Banh Mi So
This is was the most disappointing, least interesting of the banh mi sandwiches I tried at the Eden Center. I hate to say this, because I really liked the look and feel of the place. As I walked up, two young women who worked there were playing a kind of modified hacky sack in the front parking lot, kicking a small plastic thing that looked like an enlarged badminton shuttlecock back and forth. Seeing them do this solved a question that had been lurking in my subconscious for a month or so. I bought one of those shuttlecock things about a month ago in Little Saigon (L.A.) but couldn't figure out what it was for. The one end has a kind of plastic springy thing that I thought would make it bounce, but when I tried bouncing it I found out it isn't anywhere near springy enough for that to be the point of it, so I had no idea what it was for. Well, now I know.
The sandwich itself was pretty bland. It had one big very spicy pepper on it, but other than that it didn't have much flavor at all. The bread appeared to be freshly baked, but without an interesting filling that didn't do much good. (Speaking of which, a DVD extra on Rick Sebak's "Sandwiches That You Will Like" documentary is an absurdist collage of people debating whether the bread or filling is more important to making a good sandwich. What struck me about this collage is how we're able to watch, and understand, people's comments, even when they're edited together so quickly that all you're ever really hearing are sentence fragments. Are there any precedents for this sort of linguistic expression? I can't think of any.)
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 5:52 PM
3 Comments:
Precedents for what kind of linguistic expression? Sentence fragments?
Sellars and many others have written about "ellipsis", which involves sentence fragments expressing complete thoughts:
-Sellars, W. 1954: Presupposing. Philosophical Review, 63, 197-215.
-Strawson, P. 1954: A Reply to Mr. Sellars. Philosophical Review, 63, 216-231.
No, not just sentence fragments. I guess the easiest way to make my point would just be to show you the DVD extra itself, but I've already returned it to Netflix. Besides, it's the sort of thing everyone's familiar with from MTV anyway. The basic idea is that with quick-cut editing, we've become used to watching a bunch of people's words pasted together to form new thoughts. But, of course, that's the sort of thing that's possible in an audio-only mix, a la 80's hip hop megamixes, in which vocals from different recordings are combined to say something new. I'm not talking about (just) that. I'm trying to talk about when, on video (I think that's an important part of it), a bunch of people's incomplete statements are edited together, in quick succession, but not to get them to say something new by combining their words. Rather, the idea is to get a bunch of different, often contradictory, thoughts and quickly contrast them, the point being, I guess, that contrasting them so quickly gets us to see them all in a new light.
My simple point is: you can't do this with live people, not in the way a video does, at least, nor can you do it with just audio (because it's too hard to recognize who's speaking just from the sound of their voice).
My more complicated (and harder to express) point: isn't this a novel form of expression, one that's only possible on video? And, given its novelty, isn't it weird that we're so easily able to understand it?
Why do you think we can't tell who's speaking just from the sound of his voice? I used a lot of overlapping voices on some of the tracks of my CD, but I think you can tell when the same person comes up again, because voices are just that distinct. I mean, not just the tenor of the voice, but the diction, how the person puts her thoughts into words.
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