Herculodge

When a Car Is a Fantasy

As I walked my dog past a parked Hummer H2, black with custom chrome wheels, I realized the car is not a car. It’s a fantasy. You step into the H2 and you can’t help but feel that you’re a superhero in an action film. In other words, you’re play-acting, like a six-year-old kid playing cowboys and Indians, only you never grew up.

But why not? I quickly grew bored after I bought my 1999 Volvo S70. I bought it used in 2001 and still have it, but there’s little emotional rush in owning it. Why not pay for a car that makes you smile every time you sit inside it? While the gas-thirsty H2 is too much of a macho elephant gonad swinger for my tastes, I wouldn’t mind living the fantasy of driving a supercharged “Space Blue” Mini Cooper. To maximize the car’s fun factor and save $1,200, I’d probably have to get it in a manual. I wonder how long before I got sick of shifting gears and sitting inside a car that, based on the disparity between my 220-pound frame and the car’s small proportions, renders me looking like a circus clown.

In my imagination, I’ve already lived out the fantasy, taking it to its logical conclusion. I guess that’s why I still have my Volvo. Playing out the fantasy beforehand just saved me about 25,000 dollars.

The Twilight of American Culture in The Real Housewives of Orange County

Kitsch refers to tasteless art and decoration such as velvet Elvis Presley paintings, lava lamps, and tomato red Naugahyde bean-bag chairs. Often used for satirical purposes, it clutters the films of John Waters. It abounds in the Paul Thomas Anderson film Boogie Nights. It’s conspicuous in the underexposed Todd Haynes film Safe. It raises its ugly head in the Todd Solondz film Happiness. Kitsch can be used as a “character” or as an extension of a particular type of character. It speaks the language of decay and spiritual death. Therefore, when I was appalled at the kitsch as I watched The Real Housewives of Orange County, especially the episode featuring the horses with their hooves painted with glitter, the hubcaps studded with cubic zirconias and the rich real estate developer’s diamond and gold shaker, much of my gut response was the show’s vision of spiritual death. To refer to kitsch as spiritual death is not to indulge in hyperbole. To the contrary, spiritual death is the essence of kitsch. This idea is not my own. I came across the idea while reading Morris Berman’s  The Twilight of American Culture in which he traces the causes of a collapsing civilization. The first is “accelerating social and economic inequality.” The second is “declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems.” The third is “rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness. The fourth is explained as thus: “Spiritual death—that is, Spengler’s classicism: the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas—kitsch in short.”

The Either-Or Fallacy of Michiko Kakutani

Ben Yagoda, author of a book I'm currently enjoying, The Sound on the Page, a defense of writing "style," has recently written a critique of book critic Michiko Kakutani in Slate. He highlights some of her weaknesses as a critic:

"For Kakutani, there is no middle ground: a list of deficiencies, and a bit of plot summary, are all she has for us, and, lacking any other ideas or themes, she (characteristically) exaggerates the novel's faults. In her world, books tend to be masterpieces or rubbish; in the real one, they're almost always somewhere in between."

He goes on to point out that Kakutani is somewhat of a philistine when it comes to language:

"Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize the prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing, but they just make her look like she's protesting too much."

A convincing writer, Yagoda has made me feel abased, but for the better, for having relied on Kakutani as my literary bible for the last twenty years.

World's Sexiest Radio Ever

The Eton Corporation’s website announces that “coming soon” will be the Eton Sound 100, an AM/FM tabletop clock radio with memory presets. Available in seven colors, it’s being marketed as a “Retro Style” radio. The price has not been announced but I guess it will be in the $100-150 range. More photos are available from the recent Eton display at a Las Vegas convention. I believe it’s made by Tecsun for Eton, so it should be a strong performer. No word yet as to when the Eton Sound 100 is available, so until then the most attractive radio is the Tivoli Songbook, which I reviewed for Radio Intel.

Designer Maladies, Inc.

It has been reported that there is a firm in Los Angeles, Designer Maladies, Inc., that specializes in giving people their own fictitious or semi-fictitious mental or physical illness in order that their clients can enjoy more attention at cocktail parties, the publishing world, and social interactions in general. After several consultations and ten thousand dollars, clients are considered well versed in the details of their malady, which often requires the intense study of medical jargon, and are given a certificate of “Malady Originality,” which guarantees that their illness is unlike any other person’s in the world. As self-proclaimed “pioneers” of their affliction, they are now qualified to do the lecture circuit, appear on various TV and radio venues, write memoirs, give seminars, create support groups, and get involved in other lucrative ventures. One of the more colorful maladies is Myopic Eating Syndrome in which the person can only eat one food, say, crab ravioli, for six months straight before going to a new food, say, raisin bread, for another six months, and so on. Margaret Lombardo, who claims to suffer from the syndrome, has published her memoir and already millions of readers have convinced themselves that they suffer from the same syndrome, which in turn has created a special niche market for therapy groups, T-shirts, stuffed animals, get-well cards, etc. Currently Ms. Lombardo has retired on a Spanish island where she is in the middle of a six-moth phase of eating poppy seed bagels with light cream cheese spread.

“That’s the beauty of our business,” said one Designer Malady employee who wished to remain anonymous. “One person picks up one of our custom maladies and soon everyone else on the block wants to have it. The potential for growth is astounding.”

This employee was then posed the question: “If everything is a malady then is it true that nothing is really a malady any more?”

He refused to answer the question.

Let's Lose Weight by Making a Deal with the Devil

People are so beholden to their raging appetites and the self-loathing of not having a svelte body conducive to underwear modeling that they capitulate to another form of slavery: The Extreme Diet. One that piques my imagination is the current Cookie Diet, in which you eat cookies, allegedly chockfull of nutrition, throughout the day and then eat a lean protein dinner and salad at night. I imagine if we ate only ONE food every day, we’d be bound to lose weight. But there is something unseemly and dehumanizing about being so desperate to shed pounds that we would eliminate our food choices and curl up in a fetal-like reductionary diet. Desperately sucking on the teat of some doctor’s prescribed “nutritional cookies.” Others would take a fat-blocking substance like Olestra that leads to “underwear staining” and incontinence. I smell a Faustian Bargain-like stench in today’s asinine culinary zeitgeist.

Mr. Bovine's Demise

Ten years of sterling service and great Mediterranean-style food at the warmly ambient Zazou restaurant in Redondo Beach did not prepare me, on my wife’s birthday, February 17th,  for the doltish waiter, whom we’ll call Mr. Bovine. Torpid-eyed, chunky, slow-moving, socially awkward, he was not your typical Zazou food server. I have found them to be sharp, alacritous and helpful without being sycophantic. But Mr. Bovine was late with the appetizers, the drinks, and the entrees. My wife and I commented that we had never waited so long at Zazou. Mr. Bovine looked overwhelmed as he navigated across the restaurant floor, lumbering with a look of reticent panic, and it was apparent he was struggling. To make matters worse, he responded with anxiety when I asked him if I could make a variation of one of the entrees. While the other servers have always happily said, “No problem,” Mr. Bovine made it clear that my request (for a dapple of pecan pesto on the side) was impossible. But his incompetence was, up until this point, forgivable. However, things deteriorated when he served me my seafood risotto. With grandiloquence he asked me if I would like some freshly-grated parmesan, upon which I said affirmative. I waited and waited but when he never showed up I capitulated to eating my risotto before it got cold. Nearly done with my entrée, Mr. Bovine returned with the parmesan, but bypassed me without acknowledging me, and headed straight for two attractive women, a mother and daughter, sitting at a table next to mine. Looking infatuated with the teenage daughter, he smiled at her and grated the parmesan over her penne pasta. To add to his insult, Mr. Bovine stuck his corpulent buttocks in my face as he grated the cheese. At this point, I was asking: Is he deliberately trying to anger me? Is he perhaps jealous of my ever apparent good looks and superior intelligence and knowing he can never attain my greatness he consoles himself with petty acts of taunting and cruelty? Speculations aside, when he took my empty plate twenty minutes later, he didn’t apologize for forgetting to come back with the parmesan and had no doubt forgotten his blunder. I was in a foul, pissy mood. I could not order the usual bread pudding dessert or the usual after-dinner cappuccino. I dreaded coming back. With my luck, Mr. Bovine would be there.

But I am happy to report that in late April, on a Friday, my wife, a friend, and I returned and got great service from another waiter and Mr. Bovine was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he has been given the boot. I hope so because if I have to endure that nincompoop of a waiter one more time, my relationship with Zazou will, sadly, have to come to a close.

Troglodyte-Style Eating

In Laurence Shames’ book The Hunger for More he explains that America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we regress into our troglodyte ancestors.

Gluttony and feral barbarism have been disguised as the pioneer’s conquest. This is precisely the theme that restaurants and other industries use to appeal to our most base instincts. Near my house is a popular restaurant aptly decorated like a Wild West saloon. Its theme is the prospector’s search for the mother lode. The restaurant specializes in oversized portions of steak, prime rib, baby back pork ribs, spicy chicken wings, cheddar cheese mashed potatoes, deep-fried onion ring “flowers,” carrot cake, cheese cake and chocolate fudge cake. The cakes are famous for their moisture, the result of several cups of mayonnaise that are used in the batter, and for their huge size. Each “slice,” if it could be called that, is over a foot tall and leans to the side as if it were about to tip over, but through a miraculous breakthrough in chemical-additive engineering, the cake remains upright and intact.

The portions are so big that the waiters have to practically use cranes to get the platters of food from the kitchen to the patrons’ tables. Big helpings of food require big tableware. The knives resemble ivory-handled scimitars, and they evoke a more primitive age when people dressed in animal skins and tore the blubber off of beached whales and woolly mammoths.

While romanticized by these Wild West restaurant theme parks,  troglodyte-style eating is ultimately an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Texas where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

What Is GuyThink?

With few exceptions even the strongest of men must contend with a Spoiled Inner Brat who is a whiner, a malcontent, a sore loser, a gloater, a voyeur, an ingrate, and a fantasist whose self-regard and sense of entitlement far exceeds his moral character and accomplishments. This is a bleak appraisal of the male condition, but it is a true and accurate one. It is also the basis for GuyThink. For guys don’t want others, including themselves, to know the self-incriminating, immature thoughts that percolate underneath their façade of respectability.

Of course, not all men are interested in maintaining a façade. There are some men—we shall call them troglodytes—whose ugly, infantile thoughts are an open book. Troglodytes are eager to unleash their crudities, their well-honed ignorance, and other imbecilities to the public because in part the troglodyte version of man is not capable of shame or honor. However, the troglodyte’s moronic behavior is too easy of a target to be of interest here. GuyThink does not pertain to them. GuyThink pertains to the secret and unflattering childish thoughts that guys, trying to play the role of civilized men, keep under the radar screen, both to the public and to themselves. Whereas the troglodyte freely gives the world a transparent view of his character malignancies, the guy tries to keep the window to his secret emotionally-arrested universe closed at all times. This is both to the guy’s advantage and to his detriment.  On the one hand, he learns to discipline and keep in check his indulgent, childish self that otherwise might overtake him. On the other hand, guys often bury their secret thoughts so deeply that sometimes those festering, obsessive thoughts can suck guys into a bottomless pit from which there is no return. It is our purpose to bring GuyThink out into the open and to expose it into the light in a way that is for the most part harmless so that we can identify it, master it, laugh at it, and in the end, put it in back in the secret gloomy dungeon of men’s psyches where it belongs.

Tomorrow we will look at GuyThink #1: The Myth of Squandered Opportunities.

Streisandism: How Very Santa Monica

In the New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn, reviewing A.M. Homes's new novel This Book Will Save Your Life, writes:

"Homes's respect for the wisdom of the East and her disdain for the vanity of the West are both very Santa Monica, of course. Properly combined with opportunism, in fact, they form Streisandism — the alchemical religion that allows Hollywood's bipolar elite to self-loathe its way into a party mood every wartime Oscar night. For masochistic moneyed meditators, shame is bliss, embarrassment nirvana. Their biggest grins are their most conscience-stricken. That's why they hire satirists as hosts and why the guests look so refreshed after their beatings, while the satirists go home looking glum and neutered. They came to harshly tease but they appeased."