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Behind the Scenes with Jonathan Mitchell, producer of City X
Interview conducted by Julie Shapiro
> What was the initial inspiration for City X? Were you a mall
rat growing up yourself? (What was your favorite store?!!!)
I was born and raised in the city where I recorded the piece, and the mall was
a pretty central part of my life growing up. When I was very young, I would
wander around a toy store called Circus World for hours while my mom shopped
for clothes. When I was older, I went there with my friends on the weekends. We
spent most of our time at Aladdin's Castle (a video arcade), or Spencer's (a
tacky gift shop that sells lava lamps and sex toys). We'd see movies there,
check out the record stores, that kind of stuff.
I hung out at the mall partly because there weren't that many other options
available; our city was fairly isolated, and the mall had pretty much put the
downtown stores out of business. But I also hung out there because it offered
me a sense of freedom, especially in that period before I was old enough to
drive. It was a place where I could walk around by myself, and my parents
didn't seem to mind. Looking back on it, it was sort of like training wheels
for the real world.
After I finished college, I moved to a large city on the west coast, and lived
in a neighborhood with all kinds of locally owned stores, coffee shops, a
farmer's market, and a movie theater. There was a much stronger feeling of
cultural vitality there. I had no real reason to ever go to a mall, and no
desire either.
But I would still go back to my hometown to visit my family for the holidays,
and often those trips would include a visit to the mall. Having been away from
that environment, I found myself observing the mall from a more critical
perspective than I had growing up, and I noticed a lot of things that I thought
might make for a good radio piece.
> We hear from such a diverse cast of characters throughout the piece.
How did you find them?
A lot of the people in the piece are my friends and family members. My friend
Rebecca Lee walked around the mall with me, and we recorded our visit, stopping
along the way to interview the people who were shopping and working there.
I also interviewed the owner of what was once the biggest department store in
town, who was also very involved in getting the mall built. I interviewed the
city historian, who has an office at the public library, and I talked with a
woman who was working as a lobbyist for legislation that was intended to
improve the downtown. I also interviewed the head of the city's Chamber of
Commerce—I just walked in to his office one day, and he gave me a 30-minute
interview right then and there.
> When you began producing City X, what were the most important
aspects of the mall experience that you wanted to bring to listeners, and how
did you figure out the best way to accomplish this?
I wanted to create a document of something that was familiar to me, and in
particular something that expressed what it was like to grow up in a mid-sized
city in the Midwest. The city where I lived was fairly isolated, surrounded by
cornfields, and I remember feeling like all the really important stuff in the
world was always happening someplace else. One of the things that often
countered that feeling was when I saw a big chain store open up. In my mind,
the chain stores gave our town a sense of legitimacy. Of course, the irony is
that the chain stores ended up eroding the city's sense of a unique identity.
I thought that an interesting way to approach this idea was to never name the
city, and to generalize the descriptions of the city to the point where the
piece could be talking about any number of places. The piece intentionally
leaves out certain details, with the hope that people will fill in the gaps
with their own experiences or expectations. It's an extension of the notion
that people are creating the pictures in their head because it's radio; in this
piece, people are also creating many of the narrative details, too. The
intention was to create a more personalized experience for the listener, while
also using that as a way to make this larger point about the homogenization of
our culture.
> There's a real playfulness to the piece, yet it explores very
significant, even "serious" changes in our society. How did you think about
balancing these two elements?
The balance came about very instinctually, based on what I thought was the most
effective use of the tape I had. When I go through the tape I collect, I look
for the bits that evoke a strong emotion in me. Sometimes I find what the
person is saying to be funny, sometimes I find it profound, and sometimes the
person is saying something that I totally disagree with. But the most important
thing is that I have a strong emotional reaction to it.
I enjoy trying to look at subjects from many different angles, exploring how
different perspectives can contradict one another, yet still be equally valid.
My own attitude about the mall is actually quite complex, a mixture of humor,
nostalgia, admiration, disgust, and melancholy. And I think the balance in this
piece is a pretty good representation of how I feel.
> There's also constant humor and easygoing feel throughout the piece.
Are you hoping that to some degree, people simply have fun with City X,
and enjoy the nostalgia of thinking back on their own mall experiences while
listening?
I think humor is a really good way to draw people in, to help them care about
what's being said. And I prefer to listen to work that has a nice feel to the
way it's constructed, that has a compelling flow to the information being
presented. I think of what I'm creating primarily as an aural experience.
I anticipated that there might be some people who have a very nostalgic
reaction to the piece. But nostalgia for it's own sake isn't very interesting
to me. I wanted to use the mall as a metaphor for larger ideas, such as how we
think about the future in relation to the past, and how we choose the things we
want. I was also interested in the idea of creating a piece that documented
this experience for people who aren't very familiar with the modern shopping
mall as it exists in mid-sized cities of the American Midwest. These might be
people living in big cities, or people living outside the United States, or
people living 100 years from now. I was trying to document human behavior in
this one specific context, observing that behavior in order to gain another
perspective on what it means to be human.
> What did you learn from making City X, in terms of production
techniques?
I feel that most of the production techniques I used in this piece are things
I've done before. In formal terms, I think of this piece as a study in ways of
sustaining a montage. I liked the form the piece took because it often allowed
me to have some fun digressions, like the section when we're in the food court,
or when we're at the Zoltar machine. I was really interested in the idea of
using the same tape in several different places, developing themes through the
use of repetition, like in a piece of music. I thought a lot about the rhythm
and momentum of the piece, and creating musical phrases by editing the voices
in a certain way. The voices are constantly changing. I think the longest any
one person talks is 40 seconds, and that only happens once.
This piece explores some underlying notions that I have always been interested
in. One is the idea of creating an opera with no singing, by exploring the
musical setting of spoken text, treating natural conversation as music. Another
is the idea of a "cinematic music" -- using techniques generally associated
with film in a quasi-musical context. I'm especially interested in applying
these ideas to audio documentary, using interview material and recordings of
natural speech as the source material.
I'm also interested in what one might call meta-narratives. I use that term
loosely, to mean narratives that are generalized and could apply to many
different sets of specific circumstances. I think documentary is a perfect
place area to explore this idea, because the specificity of the source material
(a particular person is actually saying what you hear) creates a nice tension
with the generalized nature of the presentation.
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