Trench & Gantry

Tall Tall Trees EPK

2010-05-26T17:40:00.000-04:00

Don't eat your words

2010-05-24T22:17:00.028-04:00

During a business writing workshop I recently led for employees of a global technology firm, I showed my students the following passage (culled from one of their company's actual internal emails):

"Our businesses have the full sales and operations capability to extend their market position into prominent growth engines in their market spaces. In addition, our businesses have defined their focus on customer vertical segments. With deep domain knowledge, it will become possible to offer solutions based on our full portfolio of products and solutions. This cross sell will enhance and create a multiplier effect on the individual success of each business unit."

The students' task, I explained, would be to hack away at this dense thicket of jargon. Several of them shook their heads.

"That's not jargon," one yelled out.

"Oh no?" I asked, "Let's take just one expression as an example: 'customer vertical segments.'"

"'Vertical segments' is not jargon! It's industry standard terminology. Maybe it's jargon to you, but everyone in this business knows what it means."

We'd reached an impasse. "Industry standard terminology" sounds proper and educated and like a chap who might give you a lift to the annual conference; "jargon" sounds like a guy who grabs you in the hotel bar and yammers away while his buddy lifts your wallet. Value judgments aside, though, there's absolutely no difference between the two. Jargon is by definition industry standard terminology. The question is, what's so bad about it?

I came across a post by James Governor the other day at Enterprise Irregulars, in which he makes an argument against the writer Charlotte Otter's argument against jargon. Their point of contention is the use of idiomatic metaphors. Otter cautions against them, as "barriers to understanding," while Governor says:

"If you can’t use metaphor then communication is all the poorer. People are generally great at disambiguation."

Well, yes, people do tend to be good at ascribing meaning to things they can't quite make out—but that doesn't mean that they're picking up on the right meanings. In literature, this ambivalence can be something to celebrate; in business or technical writing—say, an annual report, or the operating instructions for a nuclear power plant—it can be a disaster. My real problem with jargon, though, is that it simply has no power to persuade. Sure, a person might get bullied by a barrage of incomprehensible terminology—llike when the mechanic tells you why he’s going to have to give your car a new transmission—but they're not going to move their minds too much.

The reason for this has to do with why we learn, and how. The cognitive psychology pioneer Jean Piaget ascribed learning to our biological need to adapt ourselves to our environment, and he divided this "adaptation" into two parts: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is when we put a new experience into a pre-existing category: a preschooler calls his teacher "Mommy," or every animal a "doggie." Accommodation occurs when the new experience won't fit: teacher says her name is "Ms. Waters;" the furry little animals with whiskers are called "cats." Both assimilation and accommodation are necessary for us to properly adapt to the world; but, from the time we're babies, sticking everything in our mouths, we prefer to assimilate. It's much easier, much less stressful, a lot more tasty.

Any fact, no matter how damaging to a person's preconceptions, will, if presented weakly or ambiguously—if presented in jargon—be somehow assimilated into those preconceptions. It’s the path of least resistance. Your only hope of changing peoples' minds is to make your case in the clearest, simplest, and most precise manner. You'll be resisted and resented at first... and then eventually, if you’re dealing with reasonable people, they’ll accommodate. Given no other option, people will change their own minds.

But back to "vertical segments." The writer of this text is not trying to convince anyone that they've discovered a bold new way to run their business. What the writer of this text is trying to do is convince people that they have a solid business plan just because they are speaking proper business-speak. This is the voice of dogma, which is the enemy of both self-reflection and innovative thought. If the email had read, "the plan is to get bigger by selling more stuff to our customers because we know them really well" (which is basically how the selection parses), people might start wondering just why the guy has a corner office. The writer of this text is specifically trying to keep people from changing their minds.

If we want to progress, we must make ourselves plain. Think you have good ideas? Don't hide them. Write simply. Expose your thought to scrutiny—most especially your own. As George Orwell put it, in his classic Politics and the English Language:

"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself."

Pack Light

2010-04-12T09:00:00.003-04:00

By way of speaking of the future of online video, the Internet theorist Clay Shirky recently made some interesting observations about how increasing organizational complexity tends to lead to an inevitable collapse. The gist of the idea is that, while organizations tend to initially grow and prosper through increasing sophistication, at some point, their model becomes so complex that they are no longer nimble enough to respond to evolving circumstances and aggressive challengers. As complexity increases, more and more of an organization’s efforts tend to go toward sustaining that complexity. As Shirky puts it:

“Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.”

The same logic applies in writing. There’s a pronounced tendency in marketing to do what I call “packing the suitcase.” This is when a single sentence is crammed to overflow with all the many charming proof points and benefit statements a marketer thinks they’ll need for their company’s long journey into the public’s consciousness. The following is an actual (necessarily unattributed and anonymized) example of this:

“We bring innovative ideas to maximize your efficiency with flexible solutions that adapt to your evolving needs and consistently give you detailed performance data so that you can have transparent control over costs at all times.”

This sentence happened because the company in question is focused on its own internal, organizational needs, rather than their clients’ real-world needs. It is the company that needs to come up with “innovative ideas,” and “adapt,” and be “flexible” and “consistent” and “transparent.” What do they think that their clients need? “Efficiency” and “control.” Here’s a less-cluttered expression of the same idea:

“We make you more efficient, and give you more control over your costs.”

But the suitcase is still packed; the important question is, why would a client want to be more efficient and in control of costs? These are both abstract business objectives. Here’s what they actually mean to say:

“We save you time and money.”

Original? No. Human needs are not original. Human needs are eternal. Human needs are simple. And as Shirky sums up:

“When the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”

Book Trailer 3 for "Crashed"

2009-09-02T12:22:00.001-04:00

Third trailer for Robin Wasserman's Crashed, releasing on September 8, 2009.

Book Trailer 2 for "Crashed"

2009-08-28T20:51:00.002-04:00

First trailer for Robin Wasserman's Crashed, releasing on September 8, 2009.

Book Trailer 1 for "Crashed"

2009-08-19T12:50:00.003-04:00

First trailer for Robin Wasserman's Crashed, releasing on September 8, 2009.

God and the BQE

2009-04-08T11:32:00.001-04:00

Every year I've lived in Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens, I've seen signs for the local Good Friday procession, but never bothered to investigate.

Apparently, my neighborhood boasts Brooklyn's (and Long Island's) oldest Italian Catholic Parish (in addition to having it's oldest Synagogue). According to the church, around 1900 this area boasted the "largest single concentration of Italians in the country."

The parish initially had space in the former church right across Warren Street from me (now condos). In 1885, they built their own church at President & Van Brunt, and Mother Cabrini (the namesake of Chicago's infamous Cabrini Green projects... near which I also used to live) opened a school there. The building was slated to be torn down by Robert Moses for the BQE, and the last mass was said there on December 7, 1941. God immediately punished the country later that morning, via the tragedy of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Undeterred, Moses still tore down the church.

The parish now lives in the massive church at Summit & Hicks... immediately adjacent to a pedestrian bridge over the BQE trench.

Bag of Chips, Full of Nuts

2008-12-09T17:22:00.002-05:00

After perusing the complaint against Blagojevich (I know: I have a problem), I have decided this guy deserves a medal. Not only was he asking for money for the Senate seat; when he found out the Feds were onto him, he proposed using some of this money to pre-pay his defense attorney. But my favorite bit was this:

"ROB BLAGOJEVICH has spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat, and has expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including frustration at being "stuck" as governor, a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor, and a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016, avoid impeachment by the Illinois legislature, make corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office, facilitate his wife's employment as a lobbyist, and assist in generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office."

What, no squirrel?

2008-12-06T12:44:00.003-05:00

Overheard in my apartment this morning:

"Yes, I heard that you have moose and deer?...
Great, I would like one large moose, one large deer, and one small moose....
Yes, that's going to be delivered...."

My trials on a jury

2008-02-28T00:55:00.003-05:00

I tend to vote. I pretty much obey the law. I have thus far refrained from open insurrection against the government. Contrary to the fancies of a particularly obstinate IRS agent a couple of years back, I have always paid my taxes. And I was born in Iowa. So maybe I’m not a Great American, but I like to think I’m a Decent Enough American.

By and by, the State of New York determined to test this premise. A little more than a month ago, I received in the mail a pink perforated summons to report for jury duty at the Supreme Court in downtown Brooklyn. My friends reacted with great sympathy; I got a lot of “man, that sucks” and “lemme tell you how to get out of it.” But I, awash in civic virtue, and convinced of my essential decency, never once did entertain the preparation of a series of excuses and/or prejudices which would disqualify me from service. This was my duty as an American, dammit; I was no dodger...

I can recall a moment way back in 1991, when the country was busy cheering on Iraq War Part I, and there was some widespread consideration given to the prospect of reinstating the Draft. The subject somehow came up in my high school French class, and I remember my teacher suggesting that, should the Draft come back, John — the only other male in the class — would readily head to battle, whereas I would most likely flee to Canada. I took great offense to this notion — despite its implication that I was smart and John was a meat-head. Go to War? Of course I would go to war! I was a 17 year-old male, flush with testosterone, and my universe divided neatly into three distinct categories: boring stuff, stuff that gave me an erection, and stuff I wanted to blow up. Going to war promised to remove me from the first and provide me a great deal of the third, with the prospect of a great deal of the second upon my triumphant return from battle.

Seventeen years on, my carnal and destructive appetites have become a bit more manageable; however, I have discovered in adulthood an entirely new desire: the desire to Judge. With my many years of experience as a human being, I was anxious to display my abundant wisdom in rendering the most impartial and well-reasoned of verdicts. Not only was I not going to try to get out of jury duty, I told people, I was smugly certain that I was going to get picked to serve on a trial.

I will now tell you the Great Untold Secret of the American Judicial System: no sane person — NO ONE — actually wants to sit on a jury. In fact, were I asked to define the term “jury,” I would say, “a collection of citizens held against their will, and forced to arbitrate the problems of complete strangers.” This is not, however, to suggest that other individuals summoned to serve will expend the same amount of effort to get themselves disqualified. Some people receive full salary for time spent in the courthouse; others genuinely hate their jobs. And then there’s me: someone who both enjoys how he ordinarily spends his days, and receives no money whatever for time missed from work, yet for reasons of vanity concludes that he must serve.

In brief, my jury selection went like this: I showed up in court at 8:30am last Tuesday, sat in the Central Jury Room until noon, then got called in as part of a group of about 20 to a cramped “empaneling room.” Three lawyers had us fill out questionnaires, then we broke for lunch. When we returned, the attorneys questioned us all in turn as to our impartiality. The more savvy and ballsy of us either (a) said straight away that they could not be impartial, (b) claimed to have specific knowledge of the details of the case, or (b) pretended to not speak English. All strategies seemed equally effective. Two and a half hours of questions later, simply by dint of having not tried to get myself off the jury, I was sworn in as Juror #3. I was sent home, and told that the trial would start the next day.

The trial did not start the next day. Neither did it start Thursday. Nor Friday. We selected jurors were, however, required to report each day, and sit around doing nothing. Our group gradually gravitated to the so-called “lounge” area, so as to avoid the hoi polloi in the Central Jury Room. And the griping began. Griper-in-chief was a fifty-something woman who was the only person in our group to have served on a trial before, so she knew that we were in for a bunch of bullshit. Periodically, she would bring our group complaints (e.g., “we’ve just been sitting here for days; no one has told us anything; we’re all very angry”) to the Empaneling Clerk, who would laugh in her face, and say that we were basically screwed: We were on a trial involving the City of New York, and the City liked to drag these cases out.

On one of these occasions, the Clerk let loose something else. The Griper was explaining again why it was impossible for her to be on this trial (something to do with her vacation days), and he replied, “Look, the only person who can get you off this trial now is the judge, and he’s probably not going to do it for that reason.”

Ah-ha… So, it was still technically possible to get off this case. You just needed to convince the judge. I went home that evening and googled information about serving on a jury. One page that came up explained that a juror can ask the bailiff to present the judge with a written note, requesting an audience. But what would the note say? Obviously, a mere explanation that jury duty was bad for me wasn’t enough. I would need to explain why me being on the jury was bad for the case: I would need to declare in open court that I could not be impartial, that I was not even a Half-Decent American.

But was this actually true? I reasoned thusly: As a freelancer, being on this case meant both lost wages, and potential endangerment of future earnings. Given that this was a civil case, with a plaintiff seeking financial compensation, my determination of a reward would be influenced by the fact that it would have come at my own expense, so to speak. I don’t know and will never know if this would have been true; I do know that I had started using the name of the plaintiff as a curse word.

Monday morning, my jury was finally moved upstairs to our official trial jury waiting room. I had come in with a printed letter to the judge, which I gave to the Court Officer. About 15 minutes later, he brought me in alone to the courtroom.

I walked in through the jury door, and nervously stood in the box. I know there were a number of other people in the room, though my vision seemed to tunnel in on itself. The lawyers were there, the court reporter was there, there was a woman seated in the spectator’s gallery. The plaintiff and defendants may well have been there, too. I don’t know; I was having trouble just focusing on the judge.

He was a sixty-ish Jewish man with thick glasses and a serious Brooklyn accent.

“Why didn’t you state your problems earlier?” he asked.

“Because I was just answering the questions the lawyers asked. I wasn’t trying to get out of it.”

“But if you had said something earlier, we could have gotten another juror.”

“I know, your honor. I’m sorry. I’ve never been on a jury before, and I thought it was my duty. But in the last week, I’ve lost two jobs because I’ve been unavailable.”

This went on for a few minutes, just so he could be sure I knew just how much of an ass he thought I was. Then, the questions turned to the other jurors. Did they know I was trying to get off the jury? I said I suspected they did. Had I discussed the note with any of them? I said I had not. The judge was obviously concerned that there would be a bum-rush of jurors with notes all trying to get off the case. He winced and shook his head at me, then told me it would be taken care of… and not to talk to any of the other jurors about this. I would corrupt them. I was a Rotten American.

I returned to the jury waiting room. The other jurors asked how it went. I shrugged my shoulders. Ten minutes later, we were all called into court, and told that the trial wouldn’t actually start until Monday. I felt better about my note.

Within another 15 minutes, I had received my discharge, and skipped down the courthouse steps. I felt deliciously free — reminiscent of how I felt upon my high-school graduation. I had weaseled my way out of my civic duty after all, and it felt great.

Trust no one except everyone

2007-05-07T23:29:00.000-04:00

Many, many technical problems this past month. My much-beleaguered Powerbook died, then was brought back to life, then died again, then was re-animated once more... and I no longer trust it whatever.

Time was, I didn't trust the internet. Now, it's about the only thing technical which I do trust. At least it doesn't seem possible for the whole thing in its entirety to collapse at once. Which is what happened to my POS Apple. Twice in a week. Just to get it to work modestly, I had to wipe clean the entire hard drive. And even that didn't solve the "phantom monitor" problem, whereby, like an new amputee, the machine thinks it still has an external display attached.

Sigh. Here's some advice: buy the cheapest machine you can get away with using. Exclusively store on it nothing of significance. Work through browsers whenever possible. A work in digital format must exist in multiple copies, in multiple locations, across multiple machines. Otherwise, it cannot even be said to exist at all. Data achieves presence to the extent that it is replicable & replicated.

Remember "things?" Documents on paper. Audio recorded to tape. Films made on film. Art before the advent of mechancial reproduction. If an item is to exist in only one location, it better have a physical presence. Otherwise, it's as fragile and transient as a late-afternoon daydream.

Productivity

2007-03-22T23:10:00.000-04:00

I present to you one Rainer Maria Werner Fassbinder, director of 43 films between 1969 and 1982. That's about 3 films a year, for 14 years straight... including the 919 minute Berlin Alexanderplatz, a restored print of which is going to be screened next month at MOMA. The above picture is of Fassbinder on the set of this mammoth project, which was shot, edited & scored in six months.

Six months for 15 hours of film? It took me almost 14 months to complete Spleen, and that thing runs just a bit more than 10 minutes. To be sure, Fassbinder probably didn't need to create web templates for an online medical education testing service, or update quarterly and annual reports for a series of mutual funds, or edit bogus focus group footage for a hamburger chain, or PA a promotional video shoot for a Hassidic-run rest home, all in a futile attempt to make ends meet.

But still, Fassbinder's example makes me feel like I must be wasting a ton of time. I'd like to believe that it's just a matter of me not having access to resources which explains the paucity of my output. Should I ever manage to get Spleen into a damned festival (more on this issue later), and accrete enough mojo to launch paying, professional projects, then I think my motivation will be truly put to the test. In the interim, I'll have to content myself with a smorgasbord of internet-based side-projects.

Of course, if Fassbinder were making web videos, he'd probably have his own YouTube subdomain.

Did I mention the cat died of an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills?

America as comedy

2007-02-21T02:17:00.000-05:00

The above comic strip comes from Get Your War On, by David Rees.

The philosopher Henri Bergson had an interesting notion about the comic: "something mechanical in something living." That is to say, when a living being, or something apparently alive, behaves as if it were a dumb machine, we find it funny, and therefore laugh. The social value of this laughter is as a corrective; it is meant to humiliate the subject into properly adapting to circumstances.

One of the most common and effective methods of producing comedy is through repetition. Think of a man repeatedly tripping on the same banana peel. According to Bergson, we laugh (evolutionarily speaking) at this individual in order to shame him into correcting his faulty sensory-motor schema. The more times he falls, the bigger the falls, the greater the peril to his personal safety and that of those around him, the harder we laugh.

As our government at least makes play at undertaking a third simultaneous war, we would do well to laugh as hard and as often at them—at ourselves, really—as possible.

Gift as Excess Value

2007-02-17T17:10:00.000-05:00

I want to revist an idea I stole from Jonathan Lethem in an earlier post, which I now think is entirely incorrect: that a commercial can have no status as a "gift".

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The whole point of the Super Bowl Ads, the whole reason that people get worked up about them, is precisely because they are in fact gifts — their value as entertainment exceeds their value as sales pitches. Why did everyone hate the SalesGenie.com spot? Because there is no excess value; there is only the sales pitch. Why did people like the "Rock Paper Scissors" Bud Lite ad? Because they appreciated the gift of the comic vignette (in much the same way that people appreciate funny little YouTube videos), whose value was far in excess of any direct instruction to purchase beer.

If this "gifting" has any potential to sell stuff, it's through displacement of the emotions inspired by the gift to the product for sale. That is to say, one appreciates the humor of a beer commercial, takes pleasure from watching it, and then mistakenly associates these positive feelings with the beer itself.

How well does this work? I don't know. Do I wish it to work? I am pretty neutral. I find the tactic of "gifting" in itself to be far less manipulative than the inclusion of the product for sale within the symbolic exchange of the ad (usually as the object of desire). I know now that I was wrong in thinking that I could easily subject commercials to a symbolic analysis without digressing into armchair sociology and psychoanalysis-light. But, I still think a useful analysis could be made of commercials — one which would bring us closer to a pre-linguistic, imagistic understanding of the logic of desire.

Which I'd like to think would bring me closer to a functional notational system for the cinema.

Super Bowl Ads IV: Only fools work hard

2007-02-15T19:04:00.000-05:00

This spot is currently the second-lowest rated Super Bowl ad on You Tube (the lowest being the Sheryl Crow Revlon spot).

SalesGenie.com

The male protagonist encounters four other characters in economical shot/reverse-shot exchanges: an attractive woman, an overworked co-worker, a commendatory boss, and a dazzled junior employee. The exchange with the woman shows the protagonist to be desirable; the exchange with the co-worker shows him to have lots of luxury time; the exchange with the boss shows him to be professionally on the rise; and, the final exchange with the young employee is a vehicle to explain the protagonist's secret to success. The spot ends with a trophy shot of woman, car & house, and then promotional titles.

A number of online commentators have been baffled that a spot with such low production values would warrant a $2.6 million Super Bowl placement; but, I think they miss the point. SalesGenie.com obviously believes its own message: the leads are everything; the pitch is nothing. Why waste time and money on a glossy/ironic/celebrity-enhanced ad? Why "work hard," as the protagonist puts it? All you need to suceed is to pay for access, and SalesGenie.com purchased access to over 90 million people.

I recently read an article in New York Magazine about Wal-Mart's advertising strategy, in which I was introduced to the direct-marketing kingpin Howard Draft. A line from the article: "No one really knows if award-winning ads increase sales." The point is, irony & humor & even beauty can be distractions from a direct solicitation — and direct solicitation is now and has always been the most effective way to sell. Is Nationwide really going to benefit from their Kevin Federline spot? Why pay David Lynch to direct an ad for a pregnancy test (not that I don't approve of him getting the cash)?

By way of closing the book on my Super Bowl ad analysis, I present what may be the most perfect commercial of all time:

"Motley, only fools work hard!"

Super Bowl Ads III: Redemption of the Real

2007-02-14T17:49:00.000-05:00

Garmin — "Maposaurus"

As a parody of an old Japanese tokusatsu show (Spectreman comes to mind, in particular), this spot doesn't lend itself so well to a straightforward, symbolic analysis. However, it does call to mind an answering machine greeting my roommate and I recorded back in college. Over a menacing bassline, I recited the following excerpt from Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations:

"It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself."

Upon hearing this greeting for the first time, my roommate's mother exclaimed, "That sounds like a devil worship!" and promptly hung up the phone. I still have the recording of her saying this saved on my computer.

Baudrillard was in the above passage reframing the so-called map/territory relation — a classic philosophical problem of distinguishing between symbol and object (or sign and referent, if you will). As the great bard of postmodern nihilism, Baudrillard contended that representations of reality (and representations of representations) had replaced reality itself in contemporary society. (It's no coincidence that the expression "desert of the real" made its way into the first Matrix movie.)

It is generally agreed that the destruction and/or replacement of reality is a bad thing.

As you can see in the ad, the Evil Maposaurus is hell-bent on destruction. Not only is the map here "not the territory" (as per Alfred Korzybski [see above link]), this map in fact actively destroys the territory. What can save the Real? Who can save us from this lumbering abstraction?

Technology! Garmin GPS comes to the rescue, and effortlessly dispatches the Bad Map. The message here is a rebuttal of high-postmodernism, as well as the Cyberpunk movement: Rather than further abstracting us from the Real, technology redeems it to us.

How? Through karate kicks and laser beams, mostly.

Super Bowl Ads II: The Corn Chip Whore

2007-02-13T15:34:00.000-05:00

Doritos — "Live the Flavor"

A man, physically empowered by his vehicle, is about to enjoy an object of desire, when he spots another object of desire—a woman on foot (and thereby relatively disempowered). Seeing the man with his object, the woman smiles, and extends her arm to show that she is possessed of the same kind of object. Clearly, they are in this scenario for the same kind of enjoyment, so to speak. Distracted by this recognition, the man crashes his car (disempowering himself), and destroys his bag of chips. Concerned, the woman rushes to his aid... with her own chips in hand. There is still a chance for them to experience mutual enjoyment. But no, she trips, and crushes her chips as well. Both are "losers": both have taken no pleasure, and both have experienced physical injury [which was likewise necessary in the spots I analyzed in my previous entry]. Normalcy returns in the final shot, with the man again relatively empowered (as he is at least still in his car, and the woman is on all fours on the street). The strap line appears in an overlay: "Live the Flavor". Though they cannot any longer experience the pleasure of the corn chips' qualities through the eating of the chips themselves, this man and woman can experience the same pleasurable qualities in their relationship with each other.

If anyone thinks the scenario of this ad is an analogy for anything other than picking up a hooker, I'd love to hear about it.

Super Bowl Ads I: Parity is Queer

2007-02-13T01:21:00.000-05:00

Two spots involving contested objects of desire:

Bud Light — "Rock Paper Scissors"

In an open field of play (established by a wide shot), two contestants approach the object of desire. Body positioning and shot order establish the man in the hoodie as the protagonist. Unable to immediately resolve their contest through physical strength, the antagonist in the oxford shirt proposes, and Mr. Hoodie agrees to, a contest of wits. The contestants play their game; however, Mr. Oxford wins through violence. As Oxford claims the object of desire and leaves the playing field, a vanquished Hoodie questions the contest's fairness. Oxford's response confirms that not only has Hoodie lost a physical contest, he has in fact also lost a battle of wits. A product shot with a voice-over strap line confirms the legitimacy of Oxford's victory through trickery and violence. The final shot of the supine Hoodie confirms his status as loser of the contest.

Snickers — "Kiss"

Two individuals cooperate on a technical task in a confined space. Body positioning establishes the long-haired man as the protagonist. Mr. Long-hair produces an object of desire, and begins to take pleasure from it. The short-haired man sees and covets the object of desire, then procedes to likewise take pleasure from it. A contest ensues for which man can take more pleasure from the object. This contest ends in a tie, and in intimate physical contact. The contestants abruptly pull apart from each other. Both men are "winners," in the sense that they have each taken equal pleasure from the object of desire; however, this cannot stand. In order to establish their status as "losers" of a physical contest, the men commit violence against their own flesh. A product shot and tagline overlay confirms the rightness of this final act.

I don't think it's the kiss itself which activates the "gay panic" in the Snickers spot; I think it's the mutual and equal pleasure the men take from the candy bar. If the short-haired man had quickly munched down 3/4 of the length of the bar, and then the two men had inadvertently kissed, the outcome would have been different—there would have been a clear winner to the exchange. As the Snickers folks clearly realize, ties are not satisfying.

As a thought experiment, imagine a version of the Bud Lite ad in which the two men confront not a bottle, but a pint of beer, and then avidly suck down the contents through straws. If both men drink at the same rate, you end up with a potentially queer image.

Interestingly, what both of these spots suggest is that to lose a contest over an object of desire, a contestant must be physically injured... which I suppose is appropriate for ads placed during a football game.

What I'm playing at

2007-02-11T13:05:00.000-05:00

I've been busy with the "Synesthesia" project all week, so I haven't gotten around to parsing the SB ads yet.

(Incidentally, we got a decent review from nytheatre.com.)

Also, I must confess to an utter absense of enthusiasm for watching them again. In this month's Harper's, Jonathan Lethem has a great piece on (and which is a) plagiarism, wherein he adopts Lewis Hyde's concept of art as a "gift," which cannot properly ever be "stolen." He goes on to say that even the best ads can never be art, because "an ad has no status as a gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at."

Ironically, it is precisely this absence of personal value which I think makes TV spots a good place to start an analysis of contemporary film grammar. There is a mechanical, disembodied feel to commercial filmmaking; analyzing ads is like diagraming simple sentences in grade school: Who the hell really cared what those sentences were about?

Bless the little purple one

2007-02-06T02:32:00.000-05:00

I'm still recovering from the miserable Bears loss.

I will, however, take this opportunity to second the CW on the half-time show: it was the best ever. And Prince is one of the best Rock & Roll guitarists of all time. And will probably never get credited as such.

[NOTE: There used to be an embedded video here of Prince at the Super Bowl; but, it was killed by Universal Music Group. Corporate copyright sucks.]

Forget the red carpet

2007-02-02T23:35:00.000-05:00

Rejoice, dear viewers, for it is time again for our annual, national celebration of the apotheosis of American Filmmaking.

No, I'm not talking about the sad celebrity orgy of the Oscars; I'm talking about the bourgeois bacchanal of the Super Bowl Spots!

More people will watch these commercials than will see any of the Academy Award contenders this year. More money is spent per second in the production and distribution (CBS is charging $5.2 million a minute to show these spots) of these commercials than in any feature film. If cultural value in our society can be measured by dollars, and cultural relevance by audience members, then it's hard to overstate the significance of the Super Bowl ads.

Want an indicator of just how important these "shows" have become? They now have their own marketing campaigns. Let that settle in. Ad agencies are creating ad campaigns to promote advertisements. Previously, the measure of an ad's success was the extent to which it was remembered and talked about after the game. Now, spots are "leaked" to YouTube ahead of the event, and a special section of the site has been reserved for a post-game contest.

This year, in deference to the outsized importance of the Super Bowl Spots, I will provide in this blog a filmic analysis of all the commercials.

Stay tuned.

Synesthesia

2007-01-24T22:38:00.000-05:00

I am taking part in a group show February 7-10 at the Harris Lieberman Gallery called "Synesthesia," put up by Electric Pear Productions.

More info HERE.

The best way to describe it is as a game of artistic telephone: the works are presented sequentially, each work having been inspired by the previous artist's entry. I'm not actually a link in this chain; rather, I am editing (and I partially shot) the accompanying interviews that form part of the program.

Should be a good show. Tickets can be purchased HERE.

How Cobble lost its Hill

2007-01-05T20:05:00.001-05:00

This plaque of George Washington decorates the east side of the Independence Savings Bank located at the corner of Court & Clinton streets in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. It marks the site of the fomer Cobble Hill Fort, which the Continental Army built atop what was then called "Cobleshill" — at the time, quite a steep hill.

Cobble Hill was one of a number of forts built by General Nathanael Greene, who was charged by Washington to defend Brooklyn from the British. (George himself decided he would prefer to defend Manhattan, the posh toff.) For the British to take New York City, they would first have to take Brooklyn. To this end, the Brits had started ferrying their troops across the Narrows from Staten Island, and landing them in Gravesend Bay.

Greene's first idea for defense was to simply burn New York to the ground, but that didn't go over too well. Plan B was to run a defensive line along the Heights of Guan, a natural ridge which separated northwest Brooklyn from the rest of Long Island. Greene only needed to defend a handful of passes in the hills in order to keep the Redcoats from reaching central Brooklyn.

Unfortunately, Greene caught a bad bug of some kind, and was laid up when the Brits attacked. In his stead, General John Sullivan decided to mass his forces near the Gowanus Creek and the roads to Flatbush, and sent a contingent of only five (5) men to guard the pass on the road to Jamaica (now Broadway Junction). Naturally, this is the route the main British force used to sneak in behind the American lines.

Attacked from two sides at once, the defenders at the other passes got pretty well routed. Washington himself deigned to jaunt out from Manhattan around mid-day to watch from Cobble Hill Fort as his men splashed across the Gowanus Creek in a mad dash to Brooklyn Heights.

Long story short, the Americans quickly lost Brooklyn, and then all of New York City (which the British burned down anyway, proving that Greene had the right idea). In order to ensure that the Americans wouldn't retake the strategic vantage of Cobble Hill Fort, the Brits demolished the structure, and then levelled the hill itself.

Ironically enough, less than eighty years later, Winston Churchill's mother was born a few blocks away from the site. The surrounding, nearly flat neighborhood was known as simply part of "South Brooklyn," until a 1970's re-branding to foster gentrification.

Dormitory of my dreams

2007-01-03T01:06:00.000-05:00

In 1931, the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights was the largest hotel in New York City... and somewhat posh. It used to boast the largest indoor salt-water pool in the US.

Then, the place went through a bit of a rough patch.

By the 1970's, the hotel was rife with addicts & bums, and boasted a strip club named "Wild Fyre" [sic] on the ground floor. Appropriately enough, the location was used to film the scene in The Godfather where Luca Brasi gets murdered.

(So, when the Corleone family gets the news that "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes," he could very well have been in the hotel pool.)

And what of the St. George today? Well, a bit burned down, a bit went co-op, and the rest? Student housing, of course! With a subway stop directly beneath the building... and of course, as you can see in the picture, every college student's most important supplier located on the ground floor.

I can just imagine upstate parents' expressions as they pull up in front of the liquor store with their loaded minivans and wide-eyed teenagers. I wonder how many of them have simply turned their vehicles right around.

No, I don't blame the English for our troubles

2006-12-18T00:08:00.000-05:00

The Plymouth Church of the Pigrims of Brooklyn Heights was founded in 1847, with Henry Ward Beecher as its first pastor. Beecher was the most famous American preacher of the time, counting amongst his fans the likes of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Abraham Lincoln. An ardent abolitionist (and not coincidentally the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), Beecher turned the church into the "Grand Central Depot" of the Underground Railroad. For this reason, the building is included in the National Register of Historic Places.

True to its name, the church also houses a piece of Plymouth Rock itself, presumably chipped off by one of the founders.

I've been thinking a lot about the Pilgrims lately, in light of the ongoing dissolution of the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopalians are the American branch of the Anglican Communion, which is headed by the Church of England. The best characterization I have heard of the Episcopalian ethos was offered by my paternal grandmother to my mother, in a vain attempt to get her to convert:

"Oh, Susan, you simply must convert to Episcopalianism. It's so easy. You don't have to do anything."

The only requirement was that you occasionally went to church. What you did or did not believe was your own concern. What anyone else did or did not believe was their own concern. Don't ask, don't tell. Dress up, show up, shut up.

This works pretty well, as long as no one starts taking themselves too seriously — which is exactly what happened with the Pilgrims. "Free to believe whatever we want, as long as we just come to school and play nice? Screw you! We're going to Holland! And when we get bored there, we're all gonna go missionize some heathens in the New World! See ya!"

The English have lived for quite a while in quite a crowded little piece of land, and have established traditions of communal practice coupled with tolerance in order to get along. This is decidedly not what the Pilgrims et al brought with them to America, which is why our branch of the Anglican Communion was probably always doomed to schism. "Free to discriminate against women & gays, as long as we accept that this doesn't happen everywhere? Screw you! We're going to join the Church of Nigeria! See ya!"

The Grand American Tradition is that of the dramatic exit. If we don't like the rules of the game, or it doesn't look like we're going to win, we storm off in a huff. We are malcontents. We are what the English would call "bad sports."

I've been criticised for repeatedly harshing on the English in this blog. In my defense, I want to first say that every American schoolchild is taught that the English were horrible tyrants who killed half of Boston and hated us for our freedoms. I would also like to say that I think my country has gone bonkers, and I resent that the one people on Earth to whom we might listen have not brought us back from the brink.

But mostly, to an American, what is frustrating about England is that it all just seems to work somehow. Because it shouldn't really. I mean, you're not trying hard enough. Not enough Protestant in your work ethic, not enough sweat on the brow, not enough dyspepsia. Where's the ulcer that shows you really care?

The Donut Jesus of Court Street

2006-12-15T20:06:00.000-05:00

This is the courtyard behind the Dunkin Donuts on Court Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In the foreground, you can see an advertisement for their new breakfast sandwich.

And in the background?

"Blessed are those who hunger for the omelet sausage supreme,
for they shall be filled."

Some Pig

2006-12-12T18:18:00.000-05:00

In 1626, Peter Minuit bought this island for the Dutch from the Lenape Indians, whose name for the place meant either "hilly island" or "place of inebriation," depending on whom you want to believe. The Dutch called it "New Amsterdam," since it was the seat of the "New Netherlands".

In due time, of course, the English realized that someone else owned something somewhere that they did not, so they sent a few boat-loads of blokes with guns to rectify the situation. The city was then renamed "New York," in honor of the then Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy (and secret Catholic), soon to be ignominious loser the Battle of the Boyne (and downfall of the House of Stuart), James, the Duke of York & Albany.

This is the guy who marched a Catholic army into Ireland and lost, earning him the gaelic nickname Séamus á Chaca, or "James the Shit".

But where did "York" come from in the first place?

The Celts used to call this particular bit of what is now northern England Eborakon, or "place of yew trees". When the Romans took over, as was their want, they changed the name ever so slightly to Eboracum. Then came a couple of misunderstandings. The Anglo-Saxons heard Ebor as their own Eofor, and changed the name to Eoforwīc, or "wild-boar town". The Vikings in turn heard Eoforwīc as their own Jórvík, or "horse bay". Ever the economizers, the Normans then simplified this to "York".

Therefore, "New York" can be taken to mean:

"New Place of Yew Trees",
or,
"New Wild Boar Town" (though my preference would be for "New Pork"),
or,
"New Horse Bay",
or even,
"New Shit".

Edgy

2006-12-09T15:37:00.000-05:00

The arbitrary enforcement of our infamous Alternate Side Parking regulations is yet another of the Ten Thousand Reasons to Not Own a Car in New York City. Yesterday, for instance, the rules were suspended in honor of the Immaculate Conception. Perversely, this observance means that half the streets in the city will fester with refuse for another week.

Woody Allen once said the only cultural advantage to living in Los Angeles was being able to turn right on red. This is only an advantage if one drives a car, which many people in NYC never do. It is entirely possible to function here without ever bothering to get a driver's license, and suffer no great shame from it. I would even go so far as to say that, unless you are very rich or live very far from a subway, owning a car in NYC makes you an fool.

Many New Yorkers, therefore, never have to suffer being judged as a human being through an assessment of their driving style. Growing up in the Chicago area, I knew there were only two kinds of drivers: Idiots, who were the people driving slower than me; and Maniacs, who were the people driving faster than me. There was a third group as well, the people who were driving just like me, but on short jaunts to the mall they were rather tough to ferret out. On longer road trips, though, say at least a hundred miles or so, it was only natural to fall into a pack of other vehicles all travelling at a mutually acceptable speed. This is not a bad metaphor for discovering one's peer group.

The packs in which I travelled invariably drove rather faster than the speed limit. I think it is the nature of packs to set their own rules. What kind of driver did we unconsciously want in our group? Certainly not the damn fool driving the limit, but also not the crazy speed demon. We were too clever for the idiot mainstream, but we were not maniac extremists. We were the clever drivers. We were the edgy drivers.

The word "edgy" has a tremendous amount of cultural currency in New York. "We want edgy." Everyone says that here. What they invariably mean is, "We want art that won't be liked by the people we don't respect." That is to say, they want something the idiots won't understand. But truly groundbreaking work? Work which does not simply "push" boundaries, but obliterates them?

Only maniacs would appreciate that.

Chilo, the Human Chimpanzee

2006-12-03T11:15:00.000-05:00

'Allo, govna!

Chilo just had a birthday. He is now quite an old primate. Sometimes, he forgets to wear his top-hat.

The best thing about Chilo is, if you need a dinner or theater companion, or maybe just someone to sit shiva, you can always put a white bib on Chilo, give him his top hat, and people will think you are accompanied by a gentleman in formal attire.

This page has an actual picture of Chilo. Why then does the text identify him as "Mary Lou?" Did the folks at the Milwaukee Zoo think we would not recognize our friend Chilo without his top-hat? This makes me very irritated.

I am in a room in a house in a suburb on the Interstate corridor between Milwaukee and Chicago, feeling very much the fancy monkey. Chilo's image laughs at me from the wall. We would both rather be throwing our own poop.

With the greatest respect...

2006-11-30T10:58:00.000-05:00

This photo was taken on the street in the Soho section of London.

Knowing the proclivity of the English for saying one thing yet meaning another, I suspect this shop probably sells socks.

The famed "British courtesy" in particular appears to stem from a desperate desire not to acknowledge the needs and desires of other people.

Checking in at Heathrow for my flight to New York, I requested a window seat, as I am mildly claustrophobic. Looking out the window generally enables me to pretend that my knees are not pressed up against my chest in an airless tin can. "No trouble at all, sir," said the check in lady, and I made my merry way to the gate.

Upon boarding the plane, I discovered to my horror that, while I did in fact have the seat nearest the fuselage, there was no window in my row. My window seat had no window. I sat down and began to sweat, my anxiety rising as the other seats filled in with boarding passengers.

Soon, a couple sat down in the aisle and middle seats next to me. Being average-sized Americans, they were quite obviously too large for the miniscule coach-class chairs. Also, they smelled like they had both just eaten full English Breakfasts, blood pudding and all. I started to feel light-headed. Perhaps it had not been the best of ideas to spend the previous evening in a futile endeavor to match a couple of Englishmen pint for pint. I sipped from a bottle of Coke, and nonchalantly began searching the seat pocket in front of me for the barf bag.

A stewardess approached.

"Are you quite comfortable?" she asked.

"Actually," I said, "I think I'm going to have to switch seats. I requested a window seat, but I don't have a window."

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm a little claustrophobic, and I feel like I'm being pressed against the wall here." Actually, I felt like I had been packed into the bottom of a can of processed meat. Nausea came in great waves.

"You asked for an aisle seat, sir?"

"No, I wanted a window seat. I need to look out the window. But..." I gestured dramatically to the blank wall on my left, "no window. I need to move." The stewardess seemed to be standing ten feet above me. I thought, this must be what it feels like to be buried alive.

"Are you seated in your ticketed seat, sir?"

"Yes. But I need to switch. Like, now. I feel sick." The plane began to spin. I anxiously rifled through all the seat pockets in my row, as the other Americans eyed me nervously. No barf bags to be found.

"I'm terribly sorry, but you'll have to remain in your assigned seat until we're airborne, and the captain has turned off the 'fasten seatbelts' sign. Then you may relocate, should we have any available seats. Thanks ever so much, sir."

The stewardess smiled, and walked off to ignore some other passengers. It was like the scenes in zombie films, where the evil Voodoo priestess cackles overhead as the undertaker closes the casket lid. I wanted to scream, "Don't let them bury me! I'm not really dead!"

"You OK?" asked the American woman, "You don't look so good."

"Sorry, I gotta get out," I said, and stood up as the Americans hurriedly made way for me. They could see a bad thing was about to happen.

I lurched into the aisle, and grasped the back of an empty end seat in the middle section. The stewardness noticed me.

"Sir, I'm sorry, but you'll have to wait until later to move."

I tried to fully right myself, and quickly realized there was no hope of making the bathrooms. I rifled through several more seat pockets. No barf bags anywhere. How very optimistic of them. I tore the plastic covering off of a blanket. No way that was going to work. I considered the water-retaining capabilities of the pillow case. Nope. The Coke bottle. That was going to have to do it. It would be tricky, though.

"Sir." The stewardess strode toward me, looking vexed.

I leaned over and retched into the coke bottle — mostly. A bit of ick hit my shoes, a bit hit the floor, a bit hit one of the empty seats.

I wiped the ick from my face, dropped down in an empty seat in the middle section, and looked over at the stewardess. She stood frozen for a couple of seconds, then abruptly turned and walked away.

One by one the other passengers quietly moved away from me, until practically everyone in the cabin was now seated in a different seat.

In classic English fashion, no one on the plane acknowledged that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. The capped Coke bottle of vomit rested in the seat pocket next to me for the entire flight.

I was, however, given one extra "Refreshing Facial Towelette" when those were distributed.

[Postscript: I feel like something of a whiner at this point, given that my flight could just have easily come with duty-free Polonium-210 service.]

End of the Union

2006-11-27T05:38:00.000-05:00

It's time to stop pretending we get along so terrifically well. Time to "break up" a bit.

No, I'm not referring to the fact that the English wish to secede from the UK, however strange and fascinating I find that to be.

I'm talking about our two countries, America and Britain, and the bizarre, co-dependent relationship we have.

It's instructive for us to remember that we fought two wars against each other, essentially just the other day in European time. Our national anthem was born from the second of these wars. The Brits sacked and burned Washington, DC. They remember this better than we do.

Tony Blair jokingly apologized for the arson thing when he addressed a joint session of Congress a couple of years ago. At both the start and finish of his speech, he received the longest standing ovations I've ever seen.

Why? Iraq, of course. Because they joined up with us against pretty much the entire world.

But, why did they do this? I understand why we went in, kinda, in some ways... but, the Brits? All the evidence suggests that they were wholly convinced we didn't know what the hell we were doing. And they still came along for the ride.

I suppose it's a bit like agreeing to be the best man at the marriage of your closest friend to the woman you know will ruin his life. And then giving a rousing toast to the couple's happiness at the reception. And then going on the honeymoon with them. And then all moving in together. And then assiduously dedicating yourself to the task of preventing the rest of the world from discovering just how miserable your friend has become.

If America is drunk on power, it's the Brits who keep passing us the bottle.

Cheers!

We shall defend our island

2006-11-25T05:40:00.000-05:00

You already know what this is; it's a London telephone box.

Likewise, you know that they drive on the opposite side of the road here, their language as written bears little relation to the way it is pronounced, and they adamantly refuse to give up their monarchy.

Or their currency. There seems little danger of the Brits dropping the pound sterling any time soon. And why would they? The exchange rates they get are phenomenal — particularly against the US dollar (I hope you took my earlier advice and sold all your dollars, because things looks bad.).

What with their fabulous currency and dirt-cheap airfares to the bulk of the Continent, the British are weekend-colonizing Europe. Each Friday evening, planeloads of drunken Brits dash across the tarmacs of Central & Eastern Europe, in a mad rush to drink, gamble, and whore at cut-rate prices. Those with more sedate tastes are gobbling up cheap real-estate, and marvelling at the infinitesimal cost of living. Even France, to its chagrin, has found itself under theat of invasion.

How has this happened? Why is the British citizen once again the richest exploiter on the planet?

This island is a case-study in the benefits of cultural and economic protectionism. Seeing what happens economically and socially to countries that fully comply with the desires of the World Bank et al to fully disarm in the face of international capital and culture (and the US is not immune; see, for example, the case of California), it's impossible not to admire the Brits for sticking up for themselves.

I've never actually seen anyone using a telephone box here — everyone naturally has cellphones. Their presence, like that of the Queen, is almost entirely decorative. But like the driving on the wrong side bit, and the confusing spelling bit, there is great power in deliberate difference. "We are British before we are European," says the telephone box, "and we are certainly not American." (Is there a single working payphone in NYC?)

The famous 4 June 1940 Churchill speech, from which I excerpted the title of this entry, is notable in that its most renowned passage — "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" — contains only one word not descended from Old English: surrender.

Long live the Empire of the Telephone Box.

Liberty, love

2006-11-23T05:05:00.000-05:00

Flashback to Budapest:

Szent István Király, a.k.a. King Steven I of Hungary, doesn't look so happy here. In stark contrast to the image of majestic command on display in the Castle District, Steven seems introspective here, anxious. It could be because his horse is trying to edge him off of the pedestal.

Or it could be because of the location. Steven is looking roughly in the direction of the Cave Chapel, which was built by Pauline monks into a part the natural cave system of Gellért Hill. On Easter in 1951, the Communist Secret Police stormed the Cave Chapel, arrested all the monks on charges of treason, executed their leader, and sentenced the rest to prison. The Chapel itself was walled up, and only reopened in 1989.

Behind Steven is the Liberty Bridge, or "Szabadság híd" in the original Magyar. In front of him, over the Cave Chapel, looms the Hungarian Statue of Liberty, or "Szabadság-szobor." This statue, erected in 1947, boasted an original inscription which read, "Erected by the grateful Hungarian Nation in memory of the liberating Russian heroes."

As you might imagine, the word "szabadság" is quite historically loaded for the Hungarians.

While in Budapest, I had the chance to see a new Hungarian film, "Szabadság, szerelem." The official English title is "Children of Glory;" but, the literal translation is "Liberty, love." It's about the 1956 Hungarian Olympic water polo team, which had the distinction of winning a gold medal for a nation that did no longer existed (the Soviets having re-taken the country while the team was en route to the Games).

The picture was an odd amalgam of European Arthouse Film and Hollywood Action Movie, with the 1st Assistant Director given prominent billing in the credits for directing all the fight & water polo scenes. So, half the film was directed by one person, half by another. As such, vigorously paced battle scenes had a tendency to inexplicably lead to long, static shots of composed drama.

Of course, the real problem may have been too many writers: four are credited, which probably means at least six worked on it. And one of them is... Joe Eszterhas. Yes, that Eszterhas, the guy who wrote such classics as "Flashdance", "Basic Instinct", "Showgirls", and "Basic Instinct 2" (Electric Bugaloo).

I went to see this film with my friend Ljova, his fiancée Inna, and their friend Jeff. And at some point mid-way through the film, I started getting very nervous. The four of us were clearly not responding to the film as its many authors had intended. As Americans, there was no way we could hold back from laughter at the bathetic dialogue (e.g., "Grandfather says, sometimes you have to hit back!" the lead water polo player exclaimed, before going outside to blast away a group of Secret Police.). I think Ljova (who is from Russia) and Inna (who is from Lithuania) couldn't help but identify at least a bit with the evil Soviets in the film, since they were speaking in Russian. Inna in particular couldn't help but sing along every time the Soviet anthem played — as it inevitably did to announce some horrid disaster about to befall the poor Hungarians. And as four Jews, the inevitable paranoia kicked in: At the climactic moment of the film, as brave Hungarians are being massacred onscreen, they run about wailing, "The Soviets have betrayed us! The Americans have abandonded us! And the Jews are to blame!" And there we sat, thankfully in one of the back rows, four American Jews, two of us former Soviets, as we were collectively blamed onscreen for the Great Hungarian National Tragedy. Fortunately, the English-subtitled screening was only sparsely attended, and had likely not attracted the most ferverent Magyar nationalists.

At the end of the film (spoiler warning), in contravention of the movie's title, the Hungarians end up with neither freedom nor love... unless the defection to the West of the entire national water polo team counts as freedom.

Could that be why Steven looks so unhappy?

Mind the glass, please

2006-11-21T12:13:00.000-05:00

You see here the Nová Scéna, the modern extension of the Prague National Theater, built in the waning days of the Soviet puppet state. It is covered in its entirety by frosted glass blocks.

The Czechs are famous for their glassmaking. As far back as then Bronze Age, the Celtic Boii tribe (thus, "Bohemia") were crafting glass jewelry. When the Boii got kicked out by the Slavs, I guess they must have dropped a bead or two behind, because the proto-Czechs really took to the stuff. Fast-forward to the turn of the 18th century, and the Czechs were the acknowledged masters of glass and crystal. And by the turn of the next century, Danny Swarovski had his thing happening.

Given their national affinity for glassmaking, it should come as no surprise that the Czechs likewise have an important historical relationship to windows.

For throwing people out of them, that is.

I speak now of the Defenestrations of Prague. Two are officially acknowledged. The first occured in 1419, when enraged Protestants tossed the mayor and several city councilmen out the windows of town hall to their deaths. The second occured in 1618, when enraged Protestants tossed two Roman Catholic councillors (and their scribe, how cruel) out the windows of Prague Castle. These two survived, supposedly beacause they landed on the massive dung heap that was there from all the chamber pots tossed out the castle windows (though the Church claimed it was "angels" who cushioned their fall). The third defenestration (such a brilliant word) may or may not have occured in 1948, when presumably cold, calculating Communists tossed Czech nationalist Jan Masaryk to his death out a window in the Foreign Ministry.

Officially, Masaryk's death was ruled a suicide; however, it was noted that the window from which he supposedly leapt was closed when they found the body.

You will note that this building the Communists built has lots of glass, but no actual windows. Clever fellows.

The world's most heavily guarded street

2006-11-20T12:57:00.000-05:00

Is it in front of the Whitehouse? The Pentagon? The UN? Any Israeli consulate anywhere in the world?

No, silly, it's Prague's "most visited street" (according to all the tourist propaganda), the Golden Lane!

You see here one plainsclothes and four uniformed security personnel, vigilantly defending the former shanty-town where Kafka briefly lived with his sister in 1917. To actually set foot on the street, one has a to purchase a ticket — all in order to be permitted to visit... gift shops. Trinket stores. And the Franz Kafka café.

Again, I think he might have appreciated this.

People of Whom We Know Nothing

2006-11-19T11:08:00.000-05:00

This is the Franz Kafka statue in the Josefov section of Prague. As it was erected in 2004, presumably it is not a perfect likeness.

Josefov, which used to be the Jewish ghetto, strikes me as the equivalent of "Little Italy" in NYC. There are a panoply of Judaica shops, synagogues, kosher restaurants, and guided tour companies; however, little or none of what looks to be authentic, indigenous Jewish life.... As opposed to in Budapest, where, for example, you can still get good kosher baked goods (though, what with all the new construction in that district, I fear that something like Josefov might be in the works).

Aside from the loss of almost the entirety of its Jewish population, Prague was spared the devastation of World War II. Budapest, on the other hand, largely preserved its Jewish ghetto, but was blown to smithereens by the Soviets.

Twice.

The second time was of course in 1956, when the Hungarian population rose up and said, "Hey, Communism is OK, but how about a little less of the Stalin-type thing?" And the Soviets sent in the tanks, and the Hungarians vainly fought back, and no one helped them, and they all got killed.

Twelve years later, in 1968, the folks in Prague had a similar notion. They said, "Hey, Communism is OK, but how about a little less of the Stalin-type thing?" And the Soviets sent in the tanks, and... and that was pretty much the end of it.

Yes, I know that everyone took to the streets to wave signs and all that, and that Kundera got a good book idea (or three); but, the Czechoslovaks were not about to do anything as foolish as take on half a million Warsaw Pact troops, and get their capital razed in the process.

Here's an interesting thought, though: What if they had taken up arms against the Soviets? Would we have come to their aid?

When the Nazis proposed to annex Czechoslovakia in 1938, Neville Chamberlain, then the Prime Minister of Great Britain, famously rejected opposing Hitler on the grounds the whole matter was "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing." In simple terms, he didn't give a shit.

But that is not the American way. If nothing else, we like to think we care; and, in 1968, we were involved in just such a "quarrel": Vietnam. What for us was a battle between the forces of Social Democracy and Totalitarian Communism, was for the Vietnamese largely about self-determination. But if the Czechoslovaks had fought back against the Soviets, that really would have been the war we thought we were fighting in Vietnam. And that would have made us look really weak, because I still think we would have done nothing — just like in Hungary in 1956. The cost would have seemed too high.

As a contemporary analogy, imagine that we went to war with one of our enemies because we thought that they had weapons of mass destruction, and they did not, and then another one of our enemies proudly displayed to the world that they really did have weapons of mass destruction, and we did nothing much about it.

It would make us look pretty weak, no?

But I think Kafka would appreciate it.

Hats are OK in Praha

2006-11-19T08:01:00.000-05:00

As a bookend to my "Bonus Prize Question" post fro Budapest, I present the following image from near Old Town Square in Prague.
Unlike the Hungarians, the Czechs are apparently OK with Men in Hats and Small Girls Also in Hats holding hands. Which just goes to show what a decadent city this is.

Lingua Franca

2006-11-18T17:31:00.000-05:00

This is the sign over the front door of the bar underneath the pensione where I am now staying in Prague.

Americans would recognize the name (but not the flavor) of the beer which is served here: Budweiser. Suffice it to say that it is delicious and cheap — a little less than $1.50 a pint, at our current, miserable exchange rate.

As an American travelling abroad, I believed there was one thing of which I could be certain: that I was a cultural chauvinist. In my travels, I would unreasonably expect everyone to speak English, and act indignant when people demanded to be spoken to in their native languages.

Admittedly, things were tough in Hungary; many people in the shops and on the streets know little or no English whatever.
What I did not realize, though, is that English is not necessarily thought of as "belonging" to any one culture — be it the Americans', the Austrailans', or even that of the English themselves (who seem to have a deliberate preference for the most oblique of semantic constructions possible).

No, English is our Lingua Franca. English belongs to the world now.

A couple of nights ago, as I sat in a bar having drinks with Ivan the Spaniard with the Russian name, and Achim the German with the Hebrew name (though adamantly not Jewish), the fact struck us: "Isn't this wonderful?" said Ivan, "I am Spanish, he is German, you are American, and we can all talk in English. They tried this with Esperanto, and it didn't work. But now, everyone in the world can talk to each other in English."

This was not the first time I heard this sentiment. On the flight to Budapest from Paris, the Hungarian woman seated next to me marvelled that English was my mother tongue. "I speak Hungarian, because that is where I come from," she said, "and, I speak English, so I can do business in the world. But you, you grew up speaking English. It is amazing to me. That language does not seem like it is from a place. It is what we learn to talk to people from other cultures."

Certainly, the English themselves would disagree; and, they have their own terribly rich linguistic history and are welcome to it. But for we Americans, though, I think this woman was right. The language for us is not from a place. It is an idea, the idea that people from many places can learn to communicate with each other. We simplified the language, made it more direct and obvious, peppered it with borrowed expresions from our various immigrant groups, and it now knows no single master.

Obviously, something is lost in all this. Like the beer we call "Budweiser," our mother culture has been stripped of most of its authenticity. I think it still strikes Europeans as odd that there can be such a creature as an "American." We are not a people but a force. We are the force of equivalence. We say, "You are Hungarian, you are French, you are Ethiopian, you are Sri Lankan — great, you can all speak to each other in plain English, and in so doing, you are all Americans."

Bonus Prize Question

2006-11-17T14:26:00.000-05:00

This is a street sign on Váci Utca. Anyone want to guess as to its meaning?
My money's on, "It is not permitted for Men in Hats to hold hands with Small Girls Also in Hats."

Looking Busy

2006-11-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

Here in Budapest, they are quite literally laying down tiles in front of my feet as I walk along the streets.

This entire city is in the process of becoming. I saw at least one crane every other block in District VII today. As I write this, someone is jackhammering next door.

I can discern no central strategy from what I see — half-finished condos here, half-finished sidewalks there, half-renovated historic buildings everywhere, and an as yet conjectural new metro line — and nothing looks like it's going to be completed any time soon. My new Spanish friend Ivan summed up my questions nicely, as he stumbled drunkenly through an empty facade on the main tourist drag of Váci Utca last night, and began to urinate into the giant pit therein. "They are no ever going to build this," he said, spraying wildly, "they have no fucking money!"

So, Budapest's construction philosophy, much like the Hungarian goverment's economic policy, seems to be: Look Busy. Make it seem like you're fixing up everything all at the same time. Do it during the miserable late fall, when there's like 3 hours of sun each week and it rains a bit every day, so it seems particularly industrious. Break up the sidewalks. Lay down some new tiles.

If some American investor-type were to show up for a visit, they would get the impression that this city was on the verge of becoming something really nifty. Of course in the US, conspicuous construction projects tend to provoke either civic pride or civic petulance, and often both. But here, there's a kind of odd resignation. As the citizens stomp along the new sidewalk tiles just as they're laid, or gamely attempt to maneuver their ancient Trabants around cranes parked dead in the middle of the street, glances are exchanged, heads are nodded, entirely undecipherable Magyar words are spoken, and there is a mutual acknowledgement that these projects will never end, that things will always be thus, that things have ever been thus, and that they are merely performing an ancient ritual of fealty to a foreign master. Once, it was the Turks. Then the Austrians. Then the Germans. Then the Soviets. Now, it is us.

Hostile

2006-11-16T06:16:00.000-05:00

This is the closest restaurant to the hostel where I'm staying in Budapest. I have not yet eaten here.

This is the only sign indicating the existence of my hostel. When I first arrived, it took me about 20 minutes to find it.

The hostel is tucked away in an apartment on the first floor of a building which looks like it still bears the scars of the Soviet incursion. On the upper floors, you can see the bullet holes in the walls.

This is the six bed dorm room where I am staying. The bed with all the crap on it is mine. Different people keep cycling through this place. The worst were a couple of Australians, who yelled obsceneties at each other into the early hours of the morning, broke glasses, and knocked over furniture. Oddly enough, I don't even think they'd been drinking.

We are the new Third World

2006-11-15T12:56:00.000-05:00

This is a bad sign.

Back in late August, the going rate for the US Dollar was 219 Forints. Shortly thereafter, the Prime Minister of Hungary was caught on tape admitting that he and his party had been lying about the country's financial situation. His words:
"...we have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. It can be explained. We have obviously lied throughout the past 18 to 24 months. It was perfectly clear that what we were saying was not true." [complete text]

In the aftermath of this revelation, and coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, students rioted in the streets of Budapest. The police went around beating up tourists in cafes.

And the reaction in the world currency markets? The dollar drops like a rock compared to the Forint, losing almost 10% of its value. Even in the short time I've been here, I figure I could have gotten about a 2% return if I'd just changed all my dollars into Forints on day one.

I am officially starting a panic. Sell all your dollars. Move to a more stable country, like Thailand. Never mind the change in Congress, we are quickly becoming the poorest post-industrialized people in the world. When Europeans start bragging to you about how they couldn't pass up the opportunity to purchase a flat in Manhattan, because it was just too cheap not to, you know there's a problem.

The Fourth-Saddest Song in The World

2006-11-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

This sign marks the place where in 1932 Rezső Seress is supposed to have first played "Gloomy Sunday," a.k.a., "The Hungarian Suicide Song." Made famous in America by Billy Holiday, at one time banned by the BBC, legends abound of previously upbeat individuals flinging themselves from bridges and throwing themselves under busses after hearing just a couple of verses. Should you wish to really test yourself, Björk has covered it recently.
It goes without saying that Seress was Jewish. He lived and played in District VII, the old Jewish Quarter, which boasts the massive Great Synagogue — one of the world's largest. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was born just down the street, and had his Bar Mitzvah here.
Hungary recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the failed 1956 revolution, wherein they proclaimed a democratic government, withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, and begged the United States for help as Soviet tanks proceeded to blast the hell out of Budapest.
And we did... nothing.
And the Hungarians blame... the Israelis.
Why? Because while Hungarian schoolchildren were tossing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks, the Israeli army blitzed through the Sinai and took over the Suez Canal. And canals, you see, are very important, so we were a bit distracted.

You can find the lyrics to "Gloomy Sunday" here.

"Fourth-Saddest" refers to the song's place in a competition held by the BBC to determine what was the most depressing song ever written. Seress threw himself out a window in 1968. I don't know if this was before or after the competition results were announced.

Bathhouse Fun

2006-11-13T14:54:00.000-05:00

Ah, the Gellért Baths. There's nothing so beneficial to one's constitution as a long soak in mildly radioactive waters. According to the official literature (www.spasbudapest.com), the Magyars have believed in the powers of these "miraculous" (their quotation marks, not mine) carbonic waters since the 15th century.
Coincidentally, Hungary has also not won any wars since the 15th century.
St. Gellért, for whom the baths are named, and whose statue imperiously looms over Pest from the far side of the adjacent, eponymous hill, was a Venetian missionary who had the great good fortune to become Hungary's first Christian martyr. When King (later Saint) Steven made the patently political decision to align himself with the Catholic Church, and in the process covert the whole of the Magyar nation overnight to Christianity, the local folk didn't take it too well. They stuffed Gellért naked inside a spiked barrel, and rolled him down the hill into the Danube River... thereby instigating the Budapest bathing tradition.

Budapest... the Chicago of Eastern Europe

2006-11-12T11:02:00.000-05:00

If the Soviets had "liberated" the city, and you added in several ornate castles and a few massive public baths, Chicago would look much like Budapest.

Well, maybe not so much. There are no "naked Indian on horseback" statues here.

But what strikes me is the similarity in the colors of the landscape and buildings. Also, the complete disregard for construction esthetics, apart from the downtown and the historic buildings. The Soviet-style housing blocks? They look like Cabrini Green (albeit in better condition). And the Szoborpark, where the Hungarians have unceremoniously dumped all their Socialist statues, and where I snapped this photo of Lenin rending the heavens? It's been slapped together behind some suburban housing tract on the outskirts of Buda, which looks like nothing so much as... Libertyville, Illinois. Lenin looks a bit like he's trying to sell me a duplex.

Spleen

2006-10-29T01:24:00.000-05:00

The U.S. Government is going door to door collecting spleens, and Calvin Whiteman is next on their list.

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