Deja Vu Lane

from New York Times

It’s a trip down déjà vu lane for the participants as well as the reader, as memories of how NBC nudged Johnny Carson into retirement and ambivalently passed over David Letterman in favor of Leno per­meate nearly every choice made this time around.

Conan O'Brien's usurpation of Jay Leno recalls when Leno himself surpassed David Letterman. So this stuff happens in cycles. Repetition. A second "trip down memory lane."

But as Heraclitus knew, it is impossible to step into the same river twice. What you knew as Memory Lane has been recolonized by some neural city planner. It's now Deja Vu Lane, and you're grasping at recollections instead of reality. TV is a dreamlife!

Mystery-Wrapped Riddles

from Winston Churchill's first wartime radio address

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

It cannot be in accordance with the interest or safety of Russia that Germany should plant upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of South-East Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia. But here these interests of Russia fall into the same channel as the interests of Britain and France. None of these powers can afford to see Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and above all Turkey, put under the heel of the Nazi buccaneers.

Through the fog of confusion and uncertainty we may discern quite plainly the community of interests which exists between England, France and Russia, to prevent the Nazis carrying the flames of war into the Balkans and Turkey. Thus (at some risk of being proved wrong by events) I will proclaim to-night my conviction that the second great fact of the first month of the war is that Hitler and all that Hitler stands for have been and are being warned-off the East and the South-east of Europe.

Churchill, in addition to his tactical genius, was apparently also a pastry chef. He liked his mystery-wrapped enigma-riddles with a schmear of the fog of uncertainty.

The strange thing about this overwrought and oft-misquoted speech is how unnecessary the description of Russia is. It's like he's saying, "I'm not sure what Sergei will do. But the key to what Sergei will do is finding out what he ought to do."

"Russian national interest" is said to underlie Russian wartime maneuvers. Which should be self-evident. Churchill was insisting on anti-Nazi solidarity while trying to keep the Russians at arm's length by suggesting that they are treacherous and irrational.

To me the main obfuscation in Churchill's speech is the conflation of a "national interest" with the machinations of a cabal of totalitarians. Even when the prime minister speaks of a democracy like "France," he is still reducing it to a homogeneous monolith. He doesn't even explain why a Nazi push east would hurt the West. Granted, war made us tend to band together, but on the other hand there were limits to that, as Churchill's treatment of Russia indicates.

So don't let anyone tell you your interests, folks. Least of all Winston Churchill.

What is a Hoe?

from TV's Jeopardy!

Trebek's answer was "this term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker." The expected question was "What is a rake?" but all-time champ Ken Jennings delivered a terrific double-entendre, made all the sweeter no doubt by his commanding lead over the other contestants. His Mormonism and aw-shucks persona contrast with this response.

Jennings' book about his Jeopardy! experience, which delves into the American subculture of trivia, deserves an MMM recommendation.

Bieber's Jewman

from TV

It looks like the Copyright Sheriff got to this video clip. But apparently an interviewer from New Zealand asked heartthrob Justin Bieber about a "German." Bieber got uncomfortable and said that we don't use that term in America. But the lad is not a moron -- he's just sensitive to discriminatory language. He thought his Kiwi interlocutor said "Jewman," which we indeed do not say in American English.

I had this friend from NZ who got a huge laugh every time he referred to "the deck" because it sounded to our North American ears like "the dick." As in, "Would you like to join me for a beer on the dick?"

Immunized Doctors

from Morrison v. MacNamara, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, 1979.

Quite apart from the locality rule's irrelevance to contemporary medical practice, the doctrine is also objectionable because it tends to immunize doctors from communities where medical practice is generally below that which exists in other communities from malpractice liability.

They used to hold doctors not to a national standard, but to a standard deemed reasonable for a practitioner within their community. Of course that meant that in worse-off parts of the country, quacks got away with a lot: they were "immunized" from negligence.

The word choice suggests a cabal of Bruce Banner-like scientists in lab coats, treacherously taking disease-fighting strength from their patients and slowly becoming legally invincible.

Unboyfriendable

from "All My Little Words" by the Magnetic Fields

Now that you've made me want to die
You tell me that you're unboyfriendable
And I could make you pay and pay
But I could never make you stay

Stephin Merritt is wordy, even by the standards of an indie rock songwriter. I doubt that Conor Oberst could pull off a five-syllable neologism, with the emphasis delicately placed upon the third, antepenultimate syllable.

The Magnetic Fields like to play with gender identity even within the confines of a conventional, Cole Porter-esque ditty. The fact that the speaker of this quatrain is gay makes "unboyfriendable" ambiguous. Is "to boyfriend" someone to convert them to a boyfriend, or to become their boyfriend? Could a straight man--an irresponsible party animal, say--be "ungirlfriendable?" Either way, Merritt's yearning will continue unabated.

The Iman Will Keep His Word

from the Associated Press

Florida pastor Terry Jones has been using the media to make Muslims angry. There's still a chance he may throw a Koran-burning party tomorrow, in spite of the efforts of cleric Muhammad Musri get Jones to douse his pyre.

I just heard on NPR Jones confiding to the press that he believes that "the Iman will keep his word." This indicates that although he knows enough about Islam to insult its millions of practitioners, he can't keep straight which word means holy man and which is the supermodel that also goes by Mrs. David Bowie.

Templates of Love

from "Those Shoes" by The Eagles

They’re lookin’ at you, leanin’ on you
Tell you anything you want to hear
They give you templates of love

The Long Run is The Eagles' most fully realized album, lyrically and musically. Henley, Frey et al. seem to have shed the country-tinged fakery of previous efforts and have embraced their own smooth hyper-commercial sound.

But they're not sleek to the point of omitting the obligatory tale of a sexy young woman headed down a perilous path. In "Those Shoes," the act from which she can't return is the slipping on of the sexy shoes. Soon, people in the drinking establishment are flattering her...but to what end?

The above lyrics sheet says that these sleazeballs offer her "tablets of love," which is clever: a small, easily dispensed dose of attention, which may actually be a drug that will get her hooked.

But I swear that it sounds like Don Henley sings "templates of love," which for some reason seems far richer in its ambiguity. The woman only receives the same formulas that everyone gets, instead of honest connection.

When the song later claims that "you can't believe your reviews," it becomes clear that the Eagles are not just officiating some woman's Friday night. They are analyzing the sycophantic and hype-driven corporate music world that they had just conquered.

I Want It To Be HAL

from Esquire

I call it the Internet of One. I want it to be mine, and I don't want to work too hard to get what I need. In a way, I want it to be HAL. I want it to learn about me, to be me, and cull through the massive amount of information that's out there to find exactly what I want.

At first blush it doesn't sound out of the ordinary for the confident new CEO of a technology company to use a classic sci-fi movie to illustrate her philosophy. HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey is a computer with a human psyche, and a marvel of hands-on artificial intelligence.

But Carol Bartz has forgotten the outcome of the movie, based on Arthur C. Clarke's novel. HAL malfunctions and kills the astronauts that he was supposed to be working for. Because HAL was programmed to ensure the success of the mission at any cost, the computer deemed fit to sacrifice Frank and Dave.

In this light, Google and Apple have never sounded better, since Bartz seems to be threatening her users with murder if they stand in the way of Yahoo's progress.

Robber of Dead Men's Dream

from Cabinet

Ern Malley caused a scandal amongst the Australian literati after World War II. Malley was not a poet at all but a hoax perpetrated by Harold Stewart and James McAuley. The two tricksters' intention was to expose an eagerness to find edgy modern poetic genius in what was worthless and arbitrary. They did not intend for Malley to continue to attract readers decades afterward.

In this piece in Cabinet, Christine Wertheim explores the continuing fascination of Malley the episode, Malley the poet, Malley the vehicle of cultural critique. Reprinted verbatim is Malley's poem "Durer: Innsbruck 1495," which was in fact written by McAuley and discarded only to be resurrected and then lavishly praised:

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colorful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at 
 the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters—

Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.

Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.


What McAuley wrote as a fairly straightforward account of a poet admiring a painting became doubly ironic since the "interloper," the "black swan of trespass" and the "inanimate lids" all point to the nonexistence of the author.

When the author closes his eyes, either the painting or the reality is paradoxically revealed to him, and to us.

The "robber of dead men's dream" seems to suggest that reviving a centuries-old work of art could be construed as a crime. When Ern Malley was exposed as a fake, it was a vandalization of high culture. But when John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch revived Malley's reputation, the "robbery" proved a great gift.

No There There

from Slate

That makes the search for a compelling Kagan narrative even more imperative. But there's no there there...Lacking Sonia Sotomayor's up-from-poverty life story and John Roberts' sprinkled-with-fairy-dust charm, Kagan has been halfheartedly sketched by her enemies as a snarling hater of the military, and by her friends as awfully nice.

Gertrude Stein was famous for long torrents of doggerel, but nothing she said or wrote has proven so immortal as how Oakland, California has "no there there" (except for maybe "You are all a lost generation," directed condescendingly at Hemingway and Fitzgerald):

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

This comes from her memoir "Everyone's Autobiography." She was searching for a house she once lived in and couldn't find it. Moreover, she found Oakland unworthy of reminiscence.

To me I think this quip is not just minor disappointment. There is also subtle dig at California's disposable culture. Stein lived in Paris, and the quote gives off a whiff of haughty Old World dismissal.

But now "no there there" has become common enough currency to apply it to any non-entity. Journalists overturn every stone in search of a scandal that would complicate Elena Kagan's judicial appointment, but there's "no there there."

Could anyone use this phrase affirmatively? As in, "I love that new restaurant. Its ambiance is so unique. There's a wonderful there there." The phrase completely avoids an attempt at accurate description.

A "there there" is an essence, a gestalt, or a special luminosity that disappointing things don't have.

Fuel

from Terminal 4 at JFK Airport

A clever monosyllabic bar name should link the ritual of imbibing with some other site-appropriate concept. Think of Clink, at Boston's newly renovated Liberty Hotel. The place used to be a jail!

And there's a bar at Kennedy Airport called Fuel. The stuff you put in a plane, and into yourself, get it?

Coup de Gras

from the San Francisco Chronicle

The coup de gras was Kevin Kouzmanoff's double to left.

In French, "un coup de grâce" is a merciful death blow. It's euthanasia for one's enemies, but in its borrowed American form, the term feels sophisticated and luxurious.

Except that sometimes grace is misspelled "gras," which springtime revellers know means "fat." "Coup de gras" doesn't mean anything, although it calls to mind some kind of suffocation with meat.

In this example from baseball, where Kouzmanoff puts the game out of reach, he might be swinging a bat made of sausage links, or waddling around the bases all bloated from a big lunch.

Whatever Lifts Your Luggage

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The Doughnut-Pyramid

If we think of the misery of war as being at the center of human affairs, the Japanese people have since Hiroshima been fleeing in all directions away from the center. Thus we have developed a "doughnut" view of life, keeping as much distance as possible from war's misery at the center. With the growth of our affluent consumer society, our standard of living has risen dramatically; so, to add a vertical dimension to this perspective, we leave the tragedy of war at the bottom and seek to rise higher and higher above it. With our double effort to get away from, and also above, the misery of war, the simple doughnut has been replaced by a three-dimensional pyramid as the shape of our common lifestyle -- with the [1964 Tokyo] Olympics at the top.

--Toshiro Kanai as told to Kenzaburo Oe

Wow. Not a lot I can add to this one. A doughnut of repression! A pyramid of affluence, with a hole of war at its vacant heart! Simply an outstanding mixed metaphor. And bonus points for mentioning the moral bankruptcy of the Olympics.

Victor Ward

from Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis novels unfurl the vanity and vacuity of overexposed models and heirs in NY/LA. American Psycho got the most notoriety but for my money Glamorama is the funniest, strangest, most haunting Ellis effort.

The book's protagonist is first glimpsed in The Rules of Attraction, where he has a cameo as the object of Lauren's unrequited love. In Glamorama, Victor Johnson is a wisecracking heartthrob whom someone's trying to kill. Except he has chosen a Pynchon-esque nom-de-mode for himself: Victor Ward.

Drowsy on pills and booze and more fashionable than most of us could ever imagine, it's a given that people envy Victor Ward. But like a good Ellis character, he hates himself and is hurtling fast towards oblivion. It's almost like he's institutionalized in a fashionable milieu from which he can't escape: the victor ward.

Two from Caetano

from Caetano Veloso's memoir Tropical Truth

[Rogerio Duprat']s tireless and unconventional intelligence had become legendary. Equally legendary was his passion for a young woman--Anecir, Glauber [Rocha]'s younger sister. It was said that he would stand before her door in the Barris neighborhood for entire nights in mute serenade.

The most envy-inducing part of Caetano's memoir is his descriptions of the unique artistic milieu that surrounded him. Caetano took this group of voluptuous ironists with him from undeveloped Bahia to bustling Rio, then into exile in London.

Someone like Duprat should be part of every rock star's entourage: a suffering intellectual, at once cocky and fragile, capable of a "serenade" without doing any singing or even opening his mouth! And all in a neighborhood named after the guy from The Gong Show.

This group of youths in their barest underwear, not knowing exactly what was happening to them, thrown into a cell like so many loaves of bread in the oven...

Caetano is humble enough to pull off this sudden and terrifying comparison to a concentration camp. He was kidnapped by Brazil's military dictatorship in 1969 and held without trial for two months. The experience recounted in his memoir is essential reading for those interested in totalitarianism, dissent, Brazil, reality-as-just-another-dream, and prison sex.

The chapter covering this nightmare is hilariously named "Narcissus on Vacation."

Magpiety

from Ron Rosenbaum's inquiry into Bob Dylan's Jewishness

Dylan has been aptly described as a “magpie” who snatches images and allusions from any context, as he happens upon them. And what [Dylan scholar Seth] Rogovoy sees as piety may be mag-piety.

A magpie is "a person who collects things, esp. things of little use or value, or a person who chatters idly." Sounds appropriate for a singer-songwriter whose verbosity sometimes outpaces his coherence.

Seth Rogovoy points to Dylan's Old Testament verbiage as proof of the artist's essential Jewishness. But Rosenbaum knows that Dylan borrows as much from the daily newspaper's trifles as he does from the Jewish bible. He's a "song and dance man" rather than "the voice of a generation."

Bob Dylan employs religious idioms with twangy sprezzatura. "Mag-piety" captures the devil-may-care-ness as well as the determined traditionalism of the songwriter's oeuvre.

No Airs in Central California

from Chuck Klosterman's Pavement profile in GQ

There are no airs in Central California.

The famed band's lead singer denies that his music is a reflection of tension between his aristocratic youth and the disenfranchisement that gripped American culture in the '90s. Steven Malkmus grew up middle-class in Stockton, Calif., a place where folks don't "put on airs."

But it's possible that Malkmus said that none of his peers stand to inherit wealth, i.e. that there are no "heirs" where he's from. The meaning would be pretty much the same either way, even though acting pretentious and writing a will are two mutually exclusive concepts.

Indian Summer for Whitey

from John Higham's Strangers in the Land p. 139

...the declining vitality of native culture contributed to a defensive attitude. Brahmin intellectuals such as [Henry Cabot] Lodge, Henry Adams, and Barrett Wendell knew that the historic culture of New England had entered its "Indian Summer..."

This classic history of nativist ideology exposes many of the ironies of fearful race-based nationalism. On the other hand, early assimilationists don't impress much either, since they assumed that the "tempest-tost masses" had no agency of their own. Even the progressives have large blind spots.

Nativism relies on a vague sort of declinism. Hackneyed phrases like "Indian Summer," the last few hot days in September or October, effectively mask the wrongheadedness of racist ideology. They also suggest a dark-skinned assassin ending the reign of the white man.

Higham took the phrase from Census Monograph No. 7, "Immigrants and Their Children," 1920.

Leftovers

from "Folk Song" by James Tate, collected in Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee.

And the vegetable garden, the folk songs, the talk of having a family, were they simply leftovers on a dead person's plate?

This here is the central image in a very short story about a woman whose mother has committed suicide. Darcie can't seem to find comfort in settling down with Johnny, and her pregnancy is a source of anxiety.

The fact that Darcie has not yet died, and the plate is her mother's, makes this the sort of bizarre interpersonal anguish that is one of Tate's principal themes. This collection of stories is just as hallucinatory as the author's poetry, but the book reads smoothly enough that you end up suffering alongside the characters.

Darcie seems to independently appreciate folk music and horticulture, but the narrator rhetorically suggests that these traits are an unwilling inheritance. She is doomed to a bad imitation of her forebears, in just the way that the march of time relegates us to eating unappetizing food that's been in the fridge lord knows how long.