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Karaoke
People
Doubles
Pulsing in the very idea of karaoke is the old legend of the doppelgänger, of the double, the lookalike, the twin and the surrogate. Karaoke-people are wannabes.
Legends about doubles have always fired the human imagination. With the epochal birth of Dolly the sheep, the first live clone, not to mention the recent first full-face transplant, this intriguing subject has left the unfettered sphere of the romantic and slipped into the domains of ethics, medicine, and the entertainment industry. Worried about the real possibility of the production of doubles, contemporary medicine moralistically trumpets that in life we are all one-offs and that we have but one life. The entertainment industry blares back that the market has room for everyone, secretly hoping that an anonymous karaoke singer will efface Elvis’s performance of “Only You” from the collective memory, while simultaneously doubling sales of his CDs. The entertainment industry lives on recycling, and hailing its significance, theoreticians of popular culture dignify the profits.
As a child I was riveted by Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper. To me it was a story about risk, and it fueled my childlike fantasy that a little girl, my double, might appear and take my place, prompting a feeling of freedom that was both terrifying and exciting. (What if my double were to usurp my place in my parents’ hearts for good?! What if I could never come home again?!) Whispered among the adults, stories about Tito got my child’s imagination going, especially the one about Tito not being the real Tito, but his double. These rumors were given legs by the fact (real or imagined) that apart from speaking several languages, Tito also played the piano. People could never get their heads around that piano. How, for Christ’s sake, did a poor kid from Zagorje complete a locksmith’s apprenticeship, set up the Partisan movement, defeat the Germans, establish the Yugoslav state, and learn to play the piano?
Rumors about doubles have often accompanied kings, dictators, presidents, and generals. Irakli Kvirikadze’s film Comrade Stalin Goes To Africa (Poezda tovarišča Stalina v Afriku, 1991) is a bitter comedy about an ordinary Soviet worker, a Jew, who as a result of his striking physical resemblance to Stalin is arrested by the NKVD and drilled for months in how to impersonate Stalin. When the luckless worker finally completes his secret training, news of Stalin’s death arrives from Moscow and the NKVD puts a bullet in his temple. It might seem quite by the by, but today, successfully cloned embryos are destroyed in laboratories when the embryos are between twelve and fourteen days old. For the time being that is apparently the allowed lifespan of a human clone.
In his 2008 autobiography Feliks Dadajev confirmed the rumors about Stalin’s doubles. Dadajev, an old man pushing ninety, a former dancer and juggler, was Stalin’s lookalike (apart from the ears, “My ears were smaller” claims Dadajev), his official double. Doubles served as targets for potential assassins (apparently there were two attempts on Stalin’s life), stood in as Stalin’s surrogates at parades, and traveled to and from airports to confuse the assassins. Trailed by journalists, in 1945 Dadajev traveled to the famous Yalta conference. The real Stalin was already there.
Literature and film have frequently exploited the motif of the double, the twin, and the lookalike. Alexandre Dumas (the story of Louis XIV and his twin brother), Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Anthony Hope, and Bolesław Prus are but a handful of the writers who have been fascinated by the theme. Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda has seen endless movie remakes. Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Great Dictator is a story about a double. Karaoke-people, wannabes, fans, they buzz around famous people like flies. Give me a celebrity and I’ll give you a double; it doesn’t matter if it’s Paul McCartney, Elvis, Princess Diana, Paris Hilton, or even Bill Gates.
Želimir Žilnik’s film Tito A Second Time Among the Serbs (Tito po drugi put među Srbima, 1994) is an intelligent work of cinematic provocation. An actor who physically resembles Tito appears on the streets of Belgrade, and passersby, ordinary people, spontaneously get in on the joke and have a chat. During the course of the conversation, the game takes an unexpected turn. For a second people forget he’s an impostor and, as if in a kind of regressive psychotherapeutic séance, some accuse Tito of being “guilty for everything” (for the war, for the disintegration of Yugoslavia), while others urge him to return, because “everything was much better” when he was alive.
There is an anecdote about Charlie Chaplin, apparently true, that underscores my childhood nightmare about doubles, the one inflamed by Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. The story goes that sometime in the thirties Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. They say he didn’t even make the final.
Fans
Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (and let’s not forget François Truffaut’s screen adaption) depicts a bleak future of a world without books. A forest-dwelling group of “outlaws,” book-lovers, are humanity’s only hope for salvation from total cultural amnesia. They are book-people, a living library, each having memorized a book by heart.
Visiting Moscow for the first time in the mid-eighties, I was invited by friends for a walk in a nearby forest. Given what I saw, my literary-orientated imagination promptly made associations with the community of book-lovers in Bradbury’s novel. It was mid-winter and people sat on makeshift stools playing chess, their breath hanging in the air, others were just out for a stroll, and many (and not just in the forest!) recited Russian poetry by heart. My political imagination was inculcated with Tito’s historic “NO” to Stalin, anti-totalitarianism, Zamyatin’s novel We, Orwell’s 1984, dissident underground culture, and the Soviet everyday (many books really were banned), and so like everyone else I had read Bradbury’s novel as a fierce critique of a totalitarian (of course Soviet) regime. Much later, Bradbury rejected this interpretation, and he claimed that his criticism was targeted at the totalitarianizing influence of television. In the early sixties Bradbury had believed that television would wipe out books and literature.
If we were to try to translate a few things from Bradbury’s novel into today’s language, Guy Montag (played in Truffaut’s film by the unforgettable Oscar Werner) would be a newly-initiated fan, and the people huddled in the forest would be fans. Their community would be a fandom, bound together by their common fascination with books. For those outside the community—particularly those who write, produce, or sell books, the forest-dwellers would be a much-valued fanbase. Within their fandom, fans often communicate in slang, fanspeak. The forest in which Guy Montag meets the book-lovers would be called a convention (or con). If some of the book-people were dressed as literary heros, this would be called cosplay.[1] Given that people from the forest learn by heart and recite fragments out loud, this would be called fanac (fan activity). If the book-lovers were to offer Montag a publication that details their activities, it would be a fanzine.
Bradbury’s novel was published in 1953, in a time when television (in black and white) had just begun its historic invasion of American homes. The idea of television as opium for the people (Bradbury uses the word opium) would appear just a few years later. The commercialization of the Internet, a phenomenon of the past decade, has given the culture of fandoms and fans an unprecedented boost. Today almost every pop culture “product” has its own fandom, irrespective of whether this product is a TV show, film, cartoon, comic strip, video game, or book from any of the popular genres (horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, vampire, gothic, etc.). If we take science fiction as an example, there are numerous forms (film, cartoons, comics, TV series, literature), genres within these forms, and within these genres, sub-genres. Further divisions run along the lines of age (children, teenagers, adults), gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Fandoms themselves are broken down into groups, subgroups, and sub-subgroups, structured in complex communities.
Being a fan and member of a fandom means being an expert. A fan of the film Planet of the Apes, for example, particularly one with designs on becoming a Big Name Fan (a supreme authority, an initiator, a fandom leader) has to know that Pierre Boulle is the father of the fandom and that his novel La planète des singes was published in 1963. As a consequence, this ambitious fan will learn French and travel to France, finding out all he can about the author. The fan will watch Franklin J. Schaffner’s four-part film adaption ad nauseum. The fan will know the name of the screenwriters who adapted the book, the names of the actors (both lead and supporting), and will memorize the smallest of details, from the music and costume design to dialogue lists. He’ll know all the key lines by heart; he’ll know everything about the television series and the “monkey” films that followed; he’ll have boned up on the graphic novels and be able compare them with the book and the films; he’ll be an expert on monkey TV series, cartoons, comics, and video games; he’ll know his way around monkey websites; he’ll chat on forums, Facebook, and by e-mail with other fans; he’ll go to conventions, buy signed souvenirs, posters, and photos, adding them to his monkey collection; he’ll buy a monkey suit and, all dressed up, haunt the convention corridors; he’ll meet the actors, authors, graphic artists, and costume designers of the “monkey planet”; he’ll meet other fans, swap addresses and experiences, and exchange all kinds of trivia on monkey products.
Science Fiction has the oldest and largest fandoms, and apparently their conventions draw the biggest crowds. Anime and manga fandoms are pretty popular too. Among many others, there are fandoms for karaoke, Tolkien, Star Trek (fans are Trekkies), Harry Potter, and something known as a “furry,” whose fans are into comics, cartoons, literature, painting, and other forms of cultural production that feature anthropomorphic heroes and motifs. A “furry” possesses both animal and human characteristics, whether mental, physical, or a combination of both. A “furry” can also simply refer to a “furry” fan.
Fandoms use all available forms of media—websites, podcasts, song videos, fan art. At conventions they work out schedules of activities, which include everything from promotional events to specially organized tourist trips and foreign language classes. Manga and anime fans go to Japan, the popularity of both having made learning Japanese cool again. Although informal communities, fandoms become more and more complex, developing their own language (incomprehensible to a non-fan), codes, rituals, and etiquette. A Big Name Fan, for example, has the right to give his autograph to other fans, meaning that he can create his own personal fandom within the larger community. Fandoms are also gender conscious: there are fanboys and fangirls.
As far as Bradbury’s anxieties about literature go, not all is completely lost. Although coined a century ago, today the word Janeite denotes a person who displays a voluntary idolatrous enthusiasm for Jane Austen. First adopted as a badge of honor by Austen lovers within the academic and cultural elite, the coinage has undergone a recalibration. When Austen was canonized in the 1930s, and her place within the upper echelons of English literature put beyond doubt, the coinage simply came to mean—a fan. In more recent times film and television adaptions of her work have made Austen a cult writer, and as such, today’s Janeites engage in ever more elaborate fandom activities: reading clubs, outings, dress-up parties, tea parties, discussions, trips to where Austen or her heroes and heroines lived. Janeites practice their “mad enthusiasm” in every which way, studying everything from her characters’ genealogy to the fabrics of the era.
Fandoms allow for a random, unstructured, and chaotic self-education. Fascinated by the films of Aki Kaurismäki, a young woman I know started learning Finnish. A friend of mine who is an actress has starred in two popular American TV series. The head of her fandom is a shy Canadian office worker, who, knowing that her idol is originally from Croatia, has spent the past several years diligently learning Croatian.
While unschooled and disadvantaged by his low caste, the boy hero of the film Slumdog Millionaire unexpectedly wins a television quiz show, the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Everything he knows he picked up through random life experiences. Today, millions of adolescents acquire knowledge in a similarly wild, unstructured, and random way, owing everything they know to “playful enthusiasm” and technology. The wave they surf is popular culture. Injected with popular culture, few will become astrophysicists. The majority will just become fans.
Avatars
We live in a time in which fantasies of the surrogate are no longer reserved only for the famous. Today the Internet disseminates, enriches, and popularizes fantasies of the surrogate. The surrogate is no longer our replica, but a second, third, fourth, and fifth self, one we design and redesign, model and remodel, one we control or make disappear with the touch of a fingertip.
The Guardian article “Second Life Affair Leads to Real life Divorce” (November 13, 2008) reports the case of an English couple, Amy Taylor and David Pollard, who met in an Internet chat-room, fell in love, and got married. In Second Life, an Internet computer game, both had an avatar, and these avatars, “Laura Skye” and “Dave Barmy,” were lovers. Then Taylor caught her then lover in flagrante: Pollard was watching his avatar make love to a prostitute. In virtual life, the embittered Taylor broke off the relationship between her and Pollard’s avatars, but in real life she and Pollard remained a couple. Some time later Taylor decided to test Pollard’s fidelity and went back into Second Life as a virtual private eye, setting a honeytrap, which “Dave Barmy” (i.e. Pollard) successfully avoided, claiming that he was in love with “Laura Skye.” “Laura Skye” and “Dave Barmy” then got married, a marriage soon followed by the real life nuptials of Amy Taylor and David Pollard. The final twist was when Taylor again caught Pollard cheating in virtual life and so in real life applied for a divorce. Pollard admitted to the virtual ex-marital affair but said it hadn’t even gotten as far as cyber sex, and that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Created by Linden Lab and launched in 2003, Second Life is but one of the numerous online virtual worlds, which users, or residents, enter through their avatars. Avatars can take whatever shape or form a user chooses, and although most often human, they can actually be animal, mineral, or vegetable. But few choose to be a plant in their second life. Avatars can be completely different or strikingly similar to their real life users. In the virtual world, avatars do more or less the same things as their real world users. They buy virtual goods (land, houses, cars, clothing, jewelry, works of art), they hang out, go to Sexy Beach, visit virtual sex shops, play computer games, spend special Linden dollars, and apparently, some also earn real American dollars. Second Life is home to companies, educational institutions, libraries, universities, and religious groups. Avatars can sign up for different classes and pray in the virtual temples of every faith. Embassies are located on Diplomacy Island. The Maldives was the first country to open a virtual embassy, followed by Sweden. The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, announced that he hoped to get an invitation to his embassy’s virtual opening. Serbia bought and created its own diplomatic island as a part of another virtual project known as “Serbia Under Construction.” Visitors can visit the Nikola Tesla Museum, the famous trumpet festival in Guča, and the Exit music festival in Novi Sad. Estonia opened an embassy in 2007 and was followed by Columbia, Macedonia, the Phillipines, and Albania. Avatars can play sports, visit museums and galleries, and go to concerts and the theatre. In 2008 the Second Life Shakespeare Company gave a live performance of the first act of Hamlet. Many companies flocked to advertise on Second Life and many got burned. Coca Cola allegedly pumped big money into opening Coke’s Virtual Thirst Pavilion, which attracted fewer than thirty avatars. All in all, it seems that Second Life is conceived as a paradise built to human dimensions. The only thing missing is funeral services.
Avatars fulfill our fantasies of being someone else, somewhere else. Adult users return to childhood, by definition a comfort zone. The virtual world is also a comfort zone. Adult users of Second Life experience life free of risk or consequence—they fly without falling, have unprotected sex, make risk-free acquaintances, and teleport themselves free from the risk of forever remaining in a virtual world. Users have the world under absolute control; they are Gods, able to connect and disconnect at will. Through this simulation game young users of Second Life learn about the world of adults. A young girl made her Second Life avatar a prostitute. It wasn’t so bad, she said. And besides, she wasn’t prostituting herself, her avatar was.
Can we live two lives? The American documentary Second Skin follows the lives of several players of the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is a “massively multiplayer online role playing game” (or MMORPG) situated in the fantasy Warcraft universe. Statistics suggest that some fifty million people, of whom sixty percent are between twenty and thirty years old, play the game. The documentary follows four addicts who live together; each spend about sixteen hours a day on the game. Asked why the “synthetic world” is better than the real one, the gamers reply that in the synthetic world the starting line is the same for everyone and that everyone has equal opportunities. They maintain that with their avatars they feel a greater freedom (the word they use most frequently) than they do in the real world, that the game is an extension of themselves, and that in the world of the game they are more than they are in the real world. Coming from someone who is confined to a wheelchair, these reasons would be understandable, but they are terrifying when offered by healthy adults. Most of the gamers live with the consequences of their obsessive connection to a fantasy world and disconnection from the real world—unemployment, divorce, suicide, alienation—the very things that accompany any kind of severe addiction. Obsessive gaming changes one’s perception, hearing, sensation, sense of color, and perspective—one addict confesses that in his first days of abstinence it was the real world that seemed fake. Other gamers say that in the virtual world they’ve struck up partnerships and friendships that are more enduring than those they have had in the real world. “We’re alienated,” says one gamer, “but connected, because the game is a safe place to get more intimate.” The gamers band together, meet new people, set up associations and virtual unions, and sometimes even meet in real “parallel” life. Gamers share an intimate bond with their avatars, which they experience as the better part of themselves.
A Wired Magazine article entitled “How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life” and published in mid-2007 claims that eighty-six percent of Second Life users have abandoned their avatars, and that corporate investment in the venture has been a fiasco.[2] “It’s really the software’s fault,” said the president of Linden Lab. Users returned to their First Life, impatiently waiting for better software solutions in their Second Life. In the now deserted Second Life a user could only have a single avatar. But Sybil had sixteen.[3]
Who’s What to Whom?
Woody Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode” revolves around a middle-aged professor of humanities who teaches at The City College of New York. Bored with his life and marriage to Daphne, Kugelmass wants a romantic escapade. At Kugelmass’s request, and assisted by a magic cabinet, the magician Persky teleports Kugelmass into the virtual world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Kugelmass meets Emma Bovary, wanders the streets of Yonville with her, and falls in love. Emma, however, wants to see New York, and with the help of Persky and his magic cabinet is teleported there. After a while she starts to tire Kugelmass, and so he asks Persky to send her back into the novel. Insatiable, Kugelmass soon requests Persky to get him into Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. There is an explosion during transmission, the cabinet catches fire, Persky dies of a heart attack, the whole house goes up in flames, and Kugelmass is forever stuck—not in Portnoy’s Complaint, but in a Spanish language textbook, chased by the irregular verb tener (“to have”).
Allen’s story was first published in The New Yorker in 1977. Today, thirty years later, its anticipatory charge is startling. Like Kugelmass’s, our time is stuck, hounded by the irregular verb tener. In the story, as in interactive virtual worlds, no one is left unaffected. Every time Kugelmass is magically transmitted into Flaubert’s novel, anyone reading the novel anywhere in the world has to read pages of bizarre dialogue between Emma Bovary and a character that wasn’t even in the novel, a certain Professor Kugelmass. In his little comic caper Woody Allen has neither the time nor inclination to ask questions about the nature of the interaction, which in the intervening time has become known as “participatory culture.” Allen’s story was written in a different, pre-Internet context, when postmodern artistic practice (film, literature, visual art) toyed with the concepts of metatextuality, intertextuality, citationality, and the canon. Artistic and aesthetic canons still existed back then, their subversion a legitimate part of artistic practice. Today, thirty years later, the Internet, like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucks up absolutely everything, including the canons. The complex dynamics of turns and shifts take place in the interaction between the marketplace, the Internet, and the Internet user. In this process the market isn’t a producer of goods, and neither are Internet users passive consumers. One feeds the other, and one feeds itself on the other. In spite of their incompatibility, Emma Bovary and Professor Kugelmass are still “old school” lovers. Today they both are Wikipedia entries. Whether anyone will ever bring them together or separate them depends on the good will of AA, the anonymous author. Because AA is this beginning of a new cultural alphabet. Whether this alphabet will also be called “artistic” is hard to say.
Incidentally, as far as karaoke goes, there’s a new gizmo on the market, the Vocaloid, a vocal synthesizer application that was developed by Yamaha. For the time being the anemic digitalized voice seems best suited to anime characters whose eyes are twice as big, round, and moist as Bambi’s. But, any day now, imitating cutesy synthesized voices will no doubt be all the rage, all over the world. Maybe some plastic surgery clinics already offer clients eye-enlargements and socket sculpting so they can look like their anime heroes. Professor Kugelmass on the other hand—he’s out of luck. He lived in postmodernism, in the pre-Internet age, at the very dawn of the digital revolution.
[1]The cosplay craze appears livelier in Japan than anywhere else. The following is an invitation to humanities scholars to present papers at a conference entitled Cosplay: Media, Identity and Performance in Japan and Beyond at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Tokyo’s Sophia University: “A vibrant fan culture has developed around manga, anime and videogames, and perhaps the most visible indicator of its presence is ‘cosplay.’ A portmanteau combining ‘costume’ and ‘(role)play,’ cosplay is for some people almost synonymous with Japanese fandom, but its roots are in sci-fi conventions in the United States. Connected with the rich media scene in Japan, the practice of costuming as favorite characters took on a life of its own. Conventions can draw 14,000 cosplayers, and websites over 200,000 users. The annual ‘cosplay market’ is estimated at $350 million. For a short time there was even a ‘professional cosplay course’ offered by a trade school. And this enthusiasm is fast spreading around the world, as evidenced by the annual World Cosplay Summit. The quality of costumes and passion of their wearers continues to draw media attention around the world. Unfortunately, cosplay has yet to draw much academic attention, despite the potential wealth of insights to be gained. This conference brings together scholars from a variety of backgrounds to consider not only cosplay, but also intersections with fashion, subculture, performance, identity and gender.”
[2]Second Life might currently be a fiasco for investors, but it’s fertile ground for academic research. Zoe McMillan and Steorling Heron recently proposed a collection of essays entitled Challenging the Virtual: Women’s Cultural Experience in Second Life and sent out a call to fellow female academics to contribute chapters on the following topics: SL Economic and Business; SL Artistic and Creative Expressions via Building, Scripting, Animation; SL Subculture Identities (for example, Gorean, Furry, Neko, Sci-fi, Borg, Tinies, Roleplay, Child Avatars, etc); SL Relationships/Defending Personal Boundaries (Intimacy/Privacy in Digital Environment). Concerned as it is with these two diligent academics this footnote is not meant to be ironic. The fact is that from the beginning of time humanity has used religion to passionately and devotedly live parallel lives. The mere 2.2 billion Christians currently on planet earth believe in the story of the Second Life. The fact that Second Life the computer game differs slightly from the religious concept is quite irrelevant. The heart of the matter is that the human mind has always been ready to teleport itself into other worlds. And in this respect, the thesis that Google is actually the Heavenly Father is also more plausible.
[3]In the early seventies the psychiatric case of Shirley Ardell Mason, better known as Sybil Isabel Dorsett, aroused unusually widespread interest, her rise to infamy helped by a bestseller written by her psychiatrist, Cornelia B. Wilbur, and two movie adaptions of the book. Sybil’s diagnosis was “multiple personality disorder” (now known as “dissociative identity disorder”), and she was reported to carry sixteen different female identities within her. Interestingly, Sybil’s case inspired the computer security term “Sybil attack.”
