Feb 13 2009
Spotted some new stuff on the Brown Line, so I wanted to take a little ride before it was buffed. Might get back to our series before too long.
Just east of Rockwell stop
NINE piece, Brown line rooftop near Montrose
NINE second view
NINE detail
Feb 08 2009
Wow. This whole blog-thing is getting so confessional. Whatever.
Feb 05 2009
What’s with all the crime fighting professors on my teevee? On CBS, they have a mathematician solving crimes in the utterly preposterous NUMB3RS. I’ve only seen one or two episodes of this show, but it apparently involves a mathematics professor who solves crimes by figuring out criminal probability statistics and various other number-related aspects of criminality. There are actually interesting studies on this sort of thing; the locations of a string of crimes can “reveal” the likely place of the criminal’s residence to a remarkable degree of accuracy. Such analyses always seem to depend on a wide variety of social forces (transportation infrastructure, social codes on residential mobility, typical patterns of work and other schedules, etc.), but they are almost always reduced, when described in documentaries, to either psychological theories about “comfort zones” or even more cringe-inducing naturalism about “predators” and “hunting zones.” I’m sure some of this stuff comes into play, but the mathematician-criminologists will usually, in what I’ve seen, tend to see the statistical analysis as a reflection of some deeper and ahistorical phenomenon rather than as an effect of social processes (although I have to believe that the studies account for social factors). Second, Tim Roth now apparently plays an anthropologist who helps determine whether various criminals are lying, his training in the workings of the Yanamamo culture presumably preparing him for this sort of thing. OK, I’ll admit that I’ve never seen one episode – or even minute – of Lie To Me, but it’s close enough to Numb3rs to suggest a trend. So how can the rhetoricians get in on the act?
Teevee show premise: a teacher of first-year composition is suddenly elevated into the national spotlight when her gaffe-plagued husband runs for Vice President. Hilarity ensues. No, wait. That really happened, and that’s a sitcom, not a drama. Teevee show premise: A rhetoric professor helps the police solve crimes by… By what? We know there are “forensic grammarians,” who analyze the writings submitted in one form or another by criminals. I saw some murder show on this point a few months ago, where the murderer tried to throw the police off his trail by writing a letter – supposedly from a third party – admitting to the crime. But the silly criminal had left grammatical DNA. To wit, he often used improper contractions of some sort, and these were found both in the fake confession letter and on his personal computer. Some forensic writing specialist nailed his ass to the wall on that one, and it was quite convincing. But these scientific analyses of grammatical patterns always ring a bit hollow, and where’s the excitement in that? Then there’s prose style. There are already “experts” who claim to “exclude” persons based on prose style. The low point for the Hillary Clinton campaign, in my view, was when several of her surrogates picked up the absurdist right wing slander – supposedly proven by “independent scientific analysis” – that William Ayers had actually written Obama’s books. Needless to say, one of the chief insults against skillful African American writers and orators has always been that they were merely parroting or plagiarizing some white person; indeed, the charge goes all the way back to Phyllis Wheatley (whose very ability to have composed a book of poems had to be attested to by a panel of examiners), and was subsequently launched against pretty much every prominent African American rhetor in American history, with Obama himself now included. The problem for rhetoricians is that they (and maybe I’m assuming here) usually take prose style to be an impersonal effect: prose style is precisely that which migrates across writers. The plagiarism detective thus kind of sucks, because she can recognize stylistic patterns, but can’t “exclude” suspects: there is no prose style DNA, theoretically or otherwise, because prose style is that which can be forged or imitated, imitatio, dissemination. So the sequence of arguments, then? The character of examples? The form of evidence? No, ditto on imitatio. The rhetorician is plagued by – indeed proceeds by – the problem of of the simulacrum, as Plato already showed us. She is the counter detective, the one who exonerates. But defense lawyer is too cliched for the rhetorician – the two are mired in slime as it is. We’ll need work on the premise. Perhaps the rhetorician will be like Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, identifying the weak parts in the false story, the gaps in logic, the manufactured evidence, the tenuous warrant? Teevee show name: Available Means. We’re off and running.
Feb 03 2009
As an addendum to the last post, the mafia nickname. This is also in honor of today’s headline in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Joey ‘The Clown’ Gets Life.” Don’t worry. I won’t do another subject line analysis on that headline suggesting that the neighborhood joker finally had an epiphany (I get it now, said the Joey the Clown, I really, really get it…). But since we were on the mafia, and names, I’ll add this bit about a friend I had. My uncle once gave me some sage advice. He said never to hang out with somebody who had more than two nicknames. Once you hit three, you’re really dealing with aliases. Now my uncle drove half-tracks in the vicinity of Tay Ninh City during the Tet Offensive, so I usually take his life wisdom as fairly definitive, and it’s been born out in practice. So, this is the story of a guy with (at least) three nicknames, Crazy Joe, a.k.a Joey Bats, a.k.a Joey the Lid.
In junior high school he was Crazy Joe. This is a fairly typical nickname arrived at through unconventional means. Joe was off the wall, for sure, and was best known for lobbing M-80′s and blockbusters into crowds of kids hanging out after school. But I think he really got the nickname Crazy Joe when he was fourteen, and got arrested for train robbery. You heard me right. Joe was arrested for train robbery in New York City in the late 1980′s. Joe’s dad owned a truck parts business in Long Island City, which was then a very industrial area. So Joe used to hang out there after school, and he made friends with some other kids from the (hip hop infamous) Queensbridge Projects. So Joe and these kids would break into the freight yards near the Queensborough Plaza stop on the Seven, and they had a field day, boosting sneakers, beepers, and other items right off the trains. One day, Joe and these kids are back at it, and they crack open a freight car looking for some electronics. Instead, they find a car full of cereal. I’m talking General Mills, all brands, loaded on pallets and the whole bit. Now, the savvy criminal would realize that this car was not particularly fruitful, and move on, but Crazy Joe and his boys decided that they were hungry (munchies, most likely), so they parked their asses on the car and started eating straight out of boxes of Fruit Loops. Needless to say, this was the day their scheme was up, and about twenty cops jump out of everywhere, guns drawn and ready for action. Joe and his buddies get trucked down to the 107th Precinct, where the cops all call him Fruit Loops. Train robbery.
Later, when we were in high school, Joe was known as Joey Bats. Now, you might think that he got a name like that because he was proficient with a baseball bat, but Joe wasn’t really a fighter so much as he was a stoner. So “Bats” derives from the giant joints he used to roll, which looked a bit like baseball bats. No, really. They were fucking big. Back then, New York used to have a “pot parade,” which was really just a NORML rally in Washington Square Park, but it was a kind of get-out-of-a-ticket free day, or rather, Washington Square Park became a forgiveness zone for drug possession. Seriously, there would be thousands of people in the park, all smoking pot and drinking openly, and there’d be a lot of cops there, but the cops were just there for crowd control: they didn’t bust you even if you were smoking a blunt right in front of them. This had to be well before Giuliani, because this is precisely the sort of shit that Giuliani couldn’t stand. So one year we were at the pot parade, and we ended up standing near a group of Puerto Rican guys from the Bronx. Joe asked another one of my friends for some rolling paper, and these Bronx guys were all like “Oh, check out white boys with the joints!” They were unimpressed. “White boys,” they said, “You can’t get high on no joints; you gotta smoke the blunts, son” and they pulled out some big blunt, and generally thought they’d stumbled on to some Long Island know-nothings or some such. We all looked at Joey Bats. He just smiled. “Gimme the whole pack of papers,” he said, “and gimme the ounce.” We knew it was definitely on. Joey Bats proceeded to roll the biggest joint any of us had ever seen – giant, otherworldly, and definitely fitting for the occasion. “Mira,” he said to the Bronx guys, holding it up, and their eyes just about bugged out of their heads. Of course, we shared with them, and we knew their prejudice against joints was definitely relieved when they said “These white boys a’ight.” It didn’t hurt that we brought the good shit, and not their Gun Hill Road swag. Spread love, son.
It’s my belief that you don’t really have a nickname unless you have a “the” in it. The definite article lends the nickname a certain grandeur, as if you are the only person that can lay claim to that title. There may be many clowns who understand life, but the readers of the Chicago Sun-Times are expected to know precisely who is being referred to when the headline writer invokes the name of Joey the Clown. And so it was for us. Probably my first year of college, while I was away, Joey Bats became Joey the Lid. Now, this nickname eventually morphed into just plain Lid, as in “Hey Lid, shut the fuck up and roll us a joint.” But I was always partial to the full version, as in “The fuckin’ guy was launchin’ blockbusters at us up on 154th street.” “Who?” “Fuckin’ Joe.” “Joe Mastaciola?” “No, dickhead. Joey the Lid.” You’d think that a movie-script perfect mafioso nickname like Joey the Lid would have come about through some fantastic incident. Sadly, no. Lid and his buddy Tommy were driving around doing whippets (Nitrous Oxide), which – and this is life advice – is not a particularly smart thing to do. Joe’s specialty was a four whippet balloon, which means you crack four nitrous canisters into one balloon: it’s not conducive to staying conscious, much less alert, while driving. So Joe – in his infinite wisdom – loads up four whippets into a balloon and hands it over to Tommy, who’s driving, and Tommy sucks it all in and predictably passes out and crashes into a light poll. Joe gets a nice chunk of windshield glass right in the eyelid (which strikes me as lucky, all things considered). Thus Joe Bats ends up with a scarred eyelid that hangs down a little, and fairly instantly becomes Joey the Lid. It could be worse, I guess.
Now I should admit my own nicknames. I’ll do that if I hear others. Confession is a two way street.
Feb 02 2009
Some random thoughts on the Super Bowl. First, I should say that I haven’t watched football seriously in more than ten years. It’s getting to be like Easter for the semi-Catholic: I watch the Super Bowl, and maybe a playoff game or two. I have better things to do with my Sundays. OK, I don’t have better things to do, but the game bores me, which is strange, since I used to be really into it until just after college. In any case, watching the very exciting closing minutes of this year’s Super Bowl, it occurred to me – as it no doubt did to many others – that I’d seen this game before, like, last year. So I wondered, Descartes-style, whether there might be an evil genius who scripts these things, and, if so, how the script works. Because there does seem to be a formula. So, first, what are the problems that have to be overcome by the Super Bowl script. The obvious first problem is the blow-out. Nobody but the fans of the winning team keep watching a game that looks like a blow-out, and many of the Super Bowls of my youth were just that. If the advertisers are paying so much money, the second half slots have to pay off. So, you need a close game, or at least one in which the possibility of a come back remains very real until well into the fouth quarter. Second, you want to promote football itself, while also including the sports channels and shows, which would have to be in on the con. So, it should be exciting, with numerous back and forths and big plays, and it should have two or three really serious highlights for the sports shows, preferably dazzling catches or impossible runs. Not only can these be run on a loop as a “signifier” for the game, but they are also sought after by fans and others trying to relive the experience of having seen the event live. So the David Tyree helmet catch from the 2008 game or this year’s toe-tap game winner by Santonio Holmes will serve as little snippets of marketable code. The script, given this set of problems, becomes clear. The teams battle back and forth, but stay within two touchdowns for the first three quarters. Everything then loosens up in the fourth quarter. The then trailing team springs to life, just as we always knew they would, and suddenly takes the lead, preferably with a magnificent drive led by their legendary quarterback. The team that had been leading, that had sensed victory just minutes before, is crushed. They get the ball back with two to three minutes remaining. It all comes down to this! Everything seems doomed, but they claw back and push and push. The final drive – which ends in a dramatic touchdown with under a minute remaining – is either capped by or includes an amazing play that will be the pre-packaged “memory” for the viewer…I saw that catch live, sonny, etc. The team that had come back, but now trails again, gets the ball back with 30-50 seconds left, just enough to keep viewers watching and anxious until the final play of the game, and transitioning them into the post-game show. The last two Super Bowls followed this general script exactly. Diagnosis: sound stage in Burbank! (The innovation in this year’s script was the miraculous interception and run back to close the first half: why waste even a second of ad time, and why not give the viewers a treat to remember?)
Of course, I don’t really believe this. On average, if you watch a lot of football, I suspect many of the games play out in this way owing to the various forces at work through the rules, within the coaching tradition, and on the field itself. (Example: I’d still argue that a “prevent defense” is a terrible idea, though I’d bet that coaches have clear statitistics on how it works more than it fails.) But it is odd that the last two Super Bowls have operated according to what would seem a strict formula for maximizing viewership at all levels (current, future, and auxiliary programming such as ESPN and DVD sales).
On the commercials: meh. The first half featured the usual “Women are better naked” misogynistic crap. The Bob Dylan/will.i.am commercial was somewhat memorable (the graffiti evolution bit helped). But two struck a chord with me. First, the Denny’s “Serious Breakfast” commercial. The premise is that three mafiosi are sitting in a diner discussing a future hit on an informant. But just as the mob boss tries to order the hit, a waitress comes over and starts spraying a whipped cream happy face on his pancakes. The noise of the whipped cream container interrupts the serious discussion a few times, and then we cut to the catch phrase: Isn’t it time for a serious breakfast? Cue bacon close-up, etc. The commercial is funny in its own right, but it reminded of of a phenomenon I’ve been noticing on Facebook. Specifically, when I compare the friends I had growing up with the friends I’ve made since college, I notice the glaring imbalance of Italian names. When I was growing up in Queens, I just assumed that a prevalence of Italian names was common across the country. You had your Massimo’s and Vito’s and Angelo’s and Rocco’s, your Francesca’s and Concetta’s and Rosanna’s, and even where the first names were anglicized, they were anglicized in a certain way (no Dave’s or Gary’s, but all Mike’s and Joey’s and John’s), and you had the last names to get you through: the Mastaciola’s and DiPietro’s and Pallazzolo’s and Capparella’s. And when I look at my friends list, I see it, all those Italian names, and then I look at their friends and it’s even more so, with something like half of all names being Italian in origin. But not so much the friends from college and afterward. The names have all changed since I hung around, so to speak. And when I think about the people I grew up with, I notice that most – including me – had at least one parent who wasn’t born in the United States, who had an accent (Irish, Italian, Greek, Croatian), who arrived here in the late-1960′s or early 1970′s, or later. I thought this was normal. But, of course, it’s not. What I realized only later is that I grew up in what was essentially an “ethnic enclave,” a strange thing when you think on it, but not uncommon for big east coast cities. I’ve never really considered myself “Italian” or “Irish,” though my father is to this day an Italian national, and my grandmother emigrated from Ireland in the 1920′s, and kept her brogue until the day she died. I’m American, and I think I’ve always been a little embarrassed of the whole “claiming your cultural heritage” bit. I still am. I certainly don’t get all worked up about “images of Italians in the media” and other such issues, because I’ve never really thought of myself as Italian, and I always assumed that anti-Italian discrimination – in terms of actual life effects – was really an early-to-mid 20th century thing. But two incidents.
First, I was visiting a (midwestern) school while I was deciding on PhD programs, and one of the graduate students who was showing me around kept introducing me to people as “[insert stereotypical Italian first name here] from Brooklyn,” and he kept saying it with a really obnoxious Vinny Barbarino accent. He was thoroughly amused by this, and the fake New Yawkah accent grew thicker and more insulting as the day went on. He was a Southerner, from Alabama if I remember correctly, and he didn’t pull off the Barbarino bit particularly well, but the message was clear enough. I remember being annoyed, thinking it was disrespectful, though I just smiled along wanly, fuming. I was careful to eliminate any hint of a New York accent from my diction when I said “Hi, it’s nice to meet you” after his little performances. I bumped into the guy again at a conference in New Orleans last year, and one of my friends introduced me to him. He knew perfectly well who I was, but I used my full name, decidedly unanglicized, emphasizing its vowels. It was all I could do to keep from tagging the guy with a right hook on the fucking spot. Spread love: it’s the Brooklyn way. Second, I was at a job interview at another midwestern school, and I was on my last event, having breakfast with some graduate students. I don’t remember how the question came up, but one of the students asked, and I do remember it was out of the blue, whether my father was in the mafia. In the fucking mafia! In 2007! Needless to say, I replied “that’s right,” and kind of laughed it off. But on the plane back home, I grew increasingly agitated (I had da agita ovah dis fuckin’ bagiagaloop!) by the question. Like, what the fuck? In the mafia? Really? As an innocent question – playful or not – at a graduate student breakfast with the prospective professor? Ey, ya fuckin’ skootch, isn’t it time for a serious fuckin’ breakfast?
The second memorable ad was for Career Builder dot com. It starts with classical music playing in a lush office, obviously the well-appointed digs for some hotshot CEO. The camera then zooms in to the magnificent moosehead on the wall, an impressive trophy. Then, in a continuous shot, the viewer is led out of the executive’s office and around to another office directly adjacent, and here’s where we see the joke. The classical music transitions into the repetitive sound of a printer, and we find in the second office a man at work on the computer, trying valiantly to type away. It turns out the the stuffed moose’s head was not removed from the body, but merely stuck through the wall with the rest of the mooses body – to wit, the ass-end – residing in the poor man’s office, and, indeed, standing directly on his desk with the ass just above his head. He has to work with a moose ass in his face all day. He looks unpleased. The catch line is something like “Time for a new job?” Conceptually and technically brilliant ad, in my view. But, really, what a metaphor for class consciousness! The apparent splendor of the boss’ office mirrored on the back end by the misery of the working conditions, with the two intimately connected through the same device: the body of the moose. When you look “beneath” the luxury of moosehead (and a traditional signifier here), you get the cost of that luxury on the worker. If I wanted to start a propaganda outfit, I’d want the writer of this ad on my team. Just great.
RUNNING on Wordpress
Recent Comments