I've just been strolling down Recollection Lane, listening to some great Aussie hits at UteUbe. Apart from remembering that Ella Hooper flies straight through my first hotness filter and would be at short odds to get through the next one, I checked out some 'gurge, some 'gurus and some 'gAustralian Crawl.
There was this awesome clip of Oh No Not You Again (great song, buy the whey), with beautiful early, early 80s fashion. But it wasn't James Reyne on lead vocals. Or was it? Maybe if I squinted my eyes it was, except there's another guy who crops up with some backing harmonising at choice moments during the song and he looks much more like James Reyne. Could it be the Joey Travolta/Frank Stallone of the Reyne family, David? No, it turns out it's actually Guy McDonough, brother of the band's drummer Bill.
'the Hell?!?!
I am very disturbed by this. Imagine that you discovered that half the songs by some band you like are actually sung by different people and you never realised. Never even had an inkling. I'd listened to this and many Crawl song so many times, and always thought it was James Reyne singing. He has the twang and everything. Now I don't know what to do, or where to go. What else did McDonough sing? How can this happen? My head is spinning like a top and my whole world is crashing down around me.
It reminds me of some Brasilian friends of my sister who lived in London. I met them and was shocked and delighted to discover they were huge Cold Chisel fans. Now my memory is a little hazy on this, but I either introduced them to Australian Crawl, or I helped them decipher the lyrics of the original Mr Unintelligible, James Reyne. Or was it Guy McDonough?!?! I am absolutely shattered...
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Accounting for taste
With the league season over, but still two intercity train trips to make each day, my mind has turned to some of life's great topics - love, justice, the absolute, as well as a range of topics unrelated to league. One of these topics has flitted across my mind from decade to decade, without even so much as a second dwelled thereupon: could it be possible to account for taste? Taste in... hotness?
Many studies claim to show the factors which count in interpersonal attraction [citation needed]. Typically some blend of youth, symmetry and in males, relative power. If you want to know the average preferences of an average person, this might come in handy. But as the Surrealist Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Normal points out, it is exceedingly hard to find a typical, normal, average, standard person with likewise preferences. And to my mind, all the interesting things are left out of these studies anyway.
So what is hotness? Forgetting for the moment any deep philosophical discussion of the nature of hotness, let's start as any good scientist would, by producing some units. Consider the figure below, which I will dub the Hotness Scale.
On the Y axis we have Depth of Hotness. At its most shallow, we have Attention Capture. As we move further up (deeper in hotness) we enter the arena where a person's hotness has a Life of Its Own. This ranges from them making multiple involuntary appearances in your mind, through to the varying shades of crush, to the maximum: Lost Cause. There is no way, no how, that this person can ever not be hot. Surrender, all ye who enter here.
On the X axis is Duration of Hotness. This is a simple chronorithmic scale, ranging from 1 second to 1 day, 1 month, a year and all the way up to a lifetime.
On the Hotness Scale, the letter A could refer to glancing at an attractive person in a magazine. B could be some kind of crush, while C represents my hotness rating of wifey.
We are all familiar with some typical trajectories on this figure. There's love at first sight, which starts off at a very deep level of hotness and continues. There's the slow and steady burn, which starts near the origin and follows a line roughly corresponding to the equation Y=X. There's the Friend to Lover transition, in which someone coasts for some time at minimal hotness (they may not even be on the Hotness Scale) before a sudden nonlinear episode kicks them into deeper waters. And there's the U-Turn, in which someone becomes less hot, sometimes very much so. This can happen anywhere on the Hotness Scale, but is most frequent in the lower left quadrant.
To my mind, anyone on the Hotness Scale is hot. What they all share in common is the ability to pass through the beholder's Hotness Filter. The Hotness Filter consists of a series of pores, each corresponding to some quality or trait in a person. Now you and I may both have a pore corresponding to eyes, or waist to hip ratio, or amount of denim worn, but they probably won't be the same shape. My denim filter may exclude people who wear double denim or greater. Yours may let these people pass through. So in accounting for taste, I want to know what dictates the shape of the many pores in someone's Hotness Filter.
In fact, there are several Hotness Filters. I counted at least five, and you don't necessarily pass through them in any particular order. They are
There is another aspect to this that I think we all understand quite intuitively, which I think of as a kind of temperature. At low 'temperatures' we are less likely to find someone hot e.g. while skydiving, when feeling nausea. At high 'temperatures' we are more likely to find someone hot e.g. alcohol, after two years of abstinence, after eating half a dozen oysters. (Nb. too many oysters probably turns the temperature down). Think of temperature as making the pores in the Hotness Filter bigger or smaller. Proximity and total eye gazing time may turn the temperature up.
There's also a kind of Hotness Geometry, involving the angle from which you view someone, the distance (1 cm vs 1 m vs through binoculars) and dimension (ie on paper/screen/photo vs in real life).
Well, all of this didn't get me any closer to understanding why people's Hotness Filter pores are the shapes they are. In fact, I started to wonder whether it even makes sense to speak of the independent existence of stable filters and pores. Could it be that the Hotness Filter is actually created when someone passes through it? Could the fluid interaction of beholder and beheld be decisive in shaping what we thought was something fixed and pre-existing? How very quantum if that were the case.
I had to end my cursory excursion into Hotness Theory there, as my stop came up.
Many studies claim to show the factors which count in interpersonal attraction [citation needed]. Typically some blend of youth, symmetry and in males, relative power. If you want to know the average preferences of an average person, this might come in handy. But as the Surrealist Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Normal points out, it is exceedingly hard to find a typical, normal, average, standard person with likewise preferences. And to my mind, all the interesting things are left out of these studies anyway.
So what is hotness? Forgetting for the moment any deep philosophical discussion of the nature of hotness, let's start as any good scientist would, by producing some units. Consider the figure below, which I will dub the Hotness Scale.
On the Y axis we have Depth of Hotness. At its most shallow, we have Attention Capture. As we move further up (deeper in hotness) we enter the arena where a person's hotness has a Life of Its Own. This ranges from them making multiple involuntary appearances in your mind, through to the varying shades of crush, to the maximum: Lost Cause. There is no way, no how, that this person can ever not be hot. Surrender, all ye who enter here.On the X axis is Duration of Hotness. This is a simple chronorithmic scale, ranging from 1 second to 1 day, 1 month, a year and all the way up to a lifetime.
On the Hotness Scale, the letter A could refer to glancing at an attractive person in a magazine. B could be some kind of crush, while C represents my hotness rating of wifey.
We are all familiar with some typical trajectories on this figure. There's love at first sight, which starts off at a very deep level of hotness and continues. There's the slow and steady burn, which starts near the origin and follows a line roughly corresponding to the equation Y=X. There's the Friend to Lover transition, in which someone coasts for some time at minimal hotness (they may not even be on the Hotness Scale) before a sudden nonlinear episode kicks them into deeper waters. And there's the U-Turn, in which someone becomes less hot, sometimes very much so. This can happen anywhere on the Hotness Scale, but is most frequent in the lower left quadrant.
To my mind, anyone on the Hotness Scale is hot. What they all share in common is the ability to pass through the beholder's Hotness Filter. The Hotness Filter consists of a series of pores, each corresponding to some quality or trait in a person. Now you and I may both have a pore corresponding to eyes, or waist to hip ratio, or amount of denim worn, but they probably won't be the same shape. My denim filter may exclude people who wear double denim or greater. Yours may let these people pass through. So in accounting for taste, I want to know what dictates the shape of the many pores in someone's Hotness Filter.
In fact, there are several Hotness Filters. I counted at least five, and you don't necessarily pass through them in any particular order. They are
- Attention capture hotness. It could be an image on a screen, or walking past someone on the street. For a split second at least, someone has captured your attention because they are hot.
- Interaction hotness. Some people who pass the first filter get blocked here because of some information gleaned when you interact with them e.g. they stink, they vote Liberal, they care about politics etc.
- Contact hotness. Entering into quite close proximity with someone is another kind of filter. Pheromones start coming into it here.
- Going out hotness. Getting serious now. They have to pass the "I'm coming back for seconds" test here, among others.
- Commitment hotness. To love and to hold etc.
There is another aspect to this that I think we all understand quite intuitively, which I think of as a kind of temperature. At low 'temperatures' we are less likely to find someone hot e.g. while skydiving, when feeling nausea. At high 'temperatures' we are more likely to find someone hot e.g. alcohol, after two years of abstinence, after eating half a dozen oysters. (Nb. too many oysters probably turns the temperature down). Think of temperature as making the pores in the Hotness Filter bigger or smaller. Proximity and total eye gazing time may turn the temperature up.
There's also a kind of Hotness Geometry, involving the angle from which you view someone, the distance (1 cm vs 1 m vs through binoculars) and dimension (ie on paper/screen/photo vs in real life).
Well, all of this didn't get me any closer to understanding why people's Hotness Filter pores are the shapes they are. In fact, I started to wonder whether it even makes sense to speak of the independent existence of stable filters and pores. Could it be that the Hotness Filter is actually created when someone passes through it? Could the fluid interaction of beholder and beheld be decisive in shaping what we thought was something fixed and pre-existing? How very quantum if that were the case.
I had to end my cursory excursion into Hotness Theory there, as my stop came up.
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