I spent most of this past week’s festivities enjoying the moment instead of running around snapping pictures, so I can offer only a paltry collection. Luckily the day of the marriage ceremony included a professional photographer and his $5k Nikon digital SLR (almost worth gettin’ hitched just to register for one), so posterity need not worry about a lack of documentation.
It’s slow going here as I try to resume some semblance of a normal schedule after a week off work, couch-squatters, happy hours, and a jubilant wedding, so let me toss my hat back into the ring to try and reverse nearly ten days of inexcusable absence. Bear with the sincere tone and lack of vitriol, which should hopefully return as I replenish the frustration deposits cleansed away with a Russian bath house, dancing and ale.
First, a couple quick shout-outs from a shut-in, to the Push Fluids triumvirate (diagnosis: M.D.) and a swarthy legal eagle named Sam (verdict: J.D.). The bestowment of your graduate degrees helps to dispel the perception of our generation as self-entitled and self-obsessed lollygaggers, a notion I have tried exceedingly hard to promote by maintaining this web site.
Second, a hearty congratulations goes out to Josh and Cristina whose wedding I had the pleasure of attending this past weekend. It amazes me how all it takes is one brief ceremony and a marriage license to transform late-night escapades with strangers from merely taboo to full-fledged swinging. Pictures (of the wedding) to come.
[Samuel Johnson] included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error. On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.” This story thus illustrates how dictionaries are often viewed as providing norms and how the ultimate arbiter in language, even for the dictionary itself, is popular usage.
Thus the interesting history of the word internecine is used to equate language to never-ending arbitration proceedings. I rather like this idea, that all speakers in a linguistic community are one gigantic committee locked in negotiations, chasing a definitive collective bargaining agreement that will elude them like a carrot dangled in front of a mule.
While on the subject of language, let me except a statement by Burt Reynolds I came upon today from the June 2005 issue of Esquire magazine that, should some committee member duplicate the ambition of Samuel Johnson, clearly deserves a place under the entry for urbanity (available online only with an Esquire subscription):
For a long time, if you were seeing a psychiatrist, you were thought of as being a wacko. But because of good ol' Dr. Phil, people know we need to talk to someone who just sits there and is nonjudgmental and says, "Do you think it's a good idea not to have a bowel movement for three months?" Because a lot of stuff gets clogged up there, and you gotta get some of it out. And getting it out is painful, and you can bleed.
If anyone wants to drop me a line (morland at this domain name, you know, theoretic.org) and let me know why that last post got picked up by one or more podcasts, that'd be just super. iPodder isn't very forthcoming with its referral information.
My (ex)coworker Miyuki's band, The Rogers Sisters, had a song featured in this week's past The O.C. for a solid two minutes, causing big waves in my small, petty world. It starts right as Julie like, totally gets her comeuppance and ends right as Summer literally cracks the whip to stop Seth and Zach from fighting. But gosh, wouldn't it be better if I had a clip to show you instead of describing it?
I don't know enough about transcoding video to create MPEG and Quicktime formats, although I wanted to. If you're in-the-know, share the flame of your knowledge with me.
Gladwell's a best-selling writer, commanding an estimated $800,000 a year from speaking engagements alone and having his book "The Tipping Point" become the blow-up doll du jour for the trend-horny MBA groupthink priapism, so I'm certainly not impugning his ability to understand "EBIGfY: HTPCIAMUS", nor formulate clear and cogent opinions thereof, for I am certain it dwarfs that of yours truly - and I'm not being facetious. Plus, his body of solo work aside, Gladwell's a reviewer for The New Yorker and eminently qualified. But my first thought when I saw his name in the byline was "this is as insular as having Ben Stiller review an Owen Wilson movie".
The comparison is less shoehorned than it might appear at first. Sharon Waxman wrote an article just this past March about how Stiller, Wilson et al. had formed "Hollywood's funniest clique" - a loosely-affiliated group that cross-pollinated each other's work and created an audience for themselves largely out of sheer persistent inundation and the Will to Humor:
The funnymen appear in one another's movies, from "Dodgeball" to "Anchorman" to "Elf" to "Zoolander," creating a wheel-of-comedy effect that can leave viewers wondering just whose movie they're watching. What's more, the stars and their representatives live, work and play in a continuum that has virtually shut the studios out of the development process. By coming up with their own concepts, finding screenwriters and then offering the whole package for production - script, director and cast, take it or leave it - this group is reshaping screen humor to their liking.
Well, there's a new clique of pop academics ("nü-business' most prescient cabal"? "publishing's keenest cadre"?) adopting the very same "smart-dumb" ethos as Waxman's subjects and targeting it squarely at corporate America and armchair socio-futurists. It includes, at a minimum: Gladwell, Johnson, James Surowiecki, Chris Anderson, and Stephen J. Dubner**. Now writing texts like these doesn't involve the same type of cross-casting and side-by-side collaboration as creating a motion picture might (though I'd love a Gladwell cameo in "The Long Tail"), but there are interconnections that would make the Hapsburgs blush. Gladwell and Surowiecki both work full-time for The New Yorker. Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired, where Johnson is a contributing editor. Johnson also happens to write for The New York Times Magazine, to which Dubner - an editor at the Times for several years - is a regular contributor. Oh, and Dubner writes for The New Yorker too. They know each other. They like each other. Here's Steven Johnson's reaction to Gladwell's review:
it's especially nice to have [a review] written by Malcolm Gladwell, whose writing and ideas have influenced me in a million ways, small and large, over the past ten years.
And what about crossover in readership? Here's a screengrab from Amazon.com, telling us which other books purchasers of "EBIGfY: HTPCIAMUS" bought, as of today:
Dubner, Gladwell, and Surowiecki. For a book by Johnson. Only Anderson's missing and I have a sneaky suspicion that's because his book isn't finished yet (you can interactively explore this incestual relationship using this java-based Amazon catalog browser).
So why, oh my god why, do I care? Let me pull from Waxman again:
"We are all the spawn of Hal Ramis," Mr. Apatow said, referring to the director or co-writer of the last generation's touchstone comedies, like "Animal House" and "Meatballs."
"Starsky and Hutch" was funny. Was it "Animal House"? No, but the comedies by these new Hollywood funnymen don't need to - and make no pretenses to - strive for classical resonance, deep cultural significance, or high societal import. They're funny in a disposable, hollow, meringue cookie kind of way. It's precisely why they're enjoyable. But what about the authors?
If the smart-dumb comedians are the spawn of Harold Ramis, the smart-dumb authors are the spawn of Marshall McLuhan.
"Blink" was insightful. Was it "The Medium is the Massage"***? No. Hecky naw. One aspect of McLuhan's imperishable legacy was that publishers began to address a new niche, a quasi-scholarly soup of prognosticating think-pieces and societal introspection. Neil Postman's 1986 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death", comes to mind, if only because it posits the antithesis to Johnson's "EBIGfY: HTPCIAMUS": that television was, due to the inherent nature of the medium, permanently and pervasively degrading public discourse by eroding our capacity to think clearly and critically. It was also described more than once as "McLuhanesque", and it's probably a bit more deserving of that adjective than any of the books by the smart-dumb authors I've mentioned above. Postman was, like McLuhan, a tenured academic; a Ph.D. unworried about offending potential readers or making himself marketable to future media-conglomerate employers. Academia sealed them off, gave them perspective that being a journalist knee-deep in the ephemeral fashions and fancies of a fickle public can't, even with a sabbatical. And that's just what every one of those smart-dumb authors is: first and foremost a journalist, used to writing articles instead of books (and good ones too - the review that sparked this tirade is no exception), dependent on qualitative analysis instead of quantitative****, having just enough space to raise important and provocative questions, but coming up just short of providing the answers.
The reading audience clamoring for two-thousand-page peer-reviewed treatises is orders of magnitude smaller than the readership buying "The Tipping Point" and "Freakonomics". Anyone working a 9-to-5 job will typically have just enough time to read nonfiction bordering on academic and not much beyond it. There's a strong demand there to be exploited. That's why it's called pop/armchair academia, and it's ok. Let me state clearly: I like these books, in the same light-hearted way I like those clique-y comedies, which really - in a less-neurotic world - ought to be all I'm concerned about. But it's not, because what I see, what Gladwell's review of Johnson's book shoved in my face, is a clique achieving unquestioned acceptance and disproportionate intellectual weight through the sheer ubiquity and prominence of their collective presence, each member reinforcing the certitude of the next, an arranged power marriage of merit with marketing.
*The title of this book once again reminds me that I cannot trust my instincts when it comes to capitalization rules. In a hurry, I would have left both instances of "Is" un-capitalized, and maybe even the "Us", but upon close inspection I see why I would have been lulled into thinking that by the specious trap of using word length as a shortcut criterion when the publisher has indeed got it right. My future as a copy editor is dire.
**I'm hesitant to lump Dubner's co-author, Steven D. Levitt in with the others, since Dubner is by far the more culpable of the two when it comes to committing the exaggerations, omissions, over-summarizing, and other errors of laziness/convenience. The book suffers because Levitt's theories and conclusions are watered down - he's really just an Economics Ph.D. whose only sin is being seduced by a few dollar signs, and I can forgive a wee bit of avarice - which is the crux of my whole rant here and, I suspect, Dubner's doing.
:: In a post-apocalyptic world marriage would take on added importance
Even if the destruction wasn't that bad - say if a virus killed 99% of the urban population but left the rural population and physical infrastructure largely intact - wedlock would be burdened with additional gravitas. Forget staying together "for the children", couples would now have to coexist peacefully "for the species", and that's enough to drive a man to drink (and how - by raiding the abandoned gin distillery).
Now let's be honest. Would the best way to repopulate the species be to engage in polyamorous group marriages (sometimes referred to as polygynandry or "line marriages")? Yes. Are you going to be the one to suggest that everyone turn their collective back on a tradition that grounds them and serves as a link to their past during a harrowing time when they need it the most? I don't think so. Just sip that martini and stay strong.
Alexis Bledel, star of Gilmore Girls: Born and raised in Houston, Texas. Daughter of Mexican and Argentinean parents, learned to affect an erudite (if stilted) nondescript American accent, helping her land the role of Rory, a well-bred college student and Connecticut native attending Yale university. Down-home Spanish-speaking Houstonian -> Connecticut WASP Yalie = fame + success + all-American sweetheart.
George W. Bush, star of That's My Bush: Born in New Haven, Connecticut. Heir to a blue-blood patrician political and financial dynasty, attended eastern preparatory schools and eventually Yale university before relocating to Houston, Texas. Learned to affect a humble southern accent (and allegedly learned Spanish), helping him land the role of 43rd President of the USA, a sometimes bumbling everyman whose propensity for strong conviction is matched by a singular inability to articulate it in a manner consistent with his education. Connecticut WASP Yalie -> Down-home Spanish-speaking Houstonian = fame + success + all-American sweetheart.
Never underestimate the American capacity for expedient reinvention.
The National Day of Prayer (tomorrow) website has a handy page listing prominent public officials for whom you should clasp your hands, genuflect, and plead to the heavens roughly thus:
Dear father, who art in heaven and art truly the awesomest and knowingest, who art the kind of "cool" god that doth buy a sixer of Natty for His children when they art underage, who broke up the Red Sea and reunited The Pixes, today I pray in most earnest fashion for the health, well-being, and continued sexual vigor of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns.
They have left the slots for state and local officials blank. This is ostensibly so that you may, for ecclesiastic extra-credit, research that yourself (warning: unlike the authorities endorsed and listed by NDP.org, they may be liberals!), but I'd like to think that, much as in Brewster's Millions*, it's a vote for "none of the above", or at least a bunch or underscores.
*Discovered while searching for this link: Brewster's Millions has been remade at least five times, once with a woman playing the titular character ("Miss Brewster's Millions").
Friday I was finally free from jury duty and decided to finish up the day working from home. Lacking the common sense to have picked up lunch, I decided to forego any further interruption and order in from the local Thai restaurant. They're one of those establishments that ties your address and name to your phone number, so all you have to give them is your own little ten-digit ID number and badly-mangled Thai dish name of choice, and your telephone conversation is over. When the food arrives all the pertinent bits of information are printed on the receipt, your name having acquired the suffix "Resident" as a tribute to their efficient desire to prepend, instead of overwrite, the default name for a new customer. Mine, reflecting the name of the first person to place an order from my apartment, still reads "Barrett Resident". So there I sat munching on some Pad See Ew, staring at this culinary invoice for a dead man, and feeling very much like I have in the weeks since I started referring to him in the past tense: highly emotionally constipated.
The dearth of posts here, really my state of reticence both on-line and off, has been largely the result of a belief that to move forward I must first eulogize and abreact. As weeks start to pass I'm beginning to realize that this belief is actually stifling my natural grieving process. This isn't an abscess that can be lanced and drained in one fell catharsis, this is a fresh wound that will take some time to heal, and even then as a scar. But still, if only to record my thoughts while they remain unfettered by composure and rawly stung, I think I should put something here, however incomplete and forced it may be. Not to get it all out, not to move on, but because failing to due so, failing to say something, anything, would trivialize the importance of a friend.
In an uncharacteristic act of initiative, it was I who sought Barrett out freshman year of college. He'd become somewhat of a class legend thanks to his facebook entry, which featured a photo of him in a huge, curly, blond wig and listed his interests (amongst row after row of everyone else's homogeneous "community service", "sports", and "greek life") as "social insurgency, butterflies". It would be a great disservice to us both, I reasoned, if we were not to meet. And so I looked up his number and gave him a call, whereupon we met and I experienced his ecstatic verbosity for the first time, parting with him after several hours.
This was to be a harbinger of our friendship over the years to come, for a couple of reasons. First, Barrett came in bursts - irrepressible, overwhelming, intense, and giddy bursts. While he shuffled around the country on one of his many extended hiatial dalliances it wasn't unusual to go months without seeing or hearing from him in the slightest. When he invariably breezed back into town it might be with a whimper or a boom, but you could be assured that if you set aside a few hours Barrett would fill them with regale-force winds and leave you almost less sure of what he'd been doing than before (he once sardonically called this in an email his "Unexpurgated Vault of Lies and Convenient If Not Patently Obvious Exaggerations"). At the very least I was acutely aware of being in the presence of someone for whom boredom was an alien sensation. Second, our friendship became, much like Barrett, highly independent. It stood apart from the mutual social circles, geography, and circumstance of which so many acquaintanceships are born. Sitting in the campus cafeteria that first night was no different than the stoop of his building several years later, or the roof of my apartment a year ago. It was just an ongoing conversation between him and I, and to hell with anything else.
Later freshman year we took a road-trip with our friend John to Chicago, using Barrett's car (a vehicle he knew quite well bestowed him with immediate respect amongst the pedestrians of the underclasspeople). As John endeavored to make romantic progress with a girl he knew from high school - our host for the night - Barrett and I retired to the car, resigning to simply sleep there as best we could. This plan was hampered somewhat as the temperature dropped, and we made intermittent shivering conversation through the cold Chicago night. Fetching our failed lothario the next morning at some ungodly hour from the heated and carpeted shelter we'd been promised, we drove to the John Hancock Tower and looked out from the observatory. In front of a novelty backdrop set up for just such an occasion, Barrett and I assumed comical poses as construction workers enjoying lunch on an I-beam. His friend Bryce was to later deem it the most disturbing photograph ever taken. I'd all but forgotten about it, until Barrett - six years later, now ending his tenure here in New York - handed me a framed copy as a departing gift. It's just large enough to hold the program from his funeral.
I think sometimes about his sense of humor, how the more awkward, tragic, or unpalatable a situation became, the more fodder for amusement it gave him - how he had such a clear perspective and sense of import that quotidian worries, from social etiquette to paying bills in a timely manner seemed put in their place. They were trivial distractions, and their failure to be recognized as such by people by and large was a constant source of bemusement and amusement for him. And the comedic self-flagellation, my god how that man would willingly hand over his ego to be feasted upon for the sake of a laugh. I'd like to think that with that insatiable self-deprecation he'd be the first to smile at the way things turned out. If not for that reason, I'm sure he'd crack a grin at having confounded expectations in a most flamboyant manner yet once again.
One of those expectations, that losing a peer is not something to be dealt with for some time, has been proven invalid in an excruciating and agonizing way. To realize that it's not just those walking before us, but those walking at our sides who are frail and vincible, at any time, without the slightest warning, is to acquire, for however transient a moment, a very clear viewpoint - one that underscores how meaningful others really are, how very little in this world is genuinely undeserving of your interest, and how confusingly simple the mere act of living can be. It is, in essence, to be given the gift of thinking as Barrett did, if only until the suffocating and petty concerns of the day-to-day relegate us back down from his level. Only a rare few occupy that realm permanently. This one in particular will be missed dearly.
:: How to be just enough of a smartass during jury selection as to ensure dismissal without risking a charge of contempt
Say, for instance, the case involves a pedestrian suing a driver for medical expenses and punitive damages.
Attorney for the defense - a man seeking to ferret out potential bias: "You mentioned that your roommate was hit by an automobile recently. Should I be concerned about that?"
Prospective juror (in this example, the part of "prospective juror" will be played by me): "That depends on how much you wish for his well-being."
My (ex)coworker Miyuki's band, 