The Apple Rolls Back Towards The Tree

"One spill. Maybe 2 if the first one is small."                      "Are you nuts? 3 minimum. 4, if it's Bounty."

If this Amy Schumer sketch is to be believed, a woman doesn't like to be told that she's turning into her mother.  You're better off telling a man that he's turning into his dad. Most guys will just nod their heads in rueful acknowledgment.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of my father's death, and lately I've been seeing more and more of him in myself. My father was a "Depression baby." He never spent money easily. He put off getting rid of old household items for as long as possible ("we may find some use for that later"). He spent hours reading Consumer Reports, but seldom bought anything. He cleaned out old peanut butter jars and stocked them in the pantry, in case we ever needed extra drinking glasses. He waited until the kitchen sponge fell apart in his hands before opening a new one. 

Like all parents, he grew exasperated with the wastefulness of his kids. Most of his complaints about me were standard parental fare --"Turn off the lights when you leave the room" -- but sometimes the nature of my infraction was more esoteric. Paper towels, for instance. If I spilled something in the kitchen--a splash of Dr. Pepper, say, or a spoonful of Jell-O---I'd use a paper towel to clean it up, then throw the towel away. My father inevitably pounced. "How can you waste so much of that towel?" he'd say, aggrieved. "Look: you only used one corner! There's plenty of good material left." 

Such scolding made me think there was something seriously wrong with my father's outlook. We were talking after all, about a paper towel. It was cheap and it was disposable. How sad, I thought, that my father couldn't see how irrational he was being. How sad that he didn't know how to truly live.

I was not making any money at this point, though I was quite prepared to spend my father's. He was a psychologist with a private practice--essentially a one-man business. Some months he had no idea how he was going to pay the gas bill, but he and my mother kept me blissfully unaware of the financial side of things. As far as I was concerned, there was always money, and to value it above other things was to miss out on life. So I looked on my father with an unearned sense of superiority, and felt pity for him because he gave money too much importance. It never occurred to me that my financial insouciance was only possible because of his financial anxiety.

The irony is not lost on me now, when I'm starting to see the same look of pity in my own kids' eyes. A recent dinner with my younger son drove this home. After spilling some pasta sauce, he got up from the kitchen table, grabbed a fresh paper towel, wiped up the sauce and threw the towel out. "What are you doing?" I asked incredulously. I pointed to the three crumpled-up paper towels sitting on the kitchen counter, which I had used to clean up some earlier spill. "You could have used one of those! They're still perfectly good!" 

My son shrugged, I took a step back in horror, and my Dad's ghost laughed, sounding not so much like himself as Nelson Muntz, the schoolyard bully from The Simpsons. One quick, short "Ah ha!" and I knew I'd become a Depression baby too.

 

More Cowbell

I look tired? Well, I did just record Blonde on Blonde...

I look tired? Well, I did just record Blonde on Blonde...

Have you ever heard The Troggs Tape? The Troggs Tape is one of those celebrities-at-their-worst artifacts, capturing an unproductive recording session by The Troggs, the British group who gave us "Wild Thing" and "Love Is All Around." The track they are trying to create was eventually released as "Tranquility"--an irony, as most of the tape is the band members arguing. Very little music is actually made, though after a while the accumulated repetition of "fuck," "fucking" and "fucking fuck off you fucking wanker" does attain a certain kind of melodic brilliance. If this sounds like a description of a scene from Spinal Tap, that's because the Troggs Tape was one of the prime inspirations for the fake British heavy metal trio. Echoes of the Troggs Tape can be found in just about every depiction of rock star ass-hattery that has followed, from VH1's Behind The Music to SNL's famous "More Cowbell" sketch with Christopher Walken.

The Bootleg Tapes, Vol,. 12: The Cutting Edge, 1965-66 brings to light another famous recording session--or rather a series of sessions that took place between January '65 and March '66, in which Bob Dylan created what many regard as the greatest work of his career, the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. The banter preserved here is often quite funny, though it never reaches Troggs Tape levels of ridiculousness.  But I was delighted to hear, during an early rehearsal for "Visions of Johanna," producer Bob Johnston stop the take and cut in with an instruction to the drummer: "More cowbell."

This retroactively meta moment comes on Disc 9 of the special Deluxe Collector's Edition of The Cutting Edge.  Including everything Dylan recorded during this period, this 18-CD monster has 379 tracks. That's far more than last year's "The Complete Basement Tapes," though far fewer songs are attempted: there are a lot of takes of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" and "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat" to wade through. It's amazing that Dylan devoted so much energy to such minor songs, but that's how these sessions went. Even some of the more sure-footed offers took a while.  There are about fifteen versions of "Visions of Johanna," for instance. Though the final record sounds like it  emerged in a burst of easy brilliance, it had to be attacked over and over until Dylan was satisfied.

Unlike The Beatles, who were even then starting to construct their final records from multiple versions and overdubs, Dylan kept doing take after take until he got one he liked. In most cases, that live-in-studio performance became the final record. As anyone who has seen Dylan in concert over the last 50 years knows, he doesn't consider the released versions at all definitive. These are the songs that define him, yet he continues to tinker with the arrangements and phrasing, even going so far as to write new melody lines on occasion. The Cutting Edge shows that this is not something he started doing mid-career: it was his method from the start. Unlike The Troggs, fruitlessly arguing about how to make a mediocre song come alive, Dylan kept banging away at his good songs, until, by dint of sheer perseverance, they became masterpieces.

Too Much Cheese

The bros at Epic Meal Time have been taking culinary excess to cartoonish extremes since 2010. They’ve stuffed Philly cheesestakes into sushi wrappers, baked cinnamon roll/cotton candy pizza, and-- in the video above—created the enormous All-Bacon Burger, which clocks in at nearly 50,000 calories and includes 25 pounds of pork. Their cheerful culinary abominations have garnered 800 million YouTube views and attracted the participation of celebrity guests like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tony Hawk. The crew even has its own merchandise and mobile game.

So, by combining the 21st century model of Internet success with the 20th century model of the good life (or a gross parody thereof), Epic Meal Time has inadvertently created a perfect commentary on contemporary America, a place where "bigger and better" has become "biggest and weirdest."

In the video above, they also manage to embody our current racial confusion—without, one expects, quite meaning to. Listening to four white boys refer to themselves as “gangstas” and boast about “trill mobbin’” in mock hip-hop accents leaves one feeling almost as queasy as the sight of an entire block of cheddar being wrapped in raw bacon: you worry that if one doesn’t make your heart explode, the other will.