以集体记忆的名义 有关LiLei和HanMeimei的那点事
名词解释
集体记忆：法国哲学家与社会学家哈布瓦赫，为了与个体记忆区分而率先使用的。它的源头是内涵更加复杂的“集体意识”。根据《科林斯社会学辞典》解释，集体意识就是社会里作为一种凝聚力量，民众共有的信念和道德态度。
虚拟关系的全民猜想
“后来，Han Meimei当然没嫁给Li Lei，离了一次婚，成了一个文风忧郁的女作家，笔名寒寐，足不出户，却在网络上颇受欢迎……”在豆瓣小组“李雷都这么牛了韩梅梅却不喜欢他”，网友们对Li Lei和Han Meimei未来生活的最新描述只不过停留在几天前。
如果你出生在1980至1988年间，你一定认识LiLei和HanMeimei。没错，他们是1993年首次改版的初中英语教科书里的插图人物。LiLei剃平头，穿浅色T恤；HanMeime齐耳短发，颇具妇女干部的气质。在将近三年的时间里，他们的形象不仅被网友们重新挖掘了出来，还被赋予了私人化、全角度的再度解读。凭借着网络强大的传播力，这场关于Li Lei和Han Meimei虚拟关系的全民猜想，事实上已成为了80后网友对于青春记忆的一次“集体缅怀”。
让我们回顾一下这场猜想的发迹史。2005年12月15日，天涯社区娱乐版出现题为“八一八中学英语课本中为什么有一个奇怪的名字”的帖子。虽然这个帖子里只字未提LiLei，但重点讨论了书中女主角的起名缘由，特别是HanMeimei的名字因何而起的疑问也成为了讨论的导火索。一时间，大量80后网友开始跟帖。不久，另一个名叫“露珠姑娘”的网友说道：“我当时总觉得那双胞胎之一Lucy喜欢Li Lei，那个Jim喜欢Han Meimei。”
也就是从这时开始，话题开始从单纯怀旧转向了认真讨论LiLei和HanMeimei的关系。但不知为何，讨论并未形成气候。2006年5月1日，当时还是香港大学新闻系学生的杨柳，受到帖子触动，开始在博客中提及这个故事，而流传在网络上的大部分关于LiLei的文字出她之手。2007年5月27日，题目《Li Lei，Han Meimei和Jim Green缠绵悱恻的爱情故事》走红网络，虽然文章作者成谜，但从那时起，Li Lei和Han Meimei的话题已经急速升温，影响力开始扩展到整个网络。接下来，Li Lei和Han Meimei的身影出现在了大大小小的网络论坛里，网友们对于他俩关系的想象力开始层出不穷、势如破竹。
虽然与事实相距甚远（书籍的编写人曾解释，其实 Li Lei和 Han Meimei从头到尾就没说几句话），但这场掺杂了个体欲望与诉求的集体猜想，让80后网友与担当了将近10年的学习伴侣打了个照面，分享了很多曾经以为自己独有其实却有普遍性的经验。比如他们发现，原来有这么多人都喜欢把鹦鹉Polly的发音读作“玻璃”，这么多人看到那位风姿绰约的教师MissGao都曾在心底暗暗的惊叹：真是太有女人味了！
集体记忆的商业属性
第一个把LiLei和HanMeimei引入商业领域的是蔡凯。2006年5月，25岁的蔡凯还在为参加广州创意集市的作品创意而绞尽脑汁，而突然的灵感迸发，让他想到了初中课本里的LiLei和HanMeimei。
5个月后，他设计的以LiLei和HanMeimei头像为LOGO的作业本、贴纸成为了当年创意集市上的明星。这些印刷质量粗糙，标价10块钱一本、50块钱一套、总共200套的作业本，两天之内被抢购一空。几乎每个围上来的年轻人都会眼睛一亮，继而发出尖叫，“天哪！这不是LiLei和HanMeimei吗？！”
得到信心的蔡凯，马上把“LiLei和HanMeimei”注册了商标及域名。之后，他干脆从美术学院辞职，推出了第二代产品——包括尺子、三八线、情书、检讨书和贴纸在内的办公室用品，还参加了当年的“大声展”。这两个人物已经成为他不断开拓的系列设计的品牌标识。2008年4月，蔡凯参加了佐丹奴发起的“没有陌生人的世界”创意设计活动，顺势推出Li Lei&Han Meimei主题T恤。这款全球限量发行2000件的T恤，面向高达过亿的潜在用户——从1990年至2000年，10年间使用人教版英语教材的中学生。
2007年的愚人节，一支由4个非职业乐手组建的乐队开始了第一次排练，他们的理由足够简单，因为那天是个周末。在这一天晚上，由于成员caca在自己的博客里为这支80后乐队找到了一个非常讨巧的前缀：the Lilei & Hanmeimei’s。4个月后，当他们站在舞台上，一脸青涩地唱起“Polly之歌”时，台下歌迷们尖叫、扭摆、泪奔，闹得一塌糊涂。
2008年8月，“一直想做探讨和表现男女一生欲望的专题”的搜狐男性频道，受知名游戏《模拟人生》的启发，决定设定Lilei和Hanmeimei这两个虚拟人物为蓝本，用他们的故事来完成一个悲欢离合里性致盎然的故事。2个月后，还沉浸在情欲河流中难以自拔的Lilei和Hanmeimei，摇身一变，成为了标准的宅男宅女，在当当网首页充当起了“十一”长假读书活动的虚拟主角。
“大家像是找到了组织，尽情地晒当年的回忆，与集体记忆相关的主题产品会很有市场。”正如蔡凯在接受采访时的回答，他们在对LiLei和HanMeimei形象不断颠覆的过程中，集体记忆所隐藏的商业属性，也一点点地被揭示、被公开。
对话
每日新报：你们是怎样想到用LiLei和HanMeimei这个名称的？
蔡凯：是在几乎快忘记的时候想起来。因为决定要做一件好玩的事情。做那些大家天天都可以看到的形象没有意思。虚构一个也没有意思。就在大家几乎要忘记他们的时候，我觉得可以拿出来做。
the Lilei & Hanmeimei’s乐队：我们组建乐队主要就是想玩儿一些传统的真乐器的摇滚乐。乐队名是对初中英语的怀念、致敬与反抗。我们都是那个年代的人。
每日新报：你们接下来的打算是什么？
蔡凯：我其实从来就没有拿lilei和hanmeimei当成什么重点来对待。只是想按照自己的想法重新设定他们的形象。不是借助形象设计产品。本意就是要设计产品。但是产品需要一个logo。而他们就是logo。真正的产品就是“大声展”的那批黑白的设计。后来的产品是应景的，才推出了tee之类的。
the Lilei & Hanmeimei’s乐队：没有，我只是不太喜欢被当作LH的附属品。如果要采访我们这个乐队，我很乐意说我们为什么是这个乐队，为什么用这个名字，或者为什么现在也没啥作品但是玩儿得高兴。只要说音乐就好。 当然，若不是这个名字的附属品，也不会有这么多人关注了。究竟是每次开场都唱一遍教材歌曲呢，还是真正高明起来呢，我们都很困惑。好玩是最重要的，我一直认为我们是有LH气质的四个人，但不是我们就真对它怎么着了。
人物辞典
Li Lei：中国男孩，平头短发，喜穿浅色T恤。不是书呆子，他很喜欢玩，这种动静结合的性格，使得他在哪儿都吃香，既能和Lin Tao这样好学的人成为莫逆，也能和Jim这样好动的人成为死党。
Jim Green：全名是James Allen Green，在中国生活的英国孩子，一头棕色的卷发，喜欢穿深色的T恤，给人的印象是有活力、聪明，但是有些马虎，时常犯些小错误。
Han Meimei：这个齐耳短发的中国女孩，文雅温和，智慧善良，几乎是所有女性美德的化身。在书中，她更像是一个姐姐的身份，帮助同学们排忧解难。
Kate Green：Jim的妹妹。和哥哥一样，Kate也是昵称，全称是Catherine。同样是一头棕色卷发，活泼可爱，书中很爱和大几岁的哥哥的朋友们玩。
Lucy and Lily：可爱的双胞胎姐妹，来自美国。两个人长得一模一样。开始的时候，两人都是同时出现，不过到后来，编者有意扩大她们之间的区别，也经常会单独出镜。
Ann：加拿大人，一头金色长发，标准的西方血统。她和Jim、Lilei他们不在一个班，但是和Han Meimei是好朋友，另外，她还有一个中国好朋友Chen Hua。
Comme des Vuitton
In an extraordinary collaboration, Louis Vuitton, the ultimate French luxury brand, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, the ultimate fashion rebel, will open a joint Tokyo store in September — an ephemeral three-month space where six one-off bags, designed by Kawakubo in LV monogram pattern, can be ordered by shoppers.
Yves Carcelle, chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton, sitting front row at Kawakubos’ show on Friday, said that he was approached by Comme and considers the project a fine way to celebrate 30 years since Vuitton first opened in Tokyo.
Backstage, Kawakubo said that memory of her excitement at the arrival of Parisian luxury in Japan in 1978, resulted in this unlikely idea of the new design duo creating the store within the Comme des Garçons shop off Omotesando.
For Comme acolytes, this move will be considered either as sleeping with the enemy — or a brilliant and imaginative partnership.
Kawakubo has re-designed the entire Comme des Garçons store on Kottodori, Omotesando for the Vuitton project. Carcelle says that LV is investing in the store, and that any financial profits will be divided.
Although there have been many recent collaborations between ‘high’ and ‘low’ fashion, starting with Karl Lagerfeld’s mini collection for fast fashion store H & M, this meld is different, since it involves a beacon of individuality with a company at the heart of corporate luxury management, as part of the LVMH (Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton) group.
Carcelle said that Marc Jacobs, artistic director of Louis Vuitton, admired Comme des Garçons and was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of a joint venture.
“It is impossible to overstate Rei Kawakubo’s influence on modern fashion,” Jacobs said in a prepared statement, ‘I find it wonderful to think that 30 years ago, this immense talent, someone who has inspired so many others, was inspired by Louis Vuitton.”
Kawakubo described her designs as ‘party’ bags, promising multi-handles or two handles morphing into one. All will use the Monogram toile, with the LV initials, and the offerings will hark back to the styles of 30 years when Vuitton made only bags and leather goods.
Suzy Menkes is fashion editor at the International Herald Tribune.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/comme-des-vuitton/
Air: French Mood Setters Still a Band Apart
AIR. It always was an ambitious name for a band, so brief and elemental. It posed from the start the question of substance, and when the French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel turned up in 1998 with the, well, airy electronic sketches of Moon Safari, they achieved saturation in certain circles followed by a depletion of density.
Having spawned no imitators, initiated no trends, they returned at unhurried intervals with albums mining essentially the same concept: highly produced affairs with a pop sophistication so uncanny as to cause as much wariness as listening pleasure, earning them not-quite-friendly designations like “soft electropop.”
And now they’re back, three years after their 2004 sortie Talkie Walkie, with a new album called Pocket Symphony that finds them in a stripped-down, quiet place, a minimalist project that might or might not prove a commercial risk. The “French Touch” club wave, to which they only awkwardly belonged in the first place, has long since waned. They are alone – a condition, it turns out, that they find quite appealing.
On a chilly evening, Godin and Dunckel sit in a Williamsburg photographer’s studio, letting a soggy couch support them after they’ve posed for a shoot. They’ve had a tedious day, spent mainly at the French consulate renewing passports after a misunderstanding with authorities at JFK. Godin, who has the perkier personality, is distracted at first, texting with his girlfriend in Paris. Dunckel seems part contemplative, part jetlagged.
Neither man is a massive physical specimen, but both are attractively lanky and appear comfortable in their skin and relaxed-European garb: jacket, dark pants, open shirt. They are, to put it simply, French – casually, fluidly so, but leaving no doubt as to their cultural provenance. For this writer, who happened to grow up in France about the same time Godin and Dunckel did, it’s an uncanny blast from the past.
And so is their music in a lot of ways. There’s a retro, romantic underpinning to their work – a self-conscious effort to put themselves outside trend and time. Critics pin on them pop labels – post-Kraftwerk synth-electronica, post-Gainsbourg French existential pop, and the 1990s “French Touch” club music – but they resist all designations.
The influences they credit are not performers but composers – Erik Satie, Olivier Messiaen, Philip Glass – and most of all the soundtrack composers of their childhood like Ennio Morricone and Michel Colombier. A fascination with film scores is key to the Air sensibility and results from the pair growing up with a typically French cinema habit.
As epiphanies go, Godin likens the first time he heard Morricone’s soundtrack to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in its life-changing effect, to an American first hearing the Beatles in 1964 on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
“I think for a French kid watching these movies was the biggest shock you could feel when you were a teenager or child,” Godin says. “Because pop culture isn’t a French thing, but music soundtracks are a strong part of French culture.” He cites composers such as Georges Delarue, who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, or Michel Colombier.
There’s a retro, romantic underpinning to their work – a self-conscious effort to put themselves outside trend and time.
Growing up, Godin says, “You can’t be French and say I’m going to be hip hop. As an American teenager you can dream of hip hop, but as a French teenager it’s ridiculous. But we have these soundtracks. That’s why we go more into this orchestral music.”
That premise, of course, is open to challenge – after all, there’s a profusion of quality French hip hop – but it indicates from where Air is coming. They are, in a sense, space-age cultural conservatives, purveyors of a nostalgic electronica in which lyrics are optional, song structure is secondary, and the priority is the establishment of a sonic haven where you can be free with your fantasies, just like at the movies.
“Normal people go to the cinema and that’s the way they get moved,” Dunckel says. “And so I try to model this emotion and make music with it, and have the same effect. What I take from a movie, I put it in some speakers, and that’s the basis of Air’s music, I think. People just listen to our music and they think they are in a movie.”
Air have one actual soundtrack to their credit, the 2001 score to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. It was their second full-length project and seemed a departure from the proper progress path for a new pop group. Looking back, it may have proven a rare chance to score a full movie from a clean slate rather than assemble a package of songs “inspired by” the film, as is increasingly common.
It’s an approach they’d like to revive, although probably not with Coppola: “She’s doing less and less in terms of traditional soundtrack,” Godin says. “She works with a guy who collects a lot of songs and puts them in the movie. We prefer the traditional approach.”
Dunckel picks up: “I think that when you do a soundtrack, your heart is more full and your mind is more open, and anything is possible. But when you do an album, it’s more formatted. Even before you start you feel more limited, because it’s songs. When it’s a soundtrack, it can go in any direction; there’s no rule.”
Some people like songs, of course – even Air, when pressed to discuss specific tracks. Still, they are coming back to the wide-open soundscapes of their early work. Principally instrumental and, on the whole, a relatively quiet album, Pocket Symphony lacks the agitation of 10,000 Hz Legend or the crisply packaged pacing of Talkie Walkie. It makes no apologies for the minimalist serenity that may drive antsy listeners up the wall, but that reflects the state of mind of the duo, who are now deep in their thirties.
“Every record reflects where we are,” says Dunckel. “It’s amazing. I can read all my life looking at the records we did. Moon Safari was innocence, 10,000 Hz was tortured…”
Asked how they’ve changed, Dunckel answers by means of a projection.
“I think there is always this girl that we are speaking to,” he says. “Like the average woman, or the girl that we would like to have, or that we have just had, and it’s this freeform shape, this woman that we are talking to and is always there.”
“At the beginning she was a brunette,” Godin interjects. “Now she’s a blonde.”
“At first she was only there to pass a good time with,” Dunckel continues. “But now she is a mother. She has to be able to face maternity.”
Godin and Dunckel are family men, though vague about the number and distribution of baby-mamas. Dunckel and his girlfriend live with his three kids and her two in a loft in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, a once-seedy, now artsy district near two major train stations. Godin has two kids, a steady girlfriend, and lives in the upscale 16th.
Between work and family life, Godin and Dunckel by their own admission don’t get out very much anymore. They don’t exude fascination with other pop developments, in Paris or elsewhere, and they reject any association with a music scene. They are quite literally bande à part, a French term for outsiders that translates to “a band apart.”
“Even when the ‘French Touch’ started, we were the only ones to do music with no beat in it,” Godin says. “And that’s amazing, even when we are part of a movement, we are alone in this movement. Now more than ever.”
“We are more part of a culture than part of a music scene,” Dunckel says.
Typically, a stance of splendid isolation in pop is hard to back up, exposed as it is to accusations of arrogance or complacency that are all too often well-founded. So it’s tempting to scrutinize Air for signs of hubris or, at least, disconnection with daily life. Remarkably, there are precious few. Godin and Dunckel are too down to earth, too obviously true to their game, and most of all too damn intelligent.
In fact, you could fairly call them intellectuals, ones who made the most of their high-end French public education and ultimately, despite becoming full-time musicians, never renounced their original fields – architecture for Godin, mathematics for Dunckel.
That background means that when Godin talks about building a song, he’s barely being metaphoric.
“Every song has an approach,” he says. “Our music is very built with a foundation and space. The first thing that they taught me at school is [that] the important thing is not the walls but the space behind the walls. The wall is nothing. Just put two walls together and it creates a space. Because if you take a baseline and a point, the whole energy between them creates the space of the music.”
“Our music is very spacey, it’s the most spacey music I know,” Godin continues. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing of bad, but at least it’s fucking spacey.”
The mathematically trained Dunckel, meanwhile, brings to the Air tracks the tinkering of an experimentalist who knows there can be beauty in an unexpected equation.
“Theory can be really important for improving music,” Dunckel says. “You say, I’m going to do some conceptual music now, and I want to reverse what the melody will do. I want the melody to be done by the bass, the bass lines to be made by the drums… It can lead to some really weird music.”
He grows animated as he details an example: “One day we made a track, we reversed the tape, pitched it down, picked it up… We wrote it down on paper, recorded the guitar making new chords, these chords were weird because we made some mistakes, we kept some reversed tracks mixed in with some new parts – it’s a theory thing but it works. The track is called ‘Caramel Prisoner’ – it’s on 10,000 Hz. Things like that.”
By stripping down the sound on Pocket Symphony, the pair have allowed themselves to dwell on conceptual matters. “Nightsight,” the album’s closing track, offers a simple illustration. It is built on two cycles, one of four notes and one of seven. The cycles merge and separate to an almost hypnotic effect kept off-kilter by the unusual spacing.
“When the cycles just go back together it’s such a relief,” Godin says. “And we say that the system of the song is that magic moment when suddenly they go back together for [about] one second. So we didn’t want to have too much on top of it. They just separate and come back together; that’s what creates the satisfaction. It really is a theoretical thing.”
Though it might sound paradoxical, for Air, the return to theoretical basics has meant a chance to make music that they consider warmer, by which they mean more sensual, compared to Talkie Walkie, which may be their best-crafted work songwise, but they now feel lacks an overall emotional signature.
“Our music maybe on Talkie Walkie was too cold, and I like that in the early years we were more sensual,” Godin says. “So many people made love to ‘La femme d’argent.’ We wanted to go back to that vibe.”
They like the idea of listeners having sex to their work. “At least feel some sensuality, some sexiness,” says Godin. A sonic architect, he wants to remodel your bedroom, perhaps modify some other spaces in your world to make them more conducive.
In the end, it comes down to basics. Music. Sex. Fantasy. On the new album, these themes seem to join in the repeated evocation of Japan. They know Japan from touring, of course, and Godin recently took up study of the Japanese koto, which he plays on the album. But Japan is also a parallel fantasy that could etch itself, in the end, anyplace.
“It’s a Pacific wind blowing in your face,” says Dunckel, explaining the song “Mer du Japon,” one of the few that includes a vocal part. “It’s like when you are amazed by an Asian girl, by her beauty, and you are jetlagged because you are in Japan, the wind from the ocean in your face, you are a little bit dizzy, you are lost…”
The essential truth that Air is onto is that: It’s important to be able to get lost, especially when you’re a star, or when you are creative, or when you live in the city, or maybe simply when you are human at all. Like the element they chose as their name, Godin and Dunckel have perfected the art of being present and absent at once vis à vis their audience, their peers, and even their country.
Two years ago, they were awarded a top French honor and made Knights in the National Order of Arts and Letters in a fancy government ceremony, the Minister of Culture reading a citation and adorning them with the order’s official lapel ribbon. They were, as ever, slightly flattered, slightly nonplussed, and not entirely there, already reworking the event into their fantasy world, turning it to potential creative material.
Godin smiles at the memory.
“I didn’t expect it, no,” he says. “But I was always a fan of Star Wars. I wanted to be a Jedi for the Republic, and now that’s what we are: knights of the French republic. When you are an artist, things happens to you, and you transform them into fantasy.”
– Story by Siddhartha Mitter, photos by Noah Kalina
http://www.alarmpress.com/341/music-interview/air-french-mood-setters-still-a-band-apart/
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
linger 