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I asked Donald Fagen, co-founder of Steely Dan and occasional Slate contributor, for his thoughts on J.D. Salinger. He writes:
Like a lot of teenagers of my generation, I fell in love with Franny Glass. I figured she wouldn't have been nearly as high-maintenance a girlfriend if she were with me, a sensitive and understanding fellow-seeker, rather than that douchenozzle Lane Coutell.
Some readers seem to think that Salinger's work (what we have of it up till now) never addressed the concerns of the real "adult" world. We shouldn't forget that, in the years when Salinger's stories were appearing, American society—i.e., the men who came back from the war and their families—was suffering from an ugly, prolonged case of post-traumatic stress disorder. The fear-based, conservative, conformist adult world wasn't a club we wanted to join. When we got to observe the overeducated, hyper-sensitive Glass children struggle to find some other way to live, we felt a little less lonely.
OK, it wasn't art pour l'art. On some level, Salinger obviously dug being a mentor, a Socrates, always with the message. And yet, as with all the best writers, his gentle revelations were all in the telling, in a style that was never less than artful and clean. I've missed his cool and intimate voice since the day he decided to skip town. And what ever happened to my girlfriend Franny? Maybe, now, we'll find out.
—Donald Fagen
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After each episode of Project Runway’s seventh season, a gaggle of Slatesters will gather to dish about the show. This week, the first part of the challenge was to create a high-end, signature look in teams of two inspired by 10 iconic outfits at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. The second part of the challenge was to create a mass-market look for less inspired by another team’s signature look. Mila Hermanovski was the winner. Ping Wu was sent home.
Hanna Rosin: I have to say, I am a total sucker for team challenges. They are bad for the fashion but excellent for tension and drama. The looks—with one exception —were pretty forgettable. And that second challenge was kind of pointless and messy. But this episode produced some of the best lines of the season so far: "I'm just trying to rein in the crazy" (Jesse on Ping) and "We're designing for the vice president of McDonald's” (Anthony).
David Plotz: I totally disagree with you, Hanna. We've seen exactly this episode of P.R. a dozen times before. There's the team leader whose ego is too big. The team leader whose subordinate is relentlessly, systematically undermining her. There's the team where one person can't sew. Oh, and then there's the "surprise" second challenge, which is supposed to come as a shock to everyone but is just as formulaic. If we wanted to see how reality teamwork is supposed to work, we should have tuned into the season premiere of America's Best Dance Crew over on MTV. I caught a few minutes of it, and enjoyed the team spirit—and the fashion—a lot more than I enjoyed tonight's P.R. episode.
H.R.: Well, we've also seen Nina Garcia do her little wave 100 times, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it. And we've never seen the team challenge where the lady named after a tabletop game falls apart at the hands of Thurston Howell. Also, weren't you touched by Seth? What a gentleman not to sell out Anthony, when it was clear he had nothing to do with those looks. Makes me think he gets high a lot and preserves a permanent mellow.
Jessica Grose: I am somewhere in the middle between Hanna and David—I thought the episode was more sparky than the premiere but less interesting than last week's burlap-sack challenge. I knew it was going be a magnificent disaster when Ping said into the camera, with a straight face, "I am very good at giving clear instructions." However, I wish they had made more use of the Met, which has so many better sources of inspiration. It's a frickin’ art museum! I don't know why they're being painfully literal this season—make a dress out of a burlap sack! Design clothes that are inspired by ... other clothes! I wasn't even very impressed with the winners—but more on that later. What did you think about the rest of the clothes?
D.P.: Maybe it's how everything was filmed, but I thought this was an indistinct, blah bunch of outfits without a surprise in the bunch. (But let me just take a quick bow. After Episode 1, I predicted Ping's ejection in Episode 3.) And you're right, Hanna. Though I continue to wish Anthony back to the dinner theater he has escaped from, his McDonald's line was one of the funniest moments in Project Runway history.
Mila's victory was deserved, don't you think? She's a festering, vicious, open sore of a person, but I sympathize with her. I'm turning 40 this weekend, and seeing her, at 40, looking as if she's a billion years older than the young hottie designers (Maya, Amy, annoying Janeane) really makes me root for her. And she's a hell of a designer. I love the way she always uses a flash of color to line the inside of her pieces.
J.G.: I have to disagree with you, David—strongly! I hated Mila's look. I thought it was reminiscent of a German street sign, and it reminded me of a dress that Kara Janx made in season 2 of P.R. that was inspired by “no trespassing” tape. Mila and Jonathan’s look for less made their model look like a pregnant teenage hooker.
H.R.: I understand the appeal of Mila's jacket, "sportswear-inspired," etc. But it was not a museum piece. And she is such a consummate underminer. I'm waiting for the day she has her Wintour-inspired fit.
I preferred Maya's skyscraper on the shoulders, and their second look was quite nice. In general, I thought this episode was heavy on jargon, maybe to make up for any instinctively pleasing looks—"signature," "multifunctional," "hard and soft," "luxury and fashion-forward." Also, I think the money threw them off—they had $500 to create their signature look. Designing on the cheap seems to give them a sense of urgency and freedom. This time they were weighed down.
D.P.: That sinuous, eel-like shoulder of Maya and Jay's dress was a highlight for me, too. So was Amy and Jesus' jigsaw puzzle dress and Mila's jacket. Everything else left me unimpressed. And a shocking number of looks gave the models big asses.
J.G.: I was really bowled over—as Nina Garcia was—by Maya and Jay's look for less. I thought the pleating on the bodice was miraculous.
D.P.: Before we go, I wanted to mention a new deplorable trend: Talking models. The emergence of Models of the Runway is really messing up P.R., since the girls now seem to feel they are integral to the show, not just decoration. Last week they were the clients. This week, Ping's model sassed. Next week it will probably be Freaky Friday, with models and designers changing jobs.
H.R.: I have a different pet peeve that's been bugging me all season: the endless hugs. It used to be they hugged each other only when someone got kicked out. Now they've lowered the hug bar. They hug all the freaking time. I don't know whether it's gay Anthony; or whimpering, needy Janeane; or stoner Seth. But they are always hugging. Is this increasingly true on all reality shows, and I just never noticed?
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When Nine Stories appeared in the spring of 1953, J.D. Salinger had been the nationally reknowned author of The Catcher in the Rye for two years. But the collection was, in some sense, his debut. Its stories, most of which first ran in The New Yorker, largely predate the novel, and they served as templates for a lot of what he wrote in the ensuing years. Although the book was not nearly the public coup Catcher had been—the New York Times politely lauded it as "so interesting, and so powerful"—it heralded a crucial transition in postwar fiction. Nine Stories was a bellwether of the era in which general-interest magazines turned literary.
Today, the existence of literary fiction in respectable glossy magazines is often taken for granted (or bemoaned in its absence). But in the late '20s and '30s, when Salinger was a student of the form, these quality standards had not entirely been set. Several general-interest magazines ran stories—often several per issue—but few, if any, sought out what would today be recognized as worthy fiction. Vignette and genre entertainment was the taste of the day: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned a great run of hastily composed F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, most of which read like imitations of his better work; The New Yorker, under Harold Ross, went in for prose skits and "casuals," putting a jaunty frame around prosaic life. There were, of course, great talents trying to navigate these expectations. But great talent itself was not the point. American glossy-magazine fiction between the wars was predominantly popular fiction. Its chief goal was to entertain until the next issue arrived.
This was the landscape Salinger was entering when his first story—a vignette he had written for a class—appeared in print in 1940. Over the next few years, he went to war and slowly grew into a favorite of The New Yorker's fiction department. The shorts that eventually became Nine Stories are today known both for their inimitable Salinger purfling (the wise-child protagonists, the lambent madness) and as the archetype of '40s "New Yorker fiction" (clipped, urbane prose with lengthy conversation pieces; sharp, deus-ex-machina endings). Their brilliance was to have it both ways.
What's striking on rereading these nine stories, in fact, is how distinctly they are written into snappy '30s form. Two begin with phone calls, one with a wedding invitation, another with highball cocktails, another with tennis: A reader encountering these openings for the first time would have no reason to anticipate anything besides boilerplate casuals. The overtures, of course, are misleading. "Teddy," which finishes the collection, begins on a cruise ship with a jaunty quote and ends with a child dying in an empty swimming pool. Throughout the book, haunting backstories billow behind Salinger's natty prose like gossamer; a story like "The Laughing Man" (from 1949) is as intricate and contrapuntal as anything Borges composed. Today it seems clear that Nine Stories is a book about war trauma, but in its setting, storylines, and style, it is the most oblique war narrative imaginable. Salinger captured the personal refractions of a national crisis and placed them into the hollowed-out shell of domestic narrative. This was, in many ways, the genesis of the postwar short story.
The hybrid form also shaped Salinger's writing itself. There almost is no Salinger style; his gift for mimicry was so sharp it is easy to forget how totally he owned his prose. (William Maxwell, one of his New Yorker editors, once got chewed out for adding a grammatically correct comma in the press version of a story.) He was a student of Hemingway's elliptical approach and channeled the buoyant, lucid tone prized by magazines like The New Yorker to play a smoke-and-mirrors game with daring subjects. He did not avoid the breezy surface appeal of popular shorts. Instead, he carved spaces for depth and nuance in its interstices. Precocious child protagonists walked among the two-dimensional grown-ups he'd imported from light vignette fiction, giving the stories stakes—and, in some cases, horrors—in geometries an actual vignette could never conjure.
It is easy to cast the magazines Salinger wrote for as the dupes in this game. But the truth is that writers and editors grew together. The '40s and '50s were a period of stiffening ambitions for The New Yorker's fiction department, largely under the influence of Katherine White and Maxwell; stories got longer, more complex, and, in the best instances, canonical. By the '60s, Donald Barthelme had secured the magazine's benediction. Nine Stories may have been a hinge that opened the door to this new generation of short fiction—but it was also, and maybe more crucially, a collection that helped prime the market to get those stories read.
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"I almost always write about very young people," J.D. Salinger said in 1946, and today this giant of midcentury fiction is being remembered as a chronicler of his time and, especially, of a time of life. But he was also a poet of place. Nearly all of Salinger's troubled, brilliant young people—Holden and Phoebe, Seymour and Buddy, Franny and Zooey—are Manhattanites, and their stories are distinctly New York stories, set against a backdrop of bustling avenues and classic sixes on either side of Central Park, and narrated in an ironic, neurotic, contrarian voice whose provenance is unmistakable.
The Catcher in the Rye is, among other things, one of the great New York travelogues: Like Leopold Bloom, Holden Caulfield is a Ulysses at sea in his hometown. Holden professes to loathe the city. ("I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks. ...") And yet he is a New Yorker through and through. In one of the book's best set pieces, Holden finds himself up boozing and dancing in a down-at-heel hotel ballroom with three young women, tourists from Seattle. He can't suppress his Gothamite's disdain for the rubes:
That business about getting up early to catch the first show at Radio City Music Hall depressed me. If somebody, some girl in an awful-looking hat, for instance, comes all the way to New York—from Seattle Washington, for God's sake—and ends up getting up early in the morning to see the goddamn first show at Radio City Music Hall, it makes me so depressed I can't stand it. I'd've bought the whole three of them a hundred drinks if only they hadn't told me that.
There was a discernable ethnic tinge to Salinger's New York accent. His father, Sol, was a Polish Jew; his Scotch-Irish mother, Marie, changed her name to Miriam and passed as Jewish. Like his characters, Salinger was assimilated, upwardly mobile, uptown. (He was raised on West 82nd Street and, later, Park Avenue.) The Jews who populate Malamud and Roth—fierce bridge-and-tunnel strivers, steeped in Yiddishkeit and lingering Old World resentments—are nowhere to be found in Salinger.*
But consider Holden, the dyspeptic social outcast who rails against snobs and "phonies"; and consider the brilliant bourgeois-bohemian Glass family, with their vaudevillian background and bookish Eastern spiritual dabblings. Technically tribe-members or not, they're just so Jewish. The New York Jewish counterculture that infused American life in the 1950s and '60s—from Lenny Bruce to Allen Ginsberg to Bob Dylan—is stirring beneath the cool elegance of Salinger's sentences.*
The writer's own relationship to his home city was apparently fraught. Holden Caulfield longed to go "someplace way the hell off. In the woods or some goddamn place"—and Salinger did just that, heading for New Hampshire at the height of his fame, never to return. But he left behind some valentines. One of my favorite passages in Salinger is the lyrical description of a curbside marbles game that comes toward the end of Seymour: An Introduction (1963):
One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on—some on, some still off—I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to—his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's—and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles.
*Corrections, Jan. 29, 2010: This blog entry originally misspelled the names of Allen Ginsberg and Bernard Malamud.
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J.D. Salinger left behind one novel and about 40 short stories. Only 13 of the stories were ever anthologized—nine in Nine Stories and four novella-length stories in Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Before the advent of the Internet, combing through microfiche or university stacks for the remaining 20-some stories was the final initiation into Salinger fandom. (You could also make the pilgrimage to Princeton's Firestone Library to view their closely guarded J.D. Salinger archive.)
Now it's possible to find all the stories on a Hungarian site called FreeWeb, where someone has retyped nearly everything Salinger ever published. The following are some highlights from that list, with brief annotations.
"The Young Folks"
Story, March-April 1940
Salinger's first widely published story.
"The Hang of It"
Collier's, July 12, 1941
A classic bait-and-switch, revealed in the last sentence.
"The Heart of a Broken Story"
Esquire, September 1941
A story about an aborted story intended for Collier's.
"The Long Debut of Lois Taggett"
Story, September/October 1942
A young woman flounders in American upper-crust society, the world Salinger's characters would frequently brush up against in later works.
"Once a Week Won't Kill You"
Story, November/December 1944
A man prepares to ship off to war despite the vapid protests of his wife. Many of Salinger's stories in the ''40s featured soldiers and veterans.
"I'm Crazy"
Collier's, Dec. 22, 1945
An early experiment with the Holden Caulfield character, in which he visits a favorite instructor—a scene that makes its way into the first chapter of Catcher in the Rye.
"Slight Rebellion Off Madison"
The New Yorker, December 1946
A second appearance of Holden "Morrisey" Caulfield in a short story, this time as he returns to New York City.
"Hapworth 16, 1924"
The New Yorker, June 19, 1965
Salinger's last published story, two years after his fourth and last book was printed. Like most of his anthologized stories, this long epistolary story concerns the Glass family.
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I love J.D. Salinger, who died today, far too much to write about him with any perspective. Perhaps this qualifies me to eulogize his last anthologized work—the story of a man who loves and admires his deceased brother too much to write about him with any perspective.
"Seymour: An Introduction" was originally published in The New Yorker in 1959 and was printed in book form, alongside "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters," four years later. It runs about 120 pages and has no appreciable form, reading like an unedited, freewheeling character description. I know several avowed Salinger fanatics who have never made it through the thing, and I don't blame them: The story is dense, tiresome, and irritating. Its charm is difficult to diagnose. But I submit that it's the best story the guy ever wrote.
Narrated by Buddy Glass—the second eldest brother of the prodigious family that occupies the majority of Salinger's post-Catcher fiction—it takes place years after Seymour Glass committed suicide. There is very little plot. Buddy, like Salinger, has retreated to a bucolic existence in New England, where he is preparing a volume of his dead brother's poetry for publication. The story is a jumble of anecdotes, musings, and epic descriptions, punctuated by Buddy's still-raw anger and confusion over his brother's suicide. A sampling: "Alright. The Nose. I tell myself this'll only hurt a minute." A long paragraph on Seymour's proboscis follows, running more than a page.
When the story was anthologized in 1963, Steven Marcus had this to say about it in the New York Review of Books:
Written in a prose so self-consciously arch and cloying as to be almost impenetrable, it circles and loops about itself and gets nowhere. Obsessed with the character and the suicide of Seymour, Salinger seems on the one hand in danger of being swallowed up by the myth he has created.
True, true, and true. Salinger actually beat Marcus to the punch on this one. About 40 pages into the story, Buddy wonders: "Do I go on about my brother's poetry too much? Am I being garrulous? Yes. Yes." But disorganization is no reason to ignore the story. I see the messiness of "Seymour: An Introduction" as Salinger's final confrontation with all the strains of his earlier fiction: sentimentality, depression, Eastern philosophy, isolation, and the guilt of being happy.
This struggle reads like Salinger's final battle. Whether or not he saw it this way, with "Seymour" Salinger wrote his own literary obituary. The story is readable, but just barely—very nearly smothered by the author's self-consciousness about being a writer. From here on out, it seems clear, Buddy will be too plagued by his literary persona to write a story worth reading.
Unfortunately, "Seymour" is not the final note on Seymour Glass. As any devoted Salinger sleuth has discovered in the catacombs of some university library, he published a final story two years later in The New Yorker: "Hapworth 16, 1924," which takes the form of a letter from a 7-year-old Seymour Glass to his parents from summer camp. The story is grating, ponderous, and, I find, unreadable; I've never made it through more than 5,000 of the 30,000 words. If we needed any more evidence that Buddy—or Salinger—was on the brink with "Seymour," "Hapworth" is it. If he has been writing for the past 40 years, I fear it was more of the same.
Also in Slate: Stories on J.D. Salinger from our archives; Stephen Metcalf on the precise nature of Salinger's genius; the Audio Book Club on Catcher in the Rye.
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Jody Rosen: Hey, Jonah. Our Track of the Week is Taylor Swift's "Today Was a Fairytale," from the soundtrack of the forthcoming Valentine's Day. Last week, "Today Was a Fairytale" was downloaded 325,000 times, a new record for weekly paid download sales by a female artist. The song will debut on the Billboard Hot 100 at No.2, just one notch behind "Tik Tok," the megahit by that anti-Taylor Swift, Ke$ha. (Goody Two Shoes in this corner, Bad Girl in that corner ... fight!)
Someday Swift's vision of romance may move beyond costume drama. (Maybe when she turns 21?) For now, though—she's strictly Merchant-Ivory. Her great 2008 hit "Love Story" was a Romeo and Juliet tale; the video found Swift in Regency-era togs, batting her eyes at a pretty frat boy stuffed into a Fitzwilliam Darcy outfit. The new song begins like this: "Today was a fairytale/ You were the prince/ I used to be a damsel in distress." This is a girl who likes playing dress-up.
But in Swift's songs all the ball gowns and unicorns have a different effect than you'd expect. They make her songs more emotionally vivid—they sharpen the focus instead of softening it. It's a cliché to describe Swift's lyrics as journal entries, but that's what they feel like; the period-dress scenes are her dreamy little drawings in the diary margins. And in the new single, the fairy-princess talk gets thrown into relief by everyday 21st-century details:
Today was a fairytale
I wore a dress
You wore a dark gray t-shirt
You told me I was pretty when I looked like a mess
Today was a fairytale
Where she really excels is in the tunes. Am I wrong, Jonah, or is "Today Was a Fairytale" one of the catchiest Taylor Swift songs yet? I love the way the melody climbs in the chorus, especially over that one brooding minor chord: "It must have been the way you kissed me."
Also noteworthy: With the possible exception of that woodsy acoustic guitar picking in the song's opening bars, I don't hear any country gestures here. No fiddle, no lap steel, nothing. Taylor's vowels have gotten flattened and Yankee-ified. (Compare her accent in "Today Was a Fairytale" with the twangful "Our Song," from 2007.) See ya, Nashville!
Jonah Weiner: Hi Jody. There's the faintest trace of countryish fingerpicking here, but yes, one of the first things that struck me about "Today Was a Fairytale" is how nominal-to-the-point-of-nonexistent its claims to Nashville citizenship are. But we've seen this coming for a while now, right? Haven't the country gestures always been largely nominal with Taylor Swift? Isn't a large part of her success and savvy that she can take a Kelly Clarkson-esque power ballad, smear just a bit of lap steel on the margins, and thereby court audiences north and south of the Mason-Dixon without alienating either?
Music-wise, this is one of my favorite Swift songs. And you're right, that "kissed meeee" scythes through you like a warm pink laser beam. This is a marvel of pop-craft—we've heard the song's anxious pre-chorus, swooning/pining hook, and eleventh-hour drop-everything-but-the-sighing-vocals-and-acoustic-guitar parlor trick a thousand times before, and yet it all thrills.
Taylor Swift seems like the kind of girl you go over the moon for (unless you're one of the unfortunate BFs legendarily disemboweled on her debut). But I'm not so over the moon that I quite buy your case for the lyrics here. They're OK. The hook is my biggest problem: The fairytale refrain strikes me as so blandly corny that it snaps me out of the fantasy. Swift is capable of the sharp detail you credit her with—the image (and unheard squeak and slam) of the "screen door" on "Our Song" sticks with you as much as anything in the melody—but I don't see that at work here. The gray T-shirt doesn't do much of anything for me, nor does the generous compliment that the hottie wearing it offers our insecure Goldilocks. It's an overly familiar Mr. Right trope that he will find us beautiful when we are suffering a bad-hair day/have morning breath/haven't yet been attended to by our team of stylists. Swift doesn't do much but invoke the cliché and hope it does her heavy lifting for her. (Ditto "Everything you say is right," "Time slows down whenever you're around," etc.) I do like "you picked me up at six"—it's a nice intrusion of the quotidian into the enchanted forest, and also, what a chaste time to start a date!—but I feel that Taylor is being a little disingenuous: She's not wishing for ponies and pixie dust, exactly, but there's a whiff of her reinforcing a brand on this song: selling a product (The Taylor Swift Princess Castle by Hasbro®, Recommended Ages: 8-15, maybe?) rather than painting a picture. And I don't mind pop selling me product, but I need a better pitch than this. In the case of this song, it's the tunes doing the hustling.
J.R.: Jonah, you're right: The lyrics here are just so-so. The song's a bit lazy, really. In "Love Story," Swift has that neat third-verse narrative twist, which puts the final chorus in the voice of her beau. That's classic high Nashville craftsmanship. Here she's complacent; you're right that on its own the "fairytale" business doesn't do much.
But I'm impressed by what Swift gets away with. Her tunes are so strong they elevate her doggerel, or render it irrelevant: I can feel the emotions even when they're insipidly expressed. (Of course, in Swift's best stuff—"Our Song," "Fifteen," "You Belong with Me"—the lyric writing is pretty tight.) Also, Taylor Swift songs have this weird, ineffable, intimate quality; the clichés just seem personal. The combination of ninja-like melodic craft and gauche lyrics give songs like "Today Was a Fairytale" a rough-hewn quality that sets them apart from, for instance, Kelly Clarkson. This song is sonically airbrushed and pitch-corrected and buffed to a hi-gloss shine—and yet it feels handmade. It's Etsy-pop.
J.W.: If Taylor Swift were an Etsy product, would she be these "Let's Make Out/Let's Be Friends" throw pillows? I could see two characters holding these babies aloft in a Swift video, communicating their adolescent longing/ambivalence between adjacent suburban bedroom windows.
Anyway, this song is a funny mix: some of her tightest songwriting to date, but some of her laziest lyrics. I'll reserve final judgment until I see it in the context of Valentine's Day—the scene in which her beau turns into a werewolf and passionately humps Topher Grace's leg is supposed to be a real heartbreaker.
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Tomorrow, Steve Jobs will reveal the real Apple Tablet, but I, for one, am going to miss the fake Apple Tablet. Ever since rumors of the rumored project began to surface, the Internet has been seeded with renderings of what the supposed iPad, iSlate, Magic Slate, or Apple Book will look like. On Jan. 13, Valleywag threw some gasoline on to the fire by offering 10 grand for "bona fide" photos and 20 grand for video of "one in action." No one has claimed the prize, but there have been some amusing fakes along the way.
The faker's options are 1) go with the blurry, spycam Web shot of mysterious origin or 2) test your photoshop skillz and release a high-res image. Just this morning, what many have deemed the finest high-res fake has emerged. The supposed Tablet has the right proportions and a lovely slimness, but the image is considered counterfeit because of suspect drop shadows and unconvincing reflections.
Next are the obvious, skylarking fakes. My favorite of these was this "expert mock-up" reprinted in the Guardian, which was just a stupidly massive iPhone filled with apps. I also like the images of people trying (and failing) to shove the new iPad into their pockets. Another genre is what you could call random-dudes-holding-the-Apple-Magic-Tablet-in-their-cubicles. Their faces are blurred out, and the image is clearly false, because there aren't seven other dudes gathered around clamoring to play with the new gadget.
That's not to say that all fake Tablets are worthless. This one coolly places the Tablet in situ with a coffee cup, plus draped-over headphones, suggesting that the iSlatepad has become a trusted and beloved accessory in someone's life. The image is also, reportedly, a fairly good rendering of what the real one will look like. But I tip my hat to the best fake of them all: the two pieces of cardboard that the guys at Gizmodo put together to test out what the Tablet future will feel like. Turns out that the screen seems pretty small.
Can't wait for my new iSquint.
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The criteria for People magazine's annual "sexiest man alive" selection are fairly intuitive. It's a title bestowed on that man who, in a given year, best exemplifies sexiness. The thinking behind Time's "person of the year" is murkier, though being president or an advocate of peaceful civil disobedience seems to help. But what does it take to become Library Journal's Librarian of the Year?
As dozens of people across the country already know, this month's Library Journal announces that the 2010 librarian of the year is Craig Buthod, director of the Louisville Free Public Library. Did Buthod revolutionize the Dewey Decimal System? Will school kids and scholars alike now file books according to the Buthod Boson Scheme?
Not exactly, but Buthod does seem like a worthy recipient of the honor, at least to this non-librarian. Despite the fact that the ungrateful citizenry of Louisville defeated a tax proposal that would have better supported the library system, Buthod opened a branch in a neighborhood that had never had one before—it was the first library built in the city since 1996. He also raised money privately to restore the main branch, which had been devastated by a flood. And he created the Student Power Plus Card, which gives kids access to the library as well as to fare reductions on the bus system.
Suggestions for further accomplishments: Resolving the porn-is-gross-in-public-spaces vs. censorship-is-wrong debate; reversing the decline of print publishing.
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Yesterday I suggested that MTV should follow mega-hit reality show Jersey Shore with a show documenting the truculent Boston-area folks known affectionately as Massholes. Last night’s 30 Rock should provide the network with extra assurance that Massholes are the next “it” subculture. Liz Lemon and crew moved TGS to Boston for an episode—mostly so that Jack Donaghy could pursue his married high-school sweetheart, Nancy Donovan (played with a brutally thick Beantown accent by Julianne Moore). They find their new office teeming with sports-lovin’, ill-tempered Massholes.
Liz enters the office to find Kenneth the page getting the snot kicked out of him by several burly guys. “These gentlemen are the writers for Bruins Beat, whose office we’ll be sharing,” Kenneth informs her. “They are all named Sean, they are mean, and I hate it here.”
There are a few other great Masshole jabs (Jack to Nancy: “Your neighbors named their daughter ‘Belichick’!”) and some wonderfully specific local detail (references to Chet and Nat, Marina Bay and Kelly's Roast Beef). When Nancy tells Jack that her husband has left her, she says, “He wants to go to New Orleans and get on that b.s. Saints bandwagon…sniff…go Pats!” You see, even in a time of grave crisis, a true Massholina remembers where her loyalty lies: with Tom Brady. Hopefully Nancy’s character is a recurring one, so we can get a small weekly dose of Masshole flavor to tide us over til production starts on Corporation Beach.
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After each episode of Project Runway’s seventh season, a gaggle of Slatesters will gather to dish about the show. This week, the challenge was to make a party dress out of burlap sacking. Jay Nicolas Sario was the winner, and Pamela Ptak was sent home.
Hanna Rosin: Now that's a Project Runway. A fantastic challenge, executed in many interesting and surprising ways. A little bit of hating and drama. Ass flaps and a flash of nipple. Plus, I think they made the wrong decision on both sides, which always gets me exercised. But before I get critical, didn’t you both think that was the best challenge in a long, long while?
David Plotz: I totally agree. Those were stunning dresses tonight, and so environmentally friendly. It was locavore fashion, consuming low on the food chain.
June Thomas: I wish it had been one step further from "make a pretty dress," since it was basically "make a pretty dress in a difficult fabric," but I agree that it led to some gorgeous garments (and a few monstrosities). And it was worth it to see Tim Gunn's full-body shudder when Jay did a cartwheel in the muddy field.
H.R.: What do you mean, one step further? Isn't it always effectively make a pretty dress? That was burlap, for God's sake, as old as Moses, as Emilio said. And it produced a handful of amazing dresses in many shades.
J.T.: I like an unusual materials challenge, but I prefer it when they have to make a beautiful garment out of something that isn't fabric—like groceries or parts of a car. One definite upside of the challenge was that the material took dye so well—some of the colors and effects were truly spectacular. I really loved Amy's petal effect, for example. The trick of making a really sophisticated look from a very basic fabric was a good one, but I wanted to see them braiding fronds that they grabbed from a florist’s stall or the sweepings from a hairdresser's salon.
D.P.: Michael said of Mila's dress, "The boys will like it," and speaking for the boys, I certainly did (though I found the repeated blurring of the model's right nipple irritating). Mila has the potential to become reality-TV royalty. Her apparently vast talent is inextricably knotted to a seething, passive-aggressive fury. Did you catch that moment, after her model abandoned her for Anthony, when she hissed at him, "It's funny she would pick you over me." Anyone who says "it's funny" like that is someone who would push you under a truck. Yet that very reservoir of rage must drive her, because she certainly made a knockout dress.
H.R.: Oh, David, you are so harsh. A girl needs to process. It's humiliating, having your half-starved, no-talent wench of a model leave you standing out there in the hayfield, the wind whistling past. She had to take it out on someone.
J.T.: At first, I thought that Mila was wasting energy stressing out about something a model had done (and taking it out on Anthony was smart if you're "playing the game" and messing with your opponents' heads, but it’s not at all fair—Anthony hadn't done anything to make Mila's model bail), but I agree, it helped her get to her rageful place, which is apparently where her creativity resides.
D.P.: And it sure didn't hurt Anthony, whose red dress was a legitimate contender for the top three, I thought.
A moment about my favorite dress of the night. Amy's burlap flower was incredibly brave. It made the fabric do all the work. And the dye job—a frame of black, fading into a mist of brown, fading into the tan burlap—mesmerized me. That was the coolest bit of work of the night.
J.T.: I also would've given the nod to Amy for the petals, the subtle styling on the halter straps that Lauren Hutton pointed out, and the way she made this very stiff fabric seem soft and flowy. I was not as wowed as the judges were by Mila's look—there sure was a lot of burlap covered up on that dress. Of course, it was tight, short, and shiny, which are Heidi's three favorite qualities in a garment. Jay's feathers did nothing for me—partly, I think, because his dye job was so dark, so the fiddly bits really didn't show up well on television.
Seth's hooded dress was exquisite. And I speak as someone who does not care for his self-presentation (though his hair was less offensive this week). I know I shouldn't be so affected by the way the designers dress themselves on the runway, but I can't help it. I loved Jonathan's vesty look—very Simon Baker in The Mentalist—and Jesus' bow-tie was adorable.
H.R.: I'm with you on Seth and Amy. Especially Amy. I was way more impressed by her ability to transform burlap into something flowy and subtle than by those tedious black feathers. And you have perhaps hit on why they did not kick out Jesus—that cute baby Elvis meets Pee-wee Herman look.
I'm still a little puzzled about why the judges are giving Ping such a wide berth. That was a tedious, ill-fitting dress. And the model's crack was showing, a fact the camera emphasized several times. Is it just the comic relief? Or is there some potential there?
J.T.: Ping not being sent home for that garment is one of those decisions that makes me doubt the integrity of the competition. That skirt was an abomination. I am grateful for the new insult "ass flap," but I don't ever want to see another. That was not "edgy," as one of the judges suggested; it was ugly, amateurish, and ugly again. (And her model was an idiot to stick with her—she had the chance to go with another designer, and she should have.) It must be producer manipulation. Next week is a team challenge, so the producers knew that whoever was paired with Ping would be in for a whole world of drama. I can see no other reason to keep her.
D.P.: It is mysterious that they booted Pamela Ptak (I just like writing her name), when they could have booted the ass-flashing nursery-school project that Ping made, or the second astonishingly tedious dress from Jesus. Incidentally, Jesus has now referred to himself in the third person two weeks in a row, which is in itself justification for expulsion.
J.T.: Third-personification apart, what did you think of the judges' critique of Jesus' dress? It's legitimate to ding him for covering up too much burlap, but I thought they were wrong to say that his dress was "mundane and matronly" and to complain about the colors. Maybe he used too much ribbon, but I thought it looked great—the undulating layers of that beautiful green color really popped against the brown. It felt very painterly to me.
H.R.: Jesus is not going to rise to the occasion, designing as he does for his mom's friends. His future is at the neighborhood hair salon. I felt the same about the winner. I understand the value of the trickery—making burlap look like feathers. But the final result was not all that interesting—not nearly as edgy as Mila's, or as nice as that pair of red dresses, or even that bitchen Red Riding Hood get-up from Seth.
D.P.: Seth. I'm beginning to hate that guy. Did you catch his snigger at Ping's bare-ass dress?
H.R.: Also, the dude wears nail polish. David, could you ever love a man who wears nail polish?
J.T.: I would've kept Pamela over Ping, but the ass-magnification powers of Pamela's dress were spectacular. Too. Much. Butt. And I know she was very proud of producing a color that evoked denim, but many of the other contestants created more interesting shades.
H.R.: Well, June, you can't complain about Pamela's dress and forget what Michael Kors said about Jesus' dress. Too. Much. Butt. juxtaposed with No. Butt. At. All. The colors were fine by me, but I hated that ass-ymmetry. Especially on the back side.
JT: I was not in love with the back of Jesus' dress. All that focus on the zipper was a very bad idea.
D.P.: Not to reveal my mannish ignorance too much—keep in mind that I did not know the difference between a skirt and a dress until I was 21 years old—but what the heck is hambre or ombre or hombray? And why were we supposed to be so impressed that Ptak was ptakking it?
H.R.: Well, hombre. It's o-m-b-r-e. And here's a video demo. It's sort of like making Jell-O, and then dipping fabric in it. I've tried it before, but I ended up with colors nothing like those nice reds and grays.
D.P.: Is it too early for us to predict our top three for the season? I don't think so. I have my money on Amy, Emilio, Mila, and Seth. You ladies care to join me?
H.R.: Uh, that's the top four, David. Harder to pick three. I'll knock Mila off your list, since Tim Gunn complained about having too many women last time.
J.T.: My ridiculously early pick for the top three would be Emilio, Seth, and Amy. How spooky that we all predict the same Fashion Week finalists, but remember, there are lots of designers whose work we really haven’t seen yet.
Previous chats: Week 1
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Jonah Weiner: Hello again, Jody. Today we're talking about a new song from M.I.A. called "Space Odyssey." It comes to us via M.I.A.'s Twitter—she filmed a cheapo video for the song, uploaded it to TwitVid, and posted the link to her feed. She has described "Space Odyssey" as a protest song (the video arrived amid a bunch of angry tweets about a recent New York Times Travel piece that declared the ethnic combat in her native Sri Lanka "over" and then gushed about the country's scenic beauty), but that's interesting since a) the phrase protest music could be, in some form or other, applied to most of her music and b) this is a mellow track, the most prominent lyrical theme of which is total disengagement. "My lines are down, you can't call me/ As I float around in space odyssey," she sings (only the faintest hint of rapping here). The music, courtesy of the U.K. dubstep producer Rusko, is lush, languid, and squishy, punctuated here and there by deep burps of bass and a synth squeal that suggests an air-raid siren. Call me crazy, but it reminds me of the "Reading Rainbow" theme. Her longtime collaborator and ex-boyfriend Diplo said last fall that the music on her next album would resemble a combination of Animal Collective and Gucci Mane, and Rusko's bass-heavy psychedelia seems more or less of a piece with that unlikely description.
I wanted to talk about "Space Odyssey" because anything from M.I.A. is worth excitement and because I think it's hauntingly lovely. That said, I'm not sure whether it's that the song's unfinished (the vocal line could stand some variation) or just that the audio quality is so poor, but this one feels a bit undercooked, doesn't it? It sounds a like a demo played on a stereo in a room and recorded by a computer microphone, which may be exactly what it is. Which is fine, except we're missing a lot of musical detail—all these little ambient squiggles and sighs and moans—and a lot of bass, especially in the glitchy breakdown that comes at around 3:10. What I should have written above is that the song is almost lush.
Jody Rosen: Jonah, I love M.I.A., but "undercooked" is generous. "Space Odyssey" stinks. What we have here is a single, gratingly monotonous melody line, repeated more or less continuously for four minutes. (It feels like 25 minutes.) The effect is not unlike "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," although that song holds far more melodic and harmonic interest than M.I.A.'s. The various gurgles and bird twitters are, I guess, intended to distract our attention from the droning saminess of it all; but they're window-dressing. There's something almost offensive about the slapdashness of the method, here: disgorge a rudimentary tune, toss some sound effects at it, throw the word "space" in the title, and, presto!—it's psychedelic, man. But good psychedelia takes work. The best "space" songs are even more meticulously worked-over than "straight" songs. But "Space Odyssey" isn't languid. It's lazy.
Or maybe just rushed? I think what we're hearing here is one of the pitfalls of the brave new pop world. It's neat that M.I.A. can cobble together a song and blast it out on the Internet in just 24 hours. But what's being lost? A bit of rigor, I'd say. As for M.I.A.'s claim that this is a protest song: Isn't coherence a protest-song prerequisite?
J.W.: Maybe the "protest song" tag is something of a red herring—it's twice removed from M.I.A., after all, synthesized by a Fader reporter from a publicist's statement. But, anyway: You do not like this one. I think we've discovered by now that I'm a bit more content than you are to splash around in mood and texture and that I'm a bit more willing to take or leave "song craft"—or maybe I just have a loose, degenerate definition of the term! You say the gurgles and pitch-corrected moans and such are here on "Space Odyssey" to disguise some deeper lack. I'm with you that something else needs to happen (I wouldn't say the song feels like it's 25 minutes long but I'll give you, oh, seven), but for me, the ambient bits aren't ornamental elements so much as the perfectly engrossing main event, weaving and floating and humming and buzzing vertiginously through the mix. They don't smack you across the face the way the drums on "Bird Flu" do, say, and this would be an odd choice for a single, but I find the steady, thwacking beat and electronic flotsam, if not hypnotic, then pleasantly lulling and even a bit poignant. I could see "Space Odyssey" re-emerging—in CD quality, and hopefully with the melody changed up—as a quiet kind of knockout.
J.R. Just for the record, I don't have a problem with mood and texture, per se. I'm on record as a Four Tet fan. I just think the mood and texture in this song is awfully sloppy. Nothing that grabs my ear or grabs anything else. Feels like rush job-underthunk and underfelt. But, anyway. I reserve the right to be blown away by the upgraded album version of this thing, if and when it surfaces. Here's hoping.
In the meantime, one more gripe. The video is godawful. I wish M.I.A. had just leaked the MP3, sans alleged video. Or at least set her space odyssey to some stray Sagan footage!
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Robert B. Parker, who died
yesterday at 77, wrote his Spenser detective series in two speeds. Fast for
the action sequences and for his friendship with Hawk, the bald, black hit man
who never fails him. Slow for Spenser’s food, his clothing, and his love for
Susan Silverman. It’s Hawk and Susan that I kept coming back for when I
devoured two dozen of these novels in high school and afterward. Spenser’s
relationship with Hawk let me peer into a kind of brotherhood that I didn’t
know anything about firsthand, as one of four sisters. (We all must have felt
that way, since we read these books out loud in the car on long trips.) And his
long, intimate, sustaining relationship with Susan? It was a model for the
companionate marriage we on
DoubleX and many
others
have spent so much time examining recently. Never mind that they never actually
got married.
Here is how Spenser introduced Susan in 1976: "Susan
Silverman wasn't beautiful, but there was a tangibility about her... It was
hard to tell her age but there was a sense about her of intelligent maturity
which put her on my side of thirty." The teenage me already knew that when
you get to the other side of 30, that’s what you aim for. A dozen years later
in book years, Susan left Spenser for a while for a new job (she got a
psychology Ph.d. at Harvard). He found another woman for a time. A bit of
lonely bitterness crept into the series, but not enough to throw off the rhythm
of these books, which are plotted as well as anything I’ve read by Scott Turow
or Tony Hillerman.
Eventually, Spenser has to rescue Susan. This occurs in the
only book in the series that I remembered the title of when I heard that Parker
died: A Catskill Eagle. It came out in 1985. It threw me. Susan had
become helpless, cold, selfish, no fun. I hardly knew her. I got mad and
stopped reading Spenser books for a while. It soured me on the TV show, too
(though the casting
of Hawk was masterful).
Every profile of Parker points out that he himself is the
basis for Spenser (except Parker was shorter) and his wife Joan is Susan. I
don’t know what fissure opened up between the real couple in the mid 1980s, but
it produced what reviewers say is the only bad book in the series. The Parkers’
marriage recovered, and with it the novels. There are a couple of missteps over
the years but considering the man lived with his characters through 37 books, it’s
remarkable that his affection for them persisted undiminished.
Louis B. Park of the Houston
Chronicle (who I trust because he hated A
Catskill Eagle, too) wrote in 2003 that “Spenser
readers are pretty much divided into two camps: those who love Susan Silverman and Spenser's dedication to her (not to
mention constant mooning over her) and those who wish she would fall out a
window.” I’m clearly in the first camp. I guess you can read the Spenser novels
and skip the slow Susan bits without missing much of the plot. But it’s
Spenser’s loyalty to Susan that explains why he’s the private eye you’d most
want to hire.
(Cross posted on DoubleX.)
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The Shame Index complained last week that How I Met Your Mother's 100th episode didn't give Marshall enough to do. Episode 101 was welcomely Eriksen-centric.
Awesome:
—Marshall's skee-ball moniker, "Big Fudge."
—Amanda Peet. The Shame Index confesses that he's never quite understood Peet's appeal, but she was well-deployed here. The Jenkins-is-really-a-woman gag was clever, and Peet had some memorable moments, particularly her attempt to convince Lily she was not, in fact, Jenkins, but an emissary from the French consulate: "I am here because of a small but significant cheese incident that occurred."
—Pelican Rapids
—"You can't handle the Fudge"
—"But Um." The Shame Index has been irritated all season long by Robin's poor treatment at the hands of HIMYM's writers, but the latest indignity visited on her—becoming the subject of a college drinking game—ended up being pretty funny. And at least Robin got the last, bullhorn-amplified laugh. (Kudos to the writers for tying the Marshall and Robin plots together by making Jenkins' kiss of Marshall the result of having been sloshed after a round of "But Um"—a nicely Seinfeldian touch.)
—"Wait a minute. ... You're Big Fudge."
—That Marshall and Lily are deciding whether their pet will be a monkey or a cat depending on the outcome of a game of Risk they've been playing for three years. We've previously learned that Marshall is an exceptional talent when it comes to board games; Lily must really not want that monkey. (Marshall is surely the one who wants the monkey, right?)
—Marshall's description of Jenkins's tongue as being "thick and rough like a starfish arm."
—The conclusion of Ted's lecture on the sad—and apparently invented—architectural legacy of Gregorio Francetti Gazebo.
—The use of Samuel Barber's Adadio for Strings—better known as the Platoon theme—to score the final "But Um" binge and its aftermath.
Shameful:
—A reacher and a settler. Perhaps this is just the Index's deep affection for Big Fudge talking here, but Marshall is the reacher in that marriage? The Index didn't really buy that. (If Oprah were about to crash a plane carrying the Index's children and grandchildren into an art museum holding the Index's favorite art, the Index would still say that neither Lily nor Marshall is a reacher.) Also, how peevish of Robin and Ted to tell Marshall that he is the reacher in his marriage. This latest instance of the friends being markedly cruel to one another happened to be in the service of moving along a funny, well-conceived plot (unlike, say, Barney's treatment of Robin earlier this season), but it was bothersome nevertheless.
A solid start to the second half of the season. But ums up!
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
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We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines—but which headlines? Every week, Brow Beat matches L&O's plot points to the events that inspired them.
Jan. 15, 2010: "Blackmail"
These Are Their Stories
When freelance journalist Megan Carrick is murdered, Detectives Bernard and Lupo discover that she was investigating daytime TV host Vanessa Carville. The host had engaged in consensual affairs with several women on her show's staff, including Carrick. Suspicious, the detectives decide to question Carville. They find her mid-meeting with District Attorney Jack McCoy, explaining that someone is trying to blackmail her. A habitual early riser, she had gone to her car at 6 a.m. and discovered a packet full of incriminating photos, e-mails, and diary entries, along with a blackmail note. The detectives arrest the would-be blackmailer when he picks up a check from Carville. She later apologizes to her show's audience and tells them she has done "some pretty kinky things."
This Is the Real Story
In early October 2009, late-night TV host David Letterman shocked his studio audience by confessing to some "creepy things," including a number of consensual affairs with female employees. Letterman had found a blackmail package in the back of his car when he went to make his customary early morning drive to the studio. He took the information to the district attorney, and the alleged blackmailer, Robert Joel Halderman, was arrested when he attempted to deposit the check Letterman gave him. Until shortly before the sting operation, Halderman was involved with Stephanie Birkitt, Letterman's one-time personal assistant and one of the women with whom he'd had an affair. According to Time, "Extracts from her diaries were reportedly in the package in Letterman's car."
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After each episode of Project Runway’s seventh season, a gaggle of Slatesters will gather to dish about the show.
June Thomas: The first week of Project Runway is always a bit of a blur. The producers have to introduce 16 designers—and get them down the runway. That doesn't leave a lot of room to signal who's the kook, who's the no-hoper, and who's the bitch. But this episode was particularly turbo-charged, and it was great.
There was a lot less of the manufactured suspense that we're used to having in the announcement phase. Instead of a lot of shots of Heidi looking sadistic and the contestants looking nervous, Heidi just announced the winner (congratulations, Emilio Sosa), and a minute later, it was “auf Wiedersehen, Christiane King.”
Hanna Rosin: I have to say, I could have used a little more tension. As a challenge, "make a dress that reflects your design aesthetic" was a little flat, the equivalent of my editor telling me, "Write something." It's as if, after the disaster of last season, they have to remind us of the original formula, "make it work" and all.
That said, they did wring some drama out of Janeane Marie Ceccanti and Seth Aaron Henderson. She is like a walking Abilify commercial, and you can't imagine her making it through the season. Her outfit was also utterly forgettable, practically institutional.
Seth was the surprise of the evening. The whole episode I was trying to pin him down. Is he Pirates of Penzance? Vegas lounge lizard? Dan Zanes? It never occurred to me he would make a fine dress. Did you guys like the dress, by the way? The back was lovely, I thought, but the front was straight out of the Delia's catalog.
David Plotz: June and my beloved wife, Hanna, I'm honored if a little scared to be permitted to bring my Y chromosome to this discussion. Lifetime's commercials—vitamins specially formulated for women, weight-loss pills for women, calcium for women, cereals for fat women, hair-care products for women, based-on-a-true-woman’s-story movies (The Pregnancy Pact!) suggest that I am not Project Runway's target audience. But if Slate can have three women write about Friday Night Lights, it can certainly allow a guy into the Project Runway conversation.
Seth's gingham milkmaid hooker dress didn't interest me as much as his architectural hair, which was not even the most vertical of the Season 7 men’s, suggesting we have finally reached the grim cultural moment when men spend more time on their hair than women do.
Heidi, who seems to be a one-person pregnancy pact (what is this, her fourth kid?), seemed a little more robotic than usual in the premiere. She's surely bored with saying exactly the same thing week after week, season after season, and I felt like her boredom was showing. I don't know how many more seasons they can do with exactly the same formula, same words, same catchphrases, same everything.
J.T.: David, I think it can go on forever as long as they sign up talented contestants and the judging makes sense. After all, we tried change last season, and look how that worked out.
I did not think that Seth deserved to be in the top three, but perhaps that's because I'm sad that the judges like him. One look at the way he styles himself—I swear his runway outfit made him look like the ringmaster in a satanic circus—and I immediately took against him. But every reality show needs someone viewers love to hate. (I did like the back of his dress, well, other than that monstrous red zipper. I hated the fabric, though. It read very old-lady to me.)
Let's talk about the winners and losers. In every Week 1, only six of the contestants count: the top three and the bottom three, whose dresses we actually get to see for more than a millisecond. The rest are just extras.
I was glad Emilio won. He seems like a nice guy, but most important, he made a beautiful dress that was lovely to look at and showed off his technical skills. It was another short challenge, which is something I don't care for in general—would it kill the producers to give the designers enough time to think and to make properly finished garments?--but it did separate the contestants. In just over a day, Emilio managed all manner of braiding and appliqué and complicated inlays. The dress looked like something young women would want to buy, but it also had an expensive, high-end look. In fact, it was one of my all-time favorite Project Runway dresses.
D.P.: Totally with you on Emilio. Loved the dress. The other designer I wanted in the top three was Anna Lynett, the artist who made that very sunshine-y cute dress.
H.R.: June, you say only the top and bottom three matter. But I thought there were some real doozies that got away. Jay Nicolas Sario—one of three people on the show to refer to himself in the third person—had that dress with poof-balls stuck on it, an homage to paint-ball victims everywhere. And right after that came Pamela Ptak's pink flying nun. Those two definitely stuck with me.
J.T.: At the bottom of the pack, I would have been fine with any of them going home.
The judges were right about Jesus Estrada’s dress—not sexy, not fashionable, dated—but I kind of liked the chiffon train. Anthony Williams was safe because he brought the sound bites—“I’m sweating like a Baptist preacher”—and made a naked appeal to demographics when he described himself as "black and gay in the ghetto" and started ragging on the Miss America pageant. But he got the worst note that the judges can give: They questioned his “taste level.”
D.P.: I am already over Anthony, who seems like a character in a canceled sitcom. Ping Wu, too, is going to wear out her welcome soon; she’ll probably be auf'd by Episode 3. I'm most looking forward to either the success or failure of Type A egomaniac supervillain Pamela Ptak (who probably fired the other vowels in her last name just to keep the "a" in line). Her pink dress, with its gasp-inducing absence of a back, had the odd effect of making her model look simultaneously naked and fat.
J.T.: Ping is clearly this season's wacko—and although I can't see her lasting too far into the show, she's interesting and amusing, and she certainly has a point of view.
H.R.: I was sure that Ping was going to end up like Elisa, that yoga freak from Season 4 who spit on her fabrics. Especially after she started dancing in front of the mirror and giggling into her wrist like a Japanese teenager. And that weird tea cozy head thing? Her outfit did not translate on TV at all. It was impossible to discern its construction; it could have been strung together by that single suspender for all I know. But then the judges decided it had a kind of eccentric Rei Kawakubo charm and declared her the artiste of the show. To me, it was a lesson on the arbitrary nature of taste. It really could have gone either way.
J.T.: I totally thought of Elisa the spitter when I saw Ping. Despite being the contestant who appears to have the least-developed command of English, she spun a good story about her clothes. That always wins over the judges—and it does feel like a necessary talent for someone who wants to be a "real" designer. High fashion can be very conceptual. If you can conjure a whole world for your clothes to fit into, you can get around that whole "wearability" question.
H.R.: Yes, June, but isn't that where Brüno comes in? ("My collection is all about stones and hopping toads ...") And remember what happened to Malvin the egg man from last season? He was high concept, too.
J.T.: Christiane was the first person to be kicked off the show. Her dress was just too generic (and the blue fabric was garish—that old "taste level" thing again). Project Runway is a tough place for black women—I'm still feeling bad about Korto’s fate in Season 5—but Christiane’s outfit was boring and badly made, and that should earn you a ticket home.
H.R.: I have to bring up the subject of ethnic hierarchies on the show. They do seem to prefer the Persians. The woman who sewed my wedding dress was a Persian seamstress, so I understand it’s in the blood. But the show seems to accord the Persian women a certain authority and respect. Other ethnics, meanwhile—Ping, Anthony, Jesus—are played for comic relief.
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Jody Rosen: Unlike nearly every other youngish white inhabitant of the gentrified New Brooklyn, it took me a while to warm up to Dirty Projectors. In fact, I'm still only lukewarm. I respect them, I'm mildly awed by them, but I don't quite love them. It's my fault, not theirs. In general, I have a hard time with art rock, and the DP's tricky, showy songs are very arty indeed: trompes l'oeil—or trompes l'oreille—whose meaning and purpose, concealed beneath disorienting blasts of rhythm and melody, emerge only after a lot of close listening. But at his best, songwriter-guitarist-frontman Dave Longstreth has something of Thelonious Monk in him, an off-kilter sense of musical time and space that seems to be saying something about, well, space-time, life, the universe-musical jokes that grade into cosmic, metaphysical jokes. Plus, the vocal parts Longstreth writes for backing vocalists Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, Angel Deradoorian—the Acid Andrews Sisters—are truly awesome.
Which brings me to "Ascending Melody," a new, nonalbum single, released as a free MP3. (You can download the song here.) As usual, it'll take me a while to really wrap my ears around this song. Here are some things I like. I like the gangly funkiness of the lead guitar figure. I especially like the swank smooth jazz-feel of the acoustic guitar noodling that darts in and out in the song's opening minute. I love the way those gals sing. And I like the moment, around the 3:00 mark, when the song grinds to a halt and stays there for far too long. Nearly a full minute by my count, without much going on at all. There's something kind of gangsta about that.
Here's what I don't like: Longstreth's voice. The guy sings the emasculated warble that's the default style of seemingly all male indie rockers these days: a wimped-out version of David Byrne's yelp. This sound just gets on my nerves. Also, the lyrics. "Reciprocity for hungry souls/ Go away hungry." Huh? What? Help me, Jonah: what are these young people talking about?
Jonah Weiner: I didn't think I minded Longstreth's voice, but now that you mention it, my heart sank a quarter-inch or so when he started singing here, after the ladies had been going for the first minute. (Not sure whether they're all singing on "Ascending Melody.") The effect of his arrival was sort of like when Charlie Rose is interviewing someone you really want to hear talk and he keeps interrupting them. Somebody turn this guy's mic off! Longstreth can sing, but he's a less interesting—and in the indie-rock context at least, more conventional—singer than the girls. As you said, his gifts lie elsewhere, as a songwriter and arranger.
I tend to agree with you: I'm impressed by this band, but I don't enjoy listening to them, exactly. The big exception to that is no big surprise: "Stillness is the Move," the "breakout" single off Bitte Orca. In-the-pocket clatter, nagging guitar drone, Longstreth-free vocals, and Coffman doing a spry, note-vaulting, tricky-cadenced, Destiny's Child/Aaliyah impression. One of my favorite pieces of rock criticism last year was Solange Knowles' smart, lush "Stillness" cover, which made the song's R & B connection explicit. Between the Xx's "Hot Like Fire" and tUnE-YarDs' "Real Live Flesh," it's a good time for R & B-inflected art-rock.
That gangly funk riff that starts off the song contains a near-direct Talking Heads quote, doesn't it? That fraying flourish at the end? I just skipped through Remain in Light to try and find it but came up empty-handed. Help me, Jody: What ye olde cultural artifact am I talking about?
J.R.: I just zipped through a couple of Talking Heads albums and I couldn't find the bit, either. We may need to turn to "The Fray"—the Slate message board, not the band—for guidance on this.
Meanwhile, I managed to find the "Ascending Melody" lyrics here. It's not a pretty picture, I'm afraid. Here is the song, in full:
Two businessmen corralling life
Restrain yourself, you both must hunger properly
Unfathomable enigma
Repine unfathomable enigma
[CHORUS]
Ascending melody, rise above
Ascending melody, stronger than all concern
Are you happy to repeat yourself
For a minute then, I thought I was someone else
Ask the world for the right release
Reciprocity, the hungry souls go away from greed
[REPEAT CHORUS]
Is it wrong of me to hate these lyrics as much as I do—to want Dirty Projectors to make sense, or at least to be less pretentious about their nonsense? The band is lavishly interesting, musically; I know that should be enough. But as with Radiohead, I can't ignore the doggerel. "Repine unfathomable enigma"! Bob Dylan used the word "repine" in a song once, but he's Bob Dylan. No one else should go near that word. Ever. Also, can we call for a moratorium on Williamsburg hipsters giving snotty life-advice to "businessmen"?
One thought: Maybe the DP's should go completely lyric-less—just have those women sing lots of long vowel sounds? Or maybe they should croon the word "Deradoorian" for four minutes?
J.W.: Those words are bad, although I don't totally trust that lyrics site—I had it as "two businessmen quarrelling," and "unfathomably angry." But, either way, the fact that there's some ambiguity about the words they're singing is an asset. A word like repine shouldn't be front-and-center in any song that's not about evergreen reforestation, and, thankfully, it's not front-and-center here. I like your vision of Dirty Projectors doing away with words for phonemes. I sort of listen to them (and most Radiohead songs, though I find Yorke's lyrics more effective and evocative than you do) that way already. I bet a big part of the reason we prefer the ladies to Longstreth is because we can make out much more clearly what he's saying. Nice to do this again, Jody. I'm going to go type the word "Deradoorian" for four minutes.
Correction, Jan. 15, 2010: This post originally stated that Angel Deradoorian sings lead on "Stillness is the Move." Amber Coffman does.
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On Monday, I wrote a post about the New York Times Netflix map, identifying ZIP codes with bizarre rental tendencies and inviting Slate readers to find their own examples. You answered the call, locating a handful of idiosyncratic ZIPs with no interest in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Rachel Getting Married, or the other recent Oscar contenders that dominate the rest of the map.
Some of your discoveries fit into the categories I wrote about on Monday. A number of you noticed, for instance, that ZIP code 55450 is home to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Like LaGuardia and O'Hare, it has a unique list:
1. Battlestar Galactica: Season 3: Disc 3
2. Battlestar Galactica: Season 3: Disc 2
3. Battlestar Galactica: Season 3: Disc 1
That's it; there are only three movies listed on its Top 10, suggesting a single account, and a new one at that.
I had also pointed out the collegiate—some might say sophomoric—taste of ZIP code 80208, which is home to the University of Denver. Slate readers found a handful of other college campuses, all of them with preferences outside the mainstream. Among them are California State University Long Beach (90840; No. 2: Berserk: Vol. 1: War Cry), University of Maryland College Park (20742; No. 5: Sex Drive), and University of Washington (98195; No. 9: Pineapple Express). My favorite college campus, though, is that of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (20064), which several readers came across on the map. Its Top 10 would seem to reflect the interests of a budding journalist, or perhaps the syllabus of a media-studies course:
1. The Truman Show
2. Citizen Kane
3. Broadcast News
4. Control Room
5. Talk to Me
6. Being There
7. Good Night, and Good Luck
8. All the President's Men
9. Talk Radio
10. The War Tapes
Many readers noticed that race seems to play a role in the preferences of some ZIP codes. The work of Tyler Perry (The Family That Preys; Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail), for example, makes a strong showing in several ZIP codes in Greater Atlanta and in the 75237 ZIP in Dallas. Other readers pointed out that military installations were less likely to be enamored of Oscar bait. In Greater Boston, there is Hanscom Air Force Base (01731; No. 3: New in Town); in Maryland, there is Andrews Air Force Base (20762, No. 1: Yes Man).
For sheer wackiness, there's no beating federal employees. See, for instance, 90073, in Los Angeles, home to the Veterans Administration (No. 1: Swimming With Sharks; No. 2: The Big Lebowski). Reader Tony Drollinger e-mailed to flag Minnesota ZIP 55111, which is just east of the aforementioned Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. "I'm an employee of the US Fish & Wildlife Service at Fort Snelling," writes Tony. "This area is comprised of my large federal building (which also houses people from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, and several branches of the military). Next door to us is an Air Force base, and other parts of the ZIP Code house a MN DOT building, the VA hospital, a state park, a public golf course, a private tennis club, and a bar/restaurant." In other words, not many residents, and presumably only a few Netflix accounts:
1. Weeds: Season 4: Disc 3
2. The Notebook
3. Do Not Adjust Your Set: Disc 2
4. Star Trek
5. Touch the Sound
6. 27 Dresses
7. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
8. The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice
9. Highlander
10. Righteous Kill
Thanks to all the readers who wrote in with strange ZIPs. Email me at dvdextras@gmail.com if you find a great one that I left out. In the meantime, I will be adding The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice to my own Brooklyn-based Netflix queue. It features an all-star cast of Noah Wyle, Bob Newhart, Jane Curtin, and is directed by Star Trek: The Next Generation's Jonathan Frakes. How can you go wrong?
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The How I Met Your Mother team pulled out all the stops for the series' 100th episode, and while the Shame Index couldn't help but wonder whether previous episodes this season suffered in order to make this one an event, last night was a treat.
Awesome:
—"Hard Lemondade? You know what, Boomer, you can keep that."
—The list of professions held by the women Barney has slept with, especially the rhyming section ("a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker") and the detail that he's bedded both professional and amateur equestrians.
—The cutaway to Barney waterskiing while suited-up. A simple yet well-executed gag.
—Barney's secret suit locker in the McClaren's men's room.
—Barney in suit withdrawal, smearing his face into Marshall's jacket.
—The Tim Gunn cameo: Clever to cast him as the tailor, a nice play on his catchphrase, and the right touch of meta-ness, describing him as "TV's Tim Gunn."
—Bob Saget. This episode made particularly good use of the interplay between the action in 2010 and the narration in 2030. Bob Saget Ted: "I didn't know it, but I was about to hear the very first description of the woman I'd one day marry." Cindy: "She's a whore." And then just a bit later in the same scene. Ted: "Look at me. I promise I'm not going to fall in love with your roommate." Bob Saget Ted: "Oops."
—Ted's dream of having triplet schnauzers named Frank, Llloyd, and Wright.
—The musical number. The writers didn't go out of their way to explain why there was a show tune dropped into the episode, but it was exactly the kind of performance you could imagine Barney imagining, and Neil Patrick Harris just plain sold it. The Shame Index especially enjoyed his use of a lint roller as a microphone, and his gift of a doublebreasted suit to that dachshund. And that Barney managed, in the end, to get the girl and the suits.
Shameful:
—Ted Mosby did not know school policy on dating students? The Shame Index does not believe this for a second.
—The near misses with the mother were at once tantalizing and mildly shameful. It's undeniably fun to see Ted get so close, to learn the origin of the little yellow bus (a gew-gaw the Shame Index admits to not having noticed before), and to get the latest on the fated yellow umbrella. And while some of the details we learned about the mother were somewhat blah—she, too, enjoys the work of T.C. Boyle—others were charmingly quirky, and exactly the kind of thing you could see Ted finding irresistible: her hobby of painting robots that play sports, her knack for making breakfast foods sing show tunes. (Another great Saget interpolation: "Your mother's rendition of ‘Memories' as performed by an English muffin is, to this day, the most hauntingly beautiful thing I've ever heard.") Still, by the end of the episode the nearness of the misses—Ted hefted her bass! He glimpsed her ankle!—was beginning to cross the line into teasing territory.
—It would have been nice to see Marshall have more to work with in the 100th episode—he was basically left to coo over Lily. (The Shame Index, for the record, sides with Marshall: Alyson Hannigan is totally hotter than the hot bartender.) The joke about the bartender, did, however, take on new life when Lily confessed her appreciation for the woman: "That ass. I'd wear that thing for a hat." Robin, too, was given little to work with here, though at least we were spared another Don sighting.
All in all, a highly enjoyable episode. Let's hope the second half of the season follows ... wait for it ...
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
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On Saturday, the New York Times posted an interactive map of Netflix rental patterns in 12 U.S. cities, broken down by ZIP code. The map is smartly designed and great fun to explore, yet what strikes you almost immediately is the lack of regional variation. The most-popular movies across each urban area are films that contended in last year's Oscars—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Milk, Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married—plus a handful of less heady titles: Paul Blart, Eagle Eye, Twilight.
But not all of the ZIPs are so boring. Perusing the New York map over the weekend, Slate contributor Mike Shollar came across 11371, in Flushing, Queens, N.Y. Its Top 10:
1. Wall-E
2. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
3. Oz: Season 3: Disc 1
4. Watchmen
5. The Midnight Meat Train
6. Man, Woman, and the Wall
7. Traffic
8. Romancing the Stone
9. Crocodile Dundee 2
10. Godzilla's Revenge
Why such an idiosyncratic list? According to Zipcode.com, 11371 has a population of zero—it's LaGuardia Airport. Presumably, this list represents the taste of a small number of people (a single person?) who registered a Netflix account to a mailstop at LGA. Mike noticed a similar phenomenon in Chicago, where O'Hare has its own zip. The top titles in 60666:
1. Year of the Dragon
2. Transporter 3
3. Somewhere in Time
4. Videodrome
5. A Prayer for the Dying
6. Sixteen Candles
7. Orlando
8. Pale Rider
9. The Breakfast Club
10. Raising Arizona
It's not just airports that have more eclectic lists. College campuses often have their own ZIPs as well. The University of Denver, which resides in 80208, would seem to have particularly collegiate taste:
1. Flight of the Conchords: Season 1: Disc 2
2. W.
3. Volver
4. Weeds: Season 2: Disc 2
5. Appaloosa
6. Weeds: Season 2: Disc 1
7. Defiance
8. Eastern Promises
9. The Visitor
10. The Duchess
Other pockets of resistance to Oscar dominance include, interestingly, the ZIP codes in which some of the major studios reside. Universal City, home to Universal Studios, is in ZIP code 91608. Its Top 10:
1. Twilight
2. Vicky Christina Barcelona
3. Taken
4. I Love You, Man
5. RocknRolla
6. Cloverfield
7. Changeling
8. Body of Lies
9. Sicko
10. True Blood: Season 1, Disc 1
One final zip-code category that produces entertaining Top 10s: areas largely taken up by federal or state government. For example, 80225, home to the Denver Federal Center. Get the sense this list reflects the taste of a single Netflix subscriber?
1. Entourage: Season 1: Disc 1
2. Patton Oswalt: No Reason to Complain: Uncensored
3. Richard Jeni: A Big Steaming Pile of Me
4. Psych: Season 1: Disc 1
5. Heckler
6. Robot Chicken: Season 1: Disc 1
7. Patton Oswalt: My Weakness Is Strong
8. Psych: Season 1: Disc 2
9. Patton Oswalt: Werewolves and Lollipops
10. Psych: Season 1: Disc 3
This is hardly a comprehensive list of ZIP codes with unique taste in cinema. Brow Beat readers: Have you noticed a strange ZIP on the Times's Netflix map? E-mail me at dvdextras@gmail.com, and be sure to send along your best guess at what's afoot in that ZIP. And if you're a skycap with a fondness for the adventure movies of the 1980s or a federal employee with a deep appreciation for Patton Oswalt, we'd love to hear from you as well.
Update, Jan. 13, 8:13a.m.: Click here for more weird Netflix zip codes, discovered by Slate readers.
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The February issue of Esquire features an article entitled "Jay-Z: It Takes a Harmless, Hand-Built Gangster To Run this Town," by Lisa Taddeo. If the author's name sounds familiar, it might be because of another story she wrote for Esquire, a mildly controversial, fictionalized account of Heath Ledger's death in which Taddeo assumed the late actor's voice and narrated his final hours. While she has taken a more straightforward approach to Jay-Z, the end product is no less bizarre.
I will leave it to others to pick apart Taddeo's dubious assessment of the artist—the issues raised by the Village Voice's Zach Baron are a good place to start. Rather, I'd like to call attention to Taddeo's prose style, which is by turns purple ("Stoute's worldview is both oracular and pretend color-blind") and simply nonsensical. (What could she possibly mean when saying that reporters surround Jay-Z in a "buttery little square"?) There is a tendency toward strange compound constructions ("he is real deal-eyed") and a weakness for neologism (Jay-Zion). Her metaphors—"like an endorsement-gathering snowball"—are decidedly mixed. This isn't bad writing. This is writing so baffling and incomprehensible that I hesitate to guess what the writer or her editors were thinking.
Below are my 12 favorite Taddeoisms from the Jay-Z profile. Did I leave out your favorite howler? Post in "The Fray."
1. "Jay-Z walks into a gracious chamber at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. It's the same room where, thousands of years ago, crown moldings were born."
2. "He sits down in his hard-backed chair and the reporters collect around him in a buttery little square. But Jay-Z doesn't really sit. What he actually does is slalom down in his chair, real low like it's a water slide. Seventy-three inches of all-black everything, laid out like a ramp."
3. "Jay-Z is a half-dangerous rapper who grew up in the gat-happy projects of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He sold crack on feral corners and shot his brother for stealing his ring. Badass, for real."
4. "Look up, left, and listen. Jay-Z's vamping scowl is paraded everywhere, his presence vibrates from sound systems and is woven into the fabrics."
5. "Short and bald with a body type that plugs his surname, Steve Stoute is the underfamous but ubiquitous guy in all the celebrity pictures."
6. "He's black and also liquid-shiny like the mimetic shape-shifting bad guy in Terminator 2. He's real deal-eyed, and what first comes off as arrogance you realize later is sentience, with an extra side of arrogance. He's wily as hell, plus hyper-protective and defensive of his products, both intellectual and carbon-based."
7. "Authenticity is Stoute's psalm. It is a religion that he sells best and preaches savagely."
8. "Like an endorsement-gathering snowball tumbling down the great white slopes, that relationship grew bigger and stronger with each partnership."
9. "Along the way, Damon Dash's influence began to wave its tired arms from a lifeboat somewhere off the coast of Jay-Zion."
10. "Inside a large and empty belly of a building in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York, Damon Dash roosts and inflates. These are his new offices and he's barely moved in, but his aspirations seem to have leased this space forever."
11. "A campfire flickers in his widowed eyes."
12. "It's Jay-Z alone who owns that power in hip-hop; 50 Cent or Nas would not look good at President Clinton's ear. If one of them had walked into that chamber at the Plaza and said, 'Hey, fuck shit,' the laughter that reverberated off the golden tassels would not have rung so loud and so careless. It would have dribbled out a little bit nervously, more like an accidental peeing in one's pants than a sure and expected stream."
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It's no big secret that Hollywood churns out sequels and remakes. Looking over a list of the potential blockbusters of summer 2010—Iron Man 2 and Shrek Forever After among them—gives one the feeling, however, that moviedom has finally, pitifully, totally run out of ideas. Below I've compiled a list of 11 sequels and adaptations scheduled to be released this year. I've also seeded the list with a pair of phony movies. Take a stab at guessing the real from the fake, then check your answers in "The Fray."
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Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood
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Owen Wilson and
McLovin in
Marmaduke
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Neil Patrick Harris and Mary-Kate Olsen in Beastly, a modernized version of Beauty and the Beast
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Jake Gyllenhaal in the adaptation of the video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
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Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, and MMA star Quinton "Rampage" Jackson in The A-Team
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The Rock in Jerry Bruckheimer's Airwolf
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The guy from
Gossip Girl and
the girl from
Dancing With the Stars in
Footloose
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Nicolas Cage in Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice
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Jim Carrey and Steve Carell in Horton Hatches the Egg
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Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
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Little Fockers, aka Meet the Parents 3
-
Step Up 3-D
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Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher took their curtain call as authors of the Wall Street Journal's weekly wine column, "Tastings," on Dec. 26, ending a 12-year run as the nation's most prolific husband-and-wife-grape-juice-critiquing duo. In the spirit of Peter Biskind's improbable guesstimate that Warren Beatty slept with 12,755 women (one a day from 1956 to 1991), we've tried to calculate how many bottles the couple tasted over the course of the last dozen years. In the final three months of their column, Gaiter and Brecher discussed seven bottles per column. If you multiply that average by the 579 columns they've written since 1998, that comes to 4,053 bottles. Factor in that they only mention their favorite bottles, and we can double that number (using Biskind's give-or-take approach to math) for a grand total of 8,106 bottles.
What else could you calculate using Biskind's arithmetic? Number of cigarettes Drew Barrymore has smoked since the age of nine? Bill Bennett's gambling losses? Email slatebrowbeat@gmail.com or comment in "The Fray."
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Thanks, Brow Beat readers: The great hogchoker mystery of 2010 is closed. Yesterday, the North American flatfish mysteriously made it to items No. 1 and No. 8 on Google Trends' "Hot Searches." Since we at Slate couldn't puzzle out the oddly named fish's sudden rise to fame from news, blog, and Twitter searches, we asked you, dear readers, to help us solve the case.
Some amateur sleuths noted that hogchoker is a sports gambling term. It "was used rather obscurely yesterday in reference to a popular sports betting site GodsTips, so serious online bettors may have been trying to find out what the guy meant," suggested Robin. A Longhorns fan also suspected a sports connection: "My inclination is to think that it has something to do with Arkansas Razorbacks, since we call them Hogs in this part of the world—and this part of the world is all about sports this week."
Other suggestions: One e-mail noted that on the morning of the hogchoker resurgence, NPR ran a segment on "small, big-headed, oily fish that are being over-harvested." Slate contributor Nina Shen Rastogi searched Urban Dictionary and found that a "hog choker" is defined therein as "a fuckin mammoth line of coke." Perhaps the sudden spike was connected to some celebrity overdose, she proposed. Reader Brad e-mailed, "Sadly, I would bet money that it has something to do with misogynistic porn." Others pointed out the phrase's similarity to "choking the chicken," a euphemism for masturbation.
Buck up, Brad! The answer has naught to do with misogynistic porn—nor, for that matter, with sports or cocaine. Rather, the odd name cropped up in yesterday's episode of the syndicated Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? The question, according to many readers, asked what sort of animal a "hogchoker" is. The contestant couldn't answer, so she gave up and walked away.
There are two take-aways from this. First of all, it's a reminder that Google Trends measures change, not volume. It tracks sudden spikes in people searching for a term. Hogchoker is such a little-used word, it likely took a relatively small number of absolute searches for the word to become, in Google parlance, "volcanic."
Second, and perhaps more importantly: Who knew so many people were still watching Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? In fact, many of the e-mails reflected slight embarrassment on the part of the reader. Ed wrote: "(Not a fan, BTW, I only caught the show accidentally. And I only clicked on the Slate link because I thought—gee, two hogchokers in a day.)"
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The news that the director Sam Mendes is in talks to helm the next James Bond movie is disorienting, in a fruitful way. Imagining the maestro of middle-class ennui putting Daniel Craig's 007 through his globe-trotting, gadget-wielding, babe-bagging paces raises all kinds of questions: What sort of career crossroads must Mendes be at to jettison his usual genteel subject matter for a major action franchise? What sort of career crossroads must James Bond be at to seek out the imprimatur of middlebrow classiness that the Mendes name brings with it? Mainly, though, the Mendes/Bond pairing was an excuse for wit. Memes sprang up and bounded around, and here at Slate, we imagined a counterfactual history where the Bond movies had all been been directed with a Mendes sensibility.
Herewith, anonymously co-authored by Slate's entire staff, the complete chronological James Bond filmography as directed by Sam Mendes:
- Dr. No ... Well, Maybe ... I'm Not Sure
- From Suburbia with Anomie
- Polished Soapstone Countertop With Maple Butcher Block ... Finger
- Thundernoballs
- You're Only Gay Twice
- On Her Majesty's Tea Service
- Diamonds are for Symbolizing Domestic Entrapment
- Live and Let's Play Tennis
- The Man with the Golden Opportunity to Commit Statutory Rape
- The Spy Who Withheld his Love from Me
- Yardraker
- For Your iPhone Only
- I'mapussy
- A Room With a View to a Kill
- The Living-Room Track Lights
- Licence to Kill Yourself
- GoldenEyeOnTheOscar
- Tomorrow Heather Cries
- The Ostensibly Satisfying Marriage Is Not Enough
- Die A Little Bit Inside Another Day
- Casino Banal
- Quantum of Solipsism
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It's usually pretty easy to figure out how a word, phrase, or name makes its way into Google Trends' "Hot Searches," where the search behemoth lists the queries that are burning up the algorithm. The Consumer Electronics Show is ongoing, so lots of people are searching for info about gadgets like the Nexus One phone and the Blio e-reader; death announcements, news events, and weather peculiarities—Fulton, N.Y., has had 55 inches of snow!—often make the billing, too.
But today, there's a mystery afoot on Google Trends. The No. 1 and No. 8 trends at the moment refer to the hogchoker fish. The hogchoker is a small fish—about 6 inches—found in coastal waters of North America. The Chesapeake Bay Program's "Bay Field Guide" notes that the odd name "comes from farmers who used to feed these fish to their hogs. The hogs would often choke on the fishes' scaly, bony bodies."
But why are so many people searching for it today? We at Slate searched news items, blogs, and Twitter for a news hook but didn't turn anything up. Do you know what's going on with the sudden increase in hogchoker searches? Let us know in the Fray, or e-mail me at boschv@gmail.com.
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Next week brings the publication of Peter Biskind's Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, a no-holds-barred biography of the big-screen golden boy that already promises to do for early 2010 what Tiger Woods did for the final weeks of the last decade. A preview of the book published this week in the New York Post ("Sexy Tell-All Jumps Into Beatty's Bed") offers a lurid résumé of Beatty's romantic exploits, asserting, among other things, that between 1956 and 1991, Beatty slept with "12,775 women, give or take, a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on."
If the phrase "casual gropings" means something to you, perhaps this figure makes a kind of sense. Here at Slate, though, we couldn't quite manage to swallow Biskind's estimate. Twelve thousand seven hundred seventy-five, by way of context, is nearly one-third the number of plant species in the Amazon rain forest. It is more people than work at Yahoo. Biskind has said he arrived at that figure by assuming that Beatty slept with an average of one new woman every day for 35 years, beginning at 19, when he was an undiscovered actor. (On meeting Annette Bening in 1991, Beatty "fell into monogamy," as the Guardian puts it, and has ostensibly stayed that way.) To us, such a rate of conquest seems logistically, socially, and ontologically impossible. Herewith, 13 reasons why Warren Beatty probably seduced less of America than his biographer believes:
- Biskind assumes either that Beatty bedded each partner only once, in the manner of insects, or that he carried on at least two relationships every day of his life, which challenges everything we know about the possibilities for getting from here to there in L.A. traffic.
- Today, good noninvasive birth-control measures have a failure rate of about 1 percent. If Beatty's encounters had followed these odds, he might have conceived more than 100 children. For the intractable complications thereof, see (1).
- If Beatty failed to make a conquest in the course of a day, he would have needed to redouble his efforts to maintain Biskind's average. For example, he might have had to seduce four separate women one day to catch up after inclement weather or a rigorous filming schedule. An observation from personal experience: I met two friends on opposite ends of town for coffee on Saturday. It took the whole day. Good luck fitting sex in there.
- Another observation from personal experience: Seducing four women a day is not possible.
- Biskind's proposed seduction rate also does not allow for the possibility of intermittent trips to the grocery store.
- Or squash.
- Why was Beatty, a movie star, coming into contact with so many strangers, anyway? Was he a) going door-to-door? b) hanging out in malls?
- If he was hanging out in malls, should we feel sorry for him? Note that Beatty had no iPhone.
- In order to meet Biskind's estimate, Beatty would have had to seduce more women per week than James Bond, which is impossible to fathom.
- Bedsores.
- Herpes.
- Biskind's model doesn't account for the fact that Beatty came increasingly to resemble Rick Moranis.
- Was Warren Beatty ever really that irresistible to begin with? François Truffaut famously said of the actor, on turning down Bonnie and Clyde, a script he admired, "Better not to make a film at all than to make it with men like this." Surely Truffaut was not an isolated case.
Given these and other considerations, it seems unlikely that Beatty actually managed to sleep with some 13,000 women by the time he turned 54. Still, who knows: When this topic came up in the Slate offices, most of the men present found Biskind's number preposterous. Several women, though, argued it might be feasible. Interpret that, dear reader, as you will.
Were you seduced by Warren Beatty? Do you think you have a better way to estimate his conquests? Tell us about it in "The Fray."