It brings me no pleasure to point out others’ failings. Really, it doesn’t. (Well…maybe a little.)
Either there’s someone named “Wednesday” who owns a four-hour time slot—hence the singular possessive—or there’s a city employee who’s gone rogue, adding apostrophes to random plurals just to mess with me. Or it could be that the parks department is simply unaware of the rules.
Here’s a refresher: Form a plural (two or more) by adding an s, e.g. cookies. Form a possessive by adding an apostrophe and an s, e.g. Aaron’s cookies. That’s pretty much it. I mean, sure, there are exceptions, but if you just remember those two rules, you’ll be golden 90 percent of the time. Or hell, just don’t use apostrophes at all. Seems to be where we’re heading anyway.
I’m not the kind of person who stresses out about his age. Not much I can do about it, I figure. Plus, the benefits of middle age—like, say, giving far fewer f**ks about pretty much everything—far outweigh whatever advantages youth may once have held. (Honestly, I can’t remember what they were.)
There is, however, one alarming development. With every passing year, I get the sneaking suspicion that—to steal a title from Macon Blair’s directorial debut—I don’t feel at home in this world anymore.
It’s not that everyone is terrible (though I admit there’s an avalanche of evidence that indicates otherwise). It’s stories like this.
Had the video spread no more widely than Royce’s followers, a low-stress exchange of ideas might have ensued. Instead his video quickly garnered many thousands of likes and shares. Supporters deemed the term super-straight an ingenious gambit forcing dogmatic social-justice advocates to live by the same standards they enforce on others. Royce also drew a lot of critics. Haters argued that super-straight was a cruel parody of all LGBTQ people. The video quickly disappeared from TikTok, perhaps because many users flagged it as violating the app’s rules. It reappeared about a week later, presumably after human content moderators reviewed it. That’s when it went massively viral. My TikTok feed, usually a respite of surfing highlights, recipe ideas, and Generation X nostalgia, was overrun by super-straight. Fans and critics alike commented on and shared videos about the subject—or posted their own. “Let me break this down: trans women are women,” declared the TikTok creator @tblizzy, who currently has more than 425,000 followers. “So if you’re a heterosexual man and you said you wouldn’t date a trans woman because it’s a preference, that’s just transphobia, period.”
Here’s the thing. This is something that apparently warrants coverage in a national publication, yet (1) I have only the vaguest notion of what they’re talking about, and (2) even if I did understand, I still wouldn’t care. Oh, and (3) the story pretty much proves that everyone is, in fact, terrible. So there’s that.
Question: Is this what all old people go through?
First you realize that pop culture and social change are moving at such a rate that you can no longer keep up with who’s who and what’s what. This alarms you—at first. Then you realize that pop culture and social change really aren’t worth thinking, let alone caring, about. Relieved, you believe this new, improved attitude will bring you peace and enable you to focus on the things that really matter.
Yesterday I saw a dude riding a skateboard—downhill, mind you—while playing a banjo and smoking a cigarette. And he wasn’t half-bad on the banjo, either.
But the truly astonishing thing was that this guy was riding said skateboard on the sidewalk. In Spokane.
For those of you not from around here, there’s really only one word that adequately describes the state of our sidewalks: embarrassing. There’s deteriorating concrete to deal with, upheavals of entire sections, and cracks that could easily swallow a family of four. The sidewalk under the Browne Street railroad viaduct is actually squishy on accounta all the accumulated dirt and grime and human waste. It’s like you’re walking on a sponge, only…grosser.
A few years ago I saw a guy in Portland riding around on a bicycle and playing the bagpipes—while wearing a Darth Vader helmet. He was trying way too hard to be weird, it seemed to me; a performative act meant to burnish Portland’s reputation for offbeat characters and hipper-than-thou millennials rather than an honest expression of his personality.
But Spokane’s skateboard guy? He’s totally legit. The real deal. Probably never occurred to him to not take advantage of his commute by practicing some bluegrass licks.
“The first note known to have sounded on earth,” writes Mathew Lyons, “was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid (a kind of cricket*) rubbing its wings together, a fact deduced by scientists from the remains of one of these insects, preserved in amber. Consider, too, the love life of the mosquito. When a male mosquito wishes to attract a mate, his wings buzz at a frequency of 600Hz, which is the equivalent of D natural. The normal pitch of the female’s wings is 400Hz, or G natural. Just prior to sex, however, male and female harmonise at 1200Hz, which is, as Michael Spitzer notes in his extraordinary new book, The Musical Human, ‘an ecstatic octave above the male’s D’. ‘Everything we sing’, Spitzer adds, ‘is just a footnote to that.’”
So we’ve got an E, a D, and a G. Add a B and we’ve got an Em7 chord—or, depending on your mood and the chord’s root, a G6, a D6/9sus4, or a Bm#5 add(4). I prefer the Em7, though, if only because it “gives quite a jazzy feelto a piece of music.”
But I digress.
The quote comes from Lyons’s review of The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer. It sounds like something I need to get my hands on, if only because the book serves as a “comprehensive refutation” of Steven Pinker’s ridiculous assertion that, evolutionarily speaking, music is nothing more than “auditory cheesecake.” I mean, I dig Pinker, but that’s almost offensive.
*Come on. Do we really need Lyons to explain what a katydid is? Are we that dumb now?
Promises, the new album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Il bello:
If you’re wondering why the subheads are in Italian, it’s because of this, the greatest title sequence of one of the five greatest films* of all time:
*The other four are, in no particular order, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Planet of the Apes (the 1968 original, obviously).
I interviewed Elmore [Leonard] at a Tucson book festival in 2010. Just before going onstage we thumbed through a program listing all the esteemed authors, of which he was easily the best-known and, he told me, the one who had won no prestigious fellowships and few awards. “Most of these writers don’t write for a living,” he said. “They write for tenure. Or for the New York Times. Or to get invited to conferences like this. When you write to make the rent or send your kids to school, you learn how to write without a lot of nonsense.”
“The semi-colon is a funny fellow,” writes Tom Hogkinson in his review of Claire Cock-Starkey’s forthcoming Hyphens and Hashtags: The Stories Behind the Symbols on our Keyboards. “It was invented by a Venetian printer called Aldus Manutius in 1494 for editions of Dante and Erasmus. He adapted it from a bit of musical notation called the punctus versus, and it was Ben Jonson who really made sure it stuck by including it in his 1640 style guide, The English Grammar. In the 18th and 19th centuries writers went mad for it and in 1837 two rival French legal experts fought a duel over its use: one favoured the semi-colon to end a certain passage, the other a colon. The semicolon supporter was wounded in the arm by the apologist for the colon. Today I still find it an impressive piece of punctuation and young people would be well advised to use it in emails in order to impress their bosses.”
I’m not sure what I could possibly add to that, other than that I’m totally behind settling grammar arguments with pistols, and yes, you should definitely use the semicolon more often.
This morning on Twitter I saw an ad for Chipotle’s new “hand-crafted quesadilla.” No, I’m not making this up. It’s “a whole new way to Chipotle,” apparently. It’s so exciting that the “longtime leader and innovator in the food industry” sent out a press release.
So I checked out their online menu: $8.20. For a cheese quesadilla. Sure, the guacamole is included, but still.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but making a quesadilla on your own requires neither culinary training nor special skills. Just some basic kitchen tools and, what…two ingredients? Maybe three or four if you’re feeling extra fancy?
It’s also really cheap—like around two bucks for roughly 400 calories of cheesy goodness. Which means the 300 percent markup at Chipotle must go toward paying for all that hand-crafting. (It certainly isn’t the guacamole. That costs like 20¢ an ounce to make.)
But according to Chris Brandt, Chipotle’s chief marketing officer, this is “one of the most highly anticipated menu items in our brand’s history. The Hand-Crafted Quesadilla brings so many new possibilities to our menu, and fans will love exploring fresh flavor combinations through its sides and salsa options.”
I’m not sure who we should be more worried about: The customers for whom the combination of tortillas and cheese is a world-historic event, or the “longtime innovator” coming up with…a quesadilla.
Journalists call it a lede; normal, less pretentious folk simply call it an opening paragraph. Either way, Caitlin Flanagan is one of the best in the business at shooting “straight as a rifle bullet into the reader’s attention”:
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
The rest of the article, if you want to continue reading—and why on Earth wouldn’t you after that?—is here.
Reminds me of the time I was interviewing Bill Mize, former national finger style guitar champion. “People ask me all the time what they can do to be better players,” he told me. “Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden, Beyond the Missouri Sky. That’s what I tell them. You wanna know how to play guitar? Listen to that record.”
On the one hand, 61 percent of Americans reported undesired weight gain during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Check out the average poundage for millennials!)
On the other hand, Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts: “The chain says it will offer a free original glazed doughnut to anyone who shows their vaccination card for the rest of 2021, starting today. And the offer is not a one-time deal.”
The practice of smoke enemas—something that “early modern Europeans in particular took up with a surprising degree of enthusiasm”—was apparently so widespread by the 1780s that “a charitable foundation, the Royal Humane Society, installed a series of emergency tobacco-enema kits along the banks of the River Thames.”
Because Richard Mead, a prominent physician at the time, had written that the first step in resuscitating a drowning victim “should be to blow up the smoke of tobacco into the intestines.”
Makes sense, I guess. I mean, why not?
All I know is that, after reading “Our Strange Addiction,” I really want a cigar. That’s not weird, is it?
Somebody check the temperature in Hell. Rolling Stone has actually published something worth reading:
For a brief moment in the early Seventies, Judee Sill was one of L.A.’s most promising artists. She was one of the first musicians signed to Asylum Records, a label David Geffen started with Elliot Roberts that became famous for its roster of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and others. Sill was produced by Graham Nash, and her songs were covered by the Turtles, the Hollies, and Cass Elliot. But unlike her labelmates, she never found fame and success. When the decade of the singer-songwriter ended, she ended with it, dying on November 23rd, 1979, of a drug overdose.
But man, when I first heard “The Kiss,” from Sill’s second and final album Heart Food, I was gobsmacked. XTC’s Andy Partridge says it best: “Unfortunately, I can’t listen to ‘The Kiss’ anymore because it just presses the ‘sob your heart out’ button. I’m just destroyed for the next hour. I actually think it’s the most beautiful song ever written by anybody.”
Amen, Brother Andy. Here it is, in one of the few known videos of Sill performing live:
Kudos to Angie Martoccio for a sympathetic, well-written portrayal of an artist who deserves to be known. “More than 40 years after her death,” asks the article’s subhead, “could the world finally be ready to appreciate her?”
In an article about my favorite record label over at City Journal, Ted Gioia closes with an astute observation about the difference between art and entertainment:
Entertainers work to please the audience—after all, that’s the definition of entertainment—but genuine art requires the audience to adapt to it. That’s why the artistic experience is more powerful than mere entertainment. It forces the audience to go places and experience things they may have never anticipated. The artistic experience is broadening and expansive, while entertainment is narrowing and repetitive.
He’s right, of course. And it reminds me of an old joke—not sure where I first heard it—about a certain pop culture phenomenon that happens around this time every year: The GRAMMYs is a music awards show for people who don’t like music.
In the 1930s, the USSR began building hundreds of lighthouses along its 3,500-mile arctic coastline. Eventually, neither keepers nor electricity were needed to run them—thanks to radioisotopic thermoelectric generators: nuclear batteries.
How secure is your password? Here’s a handy chart that will should terrify you. (And here‘s my recommended solution.)
Random question: At what point did we decide that the addition of end to result and user was necessary? Isn’t end result redundant? Isn’t an end user just a, you know…user? So annoying. Not to mention completely unnecessary.
What’s the point of fiction? According to Erik Hoel, the novel is “the only medium where there is no wall between the intrinsic and the extrinsic…a possible world where thoughts and feelings are just as obvious to an observer as chairs and tables.”
