How Terribly Strange To Be Seventy

I just saw Simon and Garfunkel live and you did not. You are sick pig with jealousy.

I have loved those boys since I was a little kid. My parents had all their albums on vinyl and played them often. Without Simon & Garfunkel, there would be no Belle & Sebastian, so fuck off to all the too-cool for anything hipsters in the room.

My seat was in the second least expensive portion of the Air Canada Centre, which meant, after service charge, I paid $99.75. I would describe the quality of sound and of viewing as way better than I expected.

On their album Bookends, in the song "Old Friends," S & G sing:

Can you imagine us
years from today,
sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
to be seventy.

Both Art and Paul are 62. They opened with that song. So poignant.

I could complain and point out the reunion was about money, not love and grooviness. I could note that if Art Garfunkel was a sandwich, he would be ham and cheese. But I got to see them live and hear "The Sound of Silence." And sometimes that’s more enough.

Grab Bag

Working very hard the last few days. I offer "seen elsewhere" material until early next week.

From a recent David Olive article for the Toronto Star relating to the Black brouhaha: "Gotlieb, 75, was given the sinecure of Saturday Night publisher soon after Black acquired the magazine; and the former ambassador's wife, Sondra, was offered a venue for her tedious pensées on high-society etiquette in Black's National Post." (italics mine)

From Slate, on the recent Victoria Secret TV show:

This last is sported by our hostess Heidi Klum, the German supermodel who broke through as the Sports Illustrated swimsuit girl of 1998. In the five years since, Klum has done us the delightful favor of becoming Zsa Zsa Gabor, a blowsy, self-mocking hausfrau with historically important hooters. You know things have gotten pretty extreme on the body-image front when Heidi Klum looks blowsy, but there was something cheery about the sight of an actual stomach, that horizontal curve of flesh like a smile below her navel. Most of these girls have, in place of abdomens, sheer expanses of frontage, like extruded polystyrene surfboards. But if you can put aside the radical theory that they are actual members of your species (let alone gender), they are wonderful creatures to behold, alien marvels whose legs alone are taller than my entire boyfriend.

From YahooMail:

What is AddressGuard?
AddressGuard is a benefit of your Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription. It lets you create disposable email addresses to use whenever you do not want to give your real Yahoo! Mail Address.

Messages sent to any of your disposable email addresses will be automatically forwarded to your Yahoo! Mail account, and you can decide to direct these messages to a specific folder.

If any of your disposable email addresses start getting too much spam, you can simply delete it and messages sent to this address will start bouncing instead of filling up your account.

Somewhat cryptic message underneath the translucent CD divot of "The Sophtware Slump" by Grandaddy: "Good special thanks to ‘real job regular life’ people who practicing their art (thing they love) simply can’t could not afford to (no money) reality really, there is still so much gold in your days. We share parts. Hope it meant to you some good. This music. Thanks for participating as the Listeners."

Poetry Corner

Yet more evidence proving that Spam poetics could have made a killer newspaper column.

Speaking of which, I received this in my inbox, not minutes ago:

imaging actinide excessively popular meat microword explainable illustrative saxifrage hospitably methods hungered anglo mazes crater schooner materialize blushes polarograph scratchpad saws excise crack advise imbue pomp exorbitantly

exhumation exhales tanager mattress plebeian bentham scares bosom crayon temperately exasperates adorable counteract bodied bolivia excretes cosmetics posh matinee breachers postmultiply polarography mentioned acrimony acquitting metal exhaustive

executive target bellatrix coursing teaming exemplifier coverlets sawtimber bowing potentiometer teamster scalding satiate crabmeat tappet exceeding mechanize bohr illustrative alabama megabyte admissions tapped anthony idly icy bough

branched tears mediated postmasters microprocessing poking accompanying popularization arrhenius pollute idealizes hustles boa hums hypothesize courtly scalding screwed bombarded covert exalting portico estoppal matrices exchange taken scud pow boss exempt bourn scribing achieve horrifies horrendously berman boater breakfasted midsts schelling ali boatsmen scandalous box posthumous plays postmaster idiocy militarism exempted

correlative hornets satiate boatloads than arachne scoffer sawed humorously expanse postmortem ache acropolis tampon existent tantalum bailey courtly tasters posters possessors bergstrom taxicab hotel advisory explored credible

Snake Coyle

Coyle is the guy behind Dissecting Leah, a blog about Ms. McLaren. He quit doing the blog in September, and his last entry (see link above) gives a long, depressing, but mostly accurate list of his frustrations with the Great White North. Here is an excerpt, followed by no commentary on my part, because none is necessary:

Canada is a country overflowing with talent and yet it's products are - by and large - miserable at best. Why is this? I've lived in this country for most of my life and the people I know are smart, funny, interesting people. How is it possible that our nation consistently produces fifth rate cultural products?

The reason is simple. The reason is that the people who control culture in this country don’t give a fuck about it. And they don't have to.

It's not that they're evil, malevolent people, who eat babies while conspiring to keep our nation down; but rather the people who run our country's broadcasters, publishers, production companies and other media outlets are themselves a bunch of cynical business-people who just wouldn't know talent if it bit them on the ass and then later emailed them a message saying "I bit you on the ass earlier today, from Talent."

The truth is that the people that make these decisions get to keep their jobs because of legislation enacted by the government (these guys all know each other on a first name basis) which is designed to protect some ominous thing called "Canadian culture", when what it really does is protect these corporations from real competition… both from within and abroad. The result of this is that it tells the up and coming cultural producers to go fuck themselves. They don't need to sell interesting books or magazines or movie tickets or anything, because their subsidized paycheques will all just come out of taxpayers pockets, so they can all afford to work with the talentless hacks they've always done business with.

And that is precisely the message that Canada is giving it's artistic community: Fuck You.

So do you have an amazing idea for a movie? Fuck you, young promising director, the money's going to Paul Gross to make a shitty movie about curling, or whoever the fuck made Ginger Snaps.

Do you want make an interesting and funny TV show for CanWest Global? Fuck you, brilliant, unemployed producer, we're making Train 48.

Do you have a good idea for a novel? Fuck you, you unpublished nobody, this agency only works with "referrals" who write books about rural Saskatchewan.

Do you want a host a radio show for CBC radio? Fuck you, interesting person, we only accept people lacking personalities around here.

Do you want to write a hilarious weekly column for our newspaper, a Dave-Barry slice of life piece that will make everyone smile? Fuck you, you over-educated loser, the job's going to Rebecca Eckler.

Imagine that the NBA worked this way. Imagine that Shaq went up to the GM of the LA Lakers and said "I want to try-out for your team" and the GM responded by saying "Sorry, Shaq, thanks for applying, but the position is going to my nephew. He doesn't know much about basketball, being a 5'6 one-armed white kid from Oregon, but he's a quick learner." Just think about it for a second. Pretty funny, isn't it?

Now stop laughing, because this is the society we live in and it's pathetic, and it's not going to change.

(Thanks to Bookninja and especially Peter Darbyshire for alerting me to this.)

Jacko

I’m very anti-celebrity culture. You might not agree with my stance, but most would concede that a balanced media diet is a good thing to strive toward. Too much celebrity trans-fat is a terrible thing. Still, obviously I’m fascinated with the whole MJ thing, but without a TV, I miss most of the absoludicrous coverage. Lynn Crosbie has written intelligently about MJ in her Saturday Globe column (not her most recent blab, which was pretty good, but a column from a few months ago that really gave him the gears) and so has… well, that’s the only person I can think of immediately.

At the other end of the spectrum, I found a link to a transcript of the CNN show Reliable Sources which aired November 23. Now I haven’t watched Entertainment Tonight in a long time, so perhaps I’m too far removed from the world of infotainment to judge it accurately. But, well, um, just read this, which refers to the coverage of MJ turning himself in:

JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL, "CELEBRITY JUSTICE": It's wild and it is a scramble. And I'll tell you, you show up there and you're in a suit and high heels and you're running and your hose is getting ripped and people are pushing and shoving you. My photographer was nicked by the actual caravan as it went into the sheriff's booking center.

[…]

Well, I might feel a little silly at times, but I think it is a very legitimate story. And when I was up in Santa Maria covering the civil case, where Marcel Avrahm (ph), the promoter, was suing Michael Jackson, I shouted out a question and Michael Jackson answered me.

And for a second, his mask dropped, figuratively perhaps, and literally, and he said, to hell with Gloria Allred, because that's who I asked him about. And for one split second, we saw the real Michael Jackson behind the facade. And I think it was worth all that scrambling to get that authentic, genuine moment, because all these celebrities come out there with their mask and with their persona that they don't want us to crack, and we have to chase after them to crack it.

Real Woodward and Bernstein territory. Amazingly, it gets worse:

VELEZ-MITCHELL: But if one parent out there sees something in this coverage that says -- that sets off an alarm bell and says, you know, the guy down the block, Uncle Jack there that little Johnny is always visiting, maybe I won't let him go on that fishing trip, then we've done a service.

[…]

And there is a bedroom within the bedroom where -- that's apparently where his sleepover guest stayed, his young boy sleepover guest. I mean, if anybody looks at that and says, gosh, that reminds me of somebody else's bedroom that my child has contact with, then we've done a service. Child molestation is a very, very serious issue in this country.

Thankfully, the host of the show, Howard Kurtz replied, "Right, although I would hasten to point out that television networks don't often cover it as an issue unless a major league celebrity is evolved."

Two other things from the transcript:

WOLCOTT: Also, I have to say that my favorite new TV personality is Michael's personal magician, Majestic Magnificent. I mean, you would think calling yourself Majestic would be enough. But no, he's majestic and magnificent.

AND

According to the November 23, New York Times, Mark Geragos, Jackson's lawyer got 620 calls on his pager from reporters in one 24-hour period.

By the way, I forget where I found this old MJ interview snippet, but I assure you, it is real:

Q: Did you approach Invincible with a single theme in mind?

A: I never think about themes. I let the music create itself. I like it to be a potpourri of all kinds of sounds, all kinds of colors, something for everybody, from the farmer in Ireland to the lady who scrubs toilets in Harlem.

And they say he’s lost touch with the common people.

That Will Be Me in My Dotage

This old man is years behind in his New York Times reading. I can sympathize.

Chant With Me

I love saying Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. Come on. Say it.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone.

See what I mean? The music, according to the Vancouver-based Scratch Records mailing list, is "chock full of book-smarts, lovesick mood swings and calculated damage; simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking, comforting and jarring, all created solely with battery operated keyboards and electronics as instruments." One album is called "Pocket Symphonies For Lonely Subway Cars." Love it.

P.S. If you’re looking for the longest album title I’ve seen (longer than Death Cab For Cutie’s "We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes" you’ll want Bear Vs. Shark’s newest, "Right Now, You’re In The Best Of Hands. And If Everything Isn’t Quite Right, You’ll Know In a Hurry." Such verbiage inflation is only tolerated in the nebbish world of indie rock.

P.P.S. I recently finished reading the quite excellent novel Bear V. Shark by Chris Bachelder. More on that soon.

Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut Up Already About Metrosexuals! Please!

I realize I’m part of the problem, not the solution. Still, here is Richard Roeper on the topic (October 22, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times):

Now we're supposed to call such men "metrosexuals." And if we're to believe all the magazine articles and newspaper references and TV reports, our towns and cities are suddenly being overrun with untold thousands of these well-groomed, accessorizing, wine-sipping aesthetes who also dig football and lust for Halle Berry.

Yeah right. I saw tons of guys like that at the Bears-Raiders game a couple of weeks ago, and at the Cubs-Marlins games last week, and at Lizzie McNeil's pub the other night.

Of course, there are some men who fit the basic description of a metrosexual. No doubt you've had the experience of meeting someone you'd swear is gay, only to have him turn up at your Christmas party with the wife and kids.

But there have always been men like the Niles Crane character on "Frasier." I don't believe there are any more of these so-called metrosexuals today than there were 15 years ago. It's just that now we have the media, and various marketing machines, forcing this stupid term on us in story after story. It's not like they tripled in population just because "Queer Eye" is a hit and cosmetics companies are trying to sell beauty-man products.

Further to Roeper’s 15 years ago assertion, I found an interesting nugget in the 1972 classic-for-all-the-wrong-reasons book Subliminal Seduction. Here, author Wilson Bryan Key discusses Cosmo:

A typical article was titled, "She-Man, Today’s Erotic Hero." The "She-Man" wore feminine clothes, behaved submissively, and carried a pouch (purse). The "She-Man" was a "better lover, not ashamed or fearful of that part of himself which borders on or overlaps being feminine." The Cosmo male image, "loves woman as a man who envies them."

Finally, this treatise on metrosexuality, courtesy of Weisblogg.

Meanwhile, back in the non-metro world, thanks to Jeff MacIntyre for discussing Modern Dog Magazine. Also, I’m impressed at the speed in which Blogger responded to the Onion thing.

This Just In…

Imagine if you will: The year is 2003. Mid-November, to be exact, and a columnist from the Globe and Mail is pondering the vexation that is SPAM. Let us put forth a number of hypothetical intellectual considerations (all of which reasonable). We assume the author of this column, prior to penning the piece, will have deduced the following:

1) Roughly 99.9786574 percent of those reading the column will have already experienced the frustration of SPAM in some form or another.

2) Of that group, at least, say 85 percent have probably already read at least one article detailing the hassle, frustration, lost productivity and bandwidth waste related to unsolicited email.

3) From 1 and 2, we might conclude that a columnist in so lofty a forum as the Globe and Mail should tell us something we don’t already know.

4) Recent writings on the topic might (nay, should) be considered. The sworn enemy of the Globe, the National Post, recently wrote about Scott Richter, the world’s fourth largest spammer (or "commercial e-mail distributor"), in the October issue of National Post Business Magazine. Some worthwhile insights there. As well, George Emerson, in ROB, in May of this year, wrote about how the "SPAM crisis" in the workplace is as laughable and as overblown as Y2K, affecting only 15 percent of the population who qualify as "power e-mailers." Everyone gets flooded with crap through hotmail, but most workplaces are immunized. I can’t summarize the Emerson article here, but it’s an excellent article that proves conventional wisdom on the topic is faulty at best.

So, taking all these factors into consideration, how should the columnist proceed? One idea would be to stake out a bold, brave, contrary position, such as "SPAM is good" and then laud the strange, creative and downright bizarre attempts at parting a fool and his or her credit card number.

Here’s another promising direction: recently, myself and Clive Thompson, among many others, have been collecting SPAM poetics, those extra sentences inserted into garbage messages designed to try and trick filters. That would make an interesting column, methinks. The new poetry, for free.

Barring that, skip the topic entirely, since it’s been done to death.

What should be avoided, one would think, assuming the person writing the column had performed some due diligence, is to bore us stupid by providing a mundane re-cap of attempts to legislate SPAM out of existence, an incredibly over-discussed and utterly barren topic. This just in, Kate Taylor gets SPAM too. Wow, stop the presses everyone:

When I tell people about my recent spate of spam, they express one or the other of two opposite reactions. One group of sheltered souls, who have unusual e-mail addresses and a short list of correspondents, have never bought or subscribed to anything on-line and have never released their e-mail address to a commercial Web site, are appalled. The other group of jaded cynics -- mainly my Globe and Mail colleagues -- laconically go one better: 300 in a week, why I probably get 300 a day, they say.

Journalists are particularly susceptible to spam because they are in the business of gathering and distributing information and so can't filter e-mail too heavily..

(Above excerpt from the Wednesday, November 19, 2003 Globe and Mail.)

What sort of blinkered vanity drives a person to think we care about their inbox?

From what I understand, Kate Taylor was an excellent theatre critic, and her novel, Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, was met with favourable reviews. So we know that Ms. Taylor is an accomplished wordsmith, and someone with plenty of talent and ability. Indeed, the sentence construction and craft of her column isn’t in question, but rather, the dull content. The ability to write well and the ability to write a good column are two mutually exclusive ideas.

Now, the bigger question emerges: why is the Globe allowing her to faceplant twice a week? (For a fascinating, politically astute analysis of why the Globe and the Post continue to cram their respective newspapers with columnist after columnist while closing foreign bureaus, read Rachel Pulfer’s article in the September/October 2002 issue of This Magazine.)

A friend of mine, up until recently, wrote a weekly column for the National Post. He thought quite seriously about the column, how he should approach various issues, how he could best react and respond to the ideas and events du jour and push the agenda or dialogue forward instead of simply re-hashing the status quo. He sweated his copy most weeks, following the dictum that good writing is never easy.

A column is driven by relevancy and the ability to say something new about a topic already familiar, or introduce us to something we know nothing about and make us care about it. Perhaps I’m in the minority of folks who have read about SPAM once too often, but in 2003, you really don’t have to explain to your readership its origins:

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam. . . . Most commentators believe the term, originally the brand name of a processed meat, was borrowed as a nickname for unsolicited commercial e-mail because of an old Monty Python skit in which a gaggle of Vikings drown out all other conversation with a rising chorus of "spam".

For examples of columnists with confidence, strong voices and ability to burn, might I suggest reading Lynn Coady or Carl Wilson or Adam Sternbergh or Ben Rayner. Even Eckler can trick you into reading an entire column about some quirk of modern life inflicted upon her by cruel fate.

And yes, I’m aware the mark of a good columnist is their ability to provoke others into responding to their words. But as you can tell, I’m critiquing her lack of ideas, as opposed to her zany opinions on the urgent matters of the day.

www.amazon-sells-useless-shit.com

If I had the extra time and inclination, I would spend half an hour a week trawling through amazon.com, searching for bizarre adjacencies, consumer suggestions and their seemingly unending supply of ridiculous hunks of shit for sale.

I have written at least a half-dozen times about Amazon and I’m willing to bet a monthly column in a print newspaper or magazine would make an interesting read. (I’m not volunteering my services, I’m just saying, the website has enough breadth and depth of strangeness to fuel musings at that frequency.)

Anyway, as best as I can gather, I was presented with SkyBox, a "personal beverage vendor" from Maytag because I searched for Maxx Barry, author of Syrup, a less than effervescent look at the cola industry. I can think of no other reason that the algorithm would calculate that I, a literate, mentally engaged individual would wish to customize a mini-vending machine full of soda pop or "adult beverages." Feast on this, from the ad copy:

Want to hear that satisfying vending-machine "ka-thunk" when grabbing a cold beverage at game time? Now you can--while you and your buddies are crowded around the big-screen TV. The SkyBox by Maytag brings the concession stand right to the living room, so you can savor the excitement of punching a soda machine without having to feed it coins or dollar bills.

Blow me, Jeff Bozo (nee Bezos).

As I sit here and mentally hamster wheel, I seem to remember a somewhat recent book about the weirdest stuff ever sold on eBay. So, why not also, in the hypothetical publication featuring the Amazon.com column (for now let us call it Ryan: the magazine for Ryan), have a police blotter-style report on the unusual items bought and sold on eBay from the preceding month. Yes, it doubles as a plug for the site, but listing wacko auction dealings in a clinical, cold, plain manner, as if it were any other batch of statistics, would probably have some neat resonance.

A website or blog entry once a month detailing eBay and Amazon wouldn’t have the same impact. Report on one medium in another medium and it immediately has greater import. Trust me on this.