Back with interest

As if it never happened

2011-12-23T09:39:00.001-06:00

Not long ago I watched "Eyes on the Prize," the inspiring, agonizing documentary about the U.S. civil rights movement. I'm a native of Nashville, Tenn., and I paid close attention to the parts about the lunch counter sit-ins that roiled downtown Nashville in 1960.

Those nonviolent protesters are national heroes, but when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn't hear much about them. I certainly don't recall any commemorations befitting the significance of what happened. There is some of that now, including the downtown public library's marvelous civil rights collection, which was dedicated in 2004.

I have wondered whether I missed out on this history simply because I was a kid who wasn't paying attention. But yesterday I came across evidence suggesting that Nashville indeed had a case of amnesia. In a library at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I was looking at old issues of the Nashville Banner newspaper on microfilm. (Yes, that is how I spent my winter vacation.) The lead story of the Jan. 10, 1986, Lifestyles section is about luncheonettes, a bit of old Nashville that was fading away.

"I mourn the decline of the luncheonette," the writer muses, and he singles out the counters at establishments like Harvey's and Woolworths -- where the sit-ins took place, not many years before. It's very curious that the writer makes no mention of the protests, of this crucial Nashville history that's so profoundly entwined with his subject. I've wondered whether the rancor of the sit-ins even hastened the demise of the Nashville luncheonette, but there's no mention of that in this article about the demise of the Nashville luncheonette.

Market conditions

2011-05-15T18:20:00.000-05:00

Unions are so gay

2011-02-22T08:33:00.011-06:00

Anti-gay website: Here is proof that unions are gay.

Commenter #1: Gays are Nazis too.

Commenter #2: WTF, how can you say gays are Nazis.

Anti-gay website boss Julaine Appling: We have reviewed the comment and determined it does not say gays are Nazis. And, free speech.

Commenter #1: Except gays are Nazis.

FIN

2010-10-01T07:10:00.001-05:00

Good word

"Madonna’s message boils down to a complex truce between love and narcissism."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum

2010-05-03T09:06:00.002-05:00

Sentence from a blog: That reporter

Oct. 4, 2004: "Franken referred to me as 'that reporter with the bike helmet.'"

2010-04-18T11:33:00.002-05:00

Sentence from a diary: Wayne's specialty

Aug. 16, 1995: "Dad brought a plate from Wayne and Joyce's cookout, which included burgers, deviled eggs, beans, and Wayne's specialty, grilled squash."

2010-03-26T00:18:00.001-05:00

You want a white-winged horse, or don't you?

I've always loved Judith "Miss Manners" Martin's fussy Washington Post review of the original Clash of the Titans. It's one of my favorite movies from childhood, but Martin's glibly withering pan is appropriate. Here it is, just in time for the remake that comes out April 2.

***

The Washington Post

June 12, 1981, Friday, Final Edition

O, 'TITANS'! O, CLASHES!

BYLINE: By Judith Martin

SECTION: Weekend; Weekend At The Movies; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 451 words

CLASH OF THE TITANS -- At the Flower Twins, Hampton Mall, Riverdale Plaza, Roth's Mount Vernon, Roth's Tysons Corner, Tenley Circle and Towncenter Sterling.

A wonderfully movie-ish spirit pervades "Clash of the Titans," a hilarious outrage in which the special-effects boys take on Greek mythology. Far from being offered as criticism, therefore, the following points are mentioned in a spirit of admiration for the moviemakers' imagination and breadth of vision (compared, for instance, to Homer's) and in belief that the conferences in which these matters were settled must have been even more fun than the movie.

There are no Titans in the film, not even any mentioned. It's about Olympians, heroes and Gorgons. But "Titans" is a good, strong word for a title.

Thetis was a Nereid and her son was Achilles. Obviously, neither of them is dramatic enough, so she has been made an Olympian diety and given Caliban (Hellenicized to Calibos) for a monster-son. Caliban is from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," of course, but who will notice?

Danae and her son Perseus were put out to die by her father because he knew his grandson was destined to kill him, not because he was morally outraged at the illegitimate birth, and Perseus did eventually kill the king with an accidentally mis-tossed discus. However, by having king and kingdom destroyed immediately, by nature on the rampage, you get a great disaster scene.

Pegasus couldn't have helped Perseus on his quest to slay Medusa, because Pegasus was Medusa's posthumous son. It was Bellerophon who rode Pegasus. Look, you want a white-winged horse, or don't you? But you know you don't want a hero with a name like Bellerophon.

Andromeda was chained to a rock, naked except for her jewels, to be attacked by a female sea-monster. This is a little kinky. Leave her clothes on, and make it an aquatic King Kong. That's still sexy, but at least the audience will feel it has the sanction of tradition.

Speaking of cinematic mythology, you got to have an R2-D2, a cute little piece of metal that loves the hero and makes bringing noises. How about Athena gives him a mechanical owl?

Cerberus had three heads, not two. Listen, the visual-effects people are doing a serious job here -- will you keep the pedants out?

And let's not forget the job done in the casting department. A classy old guy for Zeus -- Laurence Olivier. Then Hera's got to be classy, too -- Claire Bloom. Aphrodite? Ursual Andress (snicker, snicker). And Maggie Smith at Thetis. You want good hefty ladies who would look good in marble. Naw, it doesn't matter that they both look like they've been around -- they're immortals, aren't they?

2010-03-09T09:11:00.000-06:00

Good word

"I'm no good, and I can prove it."

-- Jimmy Breslin

2010-02-28T10:47:00.020-06:00

The complete nerd

I recently ran across my friend Laura's post about The Complete New Yorker DVD set and James Wolcott's enthusiastic review of it in New Criterion. Wolcott's thoughtful piece isn't free, but it's the best piece of writing I've seen about the set, and it's worth looking up.

As Wolcott and most reviewers have noted, the collection's search function is bad. I could list many complaints, but perhaps most irksome is that the search window is so small. I have a nice big display, but I can only search using this cramped, cluttered little interface, which is made all the more unattractive by the extensive use of bold typeface, a design no-no since, oh, 1995.

I'm also frustrated by the limited options. Yes, under Department I can click Cartoon and see only cartoons. But what if I want to see everything except cartoons? I mean no disrespect to The New Yorker's signature funnies, but there are a lot of them in any given issue, and for the purposes of my browsing I am, for the most part, not that interested.

I could go on. The good news is that with a little IT elbow grease I've devised much more agreeable ways to poke around this marvelous archive. What makes them possible is the fact that although the images of the magazine pages are encrypted, the database with all the information about the archive is not. It is, for those of you following along at home, a plain old SQLite database, as I learned from this page ages ago when I was trying to figure out how to copy all the DVDs to a hard drive.

I have a bit of experience with databases, so after much fiddling -- which involved making a copy of the 640-megabyte database file, installing what's called an ODBC driver to make the database accessible, and dusting off some programming skills -- I used sturdy old Access 97 to build searching and browsing tools that make me a much happier Complete New Yorker owner.

What I'm most pleased with is this form, which lets me look at the article information in a nice big grid. In the upper left corner are drop-down boxes that let me filter by month and year. I like being able to see article abstracts at much greater length, and to see several abstracts on the screen at once. It's also helpful to see the articles in order by page number. If there's a system to how the built-in search interface orders articles, I don't know what it is.

In this form I am filtering out categories of items and articles I don't want to see, like cartoons and -- sorry, poets -- poems. (I was amused to see that in the database, these categories are collectively identified as "rubrics," which seems a New Yorker-y sort of word.) I somewhat crudely do this filtering by directly editing the underlying database query. The query is in SQL, the computer language widely used for manipulating databases. My New Yorker SQL looks like this (it would probably look better if the New Yorker fact checkers had a crack at it):

I also made this form, which lists movie reviews. I love New Yorker movie reviews, including Pauline Kael's and also those by the likes of Penelope Gilliatt. (Remember her?) But another problem with the Complete New Yorker database is that the data entry was sloppy -- surprising, given The New Yorker's famous fussiness -- so for many movie reviews there are no abstracts. But at least the movie titles have been entered as keywords, so on this screen, for example, I can see that Roger Angell's 1979 piece "High and Low" is about (get it?) Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Jerk. Cool.

Of course, when I use this software to find an article I'm interested in, I still have to clumsily switch over to The Complete New Yorker program and look it up. But what I have done here is, for my purposes at least, a big improvement. I have long been so very happy with The Complete New Yorker, and now I am even happier.

2010-02-27T13:08:00.003-06:00

Good word

"(Public relations is shown in this picture to be an even more dreadful doom than alcoholism, with the added disadvantage that one doesn't practice it simply because one is sick.)"

-- Brendan Gill, on The Days of Wine and Roses

2010-02-25T12:21:00.001-06:00

Good word

"[Robert Penn] Warren, a large man who was an inspired mimic, did an imitation of FDR canoodling with his little dog Fala which made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt no matter how many times I saw it."

-- Susan Cheever

2010-02-19T07:46:00.002-06:00

No comment

Let us mourn a Back With Interest loss. Haloscan, the company whose comments service I used, has dropped out of sight. So eight years' worth of comments are gone. As they say in cyberspace, easy come, easy go.

Here's to eight more years of commenting!

2010-02-09T18:23:00.002-06:00

Good word

"Another day, another drama."

Britney Spears, "Piece of Me"
(Compsers: Klas Frans Ahlund, Christian Karlsson, Pontus Winnberg)

2010-02-08T08:16:00.007-06:00

Consumer report

When we are at the supermarket together, I let Chef Ereck handle the decisions. Meanwhile, I wander around and use my crappy cell phone camera to photograph sights that amuse me. Recent examples:

Any'tizers. You thought chicken fries were best served just before the main course. But you thought wrong. They're best served any'time. Try rousing yourself from sleep some night for a batch of Any'tizers. You won't be sorry.

Pizza-Burger. Who doesn't love pizza? And who doesn't love burgers? And who doesn't love a cheese center? Two things gratify me about this creation: 1) It's a product of St. Francis, Wis. By my count it traveled only 84 food miles! Attention locavores. 2) Reduced fat.

Deeply snarky subhed on the front page of The Sunday Times. "She once said to me that she should never have married into a German family."

2010-02-03T08:27:00.000-06:00

Good word

"In 1993, when Bill Clinton tried to do the right thing by allowing gays and lesbians in the military to be themselves, a predecessor of Mullen’s, Colin Powell, directed the embarrassingly public and retrograde rebellion by the generals against it, leading a conga line of heavy brass over to the White House to tell the president not to exercise his authority as commander in chief and order an end to one of the last vestiges of discrimination in the armed forces. Powell helped shape the gutless compromise that those who protect our country must live by a code of honor even while they’re legally bound to be less than honest."

-- Maureen Dowd

2010-01-27T08:09:00.003-06:00

Everything's gone in life; nothing is left

Existence was tough in the old West, as was romance.

2010-01-25T20:34:00.007-06:00

Like oh my god

It's not dating well, the homophobia of Moon's discourse about her English teacher, "Mr. Bufu," but it makes me laugh anyway.

2010-01-23T17:48:00.007-06:00

Police action

Time to introduce a new series to Back With Interest. It's called Stars on 45. It features cover art from seven-inch vinyl records I collected in, oh, 1988, mostly. To ring in the new year, I give you this obscurity.

2010-01-09T08:17:00.004-06:00

To everything there is a season dept.

Impressed by Mariah Carey's unsmiling performance as a social worker in Precious, I asked Ereck as we left the theater, "NOW can we see Glitter?" (Answer: Yes.)

2010-01-07T16:17:00.002-06:00

The last roundup

Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fitting swansong for Heath Ledger. Read my review.

2010-01-03T09:51:00.001-06:00

Dialog

K: Do you like [Paul Simon's] Graceland?
E: I think I did, but --
K: -- it came to seem hopelessly bourgeois?
E: Yes.
K: That's why I like it.

2010-01-02T11:50:00.002-06:00

Good word

"Tom Carson got [Gina] Arnold's goat when he pointed out, in the wake of 1986's putatively progressive Lifes Rich Pageant, what seems undeniable -- that R.E.M.'s 'tendentious appeals to a cloudily glorious past' and 'wishful confusion of cultural might-have-beens with historical truth' were 'the emotional syntax of Reaganism, pure and simple.' Not that R.E.M. were Reaganites, of course (you knew that, right?) -- just that they didn't escape Reaganism's cultural climate. Fans of both band and pol shared the habit of closing their rapidly moving eyes and wishing stuff would go away, not to mention a disdain for the moral weaklings on the other side of the fence."

-- Robert Christgau

2010-01-01T17:11:00.004-06:00

Pensée

Something struck me last night as I watched Hannah Montana: The Movie, a Walt Disney Pictures picture. There are two scenes involving carnival rides. On the one hand that seems very Disney, since Disney is all about rides. On the other hand, Walt Disney conceived his theme parks as an orderly, controlled alternative to old-style amusement parks and their carnival rides.

2009-12-20T13:28:00.002-06:00

Those are still the days

I gave up, wiped the hard drive and installed Windows XP. Now Office 97 will run like a champ. Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. See you in '14, Bill Gates!

2009-12-19T08:53:00.006-06:00

Those were the days

I have a new computer. The operating system it runs is Windows 7 Home Premium. So far, so good, except that I'm an old Windows XP hand, and I've long used certain applications that don't seem to work so well in 7. For example: Office 97. Yes, my copy of the productivity suite is several versions out of date, these days, but I like it well enough and haven't had a good reason to upgrade. Until now.

Much has changed since '97, I suppose. On the other hand, much has not.

2009-12-07T08:00:00.000-06:00

Ahoy

2009-12-06T12:01:00.001-06:00

Good word

"Happiness is a warmed-over event, happiness is half a million friends in a sandbox with no fighting, happiness is 'Woodstock,' and 'Woodstock' isn't peanuts, for the movie is going to make a mint because of the balm it hands out at a bad time. I must say that I found seeing it a bit like going to a Busby Berkeley film in the Depression and then whistling the tunes while sheltering from a hail of falling suicides."

-- Penelope Gilliat, The New Yorker, April 11, 1970

2009-12-05T13:00:00.005-06:00

Good word

"Whereas most cartoonists, lacking the economic resources of a Nero, a William Randolph Hearst, or a sir George Reresby Sitwell, are unable to amplify their fantasies into anything so ambitious as a Golden House, a San Simeon, or a Renishaw, I reflected that Disney (whose brother and chief business associate, Roy, has a sound understanding of banking principles) has since 1928 managed to arm his assault on the impersonal universe with ever more expensively contrived choreography, color, stereo, and wide-screen gimmickry -- these efforts reaching their climax, I now perceived, in Disneyland, where, in this most elaborate of the Master's animated productions, his live public has been fitted into the cartoon frame to play an aesthetic as well as an economic role."

-- Kevin Wallace, The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 1963

2009-12-03T22:55:00.003-06:00

Pray TV

Frances Fitzgerald's 1990 New Yorker article on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker is a fascinating look at an ugly time. Fitzgerald is pointed in describing the follies of the 1980s televangelists in general and in particular those of the Bakkers, whose theology was thin but whose television appeal was limitless. They convinced viewers to send in money for their ministries, then skimmed off healthy portions of the take for their crazily lavish lifestyle. There's also lots of interesting backstory about the mainstreaming of Pentacostalism, and the Bakkers' not altogether comfortable place in that tradition.

Fitzgerald's tour of the Bakkers' South Carolina theme park, Heritage USA, is hilarious and devastating ("In Billy Graham's reconstructed family house, there was no sign of Billy Graham"). Even better is a passage describing how the Bakkers were so very much a product of their time:

They personified the most characteristic excesses of the 1980s -- the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness -- which in their case was so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence. To this list could be added narcissism, the characteristic disease of the age. The Bakkers, like many people on Wall Street and in Washington, celebrated freedom from the punishing old laws and preached faith in miracles.

2009-12-01T07:30:00.004-06:00

Fair abuse

I'm a bit of a World's Fair buff, partly because for many years I lived near the old fairgrounds of one of the most famous expos, Chicago's Columbian Exposition, which in 1893 blew minds with electricity and dancing girls. But I also was enchanted by the 1982 World's Fair, which took place in my natal city of Knoxville, Tenn. The terra cotta warriors! The giant Rubik's Cube! The jet pack guy! I was 11 that summer.

So I was intrigued to find, in the Complete New Yorker DVDs, a review of the Knoxville fair by E.J. Kahn. Kahn was, in that fussy New Yorker way, unimpressed:

Dinah Shore, a native Tennessean, who served as mistress of ceremonies at the grand opening, drawled, "What you're goin' to see here is goin' to knock the socks off your feet." Well, not quite. This fair is not apt even to loosen your shoelaces.

As near as I can tell, though, Kahn's chief quibble with the Knoxville fair was that it wasn't Expo 67, but what was?

2009-11-29T21:29:00.013-06:00

Fab lore

As an early Christmas gift I received the Beatles' Anthology collections, the three double-CD sets that collect odds and sods from various phases of the Fab Four's recording career. The discs' mid-1990s release coincided with the Anthology video series. A lifelong Beatle nut, I'm a little late to this party, I realize, but oh well.

I like the discs very much, especially the track "Real Love." That's the second of two new Beatles songs based on 1970s John Lennon demos and finished in the 1990s, for the Anthology project, by the others. I'd already heard the other new track, "Free As a Bird," but never "Real Love," somehow. I like it much more than "Free as a Bird" -- an expansive, downright spiritual take on L-O-V-E seems a great way to cap the Beatles' recorded output, since it was a theme they touched on a lot, from "She Loves You" through "All You Need Is Love" and beyond. As Ereck can patiently testify, this weekend I listened to "Real Love," or watched the video on YouTube, a dozen times if I listened once.

I'm fascinated by Anthology's outtakes and demos of familiar tunes. I love hearing songs like "Yesterday" and "Mean Mr. Mustard" in their embryonic state. But hearing the demos mostly makes me want to hear the real thing, so I've also played a lot of regular Beatles recordings this weekend. Whenever I do that -- and I'm finally getting to the point of this post -- I consult Alan Pollack's indispensable "Notes On..." series. Pollack has turned a musicologist's ear to the entirety of the Beatles' recorded output, and although I can't say I understand every technical detail of what he's done, his commentaries are endlessly interesting and funny, and because of them I continue to hear new details I've missed. (There are barely audible finger snaps in "Here, There, and Everywhere"???? Omfg.)

I'll share two examples from my listening and reading today. The first is from Pollack's analysis of "Honey Pie," the nostalgic pastiche on the "White Album." (I found my way to Pollack's writing on "Honey Pie" in the course of exploring his various takes on the Beatles' "sentimental" use of minor iv chords in major keys, if you must know.) I'm delighted with Pollack's turn of phrase in describing "Honey Pie"'s clarinets, which "get their big moment in the spotlight during the second bridge where they produce water sprays in parallel thirds." Cue this YouTube clip to 1:56, and you'll hear exactly what he means; durned if those aren't clarinet water sprays. (For good measure, the clarinets make a similar but abbreviated water spray a few seconds later, at 2:04.)

My second Pollack reading today comes from his take on "Within You Without You," George Harrison's Indian-music-derived tune from "Sgt. Pepper." I giggled (appropriately) when I read his speculation on the meaning of the eerie laughter that ends the track:

So what about the laughing at the end? I'm aware of at least two schools of thought on the matter:

* The xenophobic audience (remember there's an underlying element in the "Sgt. Pepper Concept" that at least indirectly connotes a Victorian/Edwardian-era outlook of supercilious Imperialism) is letting off a little tension of this perceived confrontation with pagan elements.

* The bedazzled composer, in an endearingly sincere nanosecond of acknowledgment of the apparent existential absurdity of the son-of-a-Liverpudlian bus driver espousing such other-wordly beliefs and sentiments, is letting off a bit of his own self-deprecating steam in reaction to the level of true courage expended by him in order to come out of the uneasily-anti-materialistic closet.

But, don't you think it's a combination of the two?

I heartily recommend Pollack's voluminous writings, which teach me a lot about the Beatles, and also a lot about music. They're both worthy subjects.

2009-11-26T21:37:00.009-06:00

Way up high

Some years back I was enthralled by Henry S.F. Cooper's book A House in Space, published in 1976, about life for three successive crews aboard the early-1970s U.S. space station Skylab. Only later did I realize the book first appeared as two installments in Cooper's long, wonderful series of articles about space in The New Yorker, and only later still -- last week, actually -- did I look up the articles in the Complete New Yorker DVD set and revisit this marvelous work of science journalism, the finest piece of writing on space exploration I've read.

I'm fascinated by those cranky astronauts, their impatience with the color of the clothes NASA designed for them, their delight at floating about in the roomy interior of the station, and especially their awe at the planet Earth as they gazed at it through the observation window.

2009-11-25T08:50:00.005-06:00

Beep beep

Ereck and I differ on how best to enter the parking lot at Metcalfe's Sentry. Now that we've lived in the neighborhood a while, and visited the supermarket many times, I've concluded that it's almost always best to enter from the rear entrance at Segoe. Less congestion. But Ereck is loyal to the Midvale entrance. We may never agree. And that's okay.

Spotted in the prepared foods last night at Metcalfe's Sentry: Cranberry fluff.

2009-11-24T08:23:00.012-06:00

Scarce resource

A couple of weeks ago, the hot water ran out.

From our taps came only warm water, and not enough of it. The water heater was on the fritz. It wasn't an utter crisis, because we did have warm water enough to bathe and shave and so forth. But we had to manage our water, and I kept thinking of that "Seinfeld" episode in which everyone is unhappy because the landlord installed low-flow showerheads. Vigorous hot showers are one of civilization's triumphs. For a sad two weeks, we might as well have been washing in a creek.

But as of yesterday, thanks to a landlordly intervention, we have a new water heater, complete with oceans of scalding water. Now excuse me while I take a four-hour shower.

2009-11-20T15:00:00.001-06:00

This thing on

At last night's Band to Band Combat, the music contest put on by my employer Isthmus newspaper, singer Matt Allen of the Madison band the Selfish Gene tested his microphone levels with an old standby: "Check. Check. Check. Check." He may have thrown in a "one two," but I can't be sure.

In my singing career I've tested many a microphone level, and I suspect I'm not the only crooner who's gotten a little tired of check check check. I've experimented with different approaches. There was a period of about a year and a half in the early 2000s when to test levels I would sing entire verses of "Crazy Arms."

But do you know what? Eventually I came back to check check. It's simple, to the point, effective, and the alternatives I've tried are mostly distracting. Testing microphone levels is one area of artistry where originality doesn't do anybody much good.

2009-11-19T13:10:00.004-06:00

Sign of the times

At a downtown Madison office building just now, I watched as a woman held a cup of coffee with one hand, texted on a cell phone with the other, and used both elbows to push her way through a revolving door.

Her progress was slow.

2009-11-18T08:05:00.000-06:00

The haunted desert

2009-11-17T07:30:00.001-06:00

The magic of cakes

2009-11-16T12:22:00.000-06:00

Shocking music

The other night I listened to Haydn's "Symphony No. 94," the "Surprise" symphony, and I remembered music appreciation in elementary school. In about fifth grade we were taken to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center for a daytime concert by the Nashville Symphony, and the program included the "Surprise" symphony, or maybe just the "Surprise" movement from the "Surprise" symphony. Before the performance a kindly speaker warned us that the music contained a surprise. We were primed for it, then, so that when the surprise arrived, we jumped exaggeratedly in our seats, and giggled. But I think that we really actually were pretty surprised.

2009-11-16T07:30:00.001-06:00

License to ill

2009-11-15T07:30:00.001-06:00

The window to your future

2009-11-14T07:30:00.000-06:00

Just say no, just beat it, tear down this wall

2009-11-13T08:30:00.001-06:00

We get letters

2009-11-12T08:30:00.003-06:00

Words to live by

2009-11-11T08:30:00.016-06:00

Feathered friends

I was sad to learn one of my stepmother's parrots died. And surprised -- these animals have human-like lifespans, and this one was only in his 20s.

Living with tropical birds has its ups and downs. I know. My stepmother has kept two, three, four of them since I was a kid. They are very pretty, and their mimicry is striking. But they also can be plain noisy, and I'm a guy who likes his quiet. They also can be temperamental and suspicious. I always wanted at least one of the birds to like me and sit on my shoulder, but they mostly cowered from me and, if I got closer, bit.

The mimicry of parrots can be so funny, though -- funny because pointed mimicry is always funny and uncanny. We laugh at Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin partly because the jokes are good, but especially because the imitation is so keenly observed. So when a bird talks and sings and whistles like a person -- or like a garbled, Auto-Tune imitation of a person -- we can't help but laugh with delight. It's really remarkable, miraculous. I was always struck by the fact that when we had a guest in the house and that person spoke, the birds would get very quiet. They were listening and learning. The birds are always listening.

Indeed, tropical birds will surprise you with their listening. You can teach them phrases, of course, through sheer repetition. But the birds also pick up tics and habits, things you say all the time that you don't even know you're saying, household sounds so familiar you've ceased to consciously hear them.

Tropical birds are like fun house mirrors in that regard. One of the birds picked up my dad's habit of regularly clearing his throat. Another mimicked the low, vaguely wary way Dad answers the phone. All the birds repeated our names over and over, because people in families say each others' names all the time. I think all the birds could whistle the "Andy Griffith Show" theme song because, well, ours was a Griffith-loving family. We watched that show all the time.

What most unnerves me is to visit home now and hear one of my stepmother's birds making a sound from the house we moved out of 20 years ago. We had a phone that rang with a distinctive electronic warble. A bird still mimics it. We had a sliding glass door that probably needed oiling and made an odd little chirp when opened. A bird still mimics it.

I remember that house. So do the birds.

2009-11-10T08:30:00.003-06:00

Oh by golly

Got my first sustained exposure to Christmas music this year thanks to the radio at Pizza di Roma. The selection: Burl Ives, "Holly Jolly Christmas."

I recognized the song immediately from the 12-string-guitar riffing. A fine tune and a good solid start to the Season of Being Overwhelmed. Ives' Red Scare-era entanglement with HUAC was -- well, it was what it was. Merry Christmas.

2009-11-09T08:40:00.009-06:00

Two tribes

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today. I was a college freshman. I didn't contemplate foreign affairs much in those days. What I mostly knew about was Cold War paranoia as filtered through 1980s pop culture -- the TV movie The Day After and songs like Sting's "The Russians" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes," whose video memorably featured Western and Eastern bloc leaders slugging it out in a ring.

So I knew what happened Nov. 9, 1989 was important, but from my teenage perspective it just seemed another in a series of disruptive events that year, including the protests and massacres in Beijing and, well, me finishing high school and starting college. Would you believe the wall's demise even made me think of that October's earthquake-disrupted World Series? Weird stuff happening this fall, I remember thinking. The earliest incidents of the post-Cold War era played out as I made my way through college, and perhaps it was my expanded perspective, college-induced, that made me better grasp the importance of subsequent events like the reunification of Germany, the Croatian and Bosnian wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the importance of the 1989 event was brought home to me a bit in French class the next morning. My teacher was from Romania, and I suspect she experienced the Cold War in ways even more intense than MTV. She tried to get us students talking about the Berlin happenings in French. "C'est très excitant, non?" she asked. But our French was limited, and we didn't have much to add.

2009-11-08T15:56:00.002-06:00

He's a ranter

Bill Maher on "Loveline" with Adam Carolla and Drew Pinsky, March 26, 2001, is fabulous. Questions from callers about drugs, sexual harassment and bullying (Columbine was a recent memory then) are occasions for Maher to go off on one tirade after another. Here as always I enjoy Maher's tirades, and they're more entertaining than the mopey callers.

2009-11-07T16:48:00.002-06:00

Brief encounter

Today I ran on the bike path. By the path a man pushed a mower. He stopped when I passed so I wouldn't be hit by debris. It was a friendly gesture, but he didn't look me in the eye. He was wearing a Q106 T-shirt. That's the country music station. He didn't look like a country fan, but who does?

2009-11-05T07:45:00.001-06:00

Good word

"I must bring to my work, and it must give to me, the legitimate sense of well-being that I enjoy when the weather is good and I have had plenty of sleep."

-- John Cheever

2009-10-02T11:51:00.001-05:00

Good word

"Adults are people who, by and large, read as a means of getting off to sleep."

-- Daniel Pinkwater

2009-09-12T13:12:00.004-05:00

The great obfuscator

I'm fascinated by Watergate. Over the last few years I've read probably 20 or so books about the scandal -- from histories to memoirs of participants (Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean) to Art Buchwald's column collection "I Am Not a Crook".

And would you believe I still don't understand Watergate? I'm reading RN, Richard Nixon's 1978 memoir, and my mind still clouds over when I read sentences like this:

Haldeman asked Colson about Dean's disclosure that it had been Colson's call to Magruder urging action on Hunt's and Liddy's intelligence-gathering plans that may have precipated the Watergate break-in.

I know who all those people are, and I understand what was at stake, but I still have difficulty keeping track of who did what when and what it all means. Is that because Watergate was, in its essence, complex and murky, or is that because the president and his men did a good job of making it complex and murky?

2009-09-03T08:02:00.004-05:00

Yesterday's news

We continue to unpack from our move, and as a result we are tossing a lot of crumpled-up newspaper into the recycling bin. Gazing last night at the full-to-overflowing bin, I flashed back to third grade and our teacher Mrs. Bridgeman's brief seminar on how to throw away paper. Never crumple up paper when you throw it away, she said, because it takes up more room in the wastepaper basket. She demonstrated with crumpled and uncrumpled paper. If only I'd listened.

2009-08-30T17:39:00.008-05:00

Makeup test

I love so many things about our new house, but there have been frustrations. One was that the bookshelf that held all my LPs is too tall for the ceilings. Last week I bought a replacement, but I found it doesn't hold all the records. It was time to do something I should have done a long time ago, donate records I don't want to the thrift store.

I went through the collection -- I have 1,000 or so -- and chose ones to get rid of. They include many oddities I won't miss, things I'm not exactly sure how I came to have, 101 Strings Play Beautiful Hawaiian Melodies, that sort of thing.

But I'm also getting rid of duplicates, and some of them brought me back 30 years. That's when the rockers Kiss were at a commercial peak. I loved them very much. (My mom took me to a Kiss concert in 1979, when I was 8.) My brother loved them too, and in the name of domestic harmony, my parents let us each buy our own Kiss albums, so that if one of us wanted to hear, say, the Rock and Roll Over track "I Want You," the other "Calling Dr. Love," we wouldn't have to fight over the vinyl.

All these years later, I find myself with both sets. I probably don't need any Kiss records, much less duplicates. Still, I dithered over relinquishing these totems of my childhood. But in these troubled times, the mood is right for downsizing. So adieu, duplicate Alive II. Adieu, duplicate Love Gun.

Actually, for some reason I seem to have three Love Guns. Maybe one was the neighbor kid's.

2009-08-22T09:36:00.001-05:00

Good word

"While the polls were closing in the East and Midwest, I treated myself to a long hot soak in the huge bathtub."

-- Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

2009-08-21T13:03:00.000-05:00

Good word

"Protestant Zion would need to be perfect both for sniping at abortion doctors in North Carolina and for marrying lesbians in Vermont."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

2009-08-20T12:14:00.008-05:00

Kablooey

I saw a car accident this morning. I was waiting to turn left onto Midvale Boulevard from eastbound Mineral Point Road. The light turned yellow, and a little Plymouth in front of me started to turn left. A Ford Ranger heading west on Mineral Point ran the light and smacked the Plymouth's corner. The Plymouth spun about 90 degrees. Both cars stopped, and the guy in the truck ran over to the Plymouth. No one looked hurt.

It was sickening to watch. And to hear. The sound of cars smashing into each other makes me queasy. I am more and more nervous about the danger of cars these days, mostly I think because I have a much longer bike commute from my new house and am all the more aware of how vulnerable we all are out there.

I was on my way to an early morning screening at Sundance for my movie reviewing gig. I guess I had movies on the brain, then, because all I could think of were the flaming wrecks of cars in Godard's Week-end. They're devastating symbols of modernity. So was the crash I watched this morning.

2009-06-21T13:12:00.009-05:00

Deep roots

This is the gravestone of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather John Brickey, who came from Virginia to settle in what is now Townsend, Tenn., just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He was born -- it staggers me to contemplate this -- 269 years ago. He is buried in Townsend's Myers Cemetery, near where tourists rent bright yellow and green inner tubes and float lazily down the Little River.

John's son Peter Brickey, my great-great-great-great-great uncle, bought the land that today includes my family's farm, where Ereck and I just spent two weeks' vacation. On the farm I gazed at giant boulders I climbed on when I was a kid; got water in the old spring house (unlike in olden days, this involves plugging in a pump); and dodged mud daubers in the attic of Uncle Peter's original cabin, a picture of which is on the Wikipedia entry for Wears Valley, Tenn.

Sometimes when I'm at the farm the hair stands up on my neck as I contemplate how rich my family heritage is there. Then I check to see what's on the Game Show Network.

2009-05-02T13:09:00.000-05:00

Good word

"Ringo is our representative on the Beatles."

-- Robert Christgau

2009-04-28T13:45:00.002-05:00

Old thinking

"I always thought Specter would consider switching to become an independent to get re-elected, and it's too bad that Michael Steele pushed him into the Democrat Party."

-- Republican strategist Scott Reed

That prominent Republicans like Scott Reed continue to say "Democrat party" says a lot about why prominent Republicans like Arlen Specter flee to the Democrat party.

2009-04-24T13:16:00.001-05:00

Good word

"Our system, left to its own devices, is not designed to let illegal acts be revealed and then ignored."

-- Eugene Robinson

2009-04-17T11:07:00.001-05:00

Good word

"I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition."

-- Mike Nichols

2009-03-30T18:39:00.000-05:00

Good word

"I've always been put off by [Hank] Snow's up-north propriety, more Vernon Dalhart than Jimmie Rodgers."

-- Robert Christgau

2009-03-28T15:04:00.001-05:00

Good word

"He chose metal over Vegas because Vegas wouldn't have him."

-- Robert Christgau on David Lee Roth

2009-03-11T08:36:00.002-05:00

All rise

Watching ABC's "World News" yesterday I was pleased to spot an old-school news convention that I figured had been long abandoned: the courtroom sketch. Yes, there it was, a lovely pastel drawing of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff surrounded by lawyers whose mouths hang open like Roger Daltry's in certain scenes from Tommy. There is an ethereal glow. I never knew courtroom walls were painted fuschia!

2009-03-06T08:28:00.013-06:00

Drug war

I have no problem with people bashing Rush Limbaugh, or any prominent blowhard of whatever political persuasion. But I'm disturbed by one tactic in the current anti-Limbaugh snarkfest: Attacking him for his addiction to pain medication. "Drug-addled," sniffs Demo politico Paul Begala. "A self-described prescription-drug addict who sees America from a private jet," tut-tuts New York Times opiner Timothy Egan. The jabs refer to the episode that began in 2003, when Limbaugh admitted an addiction to painkillers and went to treatment.

First of all, Begala's claim doesn't make sense. Limbaugh apparently was successfully treated for his addiction, so barring evidence of a relapse, he's not drug-addled. Indeed, the fact that he lives in sober clarity ought to be disquieting enough. His ravings would be less disturbing, not more, if they were simply the product of a drug-addled mind.

More importantly, no one volunteers to be an addict, and it's not fair to attack Limbaugh for his addiction. In fact, it sets a disturbing precedent, because Limbaugh did what you're supposed to do. He admitted he had a problem and got help, and he did so before his addiction got someone killed. But now his addiction -- and recovery, because we very likely wouldn't know about his addiction unless he had sought treatment -- is just so much political ammunition.

The message to struggling addicts is chilling: If you admit your problem and seek help, you'll regret it.

2009-02-28T14:30:00.000-06:00

Good word

"I'm fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the '30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War."

-- Tom Lehrer

2009-01-27T08:21:00.004-06:00

Magic kingdom

What if there were a giant, expensively mounted theme park devoted not to, for example, the Disney universe but rather the Doonesbury universe? Instead of friendly and jubilant, the oversized characters walking around would be wryly detached, and/or stoned.

2009-01-24T13:29:00.017-06:00

Might win an Oscar

Last night Ereck and I watched the wondrous 1949 film The Third Man, and I was pleased by Anton Karas' indelible zither score. During the film I had a thought, and afterward I pulled out an old Beatles bootleg I bought in high school, something I hadn't listened to in years. Sure enough, there it was: "The Third Man Theme" as rendered by the Fab Four. It's a brief, very loose performance, presumably from the ragged Let It Be sessions.

But the fact that the Beatles had "The Third Man Theme" in their repertoire speaks to the fascinating range of their listening. They played music informed by so many genres besides their trademark rock 'n' roll: country, Broadway, Indian, musique concrète, circus, Baroque -- and, in this instance, iconic movie music. Great stuff.

The Beatles - The Third Man Theme

2009-01-22T08:57:00.004-06:00

Magic just off the I-5

Yesterday I visited Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. I kept readers up to date on my doings in a series of text messages, which I'm reproducing here.

1/21/09 11:12 AM
Greetings from Disneyland. About to ride Autopia. This is where you can drive a car to the theme park so you can drive a smaller car inside the theme park.

1/21/09 11:31 AM
About to board the monorail. Did you know I love monorails? xxoxo

1/21/09 11:37 AM
The monorail conductor sounds a little like Jeff Spicoli. xoxo

1/21/09 12:01 PM
The problem is getting stuck next to a particularly unpleasant family in a particularly long line. xoxox

1/21/09 12:08 PM
Do I recall correctly that Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler operated the Enchanted Tiki Room? [Ed. note -- it was the Jungle Cruise.]

1/21/09 1:05 PM
Lines are getting longer; tensions are rising. The girl operating the Pinocchio ride just snapped at the woman in front of me. xo

1/21/09 1:12 PM
All safety announcements are in character and bilingual.

1/21/09 1:28 PM
Sleeping Beauty is saved by eros. xoxo

1/21/09 1:54 PM
Disneyland subtly or not so subtly reinforces the nuclear family. The Show White ride operator was weirded out by me riding alone in a car meant for 4 to 6. xo

1/21/09 2:08 PM
The irony is that Snow White is a story about people not in conventional families -- single women, a group of men who live together. xoxo

1/21/09 2:50 PM
Pirates of the Caribbean ride features wench auction.

1/21/09 3:02 PM
Every ride exits into gift shop. xoxo

1/21/09 3:39 PM
Either I'm on acid or I'm in the enchanted tiki room.

1/21/09 3:45 PM
Music in line at jungle cruise: "Moonglow."

1/21/09 4:29 PM
The American vernacular songbook is alive and well at Disneyland. I feel like I've heard five different versions of "Home on the Range."

1/21/09 4:31 PM
Now I'm just waiting for the live barbershop performance to start.

1/21/09 4:47 PM
It was the greatest thing ever, a barbershop flag ceremony. America!

1/21/09 5:40 PM
INDIANA JONES RIDE HOLY FUCKING SHIT

1/21/09 5:41 pm
Surrey with the Fringe on Top

2009-01-16T09:04:00.004-06:00

Luxury

A joke, right? No?

2009-01-15T08:47:00.005-06:00

Good word

"Montalban, who was born in Mexico in 1920, is one of those potentially major actors who never got the roles that might have made them movie stars. He appeared to have everything else -- a marvelous camera face, the physique of a trained dancer, talent, a fine voice (he could even sing), warmth, and great charm. Maybe the charm was a drawback -- it may have made him seem too likable, a lightweight (though it didn't stop Charles Boyer). In Montalban's first English-language picture, M-G-M's Fiesta, in 1947, which featured Esther Williams as a matador, he danced with Cyd Charisse. M-G-M next had him dancing with Charisse and Ann Miller in a Kathryn Grayson-Frank Sinatra film called The Kissing Bandit; it was said that the dancing was added after the executives saw the movie -- they wanted to give the customers something. He kept working -- in pictures such as On an Island with You, with Charisse and Esther Williams, and Neptune's Daughter, and Sombrero, starring Vittorio Gassman, and the low-budget My Man and I, in which he played a sexy handyman and displayed his pectorals, and Latin Lovers, in which he carted Lana Turner around in a tango. He had secondary parts in Sayonara and Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, and in Cheyenne Autumn, and he brought conviction to every role that anyone could bring conviction to, but, after almost twenty years in Hollywood, there he was in 1966 in The Singing Nun, with Debbie Reynolds, and, with Lana again, in Madame X. He seems to have lived a (lucrative) horror story, especially when you think of the TV commercials and his ever-ready smile on 'Fantasy Island.' It may be that Khan in 'Space Seed' was the best big role he had ever got, and that the continuation of the role in The Wrath of Khan is the only validation he has ever had of his power to command the big screen."

-- Pauline Kael

2009-01-14T18:46:00.002-06:00

Good word

"She hated war and liked soldiers -- it was one of her amiable inconsistencies."

E.M. Forster, Howards End

2009-01-08T08:30:00.000-06:00

Good word

"Some kind of equality has been achieved when it is impossible to distinguish heterosexual clichés from homosexual ones."

-- Dave Kehr

2008-12-30T19:22:00.007-06:00

Those items are food

Letters like the one I just read in the Willy Street Co-op's newsletter are the reason to belong to the Co-op. It begins:

Kindly advise your cashiers not to shove food towards customers in an effort to make them bag groceries more quickly. It's a bit indecorous. Those items are food that we've spent our hard-earned money to buy.

While you're at it, cashiers, stop pressing those keys so hard. Hurts my ears. And by the way, I work.

The letter about undue stress brought on by the article about green breastfeeding also is a keeper. Ah, Madison's fashionable east side.

2008-12-29T08:28:00.000-06:00

Imponderable

2008-12-25T09:01:00.003-06:00

The true meaning

Glad tidings of the season to you all.

2008-12-21T12:52:00.031-06:00

Rockin' in the pleasure-dome

I'm fascinated by YouTube clips of the opening and closing credits for The Krofft Supershow, a live-action Saturday morning broadcast I recall fondly. It aired in the 1970s, when I was a child, and was one of a slew of trippy kids' shows produced by the puppeteer team of Sid and Marty Krofft (cf. Land of the Lost, H.R. Pufnstuf).

Critical sequences were taped not on the coasts but in downtown Atlanta, Ga. This is because the show existed partly to promote an indoor theme park: the World of Sid and Marty Krofft, which opened in the Omni hotel complex as part of a big urban-renewal land deal. As a Southern kid I felt great regional pride that Dixie could claim so wondrous a park and TV show. A fine remembrance of the park from Creative Loafing, the Atlanta alt-weekly newspaper, is here.

Like other 1970s downtown revitalization efforts, this one flopped. The park closed six months after it opened in 1976, and the hotel went bankrupt a couple of years later. It is now CNN Center.

In about 1978 my family drove down from Nashville to spend an Easter vacation at the Omni. The theme park was gone, but there was still lots to do: an ice-skating rink, shops, restaurants -- including Burt Reynolds' own Burt's Place. The Omni is where I encountered my first mall-style cookie store, complete with a love-testing machine from the penny arcade.

But all the fun aside, I remember standing in the vast atrium of the hotel -- I was 7 or 8 -- and gazing longingly up to where the theme park had been. When I squinted I was able to imagine puppets, rides, even a performance by the Krofft Supershow's glam-rock hosts, Kaptain Kool and the Kongs. But it was all gone, utterly gone.

In the still below, Kaptain Kool and the Kongs urge viewers to follow them -- on foot, on an Interstate highway -- to central Atlanta.

A crowd forms:

Now a sea of people make their way down the shoulder to the Omni:

A camera captures an aerial view of the Omni complex, which sits like a gleaming science fiction fantasy, a high-tech entertainment wonderland amid the abandoned ruins of the city. (For another view, check out this postcard.) In the foreground is the distinctive roof of the now-demolished Omni coliseum. Wrestling matches were held there:

Inside the Omni, Kaptain Kool, the very picture of kool, sings and plays the guitar. Behind and above him tantalizingly looms the World of Sid and Marty Krofft:

Kool is joined by his backing band the Kongs, among them Superchick, seen here performing elaborate stage moves in front of the theme park. Above her is what was billed as the longest free-standing escalator, which visitors rode up to the park. It is now part of the CNN studio tour:

Adieu, World of Sid and Marty Krofft. You burned brightly on The Krofft Supershow. You were the indoor theme park of my dreams, a glittering beacon of hope for the New South.

2008-12-18T17:55:00.017-06:00

Business barometer

From day to day I assess the state of the economy based on the facial expressions of Betsy Stark, business correspondent for ABC News. She delivers financial reports on "World News With Charles Gibson," and the outlook lately has been bad:

Some relief came on Tuesday, when the Fed cut interest rates and the stock market rallied. It wasn't all good news, of course, but Betsy finally allowed herself a wry, tight smile:

Keep smiling, Betsy Stark! When you're happy, everyone's happy.

2008-12-17T15:22:00.001-06:00

Good word

"Torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin's war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction."

Martin Amis, Koba the Dread

2008-12-15T09:48:00.000-06:00

Good word

"Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism."

-- Michael Lewis, "The End"

2008-12-12T12:08:00.002-06:00

What I'm doing now that it's wintry in Wisconsin

Moisturizing. There's hell to pay if I don't.
Taking the bus to work. Kudos to Madison's winter bikers for their perseverance. I'm no winter biker.
Running at the gym. You won't catch me running in this, though the neighbors do.
Shoveling snow. Sometimes I do this in lieu of running at the gym.
Formulating new rituals for taking out the recycling. I don't want to track snow and mush all over my nice clean (?) floors by hauling the recycling container back and forth. So I have to get creative.
Staying indoors. Fuck it's cold out.

2008-12-10T08:44:00.003-06:00

Revelation

If on the left hand side of an accordion you press the C root button and the A minor chord button, you get a C6 chord. Likewise, if you press the C root button and the E minor chord button, you get C major 7. What this means is that if you throw in the obvious C root-C major chord combination, you can play the exciting C major-C6-C major 7 vamp that begins "Begin the Beguine." All on the left hand! Leaving the right hand free for skeetily bop bop, skeeby da doo.

2008-12-05T12:18:00.001-06:00

Good word

"Womanizer woman womanizer you're a womanizer oh womanizer oh you're a womanizer baby you you you are you you you are womanizer womanizer womanizer."

Britney Spears, "Womanizer"

2008-12-04T08:25:00.004-06:00

Strange basement

In his memoir Witness to Power, Nixon White House counsel John Ehrlichman describes FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover's rumpus room. Stupefying:

After dinner we were led down the narrowest of basement stairs to "the recreation room" for an after-dinner drink. Again, every inch of wall space held some framed memento. In this room the prevailing motif was horse racing. There were pictures of Hoover with winning horses; Hoover with jockeys; Hoover in his box at Del Mar with movie stars, heavyset men, even a child.

Near the door was a small bar. All the walls over and near this counter were decorated with girlie pinups of the old Esquire vintage. Even the lampshade of a small lamp on the bar had naked women pasted on it. The effect of this display was to engender disbelief -- it seemed totally contrived. That impression was reinforced when Hoover deliberately called our attention to his naughty gallery, as if it were something he wanted us to know about J. Edgar Hoover.

Nixon had enjoyed the dinner conversation, but he was not comfortable in this strange basement. After one drink, he exercised the Presidential prerogative; he said good night and we left.

2008-12-03T22:16:00.001-06:00

Like a drug

I feel smarter and funnier after watching Curb Your Enthusiasm reruns. The effect usually lasts a couple of hours. I feel the same way after watching Thin Man movies.

2008-12-03T08:34:00.004-06:00

Attention shoppers

Despite massive crowds, the mood in Chicago's central shopping district Saturday was buoyant. A salesclerk at Macy's in the Loop initiated friendly banter with me about Thanksgiving fun, and elbow-to-elbow throngs on Michigan Avenue chattered brightly in the crisp fall weather. On a street corner I watched a tout in a cumbersome teddy bear costume receive aggressive hug after aggressive hug from boisterous passersby.

Aggressive hugs on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Why not?

In H&M Ereck shopped in the ever-shrinking men's department on the third floor as on the first floor I sat on a bench next to the escalator. There was considerable turnover at the bench, but I noticed that at moments when all the benchwarmers were men, passing women nudged each other comically and said, "Look at the poor guys" -- the gag, of course, being that the exhausted men had to wait as their significant others shopped. Near the bench was a rack of extravagantly awful fake fur coats that prompted many smiles, and some women mockingly tried on the atrocities. But none were bought.

2008-11-29T09:53:00.012-06:00

Man from Midland

Last night I finally saw W., the Oliver Stone biopic of our decider-in-chief. I mostly admired it, especially the painfully studied performance of Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice and the grim determination of Josh Brolin as W. himself. Brolin's portrayal struck me as sympathetic, even though the film serves up plenty of Bush buffoonery.

Mostly W. brought me back to the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Back then I was, amid all the administration's interweaving justifications for war, baffled as to why the president was intent upon invading Iraq. It just didn't make sense to me, and I still am baffled. The movie floats a couple of explanations that at least are plausible -- that W.'s war was an Oedipal blow at his father, who spared Saddam; that the invasion was part of Dick Cheney's plan for total global domination.

But neither explanation seems sufficient. What I am mostly left with from the film is the scenes of Bush underlings bickering in the run-up to war, and these suggest another explanation, one that actually makes more sense to me than any other: That the war simply resulted from bureaucratic ineptitude. I'm thinking of the sort of blunder that can happen in any workplace: A bad idea is allowed to come to fruition only because no one stops it. In Stone's telling the members of Bush's war-making team are, many of them, limp yes-men, too weak to stand up to their boss, terrified of losing their sinecures. I include Secretary of State Colin Powell in that group -- he argues against the war up to a point, then accedes.

In this light the war is like the Edsel, or New Coke -- a poorly conceived product doomed to fail, the result of bureaucratic deliberations in an airless conference room, an embarrassing flop. Plus dead people.

2008-11-25T08:20:00.009-06:00

Better dressed

Lately I can't get enough of What Not to Wear, the TLC makeover show that every week sees its two catty hosts destroying the ego of some wan schlub, then building it up again with structured jackets and pencil skirts.

What appeals to me most are those hosts, Clinton Kelly and Stacey London. For one thing, unlike many TV hosts, they come from the world of print journalism. I respect that. I think I may have heard Stacey London use the word gerund once, or was it Faustian. More than that, the two remind me of the University of Chicago undergraduates I went to college with: Overbearing, rather pretentious, given to lashing out, ultimately well-meaning. Reasonably attractive, also well-spoken. Doubtless deeply troubled, or they wouldn't dispense so much abuse.

Except that what really appeals to me most is Carmindy, the makeup maven. There's really no problem she can't fix with lip gloss.

2008-11-23T09:59:00.012-06:00

Staying alive?

Random thoughts on Saturday Night Fever, which I had somehow never seen till last Friday night:

* Why did I deny myself this pleasure?

* The Brooklyn disco is much shabbier than I expected. I think that based on the promotional imagery, I expected the nightclub to be sleek and chic, almost like something out of science fiction. But it really just looks like the crummy neighborhood bar, except with a flashing plastic floor.

* That said, the film reminded me that in the disco era, when I was a lad of 7 or 8, I thought disco lights were wonderfully sophisticated and evocative, and I wanted nothing more than to decorate my bedroom with them. At the mall I would stand in the darkened, disco-light section of Spencer's and covet every whirling bulb.

* The line-dancing sequence to "Night Fever" made me weep a little. Like the other dance segments -- which are electrifying -- it is a moment of beauty, conviviality, focus in an otherwise depressing milieu of violence, racism, homophobia, desperation, chaos.

* The Bee Gees' "More Than a Woman" is perfect.

* It is chill-inducing to see iconic cinematic imagery in context. Yes, I nearly melted at the sight, finally, of Travolta in the white three-piece suit -- and was surprised to learn that when Travolta dances in the white suit, his face is grotesquely bruised and bandaged as a result of brutish street violence. The bandage doesn't appear in the promotional stills. Seeing Travolta in the suit reminded me of when, ten or so years ago, I went to see The Seven-Year Itch in a morning matinee at Chicago's Music Box Theatre. There I was, enjoying the film, and then suddenly the universe stopped turning as the moment arrived when Marilyn Monroe steps onto the subway grate and her skirt is blown up by the draft. My mouth went dry. I had never known that was in Seven-Year Itch! I think on some level it had never even occurred to me that this image was actually in a film, that it occurs as a moment in an unfolding narrative -- granted, as a searing, heartstopping non sequitur of a moment in an unfolding narrative. My mouth also went dry when I saw the white suit.

* The credit sequence, with Travolta strutting and swinging a paint can to "Stayin' Alive," is sheer joy.

* The disco is called the 2001 Odyssey, and the cinematic reference is striking. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Saturday Night Fever is a film about transformation, evolution, human development, about people striving to move beyond messy, violent origins. The flashing lights of the disco remind me of the psychedelic freakout segment of 2001, and the gracefulness of the dancing reminds me of 2001's elegant "Blue Danube Waltz" sequence, where the spaceships spin lazily around. Of course, one of the messages of 2001 is that even in the Space Age, man remains the animal that murders. I'm not sure the Disco Age is any less grim.

2008-11-19T17:54:00.008-06:00

Logging off

I'm struck -- but not surprised -- that PC Magazine, the venerable technology periodical, is dropping its print product. I'm a longtime reader and subscriber and have noticed that the magazine is not the phonebook-sized thing it was in the 1990s. I also noticed when it dropped back to a monthly, not all that long ago.

I was reminiscing just the other day about PC Magazine in connection with one of my first post-college jobs, at a Chicago software firm 15 years ago. Like the entry-level employees who came before and after me, I had the task of maintaining the company's library of computer periodicals, including PC Magazine. Something tells me they no longer keep that library.

It makes sense that a technology magazine would be among the first to go all-Web. But as an editor with a general-readership periodical, the Madison, Wis. alt-weekly newspaper Isthmus, I gotta say that the change is unsettling.

2008-11-18T15:15:00.004-06:00

Paging Thomas Wolfe

I'm happy to announce that I Grew Up in Donelson, Tenn., a Facebook group I started, is going great guns with 52 members and counting. Yes, I am That Guy, and I started one of Those Groups. It pleases me that from this group Facebook points members to other, possibly related groups, like I Took Dance at Miss Hill's and Still Know the Spaghetti Rag.

I liked growing up in Donelson. So far we have reminisced about Western Auto, Western Sizzlin and Coiffures Hair Design. Oh yes, and the Lad and Dad.

2008-11-17T08:54:00.006-06:00

Critics' choice

As a weekly writer of entertainment blurbs myself, I must say these three- and four- and six-word television blurbs in a 1983 New York Times are paragons of the form. Sheer poetry, and I do mean haiku.

Titans blurbed then. "Not bad. Try it."

2008-11-07T08:25:00.001-06:00

Bad word

"Among new information surfacing from inside the McCain campaign is that Palin didn't know that Africa is a continent rather than a country unto itself."

-- Kathleen Parker

2008-11-03T20:26:00.005-06:00

Match made in Valhalla

Some weeks back I posted about a computer video card I briefly owned. The card -- which is meant to go inside a computer, mind you -- was emblazoned with an illustration of a pretty, busty young woman brandishing some sort of martial arts weapon. What's it all about? I wondered.

I'm still not ready to answer the question, but I do have a response of sorts. I just bought still another video card, and on the outside of the box is an illustration of a pretty, busty young man who appears to be a bit player in Norse mythology, or else a professional wrestler.

So how can we get these kids together?

2008-10-25T09:40:00.003-05:00

He is special

Charlie Rose's 1994 interview with Fred Rogers makes me weep continuously.

2008-10-25T08:56:00.003-05:00

Stiff upper lip

There aren't enough mustaches in presidential politics. For a mustachioed major-party candidate, I think you have to go back to 1948. And what a year that was.

2008-10-25T08:33:00.000-05:00

Good word

"Sarah Palin didn't need the best clothing and stylists money could buy; she needed tutoring and coaching on the issues."

-- Joan Walsh

2008-10-10T11:41:00.000-05:00

Good word

"As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest."

-- Christopher Buckley

2008-09-26T16:43:00.005-05:00

Viva Berrymans

In my new editing gig at Isthmus I don't have much time to write magazine-length features. That's too bad, since that writing is the most satisfying work I do, and also the most challenging.

But I'm delighted that in this week's paper is an article I wrote about Lou and Peter Berryman, the local legends of comic folk music. It is here. I hope you read it. I am proud of it.