At 4:00 on 2/24 I sat down with James Dyer to watch the daily video from the Kirkwood Ski Resort website. Since we both have experience on the mountain, it was a good choice for the two of us. We opened up the webpage from James’ laptop and noticed that it had a very sleek design with cool colors such as green and blue with a large picture of a skier, chest deep in powder “rippin’ it up”. We clicked on the video and it started with a close-up of resort employee Tim Cohee, a middle-aged man who talked about the great conditions and the fresh snow they recently received. He used clever rhetorical devices to appeal to all riders and encouraged people to come up to the mountain. We then were showed a montage of snowboarders making long, arching turns down the mountain. Since they were shot at a low-angle, they managed to look like they were going fast while simultaneously taking it easy in terms of physical exertion. In practically every shot, they filmed the boarders in the tree line so that the viewer could see the snow that collected on the branches which indicates fresh snow. With the exception of one brief shot of a skier, every shot was of a snowboarder exerting themselves with various levels of difficulty. While they showed the montage, the played a blues-based, boogie-woogie type song in a laid back ¾ time which mirrored the easy going nature of the boarders riding. The clip ended with a long shot of the mountain to give a sense of scope and then faded to black with the banner “Music by AJ & the Shapes” in white letters.
Before we watched the video, we established the criteria of whether or not it would appeal to the proper demographic and showcase the culture of the mountain. In my opinion, they focused primarily on snowboarders and capitalized on the stereotypical laid back snowboard culture through its use of montage and music, although the man introducing the video and the picture on the front page were more in league with skier culture. Since I have a season’s pass to Kirkwood, I know that they primarily cater to skiers, but snowboarders compile a large portion of their demographic. Even though the video appealed primarily to one demographic (the snowboarder), it still effectively offered all viewers a comprehensive look at what they represent as an institution (laid back manner, fun being the primary objective), and what the mountain has to offer.
I have always admired the crisp nature of the way you write Adam, very clean and fast, like skiers maybe, You are correct in everything you said, and did so effeciently. Also, While my post is longer, it is sloppier, and I had more time to write it, and (in theory), to think about it. What I note is that you observed the actuality of the film very clearly, possibly because you are much more educated in visual rhetoric than I am. You were also the one to note that it was all snowboarders (almost), and you imediately picked up on the clever use of language by Tim.
All of that is good, but ethnography is something I have done quite a bit of, and so I approached this observation differently. Not with a better lens, but a different one. Note that I mentioned the place, my condition at the time, acknowledged both of our backgrounds, and considered how those things might have effected the viewing of the film. I also baldly stated the traditional antagonism between skier and snowboard culture, and used a rough reconstruction of part of our discussion as tools for helping the reader digest what we were saying both to each other and about what we saw.
This is not a criticisim of your way of approaching the gig, it really is not, just saying that your view was more clinical in many respects than mine, and that it is a difference in perspective, not in validity. Actually, I had not read your piece through before I wrote mine, and am rather interested in some of the similarities in what we thought was improtant in the observation as well as the differences. We both mention that they primarilly cater to skiers, a factoid I got from you and checked out on the side–not that I didn’t believe you, just that it is prudent to check such things, and its easy with a computer. We both noted the bluesy nature of the music, but you mentioned boogie-woogie too, which I remember you saying yesterday, and while I’m familiar with the term, and trust your judgment on that, I just didn’t hear so much, or maybe do not have an educated enough ear to hear, or maybe just don’t care and lump all Blues derived stuff like that under the lable Blues. I’m not sure.
I note that while we both used the term demographic, to say pretty much the same thing, I spent more time on specifying exactly what I meant by that in some ways, and was more casual in others, also that I seemed to be a bit judgemental of the demographic–even though, or perhaps because it is the one I come from, where you seemed to approach it as simply segement of the population with certain characteristics to be analyzed. Same with the video, an object to be analyzed–though a moving, speaking object. I just tend to think that in ethnography specifically we need to move into harmony with that which we are observeiing, in many cases ethnographers eat, live, play and sleep with their subjects. The woman I learned it from, or at least began to learn it from, Dr. Jill Stein, did her dissertation on the long term careers of rock’n’roll musicians, and she got access to that world because she was dating one of the guitarists in Tom Petty’s Heartbreaker’s at the time if I remember correctly.
I think you did an excellent analysis of what we observed, I’m just suggesting that an ethnography is a much more personally oriented sort of observation than you have been asked to do before, at least recently, and that with your position as a high school teacher, and film analyst, and Grad Student, the tendency to try to maintain a certain professional distance from your subject just gets reinforced. Time to chill a bit, stretch out, and be part of the thing that you’re looking at. In Ethnography there can not be any distance between the observer and the observed, because they are both being observed and participated in, inevitably, by the person doing the observing.