Robert B. Zajonc

Excerpts from an obituary in this morning's newspaper.

Robert B. Zajonc, a Stanford University professor who drew on his harrowing boyhood experience as a Polish refugee fleeing the Nazis during World War II to become an expert on human behavior and a founding father in the field of modern social psychology, has died.

[...]

Born in 1923 in Poland, he and his parents fled to Warsaw from their small hometown after the Nazi invasion. In 1939, the large apartment building where they were living was bombed. The 16-year-old boy woke up in a hospital, both legs broken, to learn that he was the only survivor of the blast.

He was later rounded up by Nazi troops and sent to a labor camp, where he made bales of hay. One night in 1942, he and another youth escaped the camp and spent the next three months on the run to France - hiding during the day, walking at night. In France, he was caught by Nazis and sent to a political prison. After connecting with the French resistance, in 1943 he escaped to England where he joined the U.S. Army, working as a translator. He eventually became fluent in seven languages.

When the war ended, he worked as a translator for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Paris. He relocated to New York in 1948 and worked as a statistician for American Express. A year later he was admitted to the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees. There he taught until 1994.

Professor Zajonc helped shape the post-World War II science of social psychology.

[...]

One of Professor Zajonc's early important studies led him to the conclusion that when someone else is present, one's performance is enhanced if engaged in a simple or well-known task. If, on the other hand, the task is difficult or unfamiliar, the presence of another person will adversely impact one's performance.

As part of that research conducted over three years, Professor Zajonc worked with cockroaches from Central America. A cockroach would run a simple maze faster if another cockroach were present. But if the maze was complex, or if the cockroach was alone, it would run the maze slower.

The writer who had played a writer

In the past dozen years we have witnessed in America at least a half dozen well publicized literary and journalistic hoaxes. A common theme runs through all of them: they are made up stories presented as real life reports, of people, often children, who are drug addicts, deviants, criminals. The stories create sensations, cause faux outrage (a seven year old street drug addict?!), their authors achieve fame, make television appearances, collect accolades and cash, before the hoax is discovered.

What interests me at the moment is that the narratives that attract so much attention and glory are not some Horatio Alger fantasies of luck and success, or uplifting sagas of friendship, bravery, of overcoming insurmountable obstacles, no Count of Monte Christo, no James Fenimore Cooper, no Huckleberry Finn even, they are invariably depressing tragedies of fall, failure, life at the bottom of the gutter. When they appear in a newspaper, their purpose is purely propagandistic: we are living in a heartless, evil capitalist society, the author suggests, and why doesn't the government do something about it! And their utterly negative view of human existence is apparently what causes their popularity, drawing readers, the discreetly charming American bourgeoise. Decadence sells among the well fed.

Not surprisingly, the fairly recent hoax of JT LeRoy attracted the avant-garde of decadence and self-congratulatory compassion, the Hollywood crowd, among them Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Carrie Fisher, Lou Reed. The young woman who played the fake author JT LeRoy (a man) is said to have had a love affair with Italian actress Asia Argento. She has now published a book of her own, and an interesting article about it and about her travails caught my attention provoking this post. (As I stay away from inspirational literature, I haven't read the JT LeRoy books, which apparently still sell copies!) Anyway, this is the story of a writer who had played a writer. Link.

Finally, here is a list of a few recent literary hoaxes (journalistic hoaxes of this type are typically hushed, as the newspapers and television want to quickly make us forget anything that undermines their credibility.)

Murakami

Haruki Murakami was in town. I didn't join the worshipping throng, but it turns out that if I had gone to my favourite record stores the previous weekend, I might have run into him in the vinyl jazz section. Oh, well. Yesterday, a brief interview with him was published in the local paper. Excerpts:

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake.

[...]

We are living in the future now, in a kind of science fiction - 9/11 itself was kind of unreal to me, those images of planes diving into the buildings. I felt like I stepped into the wrong world.

I have a feeling that if people like my stories, they are feeling the same way. Many people are feeling trapped. That is what I'm doing in my writing every day. I'm stepping into a dark room. There is a secret door in my mind. I step inside and I don't know what I'm going to find. Darkness. I describe what I see and I return to this world. My job is to just see and to write it down. I'm just an observer of what's happening.

Paper Wednesday

As the week drags on, the newspapers in my neck of the woods get more interesting. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are the best. Sunday, having been the edition in the not too distant past, has become unreadable, to the point where even the comics pages have now been reduced to four, down from six, down from eight pages a decade ago. The book section is now a miserly four pages. The newspapers are dying, well deserved deaths, some say, of leftist dinosaurs. In the meantime, today:

From a review of a book by Benjamin Markovits A Quiet Adjustment, a fictionalized story of the marriage of Lord Byron:

The only-you-can-save-me bad boy act has been catnip to countless generations of young ladies, and certainly Annabella (Miss Annabella Milbanke) responded to this come-on, admiring Byron's talent and intelligence, not to mention his good looks and position in society. She was confident she could prune his flaws and water his genius after they were married. Byron, for his part, was intrigued by this self-possessed young woman who declined to throw herself at him. Her refusal of his first proposal only heightened the poet's fascination for her. He was to pursue her for two more years before she accepted.

And, in the other paper today, from an article about the lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows (not one of my faves):

“My life is like being on acid, all the time,” he says. “It’s an associative disorder, so the world doesn’t look real. And I know that it is real — people tell me it is — but that doesn’t help much.”

The worst period was pre-diagnosis, from 2003 to 2006, when he hid in his apartment, forced himself to stop writing and shuddered when physicians proposed treatments such as electro-shock therapy.

“And the problem is, you begin to get scared all the time, and then you begin to drift away. Because the world’s not real, people aren’t real, so you don’t need to be connected to anyone or anything,” he says.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

A few quotes and a link to an interview:

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

You can only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power-he’s free again.

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power . . . a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

Waiting

Torrential rain, thunder, lightning suddenly descended on us as we drove back cross town in heavy evening traffic. Streams of water pouring down the windshield. A cloud must have broken, someone said. Left behind, she stood alone in a crowd of people, a crowd confused, uncertain if and when flights would take off. There was no one present to answer questions, to assure the stranded travelers. Chaos. Lasting an hour.

It hadn't started very encouraging, anyway. We had arrived early expecting to find the old terminal, where a flight took off once every half hour, deserted. Instead, the line snaked back and forth along the long room three and a half times before reaching a tall young man with a punk haircut guarding the gate and directing travelers to open windows, first three windows, then two, one, then four. By waiting she wouldn't make it to the gate in time, but was told at the information desk to join the queue anyway, and when her flight's check in would be closing, an announcement over the loudspeaker was to tell her to move to the head of the line. Why even wait in line? I asked the young punk rhetorically if the old regime was still running the joint. Two older men laughed. A few frustrating minutes later, the punk was called off somewhere, and I pushed her under the rope toward an open window. She was on her way.

I got off the streetcar at the stock exchange stop, near the museums and the monument of Charles de Gaulle. I walked past the stores Emporio Armani, Marc Cain, Escada, then ING Bank opposite a round Church in the center of the square where a priest was heard singing, as I walked by the fence of the Institute of the Deaf (established in 1817), finally passing The Olive Garden restaurant before turning east by the Sheraton Hotel towards the river. There was a milk bar at this square once, and a dive called the Rocking Horse where local homosexuals gathered, what has happened to them?

His directions were good. "Do you know where the Buffo Theater is?" "No!" , "The Army Museum?","No", "The Sheraton?" "Yes." "The park lies past the Sheraton and the old YMCA building behind it. The concert starts at 7, be there before 7 and we'll chat."

Nearing the park, I passed the elegant villa of the Embassy of Kuwait. The stage was situated outdoors under an open tent, and in front of it several smaller square tents with rows of rattan chairs underneath them. A tree or two blocked some views. On the small hill behind the stage, a young couple rode mountain bikes. In the sound booth three long haired guys dressed in black practiced on accoustic guitars. A group of a dozen older people took the center front row seats. It was early, just after six. He wasn't there. Nearby, in crowded open air caffes, groups of people were sitting at tables, instrument cases beside them. I paced around. Two pairs of tourists approached me, one of the men asking, "Pardon me, are you from this city?" "No, rather not," I answered awkwardly after a moment of hesitation.

At ten to seven, the musicians, dressed like California slobs, started coming one by one toward a closed tent on the side of the stage. Is this their stage getup, I thought? Times are surely changing. He showed up exactly at seven, shook hands with other organizers and the stage hands before coming to greet me. We embraced. "How is living" he asked, answering himself with another question,"Living?"

He can't stay, Michael is driving him to a birthday party. Oh, and Michael was looking forward to meeting her and talking American. Sorry, she had to leave early, Sorbonne's waiting. He and Michael have just returned from a country wedding, where moonshine was served. The country folk still make it! I could smell it on his breath, and he confessed he had to make sure to stay clear of his boss' nose. The moonshine recipe, he had learned, was based on an important historical date - 1410: 1 part yeast, 4 parts sugar, 10 parts water.

Somehow, the orchestra managed to start the concert without much delay, just a few minutes after 7. They were now wearing black suits, white shirts, 16 men and women, all strings, an orchestra without a conductor, originating, he told me, from my mother's home town over the present border.

We briefly got up and walked back to say 'hello' to Michael, and another older fellow, whom I might have known, he said, from the old days. My brother works for Sun in San Jose, the older fellow told me. Back to our seats and he soon said goodbye, wishing me a jolly good time. So far, they're hitting flat notes, I replied. So long until tomorrow to watch a gypsy ensemble. Be here at six!

He and Michael took off, and the orchestra quickly got up to speed after the first shaky piece, playing Astor Piazzola, Strauss, Offenbach, even slumming once into pop modernity with an original arrangement of Yesterday, which the audience, almost all seniors, might have been to old to dig. But who knows, people tend to age early here. I had planned to split soon, and stayed to the end. Jolly good time.

It started raining as I walked back to the streetcar stop on the Avenue. On top of a restored seven story art deco building, where the ground floor Poetry Bistro tempted my thirst, the crowned neon sign of Rolex came on.

Infernal dialogue

I found the following text on one of the Web forums. The author did not identify himself or herself.

One of the better exercises I’ve heard of to increase control over the internal dialogue is based on an interesting theory.

It is that the part of the brain in charge of talking to ourselves is the same part that involves attention. It has finite resources, so if you can fully use them on attention instead of talking, with practice it gives you more and more control over that part of your mind. Sometimes described as like having a “talk to yourself on/off switch”.

By not talking to yourself, you learn how not to talk to yourself.

Thus the exercise is to do several physically undemanding things at the same time, that use a lot of attention.

Ordinary walking uses a great deal of attention, directed to the legs to keep navigating, avoiding obstacles, etc. So it is a great starting point. Added to that, as you walk, holding your hands in some unusual manner, like with two of the fingers crossed. It doesn’t matter what, just as long as your attention is directed to your arms and hands as well as your legs and feet. If you lose attention on your hands, you just change how you are holding them.

The real trick is to unfocus your eyes. And this uses some interesting psychology. Normally, when you look at things, your attention and focus is “point to point”. You look from tiny spot to tiny spot, which uses just minimal attention, seeing most things peripherally. But when you unfocus your eyes, the whole 180 degree tableau in front of you is equal, as far as your attention is concerned.

And this uses a whopping great amount of attention.

Combining all three things: walking, holding your hands funny, and unfocusing your eyes, overwhelms that small part of your brain by taking so much attention, that it just doesn’t have the ability to keep up the internal dialogue.

And you stop talking to yourself, for longer and longer times.

Walking around this way is easy to learn, and with just a mile or two, every day or two, you start to notice increased concentration in about two weeks. And the effects tend to be cumulative, so the more you do it, the better you get.

Imagine being able to sit down and do an entire SAT test without distraction.

I knew one young man who did this exercise, almost because he had to. His internal dialogue was so intense that he continually vacillated back and forth between focused and unfocused. The end result was that he sounded like a California surf bum. He could barely speak a sentence without being distracted. It was both exhaustive and very frustrating for him.

In about a month, I saw him again, and he looked revitalized. He was almost a different person, could speak in whole paragraphs, and loved the ability to actually finish things he had started. I also noted that he was bursting with energy, no longer having to commit so much brain power to internal dialogue and bouncing back and forth.

There are all sorts of ways of accomplishing much the same thing, but he is the reason I remember this exercise so well.

Gretsch G5810

Rock and roll pioneer Bo Diddley, who influenced just about every first and second generation rock and roll musician, has passed away. "Watching Bo Diddley (in 1963) was university for me," said Keith Richards in a recent interview.

Gretsch G5810 is the model of electric guitar designed by Gretsch and Bo Diddley in 1958. It became Bo Diddley's signature instrument.

From a newspaper obituary:

He never lost a feeling of resentment that his signature rhythm couldn't be copyrighted and that record royalties went unpaid. "I am owed, and I never got paid," he told Associated Press in 1999. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."

28 shades

I was walking my dog around the neighbourhood park one early evening, when a little girl at a soccer (futbol) practice there, she must have been eight or nine, noticed us and remarked, "Your dog has a beautiful colour". His fur has more than one colour, the colours and markings of a yellow Labrador Retriever, which he is not being a mutt, that is to say streaks of white, orange, shades of light brown, beige, certainly, not yellow, a couple of dark brown spots on his ears and a pink nose.

The next afternoon, I was walking with a friend from work to the train station, and we were talking. Or rather, I was walking as fast as I could, and he was riding his bicycle as slowly as he could. We were looking at the massive, seven story concrete parking structure that's just opened near the station. Some local politician had called it The Tower of Torture. It was recently painted beige, one of the eight beige colours that had been considered and argued over by committees and people's representatives. The chosen colour is called "Death Valley" and it beat out "Destiny" and, believe it or not "Pearl Harbor". (The Tower of Torture remains an eyesore on the landscape, whether it's beige, or concrete gray.)

My friend, who's red headed, while I'm silver headed, wasn't surprised when I told him I had learned there were eight shades of beige paint. "Oh, yes," he said, "and there are twenty shades of white, I discovered when we were painting our house." He then told me that I wouldn't believe how the brightest white paint was made. "They make it," he said, "by adding a little bit of black to it."

OK, that's something for someone who has studied color theory to figure out. We said goodbye, he headed for his green bus which starts its route at the station, his bicycle to hang on a rack in front, I for the silver train where bicycles, if any, ride inside the passenger cars. The train car I entered was almost empty, this is the end, suburban station, there were three lone women seated, all of them dressed in black (of course), and three bicyclists, sitting near the exit doors with their bikes, all three of them wearing those bright reflective, yellowish green nylon jackets that make them clearly visible on the road. I was, as usual, colour mismatched myself.

The train soon started out for the green hills that about now are starting to turn shades of yellow, beige, brown, the colours, coincidentally, of my dog's fur.

7 doors

To reach my office cubicle from the ground floor gym, I exit through the gym's back door in the weight room, turn right and walk a short corridor behind the daycare center, climb a flight of stairs, step past the round, windowed wall of the corporate data center, then across the second floor bridge between the buildings, past a double row of cubicles into a center hallway, turn right to approach another stairway, and climb one more flight, turn left to walk north then west, passing the printer area, all the way to the outermost corner of the third floor, right next to a small open lounge by the tall windows overlooking the vast company parking lot, a sparsely occupied modern office park beyond it, and a 3,849 foot mountain in the distance. The hike takes no more than a minute or two -- I'll have to clock it with a stopwatch sometime -- probably less time than if I walked across the courtyard to the back entrance of my building and took one of the three elevators up; and the only people I ever and infrequently encounter during this daily walk are an office mailroom worker pushing her cart, or a building maintenance man, or a computer engineer emerging from the data center, which is called a 'lights out center', that is to say, not staffed, and to complete this journey I have to open seven doors, which slam loudly behind me all by themselves, breaking the perfect silence of these colorless, odorless corridors and stairwells straight out of some 1960s Michelangelo Antonioni film.

Communication secrets

"Most guys hate talking and I don’t blame them because talking leads to communication and once you communicate, you’re going to start feeling things, and from there it’s a slippery slope because you’re going to start experiencing life so I try to avoid it."

William H. Macy, actor

Gray scale

I am standing on a suburban train platform waiting for a train to take me to work. There are a few men here, and about a dozen women, most of them waiting for a train going in the direction opposite to mine, toward the great city. I notice that the women are all dressed in black. Head to toe. Black. Some are carrying backpacks or purses. Black. Sunglasses on, it is a bright morning. Black lenses, black frames. I glance at their shoes. Black. Oh, here is a young woman wearing running sneakers. They are gray and white. There is a letter 'W' sown onto the sides of her socks. It probably stands for 'Wilson', a manufacturer of sports equipment, and now apparently apparel as well. Is this 'W' blue? I strain my eyes to see. No, the 'W' is black.

No colors anymore
I want them to turn black

(The Rolling Stones)

Am I becoming colorblind, I think? Is this a black and white film? Am I watching this scene on an old RCA television set. Am I dreaming? I pinch myself. I must be in Sicily, surrounded by grieving widows.

I wanna see it painted, painted black
Black as night, black as coal
I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
Yeah!

The women all wear trousers. Not one is wearing a skirt or dress. Trousers with zippers in front, like in men's pants. (A piece of trivia, in case you didn't know it: the purpose of zippers in the front of men's pants is so that the wearer can easily pull out his (?) member when standing at a modern urinal.)

I recall seeing photographs of the woman led from the raided Eldorado Texas Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Church ranch last week, all wearing long dresses in pastel colors, and how someone told me he was shocked and disturbed to see them, that they looked like they had arrived from the early 2oth century.

Finally, lights of an incoming train become visible in the morning mist, an announcement on the loudspeaker, a tall, light skinned young black woman emerges from the up escalator. She is wearing a short dress. Her stockings and high heel shoes are black. The dress is bright pink.

Whiskey and cigarettes

I think it was John Lee Hooker (and every other bluesman) who sang of whiskey and cigarettes (and wild women, whenever possible), at one time not long ago. That was then, this is now. The National Transportation Safety Board investigating the collision of the Chinese freighter ship Cosco Busan with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Nov. 8, 2007, which spilled 53,000 gallons of fuel into the bay, disclosed a list of prescription drugs that the 60 year old local pilot of the ship was taking or had taken in the past (in addition to his past alcohol addiction.) Why such personal medical information is being disclosed to the public poses another question altogether, but in the meantime, let's set the particulars of this case aside for a minute to ponder an example of another overmedicated American. Here is the disclosed list of one man's medications:

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS AND SUPPLEMENTS:

-Provigil to ward off drowsiness. Known side effects include impaired judgment.

-Valium as a sleep aid. Side effects can include confusion, depression, lightheadedness or fainting spells.

-Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug. Side effects can include confusion, depression, double vision or abnormal eye movements, weakness or tiredness.

-Darvon Compound-65, a narcotic pain reliever. An expert doctor told the NTSB it was inadvisable to take with Lorazepam.

-Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant. Side effects can include confusion and agitation.

-Aciflux for heartburn.

-Lipitor for high cholesterol. Side effects can include tiredness.

-Alphagan, used to treat glaucoma. Side effects can include tiredness or blurred vision.

-Imitrex, a migraine drug. Side effects can include dizziness or faintness, seizures and tiredness.

-Synthroid for thyroid deficiency. Side effects can include difficulty breathing and sleeping.

-Potassium citrate for kidney stones. Side effects can include tiredness.

Whiskey and cigarettes anyone?

Between the buttons

My daughter tells me that she walked out of it. I stayed to the bitter end, playing hooky at a near empty IMAX theater, all the way to the final credits when a bad live performance of the song off the Exile on Main Street album that gave the film its title played, and only in a brief fragment. Here's its refrain, which I have always thought was ironic, the clue (in addition to the vocalist's melodramatic delivery) being "evening sun", because why "evening", and not "morning"?

May the good lord shine a light on you
Make every song your favourite tune
May the good lord shine a light on you
Warm like the evening sun

Martin Scorcese's documentary film of a Rolling Stones concert in a small New York City theater Shine a Light. One newspaper review I read was enthusiastic, another one, so so. I agreed with the latter. Scorcese, in an interview with the local newspaper, admitted that the film contained predominantly close ups. That was the first sign of trouble. There were others. The less than positive review noted that the director had used 18 cameras, and, the reviewer added, 17 of them must have been pointed at Mick Jagger. Indeed, the film consists pretty much of two hours of close ups of Mick Jagger prancing with the agility of a twenty year old.

"How could the Rolling Stones agree to this?" asks my daughter. All four are listed as "Executive Producers", who, one guesses, financed the film and will pocket some if not most of the profits. I admit that after the first half hour of the film I was considering walking out, my senses tired of the constant movement of the cameras, short, MTV editing cuts, and the proximity of the screen, as in an IMAX auditorium, which is taller than deeper, you cannot ever sit far from the screen. But, you can say, I suffered through it, so you don't have to, and in the end prevailed long enough to note Albert Maysles' name in the credits!

Interspersed throughout the film are fragments of old interviews with the current members of the Rolling Stones (ignoring the one who died and the two who quit), like the rest of the film, nothing revelatory. The band is introduced by a former president of the United States, who manages to insinuate himself into everything these days, and, customarily, makes the whole affair seem as if it was all about himself. A former president of Poland is seen briefly in the background, too, and is being introduced to somebody by the other ex-president!

There are guest stars, Jack White, Christina Aguilera, and Buddy Guy, who, despite their best efforts, manage to detract very little from the Rolling Stones, Jack filling the high notes that Mick can no longer hit, Christina, whoever she is, prancing like a Las Vegas go-go girl, and Buddy, whom my daughter liked very much, playing mostly a two note riff on an old Muddy Waters classic Champagne and Reefer and walks away with a Gibson guitar presented to him by Keith Richards.

When Mick puts on a Fender Telecaster and the band launches into a three guitar attack on Some Girls, you can hear why they are so powerful as a band. Later, Keith sings solo You Got the Silver, with Ronnie on slide, another highlight of the show.

But the sidemen, some of who, like saxophonist Bobby Keys have been with the band for decades, or like keyboardist Chuck Lovell are the musical director of the band, are ignored by the cameras, and the band as a whole is ignored by the camera of a director, who, in my opinion doesn't get the idea of what rock and roll is about. Bernard Fowler, the backup vocalist has been with them for at least twenty years, another backup vocalist Blondie Chaplin plays an accoustic guitar in the background, and has previously been a latter day member of the Beach Boys and some other prominent bands.

Last weekend, I was talking with a friend about the first rock and roll films from the 1950s, such as Don't Knock the Rock, with Bill Haley and the Comets, with bad scripts and story lines and lipsynching performers, but cameras focused on entire ensembles, not just on iconic stars. In Shine a Light, Keith launches into Connection, off a 1966 album Between the Buttons, originally sang by Mick, and the clueless director keeps interrupting the song, interspersing it with cuts from some past interviews. Why?

But hey, you have to see the film for the final Orson Wellesian shot, a sort of reverse Citizen Kane opening, helped in large measure by modern computerized effects. Just don't ask what it means!

* * *

New Yorker magazine review.

Ray Davies

Ray Davies, formerly of the Kinks, is on tour in the U.S. promoting his latest solo album. Reading an article about him in a local newspaper, I found this interesting tidbit:

Davies often strolls through his London neighborhood undetected, notebook in hand. “The only formal training I’ve really had is as a painter, and in trying to pick up emotions within pictures,” he explains. “And I guess I’ve learned to do that. … I can look at people, and they say something, then everything goes into slow motion and it registers inside me. I can pick up on that vital element, that significant visual, and paraphrase it. So I’m still in awe of great art, because something inside me still wants to be a painter,” he says. Like his songs, “There’s something about great art, where that moment can only exist as one thing. You can do reproductions, but there is only one original.”

19th century on the ropes

Hollywood actor and writer Ben Stein, perhaps the lone conservative there, takes on Darwinism. This is going to be fun to watch. Read about it here.

The properties of words

Have you ever seen an animal shrug, asks Tom Wolfe in this fascinating interview published in this morning's newspaper.

GFE

I had to look it up. Euphemisms and acronyms, in which the American culture revels so much, have a way to invading one's mind that after a while, seeing one over and over, you start thinking that you are the last person on the continent who doesn't know its meaning. And so you look it up. It's a relatively easy task these days, what with the Internet, the search engines, discussion forums where you can ask, etc.

I figured out myself what 'TS' meant. Trans-sexual, or tranny, or in earlier times hermaphrodite, except that 'hermaphrodite' refers to the time before surgeries made it possible to become a tranny. The acronyms were all in the ads. Two inch by one inch advertisements in the backs of weekly "alternative" tabloids, three such newspapers in this area. The ads support these, often radically left wing rags, that I (and everyone I know) pick up free to read restaurant, film and record reviews, that often are quite good, and not the feverish and loony political rants and crusades. Sitting at a bar and scanning through the pages I cannot avoid seeing the three or four pages of ads for prostitutes and massage parlors, with their fuzzy photos, telephone numbers, business hours (24x7 often enough!), and keywords such as "Incall", "Outcall", "TS" and of course, "GFE", or "NO GFE". What? Hold on a minute.

As I learned this past week, the ads may be entrapments set up by the police who don't have enough to do chasing the rare street crimes, so they ensnare men to solicit prostitution, which is a crime everywhere in this country except in some Nevada counties. Whenever the cops shut down a prostitution ring in the area, one often managed by East Asian immigrants, they keep running the ring's ads in the weekly rags for a spell, for the purpose of entrapping potential customers and making the world a safer place for the rest of us.

Back to GFE. Thinking that I was the last person in the 49 continental states who didn't know what it meant, I researched and found out. Still thinking that everyone knew, following the recent news of the Governor of the State of New York being caught in a prostitution related scandal, I asked around if the $4100 per hour fee he was paying included the GFE. No one I asked knew what I meant.

It's time to explain. 'GFE' stands for 'Girl Friend Experience'. The prostitute will (or will not) provide it. Or she'll provide it for an additional fee. If she provides it, she'll act during the encounter like the client's girlfriend instead of like a cold, contemptuous clerk at the government tax office. Who wouldn't want it?! Everything is for sale, even the GFE!

Vaclav Klaus

"It is not about climatology. It is about freedom," says Vaclav Klaus in an interview published this morning by the Wall Street Journal. Choice quotes:

The world, he argues, is full of risks, and the risk of catastrophic climate change is just one of them.

"if you are afraid that there are risks to something, you may prohibit everything."

King's evil

Coffee was first imported into London from the Middle East in 1657. An advertisement from the time said:

"A very wholesome and physical drink that helpeth indigestion, quickeneth the spirits, maketh the heart lightsom,is good against eye sores, coughs, head-ach gout and the King's evil"

Dude, what is "King's evil"? It is scrofula (WHAT?), a tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands. OK, I think we're safe. In the meantime studies show:

• That older women drinking one to three cups a day are 24% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.
• One study shows that after 13 years of drinking there was a 14% greater risk of hypertension, while another study (from Hahvahd, no less) could not find a shred of evidence that coffee contributed to hypertension.
• Twenty studied proved that coffee helps ward off diabetes-2 disease.
• 400 studies demonstrated that coffee was protective against colon, rectal and liver cancer.

• Finns who drank 10 or more cups daily were 84% less likely to to develop Parkinson's disease.

But I bet they were more likely to engage in Saint Vitus dancing. Well, that's all right, it's perfectly acceptable as it's now called hip hop!

The Remainders

I'm reading By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel (original French title The Gray Souls), which caught my eye yesterday at my favourite bookstore, and I picked it up paying one dollar for it. I go there almost every weekend (to my favourite bookstore), and head straight to the back wall shelf where the unwanted, unpopular books are placed and sold for one to three dollars a tome. This weekend I saw there Jim Crace's Being Dead and Aleksander Hemon's The Question of Bruno, two terrific works of fiction, that everyone ought to read, but apparently no one will, even for the price of one dollar each.

The bookstore, called Half Price Books is part of a chain out of Texas, which specializes in used and deeply discounted books. You'll never know what you'll find there. Here, it is located inside a former five and dime store called Kress' or, earlier, Kresge's, that, as all five and dime stores, went out of business, despite their success (they've been replaced by 'Dollar Stores'.) It is a grand Art Deco building downtown, the underground floor now occupied by a jazz club. I miss Kress' where I bought my detergents, inexpensive socks and brushes, but Half Price Books makes up for it nicely.

The new books they sell are either foreign imports (from Great Britain, mostly) or publishers remainders, that is books that originally cost $25, and now go for under $10. The $25 books that become remainders the fastest are those "written" by politicians, or political commentators, and related to some current events. I put "Written" in quotes, because politicians never write their own books, and not often read them. These books take 6 months to arrive in remainder racks, and remain as uninteresting as when they first came out. Others remainders are often novels by unknown writers, that just didn't manage to make it to the bestseller lists. There are illustrated albums, and history books you never knew existed, plus more sudoku collections, and computer manuals for software products obsoleted after six months.

The best finds are proof copies sent out to reviewers, who then sell them to Half Price Books, often before the official publication date. They are in paperback, and cost just a few dollars, while the hardcover editions are sold elsewhere for $25.

And by the way, some noted writers, including Stephen King, once formed an amateur rock band called, what else, The Remainders, and even went on tour!

78s

Read this article about Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records and the Down Home Music record store.

A few notes. I have been to Down Home Music a number of times, though I think I've only purchased records there on a couple of occasions, and one of those times I returned it for a refund as it was an electronically enhanced stereo version of a monaural LP. The other time I purchased a Lightning Hopkins album on Arhoolie Records label, and I remember it being quite terrible.

Chris Strachwitz is, as the article points out, a folklorist who records and preserves folklore. He hasn't been a commercial record producer, as my Lightning Hopkins LP clearly demonstrated. He caught up with Lightning in Houston some years after the bluesman's commercial successes, when he was a down and out alcoholic (as far as I know.) And so, a commercial blues artist on the way down became a folkloric curiosity, which points to certain paradoxes of Strachwitz' work. (There is no avoiding commercialism of popular music, for one.)

I believe that his (Strachwitz') best work as a record producer showed in the recordings and popularization of Clifton Chenier, the self-styled King of Zydeco. He's also preserved some Mexican folk music from Texas, as well as polka bands from the same state, which at one time had large centers of Polish, Czech and German immigrant communities.

Another reason why I seldom bought records at Down Home Music, is that they've always sold them at the highly inflated suggested list prices, that no other record store in the area would set.

Strachwitz, who, the article points out, has never been interested in making a fortune, and lost money on many releases, hit pay dirt a few years ago when country artist Alan Jackson recorded a song and issued it as a single, to which Strachwitz held rights, Mercury Blues, by an obscure blues artist K.C. Douglas. Then, even better, Ford Motor Company picked up the song (Mercury was in the song a minor and nearly forgotten Ford automobile brand), and used it for television and radio commercials, not for Mercury cars, but for Ford trucks. It was a fine rocking record (Jackson's). Here are some lyrics:

Well if I had money
Tell you what I'd do
I'd go downtown and buy a Mercury or two
Crazy bout a Mercury
Lord I'm crazy 'bout a Mercury
I'm gonna buy me a Mercury
And cruise it up and down the road

Well the girl I love
I stole her from a friend
He got lucky, stole her back again
She heard he had a Mercury
Lord she's crazy bout a Mercury
I'm gonna buy me a Mercury
And cruise it up and down the road

In any event, Chris Strachwitz is an admirable figure, a man, who, as the article emphasizes, has been able to live and work the life he chose without compromises. And in the music business that is extremely rare.

Cycling

One of the rituals of the new religion, and religion it is, don't kid yourself, is of course recycling. Not cycling, as I mistyped, thinking perhaps of the album Tour de France by Kraftwerk, but recycling. Everyone must do it and we all do it. Like people in poor countries where every empty bottle is treasured and reused. Pretty soon we'll be making musical instruments out of empty oil drums and cardboard boxes. The Chinese don't do it but the Americans must. Admit that you don't recycle, and soon you'll find yourself without friends, even penalized at work, perhaps.

The holy ritual is well organized, as befits a mature church. The city provides us with blue plastic boxes, whose manufacture, everyone conveniently forgets, must have contributed to the hellish global warming, boxes in which to place the sorted recyclables, bottles, cans, cardboard, whatever else is considered recyclable, before placing them at the curb on the weekly garbage pickup day. Newspapers are to be bundled and tied and placed on the sidewalk. A truck with the driver sitting on the right hand side arrives, stops at every house on the block, and collects these items, emptying the blue boxes into large bins in the back.

But. Ah, yes. But before the truck gets there on the garbage pickup day, or sometimes the next day, the private individual recyclers arrive at night and collect some or all of your recyclables. These private recyclers are most often the homeless pushing noisy shopping carts overflowing with large plastic garbage bags filled with bottles and crushed cans. Or they are Chinese or in any case Southest Asian grandmothers driving up in four door sedans of recent make and filling their trunks with the recyclables. The private recyclers take their loot to a recycling center and sell it for some small amounts of money. No one seems to mind them, except the city, but the city won't do anything to stop them. (Their collecting activities are illegal, by the way.)

Another recycling activity has been in the news lately. There are many free newspapers and magazines available from street corner boxes. Some are newsweeklies with a hysterically leftist bent, others advertising bulletins,, yet others thick New Age magazines filled with ads from psychics and healers, and announcements of various classes in New Age rituals, faiths and exercises, that are all guaranteed to make you happy at last. (This last topic is a category in itself, and one of these days, I'll bring you a review of New Age press.)

Well, the free newspapers have been disappearing from the boxes around town. The publishers have been alarmed, complaining to the authorities, their advertisers, including the New Age healers, an unhappy lot. What happened? Unlike during the last mayoral election, when the candidate of the Left picked up and threw away a newspaper with an editorial opposing him, and got away with it, this time it was the recyclers. But not the grandmas and not the homeless, for whom stealing free newspapers would not pay, but people with pickup trucks driving around town, emptying the free newspaper boxes and transporting their loot a a recycling center where they'd get, guess how much for it. Gasoline costs about three and a half dollars a gallon these days, how much would these thieves be getting for the newsprint to make it worthwhile? They get all of six American cents per one pound of paper! Now, of course, the recycling centers, like the stolen car chopping garages, deny that they would ever accept tainted merchandise, in this case, newspapers with the current date on the front page. And so it goes with recycling, not cycling.

Quiet car

Matthew Kaminski is an American journalist living in Paris, where he works as the editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page. (Nice gig, isn't it.) During the Holidays, he and his family visited the United States and rode an Amtrak train. He describes his experience in the article which appeared in the Stateside Journal on Friday January 11, 2008, which I link at the end of this post. Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

In this young century, we've launched a crusade, instituting all sorts of rules, in the name of making everyone happy and healthy. [...] With the proliferation of fiats intended to make people act more considerately toward one another, we've seen public civility steadily erode. [...] never before have so many different kinds of people felt empowered to demand special privileges for themselves that in some way infringe on another person's habits, good or bad.

A friend with a philosophical bent notes that as civility retreats into competing claims of entitlement, the "invisible hand" of courtesy and sympathy is replaced by the soft despotism of the state. Someone has to settle the disputes over various rights. Inevitably, that's the government (or Amtrak). "It's a bit like kids fighting," he emailed. "If they can work it out themselves, they're probably both better off. Once they go to daddy or mommy for a ruling, somebody's going to lose." I'd like to think my children would (quietly) agree.

Read the whole thing while it's available. Here's the link.

Benches to sit on

In European city parks, some of which are hundreds of years old, you'll find rows of long benches on which to sit, relax, read a book, chat, observe, feed the pigeons. Not so in the land of the free and busy. The large shoreline park in my town was built on a former garbage dump (some of my own refuse is buried there, I have to say proudly! If I could only dig up my old transistor radio from there. They don't make them like they used to), and consists of three medium size hills. overgrown with weeds, a few maintained lawns, paved paths and unpaved trails. A mile long path circles around the outside edge of the park, and many people go there to walk, run, ride rollerblades, bicycles, walk their dogs. There are maybe half a dozen short, three person benches on that path and, if memory serves right, no more than three others on the paths leading into and between the hills.

The park near my house, covering one city block, and built on top of a subway tunnel, has a large lawn in the center, and three pairs of short benches on the outside, along pedestrian and bicycle paths leading to the nearby train station. The lawn is large, maintained and available to players of various sports such as volleyball, frisbee or football. Twice a year an area amateur theater group sets up a stage for performances of self-written musical agitprop plays about Bushitler and the evil capitalists of Haliburton Corporation, all for the enjoyment of the local sophisticates. The audience sits on the lawn.

Many of the few benches in city parks and tennis courts here have brass plaques on them stating that this bench was funded in memory of such and such person. Apparently, it is a popular way to memorialize some family member who has passed away, a person not necessarily famous or known or particularly accomplished in the big wide world. One donor said that she is comforted when she sees people relaxing on the bench bearing the name of her late husband. Fair enough.

Now the City Council is considering strictly limiting the number of memorial benches, which the city parks commission says destroy the "visual character" of the city's "parkland and urban forest". Urban forest? Oh, OK.

The Deputy City Manager says, "Do we want plaques and memorials strewn over our public parks? A lot of people are offended by it - they feel that the reminders of other people's family and friends diminishes the feeling of freedom and peace you're supposed to have in a public park."

According to the new rules "the honorees must have been dead for at least a year, their contributions to the city and its parks must be well documented, and the city's Parks and Recreation Commission must approve the nomination." Plus, it will cost $1200 for materials and installation.

All in the land of freedom from memory, and peace from concerns about others.

Saying and meaning

What women say and what they really mean...

Say: We need
Mean: I want

Say: It’s your decision
Mean: The correct decision should be obvious by now

Say: Do what you want
Mean: You’ll pay for this later

Say: We need to talk
Mean: I need to complain

Say: Sure...go ahead
Mean: I don’t want you to.

Say: I’m not upset
Mean: Of course I’m upset, you moron.

Say: You’re...so manly
Mean: You need a shave and you sweat a lot.

Say: You’re certainly attentive tonight.
Mean: Is sex all you ever think about?

Say: I’m not emotional! And I’m not overreacting!
Mean: I’m on my period.

Say: Be romantic, turn out the lights.
Mean: I have flabby thighs.

Say: Hang the picture there
Mean: No, I mean hang it there!

Say: I heard a noise
Mean: I noticed you were almost asleep.

Say: Do you love me?
Mean: I’m going to ask for something expensive.

Say: How much do you love me?
Mean: I did something today you’re really not going to like..

Say: I’ll be ready in a minute.
Mean: Kick off your shoes and find a good game on T.V.

Say: Is my butt fat?
Mean: Tell me I’m beautiful.

Say: You have to learn to communicate.
Mean: Just agree with me.

Say: Are you listening to me!?
Mean: [Too late, you’re dead.]

Say: Yes
Mean: No

Say: No
Mean: No

Say: Maybe
Mean: No

Say: I’m sorry.
Mean: You’ll be sorry.

Say: I’m not yelling!
Mean: Yes I am yelling because I think this is important.