Amy Thibodeau Archive

Imaginary Places: John Hughes’s Shermer

By Amy Thibodeau, March 21, 2010, 10:20 pm in Film, Present

John Hughes, who suddenly passed away last year of a massive heart attack, is best known for writing and also often directing films about teen angst. Anyone who grew up in the 80s or even early 90s in North America probably came across The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, even though some of it is cringe-worthy now, most probably felt some kinship with at least one or two of the characters. Whether you were the princess or the dork, Hughes’s characters are archetypes that resonate with the angsty misunderstood invisibility that many teenagers, even the most well-adjusted and privileged, feel from time to time.

To the less obsessive Hughes fan, these films very much stand on their own as independent productions, but there was a thread that connected most of his characters – they all lived in the imaginary town of Shermer, Illinois, which was based on Hughes’ own hometown of Northbrook. Films set in Shermer include The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Uncle Buck, the Home Alone films, and the National Lampoon’s Vacation films.

Hughes’s Shermer was partly Northbrook and partly a composite of all the North Shore’s towns and neighborhoods – and, by externsion, all the different milieus that existed in American suburbia. In Hughes’s mind, the would later say, Molly Ringwald’s upper-middle class character in Sixteen Candles, Samantha, was a passing acquaintance of Mathew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, while Judd Nelson’s troubled Breakfast Club punk, Bender, came from the same forlorn section of ton as Del Griffith, the hard-knock but relentlessly upbeat shower-curtain-ring salesman played by John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. (Vanity Fair, March 2010)

When Hughes died, his family found hundreds of notebooks filled with stories and notes – many of them a continuation of the story of Shermer. I would love to know what happened to Samantha Baker.

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How Roger Ebert Got his Voice Back

By Amy Thibodeau, March 9, 2010, 9:55 pm in Film, Medicine, Present

Recently, Esquire published an exquisite cover story on film critic Roger Ebert, who is best known for the decades he spent debating great and not-so-great films with his counterpart Gene Siskel on the popular television programme, At the Movies. Since the article came out last month, people can’t get enough of Ebert. His blog, which was already popular, has developed cult popularity, he has well over 100,000 followers on Twitter, he’s recently created a Fan Club (inspired by an old friend who also happens to be a successful web porn entrepreneur) and he was a guest on Oprah.

Although there are hundreds of hours of footage of Ebert’s voice in At the Movies, it seemed very unlikely, if not impossible, that he would ever be able to speak again, using anything other than an artificial voice that bears no resemblance to the original. Recently, a Scotland-based company called CereProc used archival recordings to recreate an artificial voice that sounds like Ebert. Although it is still in beta, it even has the potential to eventually take on emotional inflection. CereProc is “an advanced voice synthesis company… [which] creates customized text-to-speech software. Instead of producing flat computerized voices, the company says its voices include realistic, animated and emotional dimensions.” (source)

The company undertakes a great deal of research on, what they call, the emotional continuum to stimulate realistic emotional states in voice reproductions:

CereVoice uses two separate techniques to simulate emotional states. The first is to select tense or calm voice quality. This compares closely with the perception of negative and positive emotional states (however, it also has an active/passive effect to some extent). The second is to use digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to alter the speech to active or passive states. Active states involve: faster speech rate, higher volume and higher pitch, Passive states involve: slower speech rate, lower volume and lower pitch. (source)

Pretty inspiring stuff!

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Butch Bakery – Home of the Manly Cupcake

By Amy Thibodeau, February 28, 2010, 5:14 pm in Culture, Cupcakes, Present

Recently, a New York based company has sought to redress the embarrassment manly men apparently feel when indulging in their love of cupcakes.

Founder David Arrick became agrieved when he read a magazine article that described cupcakes are “pink, sweet, cute, and magical.” His response is Butch Bakery, where “Butch meets Burtercream”. There are currently 12 flavours of cupcake available ranging from Rum & Coke (rum-soaked madagascar vanilla cake with cola bavarian cream filling) to the Beer Run (chocolate beer cake with beer-infused buttercream topped with crushed pretzels).

Butch Bakery is a delivery-only service and although they recommend you order at least 72 hours in advance of when you want your cupcakes delivered, they are currently fully booked and not able to deliver new orders until the end of the first week in March. To quote their website, “Whoa!”

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Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Sculptures – A New Form of Life

By Amy Thibodeau, February 27, 2010, 3:32 pm in Art, Past

I am absolutely spellbound by the work of kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen. He builds mind-blowing, intricate, skeleton-like structures that are so light weight, they come to life in the natural environment – animated by wind. They remind me of something from the Dark Crystal. In his own words:

Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life.

Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat.

Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storms and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

When describing how they actually function, Jansen talks about “Storing the Wind”, a process that is really a feat of modern engineering, using very rudimentary materials:

Self-propelling beach animals like Animaris Percipiere have a stomach . This consists ofrecycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind. This is done using a variety of bicycle pump, needless to say of plastic tubing. Several of these little pumps are driven by wings up at the front of the animal that flap in the breeze. It takes a few hours, but then the bottles are full. They contain a supply of potential wind. Take off the cap and the wind will emerge from the bottle at high speed. The trick is to get that untamed wind under control and use it to move the animal. For this, muscles are required. Beach animals have pushing muscles which get longer when told to do so. These consist of a tube containing another that is able to move in and out. There is a rubber ring on the end of the inner tube so that this acts as a piston. When the air runs from the bottles through a small pipe in the tube it pushes the piston outwards and the muscle lengthens. The beach animal’s muscle can best be likened to a bone that gets longer. Muscles can open taps to activate other muscles that open other taps, and so on. This creates control centres that can be compared to brains.

Amazing.

STRANDBEESTEN_TRAILER from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.

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Good Wine – A Matter of Taste or Perception?

By Amy Thibodeau, February 23, 2010, 8:48 pm in Past, Psychology

Last week a group of twelve wine executives from France were found guilty of fraud when they substituted the more expensive grapes typically found in Pinot Noir for a cheaper variety. Their label – Red Bicyclette – is a fairly popular brand in North America and the worry is that following this conviction, their deception will be detrimental to the wine industry, particular in the Languedoc region of France where the company is based.

The thing I find interesting about this case, and wine in general, is that the consumers of Red Bicyclette didn’t seem to notice the difference between the expensive grapes and the cheaper ones. There were no notable customer complaints and no one is saying that the wine didn’t taste pretty much the same as it would have if they’d done things properly. The fraud was uncovered during an audit when it was found that the company could not have been turning over as much profit if they were also spending money on the expensive grapes.

Even though consumers couldn’t tell the difference (or at least, if they did it wasn’t significant enough to report), there is almost no doubt that there will be a retaliation against the wine industry from Languedoc. Research suggests that a good deal of our decisions about which wine to drink is actually based on abstract psychological reactions and cultural context rather than on a genuine ability to discern superior grapes by taste. Two examples:

  • After the film Sideways was released, Merlot sales in the US dropped by 2%, while Pinot Noir sales increased by 16%, presumably as a response to the character Miles’ appreciation of one and denigration of the other. (via Wikipedia)
  • “Restaurant owners will often price the wine they buy cheapest at wholesale as the second-cheapest wine on the menu. Why? Because people generally don’t order the cheapest wine and thus often turn to the second cheapest.” Presto – either because consumers don’t want to appear cheap or because we imagine the cheapest option will have the worst taste, we predictably buy the second-cheapest. (via Lone Gunman)

How many of you can really tell the difference between a good wine and a mediocre one?

Rocket Bar Wine image by Mr. T. in DC

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