaking note-by-note process because I’ve never really practiced that skill. It took barely ten minutes of attempting to play written clarinet music for me to finally understand why music teachers start their sax players on clarinet: if they all started on saxophone, none of them would want to leave it behind for something so much more difficult.

I realized I wouldn’t be able to learn Silent Night from a fingering chart the way I learned Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here on my acoustic guitar by looking at a few chord diagrams. I needed to learn how all the notes on the clarinet fit together and how one register transitions to another in order to make any meaningful progress. In other words, this wasn’t a “fake it till you make it” situation. I actually needed to sit down and learn the clarinet properly. So I did exactly what worked the last time: I found a copy of the clarinet edition of the 5th grade band book I used back in 2002 and opened it up to page 1.

That’s how I found myself in the absurd position of hitting pause on working out 4-part voicings for my jazz reharmonization of Silent Night so I could practice Hot Cross Buns. My 5th grade band book does a good job of introducing new notes one at a time so you can build your range without getting overwhelmed by memorizing dozens of note fingerings. Obviously, knowing which holes and keys to press on the clarinet is a big piece of the puzzle. But I also found myself asking really basic questions I haven’t had to think about in years. At what angle am I supposed to hold this thing? How strong should my reeds be? How much of the mouthpiece should actually go into my mouth? What do I adjust if I’m out of tune? Is my thumb supposed to hurt if I play for a long time?

I had discovered new depths of having no idea what I was doing. Everything felt so new and foreign. Each time I brought the clarinet out of its case, I flipped and spun around the disassembled pieces trying to remember how to even put the dreaded black tube together. I Googled whether it was weird to play a clarinet with a neck strap to help hold it up because that’s what I’d become so acclimated to on the much heavier saxophone. When I sounded bad playing my grandpa’s clarinet, I went and borrowed my dad’s clarinet to find out if it was me or the instrument. (It was me. But in my defense, my dad’s clarinet has better intonation.) I’d strayed far beyond my musical zone of comfort for the first time in years. It was profoundly strange to learn something at the age of 27 I hadn’t struggled with since I was 10. I was reduced to becoming excited when I finally accomplished something as simple as sightreading London Bridge Is Falling Down with no mistakes. If you had told me a month ago I’d be in this situation, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d have thought I was “better” than London Bridge. Of course, nobody is “better” than London Bridge. You have to start somewhere, and you have to be unafraid of repeated and repeated failure. This was genuinely one of the more humbling things I’ve done as an adult, and it happened in the comfort of my own home.

Probably the biggest difference from my experience learning saxophone was that THANKFULLY, I’ve already learned how to read music. I can’t imagine how much harder learning clarinet would be if I had to learn to read treble clef all over again. Except…I kind of can imagine it, because at some point in my life, I did exactly that. I learned how to play saxophone and how to read sheet music at the same time. And I did it as a 10-year-old child without the benefit of a fully developed brain, and the eye-hand coordination, patience, and discipline which comes with reaching adulthood. (Not to mention nearly two decades of experience on other instruments.)

As I was nearing three total hours of screwing up crossing the break in Silent Night, I was weirdly in awe of my 10-year old self for persevering through those first and worst several months of being a musician. Actually, I was weirdly in awe of every single friend I know who started learning an instrument through their school’s band or orchestra. Learning an instrument is NOT easy or natural. Your mistakes are obvious, unpleasant, and often loud and embarrassing. Troubleshooting your mistakes can be unintuitive if not mystifying for new, inexperienced players. And it can take months or longer to reach a level where you’re making music and producing a tone you really enjoy. There’s a reason (okay, several reasons) why so few kids who start an instrument in 5th grade continue with it all the way through to their senior year, but I think a big one is that many of them don’t see all the practice as rewarding enough. As I was squeaking away in my house, I reminded myself that so many of my friends made it all the way through high school band and orchestra as better musicians and stronger people. If they could do it as children, I could learn Silent Night in C major as an adult. It was so peculiar but so lovely to take inspiration by imagining my friends as 10-year-olds struggling right along with me.

It’s only now–nearly 10 years after high school–that I’ve become broadly and deeply thankful so many of my friends and I were able to have such a profoundly formative lesson in patience, memory, coordination, self-confidence, teamwork, and aesthetic appreciation through our public schools’ music programs. If you wanted to learn a wind instrument in 2002, you had few choices but to join your school’s band and sit in a room with a music teacher for an hour each week. I was even lucky enough to have a dad with an extra saxophone in the closet who helped instruct me. But the school’s band program provided structure, regiment, and community to the learning process, which made it sustainable over many years. If it weren’t for music education in public schools, I probably would never have learned any instruments at all, even the ones sitting in my parents’ closet. My life would be immeasurably worse off. I didn’t even know I had an interest in music until I was gifted the opportunity to start playing it.

That said, there has never in human history been a better time to learn an instrument on your own as an adult. If you can get your hands on one, you have the benefit of a rich, diverse, and accessible internet full of musicians and music educators who freely and enthusiastically share their knowledge and expertise. Endless forums and blogs and YouTube channels dedicated to teaching pretty much anything about music you could ever want to know are out there waiting. All you have to do is search for it. If you’ve ever wanted to pick up an instrument, or if you haven’t played yours in a couple years, give it a try! Sure, the goose honks can be discouraging. But there’s something deeply satisfying in hearing yourself improve and making a sound that’s good and pleasing–so satisfying that even the honks and squeaks are worth it. There is so much joy to be found in making the air sing just because you can.

As a wise friend of mine once said, “Some of our talents we’re supposed to use to make the world better, and some of them we’re supposed to use to make the world a bit more beautiful.” I’ve always liked how she implied creating beauty is an obligation. And I’ve always enjoyed how my drive to fulfill that obligation has never felt like work to me. Not even practicing crossing the break.

The Fault In Our Cake

This is a story about food, friendship, and what we owe each other.

Back in my undergrad days, I and most of the people I knew ate the vast majority of our meals at the same place: Founders Table, the main dining hall at Valparaiso University. Founders is located in the relatively new Harre Union, a multi-use facility at the center of campus which was only a few years old when my Class of 2014 first arrived at Valpo. I think the university really tried to step up their food experience with the opening of the Harre Union. In the years prior, Valpo had closed down the cafeterias in each residence hall and razed the old Student Union, preparing the way for Founders to be the center of campus dining. I imagine the new facility was a costly upgrade, though one intended to significantly improve daily quality of life for students.

Based on what I heard from the upperclassmen and women who were around for the old dining hall days, this upgrade was largely successful. Founders served pretty decent food. A lot of it was your standard dining hall fare: there would always be pizza, pasta, soup, salad, and burritos available. And they’d serve main dishes on a rotating basis, repeating meals every several weeks or so.

Most importantly for our story, Founders offered a wide selection of desserts. There was always individually wrapped jumbo chocolate chip or M&M cookies. They would rotate between French silk pies, chocolate cakes, marble cakes, brownies, and on the best days, a gooey turtle brownie cookie pie they would bake in the pizza oven. And that’s just the chocolate desserts! When else in life do you have regular access to fresh baked goods and an abundance of meal plan money to spend before the semester runs out? So of course I made a habit out of having dessert, and having it abundantly. I’d pick up a dessert pretty much whenever I could, sometimes before I’d even figure out what else I’d be having for dinner. I’m a creature of comfort, and chocolate makes me so very comfortable.

All that said, I have to stress this is still dorm food we’re talking about. Most of the meals had to be mass-producible, because Founders needed to efficiently serve the few thousand members of Valpo’s student body. Some of the items were better than others—I still miss their Belgian waffles on weekends! But after living (and eating) on campus for three years, there isn’t much else I miss. Eventually you just get tired of it.

I tell you all this because I want to set the table for an incident regarding a slice of cake.

One evening in my sophomore or junior year, a group of about six of us walked down from our dorms to Founders for dinner. I swooped up a piece of marble cake with white frosting on my way to the register. After I finished my chicken or mashed potatoes or whatever was on the menu that night, I started on the cake. I didn’t think much of this routine experience as I was eating, which is why I was caught so off-guard when my friend Zach asked, “How’s the cake?”

This struck me as an incredibly strange question. At this point, I was at least a year and a half into my relationship with both Zach and Founders food. Zach and I had surely shared several dozen meals there. He knew I had a ton of unused meal plan money and an insatiable desire for desserts with chocolate. Surely he had seen me eat this cake before. He knew exactly how the cake was, or at least that I was going to eat it whenever I could. So why ask?

It kind of helps to know Zach a little to appreciate this situation. Zach is a man of principles. He’s the kind of eater who will finish every scrap and crumb off his plate so no food goes to waste. He’s the kind of sports fan who will lend his indomitable spirit and booming, projectable voice to start cheers in the stands. And he’s the kind of friend who is willing to be the only one to laugh at your jokes when they flop to spare your feelings. Zach is the middle child of five siblings, which I think explains a lot of his extroverted, self-assertive behavior as well as his tendency to poke you (sometimes literally) a few too many times before he realizes he’s being annoying.

The obvious answer seemed to be Zach was just trying to make small talk because the conversation had hit a lull. But something about his question still bugged me—why go through the charade of asking questions to which you already know the answer just to fill silence? Were we not all comfortable enough around each other to accept a few quiet moments? Still, small talk is a powerful, silent social contract which demands to accepted with a “yes, and?” lest the situation become even more awkward and intolerable.

I felt obliged to answer, “It’s fine.”

But I had forgotten Zach doesn’t particularly care for small talk either. No, he wanted to have a conversation.

“Just fine?” he replied. “You gotta give me more than that! Really, how is the cake?”

So I started thinking about the cake. Zach had caught me on autopilot, mindlessly eating Founders cake for the umpteenth time. And the harder I tried to come up with an honest answer to the question, the more I realized that upon scrutiny, the cake I would eat at every opportunity wasn’t really anything to be excited about. It was certainly better than nothing, but it was just the same old slightly dry marble cake with vanilla frosting. Apart from being sugary and desirable to my chocolate-addict brain, it was admittedly mediocre and literally unremarkable. I was eating it solely to fulfill a primal desire to feel that rush of pleasurable dessert-induced neurotransmitters and leave the dinner table satiated with the aftertaste of something sweet and chocolatey in my mouth.

The cake was a comfort choice—one I made merely because I could. Because it was there and I wanted it. Because it would bring me something approximating joy or satisfaction for the ninety seconds or so it would last on its little chilled plate once I took my first bite. And now I had come face-to-face with how utterly boring and muted even that part of my day is. It led me to wonder how much other mediocrity in my life I’ve blindly accepted.

The cake was at least somewhat enjoyable before I had been asked to think about it! And now I was afraid I would be stuck unable to appreciate dessert—one of life’s most joyful excesses—and that the best I could ever do is try not to think about how disappointing it really is.

“It’s fine.” I replied, dismissive of the question.
“Fine?”
“Yeah, it’s just fine. What more do you need to know?”
“I want to know how the cake is!”
fwas”It’s a cake! It’s…good…I guess.”

And it went around in circles like this for what felt like much too long. At least one other person at the table had a slice of cake and also found themselves unable to offer a review descriptive enough to appease Zach’s bizarrely aggressive line of questioning, so at least I wasn’t alone. We refused to elaborate and Zach obstinately refused to accept a one-word answer, so the conversation had reached an impasse. Whatever goodwill I had to play along with this inane conversation quickly evaporated as I began to perceive Zach in this moment as more annoying than genuinely trying to initiate. I didn’t know how to express the deep sense of frustration and philosophical dread I had overthought my way into. At some point, I’m sure I snapped and said something like, “I’m trying to analyze this cake so hard for you that it’s not even good anymore!”

Eventually there was no food left on our plates to argue about, so we got up, sent the remains of that meal down the cafeteria tray return, and moved on with our evenings.

Over the years, this story became something like a legend in our friend group. I would come to call having your enjoyment of something ruined by overanalyzing and overthinking it (and sometimes concluding it wasn’t that great to begin with) The Cake Effect. I’m sure there were a couple dinners afterwards where someone would sarcastically ask “how’s the cake?” when they didn’t actually care. And I have retold this story to embarrass Zach in front of new friends (particularly girls), portraying him as the annoying troll and myself as his victim who just wanted to eat a slice of cake.

But upon recent reflection, I realized casting us in those roles is a totally biased, unfair way to tell this story. I don’t think until now I’ve ever given serious consideration to this incident from Zach’s perspective. I never reflected on how my words may have affected him, or how I very well may have been the annoying troll. So I want to break down why I now believe I was wrong, identify what I could have done better, and make an apology for telling this story unfairly for six years.

First, I don’t think I lived up to my friendly obligation to reciprocate Zach’s small talk. It’s debatable whether such an obligation exists, but I think spiteful refusal to engage in small talk, even with a close friend, is rude and unreasonable. To be clear, I don’t believe in an obligation to initiate small talk, but once you’re roped in, you really ought to play along or else you risk being unfriendly and making the other person feel unvalued or uncomfortable. I think that’s something I did wrong with Zach here. Nobody likes to get back one-word answers. It makes you feel like your question doesn’t deserve thought and consideration (or otherwise makes you wonder what has gone wrong in the other person’s day to make them so unwilling to talk). Yet the whole point of small talk is it doesn’t deserve much thought or consideration, but we pretend it does to make ourselves feel like we’re having a real conversation instead of following a script. To tear down that illusion by being terse and spiteful is to violate this unspoken contract of small talk. For as much as I may not care for these polite fictions, Zach embraces them as an opportunity to be friendly, and society takes his side. (Society and small talk both seem to be built for extroverts.) Unless there’s an external compelling need to forego conversation, friends shouldn’t shoot down innocent, mindless chatter, if only for the sake of avoiding unnecessary hurt feelings and petty conflicts. (I’m sure anyone who has seen Zach and I bicker over nothing just had a good laugh at our expense.)

Like I said earlier, I think Zach was looking for something more than “small talk,” since he was unwilling to accept the sort of one-word answers that usually fly under those terms. Whatever it was, this conversation fell between small talk and thoughtful dialogue. The rules for this middle ground aren’t clearly defined and are therefore subject to arguments about what is owed to whom.

As obnoxious as it may have been for Zach to continue pressing everyone at the table to critique their slices of Founders cake, I believe it was even more unbecoming for me to refuse to engage a friend who obviously wanted to have a conversation, even a relatively trivial one. It should have been incumbent on me to recognize this and reciprocate. Instead, I went out of my way to offer Zach the least amount of information out of spite because I thought his question was dumb and pointless. That could have been the end of it, but he interpreted my reaction as dismissive at best and hostile at worst. Instead of giving up his line of inquiry, I only galvanized him to push me even further. And that only made me less likely to respond charitably. It was a vicious cycle, and as the one behaving least reasonably I should have been the one to extend a hand and pull us both out.

I also regret my failure to consider Zach’s emotional needs throughout this incident. Zach often found himself struggling to keep up with his demanding engineering coursework, which necessitated that he spend long hours in relative quiet, either by himself or in the presence of others working. Zach has a strong desire to connect and converse with other people, but in college, he had to spend a great deal of his time denying that essential need for the sake of academics. I’m an introvert, so I never really had to deal with this particular kind of angst. I can’t imagine how exhausted I would have felt if most of my studies involved long conversations with groups. At the dinner table, I didn’t imagine how Zach must have been feeling after a long day of classes and studying. It did not occur to me that he came with us to Founders hoping for a chance to recharge and talk to his friends. I was supposed to be helping him do that, but instead I stood in the way and caused a petty disagreement.

The other broad problem with the way I handled Zach’s questions was my inability to come up with any words to describe the cake beyond “good” or “fine.” Earlier I used the words “slightly dry” and “sugary,” which aren’t even that descriptive. Still, they tell you a lot more than what I told Zach and they barely took any effort to conjure. And that’s basically the extent of my ability to describe food. For as much time as I spend eating, I really haven’t put much thought towards how to talk about food, and I think that actually inhibits my ability to taste and understand it.

My vocabulary is full of terms and metaphors I use to describe music. I can say that a trombone has a “warm” tone and describe a chord voicing that clusters low notes together as “muddy.” And that doesn’t even count all the music theory jargon that can precisely describe different sounds and harmonies. Before I learned how to speak in these terms, the way I heard music was vague and indefinite and my conversations were superficial. Thanks to years of meaningful study and engagement with music, I now hear its nuances can offer informed thoughts about it. But I simply don’t have the time or motivation to do this even for things I genuinely enjoy, like food.

Certainly I don’t need to be a chef to have an opinion about something as personal as my own experience with a cake. I realize “not knowing much about food” is a lame excuse for getting tongue-tied trying to talk to Zach. You’ll have to take my word for it that in the moment, I drew a blank. Maybe I’d have been less likely to draw a blank if I watched more cooking shows or had done more food preparation of my own. But Zach wasn’t looking for flowery descriptive language. He legitimately wanted to know—from a trusted source—if the cake was good in case he wanted to buy it in the future.

This thought blew my mind when I talked to Zach for this piece. Zach didn’t have the same obsessive dessert-eating habits I did, and he often found himself pinching to make his meal plan money last until the end of the semester. My self-centered mind literally could not conceive of the possibility that Zach may have been going to Founders for so long and never eaten the cake. But according to him, that’s probably the truth. He didn’t get that many desserts because it would have drained his dining dollars faster and he just wasn’t as ravenous a cake-eater as I was. And I didn’t get that. Zach wasn’t being strange by trying to get this question answered at all—he was trying to have an extremely routine, human interaction. It was my insistence to be short with him that was strange.

That’s the root of my entire problem here, and honestly, the root of many of the world’s problems: failure to imagine others complexly.

In hindsight, the best response would have been to slide him my ID and tell him to go get himself a slice of cake, on me. It would have cost next to nothing and been worth a thousand words. These small gestures of kindness fortify friendships, and friendships fortify the world from indifference.

I realize all this may come across as being pretty hard on myself for something relatively unimportant. But it took me six years to understand this story was never about whether the cake was good. It was about how to treat your friends with compassion, even when they test your patience. Whether or not you have a sweet tooth, I think that’s something we all can agree is worth our attention.

So to Zach: I wish to offer a belated but sincere apology for failing to respond with the attention and conversation you needed and deserved. Every time I’ve retold the cake story, I doubled down on my own ignorance and lack of perspective at your expense. Though you’ve been a good sport about it and laughed along with me, I have regrets for doing that. I am so thankful to have friends as forgiving and charitable with their hearts as you. I promise to do more seeing, listening, and tasting before I start talking.

The fault, my dear Zach, was not in our cake, but in myself.

How I Decorate for Christmas

This Christmas season is the first I’ll spend living on my own rather than in my parents’ house. Which means that it’s the first year I’ll have to decide for myself how I want to decorate my home for the holidays. I don’t think these decisions are a matter of great significance or consequence. But I do think the way a person approaches these choices can reveal something about what they value. And from time to time, it’s good to take stock of how your actions reveal what’s important to you. Often enough, you surprise yourself.

While I was in college, I was away from home for much or most of December. And like many of my classmates, I didn’t make an effort to decorate my cluttered dorm room with any little trees, garlands, or lights. The two or three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas break are usually the hardest of the school year. There are late midterms, final projects, and music ensemble performances, all while classes and homework continue at the usual pace and finals are lurking around the corner. There was also that one year I developed an allergic reaction to a medication and spent Reading Day in the emergency room with jaundice. All this to say making my room more festive simply wasn’t on my mind.

But at Valpo, it didn’t have to be. The halls of the Harre Union would be decked, the Chapel celebrated Advent, and on the first Thursday back from Thanksgiving break, we would hold a tree lighting ceremony with carols, hot chocolate, cookies, and a fireworks display. Nowhere but Valpo have I ever witnessed a fireworks display while standing in snow. Valpo as a campus community had the festivities and decorations covered. It felt like Christmas, even if it didn’t look like in the room where I slept.

Outside the campus bubble, I’d typically spend a week and a half at home between Thanksgiving and Christmas on holiday breaks. And while I was there, I would reliably be volunteered to help my dad pull down boxes of Christmas stuff from the attic, often my one real contribution to my mother’s hard work of decorating the house before I’d head back to school, not seeing the final product for another three weeks.

This year, I don’t have any of that. I have no campus community to decorate for me, and no big house with the decorations my parents have accumulated over the years. My mom saved a small box of lights, garland, and spare ornaments and it’s been sitting on my dining room floor since Thanksgiving weekend. I have my relatively unadorned apartment, that box, and some disposable income.

But I can’t see myself going to a big retail store and buying things that I’ll look at and enjoy for one month out of the year. By and large, I think I’m not going out of my way to put up decorations because I realized I’ve found my own way of decorating a long time ago.

Some quick family history: in about 1957 or 1958 in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, my grandfather finally convinced his dad to buy him a saxophone so he could start getting into music and join his older brother’s band. He practiced night and day and eventually started playing gigs as a side job.  Years later, when my dad was old enough to join his school’s band program, his choice of instrument was clear: he’d be a saxophone player too. Such was the case for me in 5th grade; after some convincing, I became a third generation sax man.

I mention all this simply to explain that Christmas with my dad’s side of the family growing up always involved my grandpa and my great-uncle putting on a show. With my uncle on the accordion, my grandpa alternating between tenor sax, singing, and tambourine, and the rest of the family singing along (or at least pretending to), those Christmas Eves when my cousins and I were young were always fun.

A couple of years after I started playing saxophone, my dad came home with this red and green book called “100 Great Christmas Songs.” It’s a piano/vocal/chord book of, I assume, whatever Christmas music Warner Brothers had licensing rights to publish on the cheap in 1998. My great-uncle had marked a couple of songs for me to transpose up so I could play along on tenor sax. I had been drafted into the band!

So I fired up my family’s new Windows XP desktop, opened Finale Notepad 2004, and got to work transposing Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from C major to D major so I could play off printed sheet music. (For non band nerds, the notes on certain instruments are given names higher or lower than how they sound, so music written for them has to be set in a different key for the pitch to match with other instruments. This is too big a tangent even for me, so Google “concert pitch” if you want further explanation on a really obnoxious topic in music education.) And indeed, I played my transposed sheet music that Christmas Eve with the No Rehearsal Christmas Band and great fun was had. It must have been one of the first times I performed for people outside the walls of an academic building.

To the best of my recollection, I only played at the family’s Christmas gathering once or twice. But over the next several years, I’d get my fix of playing Christmas music on saxophone in middle school and high school jazz band. And of course, when I played in Valpo’s jazz ensemble, our monthly performance at Duffy’s (your typical college town dive bar) would turn into a Christmas extravaganza on the first Tuesday of December. We’d break out a bunch of easy Christmas jazz charts, rehearse them that afternoon, and breeze our way through them that night, filling time with outrageously long solo sections featuring everyone in the band. The environment was even more lax (read: drunken) than usual (which is saying something). The opening verse to Rudolph would occasionally inspire someone to pull this big old deer bust off the wall and form a conga line. It was reliably the most fun performance of the year.

Having dabbled at piano long enough to be able to read chord sheets and peck out a melody with modest success, in the past few years I’ve been dusting off that red and green Christmas book and faking my way through some of the more familiar tunes. Being unable to properly sightread music for piano, I improvise my own chord voicings around the symbols and play these hymns and standards until they start to stick in my memory. Naturally, I developed favorite Christmas songs in a way I haven’t before.

One hymn that has perennially caught my attention is O Come O Come Emmanuel. Its melody was composed in the 15th century and sung as a chant with Latin text for burial processionals, which I think in retrospect says a lot about its somber, dirge-like qualities. The melody is beautiful and simple, with each phrase constructed by either moving up and down the natural minor scale or outlining a major or minor triad. This melodic banality – such as a lack of unusual intervals or accidentals – ends up leaving the harmony somewhat ambiguous or open to interpretation. And while that may have worked for the monks chanting it in unison or in two parts 600 years ago, modern Choirs and churches aren’t going to sing and play O Come O Come Emmanuel in unison with no background instruments or harmony. So since 1851, clergymen, composers, and artists have been arranging their own harmony and instrumentation for it. I disagreed with the chords in my red and green book, finding its weak cadences and resolutions to be unsatisfying. So on Christmas Eve five years ago, while I was waiting for it to be time to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I decided to write my own. I hadn’t practiced part-writing and voice leading in a great while, so I wrote out the melody on staff paper and filled out the alto, tenor, and bass parts trying to observe the basic four-part writing rules:

If you play this, it doesn’t sound bad for an afternoon’s work. But the harmonic innovations I made were fairly minor, distracting pun unintended. (Actually, no! The pun is always intended if you leave it in!) My changes basically amount to changing a few minor chords to their relative major chords, which makes for more dramatic cadences and makes it sound more like a mid-19th century hymn than a chant, which I guess is what I was aiming for. But to the untrained ear, these changes would probably go unnoticed. Heck, even to the trained ear it would be hard to tell my version from any other because there is no standard version.

Cut to last December where, still not satisfied with my first go, I decided to try a radically different approach: arranging O Come O Come Emmanuel like a big band sax soli. The goal would be to record myself playing all the parts when I was done, though this meant keeping it to two altos and two tenors (because I don’t just have a baritone sax sitting around). Thinking about this song in a jazz context opened up a whole world of harmonic possibilities! My more traditional arrangement stuck mostly to major and minor triads, which meant one of the four parts was doubling a note another instrument was already playing. But in jazz, it’s pretty much expected that the chords will have at least four different notes, so if anything, it was a matter of figuring out which notes to omit from the jazz chords I wanted to spread between the horns. Allowing myself to use more colorful harmony and bend the rules gave me more room to be creative with my part-writing and write something more original.

This year, wishing to further practice my jazz harmony writing, I took a similar approach to arranging the Vince Guaraldi classic Christmas Time Is Here, from the A Charlie Brown Christmas. This ended up being more a study of the harmony Vince played on his piano back in the 1960s rather than an opportunity to reinvent the song. But I did exercise some creativity in structuring the song around a tenor solo and improvising some cadenzas at the outro.

If this whole post seems like it’s been a big, cynical ploy to promote my music projects, well, you’re not exactly wrong! My recordings for O Come O Come Emmanuel and Christmas Time Is Here are on YouTube if you care to know what they sound like. But in true Real Tangent fashion, I still need to tie together all these threads and get back to where I started.

Excluding hymns and other liturgical music, many of the popular Christmas tunes you’ll hear on the radio this time of year were composed in the Tin Pan Alley era of American songwriting. In general, the songs from this period which remain popular today either became jazz standards after being made famous on Broadway or were Christmas songs made famous by one crooner or another. Which is to say Christmas standards and jazz standards are musical cousins, and in fact some of them were written by the same composers (perhaps the most famous being Irving Berlin, who wrote White Christmas).

Thinking back to those Duffy’s performances, it was interesting to be handed chord changes to songs I’ve known since I was a little kid and recognize how similar they were to the jazz music I had learned to appreciate much later in life. Seeing songs like Santa Claus is Coming to Town or Winter Wonderland broken down into chords and understanding how they were composed felt like going back and watching a movie you haven’t seen in a long time and picking up on all the stuff you missed. (And there is a lot to miss! Songs from this era commonly offer a great deal of harmonic variety that is unusual in modern pop and rock music.) There’s something about appreciating subtleties that have always been in plain sight which deeply resonates with me. Chasing down nuances and details has led me to learn music theory to better appreciate the musical landscapes in my life, and earn two degrees in civil and structural engineering to understand the physical landscapes. So too has this curiosity brought me on many architectural tours of downtown Chicago. There is so much order and intent to be appreciated in all of these things and being in on it feels like knowing a secret code.

I think this drive to look closely at something that has always been an intimate part of my environment is what belies my unyielding fascination and love of music. And I think it especially draws me towards Christmas music because those are some of the songs I’ve known the longest, and nostalgia is sure to play a role in my adult interests in things from my past. There is something particularly apt about my revisiting and rearranging Christmas music each year, and it ties all the way back to something I wrote about nearly three years ago in A is for Annulus about yearly rituals and traditions:

We give ourselves these little roadside landmarks at the same point into every year. With each holiday we observe, we get an opportunity to compare our changing lives against a constant. Many cultures use Valentine’s Day to think about how romance in our lives has (or hasn’t) changed. Americans reflect on what their country means to them every July 4th, and inevitably that perspective changes with age. The holiday remains the same; it is we who experience it differently each passing year.

Christians observe liturgical seasons that focus on a particular theme for devotionals and reflection. Advent is the liturgical season before Christmas in which Christians prepare their lives and hearts to welcome Jesus anew. With each successive Advent and Christmas, our spiritualities, perspectives of God, and lives change, causing us to observe these seasons of the year differently each time we cycle through.

We read the same stories from Matthew and Luke’s gospels each year and reflect on the angels, the shepherds, the manger, the gifts, and the guiding star, and (hopefully!) we find new meaning in them relative to where we are in our lives. So too do I now revisit the same canon of Christmas music each December and make something new of it that the musician I was last year would not or could not have. Before writing this post, I had never heard the melody to O Come O Come Emmanuel performed as a chant. But I’m glad the writing and research process led me to discover that. Who knows what I’ll learn next year?

If it isn’t obvious by now, the way I choose to decorate for Christmas is to bounce sound waves off the walls with instruments. Part of becoming an adult is deciding which parts of your childhood to hold on to. And I think I can enjoy for many more years as an adult the Christmas music of my youth. Practicing and arranging Christmas music in a new way each year may not be any more significant or consequential than traditional home decorations in and of itself. But it enriches a way I already express myself, and that’s significant and consequential to me. I have so many more opinions and ideas about how music should sound than I do about the lights and garland in that box on my kitchen floor. And with some of my music on YouTube, my decorations can echo through halls all over the world! Part of what makes the Christmas season so special is its transience. It’s here for four or five weeks and then it’s gone for 11 months. What better way to celebrate this fleeting time of year than with decorations that exist only momentarily, only when a musician is actively decorating either in person or through a speaker? In the end, decorations are about making the outer affect the inner. As for me, I respond more deeply to music than I do to boughs of holly.

As I was finishing that last paragraph, I figured out what I can do with the lights. I just wrapped a short strand around my piano stand and across the back of the keyboard, plugged them in, turned off the ceiling lights. Then, under their warm, multi-colored glow, I played Silent Night. It brought me peace.

May you find peace this Christmas season as well.

Journal Trends (Not Really) Explained

Here are two of the craziest graphs I’ve ever produced in my life:

I’ve been writing in a particular journal with 30 lines on each page since January 25th, 2016. At some point early last year, I started tracking the length and date of my journal entries and making these plots, because this is me we’re talking about, so of course I did. Yesterday, after 682 days and 301 journal entries, I reached the end.

The top plot just shows the number of lines filled with ink in a day’s journal entry. And the bottom plot shows how close to complete the journal is (calculated by dividing the number of lines written so far by the total number of lines filled by the end).

Usually I’m reluctant to share this kind of aggregate life snapshot type stuff. But I don’t think this is all that personal or revelatory, largely because I don’t quite know what to make of it myself. Nevertheless, I have a few observations.

While I was in the disciplined habit of writing something in this journal every day, I feared that skipping just one entry would cause me to abandon daily journaling completely. It appears that this is true. Ignoring the one zero line entry at the end of May 2016 (where I had a friend spending the night and got distracted), after that first zero in August 2016, I never returned to the habit of daily journaling. I don’t think I even managed to string more than three consecutive days together since then. Even so, I was surprised to see the rate at which I was journaling settled into a new constant. The scattered and seemingly random lengths of entries appears to average out into consistency. In fact, there seems to be a daily journaling rate and a “journal whenever I need to” rate, as seen in the way the lower plot is essentially bi-linear (meaning it starts with one slope and changes to a different slope at a certain point).

I think this adaptability to a new normal reflects the biggest takeaway from this, my fourth journal in a little less than four years. Though I have some regret about failing to record memories and thoughts for so much of 2017, perhaps my recent lack of desire to be constantly writing stuff down is simply an indicator of the relative stability of adulthood where I have less change to process through.

There is one bit of internal symbolism I’m particularly pleased with, though it wasn’t exactly intentional. When I picked out this journal in January 2015, I was drawn to it for a few reasons. One, it was built with high quality leather and paper and wouldn’t fall apart. Two, it had lines, where my previous journal didn’t. But most importantly, it featured a small blooming tree in a shiny golden print on the cover and flourishes resembling a stem or a leaf sprouting at the bottom of each page. As I was writing this journal’s final entry and reflecting on how my life will move forward, I was reminded of a lyric from Walk The Moon’s Portugal: “Growing up is a heavy leaf to turn.” And it occurred to me that as I grew from writing in this journal, I would literally turn over a leaf every time I turned to a new page. Some of those pages were heavy to turn. And though I may have slowed down the rate, I believe growing up will continue to involve more writing and turning.

Kermit the Frog: It’s Not Easy Being a Meme

Author’s note:
I originally wrote this piece for a spin-off blog I no longer update called Trend Explainer. The premise was I’d dive into why certain Google Trends graphs look the way they do by explaining the moments in culture that define their interesting twists and turns. I thought this post would fit well on The Real Tangent, so I’m sharing it here as well.
The following post originally appeared here on Trend Explainer.

When Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog in 1955, he surely had no idea that his puppet would go on to become a timeless cultural icon, a celebrity in his own right, and most recently, an internet meme sensation. Yet decades before Reddit and Imgur, Kermit was already the perfect candidate to become all those things. His simple character design has remained virtually unchanged for over 60 years, making him instantly recognizable and easy to edit and remix. His static ping-pong ball eyes and relative lack of features make him dependent on body language, props, and captions to express emotions. And he has appeared in hundreds of episodes of The Muppet Show and Sesame Street and starred in dozens of films, so the internet holds a dizzying array of Kermit photos to form the basis of memes. Kermit has competed on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and made the rounds on daytime and late night talk shows with multiple generations of hosts. There is not one, but two Kermit puppets behind glass at the Smithsonian. He is the most interesting frog in the world.

How could he NOT occasionally take over the internet?

According to Google Trends, the most popular Kermit meme is what Know Your Meme calls “But That’s None of My Business.” It typically features Kermit nonchalantly drinking a beverage and calling out questionable behavior or hypocrisy, asserting at the end “but that’s none of my business.” I think it’s meant to play Kermit as a gossipy casual observer, and often a condescending one. Many of these witty social observations originated in black internet subculture and made the rounds in those circles before reaching the internet at large.

According to Google Trends, the most popular Kermit meme is what Know Your Meme calls “But That’s None of My Business.” It typically features Kermit nonchalantly drinking a beverage and calling out questionable behavior or hypocrisy, asserting at the end “but that’s none of my business.” I think it’s meant to play Kermit as a gossipy casual observer, and often a condescending one. Many of these witty social observations originated in black internet subculture and made the rounds in those circles before reaching the internet at large.

There are two main incarnations of But That’s None of My Business: one of Kermit drinking tea in a 2014 Lipton advertisement, and the other of Kermit sipping milk through a straw in the very first episode of The Muppet Show (skip to about four minutes in, you’ll know it when you see it). This trend reached peak popularity in the days following June 20th, 2014, when an Instagram account was created to highlight the best of Kermit’s shade throwing and gained over 130,000 followers.

(I just want to pause here so I can imagine reading the previous sentence to Jim Henson in 1977 and wonder how he’d react to the idea of his character thriving in a bizarre, complex world Henson would never live to see.)

But That’s None of My Business enjoys blue-chip meme status to this day, but was given a brief boost on June 21st, 2016 when Good Morning America infamously tweeted a collage of popular memes and used the hashtag #tealizard to describe Kermit. Tea lizard! Predictably, Twitter lost its collective mind. Mocking of GMA as an out of touch corporate enterprise ensued, as well as the inevitable corrections that frogs are amphibians, not lizards. There was even backlash accusing GMA of whitewashing the Kermit meme by erasing its black comedian origins. In a strange turn of events, the social media coordinator for GMA tried to claim on Twitter that people have actually called this meme Tea Lizard, implicitly casting everyone else as out of touch.

Here’s the great thing about tea lizard, though: a year earlier, in the spring of 2015, scientists announced they discovered a new species of glass frog in Costa Rica that bears a striking resemblance to you-know-who:

https://twitter.com/KariAnnWrites/status/590247500319051776

This does little to rebut the Tea Lizard truthers, and maybe we have to brush aside the fact that the original Kermit actually did look more like a lizard, but I still find it hard to believe that many people would call a fuzzy, toothless, scaleless creature—who again, calls himself a frog—a lizard.

The other famous Kermit meme has been dubbed “Evil Kermit,” and it’s taken from a screenshot of the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted. It’s a shot of Kermit facing his evil look-alike nemesis Constantine, who is wearing a black Sith robe over his eyes. (I think it really speaks to Kermit’s unique design that neither Kermit nor Constantine’s face is visible in this photo but it’s still obvious who it is.) The captions always imagine the poster’s inner urges to make poor choices in the form of a two-line dialogue— essentially a version of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The tweet that started it all was posted on November 6th, 2016, and the meme grew in popularity over the following weeks, even inspiring a Miss Piggy version.

You’ll notice that the popularity bump from But That’s None of My Business has an immediate sharp decline, while the spike from Evil Kermit decreased more slowly. I have a few thoughts as to why. One, leisure time on the internet seems to increase in late December as people have time off work and school (see The Annual Cycle of Netflix Popularity). Around this time, a smaller Kermit meme—a Kermit aftershock, if you will—began to reemerge on Twitter thanks to the large following of the quirky high-concept account @jonnysun.

On December 12th, 2016, @jonnysun tweeted this:

when u give urself a gentle hug evrey night before u go to bed, reassuring urself that no mater wat, the day was yours bc u chose to live it pic.twitter.com/fTH8o5k3h9

— jonny sun (@jonnysun) December 13, 2016

This sad, fuzzy Kermit doll belongs to a 17-year-old girl from Finland named Pinja. In September 2016, she began taking photos of her Kermit in various settings and positions and posting them in a thread of tweets, which garnered attention in certain corners of Twitter. Sad Kermit originated in a tweet from Pinja about how much she missed one of her friends. When Jonny posted his own caption for Sad Kermit, he replied to it with a challenge for his followers to turn Sad Kermit into a ‘wholesome meme,’ meaning to lend it a positive and encouraging caption rather than a snide or sarcastic one. Many people obliged in the following days, and BuzzFeed has kindly curated the highlights.

the chalemge.. can u wholesome the sadest meme in the worlbd, i think.. no

— jonny sun (@jonnysun) December 13, 2016

I mention all this because December 12th also happens to be the point on the graph where the negative slope abruptly becomes less steep. The wholesome meme crusade wasn’t enough to stop the inevitable decline of Evil Kermit mania, but I think it did have an effect in prolonging it. I also believe  (or at least I want to) that good natured humor—like the captions for Evil Kermit tend to be—naturally has stronger staying power than the condescension and criticism offered by But That’s None of My Business. Perhaps there is more social incentive to share a meme that lets people laugh at themselves or at life in general than a meme that chastises others, even if it’s also for laughs.

(If that’s true, it would be a fair criticism to point out that the snarkier meme was more popular. But I’ll remind you that trend popularity is based on how frequently Kermit was Googled as a percentage of total searches at the time, and the world got pretty busy searching for non-Kermit related subjects a couple of days after November 6th, 2016. The election appearing to interfere with unrelated trends may turn out to be relatively common—it showed up at the end of How Google Trends Works too.)

My annotated graph would have you believe Evil Kermit was only 60% as popular at its peak as But That’s None of My Business, but of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. It turns out the spike for Kermit searches in April 2013 had nothing to do with Kermit the Frog, but is instead related to the conviction of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell for murder, manslaughter, and a host of other federal drug crimes related to his abhorrent cesspool of a clinic and his felonious practice of late-term and even post-birth abortions. I did NOT see this coming when I set out to write a lighthearted blog about a Muppet and I don’t want it to take over this post. But clearly, using generic terms like “Kermit” to track meme popularity is subject to unintended and confounding interference.

Aside: I can’t fathom that there was a period of time when people named their sons Kermit. But lo and behold, there’s a whole side controversy over whether Kermit the Frog was named after a friend of Jim Henson…though I’ve never heard of anyone by that name born after The Muppet Show aired.

Anyways, I think choosing more specific search terms can shed some light on the popularity of the memes independently of the popularity of the Muppet himself:

(See interactive version here.)

You can see three spikes we’ve talked about, but this time I’ve included two names for the tea drinking meme. Because every data point is normalized based on the largest spike, I don’t think it’s a bad assumption to compare the sum of the red and orange lines to the blue. In which case, But That’s None of My Business was more like 94% as popular as Evil Kermit. But that’s assuming there are no other aliases for the Evil Kermit Meme. One starts to get the impression Google Trends isn’t the best tool to do thorough mathematical comparisons.

So we’ve covered a case of mistaken identity with a murderer, a ridiculous Twitter gaffe, and a rare species of frog. What’s next?

Guerilla marketing, it turns out. In the midst of a summer of high-profile celebrity split-ups and divorces, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy released statements on Facebook and Twitter on August 4th, 2015 announcing they were ending their long-term romantic relationship. But—of course—they would continue to work together professionally on their upcoming TV show “The Muppets” on ABC later that fall. This generated headlines in publications like USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter, but also in the style section of The Washington Post and CNN. (Miss Piggy even did a tell-all on Good Morning America just 9 months before they would forget who Kermit is.) Some reactions contained real emotion, as the news was meant to be taken as the end of a celebrity romance that spanned decades. A few weeks later, it was announced that Kermit had found a new girlfriend, a redheaded pig named Denise. All this internet buzz set up the character dynamics for the beginning of the new TV series when it premiered September 22nd, 2015 on ABC. These news articles were a show outside a show about making a show, because sometimes the Muppets just roll three layers deep.

I find it striking that this well-timed marketing stunt generated less than half as much interest in Kermit as the creation of an Instagram account that did nothing but post pictures of Kermit mocking social faux pas. Perhaps internet users saw the drama as the corporate stunt that it was, rolled their eyes, and moved on. Either way, it’s a startling reminder to modern PR executives that no amount of focus testing, brand development, and approved social media language will give them full control over what happens to their intellectual property.

Also striking is the fact that I just referred to Kermit as intellectual property and it probably felt a little odd to think about him in such cold legal terms. It did to me when I first typed it. But it’s true: as of 2004, Kermit the Frog is the property of an international media conglomerate called The Walt Disney Company. And by the way, so is C-3PO, Epic Rap Battles of History, and Good Morning America (which airs on ABC, yet another Disney subsidiary). We try to ignore the faceless corporations behind our beloved fictional characters the way we try not to think about how dirty our belts must get when we buckle them before washing our hands: often successfully, but not always. But the Muppets are different than virtually every other TV and movie character because the media and pop culture in general seem bent on pretending that the Muppets are real people.

Okay, yes, C-3PO, R2-D2, and BB-8 did appear at the Oscars last year and give a shout-out to John Williams. And sure, there is an entire attraction at Disney World premised on the droids being real. And yes, okay, fine, live Stormtroopers march around Disney’s Hollywood Studios. But that’s pretty much the extent of their interaction with the real world, and it’s the same for Disney’s other characters. Mickey and Minnie don’t give interviews to journalists and run official Twitter accounts. They don’t even speak! They interact with the real world by giving kids hugs, autographs, and photo-ops. Adults join in too, one reason being to have fun with their kids, a more cynical reason being the $95 incentive to suspend their disbelief they paid at the entrance. But I suspect most guests – kids included – know it isn’t real but play along anyways because there’s no other place where you can get a big hug from a 7-foot tall Pooh Bear. It’s special not because The Walt Disney Company or grown-ups say it’s real, but because we let it be real.

So it goes for the Muppets, but for some reason, we let them take their reality way farther into ours. It probably has to do with the way they entered the public consciousness through a variety show about making a variety show guest starring real human celebrities decades before wacky meta hijinks became popular. (One surefire way to attract praise and adulation from Hollywood is to affectionately and relentlessly lampoon it.) Audiences became used to seeing the Muppets interact with human stars. Next thing you know, the Muppets are being invited to speak in public and make TV guest appearances of their own. Kermit was even credited as the author of a best-selling book. The crossovers between Muppet world and the real world became part of their charm. But unlike Mickey, Pooh Bear, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, normal people like you and I can’t go to a theme park or a mall and shake their hands. The Muppets were accessible only to celebrities, which made them celebrities on their own.

Of course, the real reason non-celebrities can’t meet the Muppets in person is because it would be impossible to hide the talented voice actors and puppeteers who bring them to life below the camera, and seeing how the sausage gets made would shatter the layers of pseudo-reality they’ve fabricated for themselves. So rarely are the human performers behind the Muppets recognized for their work. They generally get press only when the story is about the current Muppet production itself rather than the actual Muppets. It has become totally normal for reporters to interview Muppets in character. It’s been argued that this practice makes reporters complicit in providing free advertising for Muppet movies and TV shows under the guise of arts journalism. Is the charade necessary for the Muppets to stay unique and relevant in our postmodern TV world?

I was thinking about the media and the future of the Muppets when just last Sunday, Sesame Workshop introduced Julia, a young Muppet with autism who will join the cast of Sesame Street on April 4th. David Folkenflik’s segment on NPR’s Morning Edition and Lesley Stahl’s segment on 60 Minutes include brief scenes where they talk to Abby Cadabby, Big Bird, and Elmo in character. Neither of them really needed to do this for their stories to work, but there’s something irresistibly charming about getting to interview Muppets. In NPR’s segment in particular, the in-character exchange with Abby set up how the Muppets describe Julia and her condition before Folkenflik moved on to the substance: interviewing the actors and showrunners at Sesame Workshop. With a format allowing for extended segments, 60 Minutes went more in-depth about how Sesame Street began as an experiment in educational television for children and how they continue their mission today. The Sesame Workshop conducts extensive research and consultation with educators and child psychologists to develop their characters and programming. They reached out to 14 autism advocacy groups for input into how to best portray the condition, and published books and digital content featuring Julia before bringing her onto Sesame Street. The Workshop hopes to familiarize non-autistic children with the kinds of behaviors autistic children commonly exhibit. And by showing how Julia fits into her group of Muppet friends, they hope to send the message that autistic kids can fit into their friend groups too. This is the latest of many difficult social situations Sesame Street has tackled to help today’s children better understand the world and treat others with respect. They’ve introduced children to wheelchairs, skin color, incarceration, and even death. As long as Sesame Workshop continues to pioneer new ways to make our increasingly complex world understandable to children, I believe Muppets will have no problem staying relevant. (The real question is whether or not local PBS stations will continue receiving federal subsidies to broadcast it, and for that, you’ll have to ask Ronald Grump… I mean… you know who I mean.)

The Muppets of the movies are like the rude older siblings of the Sesame Street Muppets. Their mission is entertainment, not non-profit children’s education.  Obviously, nostalgia lends a lot of power to the Muppets, which is one reason why the 2015 TV series was marketed towards adult audiences and dealt with less than family-friendly themes. I don’t know if the rude older sibling Muppets will forever hold the respect of the public simply because they’ve endured the test of time, regardless of what they have to offer today.

But I do know this: if I saw Joy and Sadness from Inside Out at Disney World, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to get my photo taken with them. To be honest, I think I’d be a little starstruck. I literally keep a Sadness plush doll on my bookshelf to remind me how much the message of that movie resonated with me. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about Inside Out (this blog is Exhibit A), and it’s made me invested in the characters to the point where if I were offered the opportunity to simply pretend to meet them, I’d have no reason not to, regardless how silly it is. Maybe some people have a similar bond with the Muppets. Maybe this country has that kind of bond with the Muppets, so our culture gives them attention whenever they have something to say. If we’re really that invested in our relationship with them, maybe we have no reason not to as well. The Muppets make their share of problematic  (and dare I say unfunny) jokes. But their timeless, cornball humor gave them a place in our culture long enough for them to become a fixture and even make fun of themselves along the way.

Iconic, self-aware, and eager to self-parody?

Kermit didn’t need the internet to become a meme.

Why I’m Willing to Wait For It

I bought tickets to see Hamilton in Chicago on August 4th, 2017. At the time of purchase, my wait to finally be in The Room Where It Happens was a staggering 312 days.

Let’s just explore the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimeyness of that.

My entire experience with grad school, from move in day to move out day, was 330 days. Excluding summer and winter breaks, I only spent 269 (painful) days earning a master’s degree. Most people I know spend less time planning their wedding than I will spend waiting for Hamilton. Babies will be conceived and born in the time I will spend waiting for Hamilton. The next NFL preseason will likely begin the weekend after I see Hamilton. This godforsaken election will be over and a new presidential administration will have been in power for six and a half months by the time I see Hamilton.

I had only been a fan for about five weeks when I bought the tickets nearly eleven months in advance. But there will come a day when I won’t be able to remember what being a Hamilton fan without tickets was like. Waiting to see the show is going to characterize and dominate the next year of my fanship.

And yeah, it’s totally possible that I’ll be over my obsession with Hamilton by the time August 4th, 2017 rolls around. It’s extremely rare for me to hold on to my initial passion and interest for an album (musical theatre or not) for more than six months. It’s why the play counts in my library hit a sharp upper bound at around 30 to 35. I’m nearly at that point for some of my favorite songs on Hamilton’s soundtrack, which is cause for concern that this honeymoon phase of binge-listening is about to end. Obviously, I’d prefer to see this show at the peak of my excitement for it rather than as someone who used to be really excited about it. I’d still know all most of the words, but my experience would be tinged with nostalgia for the months when I first fell in love with the show.

I think a ticket is the best insurance policy money can buy against that latter scenario.

Including fees and tax, my seat cost about $100.85, which in my opinion is a totally reasonable price for what may be the most demanded show ever. But I bought a lot more than the right to plop down in a front row balcony seat next summer. I also paid for that brimming feeling of excitement I get to experience for each of the 312 days I wait. For about $0.32 a day, I earn the privilege of seeing the receipt from Ticketmaster sitting unread in my inbox. I get to listen to the soundtrack and eagerly (continue to) memorize its lines, melodies, and cues in anticipation of seeing it performed live. I get to feel included in the relatively small group of people who have seen or will  see this production on stage in a world seemingly filled with fans. I have time to digest the music and lyrics and develop a deeper appreciation for its intra-references, motifs, and harmonies. I have time to learn more about its historical subtext, watch the upcoming PBS documentary, and read the Ron Chernow biography that inspired the musical itself. Essentially, I’m able to prepare myself to experience the live show to the fullest extent possible.

So much so that I’m sure to be satisfied.
So much so that I’m willing to wait for it.

Creative Breakdown: Introduction

I imagined my opening sentence as the first lines of a film, spoken over black. Usually, I’m paralyzed by trying to adapt an idea for one medium into another. Not today! Look how many decisions I’ve made already! I had to decide to make the aspect ratio of that image a classic cinema widescreen 1.85:1. I put thought into setting the font at 72pt Courier New as an homage to the standard screenwriting typeface.

You know what, though?  I think the text box is too wide and the leading could be more spread out.

There, that’s better! Now the text uses more of the screen.

…but that stupid hyphen needs to go away.

Ahh, there it is. This is the one. Look, I even calculated the third points on each edge and set guides so I could center the text. Well, it’s not perfectly centered, since the varying line breaks on the right side muddle the perception of an objective center. But it’s effectively centered, right? Maybe I should have stuck to the first version after all: the type was almost justified on both sides. Hmm. Oh, and yes, I use Photoshop to make simple graphics when PowerPoint would get the job done faster. Sure, it’s like using a steak knife to cut butter, but I need to be able to exercise complete creative control. I don’t want to be limited by the software. I want to be limited by my own creativity.

 There. Now I can finally finish my thought about the dominoes.

…dammit! According to spell check, I misspelled dominoes! Photoshop doesn’t have spell check. I can’t believe I made it this far without realizing this. Is it only the pizzeria that leaves out the ‘e’? Aren’t both spellings acceptable? I have no idea. I can’t accept the possibility that it could be wrong. I have to fix it.

Wait, should I have taken out the comma in that first title card? Screw it. I’ll just speak it. Imagine the blank title card below is a black screen and press play:

Sigh. I’m not really even sure what that means. I just thought it sounded cool.

You know the biggest irony of all? When I uploaded all these title cards to WordPress, I had trouble telling them apart because they were practically identical. I had to name them in sequence as I was creating them in Photoshop to keep track (Black Title 1, A, C, and D). At some point, there was a Title B in my draft, but I realized it inserted a line break in the middle of a word without hyphenating. Here’s the crazy part: I decided that error was too noticeable and calling myself out on it wouldn’t sell how crazy I really am. So I fixed it and purposefully left in the existing hyphen. Because I’m a wreck.

Inside Out: Outside Edition

I swore to my friends after publishing Inside Out – Commentary that I was done obsessing over this movie. No more rewatching, no more forcing it into every conversation, and no more blog posts. Then I saw film student Jordan Hanzon’s edit with all the Inside scenes removed, and I knew I would have to break my promise. Sorry, not sorry.

The major point in my original post was that the story was effective due to the relationship between the Inside and Outside worlds. I ended that post by considering what would happen if you were to watch exactly this kind of edited version:

Yet if you watched a cut of this movie without any of the Inside scenes, it would probably be only 30 minutes long and critics would complain that the characters have no depth, the plot goes nowhere, and the resolution is predictable and cheesy. But that’s the way everyday life is. Most days aren’t exciting and full of adventure. This is the stuff that our own stories are made of. Inside Out tells a story where comparatively little happens on the outside, but it shows how even the ordinary can mean everything.

Jordan Hanzon, whoever and wherever you are, thank you for giving the internet the opportunity to see this film in a new way (and allowing me to test my speculations without having to spend several hours in front of Adobe Premiere). Without further tangents, here goes round three!

Most obviously, I overestimated the combined length of the Outside Scenes by a factor of two. Hanzon’s Outside Edition accounts for only 15:23 of 1:34:38 of the movie, or 16% of the total time. It’s worth noting that Outside Edition omits all memories as seen from the Inside world. So there are no dream sequences, no core memory flashbacks, no ice skating dances, and no Triple Dent Gum jingles (you’re welcome). What remains is a short film consisting of very little dialogue, rash decisions, and emotional whiplash as we try to make sense of Riley’s feelings by seeing only their real-world consequences.

By skipping the other 84% of the film, Outside Edition moves at breakneck speed through Riley’s emotional journey. Hanzon took a very literal approach to a request on Reddit for a version with all the Inside scenes removed. Jumpy, jarring cuts immediately make it clear that most of the Outside scenes are accompanied by quick cutaways to the Inside.  I think there are only three or four Outside scenes that last, say, 25 seconds without being interrupted by Inside scenes. Consequently, Outside Edition leaves no time to react to the emotional beats, which at best gives it a short film feel and at worst robs it of its real impact as I expected.

For example, look at the dinner scene. It was the first scene Pixar completed, and it was used in its entirely as the first trailer for Inside Out. It’s a clever, funny sequence that showcases the potential of the film’s premise. But without the comic relief from the Inside, it comes across as tense and awkward, escalating too quickly into screaming and yelling to remain believable. I realized that the rapid cuts to Mom, Dad, and Riley’s minds served both to justify their words and actions and also to freshen up the monotony of a cliché, uninteresting conversation.

Outside Edition shows this to be the case for the rest of the movie. It becomes very natural to question the realism of Riley’s behavior when we see only the Outside. I had barely thought do this before. It only takes one mention of a new friend for Riley to hang up on her friend Meg, one quick survey of the schoolyard to resign to eating lunch alone, and one slip and fall for Riley to storm out of hockey tryouts. These scenes occur in succession in Outside Edition, but are interspersed with eight minutes of Inside scenes in the complete version. Without these buffers, Riley seems to give up on San Francisco very suddenly.

How suddenly? The narrative and dialogue imply this story takes place over only four days:
Day 1: Moving to San Francisco
Day 2: First day of school.  That evening, Riley fights with her parents and gets angry at Meg. Mom mentions hockey tryouts are tomorrow afternoon.
Day 3: Riley sits alone during lunch and later storms out of hockey practice. She goes to bed angry, has a weird dream, and decides to run away to Minnesota.
Day 4: Riley skips school, walks to the bus station, and eventually returns home to confess her feelings to Mom and Dad.

Personally, I find this hasty progression from minor anxieties to actually running away to be indicative of a developing yet adolescent mind. This is exactly the kind of melodramatic angst I remember feeling when I was eleven. This is the age where betrayal by friends, social anxiety, and the struggle to establish an identity seem unbearably painful. It’s possible that Pixar intended to portray Riley as melodramatic by showing her rapid descent into self-defeatism. Yet, I seriously doubt Pixar ever intended Inside Out to be watched this way or even considered how the pacing of an Outside only version would scan. The awkward, rushed feel of Outside Edition makes my point that the film’s emotional payoff depends on the interaction between the two worlds. Separating the worlds defeats the entire purpose of the movie, but it gives fantastic insight into how the premise works, which is why it’s such a brilliant idea (and why I’m so proud I thought of it six months ago).

One of the more noticeable ways Pixar exploits this interaction is with lighting. When Riley begins her speech in the classroom scene, the shot is sunny and yellow to represent the optimism of Joy’s plan for the day. As Riley becomes homesick for Minnesota and begins to cry, the room turns a dismal blue, indicative of Sadness’s interference with the Core Memories. Watching this scene as one continuous shot causes this lighting change to appear blatant and contrived. Cutting to the Inside to show how Riley’s emotions occur distracts the viewer and allows the same lighting change to appear subtle and effective.

A more pervasive function of the Inside is to change the tone of what Riley is experiencing. During move-in day, the drama is heightened when Fear, Anger, and Disgust cause unpleasant memories. The emotions argue with each other frequently, which gives a clear impression that Riley isn’t feeling well about the move. Without the emotional information of those scenes, Outside Edition gives only a few subtle signs to suspect anything is wrong. Riley hesitates as she tours the house and again before she slides down a railing. She appears crestfallen when Dad suddenly has to run to the office. Otherwise, it genuinely appears she is taking it in stride. And her façade doesn’t go unrecognized, because Mom thanks her for staying “our happy girl”. This conversation was much more meaningful this time because it was clearer to me that Riley is suppressing anxiety to keep her behavior peppy.

Even after she begins to express her frustration and angst to Mom, Dad, and Meg, she doesn’t have many opportunities to have a heart-to-heart conversation. In fact, the only other person with whom Riley has a conversation in the entire movie is her teacher. As I mentioned earlier, there is very little dialogue in the Outside, possibly a result of Riley keeping to herself. Mere hours separate hockey tryouts and deciding to run away. All this reinforces the idea that Riley’s decisions are rash and immature, as well as the theme of feeling obligated to internalize negative emotions.

Outside Edition received a variety of reactions after making the front page of Reddit and being shared by big-name entertainment news sources. A few headlines emphasized that the edit still had an emotional impact:
“‘Inside Out’ Is Just As Emotional Without A Peek Inside Riley’s Mind” (MTV)
“‘Inside Out’ Without the Feelings in Riley’s Head Will Still Pull at Your Heart Strings” (Slash Film)
“‘Inside Out: Outside Edition’ Takes Out The Feelings While Leaving In All The Feels” (Uproxx)

Others commented that the story had been reduced to chronicling a mental breakdown of a young girl. I read some criticism that the bare-bones feel of this edit proves Riley is only a puppet of a plot device, and it’s difficult to care about her without the Inside Scenes. I disagree that Riley is only a puppet, and I actually still believe that she’s the main character of this movie despite having so few lines. But it was much more difficult for me to invest in her character without getting to know her as well.

A strange thing about Outside Edition is that it still begins with all the expositional Outside scenes of Riley growing up. The complete film uses these scenes to demonstrate the mechanics of the Inside and to show how Riley came to have her Islands of Personality. Without the Inside and its symbolism, that montage now only gives a sense (albeit a vague one) of who Riley used to be.  Dialogue is so sparse on the Outside that we are forced to extrapolate from those scenes who Riley is now. This edit lso kept later flashbacks of Riley squirting milk out her nose, interacting with the rain, burying Dad in the sand, and jumping on a trampoline, to name a few. Without any clear context for these flashbacks, we’re left watching a film that has an unexplained nostalgic fascination with the childhood of its main character. It’s like the movie tells us again and again “Hey, remember how great things used to be?” Maybe that’s the point, and the unspoken whiny undertones of how much things hurt now are supposed to reinforce Riley’s melodramatic worldview.  Or maybe it shows the limitations of trying to define yourself by your past. Whatever the case, it just seems strange for a 15 minute film about a 6th grader moving to begin with her birth and spend two minutes showing how she grew up. This approach suggests that to understand someone, you must understand their origins. To me, Inside Out tries to portray life as fragile and almost sacred by approaching it holistically: backwards, forwards, internal and external.

And I think that’s another reason why Inside Out is so effective. To simply tell Riley’s story without knowing who she was and why she is undermines the emotional stakes and turns deeply personal pain into almost petty melodrama. We simply don’t understand her internal struggle when we don’t see what’s going on internally. The five emotions don’t control Riley. The five emotions are Riley. It’s only when Riley begins to be explicit with those emotions that it starts to feel like she has any depth with respect to the Outside world. In that regard, Outside Edition is right on target. People can only know us, understand us, and love us when we allow our immense depth on the inside out.

Inside Out – Commentary

About a month ago, Inside Out became the first Blu-Ray I’ve ever purchased! I wrote my original reflection on Inside Out after having seen it only once. Now that I have bonus features, commentary, and pause power, I’m going to fuel my love for this movie with one more set of reflections.

Loose ends from last time

The new expanded console at the end does not appear to have more than one light-bulb socket as I speculated before, which sort of implies Riley is not capable of holding more than one idea at the same time. But the commentary by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen says the main feature of the new console is that it’s large enough for all five emotions to stand at it together and work as a team rather than fighting for control. That’s why the new tier of Core Memories are able to have mixed colors: because multiple emotions were driving when the memories were formed.

I said that Inside Out makes the point that depression is the absence of emotion. This a grossly inaccurate simplification that the film does not explicitly make. As Riley is in the process of running away, a darkness takes over and disables the control panel. Anger remarks that Riley is no longer able to feel anything, but the word depression is never used here or anywhere in the film. I leave a psychological diagnosis of Riley and a clinical definition of depression to someone who is actually qualified.

I no longer believe “Bing Bong is in there somewhere”. He is obviously gone. Riley will never create new memories with him, but I think she’ll retain some existing memories with him. At first, I thought because he vanished in the memory dump, his existence was forgotten. But we didn’t see any memories of Bing Bong disappearing, just the cat-elephant-dolphin vanishing like Marty McFly. The point of Bing Bong’s fading away is that Riley has outgrown her imaginary friend, not that she must forget Bing Bong ever existed.

My rhetorical question regarding the repeated destruction of the Islands: If these consequences are supposed to feel dire, why numb us to it by doing it five times and then undoing it? That reduces a potentially great metaphor into a simple time bomb like the petals of the Beast’s rose.

In my opinion, one of the shortcomings of this movie is that destroying the Islands one-by-one too easily diminishes the drama it symbolizes, despite being intended to show the growing stakes. The filmmakers admitted they were committed to destroying each of the islands, but to be fair, they did realize this could grow redundant. To counter this, they claim to have purposefully shown each collapse from a different perspective. Let’s see:

1. Goofball collapses while Joy and Sadness are running away ON it. After it plunges into the abyss, we cut to a quiet montage of Goofball-themed memories.
2. Hockey Island collapses in the distance as Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong walk through Preschool Land.  Instead of cutting to a montage of hockey memories, Joy takes a quick glance at the Core memory that spawned Hockey Island.
3. Friendship Island collapses right in front of them as they were about to cross it without much discussion.
4. They watch Honesty collapse while they’re on the Train of Thought, and the collapse conveniently destroys the tracks and prevents them from making it back to HQ.
5. Pieces of Family Island collapse in stages as Joy chases Sadness and the other three emotions realize with horror the mess they have made. This is the one collapse that nicely reflects the rising action in both worlds. What I didn’t realize before is that Family Island never completely collapses. The one and only thread that Riley kept as she shed parts of herself was her family, which shows just how important they are to her. So it’s no mistake that the first “new” island to be generated with the multicolored Core Memories is a bigger and better Family Island. (This new island appears in a blank spot and the old one is never to be seen again- possibly a continuity error.)

Actually, I think this criticism of the collapses is still valid. Most of them did serve to inhibit the journey through the Inside world. From listening to the commentary, it seems as if this was an intentional device so we can see more of the Inside world than a means of accomplishing a loftier narrative goal. Despite their efforts to keep each one fresh, this is still the most obvious flaw in an otherwise strong story.

Pete Docter didn’t like that voiceover at the beginning at first either, recognizing it as a cheap way to establish expositional information. But Amy Poehler made it so much fun to listen to and it proved to be a quick and effective way to simultaneously show and tell how the Inside works, so it stuck. I agree with Docter: the Golden Years montage at the beginning of the movie is one of my favorite scenes. It’s informational, but the humour makes it less in-your-face, allowing you to simply enjoy watching a nostalgic, idyllic childhood.

Responding to Common Speculation

1. I still have no idea why Joy’s hair is blue. It wasn’t mentioned in the commentary. One early sketch in the bonus features shows a blue-haired Joy. An ever earlier sketch shows Joy, who was at the time called Optimism, as a white haired hare with two teeth. I haven’t seen convincing information that the blue hair was intended to represent a dash of sadness, nor evidence that it was merely an artistic decision. So take or leave your theories. I don’t think this film requires Joy to have sad undertones to get its point across.
2. Why are Riley’s memories in third person? Because Pixar needed a way to establish the relationship between Joy and Riley, who can’t appear together on the screen or have a conversation. Joy’s love for Riley is the driving force behind her actions, so Joy needed to see and interact with Riley to validate this relationship. Since the emotions can always see Riley’s POV, Riley originally spent a lot of time looking in mirrors and clear pools of water, but this soon proved to be ridiculous and contrived. Eventually, this led to the idea of having the memories available for playback in third person so that the emotions could watch Riley grow up. It’s still a little contrived, but not so much that it’s distracting to the movie. When Joy interrupts Riley’s San Francisco nightmare, she plays a memory of Riley performing an ice skating routine on a frozen lake. Joy mimics Riley’s movements as if she cherishes this moment so much she’s memorized it. I think establishing a meaningful core relationship is a fair reason to depart from cold, hard science.
3. I’ve heard a lot of speculation about why the emotions in adults’ minds are all one gender. One common interpretation is that the mind of adults tends to crystallize and be more rigid than the mind of a child. You’d therefore expect things to be more uniform in an adult’s brain. A growing child’s brain is quickly growing and adapting, so you’d expect a lot of variation. Or so this theory goes. (But that would imply that one day, Anger and Fear would wake up and be female, and I doubt that’s how Pixar wanted their world to work.) Yet, this theory is what producer John Lasseter thought Pete Docter was going for. In fact, Docter explains in an interview that it was done primarily for comedic effect and to simplify the number of characters for the audience to track.

“…we’re cutting between 18 characters and 4 locations in that dinner scene, so we just went broad with it – kind of how SNL would do it. They all have like dopey obvious mustaches or big red glasses so that you’re instantly clear on, ‘Oh, it’s mom; it’s dad.'”  ¹

Miscellany

I think its interesting to note that throughout the movie (and in the goofy, fun short feature Riley’s First Date?) that Dad’s Fear reports to Dad’s Anger, who runs the NORAD-like operation Inside. I’m not sure what to make of this, but during the dinner scene, we clearly see a majority of Dad’s memories that day were fear and anger. Whether that’s because his start-up company is having trouble or if he’s like that all the time is up for discussion. There will always be things to read into that the creators didn’t intend: that’s the beauty of such a diverse, symbolic environment!

The board game section of Imagination Land features a game with a clownfish called Find Me! stacked above a game featuring a green brachiosaurus called Dinosaur World, references to Finding Nemo and The Good Dinosaur.

Here’s an easter egg I haven’t seen anyone point out yet: in the establishing fly-through shot of Dream Productions, we can see the actress playing the teacher, the sheep reporting for duty, and on the right edge, a blob wearing a Mickey Mouse costume with ears like the ones you might buy at a Disney park. Now that I think of it, this shot resembles the iconic Main Street at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland.

Directing Wisdom:

The directors and producers pointed out some really interesting subtleties to this movie that I think are worth pointing out.

When Joy and Sadness are sucked through the tube with the Core Memories, the major plot point becomes getting them to return to HQ as they journey through the rest of the Inside world. The filmmakers wanted the Inside to seem effectively infinite, so as not to put a limit on the capacity of the mind. But geographically speaking, this would be confusing for audiences. The movie intentionally sticks to settings adjacent to the Memory Dump over which Headquarters is located.

This means the dump and HQ are almost always in sight from where we are. To make the Inside world look consistent, the direction of travel of every scene was carefully chosen to match the plot points. Every time the characters make progress in getting back to HQ, they travel towards screen left, and every wide shot of HQ shows it in the left third of the screen. Many establishing shots of HQ show it in the left third to say “don’t forget, this is where we need to go!”

The writers did something pretty clever at the beginning of Act 2 to set up this theme of leftward travel. The first failed path back to HQ was by way of the tether to Goofball Island, shown leading from right to left:

When Goofball collapses, Joy and Sadness have to run the opposite direction to make it back to solid ground. Upon realizing Sadness read the manual and knows the way, they resign themselves to traversing the labyrinthine Long Term Memory. When they get to the first fork in the road, Joy misunderstands Sadnessand turns right, which we now know is the opposite direction of HQ. Then Sadness corrects her (Left? Right. No, right as in correct! Go left.) and they turn around and exit screen left. They establish a direction of travel for the rest of the movie by calling attention to it with a joke!

Then, in case we didn’t get it the first time, the very next shot is an exhausted Joy, now heading towards screen right:

Joy: This isn’t working. Are we getting close?
Sadness: Yeah, just another right, and a left, and…another left…
Joy: Are you sure you know where we’re going, because we seem to be walking away from Headquarters!

Brilliant.

They wander through Long Term aimlessly until they run into Bing Bong, who offers to show them a shortcut to HQ. Guess which direction he points?

The rest of their journey follows these rules: progress is to the left, tangents and setbacks are to the right. This is consistent through the very end of their journey when Joy and Sadness crash into the window.

Another interesting director’s note was about the use of close-up shots. In this movie, close-ups represent emotional maturity. As the movie follows the parallel tales of Riley and Joy gaining emotional maturity, neither of them get a close-up shot until they come to separate realizations of the purpose of sadness. With Joy, this happens in the Memory Dump as she realizes Riley’s sadness signaled to her parents that she needed love and attention after the Prairie Dogs lost their big playoff game. Upon returning home late, Riley finally understands that it’s okay for her to express negative emotions to her parents.

Finally (and I swear I’m usually one to notice these sorts of things), the film bookends with shots of Joy and Sadness at the control panel, showing how Joy’s perception of Sadness grows. 

Our Dads and Daughters

The Blu-Ray/DVD comes with a mini-documentary which offers a rare glimpse into the family life of two of my favorite Pixar people: director Pete Docter and composer Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles, Up, Inside Out).  It’s called Our Dads, The Filmmakers, and it was a self-described ploy by daughters Elie Docter and Gracie Giacchino to get to spend more time together. As a piece of film, it’s short, ineloquently narrated, and poorly lit. But so is real life, which it manages to capture in two very specific, very real ways.

Elie takes us through a hallway of signatures from people who visited Pixar to record dialogue. There are legends on this wall. Owen Wilson’s signature for Lightning McQueen is enormous. There’s Bud Luckey, an animation legend and regular voice actor who most notably narrated Boundin’. And right next to Patton Oswalt is Elie Docter herself, who came in on May 6th, 2007 to play the voice of young Ellie in Up. She signed her name Elie “Ellie” Docter. I hadn’t realized this before. She’s Ellie, the most tragic Pixar character of all time. The one with whom we fell in love and whose death we mourned minutes after the house lights dimmed on Up. I’d read about how the idea for Inside Out began to develop after Pete observed his daughter’s attitude changing when she was 11. I told myself yes, of course he would get ideas for his movies from his family life. But it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t feel real until I saw the girl herself show me seven-year-old ink on the wall.

Real-life Elie’s closed-off adolescent years occurred during the conception and writing of this film. She was probably 16 when it hit theaters. More than anything about the movie itself, I want to know what she thought of it. Pete has said about her: “I’m not sure how much she sees of her own life in the film. She has admitted that she teared up.”² But was she moved by the story itself, or because she saw that she is the reason that this beautiful, genuine art was able to be realized? Did she tell her dad: “Yeah, it was pretty good, I guess?” and leave it at that? Or was she emotionally dazed for weeks over it? Or both?

Michel Giacchino expressed similar inspiration when Pete asked him where his musical ideas come from:

“I kept having these feelings about the movie, it just made me feel and think about things in life and what’s going on and all this stuff and you guys growing up. How it gets from that to this [mimes piano] I’m not quite sure…”

In any other interview, it wouldn’t have hit me. But hearing him directly address this sentiment to Elie and Gracie brought his process to life for me. The life experiences of any creator tends to be reflected in his or her creations. The experience of raising a child must have had a profound influence on the way Giacchino watched Inside Out and expressed how it made him feel with music.

Yet, I poured through this movie to collect screenshots for this post with the sound turned off, and the emotions still came in tall, cresting waves. There’s something about this film that is unyieldingly real. I think the signature of a nine-year-old just showed me a glimpse of what that something is.

_______
¹ Cinema Blend – Why Inside Out’s Main Character Has Male and Female Emotions
² Vulture’s Interview with Pete Docter

Inside Out

A good day leads to a good week leads to a good month leads to a good year leads to a good life!
-Joy, Inside Out

I’ve got stuff to say about Pixar’s Inside Out. Here’s my humble twist on a movie critique: I don’t know what I think about this movie yet. I need to write and journal my way through some thoughts to finish processing it because I think this poignant work of art deserves some reflection.

[Spoilers and overwrought musing ahead! Please do yourself a favor and watch this movie first! Ideas are so much more palatable when hidden inside the colorful easter eggs of cinema, metaphor, and dialogue.]

Also, I encourage you to write letters and emails to others (or to yourself, or to the internet at large) in response to books, movies, and life experiences. There’s something special about the process of converting a feeling into a thought, a thought into a sentence, many sentences into a thesis. Committing your inner monologue into structured and permanent paragraphs is proof that concrete thoughts have been formed in your mind. I’d imagine this is exactly what writers and directors want their audiences to do. They want to reach you on a deep intellectual and emotional level. They want you to reflect on their art and let it change the way you see the world.

If you don’t believe me, rewatch director Pete Docter’s message that played between the short film Lava [which I’ll gracefully ignore here] and the opening sequence to Inside Out. Docter, who also was the primary developer of the story, sits down in front of a camera and gives a minute-long spiel as to why he finds writing/directing to be meaningful. Anyone that’s ever made something for the sake of art may find this a bit unnecessary, but I think it adds to the movie for one justifiable reason: to show just how personal and passionate Pete is about this project. He had something he needed to share with the world about life and growing up, which sure is a better reason to make a movie than “John Lasseter really likes race cars”.

Screenwriters have a way of oversimplifying psychology. All Hollywood shrinks are Freudian dream interpreters on comfy chairs. Manipulating people is as easy as inducing guilt or threatening a family member. One’s deepest fears can be explained in a traumatic 30 second flashback to childhood. Hollywood psychology reduces the complexity of its characters, which cheapens films by ruining the illusion of the realism we generally expect. But Inside Out offers a cinematically rich and effective portrayal of the human mind precisely because it doesn’t aim to be scientifically accurate¹. This film wisely stays far away from the realm of science fiction and thus avoids many accusations of bad science poking holes in the plot. Pixar actually has a PR tactic so as to distance themselves from representing neuroscience: they do not speak of the movie as about brains, but rather about minds. With that said, I want to focus on interpreting how the film’s vast, colorful, high-concept Inside world affects its human characters on the Outside, and by extension, its human audiences.

The big premise of Inside Out is that each individual’s consciousness is controlled by the interactions of a team of five anthropomorphic emotions (Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust) in the mind’s emotional control room, essentially the bridge of the Enterprise. Each emotion’s personality is reflected in the way they operate the switchboard that externalizes feelings. As the title suggests, there’s an Inside story and an Outside story. The Outside story follows an eleven-year-old girl named Riley, whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco for her father’s new job. Riley feels forced away from home and struggles to adapt to her new house, new school, and new peers. The Outside plot isn’t exciting. It’s ordinary. Mundane. It’s not what makes this the most innovative Pixar story in six years.

A long and detail-packed exposition is needed to introduce the rules and mechanics of the Inside world. Although the writers used the dreaded Voiceover Exposition, I still found the rules of the movie fascinating and charming and heartwarming all at once. It takes some real talent to lead the audience into investing in a farfetched premise, and Pete Docter seems to be the master of this (Monsters Inc. and Up are totally absurd and you know it).

When Riley is born, her Inside world is dark, small, and empty except for Joy. Joy, a very optimistic pixie, stands alone at the bridge looking through Riley’s eyes and sees Riley’s beaming new parents. She presses a button- the only button, if I recall- which causes Riley to coo with delight. For a brief moment, life was nothing but happy.  Within seconds, Sadness, a blue blob with glasses and a sweater, appears and presses a second button which causes Riley to cry. In a montage that inexplicably resonated with me to nearly tears, Fear, Anger, and Disgust come on board as Riley grows up, runs around the house, and tries broccoli. The five emotions work together during Riley’s waking hours to guide her safely through the world and provide her with a balanced, happy childhood. As events unfold, colorful spheres which represent memories are created and stored in this long bowling ball track. Each sphere is colored to match the predominant emotion involved in creating that memory: yellow for Joy, blue for Sadness, red for Anger, purple for Fear, and green for Disgust. Each night, they flush the day’s spheres down a tube to Long-Term Memory, which is a massive library of Memories. When Riley has a profoundly formative experience, this creates a special glowing Core Memory. These memories are kept in the bridge (also referred to in the Inside world as Headquarters) rather than sent to Long Term. Fortunately for Riley, all her Core Memories are positive, warm, yellow ones. As Riley grows up, the Core Memories help power the Islands of her personality. There’s Family Island, Goofball Island, Honesty Island, Friendship Island, and Hockey Island. Oh, and Headquarters is housed in a big ethereal tower thing, and the Islands are tethered to them by cables which serve no structural purpose because they’re not in tension because, oh, did I mention the Islands float in space even though there’s somehow gravity because you can fall! Boy does the Inside look incredible.

The plot really begins following an incident at Riley’s first day at her new school. The teacher asks her to stand and introduce herself to the class. As the emotions debate a careful answer in this new environment, Sadness takes control and causes Riley to cry of homesickness in front of the class. When this memory ball rolls in, it glows like the other Core Memories, but this one is blue. The first sad, defining moment of Riley’s life. Earlier in the film, it’s (kind of) explained that Sadness can changed the color (and therefore Riley’s perception) of individual memories when she touches them. Joy fails to turn it back to yellow. In the ensuing argument, the not-so-ironic pairing of Joy and Sadness gets sucked through the tube to Long-Term, launching the film’s second act: a get back home story. Their trek back to HQ is witty and hilarious and heartbreaking and a little trippy. But a journey to bring back a bag of MacGuffins isn’t what makes this the most innovative Pixar story in six years either.

Sadness is treated as an outcast at Headquarters. The rest of the team discourages her from contributing to Riley’s life. Joy, who leads the team, gives Sadness meaningless tasks to perform, essentially benching her from their operation. And because she’s Sadness, she hardly minds or complains. She just stays sad. It’s almost a little hard to watch. Her entire existence is contrary to the team’s unquestionable goal: happiness. Joy was there first; she is said to be Riley’s primary emotion, her default state. I bet if you ask around, most people would want their one precious life on Earth to be a happy one. The climax and resolution of most stories would stop there. Inside Out doesn’t.

With the Inside being such a vast and symbolic world, it’s tempting to try to attach significance to nearly everything in it. I would really like to to dig deep into symbolism, but my fading memory of this film and the widespread destruction of the Inside for the sake of plot makes interpreting details rather difficult. But I’ll ask a few questions. When the Train of Thought crashes late in the second act, does that mean Riley should lose her ability to recall facts? Does she act on pure instinct? Does the train ever get rebuilt? Was it even meant to serve as a reason for any of her subsequent actions? What about the light bulb socket² in the switchboard for Ideas? Does that imply Riley lacks the maturity to be driven by more than one idea at a time? (I wish I could go back and freeze-frame the final iteration of the switchboard to search for more light sockets!) And most pressingly, what’s the deal with those Islands? Clearly they’re meant to provide stakes on the Inside for the consequences of Riley’s decisions. But when new and improved Islands show up at the end, doesn’t that invalidate the significance of their loss in the first place? How many Islands will die following the slammed doors, breakups, and ignored text messages of Riley’s teenage years? If these consequences are supposed to feel dire, why numb us to it by doing it five times and the undoing it? That reduces a potentially great metaphor into a simple time bomb like the petals of the Beast’s rose. Then again, it could just be a way to show that growing up requires some deconstruction and reconstruction.

The biggest question of all: Who knows? We the audience get to interpret the movie’s vast palette of symbolism however we choose. Consequently, I was struck throughout the film by a sense of truth. The reason why this movie resonated with me so strongly is because my interpretation confirmed the validity of my own coming-of-age experiences and reflections over the years. It stood for ideas that I’ve discovered for myself to be true. It made me feel like some of the plot points were my own ideas, and if that’s not an engaging film I don’t know what is.

First, more on the idea of Core Memories powering the Islands. People grow up to be really complex, and that’s why it’s such a blessing to have friends and family that can understand and appreciate and navigate those complexities. It takes years to build these deep, lasting relationships. But isn’t there something about the very essence of a person that makes known who they are? Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink discusses the power of thin-slicing, which is the ability to intuitively read into a person or situation based on a brief first impression. He talks about a study in which college students are invited to spend a few minutes looking through a stranger’s dorm room before answering questions about that person. The results showed that the strangers scores competed well compared to close friends or roommates. To me, this suggests that each of us have a set of core personality traits that pervade our daily life, manifesting themselves in our speech, our bookshelves, our T-shirts, our dorm rooms. They’re the things you mention during icebreakers because you consciously recognize them as paramount to understanding yourself.  That’s the significance of Riley’s islands, and it’s why the Core Memories stay in the conscious realm of HQ. If you were to have lunch with Riley, I have no doubt she’d be well behaved, talk about hockey, and mention her friends and family in the stories she tells. This is who Riley is. We all have racks and racks³ of untold millions of memories, but when you want to get to know someone, it all drops away until you’re left with a few Core stories. Something about old friends will always feel familiar. I’ve experienced this. It’s just never been explained like this before and never will again.

Another personal belief I saw reflected in Inside Out is about the fragility of our minds and how little it takes to change our moods. It happens often without us even realizing. Facebook infamously conducted an experiment by filtering content in users’ News Feeds to include strong positive or negative emotions. People subsequently posted status updates that reflected the emotion to which they were exposed. That’s downright scary. I’ve personally been prevented from writing a letter or playing an instrument because I accidentally responded to a text message or listened to a song. Attending to that one impulse altered my thoughts so severely that I lost the motivation to do what I originally intended and did something else entirely. The road to the next possible thought is continuously changing in response to our environment. Riley’s Train of Thought travels on tracks that appear only a few feet in front of the engine. We do not have access to every thought standing where we currently are; but we never stand still. The inner affects the outer and the outer affects the inner. It’s a feedback loop, a chicken-and-egg quandary, the title of this movie. The emotions in HQ seem to accept this premise in the way they aim to give Riley a happy life. The result of many yellow spheres is a happy Riley, and they create yellow spheres in changing small things like reactions and attitudes on a moment-by-moment basis. So they let Joy take charge and seem to agree- despite their different agendas and personalities- to work towards creating happiness and contentment in each moment. As Joy puts it, “A good day leads to a good week leads to a good month leads to a good year leads to a good life!” When Joy and Sadness get sucked out of HQ with the Core Memories, I think those memories leave her consciousness and carry no day-to-day significance anymore. Without a reason to hold on to the things she holds so dear, Riley finds it thinkable and easy to cut her friends, family, and hockey out of her life so abruptly.

Finally, I loved the way this movie defended sadness and depicted my favorite emotion, melancholy. Joy discovers that one of Riley’s happiest memories was preceded by her feeling alone and miserable. This came as a surprise to Joy, as she didn’t yet understand any use for (S)adness. As she watches and rewinds the different scenes in this particular memory sphere, the orb changes between blue and yellow. Sadness externalizes Riley’s inner turmoil so that others can respond and help her feel happy again.

After Joy and Sadness make it back to HQ with the Core Memories, Riley comes to her emotions and decides just as a bus back to Minnesota is about to leave to go back to her family. The emotional climax of the whole film -which is really saying something- happens when she walks in the door and Sadness helps her at last express her feelings about moving to her worried parents.  Riley collapses to the floor in tears and the parents surround her in a warm, beautiful hug. A new core memory is formed, but this one is half blue and half yellow; it’s happy and sad at the same time. And it’s more important and more powerful than the previous Core Memories. Shortly after, the bridge gets an upgrade. The switchboard becomes more complex to accommodate Riley’s upcoming teenage years. More multicolored spheres start rolling in. And the whole time I was thinking yes, this is true.

The obvious moral of the story is that “it’s okay to be sad” or “you don’t always have to feel happy.” I’m not going to split hairs on the difference between the two, but I’ll add that you don’t always want to be anything. Life needs emotional variety: low lows and high highs. Inside Out makes the wise point that depression isn’t feeling sad, but not feeling anything at all. When Joy and Sadness (here made to be opposite ends of the emotional spectrum) become lost from Riley’s consciousness, Riley quickly becomes depressed. Anger, Disgust, and Fear are necessary for survival, but without Joy and Sadness to balance them out, Riley emotionally flatlines. I absolutely prefer sadness over apathy. Sadness reminds me that I have or had something worth pain. I think sadness is most often about something that once made you happy. Otherwise, it reveals a something you may have forgotten you were missing so you might go seek it. In Riley’s case, that thing was love and companionship. This is why I was praising this movie for not ending with plain happiness ever after. The message inside the message here is to not mistake happiness for fulfillment. There is no growth, no fulfillment, no ascent without a little pain.

I think one of the main contributors to this movie’s emotional depth is its embrace of nostalgia, a specific kind of melancholy. Inside Out perfectly captures the emotions of an ideal childhood. It reminds us all of our  old imaginary friends (I still think Bing Bong is in there somewhere!), of little league sports, and of a time before life became endlessly complicated. Of course its audiences will go tell everyone to come and experience the same.

Inside Out ends with restored relationships, new friends, and tryouts for a new hockey team. But here’s the thing: these things are mundane and ordinary too. This movie is so emotionally strong because the Inside story and the Outside story depend on each other for meaning. We would hardly care about Joy and Sadness’s journey back to HQ if it didn’t stand for something significant outside itself. And we would know and care very little about Riley if we didn’t have such an in-depth perspective of who she’s been her entire life. The characters inside her mind speak of her like a beloved daughter. Of course we develop sympathy for her: she’s unanimously described as a good, sweet girl. Yet if you watched a cut of this movie without any of the Inside scenes, it would probably be only 30 minutes long and critics would complain that the characters have no depth, the plot goes nowhere, and the resolution is predictable and cheesy. But that’s the way everyday life is. Most days aren’t exciting and full of adventure. This is the stuff that our own stories are made of. Inside Out tells a story where comparatively little happens on the outside, but it shows how even the ordinary can mean everything.

That’s why this is the most innovative Pixar movie in six years. In the end, all we are are feelings and memories. If we could only stop and be introspective every once in a while, we would find worlds buzzing within us too.

 

 

FOOTNOTES:

¹Now that I think about it, Pixar does enjoy choosing settings that are so absurd scientifically that you have to focus on the emotional truths of the story. Perhaps that’s the point of anthropomorphizing toys, bugs, monsters, fish, cars, rats, etc. Of course, there are places where this movie doesn’t quite depict normal psychological behavior, and there are moments when it does something rather neurologically accurate and quite clever. I don’t intend to address any of this because that’s not to me what makes a good or a bad story.

² Q: How much faster does it take Inside Out to perform an inception than Christopher Nolan? A: About two and a half hours minus the time it takes to screw in a lightbulb.

³ I really hope this was intended to be a stealth pun for racking your brain.