Time Mowing Down Slander & Vice and Death Strangling Envy

L.A. Grise

2011-09-08T10:46:00.004-04:00

So one day in, what, 1948 or 1949, one of the studios sends a film crew out to shoot some rear-projection footage in downtown LA. Somebody had to shoot all that scenery passing by the car windows in those scenes in which some character gets behind the wheel. Encumbered by a phoniness we can no longer forgive, these scenes went extinct nearly half a century ago. Now we demand that our actors really drive, in the same way we're starting to demand that they really play an instrument (like Adrian Brody in The Pianist, or even Brad Pitt laying into Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in Tree of Life—it will no longer do for someone to simply peer over a piano at us and move his shoulders around).

But this clip. A relaxed, very un-fussy shoot—to the small crew, I guess it could not have felt more ordinary—but of course what we have here, some 65 years later, is several minutes of unposed, unaware late-40s Los Angeles going about its business. We see how people walked, how they drove (fewer cars but already plenty of smog), how they inhabited the space. And we see many homes in the Bunker Hill area that have since been demolished. (Found this comment on a blog: "all those Victorian homes bulldozed in the 60s/70s. Now Disney Hall, Chandler Pavilion, and rows of condos.") While I can understand how an East Coaster would have found this LA impossibly bare and without style, in hindsight the simplicity strikes me as serenely civilized. Already then, by the way, LA was a plenty industry-literate town: at 3:44 there is a guy with the presence of mind to wave at the camera.

A somewhat fuller account of this footage can be found on the blog of the Atlantic's rather gothically-named associate editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg.

Annotated edition of latest spam

2011-08-08T14:19:00.006-04:00

An email I received over the weekend presents such challenges to the reader that I thought I should append a section of explanatory notes.

Subject: EMPLOYMENT

We[1] are offering a temporary job which really do not require any professional skills. You really don't have to have any professional skills for this. All we are looking for right now is USA based individual[2] to handle paper work, file documents and handle payroll administration to our clients in USA. What will be required from you is few hours a day and also to pay very close attention to all instructions given to you. Your Job will be; Handling all applications with regards to new client that will like to register a company in USA and what you will be doing is Filing all papers from these individual companies which will be sent over to you under that companies name.[3] Salary terms; $200per job> Get back to us through the email address. All replies should be sent to this e-mail.vonmicheal@aol.com[4]

Regards

MR MICHEAL VAUNGH[5]

NOTES

1. No real indication of who "we" might be, although feasible candidates would include the Money Launderers Association of Lagos, the Pyongyang Internet Cafe, or the Alternative-Universe Chamber of Commerce.

2. Just the sort of job to make you feel special. It requires no special skills (let us repeat that: the job requires no special skills), and your chief qualification appears to be something you share with 300 million people.

3. First assignment: translating this sentence into English or, failing that, just any language indigenous to the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way. That is close enough.

4. The author spends part of his year as a German baron.

5. Most people should be able to spell the relatively common name Vaughn, particularly people who are named Vaughn.

Meeting of the Ukrainian Flag Development Committee upon Completion of the Project

2011-04-01T23:39:00.005-04:00

Meeting Minutes

Present: Chairman Adamovich; committee members Slivka, Bortnick, Petrovich, Wayda, Stupak; flag designers Shevchenko and Olejnik; Madame Olchansky

Proceedings: Meeting called by Chairman Adamovich to view newly designed national flag. Once Mr. Shevchenko and Mr. Olejnik unveiled their design there was some confusion over the flag itself, some of the committee members thinking it must be a second veil and that the actual flag still lay underneath it. When Shevchenko explained that this was it, a murmur went around the room. Madame Olchansky put her hand to her throat and a glass of water was called for.

Chairman Adamovich asked the pair if this was some kind of joke. When Shevchenko expressed surprise, the chairman told him that, after six months and a million hryvnia, he and his partner had "a lot of nerve" to show up with two stripes.

Shevchenko explained to the chairman that "those two stripes" held great emblematic significance: the yellow band represents the fields of wheat that are the foundation of Ukrainian life; above this is a blue band of sky.

After a long silence, board member Slivka asked if this was all the designers had come up with? Mr. Olejnik stepped up and said there was one other version. When asked what it looked like, Olejnik looked nervously at Mr. Shevchenko and explained that it had the yellow stripe on the top and the blue on the bottom. Mr. Olejnik made a strange gesture as he explained this arrangement, not unlike someone demonstrating how to use a Slinky.

Board member Bortnik expressed admiration for the flag of Moldova, which, apart from having three stripes, also has an eagle holding a shield, on the face of which is an auroch. The current flag of the Ukraine, on the other hand, could "use a little something."

At this point Mr. Shevchenko asked what an auroch was.

Philip Roth's "On the Air"

2010-10-28T10:40:00.017-04:00

In the current Esquire's profile of Philip Roth the author revisits his old turf in Newark. It's an interesting read because the usually thorny Roth is uncharacteristically, almost bizarrely, benevolent. It's not a stretch to say the reporter, Scott Raab, was probably relieved by Roth's good mood. He'd even come to the interview armed with a gift to soften up the old writer—a rare copy of New American Review #10 (1970), the home of Roth's notorious, and never-collected, "On the Air." Roth's happy to get the little quarterly, but he admits to Raab, "I hate that story." Raab confesses he isn't so crazy about it himself—in fact, he says, it's probably the worst thing Roth's ever written.

While "On the Air" doesn't have quite the mystique of, say, Salinger's also-uncollected "Hapworth 16, 1924," it is nearly impossible to find and, moreover, was published in what was a vintage time for Roth, so it does have a certain luster. When asked why he had never included it in any of his books, Roth said it was "too gross"—an impressive distinction coming from a writer who felt the scene in which Alex Portnoy sexually violates a piece of meat meant for the family dinner isn't. Roth went on to explain that the story was an extension of the id-informed, ferociously uncompromising comedy he had created in Portnoy—only that in the later story, rather than blossoming further, the style had grown a little rancid.

Back in the '80s, I found a copy of New American Review #10 in a used bookstore in Austin, and I can confirm that "On the Air" is not very good. To a certain extent this doesn't matter. The story is rare, its author is canonical, the thing demands attention. (The same is true of the elusive Salinger story, which might, by the way, be his worst.)

I hate reviewers who feel they have to synopsize every plot, but in the case of this unobtainable story—the reading of which almost amounts to a "sighting"—I guess I have no choice. So all right, then: Shoe salesman, and part-time manager of "mostly colored" showbiz acts, Milton Lippman fires off several letters to Albert Einstein pitching a quiz show idea in which contestants would try to stump the great genius. Certainly Einstein could do a better job than that goy on the radio, that "schmuck from Fort Wayne," the Answer Man. Lippman gets no response, so he throws his wife and son in the car and drives up to Princeton. "How can you annoy him, one letter after another," his wife asks him, "and then because he doesn't so much as give a single reply—drop in! On Einstein!"

The Lippmans never make it to Princeton. They pull over for ice cream, and inside this tavern, this saloon, the family is confronted with the goyim of their worst dreams: it's all whiskey and sawdust, the heads of dead animals hanging on the walls, Kate Smith singing "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain." The soda jerk, who has an ice-cream-scoop prosthetic hand, asks which kind of cone the Lippmans' son would like, and one of the choices is wool. A woolen ice cream cone. These are rugged people!

I find most of this funny enough; and honestly, the story's opening pages, which at turns resemble both Portnoy and the Nixon satires that Roth collected in Our Gang, aren't bad. Roth satirizes the way Jews fear Christians, the way Christians fear Jews, and, if not necessarily great art, the piece is vigorous and pretty smart. After awhile, though, this highly stylized story goes from broadness to all-out phantasmagoria, as surreal and menacing as Bloom's trip to Nighttown, and Roth loses his grip on it. The problem is not simply that the story is "gross" (at one point Jew and Gentile strip down and weigh their testicles on a kitchen scale, while the finale offers that old standby, a bleeding rectum, and the threat of coprophagy). And it's not just that the rampant postmodern streak takes over (e.g., the story is "interrupted" by a news bulletins and contest announcements—tropes that not only date the story but which aren't funny to begin with). The problem is that the story becomes incoherent and, for all its manic action, quite dull. Roth was in a fury of emancipation in those days, ready to take down every ruler and servant in his path—and more power to him, I say—but "On the Air" is just too raw, as unprocessed as a dream.

I find myself kind of reluctant to leave good old New American Review #10, which I've been carrying around with me all week. There are poems about Kennedy and Sinatra, another about soup. There's a report on a visit paid by Jorge Luis Borges (still alive in 1970) to Columbia University. There's a story by Russell Banks, who was still a nobody at the time. Everything is still very New York-centric. And earnest: this issue includes a "symposium," in which people like Allen Ginsberg, Wilfrid Sheed, Robert Creeley are asked all kinds of serious questions (why do you write? should politics should be kept apart from art? have we entered a "post-modern era"?), and an open letter from editor Ted Solotaroff pleading for subscribers (one year: five bucks). Nearly everyone in the magazine is Jewish or lives in New York, or both; and nearly everyone is dead now. 1970 was a long, long time ago.

Hey everybody, meet my new friend--Decy

2010-08-17T14:39:00.003-04:00

Email I received earlier today...

SUBJECT: Your new friend

Hello Dear,
I am Miss Decy Jopel. I wish to contact you through this medium so that we can get to know each other better for a serious and stable relationship. I appreciate people who can express their emotions in sincere way because i have important things to share with you, hence would appreciated your quick response [link] to enable us to communicate better. Looking forward to your quick response .Decy

Another electric lunch in central Virginia

2010-06-30T13:27:00.008-04:00

Restaurant I was in today had the radio tuned to WWWV Classic Rock. Some highlights:

—This is Sherry with the Electric Lunch on 3WV, and who am I talking to?
—This is Dwayne.
—Hey, Dwayne. What are you doing today?
—I'm just at work.
—Sounds good. So what do you do?
—Eh, it's kind of hard to explain. I work at this shirt place, and I stand at the bottom of this thing and wait for them to drop the shirts down, and then I stack them, like, whether they're extra-large or large or whatever.
—Oh, OK, I get it. So it's like a chute!
—Yeah, kind of.
—Cool. So what do you want to hear for lunch today, Dwayne?
—Could you play some Nirvana?
—Absolutely.
(Cue "Smells Like Teen Spirit")

—This is Sherry with the Electric Lunch on 3WV, and who am I talking to?
—Eric.
—Hey, Eric. What can I do for you today?
—Hey. I was wondering if you could play a little Ted Nugent.
—I think I can do that. What's going on out there, Eric?
—Oh. Well, we're just trying to get rid of this groundhog that's living under this guy's garage.
—Wow! So, when you get the groundhog what are you going to do with him?
—We're gonna get rid of him.
—I know, but what does that mean exactly?
—We're going to dispatch him.
—So, Eric, does "dispatch him" mean that you're going to knock his head in?
—Pretty much, yeah.
—I'm kind of sorry I asked.
(Cue "Free For All")

How Can I Be Sure Of You

2010-06-09T10:54:00.012-04:00

Harry Nilsson just might win the pure-talent sweepstakes, and there's evidence that this would-be Sunday child was even a hard worker (at sixteen he was already writing songs and supporting himself with a bank job). His catalog offers a trove of impeccably crafted works; but, perhaps due to a restlessness that was manifested most famously by a weakness for months-long binges with depressed ex-Beatles, he only achieved a sustained perfection once in his career—on his lone great album, Nilsson Schmilsson. One of the finest records of the '70s, it's tougher than Nilsson's earlier, occasionally somewhat twee, albums, but it has a drive and a sense of fun that his later albums mostly lacked (issued, as they were, during his long and sorrily inevitable decline). I'm not trying to write an all-encompassing Nilsson piece here, so you'll have to go elsewhere to read about his childhood or the Lost Weekend or his cursed London apartment. I'm just going to write about one song.

Nilsson's label, RCA, was not always supportive of him while he was alive, but they've been nicer about him since he's been dead. When they got around to reissuing Schmilsson in 2004, they unforgivably relocated the photograph of the inside of Harry's refrigerator—possibly the best back-cover-art in the history of pop records—to the inner booklet, but otherwise they got it right: the new edition of Schmilsson, in addition to improved sound and some good notes, has valuable bonus material, including an unused track from the Schmilsson sessions that I've become a little obsessed with: "How Can I Be Sure of You." I feel that it's a top-shelf, vintage Nilsson ballad (go ahead, listen to it), and yet, somehow, I'm the only person in the world who knows about it—a situation I kind of enjoy but feel I must correct.

While it has crossed my mind that the song is addressed to Dylan, who in 1971 was in the middle of a creative free-fall that was almost as traumatic for the rock masses as the Beatles' recent breakup—and, after all, it was Bob who broke the news about the sun not being yellow ("it's chicken")—I suspect the lyric isn't so much a veiled message as simply a bit sketchy, which may be why such a gorgeous song failed to make the album. Another reason the song went onto the scrap heap may simply be that it uses a C/Cadd9 intro and Nilsson had already deployed those chords in the opening to "The Moonbeam Song." The intro to his cover of "Without You" uses a similar device (albeit in the key of E rather than C). So "How Can I Be Sure" might have been deemed one song too many with a "major chord plus its add9" introduction for one album.

As the keeper of this excellent Nilsson site pointed out to me, Harry eventually returned to the song, reworking it into "Good for God," which appeared on his 1975 album Duit on Mon Dei. Take a listen and you'll see that the earlier lyric's verses have been turned into a god-is-dead dialogue, and the "always changing" chorus has been completely jettisoned in favor of a rather stock singalong section. The performance is rushed and ragged, and, despite the delirious atmosphere, not particularly fun. What I'm saying here is, he ruined the song. These things happen. It's not the first time I was excited by a great early draft, only to be deflated by the final product.

When I said I'm the only guy in the world who even knows "How Can I Be Sure of You," I was of course exaggerating: Nilsson fans are utter diehards, and I'm sure they all turned this particular stone over long ago. But my impression of its being undiscovered isn't based on just nothing. If you Google it, information on the song is almost nonexistent; and while you'll naturally find its lyric in a few places, there isn't a single set of tabs, chords, what-have-you for the song to be had, anywhere. I have now corrected this.

The transcription below is for guitar, although this is really more of a piano number, but the chords are correct, the pianists out there can easily adapt, and this is the only place on the entire Internet where you can learn this thing. Get it now, before RCA—or Saruman the Gray or Steamboat Willie or whoever owns the rights to Nilsson's songs these days—comes after me with a cease and desist order.

How Can I Be Sure Of You
(H. Nilsson)

Intro: C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9

C-----------G---------------C
The other day a friend of mine said
---------------Fm---------------G#
He said, the sun's not really yellow
--------------G-------------C
He said the sun is really red

C-----------G---------------------C
I said, My friend what do you mean?
----------------Fm-------------G#
You read that in some magazine
--------------------G--------------------C
Next thing you'll say the earth's not green

e -----------------
b ----------------
g ----------------
d ----------0-1--
a -- 0-2-3------
e 3--------------

[notes above]----------E-------E7
How can I be sure of you any more
----------------------------F
In a world that's always changing
--------Bb
Re - arranging
---------F-----------Bb
Always changing, changing

e 3-1-0----
b ------3-1
g ----------
d ----------
a ----------
e ----------
[landing on intro's C chord]

I said, My friend how do you do
And what you're saying isn't true
Next thing you'll say the earth is blue

He said, My friend you're in a dream
And things are never what they seem
No, things are never what they seem

Repeat chorus (How can I be...)

END

Postgame

2010-05-11T14:00:00.011-04:00

I don't know what you think, but the Phoenix Suns' dismissal this week of the San Antonio Spurs from the NBA playoffs—via a crystal-clear four-game sweep—feels pretty writing-on-the-wall to me. And how about that, it's inspiring me to write only my second-ever sports post. (Or my third, if you count this.)

There was a time when teams could contend year in and year out (did the term "rebuilding" even exist pre-1990?). But nowadays, once your key pieces hit the downside of their careers, you know what you're in for. Decline is inevitable; you cannot sustain top-tier success. Where do you go if you want a shot at fairly consistent excellence? College sports, maybe. In that environment, a strong coach and a smart program really can make that big of a difference: any year might be your year. Only I have a hard time rooting for 19-year-olds for more than a couple weeks at a time. Eventually the battles between 30-year-olds might strike me as equally inconsequential, but that day hasn't come yet, fortunately, so pro sports are still safe for me. (This is something worth thinking about. I've crossed that threshold where the hotter movie stars and all the pro athletes are younger than me. Among high-achievement populations, the only ones I have left to catch up with, age-wise, are CEOs and Supreme Court judges.)

Before this spectacular run, we Spurs fans were not long-suffering. Even without a championship, San Antonio had many great teams over the years. They were rarely losers. They were often contenders. Nonetheless the string of championships that Tim Duncan reeled off took us into a universe that we not only had never inhabited but whose most basic properties were foreign to us. And whereas anyone might get on a roll and win it all (consider these guys), the Spurs went out-of-their-minds bonkers, establishing themsleves as the most visionary organization in sports and capturing four titles. Best coach in the game. . .team of the decade. . .greatest power forward of all time. . .the winning-est franchise (since 1997) in all professional sports. . . In other words, the Spurs weren't just good; they were historically, dynastically, dominatingly great. When I watched Manu Ginobili take a game over, I couldn't believe he was on our team: he's the kind of guy who's always on the other team, the guy who always beats us, the guy I wish we had a guy like. And yet, he was ours. And when people talked about Duncan, they didn't just number him among the best half-dozen guys in the league. They compared him to Russell, to Bird, to Magic.

This was a different kind of success, a kind of success we'd never been around. San Antonio, the home of the biggest dynasty in sports? This was the same town Dennis Rodman had (rightfully) left in disgust, because it just didn't possess the "big time" gene. Our hick smallness extended into everything: when I was a kid, SA became the heavy-metal capital of the world because we could never convince anyone bigger than Judas Priest to do a concert here. So when the tide turned, I could barely believe our good fortune; I was giddy with it, I was beside myself. We all were.

But now it is 2010, and we're approaching the end. If that last big free-agent acquisition had worked—if Richard Jefferson, still a youngish player, had relocated his 2006 self—they just might have found another championship or two in them. But he didn't, and they aren't. Duncan's greatness is of such an Odyssean quality that the team he pilots might well be a tough out for true title contenders for another year or two, but we are firmly, irrefutably on our way to a different place than the one we've been in since 1997.

How Spurs fans react, after this rather glorious decade-plus ride, to a life in the middle of the pack, or even at the back of the pack, will be fascinating to see. The town has quit on the Spurs before: during the last playoff drought (second half of the '80s), attendance went down and there was talk of the city losing the team. But I think that a foundation has been set. The fans, not just the team, may have reached the big time.

Extreme makeover

2010-02-09T23:15:00.012-05:00

View from my back deck. First photo was taken in spring'08. Second one taken this past weekend (i.e., since we've officially become a tundra).

Old men on teenage girls (the subject of)

2010-01-07T23:25:00.006-05:00

Just discovered this late-50s TV interview with Vladimir Nabokov during his Lolita-era celebrity. Lionel Trilling somehow keeps a single cigarette going for two full video clips. People really knew how to smoke in those days. Notice how Nabokov at first tries to read from notecards but finally has to give it up and actually engage.

Pretty amusing how all three participants--Nabokov, Trilling, and the interviewer--all get up from the couch at one point without any apparent cue and move, en masse, to another set of chairs at the other end of the set, as if a waiter just told them their table was ready. They don't miss a beat as they relocate.

I succumb

2009-12-11T16:15:00.017-05:00

So here I find myself surrendering to one of the dumbest conventions of the cyber age: sticking a list of favorite songs on my blog. Next up for me, online dating.

And speaking of dating, I date the list phenomenon back to a 1987 issue of Rolling Stone that ranked the 100 best albums of the past 20 years. Such cut and dried canonizing was a new concept then: while there had already been a few "desert-island disk" exercises out there, those had an undeniable parlor-game feel to them and held no real sway. The RS list's rankings, most of which I remember to this day, seared themselves into my young, as yet untouched-by-lists mind. That list obviously made an impression on a few others as well, for the following decade, in which we RS-fed kids grew up and assumed media jobs, saw a complete overdose of lists. Everybody does them now, whether it's sports writers with their "power rankings," VH1's sexiest celebrity pets lists, or even Rolling Stone itself, which time passed by long ago but which continues to crank this shit out.

And now you don't even need to be a magazine or a network to have a list; you can just be a regular old schmuck with a blog. Like hanging an Egon Schiele print on your dorm wall, such lists are one of the most expedient ways to grab some quick cred for yourself—as if recognizing some artifact's quality is the next best thing to having created it. (Artists themselves are not immune to such associations. I recently saw Muse, who came onstage to Prokofiev's admittedly thrilling "Dance of the Knights"; and, while this definitely lent Muse themselves some grandness, the fact is it was written by an odd and gifted Soviet composer who died over half a century ago. What an effect, though. After a few seconds, it didn't even matter who'd written it, because it belonged to Muse.)

So go ahead and make a list: assert your taste, impress/baffle your friends ("The Ting Tings? Where's he come up with this stuff?"), or just remind yourself what you like—because sometimes you forget. Anyway, here, in no particular order, are my favorites from this decade, which has only a few weeks of life left.

"Reckoner," Radiohead

"I Thought," Bryan Ferry with Brian Eno

"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." Sufjan Stevens

"Diamonds of Sierra Leone," Kanye West

"The Rip," Portishead

"A Love You Can't Survive," Richard Thompson
"White Chalk," PJ Harvey

"Phantom Other," Department of Eagles
"Weekend Wars," MGMT

"I Feel Like Dying," Lil Wayne
"The Island," Decemberists

"Saint Simon," The Shins
"Triangle Walks," Fever Ray
"Revelator," Gillian Welch

"The Modern Age," The Strokes
"Agoraphobia," Deerhunter

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Tom Waits
"North American Scum," LCD Soundsystem
"In the Flowers," Animal Collective
"Frontier Psychiatrist," Avalanches
"Gila," Beach House
"Paper Planes," M.I.A.
"I Love My Car," Belle & Sebastian

"Ready, Able," Grizzly Bear
"Cato as a Pun," Of Montreal
"Flume," Bon Iver
"How Kind of You," Paul McCartney

"13 Months in 6 Minutes," The Wrens
"How It Ends," Devotchka

"Things I Miss the Most," Steely Dan
"Analyse," Thom Yorke

"The Crown of Love," Arcade Fire
"Paparazzi," Lady Gaga
"My Rights versus Yours," New Pornographers
"Horse to Water," R.E.M.

"Oxford Comma," Vampire Weekend
"Little One," Beck
"Wolf Like Me," TV on the Radio

"Animal Midnight," Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks

"Xanax and Wine," U2

"Disconnection Notice," Sonic Youth

"The Union Forever," White Stripes
"Crystalised," The xx
"This Tornado Loves You," Neko Case
"Fatal," Pearl Jam
"That's Not My Name," Ting Tings
"Tiger Mountain Peasant Song," Fleet Foxes

"Like Spinning Plates (Live)," Radiohead

My list of the decade's best albums can be found on this blog's younger, crueler sibling.

And let's not forget the man who was pulled over for speeding

2009-11-11T10:22:00.002-05:00

Partial list of people we're being asked to pray for by the radio station I listened to last week while driving through North Carolina (an organ playing solemnly in the background and an extremely long pause between each):

* The daughter who has been stealing from her mother. We pray that the little girl sees this is wrong.

* The woman who is in a predicament. We pray that she finds a solution.

* The woman who wrecked her car. We pray that her husband has the courage to tell his mother what really happened to the car and that there are no serious insurance ramifications.

* The man who broke his foot.

* The mother who wants to see her son find employment. (Read: When's that kid of Ethel's going to get damn job.)

This program followed a painfully old-fashioned radio play (possibly recorded in 1971, if not 1743) dramatizing the story of Samuel and Eli that had so many pedophilic overtones in it I thought the dial had somehow landed on America's Most Wanted. Such was my incredulity over these proceedings, by the time I crossed the state line I whipped out my cell phone to relay my experience to the folks back home. I didn't pay attention to my speed, nearly swerved off the road as I flew past a cop, and was smote by the Lord with a speeding ticket in Emporia, Virginia....where, by the way, they put the D.C. Sniper to death last night.

The Inner Circle

2009-11-09T19:29:00.007-05:00

My mother, who passed away this summer, cast her last vote for Obama and even volunteered for his campaign. Because she sometimes voted Republican, however, she apparently received all sorts of invitations from the GOP to donate to the cause. I know this because I happen to be receiving her mail these days, and I have to endure letters like this one, from Senator John Cornyn:

"Because you have been an active leader and concerned citizen, you are one of only a few Republicans in Virginia who have been recommended by the Republican Senate Leadership to serve as a member of the prestigious Republican Senatorial Inner Circle.

"Congratulations. This is tremendous honor that comes with both extraordinary opportunity and profound responsibility.

"As a testament to this exclusive organization, former Presidents George Bush and George W. Bush, General Norman Schwarzkopf, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, former Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have all personally addressed the Inner Circle in the past."

And so on. Following a page and a half of this sort of preamble stuff, my deceased mother is then invited to two fall events, including a golf outing. To take part in this, she need only cough up a thousand bucks. Membership in the Inner Circle comes with a special certificate and lapel pin, a U.S. Capitol lithograph, consideration for special honors such as the American Spirit Medal, and a copy of The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagen. And, even if my mother feels it is not the right time to join the Inner Circle--and it probably isn't--Senator Cornyn urges her to nonetheless make a contribution of $250 or $500 to the party, because "Nancy Pelosi and Hary Reid have increased their numbers...their power...and their bitter ultra-liberal stranglehold on Washington."

Eight More Reasons the Beatles Broke Up

2009-10-26T22:46:00.004-04:00

* Paul's Rickenbacher ate his Hofner.

* That gay episode between John and George Martin in Barcelona.

* Paul thought Julian Lennon's name was Jude.

* Ringo couldn't shake off that gang of Indian priests after him for his ring with the giant ruby.

* The cops discovered the band's dog-fighting ring in Surry County, Virginia.

* Paul was dead.

* Yoko should should have been named O-yes instead of O-no.

* I was only four years old when they broke up--too young to help!

(First ten reasons are here, but they're not very funny.)

Enjoy it now, while you can still get a seat

2009-10-16T10:40:00.004-04:00

Remember when the Bravo channel was just starting out, and all it did was show a bunch of great foreign films and almost no commercials, but hardly anyone watched it, so you felt all the effort that went into it seemed a little, well, pitiful? As we all know, Bravo began to gather steam, gradually rolling out the makeovers, the chefs, the runways, the decadent housewives, and about 37 minutes of commercials per hour. It became the center of the gay-television universe (which means that your mom watches it).

I like to think I'm doing something similar with this blog. No, my blog is not going to turn out to be gay. Let me explain. At the moment, this blog might seem a bit "early Bravo" pitiful, with all the tidy, often slaved-over posts with zero comments, as well as my having only one follower (who happens to live in my house). Just know that I have told almost no one yet that I am blogging. When I do, we may have ten, twelve readers for this thing.

Anyways, I now have a second blog. Because you can't argue with success.

Faucet's fixed

2009-10-16T09:43:00.002-04:00

Well, looks like the plumber came, because the Water History web site in my links column is now working again. My many readers and I are happy to see it flowing again. The pipes were shut for a long time, and we all got pretty thirsty.

Hey, everybody, meet my new friend--Agnes

2009-10-06T09:16:00.004-04:00

Email from earlier this week...

SUBJECT: I hope my mail will meet you in good conditions.

Hi dear,
How are you today? My name is Agnes Donaldson, i hope that every things is ok with you as it is my great pleasure to contact you in having communications with you, please i wish you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what happened in the future.

I will be very happy if you can write me through my email for easiest communication and to know all about each others, and also give you my pictures and more details about me, here is my email [address] i will be waiting to hear from you as i wish you all the best for your day.

your new friend,
Agnes.

The list all the world has been waiting for

2009-10-05T23:28:00.011-04:00

My top dozen films of the decade:

There Will Be Blood
Mulholland Drive
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Memento
United 93
The Pianist
Brokeback Mountain
Royal Tennenbaums
Un Prophet (France)
Spirited Away (Japan)
Election
The Fellowship of the Ring

Plus these other fine films (please go and see them sometime): Children of Men; Sideways; Traffic; A.I.; Gosford Park; Revanche (Austria); Black Hawk Down; Dark Water; No Country for Old Men; Mystic River; Let The Right One In (Sweden); Master and Commander; The Departed; Talk to Her (Spain); Zodiac; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Romania); Sexy Beast; Y Tu Mama Tambien (Mexico); Cache (France); The Lives of Others (Germany); The Dark Knight; Control; Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico); Anchorman; Gerry; Far from Heaven; Munich; Amores Perros (Mexico).

Not if, but when

2009-10-05T13:33:00.007-04:00

The writing could be more penetrating but, as the sole readily-available account of Stanley Kubrick's never-made film about Napoleon, this turn-of-the-millennium Salon article is about as essential as footnotes get. Hung up by budget concerns and the subject's bad track record at the box office, the film, as we all know, was never made. Kubrick used some its ideas in later works--not only in the obvious Napoleon substitute, Barry Lyndon, but even Eyes Wide Shut, whose strange idea of a good time had its roots in erotic scenes first conceived for Napoleon.

As a young film punk, I actually scored a used copy of the Joseph Gelmis book of interviews with film directors that the article refers to, and it's both fascinating and pitiful to listen to Kubrick talk about when--not if--he is going to make his Napoleon film. His failure to see it through deprives us not only of another (potentially great) Kubrick picture, but also alters the shape of his life's work: there is, for better or worse, no obvious go-for-broke shot at a masterwork, no dream project. Sometimes such all-in bets work out, and sometimes they do not, but they sit at the centers of artists' careers like Kilimanjaro. With 2001 reluctant to be nudged into the centerpiece role, Kubrick's career is just one long, weird, mostly fine, always dogged trajectory. Which may be just as well.

For those of you with a few extra bucks to spend, Taschen has published a $560 limited-edition book on the making--or, in this case, non-making--of the film.

Epigraphs for three unwritten novels

2009-09-27T23:08:00.005-04:00

"[He] neglected invesitgating one of the walls as a result of a deduction to the effect that the door of a room in the upper storey of a house is rarely to be found in the same wall which contains the window."
Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two Birds

SOLYONY (Entering drawing room from the reception room with CHERBUTYKIN): With one hand I can't lift more than fifty pounds, but with both hands it goes up to two hundred pounds. Which leads me to conclude that two men are not twice as strong as one, but three times strong, even stronger. . .
Chekhov, Three Sisters

"If we were all suddenly someone else."
Joyce, Hades chapter of Ulysses

My companion at 90-minute mark: "When is this thing over?"

2009-09-26T00:52:00.005-04:00

Went with the ten-year-old last night to see It Might Get Loud, the Inconvenient Truth guy's documentary about electric guitars. (No, I don't mean Al Gore. He must be, what, sixty years old.) Jimmy Page seems remarkably sane and benevolent for someone who was once strung out on smack, allegedly helped destroy numerous hotel rooms, hand-picked a former wrestler to run his label and rough guys up, and was deep enough into the devil to buy Aleister Crowley's old crib. Watching him play old 45s is kind of like hanging out with your newly-mellow Vietnam-vet uncle.

The Edge is the very serious fellow we suspected. Not many destroyed hotel rooms in this guy's past, I bet. The Christianity he burst onto the scene with has been transformed into a rather impressive, monk-like search for perfect guitar sounds. Can I get an amen. He is a parer-downer: plays an E chord with three strings. When Page launches into the blues, Edge gets the same skeptical-father-in-law look that McCain had when he debated Obama. One of the shortcomings of the film is its failure to address Edge's right-on dismissal of the era of the epic guitar solo, which the discovery of the Buzzcocks, Pistols, Clash, et al, emancipated him from, and which Page, on the other hand, was the godfather of. How the filmmakers failed to cash in on this brewing confrontation is hard to fathom. But no, they keep it friendly.

There are just too damn many stories jockeying for attention in this film. Which brings us to Jack White. Should have a whole movie to himself. He brings the same genius for conceptualization to this film that he brings to the Stripes. Opening shots of him building a guitar from a 2 x 4, a Coke bottle, some twine, and the most bare-boned pick-up imaginable, while a pasture full of Herfords looks on, is the highpoint of the film--and, I feel sure, was White's idea, not the director's. As was, no doubt, the recruitment of the child in the Panama hat to act as a sort of mini-White. Watching the two of them driving dream-like through empty landscapes gives us a glimpse of a never-made, better film.

Dream of the month

2009-09-11T08:23:00.000-04:00

So, a little confused as to what I'm even doing here (as one often is in a dream), I suit up and run onto the practice field. Whole team is out there, running drills, loosening up, all that jazz. Coach looks me over and says, "You ever played football?"

"No," I tell him, "but I've played hot dog."

"Hot dog?! What the hell is that?"

"Well, it's almost the same as football. Same rules, same helmet and pads. But instead of a football you play with a hot dog."

Best reason yet to drink whisky

2009-09-11T04:37:00.002-04:00

If you thought Wes Anderson's Amex spot was impressive, check out this Johnny Walker ad. Joins Touch of Evil and Goodfellas in the single-take hall of fame.

The End of History

2009-09-02T23:32:00.001-04:00

Some of my many, many readers may have noticed that the link to the left called "the history of water" is no longer working. My only explanation is that, before I discovered it, the site actually had no visitors and I single-handedly brought down their server.

Official "making of" documentary of last post

2009-08-29T09:27:00.001-04:00

My little illustrated guide was begun on a whim and ended up taking me about three or four hours. The text is from the "Ithaka" chapter of Ulysses, which is presented in a catechistic, question-and-answer format. It's past midnight, and Leopold Bloom has brought Stephen Dedalus home with him. The long paragraph I used comes after Bloom contemplates the water he draws from the faucet to make tea. Joyce uses it as an opportunity to deliver an elaborate prose poem celebrating water in all its forms (it was Richard Ellmann who called it a "pseudo-hymn to water," a phrase that's stuck with me as strongly as anything in the hymn itself). Joyce, a fellow Aquarian who was born only a day apart from me on the calendar, is a certified hydrophile; like Hollis Mulwray in Chinatown, we both have water on the brain.

In finding links for all these watery terms I had most trouble with "freshets," "rhabdomantic," "bights," and, weirdly enough, "dissolve." Also had trouble with "torrents"--it mostly brought up file-sharing sites, and besides, what the hell is a water torrent anyway? "Maelstrom" is similarly unscientific, imprecise. I had no idea what Joyce meant by "luteofulvous bed" until I broke the adjective down into two parts, both of which pertained to the color yellow, thus the pic of yellow coral. Turns out Joyce is wrong with his "Sundam trench" (should be Sunda), and the Ashtown gate in Dublin has no well (or, as he weirdly calls it, a "hole in the wall"), which just goes to show that if you write a 700-page novel about your old hometown, you're bound to remember something wrong.

Funny that Joyce, although he does include spring tides, does not mention tidal waves. More surprising is his neglecting to address high and low tides, something I'd have guessed he'd go totally apeshit over. (Plumbing and other water-delivery concepts are also absent, but the paragraph I illustrated is preceded by an equally extravagant paragraph in which Joyce traces the delivery of Bloom's water, step by meticulous step, from the Roundwood reservoir [cubic capacity: 2,400 million gallons] to the kitchen faucet.) The original Odyssey kept coming back to the wine-dark sea, and in Joyce's work allusions to water are hardly confined to this chapter. Elsewhere in the book Joyce sends a crumpled-up leaflet for a journey down the Liffey, compares the greenish morning bay to the bowl of bile beside Stephen's mother's deathbed, and, in one of his attempts to rid the world of hyphens, speaks of the "scrotumtightening sea" and "everchanging neverchanging water." His water obsession would culminate in Finnegans Wake with the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter, an account of two washerwomen on the Liffey in which hundreds of names of real rivers are ingeniously worked into the text. Upon completing it, Joyce ran out his door and down to the nearest river (in this case the Seine) to make sure the chapter's cadences truly sounded like water.

In seeking images, I found that "gulley," "marsh," and "fathom," besides being hydro terms, are also the names of various popular heavily-augmented women. (If Google searches are the yardstick, Michelle Marsh currently enjoys far more popularity than all the world's actual marshes combined.) Finally, here's a picture that I liked very much but could not find a place for even in a paragraph as seemingly all-inclusive as Joyce's. And here's another.

My Illustrated Guide to Joyce's Pseudo-Hymn to Water

2009-08-28T11:06:00.000-04:00

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

 Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Back-to-school haircuts aren't what they used to be

2009-08-22T01:06:00.000-04:00

Before and after. Can you tell the difference?

Not safe for work, home...planet

2009-08-21T11:40:00.001-04:00

A French site has posted the Stones' infamous 1972 tour film. The first clip has been removed, but the others still seem to be working. (You can also find it on this fine blog.) This film possesses an Eat The Document-level rarity, so, although I wasn't particularly in the mood for it, I felt I had to ACT NOW and watch the damn thing.

Director Robert Frank was given rather jaw-dropping access and made the most of it. Not surprising that the Stones shelved the film; they would probably have been arrested in half a dozen states if it had ever been screened. That's an exaggeration, of course, but safe to say it probably won't be showing at your friendly neighborhood theater anytime soon. It's boring at times, shocking at others. For all the film's high and low times, Frank is not out to titillate. This is the same guy who shot the spooky b&w photos on the Exile on Main Street cover; he is drawn to the empty, desolate America where anything--even something dull--might happen. He sure found the right cast to show this. Helps if you suffer from the same nostalgia for the era that I do, because above all else this is a fresh hit of 1972, in all its dark decadent glory. Hanging around in your underwear (no matter who drops by), always a groupie there to help you with your hangover, and, my god, all the endless hotel rooms. Did I mention that I was six years old in 1972?

The busy life of one NBA star and high school graduate

2009-08-11T11:52:00.000-04:00

AP story from a few days ago:

NEW YORK -- All-Star forward Rashard Lewis of the Orlando Magic has been suspended without pay for 10 games for testing positive for an elevated testosterone level, the NBA announced Thursday. "First and foremost I take full responsibility for the situation and accept the corresponding penalty," Lewis said in a statement released by the league. "Toward the end of the season I took an over-the-counter supplement which at the time I did not realize included a substance banned by the NBA. I apologize to Magic fans, my teammates and this organization for not doing the research that should come with good judgment."

We now join Rashard Lewis at his Orlando estate. It has been a long day. It began in his library, where he spent all morning drafting a public statement in which he shouldered the entire blame for his substance infraction. "We have lawyers to do that, man," his friend told him—"You don't have to write that thing yourself, Rashard." But no. Rashard insisted.

Having completed that task and returned various volumes of law to their shelves, he took the secret elevator to his laboratory. Only the dopest, phattest, sickest laboratory in any NBA crib. Rashard threw on his lab coat. "Where could I have gone wrong?" he wondered. An afternoon of intense research ensued.

"I have it!" he finally cried. The answer was clear. It was that over-the-counter drug he had taken last spring for his sniffles—damn thing was loaded with the chemical compound dehydroepiandrosterone. Of course. It had been staring him in the face all along. He dialed headquarters at once and related his findings.

He retired upstairs. In the few hours before the whores showed up, he ate three bowls of Fruity Pebbles and watched Spongebob Squarepants.

Steve, how can you be so fucking funny

2009-08-05T14:47:00.000-04:00

Avoiding the promotional copy I must write for a book on Florentine architecture by listening to Steve Martin's trio of late-70s comedy albums. First time I've heard them since I was fully past the pubertal stage, and this is what I have to say: aside from the stadium show that makes up half of the second record (and which is a document of a phenomenon more than an honest-to-god comedy act), they hold up pretty damn well. Two things strike me now as I listen to these things. First, the guy worked his ass off. There are no approximations here; he honed something until it was exactly what he wanted it to be. (What a dogged worker he was. Think it would be funny to add some banjo-playing or juggling to the act? No problem, just spend a few years learning it.)

Second thing that strikes me is how Martin can take neither himself nor the audience seriously. He lampoons the whole concept of an audience with impossible sing-alongs, transparent pandering (check the absurdly technical joke for plumbers), meaningless confessions. His act is as totally free of vanity as it is of earnestness; all he can commit to is his intelligence and discipline.

For your convenience, this guy has put links to all these albums on his blog. No Ukrainian-bride pop-up windows, no exotic file formats to convert, no Portuguese passwords to decipher, just good old-fashioned, illegally-shared recordings we can all download and enjoy.

The Albacore Club

2009-08-02T23:03:00.000-04:00

Inspired by a legal mini-drama that has just made my personal life more interesting, I'm now thinking of those residents of the Mar Vista nursing home--the oblivious front for the land grab that is exposed in the great Chinatown.

Knowing that a stretch of drought-stricken California farmland is going to benefit from a future diversion of water, fat cat Noah Cross buys it all up while the prices are bottoming out. Not wanting anyone to know he is the buyer, he registers the residents of the Mar Vista as the owners. The detective, Gittes, finds it particularly puzzling that one of the landowners, a Jasper Lamar Crabbe, bought his property about a week after he had passed away. Gittes pays a visit to the retirement home, which is sponsored by the Cross's own yacht club, the Albacore Club (earlier in the film, one of Gittes' eavesdropping operatives--in a nice naturalistic touch not entirely metaphor-free--hears this wrongly as "apple core.") Gittes approaches one woman, a resident who is embroidering a flag for the Albacore Club, and asks her if she realizes that she is a very wealthy woman.

The nerve of some people. Here's the script's author, Robert Towne, on how society deals with people like Noah Cross: "Originally, I had Evelyn kill her father [and] you knew that [she] was going to have to stand trial. . .But the larger crime against the whole community went unpunished. In a sense, that was my point, that there are some crimes for which you get punished, and killing her father was a crime for which she could be punished, and so she would be. Then, there are some crimes that our society isn't equipped to punish, so we reward it. You displace a whole community and take their land and there's really nothing that's done except putting their names on a plaque at City Hall." The full interview--and it's a good one--is online.

By the way, author Alexandra Sokoloff has posted an extravagant but worthwhile, three-part analysis of Chinatown on her blog. And here is another one.

Massing gnat maggots

2009-07-31T00:07:00.000-04:00

A colleague discovered on the Press's driveway this morning an organism she at first mistook for a snake. Looking closer, she discovered it to be thousands of tiny worms. This created a small stir in the office almost on the level of when someone brings a box of Spudnuts in.

This being a university department, after all, an answer was arrived at before lunch. These surging worms, it turns out, were actually maggots: gnat larvae. They were engaged in a mass migration, probably due to all the recent rain, and apparently we were pretty lucky to see it (it's kind of rare). Here is a photo of one of these migrations, with the attractive file name "maggot stream."

Burn building

2009-07-30T23:11:00.000-04:00

Just now, on our almost-always-worthless local news, I just came across an intriguing new concept--the burn building. This was new to me, and fairly new to most of you, too, as it does not even have a Wikipedia entry, so there you go. This thing is managed by a fire department or fire academy and is constructed solely to be lit on fire for training in fire fighting and evacuation. Some of these buildings use actual burning wood or hay, while other have gas-jet systems. They have their own particular architecture (many have towers, for example). Some are steel, others stone; some are even portable.

So, a correct use of the term burn building: "The firefighters trained all day in the burn building."

And an incorrect use of the term: "After church, we'll all meet out at the burn building."

Come to think of it

2009-07-29T18:05:00.001-04:00

I'm told by my Dutch wife (knew that marrying her would come in handy for something) that the native name for the painting that lends its name to this blog might be De Tijd die den Nijdt Doodt. But this is not yet confirmed.

The elusiveness of this hardly-obscure work (it hangs in the Royal Palace in The Hague) is a little baffling. Image searches for Jordaens' work turn up nothing, and searches on the title in English turn up only the original reference (from John Rupert Martin's excellent book on the baroque) that introduced me to this painting in the first place. Which brings us to this disturbing question: did Martin make it up?

My first commercial

2009-07-29T16:56:00.001-04:00

If y'all want some damn tasty Texas barbecue delivered right to your door, do yourself a favor and visit the folks at New Braunfels Smokehouse.

Now that that's fixed

2009-07-29T16:49:00.000-04:00

As my readers know, I began this blog (about, oh, six minutes ago) with a complaint about the number of characters allowed by the Google empire in a blog title, forcing me to hang a badly abbreviated sign outside this little shop. I just found that, through the editing option, this limit can be trumped. So we now have the complete, overblown title I always intended.

Well, to begin with...

2009-07-29T16:24:00.001-04:00

Full title of my blog was supposed to be "Time Mowing Down Slander and Vice and Death Strangling Envy," an allegorical painting from 1605 by Jacob Jordaens--and the title of the first draft of a story of mine that, rewritten years later, actually got published in a good magazine. Pretty darn angry at Blogspot or Google or whoever for limiting the word-count on titles and thus castrating my blog right out of the gate.